SOURCE: Thomson, Peter. “Twelfth Night: The Music of Time.” In Essays on Shakespeare in Honour of A. A. Ansari, edited by T. R. Sharma, pp. 211-21. Meerut: Shalabh Book House, 1986.

In the following essay, Thomson links the music of Twelfth Night—its lyricism as well as its musical interludes, ballads, and catches—to the prominence of hypothetical speeches by various characters, contending that the multiple “if” clauses in the play are part of Shakespeare's orchestration of the dialogue.

When Henry Irving, monarch of the late Victorian stage, revived Twelfth Night in 1884, the first night audience at the Lyceum was unimpressed. Some of them even hissed. For Clement Scott, reviewing the production of ‘this extremely difficult work’, the audience's response was proof of the fact that Twelfth Night ‘is rather for the book-worm than the playgoer’ and whatever blame was to be attached to the proceedings ‘belonged to the...