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Twelfth Night Quotes

Misprision in the highest degree! Lady, cucullus non facit monachum; that’s as much to say as I wear not motley in my brain. Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Lady Olivia’s clown Feste says this after she brands him a “dry fool” and orders him to be taken away. He is telling Olivia, in Latin, that “the cowl does not make a monk.” In other words appearance isn’t always the reality and she shouldn’t judge a book by the cover. While he may look the part of a fool, it does not make him foolish or without wit. And he will prove she is the fool – Olivia has gone into mourning for seven years for a brother who didn’t die recently. We come to learn that Feste is one of the play’s most intelligent characters.

OLIVIA: Take the Fool away.
FESTE: Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the Lady…
FESTE: Good madonna, why mournest thou?
OLIVIA: Good fool, for my brother’s death.
FESTE: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA: I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.
FESTE: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Feste may play the role of court fool. But he has enough awareness to see the foolishness of his mistress Lady Olivia’s seven years of mourning for a brother who is in a better place.

VIOLA: Most sweet lady –
OLIVIA: A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text?
VIOLA: In Orsino’s bosom.
OLIVIA: In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?
VIOLA: To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.
OLIVIA: O, I have read it; it is heresy. Have you no more to say?

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Olivia reads Orsino like a book. And suggests that his bid to woo her through his messenger Viola is a book that she has read before. She is suggesting Orsino’s words of love are not very original.

‘Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on:
Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Viola, disguised as Cesario, rebukes Olivia for rejecting Orsino’s love and insisting on staying a single woman. She tells Olivia that it would be a cruel disservice to the world for a woman so beautiful not to produce an heir. Her advice about marriage and children takes on a greater significance because Viola is speaking to Olivia as another woman.

O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted! I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will: as, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me.

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Olivia after Cesario/Viola advises her to marry Orsino and have a child. She mocks the kind of love poetry that compares a woman’s beauty and her body parts to things in nature.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Viola (disguised as Cesario) delivers this speech to Olivia, after Orsino appoints her to bring his messages of love to Olivia. But instead of speaking Orsino’s cliched language of lust, she says the right things to make Olivia fall in love – except it is Cesario that Olivia will fall in love with! In this significant and beautiful speech, Cesario describes what he would do if he loved Olivia as much as Orsino. Writes poems of his love, sing them throughout the night and cry out her name so that the air would echo with it. Viola actually imagines what it means to truly love someone.

Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit
Do give thee five-fold blazon. Not too fast! Soft, soft!
Unless the master were the man. How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes.

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5. Olivia is a little surprised and even upset that she has fallen in love with Cesario. But she can’t deny her feelings. The irony is she loves another woman disguised as a man. What attracts her to Cesario are actually Viola’s womanly characteristics that shine through her disguise.

My stars shine darkly over me.

– William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 1. Sebastian explains to Antonio why he doesn’t want him to go with him. Following his shipwreck and loss of his twin sister Viola he feels he is cursed. As Sebastian likes Antonio, who has cared for him after his bad fortune, he doesn’t want bad things to happen him. In an ironical way, this quote foreshadows what later happens to Sebastian – he is blessed with good fortune when he is mistaken for Cesario by Olivia.
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