The themes in Twelfth Night grow out of one simple device: a young woman dressed as a man, loved by a woman and in love with a man, in a country where almost everyone is mistaken about someone.
Around that disguise, Shakespeare builds a comedy about love that behaves like hunger, identities that slip, a household given over to revels, and a steward who dreams of rising above his place.
This guide explains the seven major themes, with the lines that express each one, and ends with a reading of the moments when the play admits it is only a play. For the story and the people, see our full guide to Twelfth Night and our guide to the Twelfth Night characters.
At a Glance
Here are the major themes in Twelfth Night for quick reference.
Love as Appetite
The play’s first lines treat love as a hunger that can be overfed. Orsino calls for music as if it were food: “If music be the food of love, play on. / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die.” He wants to eat so much of his longing that he loses the taste for it, and within seconds he has: “Enough; no more.” Later he boasts that his own love “is all as hungry as the sea, / And can digest as much,” while a woman’s love is mere “appetite,” a thing of the palate that ends in “surfeit, cloyment, and revolt.”
Other characters describe love as an illness that arrives without warning. Olivia, falling for Cesario after a single conversation, asks herself, “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” and feels the youth’s perfections “creep in at mine eyes.” In this play, people rarely choose whom they love, and reasoning does not get them out of it. What separates the characters is how they bear it. Orsino indulges his feelings, Olivia pursues hers boldly (“Love sought is good, but given unsought is better”), and Viola, who loves more deeply than either, waits in silence.
Disguise and Identity
Viola’s decision to become Cesario is the engine of the plot, and she soon sees its cost. When she realizes that Olivia loves her, she turns on her own costume: “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.” Her disguise lets her be close to Orsino, but it also forbids her to say what she feels, so she can speak of her love only through riddles and imaginary sisters.
Once the twins are both in Illyria, identity comes loose for everyone. Antonio mistakes Viola for Sebastian, Olivia marries Sebastian thinking he is Cesario, and Sir Andrew picks a fight with the wrong twin. The play sums up the confusion in a quick exchange between Olivia and Viola. “I prithee, tell me what thou think’st of me,” Olivia asks. “That you do think you are not what you are,” Viola answers, and when Olivia returns the charge, Viola admits it: “I am not what I am.” Disguise here is not only a costume. Olivia hides her heart behind mourning, Orsino hides from his own changeability, and Malvolio, in yellow stockings, tries to dress himself as the man he wishes he were.
Gender
The disguise lets Shakespeare put a woman inside a man’s conversation and let her answer back. Orsino tells Cesario that women cannot love as men do: “there is no woman’s sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion / As love doth give my heart.” Viola, who is proving him wrong as she stands there, replies, “In faith, they are as true of heart as we,” and turns his argument around: “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed / Our shows are more than will; for still we prove / Much in our vows but little in our love.”
The play also finds comedy in the gap between a role and the body beneath it. Orsino notices, without understanding what he sees, that Cesario’s voice “Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman’s part.” When Sir Toby forces her into a duel, Viola says in an aside, “A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man.” On Shakespeare’s stage, where women’s parts were played by boys, these lines carried a further joke, since the actor really was a young man playing a woman playing a young man. Olivia falls for a woman in man’s clothes, and Orsino grows attached to a “boy” before he knows she is Viola, so desire in the play runs across the lines that the costumes draw.
Folly and Madness
Twelfth Night keeps asking who the real fool is. Feste, the professional Fool, defends his trade with a motto: “Better a witty Fool than a foolish wit.” He tells Olivia that “cucullus non facit monachum,” the hood does not make the monk, and adds, “I wear not motley in my brain.” He then proves that she is the fool for mourning a brother whose soul is in heaven. Viola sees how much intelligence his work takes: “This fellow is wise enough to play the Fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit.” The true fools are the ones who think themselves wise, above all Malvolio, and the ones who pay to be flattered, like Sir Andrew.
Talk of madness runs through the second half of the play. When Malvolio appears smiling and cross-gartered, Olivia exclaims, “Why, this is very midsummer madness!” and then applies the word to herself: “I am as mad as he, / If sad and merry madness equal be.” Sebastian, loved by a stranger, asks, “Are all the people mad?” and later reasons carefully that either he is mad “Or else the lady’s mad.” Antonio’s protests are dismissed as madness too. The cruelest twist is that the one character locked up as a lunatic is sane. From his dark room, Malvolio insists, “I am no more mad than you are,” and Feste, disguised as a curate, answers with a line that turns the joke back on everyone: “there is no darkness but ignorance.”
Festivity and Misrule
The title names Twelfth Night, the last night of the Christmas season and a traditional time of feasting and topsy-turvy games. The play does not mention the holiday by name, but Sir Toby lives by its spirit all year round. “I am sure care’s an enemy to life,” he says in his first speech, and he proves by a mock syllogism that going to bed after midnight is going to bed early. His late-night singing with Sir Andrew and Feste is the play’s great scene of misrule, and Malvolio arrives to end it: “Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?”
Toby’s answer defines the conflict: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” The play takes the side of the revelers, up to a point. Their pleasure is real, and Feste’s love song gives it a philosophy: “Present mirth hath present laughter.” But the revels turn cruel when the joke on Malvolio runs on into imprisonment, and Toby himself is ready to quit once it threatens his standing with Olivia. Fabian’s defense in the final scene, that the trick was played with “a sportful malice,” captures the double nature of holiday mischief. The play’s subtitle, What You Will, sounds like an invitation to the same spirit.
Ambition and Class
Malvolio’s fantasy is to rise above his station. Before he even finds the letter, he is imagining it: “To be Count Malvolio.” He looks for a precedent (“The lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe”) and pictures himself in a velvet gown, correcting Sir Toby for his drinking. The forged letter feeds exactly this hunger with its most famous sentence: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” It also names his fear, warning that if he refuses the chance, he will remain “a steward still, the fellow of servants.” When Olivia later calls him “fellow,” he hears it as a sign of favor.
What makes Malvolio’s dream absurd is not only his rank, because rank is crossed all around him. Viola, asked her parentage, answers, “Above my fortunes, yet my state is well. / I am a gentleman,” and Olivia, falling in love, thinks at once of the obstacle: “Not too fast! Soft, soft! / Unless the master were the man.” Olivia pledges herself to a man she has only just met, and Orsino has to reassure her afterward that “right noble is his blood.” Maria, a gentlewoman in service, marries Sir Toby. The play seems to allow a marriage across rank when it comes from love or wit, but not when it comes from vanity, and Malvolio is punished less for his station than for his self-love.
Melancholy and Time
For a comedy, Twelfth Night is full of sadness. Olivia begins the play in mourning for her father and brother, Viola believes her twin is drowned, and Orsino basks in a lover’s melancholy. Maria describes her lady as “addicted to a melancholy,” and Feste wishes Orsino farewell with “Now the melancholy god protect thee.” The songs carry the mood. “O mistress mine” warns that “What’s to come is still unsure” and that “Youth’s a stuff will not endure,” and “Come away, come away, death” imagines a lover dead of unkindness.
Time is the force that eases this sadness, and also the one that brings it. Viola trusts it to solve what she cannot: “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I.” Olivia hears the clock strike and feels it rebuke her: “The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.” In the end time does untangle the knot, but it also takes its toll, and Feste reminds Malvolio that “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” The play’s pleasures are real because they are brief, which is why the characters grab at them.
A Closer Reading: “An Improbable Fiction”
In the middle of Act 3, just after Malvolio has made his cross-gartered exit, Fabian steps back and looks at what he has been watching:
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
It is, of course, being played upon a stage now, and it is improbable: a brother and sister so alike that no one can tell them apart, a shipwreck that spares them both, a forged letter that works perfectly. Fabian’s joke is one of several moments when the play admits what it is. The letter scene itself is staged as a play within a play. Maria reports that Malvolio has been “practicing behavior to his own shadow this half hour,” like an actor rehearsing, and the three men hidden in the box tree comment on his performance like a restless audience, one of them itching to interrupt.
Viola talks the same way. On her first visit to Olivia, she worries that her speech is “excellently well penned” and that she has “taken great pains to con it,” and when Olivia asks where she comes from, she says, “that question’s out of my part.” Olivia asks, “Are you a comedian?” meaning an actor, and Viola answers, “No, my profound heart. And yet by the very fangs of malice I swear I am not that I play.” Feste closes the circle in the last scene, calling the trick on Malvolio an “interlude,” a short play, in which he performed the part of Sir Topas.
These moments do not break the spell; they ask the audience to join it knowingly. Nearly everyone on stage is playing a part, and the happy ending depends on accepting a coincidence that no sensible person would believe. Sebastian, loved and married by a stranger, shows the right response: “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!” Then Feste steps forward alone and hands the play back to the audience: “our play is done, / And we’ll strive to please you every day.” The subtitle was What You Will. The improbable fiction works only if we are willing to have it so.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of Twelfth Night, answered briefly.
What Is the Main Theme of Twelfth Night?
Love and the confusions it causes, especially when combined with disguise. Viola’s disguise as Cesario creates the love triangle between her, Orsino, and Olivia, and the play explores how love can be foolish, sudden, and blind to the truth in front of it.
Why Is the Play Called Twelfth Night?
Twelfth Night was the last night of the Christmas season, the eve of the Epiphany, a time of feasting, games, and turning the usual order upside down. The play does not mention the holiday by name, but its revels, disguises, and reversals share that spirit. Its full title in the First Folio is Twelfth Night, or What You Will.
What Does “Cakes and Ale” Mean in Twelfth Night?
It stands for the simple pleasures of eating, drinking, and merrymaking. Sir Toby asks Malvolio, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” meaning that one man’s strict virtue should not end everyone else’s fun.
What Does “Midsummer Madness” Mean?
It means extreme folly or lunacy, the kind once associated with the heat of midsummer. Olivia uses the phrase when Malvolio appears before her smiling, in yellow stockings and cross-garters, quoting the forged letter she knows nothing about.
Is Twelfth Night a Comedy or a Tragedy?
It is a comedy, and it ends with marriages. But it has a strong vein of melancholy, and Malvolio leaves vowing revenge, so many readers see it as one of Shakespeare’s more bittersweet comedies.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Twelfth Night and its ideas further.