SOURCE: "6th Lyceum Season: Malvolio," in Henry Irving: The Actor and His World, 1951. Macmillan Reprint by The Company, 1952, pp. 435-54.

Twelfth Night was produced on July 8th 1884, Londoners were enduring a heat wave and those of them who made up the audience at the Lyceum were inclined to be as sultry as the night. Irving had spared no pains to match the decorative beauty of his Much Ado—perhaps in this respect he erred in overloading delicate comedy with stage effects. His Malvolio was the outcome of long and original study, for he had never seen the play performed. Phelps had revived the play at Sadler's Wells in 1848; his Malvolio was a masterpiece of make-up and elaborately studied; nevertheless, he did not appear in the part again. Lamb, in his vivid appreciation of Robert Bensley's performance of Malvolio at the end of the eighteenth century, recorded that the...