INTRODUCTION TO

TWELFTH NIGHT; OR WHAT YOU WILL.

HISTORICAL NOTICE.

In the Queen's private library at Windsor, there is a copy of the second folio edition of Shakspere, which belonged to Charles I.; and in that copy, the king altered, with his own pen, the title of "Twelfth Night," to that of "Malvolio." It is plain that Charles I., who, as Milton tells us, chose our poet as "the closet-companion of his solitudes," considered that Malvolio was the predominant idea of this play. would appear, also, that it was so considered by Shakspere's contemporaries. Amongst the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, there is a small Diary of a Student of the Middle Temple, extending from 1601 to 1603, in which the following passage occurs:

Feb. 2, 1601 [2].

It

"At our feast we had a play called 'Twelve night or what you will,' much like the comedy of errors, or Menechuis in Plautus, but most like & neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make his lady widdowe was in love with him by counterfayting a letter, as from his lady, in generall termes telling him, what shee liked best in him, & prescribing his gestures, inscribing his apparaile, &c., and then when he came to practise, making him beleeve they tooke him to be mad."

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The passage from the Student's Diary nas a great value, as giving us the true date of this charming comedy. We know, through this record, that it belongs to the middle period of the poet's career, when his genius had attained its mature development, and his art had established a complete mastery over all the subjects with which it dealt. It was this mastery that enabled him to blend the romantic with the comic in such perfect union as we find exhibited in "Twelfth Night."

"There is

The commentator upon our poet tells us, with regard to "Twelfth Night: 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 Shakspere." He did create, then, Sir Andrew, and Sir Toby, and Malvolio, and the Clown. But who created Viola, and Sebastian, and Olivia, and the Duke? They were made, say the critics, according to the recipe of Bandello:-Item, a twin brother and sister; item, the sister in love, and becoming a page in the service of him she loved; item, the said page sent as a messenger to the lady whom her master loved; item, the lady falling in love with the page; item, the lady meeting with the twin brother; item, all parties happily matched. Shakspere, it is held, did not create these characters. He merely evoked them from their hiding-places, in the rude outlines of storybooks without poetry, and comedies without wit. A better school of criticism has taught us, that whether a writer invents, in the commonlyreceived meaning of invention,-that is, whether his incidents and characters be spick-and-span

new; or whether he borrows, using the same ordinary phraseology, his incidents and characters from tradition, or history, or written legends, he is not a poet unless his materials are worked up into a perfect and consistent whole and if the poetry be not in him. it matters little whether he raises his fabric "all out of his own head," as children say, or adopts a bit here and a bit there, and pieces them together with a bit of his own,-for his house will not stand; it is built upon the sands.

The Hall of the Middle Temple is a stately room, adorned with noble portraits, and full of grave and elevating associations. But there is no association connected with this building more interesting than that at the Christmas festivities of 1601 was here performed " a play called 'Twelve Night, or what you will ""-that joyous and exhilarating play, full of the truest and most beautiful humanities, especially fitted for a season of cordial mirthfulness. Here, then, its exquisite poetry first fell upon the ear of some secluded scholar, and was to him as a fragrant flower blooming amidst the arid sands of his Bracton and his Fleta; and here its gentle satire upon the vain and the foolish penetrated into the natural heart of some grave and formal dispenser of justice, and made him look with tolerance, if not with sympathy, upon the mistakes of less grave and formal fellow-men; and here its ever-gushing spirit of enjoyment, of fun without malice, of wit without grossness, of humor without extravagance,taught the swaggering, roaring, overgrown boy, miscalled student,that there were higher sources of mirth than affrays in Fleet Street, or drunkenness in Whitefrars. The Globe has perished, and so has the Blackfriars. The works of the poet who made the names of these frail build