ABSTRACT
The analogy between Malvolio and Don Quixote occurs inevitably. For both men were of lofty bearing, cursed with an exaggerated sense of their missions, and in both of them this sense was used by irreverent creatures to entice them into ludicrous plights. The play is worth seeing across footlights, for sake of them. If the figures in the quadrille, Orsino and Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, be acted by mimes that look nice, and move gracefully, and make the most of the words allotted to them, rendering the music musically, then even they become tolerable. Various discrepancies of time and place in the scheme of the play testify to the hurry in which this Twelfth Night was knocked off. But plays like Twelfth Night, which consist mainly of hack-work, should be interpreted with real charm and ability or not interpreted at all. It is amazing that he should have cast Malvolio, as he cast Shylock, into a deliquium of extraneous nonsense.
