Malvolio

Malvolio is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will. His name means 'ill will' in Italian, referencing his disagreeable nature. He is the vain, pompous, authoritarian steward of Olivia's household.

Do you make an ale-house of my lady’s house? ~ Malvolio

He's in yellow stockings ~ Maria

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em

This is no dusky Malvolio with wand and cap of office ~ Sir Frederick Lugard

Quotes by Malvolio

• Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?
  • Malvolio, act II, scene ii
• Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do you make an ale-house of my lady’s house, that you squeak out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?
  • Malvolio to Sir Toby & Sir Andrew, act II, scene iii

• This is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's.
  • Malvolio, act II, scene v
• Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
  • Malvolio, act II, scene v
  • Malvolio is reading aloud a letter which he believes to be from Olivia.
  • Parodied in Joseph Heller, Catch-22, Chapter 9, as “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
• I think we do know the sweet Roman hand.
  • Malvolio, act III, scene iv
• Put thyself into the trick of singularity.
  • Malvolio, act III, scene iv
  • Malvolio is quoting what he believes to be a letter from Olivia.
• Feste: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?
  Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
  • Feste & Malvolio, act IV, scene ii
• Why you have given me such clear lights of favour,
  Bade me come smiling and cross-garter'd to you,
  To put on yellow stockings and to frown
  Upon Sir Toby and the lighter people;
  And, acting this in an obedient hope,
  Why have you suffer'd me to be imprison'd,
  Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,
  And made the most notorious geck and gull
  That e'er invention play'd on? tell me why.
  • Malvolio to Olivia, act V, scene i
• I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
  • Malvolio, act V, scene i

Quotes about Malvolio

• Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.
  • Olivia, act I, scene v
• Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
  • Sir Toby to Malvolio, act II, scene iii

• If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in yellow stockings.
  • Maria to Sir Toby, act III, scene i
• Truly, madam, he holds Belzebub at the staves's end as well as a man in his case may do: has here writ a letter to you; I should have given't you to-day morning, but as a madman's epistles are no gospels, so it skills not much when they are delivered.
  • Clown, act V, scene i

Quotes in other works

• [W]e feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathize with his gravity, his smiles, his cross-garters, his yellow stockings, and imprisonment in the stocks.
• Who after this will say that Shakespeare's genius was only fitted for comedy? Yet after reading other parts of this play, and particularly the garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the letter, if we were to say that his genius for comedy was less than his genius for tragedy, it would perhaps only prove that our own taste in such matters is more saturnine than mercurial. [...] The letter and his comments on it are equally good. If poor Malvolio's treatment afterwards is a little hard, poetical justice is done in the uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her mistaken attachment to Cesario, as her insensibility to the violence of the Duke's passion is atoned for by the discovery of Viola's concealed love of him.
  • William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (London: C. H. Reynell, 1817)
• Fry's Malvolio is a dessicated [sic] mandarin who makes a fool of himself because he mistakenly thinks he has a chance of love, more than of social advancement.
  • Alex Needham, "Stephen Fry's Twelfth Night: this all-male affair is no one-man show", The Guardian Online (2 October 2012)
• This is no dusky Malvolio with wand and cap of office, but a Nigerian maiden in her ornate, though scanty, wedding finery.
  • Sir Frederick Lugard, "British Empire in Africa I. A Study of the African & His Country", J. A. Hammerton, ed., Peoples of All Nations, Vol. I (1922), p. 545