Twelfth Night, nowadays one of Shakespeare's best-loved and most-admired comedies, was not always so regarded: Samuel Pepys saw the play three times in the 1660s and judged it 'silly'.

Modem audiences, critics and directors seem better attuned to its delicate counterpointing of romance and realism, to its ambivalent ending and to the poetic suggestiveness of Feste's songs.