SOURCE: "Twelfth Night: Random Notes (1937)," in The Shakespearean Scene: Dramatic Criticisms, Hutchinson & Co., 1949, pp. 74-6.

In the following essay, originally published in 1937, Farjeon comments on several issues associated with the staging of Twelfth Night in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.

In the Henry Irving edition of Shakespeare, published fifty years ago, the famous actor-manager marked in all the plays those passages which, in his opinion, might suitably be left out when the plays were performed. Many of these cuts were made on the ground of propriety. In Twelfth Night, an unusually "pure" play, sixteen offending passages, now fearlessly spoken and unblushingly heard, were square-bracketed. That, in the Victorian age, was only to be expected. Other excisions are more difficult to account for. The first really startling cut comes in the drinking scene, where the passage preceding, following, and including the singing of "O mistress mine" is recommended...