SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in The Catholic World, Vol. CLII, October, 1940 - March, 1941, pp. 467-73.

"A Great while ago the world began" and ever since men and women have been making their own dream worlds while poets, who set boundaries to dreams, show what may happen on that far Illyrian shore where Shakespeare has set his comedy. Twelfth Night was the old English name for the Feast of the Epiphany and it marked the close of all the Christmas festivities; the minor note that is sounded in the title is the minor note of Elizabethan music and of all real comedy—the wishfulness of dreaming. Comedies of manner have their brief passing season but comedy written round the vagaries of human dreams is timeless. Have there not been young men since the world began who fancied that they were dying of love? Have there not been...