SOURCE: Mullan, John. Review of Twelfth Night. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5196 (1 November 2002): 22.

In the following excerpted review of the 2002 Donmar Warehouse Theatre staging of Twelfth Night directed by Sam Mendes, Mullan contends that an overemphasis on the erotic and sensual aspects of the drama, as well as on the suffering of Malvolio, obscured its comic elements and proved detrimental to the production.

We owe to the memoranda book of law student John Manningham our knowledge that Twelfth Night was written just before or just after Hamlet. Manningham records seeing it early in 1602, though until his diary was unearthed in the nineteenth century it was commonly supposed that this romantic comedy of loss redeemed by kind tempests was late Shakespeare. With the confidence of documentary evidence, we now see how close it is to that tragedy of forbidden mourning. Like Hamlet, it opens after a death, and asks how...