ABSTRACT
Peter Hall's focus on Feste met the audience entering the theatre, on the drop-curtain painted by Lila de Nobili, who designed his 1957 Stratford production of Cymbeline. In the programme note to Peter Hall's production at Stratford in 1958, Ivor Brown speaks of the comic plot as 'secondary' but that hardly does justice to what may have been the producer's intention in keeping Steward Malvolio in his place. In making Feste the centre of the whirligig of time that brings in its revenges he had, at any rate, the authority of the New Cambridge edition. There is also the fact that the title of Twelfth Night may be more indicative than it seems to us, who have lost any sense of twelfth night as a red letter day in the calendar, the time of the Saturnalia which was also once the true date of Christmas.
