Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online

Covent Garden in 1820 incorporating the masque from
The Tempest
as well as extracts from Shakespeare’s sonnets and his narrative poem
Venus and Adonis
. At the same time, “breeches” roles such as Viola, in which women pretended to be men, with their transgressive potential for assuming figure-revealing masculine attire, became extremely popular. The American actress Charlotte Cushman, best known for her performance as Romeo to her sister’s Juliet, played Viola in New York with her sister Susan asOlivia. The production transferred to London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1846. Samuel Phelps’ productions at Sadler’s Wells in 1847 and 1858 transformed Malvolio curiously into a Spanish Golden Age
hidalgo
, one nobly born but poor (Don Quixote is the most famous literary example of the type).
    Charles Kean presented a typically lavish pictorial staging with his wife, Ellen Tree, as Viola in 1850. Five years later Kate Terry starred in Alfred Wigan’s production at the St. James’ Theatre in which, with some rearrangement of the text, she played both Viola and Sebastian. Kean’s spectacular set was matched by Henry Irving’s in 1884:
    The Lyceum Illyria is a land where ornate palaces with their cool balconies and colonnades and their mazy arabesque traceries, look forth among groves of palms, and plantains, and orange trees, and cedars, over halcyon seas dotted with birdlike feluccas and high-prowed fishing boats. 8
    While Ellen Terry was praised for her Viola, critics were divided by Irving’s Malvolio. A number objected to his mannered delivery. “When an absence of humorous expression is required to give a speech its full comic effect, Mr Irving’s restless eyebrows and obliquely twinkling eyes do him a disservice.” The production’s “tone of serious tragedy,” which culminated in his collapsing into “a nerveless state of prostrate dejection … stretched on the straw of a dungeon worthy of
Fidelio
,” was felt to unbalance the play: “There can be no doubt that the straw which clung to Mr Irving’s dress from the mad-house scene was the last straw which broke the patience of a certain section of the first night audience.” 9
    Augustin Daly’s 1893 production, which featured a violent storm as well as a moonlit rose garden, cut and rearranged the text drastically. It was generally well received, though, both in New York and London when it transferred the following year. In the words of the critic William Archer, it had “the one supreme merit which, in a Shakespearean revival, covers a multitude of sins—it really ‘revives’ the play, makes it live again.” 10 For George Bernard Shaw, Ada Rehan’s Viola was the production’s only redeeming feature: “themoment she strikes up the true Shakespearian music, and feels her way to her part altogether by her sense of that music, the play returns to life and all the magic is there.” 11 Shaw deplored the liberties Daly had taken with the text, though, which included cutting the “dark-house” scene in Act 4 when Malvolio is imprisoned and taunted with madness.
    Surprisingly, William Poel also cut this scene in his experimental production at the Middle Temple in 1897 in the (reconstructed) hall where Manningham had seen the Chamberlain’s Men perform it. Keen to gauge its possibilities as a playing space, Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society employed original staging practices as far as possible. Herbert Beerbohm Tree cut the same scene in his production at the Haymarket in 1901. George Odell described it as
    the most extraordinary single setting I have ever beheld. It was the garden of Olivia, extending terrace by terrace to the extreme back of the stage, with very real grass, real fountains, paths and descending steps. I never saw anything approaching it for beauty and
vraisemblance. 12
    Unfortunately the set’s complexity made it impossible to strike so that a number of completely inappropriate scenes had to be played on it. Tree himself played