When the Theatre Guild and Gilbert Miller join forces to produce a play like "Twelfth Night" by an author like W. Shakespeare, and for good measure include Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans, you have an event that might make even the mildest critic turn cartwheels down the center aisle.

But not everyone was so exuberant. In fact Miss Elinor Hughes of the "Boston Herald" seemed decidedly disappointed the day after the opening. Ordinarily, one just lets a critic's opinion lie like a sleeping dog, but in the case of "Twelfth Night," which is certainly the most significant Boston opening the fall, reinvestigation of the case of Hughes vs. Shakespeare is certainly in order.

In her dissatisfaction with "Twelfth Night" Miss Hughes writes that "the suspicion remains that some of it was Shakespeare's fault ... Perhaps it all boils down to the fact that 300-year-old jokes are apt to need footnotes, that actors haven't time to step to the footlights and explain why they are supposed to be funny, and that some of the jokes in "Twelfth Night" need a lot of explaining."

Here Miss Hughes is speaking much truth. No one can get much humor from Sir Toby Belch's pun on "points" if he isn't aware that points in Queen Elizabeth's day were of vital importance in connecting one's pants to one's suspenders. In fact, I fail to see how an audience can enjoy Shakespeare at all, especially his comedy, if it hasn't given the play a good once-over ahead of time. Not that Shakespeare is "deep" or needs unravelling. But it only stands to reason that an author who draws on such a wide varsity of images and people should be filled with references that don't mean an awful lot in 20th Century lingo.

So if you feel, along with Miss Hughes, that because a joke of Shakespeare's falls a bit flat today, the entertainment value of the play is dampened, you might as well not revive his comedies at all. Since Mohammed can't come to the mountain, it's only fair that the audience get into the spirit of the play by reading it.

Few had--judging by Monday night's sprinkled and hesitant laughter. In fact, the whole attitude of the audience today seems far too polite for a playwright used to the bantering of the "pit." The Elizabethan wits must have lambasted Malvolio as enthusiastically as the later 19th Century hissed the villain. His first appearance bedecked with yellow garters probably unloosed a storm of mirth and ridicule. A little more of this boisterousness would be a welcome addition to day.

Besides the jokes, Miss Hughes' only other criticism falls on Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Ague cheek who hardly exploited "the robust comedy elements of the play" I take it that Miss Hughes feels badly that the lines did not crackle like those, say, out of "Panama Hattie." I don't think Shakespeare meant them to. Toby's humor is more mellow than witty. It belongs, just as he does, to old and merry England.

Typical of Toby's humor is his bantering with Maria, who warns him to "confine yourself within the modest limits of order." He counters: "Confine: I'll confine myself no finer than I am. These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots too." There is certainly nothing "dated" in this joke to spoil it, but it would hardly rate in the poorest radio laugh-show. It belongs to a comic old knight, still able to raise cain, but really as antiquated and useless as the England which is giving way to new commerce and "new men" like the ambitious Malvolio. And rather than the "robust comedy" which Miss Hughes wants, the mellowness and restraint of Norman Lloyd and Mark Smith seemed to me a perfect interpretation.