Malvolio the Puritan

Malvolio is expressly described as a “Puritan” in Twelfth Night , and the description is apt given Malvolio’s stern hostility to frivolous entertainments. Shakespeare is offering a parody of Puritan opposition to the theater. The satire is sharp: Puritans were opposed to the cross dressing inherent in Elizabethan theater (boys playing girls roles), and Malvolio is tricked into putting on strange dress himself, hoisted by his own cross-garters.

In a 1973 article in The Huntington Library Quarterly , J. L. Simmons suggests that the satire gets closer to the heart of Puritanism. Maria says, following Malvolio’s gulling, “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.”

Simmons takes “passages” here as a reference to passages in texts. Malvolio has come to the conclusion that his lady is in love with him by “crushing” some texts, just as, according to Richard Hooker, the Puritans wrested “strange fantastical opinions” from Scripture.