SOURCE: "Another Playwright Misunderstood," in The Spectator, Vol. 218, No. 7200, June 24, 1966, pp. 789-90.

Columns are to architecture what melody is to music,' says Stendhal somewhere on his travels through Italy, and would have been pleased with both in the first minutes of Twelfth Night at Stratford: Orsino stands before a row of slender columns, listening in an attitude of conscious ecstasy—a rose in one outstretched hand, one foot poised on a stool in the centre of an empty, polished marble floor—to 'That strain again; it had a dying fall.' Orsino is a prince of the Renaissance; and Clifford Williams's production is built round that assumption, which is perhaps why it has been received with such a notable lack of enthusiasm. The chief complaint seems to be that it lacks 'poetry and pathos'; the answer is that this is not our kind of poetry, nor our...