SOURCE: "Twelfth Night," in Henry Irving, George J. Coombes, 1885, pp. 81-83.

This review was first published in the New York Tribune on 19 November 1884.

There is an uncertainty of dramatic drift in the comedy of the Twelfth Night—a kind of whimsical recklessness, sufficiently denoted in the subtitle, What You Will—which, in practical experience, has generally had the effect of making this piece a little tiresome upon the stage. Nobody can care much for anything that it contains, aside from the gentle, piquant, lovely character of Viola; and the charm of this is not essentially dramatic, but resides almost exclusively in the delicious sweetness of her temperament as displayed under the mournful light of her patient and outwardly cheerful resignation to the pangs of unrequited love. There is but little dramatic incident in her experience or of dramatic effect in the development of either her story or her...