Although the human conscience and its functions have been variously interpreted and although the ways of moralists, theologians and psychologists part when the provenance and the nature of the norms to which conscience is bound are at issue, there is a fundamental agreement as to the reality and significance of this mental faculty. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, and still less bear any ill-will towards them. Shakespeare's comic genius resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting sweets from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a sting behind it.
There is a certain stage of society in which people become conscious of their peculiarities and absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and set up pretensions to what they are not. This gives rise to a corresponding style of comedy, the object of which is to detect the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals on these preposterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and denying to those who would impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire.
Shakespeare represents these two kinds of misrepresentation in Twelfth Night. Sir Toby, with his troupe, provokes Malvolio's mis-guided desires by misrepresenting Olivia's false epistle. Misrepresentation debunks by its very falsity Malvolio's “false” desire to marry up and dominate over his household. Here misrepresentation represents the wrongness of desire stimulated by it.Malvolio is both a kind of an actor and the audience caught up by the air of pestilent performances in the theater. Malvolio's humorous and over-ruling desire is condemned as madness.
Unlike Malvolio, Viola actively misrepresents herself as Caesario. By usurping her gender and identity, she also provokes Olivia's desire of love and derives her out of her autic self. Viola's virtue lies not in her birth but in her performances and her marrriage represents the very power of representation. Thus Shakespeare represents by his misrepresentations in Twelfth Night the emergent social mobility and flexibility of men's identity. Imaginative literature, Misrepresentation is simultaneously a grace and a curse as its literary history shows.