Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is portrayed as a high-spirited, hard-drinking counter-balance to the lovelorn melancholy which goes on around him. Shakespeare used him to add laughter to the story (Twelfth Night).
Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s finest comic characters, an ambiguous mix of high spirits and low cunning. His first appearance in the play comes in the second scene, where he storms onto the stage the morning a...
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Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is portrayed as a high-spirited, hard-drinking counter-balance to the lovelorn melancholy which goes on around him. Shakespeare used him to add laughter to the story (Twelfth Night).
Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s finest comic characters, an ambiguous mix of high spirits and low cunning. His first appearance in the play comes in the second scene, where he storms onto the stage the morning after a hard night out, complaining about the sombre melancholy which hangs over his niece’s household. “What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I’m sure care’s an enemy to life.”
This immediately establishes Sir Toby at the opposite pole from the languishing melancholy which dominated the second scene (including Orsino’s speech If Music Be the Food of Love), identifying him as a force for vitality, noise and good cheer, as his name suggests. But it also raises the question of how far the audience is expected to...
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