SOURCE: "The Comedies: Twelfth Night," in Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays (1660-1905), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944, pp. 3-11.

In the following excerpt, Sprague examines the handling of stage business in various productions of Twelfth Night.

The fact that this most delightful of Shakespeare's comedies was on the boards in the sixteen-sixties, when Pepys saw it more than once—"a silly play," he calls it, "and not related at all to the name or day"—may well be misleading. For though, in 1703, Twelfth Night furnished ideas and a certain number of lines to a negligible piece by William Burnaby called Love Betray'd, it was not acted again until 1741, this time, we may be certain, without the slightest guidance from tradition.

It has long been customary for Viola, in the second scene, to be accompanied by two sailors carrying a "trunk" or "chest." Why...