The earliest recorded performance of Twelfth Night is that set down in a diary by the law student, John Manningham. He notes that a play called 'Twelve Night or What You Will' was part of the entertainment laid on for the students and lawyers of the Middle Temple in celebration of the feast of Candlemas on 2 February 1602. He goes on to single out the gulling of Malvolio:
"A good practice in it to make the steward believe his Lady widow was in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his Lady in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture, in smiling, his apparel, etc, and then when he came to practice making him believe they took him to be mad."
Malvolio was a hit with other early audiences. The play was performed at court in 1623 under the title of Malvolio, and Charles I wrote this name against the play's given title in the contents list of his copy of the Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. Verses written in praise of Shakespeare in 1640 declared that the theatre was:
 "full/To hear Malvolio, that cross-gartered gull".

The performance at the Middle Temple took place in the Great Hall, illuminated by candlelight. The regular venue of Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was the Globe Playhouse on Bankside. Plays were performed in the open air, in daylight, on a simple thrust stage, with a balcony and a trapdoor, the latter used, perhaps, for Malvolio's imprisonment in Act 4. No scenery and a minimum of props allowed the action to move swiftly and the audience to focus on the language. Music and costume added to the effect. Shakespeare wrote his plays with the strengths and talents of his fellow players in mind. His gifted boy players took the female roles so that the original audience had the unsettling experience of watching a boy playing a girl playing a boy in the role of Viola. The role of Feste demands an actor of rare talents: he must be able to sing and interact with others in a range of contrasting styles as well as maintain a dialogue with himself in two opposing voices. The role was tailor-made for Robert Armin, famous for his sweet voice, wry, inventive jesting and his writing of pamphlets and a play about fools. The original Malvolio is impossible to guess. It may have been taken by the company's leading actor, Richard Burbage, but, perhaps, the play's largest role, that of Sir Toby Belch, might have been his.

In the late seventeenth century, after the Restoration of the King and the reopening of the theatres, Twelfth Night was seen on the London stage only in adapted forms. William Wycherley took an unpleasantly satirical look at social mores in his version, The Plain Dealer. Here, a married Olivia is pursued by Manly, with the help of his page boy, Fidelia. This boy is in love with his master, being, in fact, a young woman in disguise. Manly succeeds in using Olivia's sexual appetite for Fidelia to trick his own way into Olivia's bed. William Burnaby's Love Betray'd was another reworking of Shakespeare's play. Burnaby adds Restoration character-types to the mix, removing Feste and combining Malvolio and Sir Andrew into a new character called Taquilet.

The play, more or less as Shakespeare knew it, was revived at Drury Lane by Charles Macklin in 1741. Macklin made sure that he starred as Malvolio, and the beguiling Hannah Pritchard played the 'breeches role', Viola. 'Breeches roles' were those in which female actors – forbidden, of course, on Shakespeare's stage, but by now excitingly available to the public view – spent much of the play in male disguise. Packed houses were guaranteed by the promise of the daring exposure of female lower limbs. Macklin cannily scheduled The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It alongside Twelfth Night, making the most of their cross-dressing heroines. Eighty years later, audiences were still thrilling to this public flouting of a gender taboo. Here is Leigh Hunt ignoring the actress's dramatic talents in favour of her "right feminine leg, delicate in foot, trim in ankle, and with a calf at once soft and well-cut, distinguished and unobtrusive".

The main attraction for audiences in this period was the play's comedy rather than its romance: Feste's love songs were cut, his comic ones retained and new ones added. The character most enjoyed by eighteenth and nineteenth-century theatre-goers was still that of Malvolio and this remained the part prized by any leading actor. In 1884, at the Lyceum Theatre, Henry Irving gave his Malvolio a striking and influential new interpretation by playing the role from the character's own perspective. Rather than a figure of fun, the deluded steward now became a dignified, estimable and much wronged man arousing sympathy and not laughter in his psychological torments. Ellen Terry, as Viola, was the only other actor allowed any kind of dramatic presence in a production dominated by Irving, the Lyceum's actor-manager and star. Enormous weight was given to Malvolio's final exit line; the happy lovers were quite overshadowed by Irving's almost tragic exit. Like other nineteenth-century Malvolios, Irving's favoured a haughty, Spanish style of appearance. He was gaunt and sharply bearded, dressed in close-fitting black, looking down on all around him from half closed eyes.

The fashion in Victorian theatre had been for highly pictorial, naturalistic sets and elaborate scenery. At the start of the twentieth century, directors such as William Poel and Harley Granville Barker rejected such artifice and sought a return to the simpler production values of Shakespeare's original playhouse. In 1912, Granville Barker's stylish black and silver production demonstrated the virtues of swift and fluid staging. The Feste of this Twelfth Night was notable for his melancholy and advanced years.

Successful recent revivals include the Renaissance Theatre Company's production in 1987, directed by Kenneth Branagh. This was filmed the next year. Following a late nineteenth-century tradition, the melancholy of Anton Lesser's Feste was fed by his hidden and hopeless love for Olivia. Branagh's Illyria was a wintry late Victorian world of snowy gardens and an imposing grandfather clock. Branagh reversed the order of the two first scenes so that the play began with the arrival in Illyria of the storm-tossed Viola.

The Middle Temple was again the venue of a memorable Twelfth Night in 2002, 400 years after that seen by John Manningham. Among the many excellent performances in this Elizabethan-style, all male production, that of Mark Rylance stood out for the engaging mixture of pathos and comedy he achieved in his fine interpretation of Olivia. In the same year, Sam Mendes paired Twelfth Night with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya for his final season at the Donmar, in which Simon Russell Beale played Malvolio.

Film versions of the play include the 1980 BBC television production, featuring Alec McCowen as Malvolio and Felicity Kendal as Viola. In 1995, Trevor Nunn directed Nigel Hawthorne and Imogen Stubbs in those roles in his late nineteenth-century, Arts and Crafts styled version, filmed on picturesque location in and around an Elizabethan manor house in Cornwall.

Written by Rebecca Brown