Sir Toby’s crowd play a joke on both “Cesario” and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, pushing two terrified characters into a duel. Antonio intervenes, thinking “Cesario” is Sebastian. Malvolio acts so bizarrely that Olivia fears he has gone mad, though he is following the instructions of the fake letter, designed to humiliate him.

A false letter, faked by Maria, makes Malvolio think Olivia secretly loves him, and gives him advice which will humiliate him when he follows it. Another practical joke: “Cesario” is supposedly challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Antonio dares to stick by Sebastian, though he is subject to arrest if apprehended by the Duke’s officers.

Viola’s brother Sebastian, disguised as Roderigo, and his good friend Antonio. Orsino is increasingly drawn to Cesario, the disguised Viola. But Olivia is as well. The reveling crew of Sir Toby Belch hatch a plot against Malvolio. Songs of carpe diem and of death.

Viola, dressed as a young man named Cesario, is sent to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia is shut up, wearing a veil, vowing to mourn her brother for 7 years. In comes Cesario, and Olivia promptly is infatuated with her, not realizing that “Cesario” is another woman. The antagonism between the steward Malvolio and the rowdy crew of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria. The contrast between Feste the Clown and Malvolio, the “refuser of festivities.”

Shakespeare transforms the New Comedy or comedy of manners pattern by having the action move through some realm of mysterious transformation. In Twelfth Night, Viola, the heroine, comes of out the sea, surviving shipwreck, disguises herself as a male, and enters the court of Duke Orsino, which eventually leads to the transformation of the whole society of Illyria, an imaginary country, the intersection of “delirium” and “illusion.”

The mystery of how the English won, suffering small losses, though hugely outnumbered. Slapstick scenes with Fluellen, the true honorable soldier who publicly humiliates the fraudulent braggart soldier Pistol. Act 5 ends the play like a comedy, with a betrothal. The comic wooing of the princess Catharine by Henry, though neither speaks the other’s language very well.

The conflicts in Shakespeare’s tetralogy are one phase in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, followed by the Wars of the Roses, a civil war that ended the Plantagenet dynasty. The astonishing victory at Agincourt on October 25, 1415, against seemingly impossible odds. The question of whether Henry followed the honorable rules of war.

The central theme of the play: what is justified in Henry V’s career? The death of Falstaff, and his replacement by the comic Welshman Fluellen. The comic pattern of alazon vs. eiron, boaster vs. self-deprecator. The siege of Harfleur. Another theme: the power of language. Henry’s speeches.

The portrait of Henry in this play as an idealized model or “mirror” of a “Christian king, not a realistic characterization. The mirror contrast with Richard II, who uses his imagination as escape into narcissistic fantasy. Henry inspires the imagination of others. A long disquisition over Henry’s legal right to rule France. In Act 2, the return of the lower-class characters, the quarreling Nym and Pistol, who note in passing that Falstaff is ill.

Henry IV dies offstage between Acts 4 and 5. Hal, now Henry V, embraces his brothers and vindicates the Lord Chief Justice, who had had him arrested, notwithstanding he was the future king of England. The play ends as he rejects his false father figure, Falstaff, in a devastating speech. Henry V opens with a famous Prologue that is in fact about the power of imagination, working through language, necessary to swell the bare “O” of the stage into two nations and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.