SOURCE: A Review of Twelfth Night in The Nation, New York, Vol. 151, No. 22, November 30, 1940, p. 540-41.

Presumably Shakespeare's contemporaries had no difficulty in knowing just how to take Twelfth Night and the other romantic comedies. But it has not always been so. In the next age that indefatigable playgoer Mr. Pepys witnessed a revival of the tale of Viola's misadventures, and he was probably speaking for most of his contemporaries when he called it "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw." Even today it would not be hard to find intelligent people ready to agree with Mr. Pepys, or with Bernard Shaw, who professed himself so unable to find in the whole group of comedies anything except brainless inanity that he was compelled to suppose titles like "As You Like It" and subtitles like "What You Will" were intended by Shakespeare as disavowals of responsibility. Neither...