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 can it be denied that the question of the ultimate artistic intention of these comedies presents a problem in a sense that the great tragedies do not. One may, to be sure, argue endlessly over the proper interpretation to be put upon Hamlet, but there is at least no doubt that it must be presented as tragedy in the grand style. There is, on the other hand, a real doubt as to what kind of comedy Twelfth Night is, a real doubt as to the seriousness of its artistic pretensions and the general nature of its comic intention. Is it, as apparently the Victorians presumed, romantically naive, sentimental, and whimsical to an extent which renders it almost literally brainless? Is it a merely random mixture of somewhat precious poetry and low comedy? Or do the two sets of characters bear some real relation to each other; so that the play as a whole means something more than the mere sum of its poetic and farcical elements?

For all these reasons the new and elaborate production of Twelfth Night (St. James Theater) with Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans is a bolder undertaking than any of the other recent revivals of Shakespeare. The play is not, as Hamlet is, fool-proof—at least to the extent that it cannot fail to be in some degree interesting. Audiences are probably less disposed to take naturally to it, and under the circumstances the first thing to be said is simply that it is, without question, the best production of this or any of the romantic comedies seen here in many a day and that it deserves the success which it is pretty certain to enjoy. Considered simply as an evening's entertainment, it is rich and unflagging; where it falls short of everything one could wish, it falls short because it manages almost too skilfully to avoid facing fundamental questions, because it never even tries to suggest what all the romantic posturing and all the simple fun add up to; because, indeed, it seems to assume that the whole means no more than the individual parts.

Of the performances the best is certainly that of Helen Hayes, and so far as she herself is concerned there is, in truth, very little left to be desired. Her Viola is not only charming and richly inventive; she is also mischievous, and she is dominated by a sense of fun which saves her from the mere cuteness which some performers have made cloying. Miss Hayes is superb in the scene of her first appearance before Olivia, and all through the play she delights one by striking just the right note—as she does, to cite a single example, in the soliloquy leading up to the conclusion that to her the proud Olivia has lost her heart. Here Miss Hayes, instead of being wistful or tender, exclaims, "She loves me!" with an accent of half-delighted and half-incredulous astonishment which makes completely evident the "Well, I'll be damned!" mentally accompanying it and thus keeps the mood of exuberant fun in which the whole part is played. Mr. Evans's Malvolio, considered simply as a comic characterization, is almost as good, even though his interpretation of the role debases it almost to that of a mere comic butler and therefore seems to me to be not only false to Shakespeare's conception but incompatible with that interpretation of the play as a whole which I believe to be the best one. June Walker's Maria is delightfully comic, and Margaret Webster's direction, as it was in Henry IV, is highly competent in purely theatrical ways though almost too ready to put before everything else amusing business and mere liveliness on the stage. She manages to make every moment active and amusing enough so that an audience is never aware that anything more is possible or even desirable, but her solution of the problem of how to hold the play together is largely a theatrical rather than a poetic or imaginative one.

I can only wish that she had read—and pondered—Mark Van Doren's recent Shakespeare, in which he so illuminatingly and persuasively states the case for the assumption that the whole group of romantic comedies of which Twelfth Night is one are alike in that each is a poetic whole integrated by the same problem or at least the same contrast, that the central theme in each is the clash between an aristocracy which is cultivated, self-consciously exquisite, and fundamentally decadent and the representatives of some cruder but more full-blooded or more wilful group. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio's first speech announces luxuriously that he knows not why he is so sad; in Twelfth Night Orsino demands more of the musical food of love, only to announce a few seconds later that he has now achieved the surfeit he was seeking. But Antonio and Antonio's friends have to reckon with Shylock and something which threatens their world of finicky gentility just as Orsino and his friends have to reckon, not only with Sir Toby, but also—in the person of Malvolio—with a middle class just learning to be ambitious. Out of the balance of sympathies between these two groups the finest music of the plays arises, and yet the fact that in the present production the first scene ("If music be the food of love, play on") is the poorest in the whole play and quite pointless except in so far as it provides a factual exposition, shows how completely the deepest theme of the play has been missed. As here played, Twelfth Night is a delightful evening's entertainment. But it could conceivably be better, not merely quantitatively but qualitatively as well.