In the Twelfth Night, brother and sister are shipwrecked and separated from each other. The sister, Viola must assume the identity of a man to make a living in Duke Orsino’s home, who is in love with the Lady Olivia. This play undoubtedly aligns with Bakhtin’s concept of the Carnivalesque – Scabrously shattering rigid oppositions. Birth and death, body and spirit .. are sent packing the tails between their legs. – Gender especially in this context, nothing is what it seems in the Twelfth Night.

Bakhtin says — the clown was first dressed as a king, but once his reign came to an end his costume was changed to transform him into a clown again — Malvolio’s tragedy in Twelfth Night is a cautious tale of desire that overcomes good sense, hoping in this instance that he will become Count Malvolio; the clown that becomes a king – doing this, he exposes himself to “abuse and thrashing” which, as Bakhtin puts it, tears away his ‘disguise and uncrowns him as king.

Both Mankind and Malvolio are subject to abuse and thrashing via the vice characters and laughed at respectively by the vice characters and audience alike. In her lecture on the subject of Mankind and the Carnivalesque, Dr Rosario says a typical morality play features an ‘everyman’ figure, between the forces of spiritual goodness and earthly sinfulness. This applies to Malvolio in the respect he is a puritanical character who is overcome with lust and gluttony and therefore sinful. He is then punished for his sins. Unlike Mankind, Malvolio is offered no repentance – likely due to Shakespeare’s aforementioned dislike of puritans.

The play ends with a marriage agreement between Duke Orsino and Viola and its discovered that Sir Toby married Maria. The idea of Marriage has the same idea of repentance as seen in Mankind – thus refining an audience as everything returns to the normal and social structure is reinforced. Again th