How Shakespeare presents Malvolio, and how the character develops across the text: Olivia's proud, puritanical steward, tricked by a forged letter into hoping to marry her, shut in the dark as a madman and left vowing revenge.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal', 'to be generous, guiltless and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets', 'the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies', 'Having been three months married to her, sitting in my state', 'I will be proud, I will read politic authors', 'Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he is to be thanked', 'Go, hang yourselves all! you are idle shallow things', 'I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art', 'I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion', 'Why have you suffer'd me to be / Imprison'd, kept in a dark house', 'I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you'.
His prose, his fantasy of rising to rule the household, and the forged letter that turns him into a performer for the hidden watchers.
Context: Puritans and their dislike of revelry, a steward's place in a great household, laws on dress by rank, darkness as the treatment for madness, and how far audiences pity him.
Edexcel's Shakespeare question has two parts: part (a) on the printed extract marks only language, form and structure (AO2), so context earns nothing there; part (b) on the play elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1, 15 marks) and context (AO3, 5 marks), not language analysis. Say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
