PERSONS REPRESENTED. Orsino, duke of Illyria. 1 to Viola. en attending on the duke. Lords, Priests, Saitors, Officers, Musicians, and other Attendants. SCENE, a city in Illyria; and the sea-coast near it. OBSERVATIONS ON THE FABLE AND COMPOSITION OF TWELFTH-NIGHT: OR, IWHAT YOU IVILL. THERE is great reason to believe, that the serious part of this Comedy is founded on some old translation of the seventh history in the fourth volume of Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques. Belleforest took the story, as usual, from Bandello. The comic scenes appear to have been entirely the production of Shakspeare. STEEVENS. A comedy called What you Will (the second title of this play) was entered the 6th of August 1607 at Stationers' Hall; I believe, however, it was Marston's play. Ben Jonson ridicules the con. duct (as he takes every opportunity of doing to our author) of this play, in his Every Man in his Humour, where Mitis says, "That the argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son in love with the lady's waiting maid: some such cross wooing, with a clown to their serving man, better than be thus near and familiarly allied to the time." STEEVENS. 1 ii This play is in the graver part elegant and easy, and in some of the lighter scenes exquisitely humourous. Ague-cheek is drawn with great propriety, but his character is, in a great measure, that of natural fatuity, and is therefore not the proper prey of a satirist. The soliloquy of Malvolio is truly comic; he is betrayed to ridicule merely by his pride. The marriage of Olivia, and the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contrived to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and fails to produce the proper instruction required in the drama, as it exhibits no just pieture of life. JOHNSON. |