17 quotes found
"Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?"
"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?"
"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."
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."
"I think we do know the sweet Roman hand."
"Put thyself into the trick of singularity."
"Feste: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl? Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird."
"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."
"I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you."
"Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite."
"Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
"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."
"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."
"[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."
"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."
"This is no dusky Malvolio with wand and cap of office, but a Nigerian maiden in her ornate, though scanty, wedding finery."