SOURCE: An introduction to Twelfth Night, or, What You Will in Shakespeare in Performance: An Introduction Through Six Major Plays, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, pp. 208-13.

In the essay below, Brown illuminates issues of casting, set design, and stage business in Twelfth Night, and comments on selected stagings of the play.

Twelfth Night is a paradoxical play. It is brilliant, compact, and riddling and, at the same time, delightful, easy, and enjoyable. It is full of fanciful and impossible events; yet it reflects domestic and personal life with exact realism. It has much theatrical, sexual, and verbal humor, much poetry and fine sentiment, and a little rhetoric; yet it is haunted by a continuous sense of pain and loss. Its mood is youthful; yet the play is aware of death, old age, and the changes that time brings. It is full of fervor, and also of weariness and disbelief...