Malvolio in Twelfth Night

Malvolio is Olivia’s steward, and he is already performing before the forged letter ever lands at his feet. He watches his own shadow move, rehearses his comportment in the sun, imagines himself as a count—not because he has been told he might become one, but because he has already decided that he deserves to. When Maria and Sir Toby manufacture the letter claiming that Olivia loves him and encouraging him to wear yellow stockings and smile constantly, Malvolio does not need to be fooled. He simply needs permission to believe what he has already believed about himself. The letter tells him exactly what he wants to hear: that greatness is being thrust upon him, that some are born great and some achieve greatness, but some—like him—have it offered to them. He seizes it without hesitation.

What makes Malvolio’s tragedy distinct from the play’s other self-absorbed characters—Orsino lost in the performance of melancholy love, Olivia locked in the ritual of grief—is his absolute refusal to break character. When they lock him in darkness and visit him disguised as a priest, he does not laugh at himself. He does not admit he has been fooled. He insists, with perfect logic, that he is sane and the darkness is ignorance. He clings to the performance even as it becomes unbearable, even as the yellow stockings obstruct his blood and his smile becomes grotesque. Unlike Viola, who knows she is performing and uses that knowledge as a source of freedom and truth-telling, Malvolio is imprisoned by his own performance because he refuses to acknowledge it as performance at all. He believes his own costume.

By the play’s end, Malvolio has been humiliated in front of the entire household, locked away, mocked by a fake priest, and exposed as deluded. Yet he does not join the circle of forgiveness and marriage that closes the comedy. He exits vowing revenge, unable to laugh, unable to admit fault, unable to return to simply being Olivia’s steward. The play’s cruelty toward him emerges from this refusal—not from his ambition, which the play almost admires, but from his inability to see that he has been fooled and to laugh at himself for it. Malvolio represents the danger of taking the performance of self seriously enough to lose sight of the self beneath.