SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in Plays & Players, No. 413, February, 1988, pp. 26-7.

Confronted with the business of reviewing yet another production of Twelfth Night, which sometimes seems to occur about every three or four weeks. I have often thought to fill up a bit of the space by detailing the plot. Not in this journal, of course, but there are other readerships that must be constantly irked by reviewers' assumption that everyone is as familiar with Shakespeare's plots as they are. I have felt it would be helpful to these happy illiterates to distinguish, at least, between the two great transvestite comedies—Twelfth Night, whose heroine passes herself off as a boy so successfully that another woman falls in love with her, and As You Like It, whose heroine passes herself as a boy so successfully that even the man who has already fallen in love with...