The Apprentice, the Clown, and the Puritan: Comic Revenge as Theatrical Drawing-out in Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night offers the actor of Maria unique role-playing opportunities, and the role was probably written for the Clown’s apprentice. The major training elements in the drawing-out of Maria’s role derive from the actor’s assuming a revenger’s role (a rare opportunity for an apprentice) which in turn allows the apprentice to draw out the Clown and the Puritan by devising new roles for them. In manipulating Malvolio into the role of ambition-crazed pseudo-lover, Maria humiliates and disempowers him by ironically theatrical means, while enabling Feste to extend his subversive comic role.