Sir Toby Belch

Sir Toby Belch is a character in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, believed to have been written around 1599 or 1601.

Character

He is considered one of William Shakespeare's finest comic characters, an ambiguous mix of high spirits and low cunning. He first appears in the play's third scene, when he storms onto the stage the morning after a hard night out, complaining about the sombre melancholy that hangs over his niece's household. "What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I'm sure care's an enemy to life." This immediately establishes Sir Toby at the opposite pole from the languishing melancholy which dominated the first scene (including Orsino's speech, "If music be the food of love..."), identifying him as a force for vitality, noise and good cheer, as his name suggests. But it also raises the question of how far the audience is expected to sympathize with him. Is his criticism of his niece a justified statement of the old truism that "life must go on", or an insensitive blunder by a hungover old drunkard?