A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition)

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, 1775-1920

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL

TRADITION

GENERAL EDITOR: BRIAN VICKERS

Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zurich

King John Joseph Candido Richard II Charles R. Forker A Midsummer Night's Dream Judith and Richard Kennedy

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

A Midsummer Night's Dream Edited by JUDITH M. KENNEDY and RICHARD F. KENNEDY

THE ATHLONE PRESS London & New Brunswick, NJ

First published 1999 by The Athlone Press 1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG and New Brunswick, New Jersey ©Judith M. Kennedy and Bachard F. Kennedy, 1999 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 485 81003 4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A midsummer's night dream / edited by Judith M. Kennedy and Richard F. Kennedy. p. cm. — (Shakespeare, the critical tradition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-485-81003-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Midsummer night's dream. 2. Comedy. I. Kennedy, Judith M. II. Kennedy, Richard F., 1933-. HI. Series. PR2827.M535 1999 822.3'3-dc21 99-21407 CIP

Distributed in the United States, Canada and South America by Transaction Publishers 390 Campus Drive Somerset, New Jersey 08873 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Typeset by Bibloset Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press

FOR

OUR CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES

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Contents

GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE

X

PREFACE

XX

INTRODUCTION

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

1

ELIZABETH GRIFFITH, moral conventions and human sympathy, 1775 SAMUEL FELTON, artists' interpretations of dramatic effects, 1787 EDMOND MALONE, commentary on A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1790 CHARLES TAYLOR, Bottom as coxcomb, 1792 GEORGE STEEVENS, response to Malone, 1793 WALTER WHITER, illustrations of some passages, 1794 CHARLES DIBDIN, his fertile and creative fancy, 1800 AUGUST WILHELM VON SCHLEGEL, on metre, invention, and a unified whole, 1815 NATHAN DRAKE, unity of feeling and of imagery, and the fairies, 1817 WILLIAM HAZLITT, Bottom, Puck, and the incompatibility of poetry and the stage, 1817 JAMES BOSWELL AND EDMOND MALONE, Malone's last words, 1821 AUGUSTINE SKOTTOWE, mainly on the fairies, 1824 GEORGE DANIEL, the fairy world, the clowns, the poetry, 1828 THOMAS KEIGHTLEY, new actors on the mimic scene-the fairies, 1828 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, marginalia and other notes, 1836 WILLIAM MAGINN, Bottom the lucky man, 1837 THOMAS CAMPBELL, critics refuted, 1838 HENRY HALLAM, originality in structure, machinery, and language, 1839 CHARLES KNIGHT, the Pictorial Edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1839 WILLIAM SPALDING, the poet's dream, 1840 JAMES ORCHARD HALLIWELL, anachronisms, Nick Bottom as Midas, and stage representation, 1841 NICHOLAS JOHN HALPIN, Oberon's Vision allegorized, 1843 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER, fairy drama and human nature, 1843 LEIGH HUNT, Poet of the Fairies, 1844 JOSEPH HUNTER, a comment, with some explanatory notes, 1845 HERMANN ULRICI, the theme of self-parody, 1846

vii

59 63 66 70 74 76 79 81 84 90 94 97 101 105 108 11 118 121 123 130

132 137 142 145 148 153

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

27 GULIANCROMMELINVERPLANCK, introductory remarks, 1847 28 HENRY JAMES SUMNER MAINE, the sister arts, and the play's structural balance, 1848 29 HENRY NORMAN HUDSON, a festival of dainties, 1851 30 JOHNRUSKIN, the Dream and Art, 1851, 1872, 1883, 1884 31 HENRY MORLEY, a most charming entertainment of the stage, 1853 32 DOUGLAS WILLIAM JERROLD, Samuel Phelps's Bottom, 1853 33 RICHARD GRANT WHITE, dramatic and poetic art, 1854 34 EDWARD STRACHEY, dialogue with a sceptic, 1854 35 WILLIAM WATKISS LLOYD, critical remarks on the play, 1856 36 ANONYMOUS, Celtic elements, 1859 37 GEORG GOTTFRIED GERVINUS, genre and inner purpose, 1863 38 CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE, intuitive power of characterization, 1863 39 THOMAS KENNY, the play's limitations, 1864 40 JOHN ABRAHAM HERAUD, the sacred mysteries in the play, 1865 41 ETHAN ALLEN HITCHCOCK, the secret meaning of the Interlude, 1865 42 ABNER OTIS KELLOGG, the perfection of imbecilic clowns, 1866 43 MARY PRESTON, not critics, but lowly worshippers of the Beautiful, 1869 44 HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE, the theme is love, 1871 45 DANIEL WILSON, Bottom - an ass, but no fool, 1873 46 KARLELZE, A Midsummer Night's Dream as masque, 1874 47 DENTON JACQUES SNIDER, self-reflexive structure: the Real, the Ideal, and the Representation, 1874 48 GEORGE WILKES, Shakespeare differentiated from Bacon, 1875 49 EDWARD DOWDEN, Theseus as the central figure, 1875 50 ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, a comedy of incident, 1875 51 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, consummation of Shakespeare's lyrical genius, 1876 52 JOHN WEISS, Bottom, a self-made man, 1876 53 FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL, the full glow of fancy and fun, 1877 54 CHARLES EBENEZER MOYSE, the wood is the world, 1879 55 THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, Titania and Ovid, 1880 56 WILLIAM FRANCIS c. WIGSTON, a Platonic reading, 1884 57 GRACE LATHAM, interpreting the spoken verse, 1885 58 ELIZABETH WORMELEY LATIMER, observations on the lovers and the mechanicals, 1886 59 FRANCIS ALBERT MARSHALL, poet rather than dramatist, 1888 60 GEORGE EDGAR MONTGOMERY, source of the play's popularity, 1888 61 JULIA WEDGWOOD, classical and modern, 1890 62 CHARLES DOWNING, reason and desire in Oberon and Titania, 1890 63 SIDNEY CLOPTON LANIER, the development of morality and art, 1891 64 BARRETT WENDELL, a true work of art, 1894 65 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS, the duration of the action, 1895 66 KATHARINE LEE BATES, life and art, 1895 67 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Mr. Daly and the idea of titivation, 1895

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157 162 168 173 177 181 184 190 197 203 206 214 217 219 225 229 232 235 238 241 245 253 256 259 262 264 267 270 274 277 281 288 292 295 298 303 307 313 317 321 324

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

68 69 70 71 72

ANDREW LANG, remarks on the play and modern education, 1895 FREDERICK SAMUEL BOAS, Theseus, Bottom, and the Interlude, 1896 EDMUND KERCHEVER CHAMBERS, the central idea, 1897 GEORG MORRIS COHEN BRANDES, the airy dream, 1898 MAXBEERBOHM, illusion, realism, and imagination, 1900

328 332 335 339 343

73

CHARLOTTE ENDYMION PORTER and HELEN ARCHIBALD CLARKE, dream visions, 1903

346

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

RICHARD GREEN MOULTON, a comedy of situation and enchantment, 1903 ERNEST HOWARD CROSBY, Shakespeare's working classes, 1903 GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON, the atmosphere of the play, 1904 STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE, love, dreamland, and Helena, 1905 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY, the theme of illusion, 1907 FRANK SIDGWICK, the nature and sources of the play, 1908 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, the most beautiful work of man, 1909 ERNEST DE SELINCOURT, Shakespeare's conception of his art, 1911 HARLEYGRANVILLE BARKER, screeds of word-music, 1914 CHARLOTTE CARMICHAEL STOPES, three types of fairies: Puck, Oberon and Titania, 1916 84 BJ0RNSTJERNE BJ0RNSON, the dream's validity, 1917 85 BENEDETTO CROCE, comedy of love, 1920

353 357 360 365 368 370 373 374 378 381 383 386

NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

389 419

INDEX

436

ix

General Editor's Preface

The aim of this series is to increase our knowledge of how Shakespeare's plays were received and understood by critics, editors, and general readers. His work, with its enormous range of represented situations, characters, styles, and moods, has always been a challenge, both to the capacity of readers and to their critical systems. Two main reactions may be expected: either the system is expanded to match the plays, or the plays are reduced to fit the system. If we study his reception in the neo-classic period, as I have done in my six-volume anthology of primary texts, Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, 1623-1801 (London and Boston, 1974-81), we see his plays being cropped — literally, cut, drastically adapted — to accommodate the prevailing notions of decorum and propriety. If not hacked about for the stage, they were evaluated by literary-critical criteria which seem to us self-evidently anachronistic and inappropriate, and found wanting. Yet despite this frequent mismatch between system and artefact, the focus of neo-classic critical theory on issues of characterization, structure and style did enable many writers to respond to the experience of reading or seeing his plays in a fresh and personal way. Since most of the eighteenth-century material has been dealt with in the previously-mentioned collection, the main emphasis in this series will be on documenting the period 1790 to 1920. While the major Romantic critics (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats) have been often studied, and will need less representation here, there are many interesting and important writers of the early nineteenth century who have seldom attracted attention from modern historians. As one moves on chronologically, into the Victorian period, our knowledge becomes even more thin and patchy. But there was a continuous, indeed constantly increasing stream of publications in England, America, France, and Germany, hardly known today. (See my select bibliography of the 'History of Shakespeare Criticism' in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Third Edition, Volume 2: 1500-1700, ed. Douglas Sedge, Cambridge University Press; forthcoming.) This period saw the founding of the Shakespeare Society by J. P. Collier in 1840, which produced a huge number of publications by 1853, when it unfortunately collapsed, following Collier's exposure as a forger. In 1873 the New Shakespere Society was founded by F. J. Furnivall, and over the following twenty years produced some eight series of publications, including its Transactions, which contain many important critical and scholarly essays, a group of reprints of early quartos, allusion books, bibliographies, and much else. This was also the period in which the first journals devoted exclusively to Shakespeare appeared, some short-lived, such as Poet-Lore (Philadelphia, 1889-97) and Shakespeariana (Philadelphia, 1883), Noctes Shakspeariana (Winchester College,

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1887), or New Shakespeareana (the organ of the Shakespeare Society of New York), but at least one still with us, thejahrbuch of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, which appeared as such from 1865 to 1963, was divided into separate volumes for West and East Germany in 1964-65, but happily reunited in 1991. Shakespeare's plays were constantly edited and reprinted in this period. Of the complete editions, the two great peaks are the 'third variorum' edition of James Boswell, Jr. in 21 volumes (1821), the apotheosis of the eighteenth-century editions by Johnson, Steevens, and Malone, and the Cambridge edition by William G. Clark, John Glover, and W. Aldis Wright in 9 volumes (1863-66), which in turn provided the text for the enormously long-lived one-volume 'Globe edition' (1864). The Cambridge edition, which presented Shakespeare's text with minimum annotation, broke with the eighteenth-century tradition of reprinting all the important footnotes from every earlier edition, an incremental process which burdened the page but certainly led to a great dissemination of knowledge about Shakespeare's plays. That service was recommenced on a new and more coherent plan in 1871 by Dr H. H. Furness with his Variorum Edition of separate plays, continued by his son H. H. Furness, Jr. (fifteen titles by 1908), and revived in our time as the New Variorum Shakespeare, currently under the aegis of the Modern Language Association of America. But in addition to these well-known scholarly editions, a vast number of competing sets of the plays were issued for and absorbed by an apparently insatiable public. Their popularity can be judged by the remarkable number of reprints and re-editions enjoyed, for instance, by Charles Knight's 'Pictorial edition' (8 vols., 1838-43), followed by his 'Library edition' (12 vols., 1842-44), re-christened in 1850-52 the 'National edition', not easily distinguishable from Knight's own 'Cabinet edition' (16 vols., 1847-48), not to mention his 'Imperial edition', 'Blackfriars edition', all of which being followed by a host of spin-offs of their constituent material; or those by J. P. Collier (8 vols., 1842-44, 6 vols., 1858, 8 vols., 1878, now described as having 'the Purest Text and the Briefest Notes'), or Alexander Dyce (6 vols., 1857; 9 vols., 1846-47; 10 vols., 1880-81, 1895-1901). Other notable editions came from J. O. Halliwell (16 vols., 1853-65); Howard Staunton (3 vols., 1856-60; 8 vols., 1872; 6 vols., 1860, 1873, 1894; 15 vols., 1881); John Dicks, whose 'shilling edition' (1861) had reputedly sold a million copies by 1868, but was undercut by the 'Shakespeare for Sixpence' edition (Cardiff, 1897); Nicolaus Delius (7 vols., 1854-61), the text of which was re-used by F. J. Furnivall for his one-volume 'Leopold edition' (1877, '100th Thousand' by 1910); Edward Dowden (12 vols., 1882-83); F. A. Marshall and Henry Irving in the 'Henry Irving' edition (8 vols., 1888-90); C. H. Herford's 'Eversley edition' (10 vols., 1899); the 'Stratford town edition' by A. H. Bullen and others (10 vols., 1904-07); the 'University Press' edition with notes by Sidney Lee and important introductions to the individual plays by over thirty critics (40 vols., 1906-09); and many, many more, as yet unchronicled by bibliographers. America also launched a vigorous tradition of Shakespeare editing, starting with Gulian C. Verplanck's edition (3 vols., New York, 1844-47), continuing with those by H. N. Hudson (11 vols., Boston, 1851-56 and 20 vols., 1880-81); R.G. White (12 vols., Boston, 1857-66,1888), and the 'Riverside edition' (3 vols., Boston, 1883);J. A.

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Morgan, the 'Bankside' edition (22 vols., New York, 1888-1906), with parallel texts of the plays from the quartos and folio; W. J. Rolfe, a larger edition (40 vols., New York, 1871-96), and a smaller or 'Friendly edition' (20 vols., New York, 1884); and a notable collaboration by two women editors, the 'First Folio edition' by Charlotte E. Porter and Helen A. Clarke (40 vols., New York, 1903-13). These editions often included biographical material, illustrative notes, accounts of Shakespeare's sources, excerpts from contemporary ballads and plays, attempts to ascertain the chronology of his writings, and much else. The fortunate - largely middle-class - purchasers of these sets had access to a surprisingly wide range of material, much of it based on a sound historical knowledge. In addition to the complete works, there were countless editions of the individual plays and poems, many of them of a high scholarly standard (the best-known being the original 'Arden edition', ed. W. J. Craig and R. H. Case in 39 vols., 1899-1924), not to mention numerous facsimiles of the Folios and Quartos. The more we study the Victorian period, the less likely we shall be to indulge such facile dismissals of it as Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). Where Strachey could follow the common practice of rejecting the values of the preceding age, we now should have sufficient historical distance to place the scholarly and critical output of that period into a coherent perspective. Nineteenth-century scholars produced a number of studies that held their place as authorities for many years, and can still be used with profit. For Shakespeare's language there was E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian grammar (1869; many editions), Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon (Berlin, 1874-5, 1886), revised and extended by Gregor Sarrazin (2 vols., Berlin, 1902), and Wilhelm Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik (Halle, 1898-1900,1909; Heidelberg, 1924). It is only very recently that modern works, such as Marvin Spevack, A Shakespeare Thesaurus (Hildesheim, 1993), have added anything new. On the fundamental issue of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, such as his collaboration with John Fletcher in Henry VIII, the division of labour independently proposed for that play by Samuel Hickson and James Spedding in 1847 and 1850 has been largely confirmed by Jonathan Hope in The authorship of Shakespeare's Plays (Cambridge, 1994). In other areas we now have more reliable tools to work with than the Victorians, but it was they who laid the basis for many of our scholarly approaches to Shakespeare. As for their Shakespeare criticism, while a few authors are still known and read - A. C. Bradley for his Shakespeare Tragedy (1904), Walter Pater for his essay on 'Shakespeare's English Kings' in Appreciations (1880) - the majority are simply unknown. Among the English critics who clearly deserve to be revalued are Richard Simpson for his essays on Shakespeare's historical plays, R. G. Moulton, for his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885; 3rd ed. 1906), Edward Dowden, and F. S. Boas. As for the many German critics whose work was eagerly translated into English — A. W. Schlegel, Hermann Ulrici, G. G. Gervinus, Karl Elze, Wilhelm Creizenach - who today can give any account of their writings? * **

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Professors Judith and Richard Kennedy, who are also editing A Midsummer Night's Dream for the New Variorum edition, have mastered the whole range of scholarship and criticism about this play. They include excerpts from the introductions in all the major, and several of the minor editions: Thomas Campbell in 1838 (No. 17), Charles Knight's 'Pictorial Edition' of 1838-43 (No. 19), 'Barry Cornwall' in 1843 (No. 23), W. W. Lloyd, writing for S. W. Singer's 1856 edition (No. 35), the indefatigable F. J. Furnivall in the 1877 Leopold Shakespeare (No. 53), F. A. Marshall for the popular Henry Irving edition of 1888 (No. 59), that great scholar E. K. Chambers for the Warwick Shakespeare in 1897 (No. 70), an introduction subsequently re-cycled, as was that by the Danish critic Georg Brandes in 1898 (No. 71), and G. E. Woodberry's introduction for the 40-volume Renaissance edition of 1907 (No. 78). All the American editions are represented: G. C. Verplanck's 3 volumes of 1844-47 (No. 27), H. N. Hudson's 11 volumes of 1851 (No. 29), H. H. Furness's original Variorum edition of 1895 (No. 65), and the important 'First Folio' edition of 1903 by Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke (No. 73). We also find here a very welcome cross-section of American scholars and critics, many of whom will be unknown to most readers: R. G. White (No. 33), E. A. Hitchcock (No. 41), A. O. Kellogg (No. 42), Mary Preston (No. 43), George Wilkes (No. 48), John Weiss (No. 52), Elizabeth Latimer (No. 58), George Montgomery (No. 60), Sidney Lanier (No. 63), Barrett Wendell (No. 64), Katharine Bates (No. 66), and Ernest Crosby (No. 75). Taken together with those European critics whose writings were translated into English — the Germans Schlegel (No. 8), Ulrici (No. 26), Gervinus (No. 37), Elze (No. 46), solitary representatives from France (Taine: No. 44), Italy (Croce: No. 85), Norway (Bj0rnson: No. 84), and Denmark (Brandes: No. 71) — this collection faithfully represents the extent of Shakespeare's reputation, and the fame of this play. The editors' full and detailed introduction covers the play's fortunes from its first performance up to the present day. Many readers will be surprised at the quantity of contemporary allusions here recorded, far more than have ever been listed, testifying to the play's immediate popularity. It is impossible to make proper comparisons until we have other reception-studies as detailed as this, but my impression is that A Midsummer Night's Dream was for many years Shakespeare's most popular comedy. In the eighteenth century conventional praises of its 'wild, irregular genius' and its fairy world went along with neo-classic criticism of its anachronisms and a growing appreciation of the play's characters, especially Bottom, although there was little sense of the relation of character to plot. As the editors show, critical responses began to flow in the Romantic period, and took on many different forms in the nineteenth century. Like every other Shakespeare play, the Dream can be made to serve a wide range of user interests: re-asserting family morality for Elizabeth Griffith (No. 1: 1775), confirming Hazlitt's belief that Shakespeare could not be acted (No. 10: 1817) - a prejudice that can be partly understood once we realize the huge dimensions of London theatres in Hazlitt's day,1 expressing Celtic nationalism for one anonymous writer (No. 36: 1859), helping Abner Kellogg to study imbeciles (No. 42: 1866), and proving to Ernest Crosby's satisfaction that Shakespeare despised the working classes (No. 75: 1903). In our own time, as Judith and Richard Kennedy show, it has

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supported identifications of Theseus as Christ and as a repressive patriarch, Bottom as an ithyphallic monster, and the wood as a place of nightmare and terror. Every age finds its own image in Shakespeare. The editors reconstruct the play's reception over a period of four hundred years as an evolving dialogue, in which each critic responds to his or her predecessors and tries to strike out a new path. Since this is the first comedy to appear in our series, I would like to pick out some critical trends in the main period documented here which seem to be peculiar to this play, responses which recognize its individuality and achievement. Many critics showed a special affection for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Nathan Drake, writing in 1817, felt it 'to be perfectly without a rival in dramatic literature' (No. 9), while for J. O. Halliwell in 1841 it was 'the most beautiful poetic drama in this or in any other language' (No. 21). Superlatives abound: for G. C. Verplanck, in 1847, it was 'the most remarkable composition of its author' (No. 27); for Swinburne in 1876 (No. 51) and again in 1909 its perfection made it 'the most beautiful work of man' (No. 80). In 1900 Max Beerbohm judged it 'the most impressive of all the plays, and the loveliest, and the most lovable' (No. 72), and four years later G. K. Chesterton agreed that it was 'the greatest of Shakespeare's comedies' and 'also, from a certain point of view, the greatest of his plays' (No. 76). Such remarkably high assessments often go along with another special response to the play, a kind of rhapsodic evocation of its unique qualities, 'a dream over which broods the magical dimness of a summer night, half hiding and half revealing scenes where nature slumbers in her most luxuriant beauty' (No. 20: W. Spalding, 1840); 'a forest peopled with sportive elves, feeding on moonlight, and music, and fragrance' (No. 29: H. N. Hudson, 1851); the play is 'a phantasmagory; a mask of shadows full of marvel, surprises, splendour, and grotesqueness' (No. 49: E. Dowden, 1875); it has the 'enchanting metaphysic of the stage, whose contrasts of shadow and reality are shot, now in threads of gossamer lightness, now in homelier and coarser fibre, into the web and woof of this uniquely hymeneal masque' (No. 69: F. S. Boas, 1896). Any play must have special qualities that can inspire to flights of eloquence such very different critics as Nathan Drake (No. 9), George Daniel (No. 13), William Maginn (No. 16), Thomas Campbell (No. 17), 'Barry Cornwall' (No. 23), Henry Morley (No. 31), Mary Preston (No. 43), H. A. Taine (No. 44), Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke (No. 73), and George Woodberry (No. 78), none of whom could resist the temptation to rhapsodize. The particular quality of the play most often commented on, as the editors point out, was its relation with dreams. In one of his marginalia Coleridge expressed his conviction 'that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of the play in his own mind and worked upon it as a dream throughout' (No. 15), an insight that other critics soon elevated into a thematic emphasis. Hermann Ulrici saw the play conceiving 'human life' itself as a dream, in which 'the remotest regions, the strangest and most motley figures mix with one another', vanishing 'into an uncertain chiaro-scuro' (No. 26: 1846). Another German critic, Georg Gervinus, writing in 1849, argued that the fairies had been deliberately adjusted to the amoral nature of dreams: Shakespeare 'depicts them as beings without delicate feeling and without morality, just as in

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dreams we meet not with the check of tender sensations and are •without moral impulse and responsibility' (No. 37). Two generations later the Anglo-Irish critic Stopford Brooke similarly saw Puck as 'representative of the grotesque, unmoral, unhuman creations (for fancy, without will, has no conscience, no humanity) which so strangely go and come in dreams'. Brooke saw the dream element as a cumulative effect which 'reaches its height when the Queen of Dreamland herself is set dreaming. Even dreams dream that they dream' (No. 70). These pre-echoes of Freudian theory remind us that the unconscious existed long before Freud:2 indeed the terms 'unconscious' and 'subconscious' crop up here. Several critics wrote sensitively about the play's juxtaposition of the two realms, making things acceptable in fancy that would frighten or disgust us in reality (No. 29: H. N. Hudson, 1851); bringing together 'the world of phantasy and the world of reality . . . with an ease and a truthfulness which had previously been unknown in any work of human hands' (No. 39: Thomas Kenny, 1864). The Norwegian poet Bj0rnson wrote that 'The dream gives us reality reversed, but reversed in such a way that there is always the possibility that it may, in an unguarded moment, take veritable shape' (No. 84: 1917). Better still, C. E. Moyse described 'the stage whereon the Dream is played' as 'the outside world of thought and action, diminished but intensified'. The four lovers 'have determined to go out into the world — the poet's wood — and to fight out the battle of life for themselves . . . They all fled into the world and they suffered' (No. 54: 1879). But all of these responses to the interplay of fantasy and reality have a freshness lacking in many modern accounts, burdened by the heavy weight of Freudian theory.3 Seeing the play as the embodiment of dream and fantasy made some critics resentful of the reality in which they lived. In 1854 Edward Strachey, in his original and thought-provoking 'dialogue with a sceptic' (No. 34), referred to 'the whole fairy life which Shakespeare brings before us in the various scenes of this play, and which to our nineteenth century understandings has an entirely foreign, or at least extraneous character', but -without resenting the contrast. To Charles Cowden Clarke, however, writing in 1863, 'the old faith in that fairy presence has ceased forever', and 'we have passed into an age of practicality and demonstrative knowledge', having lost touch -with 'the Sabbath of the Fancy' (No. 38). Mary Preston waxed sarcastic about 'the ultra-practical man' who ignores fairy tales and is only concerned with 'the dry commonplaces of existence' (No. 43: 1869), while Julia Wedgwood speculated that 'Shakespeare was much nearer an actual belief in the fairy mythology he has half created than seems possible to a spectator of the nineteenth century', to whom 'Theseus expresses exactly the denial of the modern world' (No. 61: 1890). A much sharper version of this juxtaposition was made in 1895 by Andrew Lang, himself a great teller of myths and fairy-tales, locating the 'truly English and human thread' of the play in Quince and his company, whose 'bones were made in merry England before the populace found its life not worth living, before we had cheap science and polluted air in place of mirth and a moderate learning' (No. 68). Judging from a more explicitly religious perspective, G. K. Chesterton, in 1904, found in the play 'the last glimpse of Merrie

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England, that distant but shining and quite indubitable country', in which 'unlike the England of to-day', a belief in 'a merry supernaturalism' could flourish, before the Puritans destroyed all 'the fables of Christendom' except witchcraft (No. 76). For other critics A Midsummer Night's Dream represented neither a remote fantasy nor a rebuke to the present age but a play, having a coherent form. Where Malone dismissed 'the fable' as 'meagre and uninteresting' (No. 3: 1790), many writers praised its complex and integrated structure. A. W. Schlegel, in so many respects a pioneer, judged 'the different parts of the plot; the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, Oberon and Titania's quarrel, the flight of the two pairs of lovers, and the theatrical manoeuvres of the mechanics', to be 'so lightly and happily interwoven that they seem necessary to each other for the formation of a whole' (No. 8: 1815). Another influential critic, Henry Hallam, found that 'the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity of Shakespeare, as much as in any play he has written. No preceding dramatist had attempted to fabricate a complex plot' to this degree (No. 18: 1839). If Hallam hesitated to ascribe this achievement entirely to Shakespeare's 'skill', other critics had no such qualms. Charles Knight judged it Shakespeare's most 'harmonious' play, for 'All the incidents, all the characters, are in perfect subordination to the will of the poet', serving 'one leading design' (No. 19: 1839), a judgment echoed by William Spalding (No. 20: 1840), G. C. Verplanck: 'one perfectly connected and harmonious whole' (No. 27: 1847), Henry Maine: 'some law of regularity' unites the play's 'several groups' into ' a coherence and connection' (No 28: 1848), R. G. White (No. 33: 1854), Edward Strachey: 'a coherent design and execution' (No. 34: 1854), W. W. Lloyd: 'a lucid and well-ordered web' (No. 35: 1856), D. J. Snider, who tried to define 'the thought which binds together its multifarious and seemingly irreconcilable elements' (No. 47: 1874); Barrett Wendell: 'few works in any literature possess more artistic unity' (No. 64: 1894); Andrew Lang (No. 68: 1895); Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke (No. 73: 1903). Some critics went beyond these general praises of the play's unified structure, trying to pin down its motive forces. Charles Cowden Clarke argued that 'Demetrius and Lysander, Hermia and Helena, with their love-crosses and perplexities, constitute the chief agents in the drama', forming the main plot, with Puck producing an 'important movement in the machinery', Theseus and Hippolyta forming 'as Schlegel happily observes, "a splendid frame to the picture'" (No. 38: 1863). C. E. Moyse disagreed, declaring the fairies 'the instruments by which the mechanism of the play is set in motion', the mortals being affected by their deeds, with Theseus restoring harmony. Moyse perceptibly showed some parallels between the plot levels, the quarrelling lovers generating 'a state of strife . . . similar to that of Titania and Oberon. The emotions of these men and women are wrought up to the highest pitch. Their intense mental strain finds an outlet in quick and violent action. Mark the running, the breathless haste, the impassioned cries

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in which the play abounds. Rapidity is the key' to its inner meaning (No. 54: 1879). The most popular concept to describe the relation between the Dream's various levels was parody, first introduced by August Schlegel, who saw that 'Pyramus and Thisbe is not unmeaningly chosen as the grotesque play within the play; it is exactly like the pathetic part of the piece, a secret meeting of two lovers in the forest, and their separation by an unfortunate accident, and closes the whole with the most amusing parody' (No. 9: 1815). The elevation of parody to a structural principle was made by Hermann Ulrici in 1839 (a book translated in 1846), drawing on Hegel's characterization of comedy in his Aesthetik (1835) as possessing an inbuilt irony.4 Ulrici argued that in the Dream 'the principal spheres of life are made mutually to parody one another in mirthful irony'. Theseus and Hippolyta represent 'the grand, heroic, historical side of human nature', but their marital quarrel is a self-parody; Bottom and the mechanicals represent 'the lowest sphere in the full prose of every-day life', but in their attempt at tragedy parody themselves as well as 'the higher sphere of the tragic and the heroic'; while the lovers, lost 'in the fantastic play of their own selfish love', are also 'a parody on themselves and their station in life' (No. 26: 1846). Ulrici's formulation was too schematic and philosophical for many critics, but some echoed it in part: W. W. Lloyd thought that 'the very incongruity of the heroic Theseus with romantic incidents and accidents, of the classic with the Gothic elements, is parodied and excused in adaptation of a story still more remote, of Pyramus and Thisbe, by journeymen clowns so contemporary to the habits of the groundling audience' (No. 35: 1856). C. C. Clarke praised Shakespeare's 'happy thought' in making the play within the play 'a travesty of the old tragic legend of 'Pyramus and Thisbe', and thereby turning it, as it were, into a farce upon the serious and pathetic scenes that occur between the lovers in the piece — Demetrius and Helena, and Lysander and Hermia' (No. 38: 1863). Towards the end of the century three writers commented independently on the element of parody: F. S. Boas noted Shakespeare's 'dramatic method' of producing 'variations upon a single theme in the different portions of a play', with the 'workmen's play' both raising the serious issue of the relation between life and art ('shadow to substance') and being 'a burlesque upon the dramas of the day, in which classical subjects were handled with utter want of dignity, and with incongruous extravagance of style' (No. 69: 1896). E. K. Chambers related 'Pyramus and Thisbe' to the play's internal themes, 'a burlesque presentment' of the difficulties of love (No. 70: 1897), while GeorgBrandes compared the 'sprightly burlesque' specifically with Thomas Preston's Cambyses, first printed in 1561 (No. 71: 1898). For some modern readers it may come as a surprise to find Victorian critics showing such a sharp awareness of the play's structure and of the inter-relation between its parts, especially since recent fashions in Shakespeare criticism have moved away from language and dramatic form to specifically modern preoccupations with Gender, Psyche, and Power. The best of these analysts of dramatic structure was R. G. Moulton, who used diagrams to define the changing relationships

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between characters in terms of their desires or 'motive agencies' (No. 74: 1903). His account of the play's developing complications and resolutions is still valuable for its clarity, the representation of motive in terms of attraction and repulsion making him a precursor of the structuralist narratology that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, as seen in the work of A. J. Greimas and Gerard Genette.5 Our awareness of nineteenth century critics is so tenuous that we could attribute very few qualities to them, but we would probably not grant them much understanding of Shakespeare's language, since we tend to see the critics of the 1930s — Richards, Empson, Leavis, Spurgeon, Clemen — as having made that break-through. Judith and Richard Kennedy have recovered many critics who will make us revise our opinion. Schlegel, having perhaps learned form his eighteenth-century predecessors, Roderick and Capell,6 noted how the dramatist varied his verse movement according to subject matter and speaker, ranging from 'ease and rapidity' to 'ponderous energy': 'Even the irregularities of Shakespeare's versification are expressive; a verse broken off, or a sudden change of rhythmus, coincides with some pause in the progress of thought, or the entrance of another mental disposition' (No. 8: 1815). Shakespeare's deliberate art in verse-movement and the use of rhyme was celebrated by Coleridge (No. 15: 1836), and by the future legal historian Henry Maine, who saw the interplay between rhyme, blank verse, and lyric as reflecting the play's dramatic structure (No. 28: 1848). Grace Latham, one of the few women to attain recognition in the New Shakespeare Society, made a particularly sensitive analysis of the role of metrical variety and punctuation in expressing a range of thoughts and feeling, and anticipated modern linguistics in her recognition that 'in real life our sentences are rarely complete; our eagerness to get through them making us drop out many of our words', relying on the addressee to complete the sense (No. 57: 1885). As for Shakespeare's vocabulary, the Latin element, only recently given proper scholarly analysis,7 was observed by Henry Hallam, pointing to several phrases which would be 'unintelligible . . . except in the sense of their primitive roots', such as 'quantity' meaning value, 'constancy' meaning consistency, and 'rivers, that "have overborn their continents", the continente ripa of Horace' (No. 18: 1839). Hallam was unsure how much Latin Shakespeare knew, and while several critics observed the presence of Ovid in the play (e. g. J. O. Halliwell, No. 21), it was left to T. S. Baynes to show that he must have known the Metamorphoses in Latin, for the name Titania does not occur in Golding's English translation (No. 55: 1880). These are some of the ways in which, reading these critics of a distant age, we can gain a sharper sense of the unique qualities of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Their response may make us aware of some imbalances in contemporary criticism, and lead us to a fuller appreciation of this remarkable play.

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NOTES 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

Cf. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage. Volume 6: 1774-1801 (London and Boston, 1981), pp. 63-4, 85. See, e. g., L. L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York, 1960); H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York, 1970); F. J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (London, 1979). See my comments on the otherwise admirable edition by Peter Holland (1995) in Review of English Studies, 49 (1998): 215-22, at p. 220. Cf. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), vol.ii. pp.1163, 1236. See, e. g., A. J. Greimas, Semantique structurale. Recherche de methode (Paris, 1966), and Du Sens. Essais semiotiques (Paris, 1970); G. Genette, Figures III (Paris, 1972); Claude Bremond, Logique du recit (Paris, 1973); Claude Chabrol (ed.), Semiotique narrative et textuelle (Paris, 1973). For earlier critics, such as Richard Roderick, see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Volume 4: 1753-1765 (London and Boston, 1976), pp. 338-40, and for Edward Capell, ibid., Volume 6: 1774-1801 (London and Boston, 1981), pp. 218-19, 253-72. For systematic modern studies of this topic see M. Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare's Verse. Iambic Pentameter and the Poet's Idiosyncrasies (New York and Bern, 1987); G. T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). Cf. Jiirgen Schafer, Shakespeares Stil. Germanisches und romanisches Vokabular (Frankfurt am Main, 1973).

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Preface

This volume seeks to extend the work begun by Brian Vickers in his six-volume Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623-1801 (London, 1974-81) through a selection of critical responses to A Midsummer Night's Dream from 1775 to 1920. Since the emphasis of the series is on criticism in English, continental critics are represented only by works which in translation became part of the English critical tradition. Commentary related to the performance history of the play is included only when it bears on interpretation or reception of the play itself, rather than when it is concerned primarily with individual actors or particular staging. The introduction explores early responses to the play through assessing references to it and imitations of it, and then traces shifting critical concerns from the earliest commentary at the beginning of the eighteenth century to the present. More detailed examination of critical trends in the mid and later twentieth century can be pursued through the well annotated and indexed Garland bibliography on A Midsummer Night's Dream by D. Allen Carroll and Gary Jay Williams (New York, 1986). The texts in this collection are taken from the first printed edition, unless otherwise noted. The following editorial changes have been made silendy: (1) the spelling of 'Shakespeare' and 'Shakespearean' has been standardized throughout; (2) italicization of characters' names has been ignored; (3) quotation marks in set-off quotations have been eliminated; (4) some set-off quotations have been incorporated into the text. Footnotes in the original documents are retained, except when their only function is the designation of act, scene, or line numbers; such footnotes have been silendy omitted, and the information placed in square brackets in the text. All footnotes, both those taken from the original documents and those provided by the current editors, are designated by a single, consecutive numbering system. They are differentiated as follows: unbracketed footnotes, 1, 3, etc., are those found in the original documents; bracketed footnotes, [2], [4], etc., are those provided by the current editors. Editorial notes in the text, such as summaries of omitted material or provision of act, scene, and line numbers, are placed within square brackets. Omissions in the text are indicated by ellipsis dots (three at the beginning or in the middle of a sentence, four at the end), larger omissions by three asterisks. All Shakespearean act, scene, and line references interpolated in the text are to The Riverside Shakespeare edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974), but passages in the documents themselves are quoted as they appear in the originals, reflecting differences in the textual traditions of the editions used by the individual authors. We are happy to acknowledge our debts to many institutions and individuals.

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Much of the material on which this volume is based has been gathered in the course of preparing the New Variorum edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream. That work was generously subsidized by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by the administration of St. Thomas University. We are grateful for the assistance of the librarians and staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the New York Public Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the libraries of the universities of Edinburgh, Pennsylvania, Yale, Harvard, Duke, and North Carolina at Chapel Hill; special thanks are due to librarians and staff of the Harriet Irving Library in Fredericton, New Brunswick, particularly in Document Delivery, Reference, Microforms, and Circulation. Our co-editor for the New Variorum A Midsummer Night's Dream, Susan May, gave invaluable help by allowing us to use her bibliography and survey of criticism of the play. We have also received support and encouragement from the editors of parallel volumes in this series, Joseph Candido and Charles Forker. Special assistance has been provided by James Kennedy, Elizabeth Klaassen, and Michael Klaassen. Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge our debt to the patience, support, and advice of the general editor, Brian Vickers.

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Introduction

i BEGINNINGS TO 1775 A Midsummer Night's Dream was a popular play from its opening afternoon, as is evidenced in the many borrowings from it and imitations of it in the drama and in the poetry of the age, and in the casual mentions of it in letters, prefaces, and so on. Instances of these allusions are given to the end of the seventeenth century, when critical attention to the play began. On stage the play seems to have split soon into low farce with the mechanicals, or into the high spectacle of opera as it was adapted by Henry Purcell and later by David Garrick. Apart from John Dryden's remarks in 1677, and a handful of statements by literary historians in the late years of the century, critical comment emerged early in the eighteenth century, concentrating to a great extent on Shakespeare's imaginative creation of the fairies. The poetry of the play early received critical acclaim, especially from the collections of its beauties. Some of the great editions of the eighteenth century - especially Samuel Johnson's in 1765 — augmented the growing body of criticism, but for the most part the criticism remained brief and limited until the 1770s. Scholars place the date of composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream about 1595-6: it was printed in quarto in 1600 and 1619, proof of its instant popularity, for among the comedies only three received two printings before the 1623 folio, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In his Palladis Tamia; Wits Treasury (entered 7 September 1598 and published the same year) Francis Meres stated that 'Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both' Comedy and Tragedy, and he lists Dream with four other comedies.1 While formal criticism of Dream began in the eighteenth century, there are indications of the appreciative reception of it in the contemporary drama, where it was imitated and adapted, in the poetry which borrowed from it, and in other allusions to it. The play was strongly influential in the drama. In Histrio-mastix (1599; printed 1610) John Marston drew on Shakespeare's mechanicals for his portrayal of Belch, Incle, Gutt, and Post-hast, who act an Interlude before Lord Mavortius, and rehearse at the end of Act 4. There are other resemblances.2 Marston's tragedies Antonio's Revenge (1600; printed 1602), The Malcontent (1604), and The Insatiate Countess (1610; printed 1613) all have several echoes of Dream in them, as does the comedy Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600; printed 1601).3 The anonymous Wisdom of Dr. Dodypoll (1600) may have borrowed the line 'Hanging on eury leafe an orient pearle' from the fairy's opening speech (2.1.15).4 Thomas Dekker's The Shoemakers'

i

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Holiday (1599; printed 1600) echoes the play in one place, and his later Whore of Babylon (1606-7; printed 1607) has Titania figuring Queen Elizabeth and Oberon Henry VIII, with other borrowings.5 In the anonymous Wily Beguiled (1602; printed 1606) the character of Will Cricket suggests Bottom in some ways, and G. C. Moore Smith gives verbal parallels.6 Narcissus: A Twelfe Night Merriment, an anonymous farce presented at St. John's College, Oxford, 6 January 1603, owes much to the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude. It has a Well as a character, much like Wall, and over a dozen close parallels with Dream.7 Ben Jonson echoes Theseus in Cynthia's Revels (1600-1; printed 1601) when Cynthia declares, 'what sort our sports | Are like to be this night, I not demaund. | Nothing which dutie, and desire to please | Beares written in the forehead, comes amisse' (5.6.77-80), which is a remembrance of the Duke's assertion, 'I will hear that play; | For never any thing can be amiss, | When simpleness and duty tender it' (5,1.81-3). Peter Whalley, who first noted this parallel in 1756, points out that 'Cynthia and Theseus are exactly in the same situation, both preparing to see a dramatic exhibition'.8 The word 'sports', which Cynthia uses, or 'sport', is uttered three times in the same scene in Dream (5.1.42, 79, 90). In his entertainment The Satyr (1603; printed 1616), Jonson included a Puck-like satyr, an Elf, fairies, and Mab the queen of Fairies; and in Bartholomew Fair (1614; printed 1631), he drew on the Interlude in the puppet burlesque of Lantern, in Act 5, scenes 3 and 4.9 His later masque, Love's Welcome at Bolsover (1634; printed in 1641), has 'A Dance of Mechanics' in which Chesil, the Carver; Summer, the Carpenter; Dresser, the Plumber; Quarrel, the Glazier; and Fret, the Plaisterer, among others, imitate the bergomask danced by the mechanicals at the end of the Interlude.10 George Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois (1604; printed 1607) echoes Puck's promise to 'put a girdle round about the earth' (2.1.175) when Bussy speaks of seamen who 'put a girdle round about the world' (1.1.23).11 In the same first scene Bussy's meeting with Maffe (1.1.158-65) uses three sentences from Bottom's first introduction to the fairies (3.1.179-83).12 John Day's The Isle of Gulls (1606) probably took the names Lisander, Demetrius, and Hippolita from Dream, along with a few phrases. Cyril Tourneur, or Thomas Middleton, or whoever wrote The Revenger's Tragedy (1606; printed 1607-8), seems to have remembered Titania's expression 'the third part of a minute' (2.2.2) in the First Officer's speech: 'we'll not delay | The third part of a minute' (3.3.16-17),13 There is a well known reference to a bit of stage business in Edward Sharpham's The Fleire (1606; printed 1607): 'Fie: Faith like Thisbe in the play, a has almost kil'd himselfe with the scabberd', which points to a very early comic portrayal of Thisbe's demise where apparently she stabbed herself with Pyramus's scabbard instead of his sword (5.1.343-7).14 Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters (1606; printed 1608) displays some verbal parallels with Dream, and Paul Yachnin has found other similarities.15 Daniel M. McKeithan finds that John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess (1608; printed 1609?) is 'largely a reworking of material taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream': it is indebted to the play for 'the theme, the method of treating the theme, the woodland setting, a number of important details in the plot, and more than a dozen situations and ideas'.16 A few other echoes are sounded in Fletcher's later plays such as The Pilgrim (1621;

2

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

printed 1647) and Beggars' Bush (1622; printed 1647), and in two plays he wrote with Philip Massinger, The Little French Laivyer (1619; printed 1647) and The Lovers' Progress (1623; printed 1647).17 Cristina Malcolmson's claim that Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling 'should be read as rewriting Shakespeare's play [i. e. Dream]' is rather strong, but there are some remarkable similarities, and one pointed allusion when Franciscus says 'Hail, bright Titania! | Why stand'st thou idle on theseflow'rybanks? | Oberon is dancin . . .' (3.3.48-50).18 Massinger imitated Dream in at least seven of his plays from 1619 to 1633.19 Robin Goodfellow and some fairies appear in the first scene of Thomas Randolph's Aristippus, or the Jovial Philosopher (1626), and John Ford echoes Dream in one place in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1632). But with the closing of the theatres in the 1640's, drama was strangled: the only imitation of Dream in the interregnum was James Shirley's privately performed masque The Triumph of Beauty (1646) where he adapted the Interlude, and modelled his shepherd Bottle on Bottom.20 The Restoration saw the borrowing resume. John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee adapted parts of Titania's seasons speech in the beginning of their Oedipus (1678; printed 1679). Lee used quotations from the hunting speeches of Theseus and Hippolyta in Theodosius (1680). In his Cuckolds-Haven (1685) Nahum Tate quoted a dozen lines from two of Bottom's utterances. The anonymous play The Folly of Priestcraft (1690) has the heroine, Leucasia castigating Politico ('A contriving Intriguing Priest') for his iniquities, particularly 'to see you impos'd upon by such a Person as Turnabout, . . . to see you hugging him in your Bosom for a converted Saint, it seem'd to me as preposterous as to see ... the Woman in Shakespeare, kissing the Fellow with the Asses-head —'.21 Over forty dramas show at least traces of the influence of Shakespeare's fairy play. Like dramatists, poets showed their appreciation of Dream by borrowing from or referring to it. In his poem 'The Perfume', composed around 1596, John Donne has a simile — 'like Faiery Sprights | Oft skipt into our chamber, those sweet nights' — which Helen Gardner thinks 'might have been suggested by the close of A Midsummer Night's Dream'.22 And, indeed, there are some verbal resemblances in 'fairy sprite', 'chamber', and 'sweet' (5.1.393, 417, and 418). Another poem which may owe something to the same play is 'The Exstasie', especially in the first stanza: Where, like a pillow on a bed, A Pregnant banke swel'd up, to rest The violets reclining head, Sat we two, one anothers best; The setting here is similar to the one where Lysander and Hermia decide to bed down for the night in the wood, and, like Donne's lovers, they have a 'conference' (2.2.46). The words 'pillow', 'bed', 'banke', 'rest', and 'head' are all in Dream (2.2.39-42,64), and the conjunction of bank and reclining violet is found in Oberon's speech in the previous scene: 'I know a bank where . . . the nodding violet grows' (2.1.249-50). Donne's idea that 'Love . . . makes both one' (35-6) and that 'soules. . . knit | That subtle knot' (62-3) is akin to Shakespeare's thought: 'my heart unto yours is knit; | So that but one heart we can make of it' (2.2.47-8; consider too 'knitteth

3

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

souls' at 1.1.172). The love which 'Interinanimates two soules' (42) is somewhat like the 'Two bosoms interchained' (2.2.49). Two other possible remembrances of Dream occur, in one of Donne's Verse Letters and in one of his Divine Poems.23 In 1602 an unidentified author, T. A., used five lines from the hunting verse of the opening of Act 4 in his poem The Massacre of Money.24 William Percy's The Faery Pastorall or Forrest of Elves, completed in 1603 and first published in 1824, includes 'Oberon, King of the Faeryes', and Atys, a 'Faery Page', who relates how he fell into a Bowl 'in forme of a Crab' and 'bobd' against the barber's mouth 'to the pleasure of the whole companye of beholders there'. This passage resembles Puck's description of his identical trick (2.1.47-9, 55).25 George Chapman's translations of Homer's Iliad (1610-11) and Odyssey (1614-16) have a half dozen verbal resemblances.26 Barten Holy day's translation of Persius's Satires (1616) has several lines - '. . . I heare some boistrous rough | Centurion say; Tush, I haue wit enough | To serue mine owne turne' — which are like Bottom's speech to Titania: ' . . . but if I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have enough to serve mine owne turn' (3.1.149-51). Francis Quarles borrowed some phrases for his Feast for Wormes (1621), and later, in his Emblemes (1635) the lines 'we fear, | Each bush we see's a bear' from 'imagining some fear, | How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear' (5.1.21-2).27 John Taylor the Water-Poet named the play and quoted from Quince's prologue at the beginning of the Interlude (5.1.108-10, 114) in his preface to Sir Gregory Nonsence. His Newes from no place (1622).28 Leonard Digges remembered some phrases from the beginning of the Fairies' song 'You spotted snakes' (2.2.12-15) in lines 29-30 of his commendatory verse, 'Upon Master William Shakespeare', prefixed to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's poems.29 Robert Herrick's poem 'Oberons Palace' may owe some inspiration to Shakespeare's fairy king and fairyland, and other poems in his Hesperides (1648) show more definite indebtedness in several places.30 But the greatest early testament of the imaginative impact of the play is in the poetry of John Milton, where one can find over a hundred parallels, over ninety in the early poetry and ten in Paradise Lost, from 'wormie bed' in 'On the Death of a Fair Infant' (1. 31; from 3.2.384), to 'spangled sheen' in Comus (1. 1003; from 2.1.29), to the simile at the end of the first book of his epic: like ... Faery Elves, Whose midnight Revels, by a Forest side Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the Moon Sits Arbitress, and nearer to the Earth Wheels her pale course; (I, 780-6)31 Various other allusions attest to the early popularity of the play. William Drummond of Hawthornden listed it among the books he read in 1606.32 In his New Shreds of the old Snare (1624) John Gee refers to 'the Comedie of Piramus and Thisbe, where one comes in with a Lanthorne and Acts Mooneshine'. This reference, together with Charles I's entry of'Piramus and Thisby' in his copy of the second folio of 1632 at Windsor Castle, 'as if it were a second title to Shakespeare's comedy',

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caused Halliwell to wonder if the Interlude had been 'separately performed at a very early period'.33 An obscure mention occurs in a letter of June 3-4, 1639, where Edward Norgate describes 'Mr. Weckherlin, who plays Pyramus and Thisbe and the Lion too'.34 One of the finest early tributes to the play is contained in Josua Poole's English Parnassus (1657, 1677) - a kind of handbook for aspiring poets, the largest section being a 419 page florilegium of English poetry arranged alphabetically by subjects - where Dream is the second most quoted of Shakespeare's plays with forty-five citations, just under Hamlet's forty-eight, and above third place Romeo and Juliet's thirty-five.35 In 1662 Edmund Gayton mentioned 'Pyramus and Thisbe, the Lion and the Moon-shine' as distinct roles, and in 1669 The New Academy of Complements included the fairies' song 'You spotted snakes' (2.2.9ff.) among its many Shakespearean lyrics.36 Andrew Marvell mentioned Pyramus, Moonshine, and Wall in The Rehearsall Transpros'd: the Second Part (1673).37 Most of these casual references indicate that the play was best known for the Interlude: perhaps HalliwelTs guess that this part of the play had early been made an independent production was true. The performance history of the play seems to bear this out. There are records of three actual early performances, the first being on 1 January 1604 before King James, the second in 1630 at Hampton Court, and the third in 1631, probably in the house of the Lord Bishop of Lincoln. Yet another enactment, about 1620, seems indicated by the stage direction first given in the first folio, 'Tawyer with a Trumpet before them' (5.1.126), which is likely from the prompt copy of the second quarto of 1619 on which the text of the folio is based.38 With the closing of the theatres from 1642 to 1660 the play was reduced to a 'droll' of the Pyramus and Thisbe Interlude and presented by strolling players at various fairs. Earlier in the century the same kind of farce was acted by English comedians in Germany and by 1657 was transformed by Andreas Gryphius into a Schimpfspiel called Hen Peter Squenz, featuring Bottom translated into the character of Pickelherring.39 With the Restoration and the revival of the theatres the play as Shakespeare had written it disappeared for the next century and a half, and became either farce or opera, truncated, rewritten, added to, and changed. The droll version continued as a burlesque, and was published in 1661 as The Merry conceited Humors of Bottom The Weaver (probably by Robert Cox) and in 1673 in a collection of drolls by Francis Kirkman, The Wits; Or, Sport upon Sport.40 This tradition continued into the eighteenth century in at least four forms: Richard Leveridge's musical afterpiece, The Comtek Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716); Charles Johnson's non-musical interlude in Love in a Forest, an adaptation of As You Like It (1723); a version of Leveridge's spoof with music by John Frederick Lampe called Pyramus and Thisbe: A Mock-Opera (1745); and Pyramus and Thisbe: a Pantomime (Birmingham, 1798) by W.C. Oulton41. Samuel Pepys saw a version in 1662 which he adjudged 'insipid' and 'ridiculous', but he did enjoy the 'good dancing and some handsome women'.42 Henry Purcell's extravagant amd spectacular opera of 1692, The Fairy-Queen, adapted from Dream by either Thomas Betterton or Elkanah Settle, omitted about half the lines of the play, and rearranged the scenes somewhat, but kept much of the action. As Gary Jay Williams observes, the aim 'was to give the spoken play its due', so that the drama was presented in five acts, each followed by a musical, masque-like spectacle.43 David

5

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Garrick's opera The Fairies (1755), with music by John Christopher Smith, told the story of the four lovers and the fairies, but omitted the clowns. In 1763 Garrick and Colman produced a revised and cut version of Dream which ran one night, and failed. That same year Colman concocted a skit called A Fairy Tale which contained only the clowns and the fairies. It was a popular after-piece, and was revived in 1777.44 While in the theatre the play was being adapted and mangled and made a farce or a spectacle, there was gradually developing a critical attitude towards the literary value of the work; this concentrated mainly on the fairies and on the genius that created them. The first significant critical statement was John Dryden's defence of the fairies for a rationalistic age, in his preface to The State of Innocence (1677): Imaging is, in it self, the very heighth and life of Poetry. . . . but how are Poetical Fictions, how are Hippocentaures and Chymaeras, or how are Angels and immaterial Substances to be Imag'd; which some of them are things quite out of Nature: others, such whereof we can have no notion? . . . The answer is easie to the first part of it. The fiction of some Beings •which are not in Nature, (second Notions as the Logicians call them) has been founded on the conjunction of two Natures, which have a real separate Being. So Hippocentaures were imag'd, by joyning the Natures of a Man and a Horse together. . . . The same reason may also be alledg'd for Chymaera's and the rest. And Poets may be allow'd the like liberty, for describing things which really exist not, if they are founded on popular belief: of this nature are Fairies, Pigmies, and the extraordinary effects of Magick: for 'tis still an imitation, though of other mens fancies: and thus are Shakespeare's Tempest, his Midsummer Night's Dream, and Ben. Johnsons Masque of Witches [The Masque of Queens, 1609] to be defended.45 The argument that the creation of'Poetical Fictions' such as the fairies and the magic in Dream is allowable if sustained by 'popular belief was later echoed by Charles Gildon and Elizabeth Montagu. The major critical focus, however, was on the creation of the fairy world which was hailed by many as a triumph of Shakespeare's imagination. This triumph was praised by Nicholas Rowe, first editor of Shakespeare, in the preface to his edition of 1709, where he says, 'But certainly the greatness of this Author's Genius do's no where so much appear, as where he gives his Imagination an entire Loose, and raises his Fancy to a flight above Mankind and the Limits of the visible World. Such are his Attempts in The Tempest, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Macbeth and Hamlet'.46 A little later, quoting Dryden, he approves the decorum of the nature of imaginary beings: . . . But Shakespeare's Magick could not copied be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he . . . Prologue to The Tempest, as it is alter'd by Mr. Dry den [1670]. It is the same Magick that raises the Fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream, the

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Witches in Macbeth, and the Ghost in Hamlet, with Thoughts and Language so proper to the Parts they sustain, and so peculiar to the Talent of this Writer.47 Similar thoughts were expressed by Charles Gildon in his 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare' in a seventh volume added to Rowe's Works in 1710, where the first cogent attempt at criticism of Dream appeared.48 Like Rowe and Dryden (whom he quotes) Gildon stresses the power of the fairies and refers to his own comments on The Tempest about the nature of these spirits. There he states that Shakespeare lived in an age when not just the 'Mob, but Men of Figure and true Learning' believed in fairies, and that such 'common Opinion' or belief sanctioned the use of these beings.49 He also links the fairies to the creative imagination of Shakespeare as expressed in Theseus's speech on the poet, which he quotes (5.1.4-17).50 A few years later both Joseph Addison and John Hughes applauded the naturalness and plausibility of the fairies. In 1712 in The Spectator Addison said: Amongst the English Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others [in 'the fairy way of writing']. That noble Extravagance of Fancy which he had in so great Perfection, throughly qualified him to touch this weak superstitious Part of his Reader's Imagination, and made him capable of succeeding where he had nothing to support him besides the Strength of his own Genius. There is something so wild and yet so solemn in the speeches of his Ghosts, Fairies, Witches, and the like Imaginary Persons, that we cannot forbear thinking them natural tho' we have no Rule by which to judge of them, and must confess, if there are such Beings in the World, it looks highly probable they should talk and act as he has represented them.51 In his edition of Spenser (1715) Hughes censured the poet because 'the Fairies in this Poem are not distinguish'd from other Persons' whereas Shakespeare, 'who has introduc'd them in his Midsummer-Night's Dream, has made them speak and act in a manner perfectly adapted to their suppos'd Characters'.52 By mid-century praise of Shakespeare's imagination as shown in Dream had grown to a loud chorus, which included William Warburton (1747), the anonymous author of An Examen (1747), and Thomas Seward (1750) .53 Joseph Warton (1756) is typical: 'With what wildness of imagination, but yet -with what propriety, are the amusements of the fairies pointed out, . . . amusements proper for none but fairies'! (he quotes 2.2.2-7, 'Fore the third part of a minute . . . queint spirits'). He also admires the uniqueness of the 'gratifications for Titania's lover' (quoting 3.1.164-73, 'Be kind and courteous . . . sleeping eyes').54 Five years later George Colman also lauded the 'imaginary Beings' endued 'with suitable Passions, Affections, Dispositions, allotting them at the same Time proper Employment'. He added, 'to body forth, by the Powers of Imagination, the Forms of Things unknown, and to give to airy Nothing a local Habitation and a Name, surely requires a Genius for the Drama . . ,'.55 More praise came from David Baker in his Companion to the Play-House (1764): 'This Play is one of the wild and irregular Overflowings of this great Author's creative Imagination'. But he adds, '-It is now never acted under its original Form, yet it contains an infinite Number of Beauties, and the different Parts of

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it have been made Use of separately in the Formation of more Pieces than one'.56 Two years later James Barclay put the author of this play above both Homer and Virgil: 'Through the medium of it [Dream] we may contemplate the unbounded imagination of our wonderful bard, which could carry him beyond the limits of the natural world, into regions to which the poetry of Homer and Virgil was an absolute stranger: and experience has shewn, by the bad success of imitators, that he alone could wave the powerful rod, or walk within the magick circle'.57 The last five words are from Dryden as quoted by Rowe above, and are quoted again by Elizabeth Montagu, who perhaps best sums up the romantic neo-classical attitude towards fairies when she says that like the Pagans, the western world too had its sacred fables. While there is any national superstition which credulity has consecrated, any hallowed tradition long revered by vulgar faith; to that sanctuary, that asylum, may the poet resort. - Let him tread the holy ground with reverence; respect the established doctrine; exactly observe the accustomed rites, and the attributes of the object of veneration; then shall he not vainly invoke an inexorable or absent deity. Ghosts, fairies, goblins, elves, were as propitious, were as assistant to Shakespeare, and gave as much of the sublime, and of the marvellous, to his fictions, as nymphs, satyrs, fawns, and even the triple Geryon, to the works of ancient bards. Our poet never carries his praeternatural beings beyond the limits of the popular tradition. It is true, that he boldly exerts his poetic genius and fascinating powers in that magic circle, in which none e'er durst walk but he: but as judicious as bold, he contains himself within it . . . . The fairies are sportive and gay; the innocent artificers of harmless frauds, and mirthful delusions. Puck's enumeration of the feats of a fairy is the most agreeable recital of their supposed gambols. To all these beings our poet has assigned tasks, and appropriated manners adapted to their imputed dispositions and characters; which are continually developing through the whole piece, in a series of operations conducive to the catastrophe. They are not brought in as subordinate or casual agents, but lead the action, and govern the fable; in which respect our countryman has entered more into theatrical propriety that the Greek tragedians.58 Montagu's bold assertion of Shakespeare's 'theatrical propriety' in his having the fairies lead the action is balanced by William DufFs enthusiasm for the wild and the strange which he finds in these creatures. Writing in 1770 he said that the fairies showed the 'exuberance of his [Shakespeare's] creative Genius', and he gives several specific examples, beginning with the Fairy's speech (2.1.Iff.: 'Over hill, over dale . . . .'), which he finds 'distinguished by its vivacity and wildness. The lightness and volatility of these visionary beings seems to be imitated in the quick returns, and (if we may use the expression) brisk boundings of the verse'. He quotes Titania's speech [3.1.164ff. 'Be kind and courteous . . . . ' ] and calls it 'strangely picturesque and original' and concludes that these 'employments, so fanciful and so wild, are however at the same time perfectly apposite to the imagined nature and qualities

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of the fairy species'. In somewhat the same way he describes Puck's speech, 'Now the hungry lion roars. . .' [5.1.371ff.]: 'This description is wild and irregular, but the objects represented in it are perfectly congenial to the occupations, time, and manner of appearance of the Fairy species with which they are connected'.59 The idea of wildness here repeated three times emphasizes the traditional view of Shakespeare as a natural genius 'warbling his native woodnotes wild', as Milton expressed it in L'Allegro. In the Bell edition of Dream (1774), which he prepared, Francis Gentleman continues praising Shakespeare's imagination and fancy, and, like Duff, admires the verse of the fairies. The introduction ends, 'the whole shews a very great master dallying with his own genius and imagination in a wonderful and delightful manner', and later in his commentary he says that 'Shakespeare had an inexhaustible fund of fancy for supernatural Beings; he gave them language peculiarly and happily adapted to themselves'. In a later note commenting on Puck's speech at 3.2.378-87, he states, 'The Fairy descriptions all through this play are abundantly rich, but Puck here surpasses all the rest, being awfully charming; though all departed bodies have wormed beds, yet giving them to the wicked peculiarly is finely conceived'. At the end of the Interlude he notes: 'The Play in reality ends here, but loth to forget his Fairies, Shakespeare has brought them on by way of Epilogue; and what he gives them to say or sing is very poetical. He is most inimitably happy in painting these children of romantic fancy'.60 While critics seemed universally to admire the creation of fairyland, some critics deplored another aspect of Shakespeare's imagination, which they saw as its tendency to overexuberance in poetry. In his Essay on Genius (1774) Alexander Gerard censures the bard because he 'was not always able to keep the richness of his fancy from displaying itself in cases where judgment would have directed him to control it'. As an example he quotes Helena's friendship speech, calling the lines from 'Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd' down to 'incorp'rate' [3.2.198-208] suitable and 'natural', but here the Poet's own imagination takes fire, and he goes on: So we grew together Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; Or with two seeming bodies, but one heart, Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one, and crowned with one crest. [3.2.208ff] And his imagination has crouded together more images than would have been proper though he had been describing infant friendship in his own person, not to mention that some of them are frigid and far-fetched. But the redundance is the more faulty, as the description is put into the mouth of Helena, who was too little at ease, too much distracted with vexation, to be at leisure to search for a multitude of similitudes.61

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Francis Gentleman voiced the same criticism: 'This appeal to former friendship is natural, agreeable, and affecting; being spun out rather too far, we have marked some lines for omission', and he signalled deletion of five lines, 'But yet a union . . . crest' (3.2.210-14). He also found an over-straining of the imagination in the same scene which caused the poetry to be 'unavoidably enervated' and he marked a further forty-two lines for cutting (3.2.232-5 and 247-284),62 For the most part, however, the poetry of the play was greatly prized, especially as it displayed the 'Beauties' of the bard. There were many collections of these 'beautiful Reflections, Descriptions, Similes, and Topics',63 from Shakespeare's plays through the eighteenth century and later, with Dream often being among the most quoted. The recital of Beauties is part of the proof of the natural genius of Shakespeare: his native imagination puts him beyond the rules of the Unities of Aristotle and the French critics. It was also a duty of a critic to point out Beauties to educate the taste of the reader, because, in Gildon's words, 'Shakespeare is indeed stor'd with a great many Beauties, but they are in a heap of Rubbish'.64 Rowe applauded these Beauties in several places, and Pope said 'the better half of Criticism' was 'the pointing out an Author's excellencies'.65 Gildon spends five pages in his 1710 volume citing beauties from Dream, more space than he devotes to any other play except Hamlet.66 Eight years later Gildon published The Complete Art of Poetry, with a section of sixty-five pages on 'Shakespeareana: or Select Moral Reflections, Topicks . . .' which he introduced by saying he might have made this part even larger, because Shakespeare 'abounds in Beauties'.67 The play with the highest number of lines quoted is Dream (163 lines), followed by Measure for Measure (152 lines) and The Merchant of Venice (130 lines).68 Pope continued the practise of distinguishing Shakespeare's beauties in his edition (1723-5) in two ways: first, he marked 'the most shining passages' with 'comma's in the margin; and where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole, a star is prefix'd to the scene';69 and, secondly, he provided an extensive index. Both shining passages and starred scenes are scarce in the plays. There is only one passage in Dream set off by commas - Helena's friendship speech to Hermia (3.2.198-210; in Pope, I, 120) - and no starred scene. At the end of the final volume there is a thirty-page 'Index of the Characters, Sentiments, Speeches and Descriptions' which gives reference to significant passages and characters in the plays. It is divided into seven sections, giving, for example, in Section II, an index of'Manners, Passions, and their External Effects' (4G2v-4H2r), where under 'Love' seven of the twenty-eight entries are from Dream, by far the largest number among the fifteen plays listed. This emphasis marks the main theme of the play, and may indicate Pope's critical attitude — as the mention of 'Moon' twice in 'Descriptions of Things' shows some sense of the predominant image of the play. It is interesting to note that thirteen of the fifteen passages highlighted in Gildon are among the thirty in the index from Dream. The index was a key to notable passages, scenes, speeches, similes - in a word, to 'Beauties' - and was reprinted in other major editions such as Theobald's (1733, 1740, etc), and Warburton's (1747), culminating in the famous Beauties of Shakespeare of William Dodd in 1752, where seventy-five per cent of his passages are the same as in Pope's index, and where the similarity of the phrasing of some headings shows a

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clear indebtedness to it. Eighteen of the twenty-one passages from Dream in Dodd are also in the index. Since there were at least fifty-eight editions of Dodd from 1752 to 1903 — along with other collections, like George Kearsley's Beauties of Shakespeare (1783, with seven more editions), and editions, like Hugh Blair's, which proclaimed on their title pages, 'In which the beauties observed by Pope, Warburton and Dodd are pointed out'71 - it is clear that these works helped form a critical attitude of regarding the parts of the play rather than the whole, and of noting particular speeches and moral sentiments rather than such larger concerns as characters, plot, structure, theme, and the like. Dream was well regarded: among twelve comedies it stands second in number of citations to As You Like It in Pope, and fourth in Dodd. While much attention went to imagination, fairies, and the beauties of the poetry, only slight regard was afforded characterization. Gentleman noted that 'there is no character strongly marked',72 anticipating the harsher remarks of Malone (No. 3) and Skottowe (No. 12). Bottom, however, seemed to be an exception: he was an immediate success in the theatre and in the farce, and critics gradually began to recognize his originality. Lewis Theobald, for example, in 1733, seems to have had him in mind when he stated about Shakespeare's clowns in general: 'If other Poets draw more than one Fool or Coxcomb, there is the same Resemblance in them, as in that Painter's Draughts, who was happy only at forming a Rose: you find them all younger Brothers of the same Family, and all of them have a Pretence to give the same Crest: But Shakespeare's Clowns and Fops come all of a different House: they are no farther allied to one another than as Man to Man, Members of the same Species: but as different in Features and Lineaments of Character, as we are from one another in Face or Complexion'.73 Theobald's use of the heraldic trope, 'the same Crest', is similar to Helena's, 'crowned with one crest' (3.2.214) in her friendship speech to Hermia, and shows that he probably had Dream, and Bottom, in mind. Certainly Dr. James Beattie was pointing at Nick Bottom when he praised Shakespeare's powers of creating individual characters. He finds Homer and Shakespeare superior to all poets in the 'Knowledge of the human heart', and says that they have 'that wonderfully penetrating and plastic faculty, which is capable of representing every species of character . . . by hitting off, with a delicate hand, the distinguishing feature. . . . Bottom, and Dogberry, and the grave-diggers are different characters. . ,'.74 Johnson pays more attention to Bottom than to any other character. In the first mechanicals' scene, where he believes Shakespeare is ridiculing 'the prejudices and competitions of the Players' he describes him: 'Bottom, who is generally acknowledged the principal Actor, declares his inclination to be for a tyrant, for a part of fury, tumult, and noise, such as every young man pants to perform when he first steps upon the Stage. The same Bottom, who seems bred in a tiring-room, has another histrionical passion. He is for engrossing every part, and would exclude his inferiors from all possibility of distinction. He is therefore desirous to play Pyramus, Thisbe and the Lyon at the same time'. He also points out his ridiculous behaviour near the end of this scene, and in the second rehearsal scene.75 Theobald and Johnson offered much more than a few comments on Bottom's character: their editions, and the other important editions of the eighteenth century also contributed significantly to help establish the main critical tradition. The earliest

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editions are important textually, and offer some critical insights in their prefaces, but Rowe (1709) has no notes at all, and Pope (1723-5) has only sparse and terse comments, as does Sir Thomas Hanmer's Oxford edition (1743-4). Theobald (1733), while he concentrates on the text, and on individual words, to explain, correct, and emend, is more expansive. Warburton (1747) is even more extensive: he has more notes and sometimes interprets critically, renders judgment, and emends wildly — changing 'here' (2.1.101) to 'heryed' (meaning 'praised'), 'increase' (2.1.114) to 'inchase' ('set off), and 'jewel' (4.1.191) to 'Gemell' ('From Gemellus a Twin'). He sometimes comments interestingly on the action, as when he allegorises Oberon's vision, or when he says as Theseus remarks to Hippolyta 'what cheer, my love?' (1.1.122): 'Hippolita had not said one single word all this while. Had a modern poet had the teaching of her, we should have found her the busiest amongst them; and, without doubt, the Lovers might have expected a more equitable decision. But Shakespeare knew better what he was about; and observed decorum'.76 Samuel Johnson's edition of 1765 quotes Theobald and Warburton and others, suggests some classical sources, emends the text, explains difficulties, and occasionally offers critical observations, as at the beginning of Act IV: 'I see no good reason why the fourth act should begin here when there seems no interruption of the action. In the old quartos of 1600 there is no division of acts, which seems to have been afterwards arbitrarily made in the first folio, and may therefore be altered at pleasure'.77 His general comment is well known: 'Wild and fantastical as this play is, all the parts in their various modes are well written, and give the kind of pleasure "which the author designed. Fairies in his time were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great'.78 With Johnson's eight volumes begins the series of increasingly heavily and learnedly annotated Variorum editions by Steevens, Reed, and Malone, culminating in 1821 with the Boswell-Malone set of twenty-one volumes. One refreshing and unpedantic edition was the already noted Bell edition (1774) by Francis Gentleman. Many of his comments concentrate on the poetry or on the performance, as in the following: (on 2.2.145-56: 'Help me, Lysander, help me! do thy best / To pluck this crawling serpent . . .'): 'This soliloquy is in favour of an actress, and will employ both flexible powers of features and expression'. He also judges verisimilitude of character, as when he observes of Helena's speech, 'I am your spaniel. . .'(2.1.203-10)): 'There is somewhat very mean, and we hope unnatural, in the open servility of Helena's affection: though some women will bear great slights, yet not one, we think, would wish to rank with a dog, except one of that kind which commands peculiar estimation'.79 Various other aspects of the play received critical attention in other works seeking to elucidate the text. The duration of the action - a problem to which Furness (No. 65) devotes almost a quarter of his preface in his New Variorum edition — posed a difficulty for Gildon, who found only one day and a half instead of the four days promised at the beginning of the play.80 Both Seward and Johnson observed the anachronistic mixture of an Athenian Duke and Duchess with Gothic fairies,81 and another critic mused at Athenian mechanicals with English names speaking of French crowns.82 In an essay on Shakespeare's learning in 1756, Christopher Smart pointed

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to Propertius (II.12.1-8) as an analogue for Helena's love speech (1.1.234-41).83 Most of the criticism was isolated, casual, and unconnected, and came in the form of books like John Upton's Critical Observations on Shakespeare (1746; second edition 1748), most memorable for his misnaming a female character 'Hernia' (p. 308), Zachary Grey's Critical, Historical, and Explanatory notes on Shakespeare (1754), or Thomas Tyrwhitt's Observations and Conjectures upon some Passages of Shakespeare (1766), or in reviews like Benjamin Heath's A Revisal of Shakespeare's Text (1765), which commented on editions by Theobald, Warburton and others, or William Kenrick's volume (1765) on Johnson's edition.84 By 1775 there was a substantial, if scattered, quantity of critical comment on the play.

II 1775-1920

The long stretch of time represented by the selections in this volume shows some chronological patterning in responses to the play. Before 1815 criticism is still scattered and sporadic; with the flowering of the Romantic period it is possible to see greater coherence in attitudes; when Victoria comes to the throne there is some sense of retrospect and reassessment, followed by new directions partly inspired by the introduction of German and American critical responses to the English scene; from the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, interest in the poet and his plays is compounded by the increasing demands of educational systems, although journalistic, theatrical, and personal responses continue to be important. Certain topics and approaches recur: the nature of the fairies, the play's stageworthiness, its structural and thematic unity, its genre, its style (particularly its lyricism), and its characters and what they represent. The selections from Elizabeth Griffith and Samuel Felton (Nos. 1 and 2) serve as summary of earlier preoccupations and prologue to later interests; they also provide a balance to the view of Malone (No. 3), whose essay on chronology first appeared in the 1778 Variorum edition. Mrs Griffith endorses the established view of the play as demonstrating Shakespeare's sublimity and poetic capacity to transcend nature, but is more interested in natural touches of character. It was perhaps her insistence on looking for moral meaning and sentiment that led to Gervinus's belief that among English critics only she (together with Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Montagu) had addressed 'the task of handling Shakespeare's intellectual side, although this cannot surely be a woman's work',85 but when she examines the dispute between Hermia and Egeus she is troubled by the conflict of authority and nature; conventional morality seems at war with hints of reaction against patriarchy. Francis Gentleman shared her view of this 'harsh peremptory parent' and the 'unnatural principles' upon which Theseus supports Egeus's claims,86 but their opinions are not represented in Furness's 1895 Variorum, and it is not until the twentieth century that these matters begin to receive direct attention. Griffith's use of the play to express social concerns (in the little regard paid to poets) also anticipates later attitudes. The interest she shows in the motives and behaviour of Hermia and Helena had already found some

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expression in earlier commentary, but in the course of the next two centuries it develops into often extreme debate. Samuel Felton represents the interplay between criticism and graphic art. Illustration of Shakespeare's text begins with Rowe's edition, but before Felton only Hanmer's instructions to Hayman for the illustrations to his edition make explicit the critical interpretation governing the visual presentation.87 Felton's assessments of what is appropriate to character and scene, for example in his suggestion of a caricaturist to capture the mechanicals, reveal a lively pictorial imagination and (in his comments on the women and on the landscape) a romantic sensibility. At the time Felton was writing John Boydell was already commissioning pictures for his Shakespeare Gallery, which opened in 1789. The contrasted views of Dream presented by Fuseli and Reynolds have been reproduced in countless editions; the extent to which their interpretations, and those of the many painters and illustrators who followed them, have influenced critical opinion has yet to be fully studied.88 In the early nineteenth century much of the scholarly effort concerning Dream was expended on the origins and nature of the fairies, and on problems of their representation on stage. This preoccupation was mirrored and fostered by artists, going beyond the play itself as it allowed for the sport of fancy and exploration of the subconscious.89 Malone's approach to the play is scholarly, not creative/aesthetic as was that of Griffith the playwright and novelist or Felton the art critic. His purpose in the essay on chronology is to draw attention to the signs of immaturity in Dream that will support his placing it among Shakespeare's earliest plays. Nevertheless, the severity of his strictures on the 'insignificant' characters and 'meagre and uninteresting' fable, together with his denying Shakespeare's originality in the fairy plot, is surprising. Gentleman had commented on the 'puerile' plot and lack of strongly marked characters, but his reservations are countered by higher praise than Malone allows.90 Even Malone's recognition of the glowing colours of Shakespeare's poetry here falls short of the usually ecstatic response it had raised in the preceding century. The ambivalence in Malone's estimate, the conflict between emotional attraction and critical judgment which often recurs in later criticism, is earlier apparent in Walpole's comment on Garrick's operatic adaptation The Fairies: 'To mark the opposition to Italian operas, it is sung by some cast singers, two Italians and a French girl, and the chapel boys; and to regale us with sense, it is Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, which is forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books. - But such sense and such harmony are irresistible!'91 Malone's chief work was as a major contributor to the continuing process of establishing and elucidating Shakespeare's text. Gervinus grudgingly acknowledges the need for the 'laborious works' of the editors, but finds litde useful in them for 'the inner understanding of the Poet', and even that litde 'limited to isolated, psychological, and aesthetic remarks' (Commentaries, 1863, p. 16). Much earlier than Gervinus, and even while Malone was still revising and adding to the edition that Boswell would bring to completion in 1821, their labours had become the target of satirical scoffing, in John Poole's Hamlet Travestie: in three acts, with Annotations by Dr. Johnson and Geo. Steevens, Esq., and other commentators (1810), among the latter Malone

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as well as Pope, Theobald, and Warburton. But the pinpricks of a popular burlesque writer could not deflect the purpose of dedicated scholars: Knight, Collier, Dyce, Halliwell-Phillipps and a host of other editors on both sides of the Atlantic found ways to make distinctive contributions. Families of editions born at the end of the nineteenth century - Furness's New Variorum, the Cambridge, Oxford, and Arden series — are still spawning new generations. Perhaps all are inspired by the vision of Lord Hailes who in reviewing the editions of 1778 and 1785 recognized the 'ingenuity, learning, and industry' they represented, but believed that 'this reflection ought not to bar the hopes of others to make even farther advances in the same arduous but honourable path - That if much has been done, something yet remains to b done; and that it is not impossible for future editors, by judiciously availing themselves of the labours of their predecessors, by the retrenchment of all that is superfluous, the supplement of material omissions and the correction of palpable errors; to present the public with the works of this great poet in a more valuable form than any in which they have yet appeared'.92 Although textual questions dominate what little is printed about Dream at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, some 'psychological, and aesthetic' interest can be found in Dibdin's effort to examine Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic development, though his comments on Dream's wild beauty and its 'labyrinths of enchantment' are still very much in the eighteenth-century vein (No. 7). More unusual approaches are provided by Charles Taylor's character sketch of Bottom and his comments on the social types that Bottom suggests (No. 4), and by Walter Whiter's application to some passages of the play of Locke's doctrine of the association of ideas (No. 6), an approach to imagery that has proved fruitful in the twentieth century.93 However, most would agree that modern English criticism of Dream begins in the Romantic period, especially with Coleridge (No. 15), Hazlitt (No. 10),94 and the translation of Schlegel's lectures (No. 8); less celebrated, but also an important contributor to early criticism of Dream, is Nathan Drake (No. 9). Coleridge's 1811 lecture on Dream has not survived, but his marginalia, printed in 1836, are characteristically acute and memorable. His admiration of its lyricism and polished verse is often echoed, and many subsequent critics seek to explain the ways in which the play is a dream throughout. The extreme distaste Helena arouses in him betrays a certain antifeminism, and belies Malone's suggestion that no passions could be agitated by these characters (see No. 3). John Keats left even less direct comment on the play, but his affinity with it is apparent in his own poetry, and in the many underlinings he made through it in various copies he owned. One characteristic comment survives: There is something exquisitely rich and luxurious in Titania's saying 'since the middle summer's spring' as if Bowers were not exuberant and covert enough for fairy sports untill their second sprouting - which is surely the most bounteous overwhelming of all Nature's goodnesses. She steps forth benignly in the spring and her conduct is so gracious that by degrees all things are becoming happy under her wings and nestle against her bosom: she feels this love and gratitude too much to remain selfsame, and unable to contain

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herself buds forth the overflowings of her heart about the middle summer. O Shakespeare thy ways are but just searchable! The thing is a piece of profound verdure.95 Schlegel provides the first surviving extended view of the play as a whole. His comments on the 'glowing colour' of the verse, and on the 'luxuriant vein of the boldest and most fantastical invention' are familiar, but his praise of the structure of the play goes beyond what had earlier been attempted. His recognition of its 'most extraordinary combination of the most dissimilar ingredients' in the interweaving of the three strands of the 'wonderful world of spirits', 'the turmoil of human passions', and 'the farcical adventures of folly', all within the 'splendid frame' provided by Theseus and Hippolyta dominates critical attempts to define the play's structure. Other aspects of the play that he opens for exploration include 'the translation of a metaphor' in Bottom's transformation, the parodic function of the mechanicals' play, and the 'profound view' that both Dream and The Tempest offer 'of the inward life of nature and her mysterious springs'. In his anthology of Shakespeare criticism Nathan Drake takes Schlegel to task for his 'systematic eulogy', blaming him for having 'gone rather too far' 'in attempting to gift the poet with undeviating excellence in the mechanism and construction of all his plots',96 yet Drake himself borrows Coleridge's concept of'unity of feeling'97 and the operation of the dream (see No. 15) to argue that this play's 'supposed defects' can be converted into 'positive excellence'. A meteor shower of adjectives (buoyant, aerial, fantastic, odoriferous, evanescent, visionary, grotesque, wild, sportive, romantic, frolic, effervescent, luxurious, phosphorescent — and more) illuminates a conclusion that the play is 'perfectly without a rival in dramatic literature'. He also undertakes a spirited defence of Helena and Hermia against the condemnation of Malone, but his major contribution is in his lengthy exploration of the fairy mythology, which combines learning with appreciation of Shakespeare's 'fancy' and of the 'felicity' with which Fuseli's fairy painting 'has embodied' Shakespeare's 'very thoughts'. His researches into fairy lore were supplemented by those of Thomas Keighdey (No. 14), whose comments on the derivation of the name of Titania are of particular interest.98 The fairies were the major stumbling block to Hazlitt's enjoyment of the play in 1816. Reynolds's 'full-grown, well-fed, substantial, real fairies' affronted his poetic sensibilities ." Dr Drake in his Suffolk retreat apparently did not test his vision of 'beings lighter than the gossamer' against the fact of their stage embodiment, but the experience was clearly beyond the scope of Hazlitt's imaginative powers. His anguished conviction that poetry and the ideal have no place upon the stage, that the theatre is incapable of transporting an audience to 'the regions of fancy', sounds a rallying cry for the negative forces in the debate over Dream's theatrical viability, a debate which survived well into the twentieth century even in the face of the evident popularity of frequent productions. Only Mr Listen's Bottom met with Hazlitt's approval in the 1816 production (though even here he complained that what 'in the play is a fantastic illusion', on the stage 'is an ass's head, and nothing more' (No. 10)), and it is Bottom who is given pride of place when

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he discusses the play's characters. Disappointingly, he does not explain fully why he calls Bottom 'the most romantic of mechanics', but the phrase surely indicates approval. Escaping the 'unmanageable reality' of the theatre, Hazlitt can find again a Puck light as gossamer, 'a most Epicurean little gentleman', and Oberon ruling an 'empire of the butterflies'. However, it must be remembered that what Hazlitt saw was a semi-operatic, spectacular 'alteration' of Shakespeare's play, in the tradition of the musical versions of the eighteenth century. Although Hazlitt's partner in the journalistic enterprise of The Round Table, Leigh Hunt, did not publish his own opinions of Dream until many years later (No. 24), his main concern is the typically Romantic topic of the nature of fancy and imagination. His extracts treat Dream as play, but he shows more interest in Shakespeare's special poetic achievement in the language of the fairies than in the integrity of the drama as a whole. Skottowe (No. 12) and Daniel (No. 13) also give most prominence to the fairies. Each voices familiar attitudes. Skottowe is disinclined to allow unity to the 'incongruous materials' and finds the conjunction of the fairy mythology and Grecian history 'irregularly wild'; Theseus and Hippolyta are 'devoid of interest' and the lovers 'scarcely merit notice'; the subject is 'extremely fanciful' but treated with playfulness, 'youthful imagination', and 'the choicest flowers of fancy'. Daniel finds it 'barren in fable' and lacking the interest of real life, but rates it highly for 'sportive invention and appropriate imagery'; it is a 'fine play for the closet' but the fairies are 'too airy - too impalpable' for the play ever to be successfully embodied on the stage. Each also introduces topics that will continue to interest later critics. Skottowe writes amusingly on the power struggle of Oberon and Titania, and (if only in passing) calls attention to contrasts of darkness and night with starlight and moonshine. Daniel arouses interest in the relationship between supernatural agency and the force of human passion, although he does so in the course of denying Dream anything more than the status of a fairy tale, despite its beauties of thought and expression. In the next decade Campbell (No. 17) takes issue with Skottowe's charge of irregularity and with those who deny Dream's theatrical viability; his insistence that this is a mirthful play is welcome, and his linking of that enjoyment with Shakespeare's own state of mind is in the tradition of increasingly biographical interpretations. William Maginn (No. 16) elaborates Hazlitt's dicta about the incompatibility of poetry and the stage, with specific reference to Bottom, and to his scenes with Titania. He sets out the question in terms of Shakespeare's own comments on the limitations of stage illusion, and the operation of the audience's imagination, anticipating critical engagement with this aspect of the play even through the twentieth century. His character sketch of Bottom is interesting not only for the surprising ingenuity of presenting him as the archetypical lucky man, but also for the parallels drawn with Romeo, Christopher Sly,100 Fielding, and The Arabian Nights; and for the social commentary in the picture of the loves of modern Titanias. Hallam (No. 18) responds more to Malone than to Hazlitt; granting the poetical genius of the play, he insists on the skill of the handling of the multiple action, but does not consider how the 'dramatic excellence' he perceives translates to successful stage presentation. He defends the fairy machinery against Malone's charges of lack

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of originality, and finds the play's language 'equally novel with the machinery'; apart from its sparkling colours and distinctive idiom, the language reveals Shakespeare's acquaintance with Latin, contrary to eighteenth-century accusations of his lack of learning. The next three selections from the late 1830s and early 1840s represent something of a breathing space, a pause to take stock; Knight in introducing his Pictorial edition (No. 19), Spalding in considering the place in Shakespearean criticism of sixteen recently published works (No. 20), and Halliwell in producing the first book-length study devoted entirely to Dream (No. 21), all pass judgment on earlier critics, and attempt to see the way ahead. Knight's desire to provide an attractive illustrated edition of Shakespeare, issued in parts affordable by large numbers of the working classes, did not lead him to compromise scholarly standards. His treatment of textual questions is well-informed and judicious; his annotations and verbal 'illustrations' are copious but not excessive. Commentary in both the Introduction and the Supplementary Notice takes into account major preceding critics, but shows independent judgment.101 He takes strong exception to Malone's dismissiveness, and outlines a plausible defence against accusations of unrealistic passions: 'the exquisite beauty of Shakespeare's conception is, that, under the supernatural influence, "the human mortals" move precisely according to their respective natures and habits' (No. 19). He finds Hallam's views congenial, but does not hesitate to attack even Dr. Johnson,102 finding him hopelessly prosaic and calling his summation of Dream 'a beacon to warn us, and not a "load-star" to guide us'. On the question of the play's actability he seems torn, partly convinced by Hazlitt, yet wishing to agree with Hallam on its 'dramatic excellence', but ultimately he relegates it to the closet. He also voices an oft-repeated reaction when he finds critical analysis of 'this subtle and ethereal' drama as unsatisfactory as attempts to reconcile it with 'the realities of the stage'. The first sentence of Spalding's long article reveals its ambitious scope: 'In no way, perhaps, could one be enabled to comprehend so readily the revolutions of English literature since the end of the sixteenth century, as by examining the amount, and method, and spirit of the study, which, in each of the principal stages of the period, has been bestowed upon the works of Shakespeare' (446).103 For Spalding, the greatest advance that has been made in the appreciation of Shakespeare is in the 'growth of that philosophical spirit, which seeks to gain the proper point of view for contemplating a literary monument as a whole, instead of poring microscopically over the details of parts' (449). He approves of Hazlitt, Coleridge, Hallam, and Mrs Jameson, but dismisses Drake's Shakespeare and His Times as a 'collection of facts' that does not justify its 'pretensions to critical authority . . . by originality or discrimination', and Skottowe's Life of Shakespeare as 'dull but industrious' (459). In accordance with his belief in the larger view, he recommends that rather than niggling over the details of the chronology of Shakespeare's plays, they should be classified in groups, 'indicating in their diversities the progress of the poet's developement and action' (474-5). This approach was given enormous currency by Dowden in his Shakespeare Primer (1877), and long remained popular. Spalding's comment on Dream (No. 20) appropriately tries to encapsulate its essence, finding

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its diversities and incongruities harmonized by the poet's dream; his reading suggests what would today be called a psychological approach, though he would probably call it philosophical. Halliwell's attitude towards his predecessors and towards the task confronting dedicated Shakespeareans differs markedly from Spalding's. He is respectful of the labours of earlier scholars, and convinced that 'even the most minute illustration of the works of our great dramatist' is not to be despised (No. 21). The Times reviewer rather condescendingly called him 'a great grubber in libraries',104 but recognized that some of his findings (for example on the treatment of time in the play) were original. He is the first to connect Bottom with Midas, and to explore the implications of Bottom's given name, Nick. He also ventures to go against the tide of opinion that declared the play 'too etherially poetic for the stage', drawing support for his position from the recent successful Planche/Vestris production, and John Heraud's review of it. After these retrospective assessments, some of the discussions of Dream in the middle decades of the century begin to move in new directions. The argument about Dream's stageworthiness develops into consideration of the nature of dramatic illusion, of the play's unifying idea, of the relationship between performance and interpretation, and of audience reaction. Procter (No. 23) defends the supernatural on stage by pointing out that all theatre is an illusion; White (No. 33) argues that the more truthful characters are, the more nearly they approach the ideal, and if they are to be debarred from the stage on that score, then all plays must be abandoned. White also argues for differences between Elizabethan and modern audiences, since the former were capable of accepting male actors as women (but he does not ask why audiences of his day accepted a woman acting Oberon). Lloyd (No. 35) insists that Dream 'is a drama, not a poem', and frequently appeals to staging to make his interpretive points. Morley (No. 31) considers that Phelps's production overcame problems of actability by managing to convey the central idea and meaning of the play: dreaming. For Jerrold (No. 32), Phelps's own performance in that production as Bottom succeeded in conveying 'the true, breathing notion of Shakespeare', catching its essence in his ability to 'mingle wonderment with struggling reason, reason wrestling with wonder to get the better of the mystery!' The debate over realism and illusion is still lively as the twentieth century begins, in Max Beerbohm's engagement (No. 72) with his own preconceptions, the facts of Tree's production of the play, and Sidney Lee's theories of staging and audiences. Beerbohm thought his half-brother had succeeded in preventing 'the definite and concrete means of the stage' from destroying the 'delicate illusion' 'of a true dream'; but realism can get up and bite you, as Arthur Bourchier (playing Bottom in the 1911 revival of Tree's production) found when he brought a live rabbit back on stage for a curtain call.105 Critics who doubted the play's success on stage sometimes used arguments similar to those put forward by proponents of its viability. Hunter (No. 25) gives great importance to the nature of dreaming in the presentation and unification of the play, but still he considers it unlikely to be successful on stage, comparing it with Comus, and thus relating it to pastoral and masque. At the same time he is sensitive to the fact that the text is meant to be spoken, not just read by 'students in their closets'.

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Hudson (No. 29) is convinced that his own sensibility must represent audience reaction, finding Bottom's transformation 'intolerable to look upon: . . . sense and understanding revolt at it', and Strachey (No. 34), despite his critical engagement with notions of the real and the fantastical, pleads against ever seeing it performed. Gervinus (No. 37) believes that the play could - and should - be performed in the right circumstances, but that those circumstances are far from being fulfilled. On the other hand, Heraud (No. 40) is receptive to a variety of performance interpretation, apparently mocking Gervinus's insistence on a patriarchal 'faery monarch properly bearded'. Attempts to find unity, consistency, and inner meaning in the play take various approaches. Many followed Coleridge in seeking ways in which dreaming explained and unified the action. Hunter sees it as the dream of 'the persons the fairies illuded', and believes that this 'obviated the objection to its incongruities, since it is of the nature of a dream that things heterogeneous are brought together in fantastical confusion' (No. 25); for Strachey we are indeed seeing the dream of the young lovers and the mechanicals (No. 34), and Bj0rnson (No. 84) offers a similar interpretation expressed in more personal and psychological terms; for Lloyd it is 'dream dramatized' (No. 35); Maine defines the structure by seeing the central dream portion as the chief action, with the first and last sections 'merely exegetical of it' (No. 28). Two interesting expansions of the idea of the dream come from the German critics Ulrici (No. 26) and Gervinus (No. 37). Ulrici's main argument is that the unity of heterogeneous elements is achieved through parody, in mirthful irony; love is a mere plaything, a mere illusion. This parodic structure is made plausible by the basic conception of the whole of life being 'a fantastic midsummer night's dream'. Although Gervinus finds the treatment of love in Dream spiritual and poetic by contrast with Troilus and Cressida, when he turns his attention fully to the earlier play he is at first inclined to condemn it for its Italianate frivolities and the prevalence of caprice. However, by focussing on dreams he is able to find the controlling moral idea he believes essential to great drama: this book of Shakespeare's secular Bible provides a condemnation of the life of love and dreams, and by recognizing how the fairies' amorality and pursuit of the beautiful represents the lives of frivolous society ladies we can perceive how Shakespeare roots the fantastical in the real. Gervinus buttresses his conviction of an 'inner kernel' of deep significance in the play by endorsing the historical allegory worked out by Halpin (No. 22). This method of adding weight to the play's meaning had been initiated as early as 1739 by Warburton's proposed interpretation of Oberon's vision; a century later James Boaden turned attention from Mary Queen of Scots to Leicester and Elizabeth, and it is this view that Halpin elaborates in ways still engaging attention in the 1990s.106 The mid-century also sees the entrance onto the stage of Dream criticism of the Americans, represented for this period by Verplanck (No. 27), Hudson (No. 29), and White (No. 33). In their social, educational, and vocational backgrounds, and in their critical opinions, these men are very similar to their British contemporaries; they too are still drawing on Coleridge's insights, but with greater emphasis on his perception of the play as the 'dramatized lyrical' than on the notion of dreaming. There is little specifically transatlantic in their attitudes, although the title-page of

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some of the parts in which Verplanck's edition was issued has a delightful picture of Shakespeare in formal Elizabethan dress holding a lyre - and sitting in the back of a canoe being paddled by an American Indian, while Titania and a triplet of Macbeth witches float overhead. Verplanck makes an interesting effort to define why Dream is a special and irreplaceable manifestation of Shakespeare's genius. Despite his well-expressed appreciation of the intertwining of the various strands of the plot, he is an early exponent of the revision theory, proposing a lost romantic lyrical version, later expanded to include the heroic figures, the dialogues of the fairies, and a revised role for the mechanicals. White's special concern with music criticism leads him to engage with the question of the relationship of words and music in drama. The long tradition of various operatic treatments of Dream had been overtaken by the success of Mendelssohn's overture and incidental music, which became the virtually unchallenged accompaniment to English-speaking productions into the twentieth century.107 J.W. Ebsworth's comments in 1880 are representative: he finds that Mendelssohn's 'loveliest melodies' 'enhance the charm' of the stage effects, and that the composer has made 'melody reveal the mysteries that underlie the twilight gloaming'.108 Although White agrees with Maine (No. 28) in finding the German's music entirely in keeping with the play's spirit, he objects to the settings of words intended to be spoken.109 Lloyd, however, believes that the oft-praised music of the verse importunes yet more musical settings (No. 35). For some, the play's musical quality is in itself operatic (e.g. Strachey [No. 34] and Elze [No. 46]); Coleridge's reference to scene-ending arias (No. 15) evolves into Katharine Bates's perception of Wagnerian leitmotifs identifying the various groups of the play (No. 66). Very recently Maurice Hunt has pursued a similar thread in examining the play's varied voices and complex harmonies.110 These early American critics are anglophile; the anonymous New Exegesis (No. 36), possibly by an Irishman, is spiritedly anglophobic.111 Its repudiation of Teutonic values and elevation of feminine 'Celtic' qualities provides a welcome contrast to Gervinus's heavy assertion of the superiority of everything German and masculine. Race and gender are not again so directly addressed in relation to Dream for more than a century. The author's emphasis on the spiritual and intellectual in the nature of the fairy queen is in line with an increasing interest in the philosophical content of the play, an interest which reflects the rise of the academic study of psychology. As early as 1856, Lloyd appeals to psychology to explain the relationship between supernatural agency and human passions (No. 35); Clarke, despite his softly warm and personal response to the play, still insists on Shakespeare's artistic care and 'intellectual power' in its creation (No. 38). Even while condemning what he sees as the play's weaknesses and denying Shakespeare conscious intellectual effort, Kenny finds evidence of the poet's unique ability to give 'an outward form to the most shadowy and fugitive images of the mind' (No. 39). Heraud (No. 40), Hitchcock (No. 41), Wigston (No. 56), Downing (No. 62), and Snider (No. 47) are among those writing in the 1860s to 1880s who represent in various ways philosophical, intellectual, or psychological approaches. Heraud advances a theory of the working of the imagination, and argues that the

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poet's purpose was to make the 'faery drama' 'the vehicle of doctrines and ideas' of his age; for this reason he objects to Gervinus's view of the fairies as amoral, seeing them instead as the spirits of nature, 'the noumena of all phenomena'. He sees two spirit worlds, that of the human soul, and that of the nature spirits. Among other truths that he sees contained in the play are that the Beautiful is the Sublime; self-knowledge is the root of all other knowledge; and Bottom's transformation and soliloquy carry deliberate religious significance. Like Heraud, Hitchcock finds the mysteries of religion and philosophy in the play; the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude provides the key to the belief that the body is the wall of separation between the spirit in man and the 'over-soul' (the spirit of nature). Wigston's approach is fully Platonic, finding the key to the play in the 'relationship of the Spiritual to the Phenomenal'; later in his career he claimed that Dream 'is the profoundest play ever penned, and is as philosophical as nature itself, and I am convinced that the fairy element has been intended to represent the occult, invisible spiritual powers behind the curtain of nature's theatre, - in short, the magical, or rather the intellectual in nature'.112 Downing, seeking Shakespeare's 'spiritual life' and 'world-personality' in his works, finds in Dream an allegory of God and nature, reason and desire; his attitude is unquestioningly patriarchal (though this is not a word he uses), with Oberon representing God, reason, and law; Titania nature, creative force, and lawless desire; the changeling lawless passion and disordered will. Snider, whose article on Dream first appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, is also interested in real and ideal worlds, and in the fairies as 'symbols of some phase of Spirit'; in his comments on the wood as the place of Nature, unknown in the world of Reason (the State), he conies close to a psychological reading (cf. Moyse (No. 54), for whom the 'wood is the world'). Snider's examination of the structure of the action in its third phase, 'Representation in Art', leads to a conclusion anticipating metadramatic analyses current in the latter twentieth century: 'the first two parts mirror themselves, the action reflects itself, the play plays itself playing, it is its own spectator'. Of the same generation as Snider, though here represented by a later publication, Richard Moulton (No. 74) seeks to combine moral philosophy with 'scientific' principles in examining the structure of the play; his emphasis on the 'intricacy of ironic situations' is reminiscent of Ulrici (No. 26), but his approach belongs more to late nineteenth-century academe. The trend in interpretation of Dream represented by these critics was not universally welcomed, Halliwell tetchily observing in 1879 'What is absurdly termed aesthetic criticism is more out of place on this comedy than perhaps on any other of Shakespeare's plays. It deadens the "native wood-notes wild" that every reader of taste would desire to be left to their own influences. The Midsummer Night's Dream is too exquisite a composition to be dulled by the infliction of philosophical analysis'.113 The attempts to discover the play's governing idea or inner meaning, and to define its structure, were associated with efforts to categorize its type or genre. The label of 'fairy play' or fantasy became increasingly unsatisfactory. Some critics, such as Ward (No. 50) and Furnivall (No. 53) tried to place it in traditions of comedy, Ward seeing it among Shakespeare's distinctively romantic comedies of incident,

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and Furnivall grouping it with comedies of errors or mistaken identity. The most attractive proposition was to ally it with masque, and to a lesser extent with pastoral, impulses encouraged by perceived analogies with Milton's Comus and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess. As early as 1794 Whiter (No. 6) found masque concepts helpful in advancing his critical views, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Gervinus unhesitatingly calls the play a masque (No. 37), but the most influential statement of the position at this period was Elze's (No. 46). The attraction of the definition is not simply in the way it helps to explain the presence of elements such as song, dance, interlude, allegory and mythology, but because it combines with assertions of historical allegory, and with the idea of Dream as an occasional play for an aristocratic wedding. The description of Dream as masque, or at least as possessing masque-like characteristics, became a critical commonplace in late nineteenth-century student editions, and has persisted in a wide range of criticism throughout the twentieth century, although there have been dissenting or cautionary voices.114 Although Elze seems glancingly to admit the allegorical interpretation of myth as important in the masque, and hence relevant to Dream, he nevertheless believes that Shakespeare in this play uses mythology simply as background. This is a prevailing view; the classical figures and allusions are identified in terms of current archaeological and philological scholarship, but seldom interpreted in ways that have become common since the mid-twentieth century work of Panofsky, Seznec and Wind.115 Maine (No. 28) 'cannot but suspect that there is a meaning in' the 'mythological origin' of Theseus and his court, and Wigston (No. 56) suggests philosophical significance in Theseus's adventures in the labyrinth, but Baynes (No. 55) is an exception in actually attempting to bring out 'the meaning and value' of the associations deriving from the Ovidian source of Titania's name. The most basic question of genre relates to the other question of theatricality, that is whether the piece is a play or a poem. In 1847 Verplanck (No. 27) appeals to the lack of generic description on the titlepages of the 'original editions' to support his contention that 'The Poet and his contemporaries seem to have regarded this piece, as they well might, as in some sort a nondescript in dramatic literature', and finding Coleridge's 'dramatized lyrical' phrase congenial, refers to Dream as a 'beautiful poem'. In 1853 Morley (No. 31), wishing to plead for its success on stage, compromises on 'dramatic poem', although fourteen years earlier Knight (No. 19) had specifically rejected this term as inapplicable to any of Shakespeare's works. Some later critics dodge the issue by using 'poem' or 'play' indiscriminately (e.g. Heraud [No. 40], Snider [No. 47], Dowden [No. 49], Bates [No. 66]), but Furnivall (No. 53) insists that it is 'a poem, a dream, rather than a play', and F.G. Fleay when arguing for Dream being earlier than The Two Gentlemen of Verona refers to it as 'so beautiful a "work." I do not say a "play;" for .. . the Two Gentlemen is superior as an acting piece, however inferior as a poem'.116 Lloyd (No. 35) had vigorously contested this view, but by the end of the century even those who share Lloyd's opinion are inclined to yield ground to the opposition, Wendell (No. 64) arguing defensively that 'the play itself could never have seemed to its writer only the beautiful poem which it chiefly seems to us' because Shakespeare 'made it for living actors, - men and boys'. Such modest voices of reason are drowned out by the enthusiasm of Swinburne,

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whose own lyrical bent responded ecstatically to 'that all-heavenly poem', finding it the 'consummation' of the 'young genius of the master of all poets', 'surely the most beautiful work of man', 'above all possible or imaginable criticism' (No. 51 and headnote; No. 80). Some writers did attempt to exercise their critical faculties in more detailed examination of how Shakespeare achieved his lyrical effects. This was sometimes expressed in recognition of the different styles of verse assigned to each group of characters, so that Verplanck (No. 27) points to the suitability of the 'calm and lofty poetry' of Theseus and Hippolyta, the 'luxuriant profusion of quaint conceits and artificial turns of thought' of the young lovers, and 'the solemn yet free music of the verse, and the elevation and grave elegance of all their thoughts and images' in the speech of Oberon and Titania. In a similar vein, Montgomery (No. 60) calls attention to the contrasts of the diction; Dream represents the whole of life, and 'every element of this life has its own speech': 'the pretentious vaporings of Bottom', 'the eloquent wranglings of Hermia and Helena, the murmurous music of the fairies', 'the wise and glowing utterance of Theseus', the 'doggerel of "Pyramus and Thisbe'". Although not attempting to name the 'tropes and figures' of the rhetoricians' books, Maginn (No. 16) gives examples of the 'brilliantly bejewelled' language, concluding his catalogue by referring to 'a hundred images beside of aerial grace and mythic beauty'. Daniel (No. 13) notes that the characteristic 'sweetness and delicacy' of the language is achieved by the similes being 'taken from flowers, from stars, from dews, from fruits — from all that is brightest and loveliest in nature', and half a century later Grace Latham draws attention to the way that in Dream Shakespeare for the first time uses metaphor 'chiefly drawn from natural objects' to prompt the audience's scenic imagination and 'to fill us with a sense of rich poetic beauty'.117 White (No. 33) shows his appreciation by analyzing specific examples of word-choice and the effects of alliteration. The abundance of the imagery and the ingenuity of the conceits were not always seen as laudable: Gervinus condemns the 'language, picturesque, descriptive, and florid with conceits, the too apparent alliterations, the doggrel passages which extend over the passionate and impressive scenes', but he exempts the fairy poetry, since he feels it reflects the native style before the pernicious influence of the Italians swept England. Gervinus's own influence is strong in student editions even into the twentieth century: for example, Stanley Wood quotes him with approval (and without acknowledgement), and expands his strictures when telling students what they should think of Dream's word-play: 'puns and quibbles . . . are, unless characteristic of the person using them, offences against good taste which the poet himself discarded in his later plays. . . . In this play the puns in which Theseus and the courtiers freely indulge in the Fifth Act tend to degrade these characters to the level of the clowns whom they criticise'. He lists 22 puns from 'fair' in 1.1.181-2 to 'ace/ass' in 5.1.308, 311 and continues: 'Other conceits, such as unnatural, far-fetched imagery, rhetorical speech-making, elaborate and extravagant compliments, excessive use of alliteration will be found in Helena's speech in [3.2.128-33], Demetrius's speech [3.2.137-44] and (purposely used in the manner of a burlesque) in the whole of the play of Pyramus and Thisbe'.118 But new forces

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in the theatre worked against academic objections: in 1914 Barker (No. 82) concedes that Shakespeare's revelling in words often holds up the dramatic action, but then refutes 'all doctrinaire criticism' by arguing that the lengthy lyrical excursions far from offending against dramatic law, 'fulfil the inmost spirit of it, inasmuch as they are dramatic in themselves'. Questions of metre and rhyme were early of intense concern to editors seeking to find guidelines for establishing the text and chronology, whether judgments were made by the personal taste of the poet/editor, as with Pope, or lengthily argued, as in the work of Malone completed by Boswell (No. 11). Technicalities engaged the attention of Fleay and other members of the New Shakespeare Society towards the end of the nineteenth century, and their concerns were reflected into the next century in the student editions and handbooks for the play, which contained detailed sections on style, versification or prosody, grammar, etc.119 Such dutiful efforts are descriptive, but do little to heighten awareness of Shakespeare's skill and achievement, unlike Duffs observation in 1770 of the 'brisk boundings' of the fairy verse,120 or Coleridge's comments on individual passages (No. 15), or even Thomas Smibert's recognition of the beautiful effects of Shakespeare's variations 'in respect of rhythm, accent, and pause' in Oberon's 'I know a bank' speech [2.1.249ff.].121 General reflections on the dramatic effects of the verse often focussed on the frequent use of rhyme; Malone (No. 3) implied that rhyming, as a sign of immaturity, was a weakness, and even when he is not mentioned by name, his opinion often seems to weigh on such defenders of Dream's rhymes as Drake (No. 9), Knight (No. 19), Maine (No. 28), or Marshall (No. 59). Hiram Corson finds rhyme irrelevant to dating Dream because it 'is an inseparable adjunct to the speeches of those persons of the Drama who are in its main current — if adjunct that can be called which, in this play, particularly, is so organic an element of the language-shaping'; he cites the season/reason rhyme as showing Demetrius's feeling in 2.2.117-8 and the repetition of rhymes on 'eyes' in Titania's instructions to her fairies attendant on Bottom (3.1.164-174) in support of his contention that rhyme 'is essential to the poetic pitch of the play'.122 Latham (No. 57) examines the effects of rhyme as well as those of metrical variation in her paper to the New Shakespeare Society on how the structure of the verse helps the actor to determine and convey meaning. Latham may have been a theatrical practitioner; the poet and musician Sidney Lanier (No. 63) is less directly concerned with the actor's task, but is even more comprehensive in his effort to unite appreciation of verse technique with dramatic effectiveness. His detailed analysis of versification is developed in support of his argument about Shakespeare's moral and artistic growth as revealed in the three chronologically grouped periods of his plays, in which A Midsummer Night's Dream represents the first (appropriately named) 'Dream Period'. Similarly, Shaw's concern with acting that does justice to the music of the verse is allied to more general observations about Art and Nature (No. 67). Dream is not hospitable ground for the exercise of character criticism, but critics favouring this approach found some room for commentary on Theseus, Hermia and Helena, the mechanicals, and especially Bottom. Appreciative savouring of Bottom's qualities (manifested early by, for example, Taylor (No. 4) and Hazlitt (No. 10)) is

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frequent: for Kellogg (No. 42) he is 'a perfect human ass', a 'prince of donkeys'; to Wilson (No. 45) he is '"not one, but all mankind's epitome'", and in Shakespeare's own theory of evolution a 'fitting progenitor of man'; to Weiss (No. 52) he represents 'a highly successful deficiency of education'; for Marshall (No. 59) he is 'the gem of this work'; for Lloyd (No. 35) he is 'a versed type of the play'; to Porter and Clarke (No. 73) he is a 'deliciously crass specimen of masculinity'; to Chesterton (No. 76) he 'is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet'. Viewing Bottom with his fellow-mechanicals sometimes leads to class-conscious reactions, which can provoke hostility towards Shakespeare's presentation of them; Kenny (No. 39), for example, objects to 'the unrelieved humiliation of the poor players'. Unsurprisingly, American critics are most sensitive to the implications of class distinctions. Wilkes (No. 48) and Crosby (No. 75) are both indignant at what they perceive as Shakespeare's disdain of the working classes and his servile attitude towards the aristocracy. Latimer (No. 58) seems less devoted to 'our modern spirit of democracy' with which Shakespeare was 'not imbued': her analyses of English, French, and American mobs are hardly flattering or even sympathetic. With a perspective apart from that of England or the American republic, Elze (No. 46) suggests other possibilities in the combination of the lower and upper classes, arguing that the contrasting 'views of love and life in the aristocracy and in the working classes' are intended to make us 'perceive that each party may learn from the other'. Commentary on the nature and behaviour of Hermia and Helena receives fresh impetus in the latter nineteenth century from women writers on Shakespeare. It seems likely that it is Mary Cowden Clarke rather than her husband who praises Hermia's conduct in the first scene in terms going far beyond Elizabeth Griffith's defense nearly a century earlier: It is worth observing, how Shakespeare makes his women express themselves at difficult junctures with combined firmness and gentleness. They are modest, even timid; but when called upon by stress of circumstance for the vindication of a principle, they speak with wonderful effect. In this [1.1.79-82], and Hermia's preceding speech, there is just that composure of utterance and calm self-possession in the announcement of a strong inward conviction, which comes to women in the midst of perturbation from external causes, when they are both noble-minded and gentle-natured. The fine way in which the poet manifests this is well worthy the study of those who sneer at 'strong-mindedness'; ignorantly confounding it with unfeminine boldness.123 Mary Preston (No. 43), not endeavouring 'to say anything very new but to direct the reader's attention 'to very old truths', points to Shakespeare's understanding of how Hermia, used to being considered 'a wit, a beauty, and (what is often the result of neither of these attributes, but of the management of friends or the peculiarities of position) a belle', is particularly sensitive to taunts of being dwarfish.124 Mrs M.L. Elliott (M. Leigh-Noel) views them indulgently as 'merry English school girls' and praises Shakespeare's understanding of their 'school-girl bickerings and jealousy'.125 Elizabeth Latimer (No. 58) is considerably less kindly, condemning Helena's treachery and shrewishness and finding that by the time they both 'have lost

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their tempers and their dignity there is little to choose between them'. Both women and men critics show a tendency to judge the young women by social standards, Katharine Bates (No. 66) seeing them as Warwickshire milkmaids with 'the vigorous limbs and untutored manners of lower-class country-girls' such as Shakespeare 'might sometime have surprised quarrelling with ready nails and fists'; and G.S. Gordon observing (with distaste?) 'that in their peculiar manner of conducting a controversy they are very like real women indeed, but women of a certain class'.126 Lang (No. 68) is something of a throwback to Coleridge in the violence of his dislike - but for Hermia rather than Helena. Theseus begins to step out of the splendid frame to which Schlegel (No. 8) had relegated him and become a guiding presence by the mid-century, when Strachey (No. 34) sees him as 'the representative of commonsense' and Gervinus (No. 37) places him 'in the centre' as 'the intellectual man'; but it is Dowden (No. 49) who in 1875 draws the portrait of him as the 'grand ideal figure' and 'heroic man of action' that dominates critical opinion for nearly a century. Men and women alike rush to hymn the greatness of this 'princely and finished gentleman', (Wedgwood, No. 61), the prototype of Shakespeare's ideal king, Henry V (Chambers, No. 70). He is the 'ideal of the noblest form of Englishman',127 'the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism' but basically still just 'an English squire' (Chesterton, No. 76). Even recognition of Theseus's early infidelities (Gervinus, No. 37) and 'wayward youth' (Chambers, No. 70) did not tarnish his image for latter nineteenth and earlier twentieth-century critics. Dowden's words seem to have tapped an astonishing vein of patriotism and hero-worship; by 1932 G. Wilson Knight, a major influence in Shakespearean criticism well into the latter part of this century, is calling him 'Christ-like'.128 Dissenting voices were not quite drowned out: Marshall (No. 59) and Granville Barker (No. 82), both practising playwrights, call Theseus 'essentially uninteresting' and 'nothing much' in theatrical terms, and Henry Cuningham, in the first Arden edition (1905), rejects Dowden's ideal figure, and puts him firmly back in the 'frame for the picture in which the fairies are the protagonists' (p. xlix). Katharine Bates (No. 66) even while paying tribute to his grandeur finds him too much the conqueror in his relationship with Hippolyta, and makes a sharp comment on men's need to have their own way. Those who so enthusiastically elaborated the picture of the 'noble master of the world' (Dowden, No. 49) often ignored another aspect of Shakespeare's delineation of the character that Dowden discusses: Theseus's attitude towards art and the imagination, and how far it represents Shakespeare's own ideas. The belief that Theseus's lines on the poet's eye [5.1.2-22] referred to the dramatist himself appears early: 'How exactly has he painted himself in his Midsummer Nights Dream!' exclaims the author of the 1747 Examen,129 and the identification is memorably captured in John Mortimer's famous 1775 portrait, 'Poet';130 many commentators share Macaulay's uncomplicated acceptance that here Shakespeare has defined poetry 'in lines universally admired for the vigour and felicity of their diction, and still more valuable on account of the just notion which they convey of the art in which he excelled'.131 Heraud (No. 40) claims confidently that here 'we find Theseus speaking as the poet's expounder'. Alfred Roffe, in 1851, is one of the earliest writers to take

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issue with the view that the passage puts forward 'Shakespeare's own idea', arguing that since Theseus's sceptical attitude towards the poet as 'the embodier of the unreal' is contradicted by the events of the play, we may be sure that 'Shakespeare himself thought precisely the very reverse'.132 At the turn of the century both Wedgwood (No. 61) and Porter and Clarke (No. 73) explore the effects of the contradiction between Theseus's scepticism and the contemptuous tone of his speech on the one hand and the supernatural events of the play on the other, but some critics of the same period are still using the passage merely as a starting point for discussion of the operation of the imagination, or the illusion of art (e.g. Brandes (No. 71) and Woodberry (No. 78)). Ernest de Selincourt (No. 81) also uses the speech in his exploration of art and realism, but he rejects the notion that Theseus is 'a veiled representation of the personality of Shakespeare', instead condemning him as a 'Philistine', 'quite devoid of artistic sensibility'. This view is more in line with later twentieth-century shifts in reactions to Theseus's character and consequent changes in assessments of what he says, such as Peter Holland's unhesitating assertion that 'Theseus' painfully and comically limited perspectives, the range of vision of rationalist daylight scepticism, are grotesquely inadequate to the experiences the play has shown'.133 The nature of poetry, the operation of the imagination, the place of the supernatural, aspects of dreaming, types of illusion are all topics which in various degrees engage critics of the play through the nineteenth century. The obviously important subject of love, together with the related subject of marriage, while never neglected, increasingly is specified as dominant or central, the theme or identifying characteristic. Hudson (No. 29) finds that the play 'has room but for love, and beauty, and delight'; Gervinus (No. 37) identifies it as the 'subject and the source of poetry' which may mislead men into the 'sensuous life of love'; Ulrici (No. 26) and Downing (No. 62) both see the play as representing love as illusion; Taine (No. 44) expatiates on the assertion that 'C'est d'amour qu'il s'agit encore'134' translated by Henri Van Laun as 'Love is still the theme'. Both Elze (No. 46) and Snider (No. 47) see connections between love as the preoccupation of the court and as the theme of the interlude. In Wigston's Platonic reading of the play (No. 56) love is the source of understanding; in more melancholy vein Wedgwood finds 'The course of true love never did run smooth' [1.1.134] to be the 'bitter theme' of the whole play. For Chambers (No. 70) the 'central idea' is love, and for Croce (No. 85) the play is the quintessential comedy of love. For some critics marriage is an important theme because it supports other aspects of their interpretations, Heraud (No. 40) for example finding that this 'dramatic epithalamium' buttresses his view of Shakespeare's Protestant attitudes, and Elze (No. 46) linking the theme to occasion to explain the masque characteristics of the play. Brooke (No. 77) takes it as given that the play was written for a marriage as the foundation for his exploration of the theme of love, and in the Arden edition of the same year Cuningham states flatly 'Marriage is the theme of the play' (xxx). The conviction of the importance of marriage as a theme is often expressed in conjunction with attempts to establish the play's date by providing it with a specific occasion of first performance at a noble wedding attended by Queen Elizabeth. That question remains unresolved, but continues to engage the attentions of both proponents and sceptics.135

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Patterns of interpretation of Dream are bound up with social and intellectual shifts, particularly in respect of the expansion of educational institutions. Up to the 1870s, writing on the play in Britain and North America was dominated by 'men of letters', (or very occasionally women), either scholars of independent means, or professional men such as clergymen or lawyers who devoted their leisure to scholarly pursuits, or those engaged in the professional world of letters such as journalists, publishers, critics, and playwrights. Writers of this type did not disappear after the 1870s; belles-lettres still had a place, and personal responses to the play were still considered acceptable. In the nineties Julia Wedgwood (No. 61) and Andrew Lang (No. 68) express opinions on life and society as intensely personal as those voiced in the sixties by Mary Preston (No. 43) or Bj0rnstjerne Bjornson (No. 84), to whom Dream appealed 'as much through its intellectual significance as through its noble, humane spirit', and which became for him 'a guiding star', giving him 'a fuller capacity for joy and a greater power to protect my joy and keep it inviolate'. But from the seventies, professional academics are increasingly prominent, as the expansion of compulsory schooling and greater access to higher education, particularly in North America, called for texts that would instruct and guide the student in serious vein, rather than seeking mainly to expand appreciative enjoyment. Lectures formerly directed to the general (educated middle-class) audience, such as those of Coleridge and Clarke, moved to classrooms and college lecture halls. Societies of interested amateurs were overshadowed by learned institutions such as the Early English Text Society and the New Shakespeare Society. Later in the twentieth century the trend continued in the shift of articles from general interest magazines such as Good Words or The Contemporary Review to learned journals aimed at professional academics.

HI 1920 TO THE PRESENT

The broad outlines of major critical attitudes to Dream in the twentieth century are easy to perceive.136 The dominant view for the first half of the century was of a lyrical fairy fantasy; after the second world war critics increasingly insisted that the play deserved more respectful attention, particularly for its exploration of the nature of love and of the imagination; since approximately 1980 many critics have treated the play as a text yielding important material for a variety of theories of 'cultural discourse'. Some critics stand out for the manner in which they have influenced or crystallized changing preoccupations — Spurgeon, Frye, Barber, Kott, Montrose, for example —, and in any period there are those who dissent from the prevailing view, or explore neglected paths. The ever-expanding academic publishing industry has encouraged both a narrowing of focus on detail, and a broadening of interests to include other disciplines such as art history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, political science and so on. This simultaneous increase in inclusiveness and fragmentation can be rapidly traced through guides to Shakespearean criticism.137 H.B. Charlton's Shakespearean Comedy, which in 1938 drew together essays

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originally published between 1930 and 1937, is generally recognized as the most considerable work in its field of the period between the world wars. In 1930, setting out to define what is meant by the label 'romantic comedy', he can ask confidently 'what is a fantasia like A Midsummer Night's Dream but the very ecstasy of romanticism?' (19)138 and when in 1933 he devotes a whole essay to the play he emphasizes the controlling point of view, or idea, that holds the three worlds together: contemporary man's 'response to the quality and the might of love' (103) and comedy's 'natural function' of'glorifying those settled institutions of man's social existence which owe their persistence to mankind's experience that such as these make for his welfare in the substantial problem of living life in the world as the world is' (117). His perception of the play, and even the terms which he uses to describe it, differ little from the view of E.K. Chambers in 1897 (No. 70). His opposition of Theseus's 'cool reason' and 'intellectual temper' against 'the undue ravages of fancy', and Bottom's 'crude native matter of human instinct' (119) is also consonant with nineteenth-century attitudes. Perhaps there is a greater emphasis on man as 'a social being' (117) in Charlton's estimate of the play, and certainly he is of the 1930s in seeing Hermia and Helena as 'Shakespeare's first real flappers, straight from a lady's seminary' (115), but his main contribution is the persuasive charm of his writing, and his presentation of the comedies in the context of romance and of Italian pastoral comedy. Comment on the lyricism of the play takes two main forms: analysis and praise of its imagery, and observations on song, dance, and the play's kinship with masque, opera and other musical forms. Caroline Spurgeon was the most influential exponent of patterns of imagery: in her 1931 British Academy lecture she takes Dream as an example of the way in which 'the imagery in the comedies supplies atmosphere and background',139 dwelling especially on moon and starlight, and woodland images, and in her still-current 1935 book Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us she concludes that Dream 'leaves us, as it has left myriads, over nearly three and a half centuries, amazed and bewitched by beauty and the strange power of the poet's pen' (263). Her emphasis on moon imagery had been anticipated in 1930 by F.C. Kolbe, who concludes that Dream is 'the true Moonlight Sonata of art—not that bright, sunny one so-called of Shakespeare's great rival, Beethoven'.140 J.W. Mackail attempts to define the nature of the play's poetry as 'articulate music', asserting that 'only Mozart could have interpreted into the language of another art its delicacy, its suavity, its certainty'.141 Agnes Mure Mackenzie finds Dream 'more masque than play', and claiming that 'the masque was the Elizabethan musical comedy', amusingly casts the characters by vocal categories and identifies arias and other numbers.142 Enid Welsford sees Dream as masque transmuted, in its 'blending of tones' (326), in being 'musically written' (330), and above all in its structural 'pattern of a dance' (331).143 An influential book of the 1930s, G. Wilson Knight's The Shakespearean Tempest (London, 1932), provides detailed analyses of the imagery and music of the play, and this lead was followed by other popular works such as Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare (New York, 1939). But Van Doren ignored Wilson Knight's perception of the more sinister implications of the play's imagery, finding that even in darkness it 'shines merrily' and that 'the smiling horizon is immeasurably remote' (61), whereas Wilson

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Knight found 'a gnomish, fearsome, Macbeth-like quality about the atmosphere, just touching nightmare' (142), and observed that the play 'continually suggests a nightmare terror' (146). Nevertheless, Wilson Knight's optimistic conclusion that 'Finally, all is love, harmony, music' (161) accords with the general view of the play as 'the purest and most enchanting fantasy', to be acted not in the theatre, nor even in the theatre of the mind, but in 'the moonlit wood of our imaginations',144 a fantasy which is a 'delicate mixture of farce and fancy'.145 Such attitudes can even accommodate the more disparaging summation of Peter Alexander that its 'changeable taffeta, opalescent with incongruities' carries no 'deep significance' or 'profound interpretation of life'.146 Some critics grew restive in the face of so much prettiness, Hazelton Spencer objecting, despite his affection for the play, that it 'is a little too romantic (in the worst sense), too glittering with poetic tinsel'.147 Other critics reacted by finding more meaning rather than less: in 1949 E.G. Pettet, while conceding the many romantic elements, foreshadowed criticism of the latter part of the twentieth century in observing that 'it contains a strong note of criticism and interrogation, which is announced insistently, even monotonously, in the very first scene'.148 Indeed, the mid-century sees something of a breakthrough in Dream criticism, with LJ. Potts finding its main significance in its 'profound revelation of human nature',149 Leonard Dobbs exploring its philosophy of love in relation to Plato's Phaedrus,150 and Donald Stauffer drawing attention to its exemplifying the 'psychological theory that art is play' and demonstrating 'the free play of the imagination on the forms of love'.151 The first half of the twentieth century saw little change in character criticism from earlier periods, although by 1932 Muriel Bradbrook clearly recognized the effects of this critical habit when she noted that in Romantic and nineteenth-century periods 'Judgment by characterisation, and therefore by story as distinct from plot, led to a serious distortion of some of Shakespeare's plays. The Tempest could be no more than a charming phantasy, or a profound allegory; A Midsummer Night's Dream had not even the alternative'.152 Of the play's characters Bottom continued to receive most attention, with substantial studies by J.B. Priestley in 1925 and John Palmer in 1946.153 Priestley's paean is much in the vein of nineteenth- and even eighteenth-century encomia, but provides one memorable image that reflects the early twentieth-century liking for musical analogies: 'to the gods, the spectacle of Bottom, soaring and magnificent, trying to grasp every part, would be no more ridiculous than the spectacle of Wagner perspiring and gesticulating at Bayreuth: they are both artists, children of vanity and vision, and are both ridiculous and sublime' (9). Palmer speaks interestingly of the divided sympathies of spectators of the victims of comic jests (xiii), and feels that 'Bottom is so much the projection of Shakespeare's own imagination into this mimic world that, if we fail to identify ourselves with his immortal weaver, the comedy falls to pieces' (109). Bottom is also put to the service of various theories: for Edith Rickert he is a caricature of King James,154 for Alden Brooks (in the play which Sir Edward Dyer wrote) Bottom is Shakespeare the actor,155 and for Robert Graves he is 'the Wild-Ass Set-Dionysus'.156 Theseus maintains his calm supremacy in the most influential discussions of the play, Peter

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Alexander in 1939 still finding him 'very much Chaucer's complete man of the world, naturally taking first place by a kind of sovereignty of nature'.157 Wilson Knight agrees with Charlton in opposing Theseus's rationality to the lovers' 'frenzied fantasies', but goes much further in hymning his power that like the rising sun dispels 'Christ-like, . . . the tormenting imaginations of fairyland, the pagan terrors of the midnight wood'.158 There are dissenting voices: Murray Bundy points out that Theseus enunciates 'the unimaginative man's view of poetry';159 George Foss paints him as a 'gay sensualist' caught having to extol the cloistered life, and observes that 'Theseus seldom gets played with sufficient humour'.160 Foss also advances the theory that Shakespeare sets the play in Athens with Theseus at the head of affairs because 'the subject he wished to write about was "the Emancipation of Woman'"; he visualizes the Amazon Hippolyta in the first scene coldly restraining Theseus's sensuality, and listening in silence 'to the degradation of her sex in this new country she has come to' (123). Agnes Mure Mackenzie in her study of Shakespeare's women is less taken with the Amazonian queen. Conceding that Dream does not depend for its success on 'the portraiture of character', she sees 'personality' only in Theseus, Puck and Bottom, and finds all of Dream's women, Hippolyta and Titania as well as Hermia and Helena, tainted with 'unintentional vulgarity', the probable effect of 'the bourgeois bluntness of spirit' caused by Shakespeare's 'upbringing as the son of a poor merchant in a country town'.161 Other topics current in earlier times continue to engage attention. Folk and fairy lore are addressed by Minor White Latham, and in general terms Cumberland Clark considers Dream's fairies in Shakespeare and the Supernatural,162 but the fairies, while not neglected, are not in the forefront of critical concern in the first half of the century. The old debate about the play's stageworthiness is not prominent, but despite increasing numbers of successful productions,163 some critics continue to relegate it from the theatre to the closet.164 Technicalities of style, such as the use of rhyme and of prose, are revisited, but with increasing attention to the dramatic effects achieved.165 Questions of genre continue to be debated, with W.J. Lawrence arguing that the play is a 'nocturnal',166 and Enid Welsford's magisterial volume giving authority to the recognition of the play's masque-like elements.167 Views of the play's genre also affected debate over the play's date and occasion, and the question of revision. The most thorough-going revisionist was J. Dover Wilson in the Cambridge edition of 1924, but as a more recent editor notes, Wilson's 'theory has never commanded general assent'.168 In most criticism of the period interest in historical allegory is muted, perhaps because of the lengths to which it had been taken in 1923 by Edith Rickert, who cogently and learnedly argued an extreme view of Dream as political allegory and satire. Her insistence on Shakespeare's understanding of the political efficacy of the drama seems premonitory of late twentieth-century 'new historicist' approaches to the play.169 A voice of the future, not echoed until Elliott Krieger in 1979, is heard in A.A. Smirnov's Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation (1936). His view of Shakespeare as 'the humanist ideologist of the bourgeoisie of the time' (25), whose 'basic characteristics of ... point of view and style — his militant, revolutionary protests against feudal forms, conceptions, and institutions - remained unaffected throughout his life' (27), leads to a deterministic summation of Dream:

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'The happy ending of the comedy is not so much the result of Puck's meddling . . . but of the energetic struggle the lovers wage in the name of freedom, against paternal tyranny, the traditional law of Athens, and even the Duke himself, . . . . Destiny, which supersedes human will and understanding, determines everything' (84). The desire to find a central idea in A Midsummer Night's Dream, apparent in (for example) the criticism of Ulrici, Gervinus, Chambers, and Charlton, intensified in the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly it seemed necessary to assert that the comedies were worthy of 'serious' consideration, that they merited earnest academic attention. The most popular approach became thematic criticism, which when applied to Dream resulted in explorations of such topics as the lunacy of love; the place of the irrational in love and life; the operation of the imagination; illusion in life and drama; the relationships of nature and art, appearance and reality; discordia concors, 'the concord of this discord'. In 1951 Ernest Schanzer finds the 'central theme' in the kind of love which he believes is ridiculed throughout the play: 'Lover, lunatic, and poet all live among phantoms of their own creation which are unrelated to reality';170 in the same year for Harold Goddard the 'central theme' is embodied in two speeches of Theseus, on the imagination in Act 5 and on the 'musical confusion' of the hounds in Act 4, which for him lead to a very serious view of the play as 'Vision', 'not just dream, nor play, nor love, nor art' but through 'Imagination' a 'transubstantiation of the world of sense into something beyond itself.171 Nevertheless John Russell Brown still finds it necessary in 1957 to be tentative and apologetic about possibly taking the comedies 'too seriously', while he advances an interpretation of Dream that sees in it a contemplation of 'the relationship between nature and the "art" of lovers and poets', and a triumphant use of 'our wavering acceptance of the illusion of drama' to make us accept the truth of love.172 One effort of thematic criticism is to find unity in the disparate elements of the play. Ernest Schanzer concentrates on the moon and the identification of Titania with Diana to set out how 'the theme of love-madness weaves together apparently unrelated portions' of Dream while 'unity of atmosphere' is achieved 'by flooding the play with moonlight'.173 In a compact article, Peter Fisher traces the 'argument' of the play to show that the 'theme of love' unites the four worlds he discerns in the play, 'of reason and accepted order', 'of passion and desire', 'of common life and activity', and 'of imagination and fantasy'.174 In a more wide-ranging essay, Paul Olson finds in the play 'a sophisticated Renaissance philosophy of the nature of love in both its rational and irrational forms', and details 'the methods by which symbol and masque pattern, structure and theme, work together to make luminous a traditional understanding of marriage'.175 Olson turns to art history, iconography, and sixteenth-century literature to illustrate his perception of the theme. Frank Kermode also calls on iconographical studies as well as invoking J.G. Frazer, Apuleius, Macrobius, and Bruno in the course of arguing that Dream is 'a play of marked intellectual content' and that its 'variety of the plot is a reflection of an elaborate and ingenious thematic development'.176 The attempt to relate the play's 'interwoven action' to 'the thematic treatment of love' struck R.W. Dent as incomplete, because it failed to embrace satisfactorily the fifth act; to remedy this deficiency, he examines the Pyramus and Thisbe play in terms

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of the place of the imagination in both love and art.177 Dent was not of course the first of the new wave of mid-century critics to note the importance of imagination as a theme or topic in Dream,178 but the neatness of his presentation of the play 'as a delightful exposition of the follies produced by excessive imagination in love and the pleasures produced by controlled imagination in art', and indeed as 'Shakespeare's closest approximation to a "Defense of Dramatic Poesy" in general'(128-9) ensured that the topic became prominent in much criticism of the next decade.179 By 1974 Anne Barton seems almost to fear falling into cliche when she says: 'Not surprisingly, a preoccupation with the idea of the imagination, and with some of its products — dreams, the illusions of love, poetry and plays - is central to this comedy'.180 A study submitted as a dissertation in 1979, though not published until 1985, takes up the notion of Dream together with The Tempest being Shakespeare's defense of poetry, but Diane Akers Rhoads181 is moving away from discussion of the imagination to an exploration of the political import of dramatic poetry, a concern which has increasingly engaged critics of the last two decades of this century. Love and the imagination were not the only topics which gave fresh insight into Dream for critics early in the second half of the century. Northrop Frye's broadly comparative and mythic approach was widely popular, and his status lent authority to brief but suggestive comments relating to Dream upon such questions as loss and discovery of identity (particularly sexual identity), self-knowledge, metamorphosis, and the 'green world' as 'a symbol of natural society'.182 Frye's emphasis on the seasons, and his perception of a Freudian erotic pleasure principle as parallelling the shape of comedy (75), are consonant with the equally influential approach of C.L. Barber who studies Shakespeare's earlier comedies in the context of courtly and popular revels and festivities. Barber finds his central argument concerning 'the holiday sequence of release through clarification' first worked out in Dream, a 'more serious play' than Love's Labour's Lost, and 'his first comic masterpiece' (II).183 In his chapter on Dream, entitled 'May games and metamorphoses on a midsummer night', he links loss of identity to metamorphosis, to the 'moment where the perceived structure of the outer world breaks down, where the body and its environment interpenetrate in unaccustomed ways, so that the seeming separateness and stability of identity is lost' (135). Despite (or perhaps because of) the admiration accorded Barber's book, two decades or more passed before many English-speaking critics again turned to central interest in the topic of holiday or carnival,184 but metamorphosis, especially in terms of transformation or change, did evoke sensitive comment, for example from Elizabeth Sewell, and developing her insights, David Young. For Sewell, Dream 'is poetic drama which handles myth in one form after another, full of dreams and shadows from beginning to end, as Ovidian and metamorphic in its action and subject matter as is The Tempest, and, like that play, putting forward sleep and dream as a method of learning'.185 Combined with the influence of Frye, Sewell's emphasis on myth helped to ensure that mythological readings of Dream became plentiful in the 1960s and 1970s. Most closely related to Sewell's Orphic view is Richard Cody's elegant study of 'Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's Aminta and Shakespeare's Early Comedies', which finds in Dream 'a familiar

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combination of poetic theology and serio ludere' and explores its episodes in the light of classical, medieval, and Renaissance interpretations of dreams and myths.186 Stephen Fender uses medieval and Renaissance mythographies to explicate aspects of the play in an unusually stimulating student guide to Dream,137 and Noel Purdon interprets the play as a psychomachia.188 D'Orsay W. Pearson draws on classical, medieval and Renaissance legends of Theseus to urge her view that awareness of the many traditions of his perfidy gives an ironic twist to Shakespeare's portrayal of love and marriage in Dream,189 and David Ormerod parallels Shakespeare's Duke, the wood outside Athens and Bottom, with the myth of Theseus, the labyrinth and the Minotaur.190 Sewell had noted L.P. Wilkinson's recognition of the close affinity of Dream with Ovid's epic: he found 'the whole atmosphere' of the fairy world 'extraordinarily reminiscent of the Metamorphoses — the magic and the freedom, the Puckish element, the blend of charm and moral irresponsibility, the sense that nothing that happens is really serious because it is all a dream, the interplay of pathos and humour, cruelty and love, the natural and the supernatural, the grotesque and the beautiful, Bottom with his Midas-ears fondled by the demi-goddess Titania'.191 In 1963 Walter F. Staton, Jr. (apparently unaware of Wilkinson's 1955 book) details more fully 'Ovidian elements' of Dream, especially in the context of Elizabethan Ovidian epyllia, but provides little comment on the implications of the parallels he adduces.192 More ambitious attempts to define the Ovidian nature of the play are not found until the work of Niall Rudd, who considers Dream 'Shakespeare's Metamorphoses — the most magical tribute that Ovid was ever paid' (193),193 and Leonard Barkan, who in a substantial 1980 article relates Titania and Bottom to Diana and Actaeon, and who devotes considerable space to Dream in his wide-ranging 1986 book The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis & the Pursuit of Paganism;194 the 1990s have brought books by Charles and Michelle Martindale, and by Jonathan Bate, which offer good basic surveys of the use of Ovidian myth in Dream.195 Questions of identity and transformation in a context of dream and illusion naturally invite a psychoanalytical approach, which comfortably assimilates mythological reference, but pushes towards specific sexual interpretations, contrary to Sewell who had found that 'Lust has no entry' (113) to Dream. Good examples of the type can be found in Hugh Richmond's Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy, in which he suggests that Shakespeare uses Ovid's Metamorphoses so heavily because it 'is a kind of classical encyclopedia of neurosis and mental disease',196 and in 'Identity Crises in a Midsummer Nightmare: Comedy as Terror in Disguise' by Melvin Goldstein, both a Professor of English and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.197 However, Goldstein's views of what the play says about body identity, sex and gender, and the grotesque are mild and unexceptionable in comparison with the earlier claims of Weston A. Gui (1952)198 and Jan Kott (1964).199 Kott's vision of a world of'erotic madness' (189), where a 'menacing devil Hobgoblin' (172) operates as 'the embodiment . . . of the perfect and unspeakable secret police' (171), where the lush Warwickshire countryside has turned into a landscape by Bosch, and whose 'dark sphere of bestiality' can best be represented by Goya (184), has become an inescapable presence in interpretation of the play, not least because of the translation of his

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ideas to the stage in Peter Brook's memorable 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production. Gui's much earlier essay has had less obvious influence, but his 'attempt to discover by the means of Freudian psychoanalysis the meaning of this dream and, if possible, the elements in the libidinous life of its creator that gave it origin' (251) is premonitory of the burgeoning of psychoanalytic criticism in the last two decades of this century. Taking Bottom's dream as central, he interprets the whole play as dramatizing Bottom's problems 'of coping with oral trauma at the mother's breast and the achievement of an identification with the father against whom he has been thrust in phallic competition' (292); the concluding section of the essay demonstrates that Bottom is Shakespeare who in this play is acting out a neurosis to do with infantile relationships (the Indian prince being his young brother Gilbert) (295). Gui's article elicited some interest in the 1960s, the most important respondent being Norman Holland,200 but it was not until 1979 that Holland published the article on Hermia's dream which, as Richard Dutton points out, both represents classic psychoanalytic criticism and expresses dissatisfaction with it.201 Not all commentary that drew on psychoanalysis or recognized erotic elements in the play was so extreme. Marjorie Garber uses a Freudian approach to her study of dream in Shakespeare, but her main interest in this play is in illusion and transformation expressed through metaphor.202 Alexander Leggatt finds nothing 'torrid' in the play's eroticism, and believes it 'steers a civilized middle course appropriate to comedy' between 'extreme attitudes to sex' (111). For Leggatt, as for many of the critics of the 1960s and 1970s, 'it is, finally, the harmony of the play's vision that gives us most delight' (114).203 Some critics of the era advanced individual ideas that gained currency. Norman Rabkin chose 'complementarity', to express the double vision he finds in Shakespeare's dramatic treatment of various themes: for Dream he examines this idea in the plot structure, and in the attitude towards love and art, arguing that here Shakespeare first turned 'his complementary vision' 'to a full examination of art itself, 'with characteristic ambivalence'.204 Fascination with Dream's commentary upon itself and its art, particularly as it is concerned with interaction of play and audience, illusion and reality, also informs James Calderwood's theory of'metadrama'.205 Rene Girard's concept of'mimetic desire' also has some perception of the mirroring technique that strikes both Rabkin and Calderwood, but turns more towards psychoanalytical and anthropological theory than was evident in Calderwood's work of the 1960s and 1970s.206 A highly individual work that has perhaps received less attention than it deserves, the poet Louis Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare,207 draws frequently on Dream (and on Spinoza and Aristotle) in exploring Shakespeare's view of love; in his acute sensibility and sensitivity to words, Zukofsky may be parallelled with the earlier poet-critic, Sidney Lanier (No. 63). A remarkable contribution to a mode of criticism unusual at the time is W. Moelwyn Merchant's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Visual Re-creation',208 which explores the play's theatrical history and its representation by artists, finding in the variety of treatment 'a critical uncertainty about some of its themes', which traced historically provides 'an instructive exercise in the vagaries of critical taste' (166). A survey of the visual record from the seventeenth century to the 1960 production of Britten's opera demonstrates Merchant's conviction that the play contains elements

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'of a life altogether darker than the apparent grace of the fairy world' (165), and that it is 'no decorative confection' but a work of'complex maturity' (166). At the same period, another work on the relations of the arts, Shakespeare in Music, offered important assessments by Winton Dean of operas based on Dream, and by Roger Fiske on Mendelssohn.209 Fiske's analysis of the way in which Mendelssohn's music defined the structure of the play influenced later critics, and has helped to counter the disdain it incurred through overuse.210 Two publications of 1978 and two of 1979 provide perspective on the past and hints of the future directions of Dream criticism. David Bevington re-examines the ambivalent nature of the fairies, and the 'tension between licentiousness and self-mastery' (88) in a response to the excesses of Kott's interpretations;211 in a similarly retrospective achievement, Harold Brooks's long-awaited Arden edition summed up a lifetime of loving engagement with the play established when he first saw Granville Barker's 1914 production at the age of seven.212 The final section of Brooks's introduction, 'The Principal Themes', is firmly in the centre of the tradition of seeing the play as 'about' love and marriage, perception and identity, imagination, illusion and reality. Robert Weimann's book subtitled 'Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function', first translated into English (in revised form) in 1978, has some kinship with Barber's perception of the importance of popular culture, but it is informed with a Marxist sense of'the unity of history and criticism' and the 'social function' of Shakespeare's plays (xiii), so that for example the combination of popular and literary traditions in the formation of Puck 'reflects the broad sociological foundation upon which the plays as a whole were built' (196).213 Social concerns are given more political import in Elliott Krieger's A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies, which demands recognition of the class distinctions in Dream, and of the way in which the often praised harmony of the play should be seen rather as 'the strategy through which the ruling class maintains its autonomy'.214 What Shakespeare's attitude was towards the levels of society and culture depicted in the play, and towards the social conventions that it appears both to question and confirm, has increasingly engaged critical attention in the last two decades. Louis A. Montrose's '"Shaping Fantasies": Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture' encapsulates several of the period's critical preoccupations.215 For Montrose the Dream is 'a representation of fantasies about the shaping of the family, the polity, and the theatre' which 'dramatizes — or, rather, meta-dramatizes - the relations of power between prince and playwright' (86,87). Queen Elizabeth, as the focus of the erotic dreams of her subjects, is represented in Titania, who in her relationship with Bottom indulges those desires 'that make Bottom's dream into a parodic fantasy of infantile narcissism and dependency' (68); as she manipulates Bottom, the amateur actor, she is herself manipulated by Oberon, the internal dramatist, so that a 'fantasy of male dependency upon woman is expressed and contained within a fantasy of male control over woman' (69). As Montrose reads the play, it is a representation of male insecurities about paternity and authority, and the threat of female fecundity; it is a myth 'recounting the cultural transition from matriarchy to patriarchy' (74). How far and how tyrannically power is asserted

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SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

in the play (by conqueror over conquered, ruler over subject, father over daughter, husband over wife), and how far it is inverted or subverted by carnivalesque elements or by the ambivalence of Shakespeare's dramatic techniques can be treated from various viewpoints, and has prompted much engaged and entertaining writing on Dream.216 Interpretations drawing on anthropological theories of rites of passage, and 'liminality', sometimes combined with feminist perspectives, have also provided insights.217 Psychoanalytical approaches continue to be popular, with some interesting shifts of emphasis from Bottom to the changeling. Daniel Lechay's Freudian reading, which places the changeling at the centre of the play's meaning,218 recurs in Allen Dunn's more widely cited article which argues that the fairy drama is the dream of the Indian Boy who 'is being forced to relinquish his oedipal dependency on the mother, . . . and to submit to the father's law'; this view also encompasses the experiences of Bottom and of the young lovers.219 In Johannes Fabricius's psychoanalytic study of Shakespeare's unconscious, the changeling is the pivot of the whole play, the divine child of rebirth, enclosed in the womb of Sapientia, represented in Dream by the moon goddess.220 With less obviously psychoanalytic emphasis, William Slights in a witty article shows him as representative of 'a prime interpretive challenge' of Dream, which is to understand 'what happens on the psychic boundary between human and fairy kind' and likens the play itself to the changeling boy as a masterwork of 'indeterminacy' ,221 It is through another absent character, Nedar, Helena's parent, that Terence Hawkes finds much virtue in 'or'; the suggestion that Nedar may be Helena's mother 'unseats a number of presuppositions investing the play and demonstrates an indeterminacy, an undecidability, that is a feature of all texts'.222 Two other characters present but sometimes strangely silent, Hermia's undoubted father Egeus and Theseus's (possibly reluctant?) bride Hippolyta, have provided the focus for critical theories concerning the text and performance, particularly in terms of the recognition of the difficulty if not impossibility of determining the play's shape and meaning.223 Treatments of Hippolyta and the changeling illustrate how theories of the nature and transmission of dramatic texts, the realization of the texts in performance, and critical interest in questions of gender and power interlace in contemporary thought. The way in which Hippolyta interacts with Theseus and responds to the lovers in various performance traditions reflects critical attitudes about (for example) whether the play celebrates or questions hierarchical order, and whether it achieves an unshadowed harmony.224 Gary Jay Williams has argued that the Indian boy's part in the spectacle of both the 1692 adaptation The Fairy-Queen and Reynolds's 1816 mounting is politically charged,225 and his shifting shape in modern productions has prompted interesting speculations about what the play may be saying about homoeroticism, and race and empire.226 More generally, the increase in attention to how performance interconnects with critical interpretation, given impetus by J.L. Styan's The Shakespeare Revolution (1977), represents something of a return to nineteenth-century articles stemming

38

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 227

from productions seen. Nineteenth-century interest in interpreting the play through graphic art shows some signs of revival in the inclusion in recent editions of reproductions of paintings by Fuseli and Reynolds, and in excellent general works by Edward Hodnett and Richard D. Altick; it may be further stimulated by the essays and reproductions in Victorian Fairy Painting.223 The increasing popularity of Britten's 1960 opera has elicited analyses of the play's structure, mood, and" diverse styles through comparison with Britten's musical treatment.229 Current criticism has also returned to an interest in the style and verbal techniques of Dream, but not in the vein of earlier praise of his sublime beauties or lyrical ecstasies, nor in pedagogical listings of similes, alliteration, puns, etc.; but in detailed, learned, and wide-ranging studies. Patricia Parker's continuing work on Dream can most recently be seen in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context, 'a book about the contemporary contexts and historical resonances of Shakespearean wordplay'; her fertile readings of such words as 'preposterous', 'rude', 'mechanical', 'partition' open up the play in a way she characterizes thus: 'One of the methodological presuppositions here . . . is that Shakespearean wordplay - the very feature relegated by the subsequent influence of neoclassicism to the rude and deformed as well as ornamental or trivial — provides a way into networks whose linkages expose the very orthodoxies and ideologies the plays themselves often appear simply to rehearse'.230 Mark Stavig's study of Dream and Romeo and Juliet in terms of patterns of metaphor is in the tradition of 'history of ideas' criticism; his general argument about the relationship of nature and society is not unfamiliar, but it is worked out in the context of contemporary concerns: 'Instead of privileging rulers, fathers, and males in general by identifying them with reason and God, Shakespeare relates the structures of the self, love, the family, society, and the cosmos to both the shifting cycles of nature and the longer lasting but still mutable values of hierarchy'.231 The study of sources and analogues has also undergone changes in approach and theoretical orientation. In the first half of the twentieth century interest in the topic seems to have been largely satisfied by Frank Sidgwick's book (See No. 79), but it revived in the 1950s, particularly because of the work of Geoffrey Bullough and Kenneth Muir, prompting a wide-ranging exploration of the play's indebtedness to many literary texts from the classical era to the sixteenth century, and increasingly sophisticated discussion of the nature and significance of that indebtedness.232 The recognition of Ovidian elements, and of mythological reference garnered from other sources, penetrates many types of criticism of the latter twentieth century. Other classical authors, such as Apuleius and Seneca, have been given new prominence in interpreting the play.233 The long-recognized Chaucerian connections have been freshly studied.234 The perceptible influence of Italian Renaissance literature, which so offended Gervinus (No. 37), has been re-examined from various angles.235 'Sources and analogues' have now become 'intertextuality', a usefully inclusive term that allows critics to explore 'complementary intertexts that participate in a multitext dialogue concerning the similarly patterned values that they have in

39

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

common 236 Other topics reappear in the most recent two decades of Dream's long critical history, but often with a twist of theory, and sociological concern. Alan Brissenden notes that Shakespeare uses dance more abundantly here than in any other play, in order 'to comment on and affect the major pattern of order and disorder in the action'.237 Skiles Howard denies that Dream's dancing 'evokes a cosmic concord to restore order', arguing that in Shakespeare's theatre 'competing cultural assertions were visually articulated in the diverse traditions of dancing', and in Dream the variety of dances allows the audience to understand 'the social construction of rank and gender', so that the 'new dance for gentles and mechanicals is a commercial contract between the artisan of images and those who seek to mend their lives with dreams'.238 The longstanding interest in folklore, 'popular antiquities', or customs, manners, and superstitions is pressed into service in class-conscious studies of popular culture or assimilated to anthropological theory. The fairies, whose origins continued to inspire scholarly researches into the twentieth century as in the work of Minor White Latham and Katharine Briggs, are psychoanalyzed or, in William Empson's extraordinary posthumous publication, treated in terms of Renaissance neoplatonism, astrology and cosmology.239 Astrology is also prominent in a book-length study of a long-favourite topic, the play's occasion, but David Wiles's240 vocabulary and intentions are very contemporary: he seeks 'to place the text within a context of thought, ritual practice and social relations — and of course conventions of theatrical performance' and he sees what he is doing as 'an exercise in defamiliarization, an attempt to break down the process of assimilation that has allowed A Midsummer Night's Dream to become a cornerstone of British culture in the 1990s' (xiv). He argues that Renaissance ideas of time and the cosmos 'did not provide Elizabethans with a single ideology — they did provide a field of discourse' (181). The insistence on a theorized approach has provoked irritation. As early as 1983 Cedric Watts used Bottom to frame his attack on the obtrusive use of various theories in literary criticism, and Brian Vickers's comprehensive denunciation of ill-informed application of theoretical approaches has more recently delighted those of a similar frame of mind.241 Three recent books discussing Dream together with other Shakespearean comedies show a similar restlessness: Stuart Tave insists that comedy 'is not about psychology, or philosophy, or anthropology, or theology. It is not even interdisciplinary', and draws attention to Dream's symmetry in plot, distinctiveness of characters, and 'happy command of the languages they speak at every level of their varied abilities';242 Gunnar Sorelius considers Dream and the other early comedies in the context of their aesthetic, literary and cultural background without reference to the ways in which these topics have been modified by theories adopted from other disciplines;243 John K. Hale believes that the best way to arrive at the 'constitutive pleasure' of the comedies is 'to be eclectic and doctrinally uncommitted'.244 These reactions are somewhat reminiscent of Halliwell's annoyed dislike of nineteenth-century philosophical analysis of the comedies (see above p. 22). On the verge of the twenty-first century it is possible to be dismayed by an intention of treating Dream 'as a site of convergence of various

40

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

and potentially contradictory cultural discourses', or to fear that some readers may take seriously the assertion that 'Critics have been slow to recognise the influence of the Tzotzil Indians on Shakespeare',245 but ultimately one must be grateful to critics such as Louis Montrose, James Calderwood, and a host of others, for the intense engagement with the play that expresses the joy and wonder they find in it. Playgoers, actors, directors, readers in classroom or closet still find A Midsummer Night's Dream endlessly fascinating, and continue to seek to pluck out the heart of its mystery.

NOTES 1 2

3

4 5

Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth (London, 1598; facsimile reprint, New York, 1973), fol. 282 (sig. OO2). See Richard Simpson, The School of Shakespeare, 2 vols (London, 1878), II, 88-9; William J. Lawrence, 'Shakespeare from a New Angle', Studies (Dublin), 8 (1919), 450-3; James P. Bednarz, 'Marston's Subversion of Shakespeare and Jonson: Histriomastix and the War of the Theaters', Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6 (1993), 103-28. Histrio-mastix is in The Plays of John Marston, edited by H[enry] Harvey Wood, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1934-9), III, 247-302. See G.K. Hunter's edition of Antonio's Revenge (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), 4.1.277-82 and note, comparing Balurdo's speech with Bottom's at 5.1.276ff. There are other parallels: Nutriche (1.2.31-9) and Balurdo (1.2.125-6) both echo Bottom's repetition of'Methought' (4.1.207-10); Antonio's speech (2.2.120-1) may be a remembrance of Thisbe's (5.1.324-7); cf. Ant., 3.1.187-92 and Dream, 5.1.371-82 (first noted by Lewis Theobald, The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols (London, 1733), I, 147); cf. Ant., 3.1.198 and Dream, 5.1.302-3; cf. Ant., 3.2.25-9 and Dream, 3.1.91, 5.1.192-3, and 1.2.108; Balurdo's 'very . . . I'll assure you' (3.2.29)) is the same as Bottom's Very . . . I assure you' (1.2.13). C.A. Herpich compares The Malcontent 1.6.42-3 with Dream 1.1.206-7, in The Shakespeare Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591 to 1700. . . . Originally Compiled by C.M. Ingleby, edited by John Munro, 2 vols (New York, 1909; re-issued by Sir Edmund Chambers, 1932), I, 132. See The Insatiate Countess, edited by Giorgio Melchiori (London, 1984) and cf. 2.1.201-3 and Dream, 1.1.145-9; 2.2.87-8 and Dream, 2.2.103; and, 2.4.29-31 and Dream, 3.2.50-1. Fotjack Drum's Entertainment see The Plays of John Marston, ed. cit., Ill, 175-241, and cf. 'the grim cheekt night' (p. 198, 1. 5) and Bottom's 'O grim-look'd night' (5.1.170); the stychomythia (p. 199) and Dream, 1.1.132-140; Pasquill's last speech of Act II (p. 206) and Hermia's speech when she awakens to find her lover gone (2.2.145-56); Camelia's speech to Ellis beginning 'Come' (p. 211, 11. 7ff.) and Titania's speech to Bottom (4.1.Iff.); Sir Edward's call for entertainment and his asking 'What Gallants . . . can entertain / This pleasing time . . .' (p. 234), and Theseus's similar lines (5.1.32-41, especially 11. 40-1: 'How shall we beguile / The lazy time . . .'). See Edmond Malone (No. 3) for this borrowing. The Shoemakers' Holiday, 1.2.1-7 (The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1953-61, I, 30) is from Dream 4.1.Iff. Edith Rickert, in 'Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Modem Philology, 21 (1923), 62 and 64, points out that 1.1.47-8 and 5.2.17-18 of Whore are from Dream 1.1.8-9 and 2.1.128-9.

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SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

15

See The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 29-31, and the Malone Society reprint of Wily Beguiled, edited by W.W. Greg (Oxford, 1912). Narcissus was edited from manuscript by Margaret L. Lee (London, 1893) with an introduction which points out its debt to the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude. E.K. Chambers added two more parallels from Dream in Appendix F (p. 163) of his Warwick edition of the play (1897), and there are others: Narcissus, lines 293-4, from Dream, 5.1.204-5 and 345-7; 299, from 5.1.279; 331, from 3.1.84-5; 410-11, from 5.1.196, 198, 275; 413, from 3.2.48; 493, from 3.1.67-9 and 5.1.131; 638, from 3.2.175; 685, from 5.1.188, 190; and the verse form and tone of 305-16 is from 5.1.275-87, 295-306, and 324-47. See The Works ofBenJonson with Notes . . . by William Giffbrd [and Peter Whalley], edited by Francis Cunningham, 3 vols (London, 1871), I, 197 note. Quotations are from Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52). See Michael Shapiro, 'The Casting of Flute: Planes of Illusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Bartholomew Fair, in The Elizabethan Theatre XIII, edited by A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee (Toronto, 1994), pp. 147-72; and John G. Sweeney III, Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater (Princeton, 1985), chapter six. Another parallel between the two plays is the humorous use of the proverb 'A Flea-bitten horse never tires' (Dream, 3.1.96, and 102; Bartholomew Fair, 4.4.16-17). First observed by Karl Elze (No. 46 below, note 1). Bussy D'Ambois, edited by Maurice Evans (London, 1965). The same expression is used in John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614; printed 1623), edited by Elizabeth M. Brennan (London, 1965), 3.1.85, and in Massinger's Maid of Honour (1621; printed 1632), 1.1.226, in The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, edited by Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols (Oxford, 1976), I, 128. Pointed out by W. C. Jourdain (fl. 1860) in his manuscript notes in the Variorum edition of 1821 in the Folger Shakespeare Library, copy 2, volume 1. One other possible echo is where Monsieur says 'Stay but awhile here and I'll send to thee' (1.1.118), which is like Bottom's command: 'Stay thou but here a while, | And by and by I will to thee appear' (3.1.86-7). See the notes on pp. 81, 136, and 141 in The Isle of Gulls, edited by Raymond S. Burns (New York, 1980). Reference to The Revenger's Tragedy is to the edition with Cyril Tourneur on the title-page, edited by Lawrence J. Ross (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966), p. 57; for a discussion of authorship see pp. xiii-xix, especially p. xviii where the editor says he 'can state with some confidence that he does not know who wrote The Revenger's Tragedy'. A strong argument for Middleton's authorship is in David J. Lake's The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays (London, 1975), pp. 136-62, 257-69. See The Fleire in W. Bang, Materialien zur Kunde des «lteren Englischen Dramas (Louvain, 1912; reprinted Vaduz, 1963), 2.1.434-5, p. 30, and The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 174. First noted by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Memoranda on the Midsummer Night's Dream (Brighton, 1879), p. 35. Another parallel is at 2.1.7-9 of The Fleire: 'momentarie sportes, which like to lightning appeares, and vanisheth ere one can say tis come:' (pp. 18-19) which echoes Dream at 1.1.143-8. Paul Yachnin, 'The Politics of Theatrical Mirth: A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Mad World, My Masters, and Measure for Measure', Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992), 51-66. Additional parallels may be found in Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters, edited by Standish Henning (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), 1.2.26, 2.1.6, 3.2.191-2, 3.2.200, and 5.2.73, and Dream, 2.2.4, 3.1.179, 3.1.42-3, 5.1.290, and 1.1.21.

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16 Daniel M. McKeithan, The Debt To Shakespeare In The Beaumont And Fletcher Plays (Austin, 1938; reprinted New York, 1970), pp. 219, 218: see pp. 86-100 for detailed analysis. 17 See McKeithan, pp. 125-6, 180-1, 170, and 185-6. 18 Cristina Malcolmson, '"As Tame as the Ladies": Politics and Gender in The Changeling'', English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 320-39: the quotation is from p. 338. References to The Changeling are to the edition of N.W. Bawcutt (London, 1958; revised 1961). Compare also 1.1.71-6 with Dream, 1.1.46, 234-7; 3.3.79-81 with 2.1.129, 5.1.384, 2.1.7; 3.3.120-1 with 1.1.233; 3.3.130 with 2.1.159; 3.3.216-17 with 2.1.195-7; 4.3.59-60 with 1.2.75 and 79-80 (this last one observed by Malcolmson, p. 328). 19 The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. cit.: The Fatal Dowry (1619), 2.2.325 (I, 45), from Dream, 3.2.208, 212; The Duke of Milan (1621), 2.1.155-75,183-4, 199 (I, 242-3), from Dream, 3.2.284-326 (noted in The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 296-7); The Maid of Honour (1621), 1.2.19-21 (I, 131) and 1.2.36-9 (I, 131), from Dream, 1.2.40-1 and 2.1.153-4; The Renegado (1624), 2.6.28-9 (II, 47) and 3.3.74 (II, 57), from Dream, 4.2.29-30 and 1.1.80-1; The Parliament of Love (1624), 2.2.86 (II, 122) and 3.2.20-1 (II, 134), from Dream, 1.2.9-10 and 3.2.131-2; The Emperor of the East (1631), 1.11.67-72 (III, 411) and 3.3.21 (III, 448), from Dream, 2.1.161-2, 2.2.2; The Guardian (1633), 1.1.302-8 (IV, 126), 5.2.33-4 and 38-9 (IV, 183), from Dream, 4.1.106-25, 2.1.204-5 and 2.2.64-5. 20 See The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Thomas Randolph, edited by W.C. Hazlitt, 2 vols (London, 1875), I, 11. See The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 379 for Ford, and II, 355-6 for Shirley. 21 Oedipus, 1.1.1-18, from Dream, 2.1.106-14: first noted by E.H. Seymour, Remarks . . . upon the Plays of Shakespeare, 2 vols (London, 1805; reprinted New York,1976), I, 44); Theodosius, 1.1.245-9 from Dream, 4.1.113-22: first noted by Edmond Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 10 vols (London, 1790), II, 514-15): see The Works of Nathaniel Lee, edited by Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke, 2 vols (New Brunswick, N. J., 1954), I, 379 and II, 247; for Oedipus in Dryden, see Dryden, Works, 20 vols (Berkeley, California, 1954-94), XIII (1984), edited by M.E. Novak, p. 120. Tate's Cuckolds-Haven: or, An Alderman No Conjurer. A Farce (London, 1685), p. 16, from Dream, 1.2.31-9 and 70-3: first noted byj. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Memoranda on the Midsummer Night's Dream (Brighton, 1879), p. 11; see also The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, II, 316. The Folly of Priestcraft (London, 1690), pp.16-17: first noted by George W. Stone, Jr., 1A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Hands of Garrick and Colman', PMLA 54 (1939), 467. 22 Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965), p. 7, 11. 27-8, and p. 123 note. See her introduction, pp. xxxi-xxxiii, for the date of composition. 23 Cf. Donne's verse letter 'To the Countess of Bedford': 'we | May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts see' (The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, edited by W. Milgate, Oxford, 1967, p. 101, 11. 26-7, glossing 'through-shine front' as 'transparent countenance') and Lysander's speech, 'Transparent Helena, nature shows art, | That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart' (2.2.104-5); and 'A Litanie': 'that faire blessed Mother-maid' (The Divine Poems, edited by Helen Gardner, Oxford, 1952, p. 18, 1. 37) and Oberon's description of the sun rising 'with fair blessed beams' (3.2.392). 24 Noted by Alan Brissenden, Notes and Queries, N. S., 35 (1988), 466-7. 25 W[illiam] P[ercy], The Faery Pastorall or Forrest of Elves, edited by J[oseph] Haslewood (London, 1824), p. 170. E.K. Chambers claims that Percy shows 'marked traces' of

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Dream (Warwick edition, 1897, p. 16), but the name of Oberon and the one parallel passage are the only similarities. 26 H.B. Sprague, in his edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Boston, 1896), compares Chapman's 'withring out' (Iliad, 4.528) and Theseus's 'withering out' (1.1.6), and in Notes and Queries, N. S., 5 (1958), p. 524, Charles R. Forker traces 'rude Mechanicals' (Odyssey, 6.422) to 3.2.9; compare also Odyssey 5.251, 5.254, 5.419, and 6.431 with Dream 3.2.3, 2.1.196-7,3.2.393, and 1.1.118: references are to Chapman's Homer, edited by Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols (New York, 1956). 27 Barten Holyday, Aulus Persius Flaccus his Satires Translated into English (Oxford, 1616), sig. C5v. See A Feastfor Wormes in A.B. Grosart's edition of Quarles's Works, 3 vols (London, 1880-1), II, 10.99 and II, 11.221 and compare Dream 5.1.74 and 2.1.86. J.O. Halliwell was the first to observe the borrowing in the Emblemes in his Works of Shakespeare, 16 vols (London, 1853-65), V, 218.

28

The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 291.

29 The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 458; the entire poem is reprinted, I, 455-7. 30 L.C. Martin's edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford, 1956; corrected reprint 1963) compares 156.4.3-4 and 247.4.1-2 with Shakespeare's 3.2.443; compare also 149.1.1-4 with 4.1.139-40; 217.1.1, 7, and 9-10 with 3.1.170, 2.2.12-14, and 5.1.421. 31 Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957). In the passage there are phrases from 2.1.141, 83-4, and 103-4. Many parallels are noted by Milton's editors from Thomas Warton, Poems upon Several Occasions by John Milton (London, 1785) on: see especially A.W. Verity, The Cambridge Milton for Schools, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1891-6), and also the Appendix 'Milton and A Midsummer-night's Dream1 in his edition of the play (Cambridge, 1893) pp. 145-8, and A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: the Minor English Poems (London, 1972), II, parts 1, 2, and 3, passim. John W. Hales has a note on the play and Milton's 'L'Allegro' and 'II Penseroso' in The Athenaeum, August 18, 1877, pp. 211-12, and see also Alwin Thaler, 'The Shakespearean Element in Milton', PMLA, 40 (1925), 676-91. Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (Madison, Wisconsin, 1985) has much on the subject. 32 The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, I, 164. 33 See J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (Brighton, 1881), 143-4. 34 J.C. Maxwell, Notes and Queries, N.S., 3 (1956), 236, citing C.V. Wedgwood, The King's Peace (London, 1955), p. 270. 35 The English Parnassus: or, A Helpe to English Poesie (London, 1657; facsimile Menston, 1972). There are over 650 citations from Shakespeare. See Pvichard F. Kennedy, 'Milton in Poole's Parnassus', Notes and Queries, N.S., 45 (1998), 52.

36 See The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, II, 127 and 166. 37

See The Rehearsal Transpros'd and The Rehearsal Transpros'd: the Second Part, edited by D.I.B. Smith (Oxford, 1971), p. 150. Three literary historians also noticed Dream in the late seventeenth century. William Winstanley, in his enlarged Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687; first published in 1684) praised Shakespeare's 'Dramatick Poetry, especially in the Comick part' and listed Dream among his plays (pp. 131-2). In An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), Gerard Langbaine mentions the farce Bottom the Weaver, and points out the indebtedness to Dream of James Shirley's Triumph of Beauty (1646), pp. 460 and 485. Charles Gildon cited approvingly Titania's speech at 3.1.164-74 in his answer to Thomas Rymer's attack on Shakespeare in his Miscellaneous Letters (1694), quoted in Vickers, II, 83.

44

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38

39 40

41

42 43

44

45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

See E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930), I, 362, II, 329 and 348-52; and Jay L. Halio, 'The Staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1595-1895', in Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton, edited by John M. Mucciolo (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 158-9. For William Tawyer, see J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (fifth edition, London, 1885), p. 500: this information - that Tawyer was 'Mr. [John] Heminges man' and therefore a member of Shakespeare's company - is not in the earlier editions. Ernest Brennecke gives a detailed introduction and a translation of Peter Squenz in his Shakespeare in Germany 1590-1700 (Chicago, 1964). The 1673 version is of particular interest because the list of characters suggests various possibilities about the doubling of roles: see Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre, (Iowa City, 1997), p. 33. See Halio, 'Staging'; Jack J. Jorgens, 'Studies in the criticism and stage history of A Midsummer Night's Dream' (Ph.d. dissertation, New York University, 1970), pp. 80-278, which covers from 1600 to 1800. Lampe's version with the musical score has been edited by Curtis Price and Stanley Sadie with an introduction by Roger Fiske (London, 1988), and recorded on Hyperion CD A66759 (1995). The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970-83), III, 208. Williams, Our Moonlight Revels, p. 45; he has a detailed analysis, pp. 41-60. Winton Dean has this apposite comment on Purcell's music: 'Although Purcell set none of Shakespeare's words, he clearly possessed that instinct for the fresh innocence of fairyland that was to be reborn in Mendelssohn and Britten' ('Shakespeare and Opera', in Shakespeare in Music, edited by Phyllis Hartnoll [London, 1964], p. 115). See also Curtis Alexander Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984), 320-57. Both Williams and Price favour Thomas Betterton as the adapter, rather than Elkanah Settle. Vickers has illustrative excerpts, I, 424-40. See George C.D. Odell, Shakespeare — From Betterton to Irving, 2 vols (New York, 1920; reprinted 1963), I, 358-9, and 376; and George W. Stone, Jr., 'A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Hands of Garrick and Colman', PMLA 54 (1939), 467-82. Peter Holland's essay '"A Midsummer Night's Dream", 1660-1800: Culture and the Canon', in Le Forme del Teatro, edited by Paola Faini and Viola Papetti (Rome, 1994) deals with Garrick and Colman, and also with other authors, adapters, and artists of the period. Dryden, Works, XII (1994), edited by Vinton A. Dearing, pp. 94-5. The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols (London, 1709), I, xxiii. Ibid., I, xxv-xxvi. Gildon (1710), pp. 313-20. Apparently attempting to profit from the popularity of Rowe's six-volume Works of Shakespeare published by Jacob Tonson, which had two editions in 1709, the printers E. Curll and E. Sanger issued a spurious 'Volume the Seventh' of the Works in 1710 containing Shakespeare's poems and two essays by Gildon, one on the 'Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England' (pp. i-lxvii), and 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare' (pp. 257-472). These 'Remarks' constituted the first critical assessment of most of Shakespeare's plays in one essay. Gildon (1710), pp. 264-5. Gildon (1710), pp. 319-20. 1 July 1712, No. 419, in Vickers, II, 280. John Hughes, The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, 6 vols (London, 1715), 'Remarks on the Fairy Queen', I, Ixiv-lxv.

45

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

53 Warburton seems to be echoing Rowe (p. 10 above) in his comment on the play (quoted by Elizabeth Griffith, No. 1 below). The author of An Examen of the New Comedy, Call'A The Suspicious Husband (London, 1747) exclaims, ' ... he has leapt their Boundaries, and boldly set his Imagination at Liberty! he has permitted her to soar . . .'. Then he quotes 5.1.12-17, 'The poet's eye ... " (pp. 22-3); also quoted in Vickers, III, 260-1. Seward, in his preface to his edition of The Works of Mr Francis Beaumont and Mr John Fletcher, 10 vols (London, 1750), says Beaumont and Fletcher fell short of Shakespeare in magic and fairy machinery because he had a 'low education' and believed in 'these Dreams of Superstition' so that 'ev'n Theseus is not attended by his own deities, Minerva, Venus, the Fauns, Satyrs, &c. but by Oberon and his Fairies:' (I, li-lii); also quoted in Vickers, III, 386-7). 54 Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), quoted in Vickers, IV, 264. 55 George Colman, 'Critical Reflections on the Old English Dramatic Writers', in The Dramatic Works of Philip Massinger, edited by Thomas Coxeter, 4 vols (London, 1759; 1761), I, 7-8. 56 The Companion to the Play-House, or an Historical Account of all the Dramatic Writers and their Works . . . , 2 vols (London, 1764), I, sig. O3r. There was another edition in 1812. 57 Barclay, An Examination of Mr. Kenrick's Review of Mr. Johnson's Edition of Shakespeare (London, 1766), pp. 14-15; also quoted in Vickers, V, 234. 58 Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1769), pp. 137-9; partly quoted in Vickers, V, 335. 59 William DufF, Critical Observations on the Writings of the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (London, 1770), pp. 142-5, 162-3; the first part also quoted in Vickers, V, 368-9. 60 From A Midsummer Night's Dream, a comedy by Shakespeare. An introduction, and notes critical and illustrative, are added, by the authors of the Dramatic Censor [i.e. Francis Gendeman]. London: Printed for John Bell, no date (1774), pp. 137, 150, 179, and 200. 61 Gerard, An Essay on Genius (1774), edited by Bernhard Fabian (Munich, 1966), pp. 78-80; quoted in Vickers, VI, 113-14. 62 Gendeman, ed. cit., pp. 174 and 175. 63 Gildon(1710),p. 316. 64 Gildon (1710), p. 425. It is curious that the phrase 'heap of Rubbish' was used earlier by Dryden (1679) of Troilus and Cressida, and by Edward Ravenscroft (1687) of Titus Andronicus: see Vickers, I, 250 and 239. 65 Rowe, Works (1709), I, xx-xxi, xxiv, and xxxv; Pope, Works (1723-5), I, xxiii. Later Johnson said in his proposal for an edition of Shakespeare (1756) that 'The observation of faults and beauties is one of the duties of an annotator', but he criticises Pope and Warburton and says this observation should be limited to beauties in 'obscure passages' (Vickers, IV, 272-3). Holland comments on Pope's index in the essay cited in note 44 above, pp. 223-5. 66 Gildon (1710), pp. 316-20. 67 The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols (London, 1718; reprinted New York, 1970), I, 304-69; the quotations are from pp. 305 and 304. Preceding this work of Gildon was Edward Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry (London, 1702; nine editions by 1762), where, after two sections on writing poetry, he has a 436 page 'Collection' of exemplary excerpts from English poets, mostly from Dryden. He quotes Shakespeare infrequently because his language is 'now become so antiquated and obsolete' (Preface, sigs. F4v-F5, 1705

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68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84

enlarged edition), but he does cite 33 lines from Dream, placing it among the top six most quoted plays. See the facsimile reprint of the 1705 edition (New York, 1971), and the first part of the 1708 edition, 'Rules for Making English Verse,' with a helpful introduction by A. Dwight Culler (Los Angeles, 1953). Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry, I, 316-22 for Dream, 308-14 for Measure for Measure, and 322-6 for The Merchant of Venice. Pope, Works (1723-5), I, xxiii. William Dodd, The Beauties of Shakespeare, 2 vols (London, 1752; reprinted London, 1971). The distinctive wording of some headings is the same in both Dodd and Pope: for example, from Hamlet, 'Immoderate Grief discommended' (1.2.87-106), and 'Providence directs our Actions' (5.2.9-11), in Dodd, I, 216-17, 257; and in Pope, VI, 4I2v, 4Klv; and from The Merchant of Venice, 'Fruition more languid than Expectation' (2.6.5-19), 'Honour ought to be conferred on Merit only' (2.9.37-49), 'Speculation more easy than Practice' (1.2.12-21), 'Lover, successful, [compared] to a Conqueror' (3.2.141-6), 'his [i.e. a lover's] thoughts, [compared] to the inarticulate Joys of a Crowd' (3.2.177-83), in Dodd, I, 62, 64, 60, 67-8, 68; and in Pope, VI, 4I2v, 4Klr, 4Klv, 4Nlv (two). See William Jaggard, Shakespeare Bibliography (London, 1911; reprinted Folkestone and London, 1971), pp. 562-3 for Kearsley, and pp. 500-1, 503, 506-7 for Blair's editions from 1753 on. Gentleman, ed. tit., p. 137. Theobald, Works, (1733), I, iii. From a letter to R. Arbuthnot dated 29 March 1762, in Sir W. Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. James Beattie, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1807), I, 41. See the commentary on 1.2.1, 1.2.96, and 3.1.1 in The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (London, 1765), I, 100, 103, and 126. Warburton, The Works of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1747), I, 110; 111; 154; 113-15; 97-8. Johnson, Plays, (London, 1765), I, 149. This comment is in the Appendix, VIII, sig. 2H7v, of 1765, and incorporated in the note at the end of the text in Johnson and Steevens Plays (1773), III, 107, where it is slightly emended, and whence it is here given. One of the most important editions textually was that of Edward Capell, 10 vols (London, 1767-8): his commentary was published separately in three volumes (London, 1779-83) as Notes and Various Readings with material on Dream in II, 99-118. Gentleman, ed.cit., pp. 162 and 156. Gildon (1710), p. 315. Seward, op. tit. in note 53 above, I, Iii, and Johnson, Plays (1765), I, xxi. Anonymous [Edward Taylor], Cursory Remarks on Tragedy, on Shakespeare, etc. (London, 1774), p. 99; on the author's identity see Vickers, VI, 124. For Christopher Smart, see Vickers, IV, 204. John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare (London, 1746; revised 1748); see Vickers III, 290-323, with comments on Dream on pp. 309, 311, 319. Zachary Grey, Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakespeare . . ., 2 vols (London, 1754); see Vickers, IV, 147-55, with a note on Dream on pp. 150-1. Thomas Tyrwhitt, Observations and Conjectures upon some Passages of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1766); see Vickers, V, 238-43, who proves that the fifty-page pamphlet was actually published in 1765. Benjamin Heath, A Revisal of Shakespeare's Text, Wherein the Alterations introduced into it by the more modem Editors and Critics, are particularly considered (London, 1765); see Vickers,

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SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93

94

95

96 97

98

IV, 550-64, with notes on Dream on pp. 553-5. William Kenrick, A Review of Doctor Johnson's New Edition of Shakespeare: in which the Ignorance, or Inattention, of that Editor is exposed, and the Poet defended from the Persecution of his Commentators (London, 1765); see Vickers, V, 200-11, with a note on Dream on p. 202. Shakespeare Commentaries (London, 1863), p. 23. Gentleman, ed. cit., pp. 140-1. See Marcia Allentuck, 'Sir Thomas Hanmer instructs Francis Hayman: an Editor's Notes to his Illustrator (1744)', Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1976), 288-315. Drake (No. 9), Maine (No. 28), and Beerbohm (No. 72) provide some further comment; among modern studies are those by W. Moelwyn Merchant (see p. 59 and note 208); Winifred H. Friedman, Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (New York, 1976); Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (London, 1981), especially pp. 34-9; Kenneth Garlick, 'Illustrations to A Midsummer Night's Dream before 1920', Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), 41-53; Barbara Arnett Melchiori, 'Undercurrents in Victorian Illustrations of Shakespeare', Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, edited by Werner Habicht et al. (Newark, 1988), pp. 120-8. See Jeremy Maas et al., Victorian Fairy Painting, edited by Jane Martineau (London, 1997). Gentleman, ed. cit., p.137, and see above, pp. 14, 17. 'Letter to Richard Bentley, Feb. 23, 1755', The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, edited by Mrs Paget Toynbee, 16 vols (Oxford, 1903-5), III, 288. 'Critical Remarks on the Late Editions of Shakespeare's Plays', [subscribed 'Lucius'], The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, 4 (1786), 361. Cf. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935), and John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston, 1927). Of their associates, Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke are represented by selections published after what is commonly considered the Romantic period (see Nos. 24 and 38). Charles and Mary Lamb have only slight comments directly on Dream, apart from the prose tale. Quoted by Caroline Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare (London, 1928), p. 52. See also R.S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (Norman, Oklahoma, 1987), especially pp. 85-8, 102-8. Memorials of Shakespeare, or, Sketches of his Character and Genius, by Various Writers, now First Collected: with a Prefatory and Concluding Essay, and Notes (London, 1828), p. 92n. Memorials, p. 79; see also p. 86n. T.M. Raysor suggests that Coleridge's sentences on unity are based on Schlegel (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, edited by T.M. Raysor, 2 vols (London, 1960), II, 216n), but Gervinus questions which of Schlegel and Coleridge has priority (Commentaries, 1863, p. 22). For extensive bibliographies on fairy beliefs see Katharine M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck (London, 1959) and The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London, 1967). Among nineteenth-century commentators are: Sir Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2 vols (Kelso, 1802); J.O. Halliwell, Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream (London, 1845); William Thorns, 'The folk-lore of Shakespeare', The Athenaeum (4 September-11 December, 1847), Nos. 1036-41,1043,1045,1050; William Bell, Shakespeare's Puck and his folkslore, 3 vols (London, 1852-64); T.F. Thiselton Dyer, Folk-lore of Shakespeare (London, 1883); Alfred Nutt, The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare (London, 1900).

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99 'Theatrical Examiner. No. 223. Covent-Garden', The Examiner, No. 421 (January 21, 1816), 44; reprinted in A View of the English Stage (1818), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London, 1930-4), V, 274-7. 100 The parallel with Sly is also suggested in an anonymous review of Drake's Memorials of Shakespeare (1828), in The American Quarterly Review, 6 (1829), 48. 101 Knight's Studies of Shakespeare (London, 1849), Book XI 'Shakespeare's Critics', ranges from Milton to Coleridge, the last being the most highly praised. 102 Keats emphatically scribbled out Johnson's comment on Dream: see Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare, pp. 29-30. 103 The review deals with fourteen works of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism published between 1823 and 1840; three are in German, not in English translation, including Ulrici (Halle, 1839; see No. 26). 104 The Times, 12 June 1841, p. 8. 105 Chance Newton, Cues and Curtain Calls (London, 1927), pp. 149-50. 106 Printed by Thomas Birch in the life of Shakespeare he contributed to the translation of Pierre Bayle's A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, 10 vols (London, 1734-41), IX, 191, note M; reprinted in Vickers, III, 89-90. Warburton's own statement of his opinion appeared in the notes to the play in Works (1747), I, 113-15; it was repeated in successive variorum editions to 1821. Boaden's alternate interpretation is put forward in On the Sonnets of Shakespeare (London, 1837), pp. 10-15. H.H. Furness lengthily rehearses the argument in his variorum edition (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 75-91; it is upon his summary that the most recent enquirer into the matter largely depends (David Wiles, Shakespeare's Almanac, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 167-70). 107 See note 5 to White, No. 33 below. 108 Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. The First Quarto, 1600: A Fac-simile in Photo-lithography, by William Griggs, with introduction by J.W. Ebsworth (London, 1880), pp. xvii-xviii; Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. The Second Quarto, 1600: A Fac-simile in Photo-lithography, by William Griggs, with introduction by J.W. Ebsworth (London, 1880), p. xxii. 109 Harley Granville Barker shared White's objections. For his 1914 production he abandoned Mendelssohn, and in his preface to the edition for The Players' Shakespeare (London, 1924) wrote: 'For long, Mendelssohn's music to the play, charming in itself, seemed to have acquired a prescriptive right to be used. But, apart from the question of intrinsic suitability, it involves a quite unallowable treatment of the text; involves, besides, the practical suppression of the lyrics' (vol 4, p. xx; reprinted in More Prefaces to Shakespeare, edited by Edward M. Moore [Princeton, 1974], p. 105.) In 1925 Herbert Farjeon strenuously objected to cutting Shakespeare's lines to make way for Mendelssohn's music ('A Midsummer Night's Dream: Mr Dean's Mendelssohn season (1925)', The Shakespearean Scene: Dramatic Criticisms (London, 1949], pp. 39-42). Later in the century Mendelssohn's music was used for parodic or ironic effect (see J.L. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century [Cambridge, 1977], pp. 185,226). 110 The Voices of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 34 (1992), 218-38. 111 Susan May lists the work as by '[O'Connell]', on the basis of an ms. notation, possibly made by Furness, in the copy belonging to the University of Pennsylvania's Furness Library ('A Survey of the Criticism of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Ph. D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, p. xcv; private correspondence). 112 The Columbus of Literature: or, Bacon's New World of Sciences (Chicago, 1892), p. 13;

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113 114

115

116

117

118

119

120 121

122 123 124 125 126

cf. William Empson's posthumous 'The spirits of the Dream', Essays on Renaissance Literature. Volume Two: The Drama, edited by John Haffenden (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 170-248. Memoranda on the Midsummer Night's Dream, A.D. 1879 and A.D. 1855 (Brighton, 1879), p. 13. For student editions of Dream see, for example, Herbert A. Evans (ed.), The University Shakespeare (London, 1887); K. Deighton (ed.), Macmillan's English Classics (London, 1891); A.W. Verity (ed.), The Pitt Press Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1893). For other references to the masque elements of the play see the index. An early dissenting voice was Dr Finkenbrink, who argues against seeing Dream as a masque or occasional play in his pamphlet An Essay on the Date, Plot, and Sources of Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream:' Part I. On the Date (Miilheim a.d.Ruhr, 1884). Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (New York, 1953); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958). 'On Metrical Tests as Applied to Dramatic Poetry: Part I. Shakespeare', The New Shakespeare Society Transactions 1874, Series I, nos. 1-2 (London, 1874; reprinted Vaduz, 1965), p. 11. 'Some of Shakespeare's Metaphors, and his Use of them in the Comedies', The New Shakespeare Society's Transactions 1887-92, Series I, nos. 11-14 (London, 1892; reprinted Vaduz, 1965), p. 403. The Oxford and Cambridge Edition (London, 1902), pp. x-xi, 86; American editions were similar: see for example The New Hudson Shakespeare, edited by Henry Norman Hudson, revised by Ebenezer Charlton Black (Boston, 1908), p. xxxi. See for example Fleay, 'On metrical tests', and in the same volume of The New Shakespeare Society Transactions (pp. 442-64), John K. Ingram, 'On the Weak Endings of Shakespeare, with Some Account of the History of the Verse-tests in General'. The 'General Preface' to The Warwick Shakespeare (edited by E.K. Chambers, London, 1897) claims to emphasize the 'literary aspect' of the plays, rather than treating them 'merely as material for the study of philology or grammar', but the lengthy 'Essay on Metre' (pp. 167-83) is dryly technical, with little effort to explore dramatic effects. For the sixth edition of 1900 of The Pitt Press Shakespeare, A.W. Verity added a similar condensed 'Hints on Metre' (155-65); Stanley Wood's appended sections on grammar and prosody (pp. 88-107) confess their indebtedness to E.A. Abbott (A Shakespearean Grammar, London, 1869) and are also technical. When considerations of versification and diction are moved to the introduction, more effort is devoted to analyzing the effects of the observed facts, as in The New Hudson Shakespeare (1908), pp. xxxiv-xli. See above, p. 8 and note 59. Rhyming Dictionary for the Use of Young Poets: with an Essay on English Versification, and Explanatory Observations on the Selection and the Use of the Rhymes (Edinburgh, [1852]), pp. 20-1. An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare (Boston, 1889), pp. 69-70. Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare, edited by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, 3 vols (London, [1864-8]), I, 324. See No. 43; the first two phrases are from the Preface to the volume. Shakespeare's Garden of Girls (London, 1885), pp. 316, 313. In his edition Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream As You Like It The Tempest (Oxford, 1910), p. xix.

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127 Elvina Mary Corbould, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream , in Louise Rossi and E. M. Corbould, Side-Lights on Shakespeare (London, 1897), p. 36. 128 The Shakespearean Tempest (London, 1932), p. 161; see also the Introduction above, pp. 30-1. 129 An Examen of the New Comedy, Call'd The Suspicious Husband (London, 1747), p. 22. 130 See William L. Pressly, A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library (New Haven, 1993), Frontispiece and p. 12. 131 Thomas Babington Macaulay, 'Milton', The Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, 42 (1825), 308. 132 An Essay upon the Ghost-Belief of Shakespeare (London, 1851), p. 29. The whole passage (pp. 27-9) is quoted (not entirely accurately) by Furness in his commentary on Theseus's speech in the Variorum edition (1895), p. 200. 133 In his edition of Dream (Oxford, 1994), p. 55. 134 Histoire de la litterature anglaise, 4 vols (Paris, 1863-4), II, 184. 135 See, for example, Moyse (No. 54); the editions of H.H. Furness (1895), pp. 259-64; Stanley Wells (London, 1967), pp. 12-14; Harold F. Brooks (London, 1979), pp. liii-lvii; R.A. Foakes (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 2-4; Peter Holland (Oxford, 1994), pp. 111-12; Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York, 1997), p. 805. The question is also reviewed by Williams in 'Appendix: Wedding Studies', in Our Moonlight Revels, pp. 263-4. 136 Most useful for tracing the history of criticism of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the twentieth century are: John Russell Brown, 'The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900-1953', Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 1-13; DJ. Palmer, 'The Early Comedies', in Shakespeare: Select Bibliographical Guides, edited by Stanley Wells (London, 1973), pp. 56-9, 64-6, not substantially altered in the new edition Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford, 1990), pp. 95-7, 99-102; Antony W. Price (ed.), A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Selection of Critical Essays, Casebook Series (London, 1983); R.S. White, 'Criticism of the Comedies up to The Merchant of Venice: 1953-82', Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), 1-11; D. Allen Carroll and Gary Jay Williams, A Midsummer Night's Dream: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1986); Clifford Chalmers Huffman (ed.), Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice: An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare Studies 1888-1994 (Binghampton, NY, 1995); Richard Dutton (ed.), A Midsummer Night's Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks (London, 1996). 137 In A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by Harley Granville Barker and G.B. Harrison (Cambridge, 1934), J. Isaacs devotes five pages to criticism 'From Coleridge to the Present Day' and nineteen to 'Shakespearean Scholarship'; his only hesitation is whether studies of imagery should be classified as scholarship or aesthetics (320). Successive reprintings of his work through 1960 brought no revision in emphasis or attitudes. In the most recent incarnation of this handbook, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (edited by Stanley Wells, Cambridge, 1986), five different scholars contribute essays covering nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism and 'new critical approaches'. A similar pattern of expansion and differentiation is seen in successive editions from 1961 to 1997 of the widely used The Complete Works of Shakespeare published by Scott, Foresman and Co. (Glenview, Illinois; edited by Hardin Craig, then Craig and David Bevington, then Bevington). The process is accelerating: 23 years after the first edition of the respected Riverside edition (Boston, 1974), G. Blakemore Evans is impelled by his belief that 'a sea change has taken place in critical approaches' to add a lengthy 'interpretive essay' on twentieth-century criticism by Heather Dubrow (Second Edition, Boston, 1997, p. vii).

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138 139 140 141 142

143

144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151

152

153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164

All page references are to the volume of collected essays (London, 1938). 'Shakespeare's Iterative Imagery', Proceedings of the British Academy, 17 (1931), 151. Shakespeare's Way: A Psychological Study (London, 1930), p. 80. The Approach to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), pp. 60-1. The Women in Shakespeare's Plays: A Critical Study from the Dramatic and the Psychological Points Of View and in Relation to the Development of Shakespeare's Art (Garden City, NY, 1924), pp. 28-30. The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry & the Revels (Cambridge, 1927). See also M.C. Bradbrook, Elizabethan Stage Conditions (Cambridge, 1932; reprinted 1968), p. 42; Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949; reprinted Bloomington, 1966), p. 50; C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), pp. 128-9; G.K. Hunter, Shakespeare: The Later Comedies (London, 1962), p. 8. M.R. Ridley, William Shakespeare: A Commentary (London, 1936), p. 36. G.B. Harrison (ed.), Shakespeare: Major Plays and the Sonnets (New York, 1948), p. 273. Shakespeare's Life and Art (London, 1939), pp. 103, 106. The Art and Life of William Shakespeare (New York, 1940), p. 232. Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (London, 1949), p. 109. Comedy (New York and London, 1949), p. 24. Shakespeare Revealed, edited by Hugh Kingsmill (London, [1948]), pp. 22-9. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World, p. 50. 1949 also saw the publication of Northrop Frye's 'The Argument of Comedy' with its suggestive comments on the green world (in English Institute Essays 1948, edited by D.A. Robertson [New York, 1949], pp. 58-73), though Frye's views of A Midsummer Night's Dream are not fully set out until A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965). Bradbrook, Elizabethan Stage, pp. 79-80; see also John Russell Brown in 1955 (op. cit. in note 136 above), who comments that 'stress on characters' has resulted in Dream being considered 'sui generis, a "symbolical" or masque-like play' (7). The English Comic Characters (London, 1925); Comic Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1946). 'Political Propaganda and Satire in "A Midsummer Night's Dream'", Modem Philology, 21 (1923), p. 66ff. Will Shakespeare and the Dyer's Hand (New York, 1943), p. 99. The White Goddess (London, 1948), p. 373 (p. 424 in the amended and enlarged third edition, [London, 1952]). Alexander, Shakespeare's Life, p. 109. Knight, Shakespearean Tempest, pp. 142, 161. 'Shakespeare and Elizabethan Psychology', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 23 (1924), 536. What the Author Meant (London, 1932), p. 124. Mackenzie, Women, p. 28. The Elizabethan Fairies: the Fairies of Folkore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (New York, 1930); Shakespeare and the Supernatural (London, 1931). See, for example, Trevor R. Griffiths's introduction to his edition of the play for the series Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 45-61. For example, Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespearean Comedy (New York, 1949), confidently asserts Dream 'has never enjoyed great success upon the stage, but it is one of the most delightful of Shakespeare's plays for the closet' (131), and see M.R. Ridley p. 50 above, and note 144.

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165 For example, Frederic W. Ness, The Use of Rhyme in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, 1941), pp. 50, 53, 60, 81-3, 91-2, 128-30. Ness has some passing comments on the use of prose in Dream, but fuller treatment awaited Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London, 1968), pp. 65-71. 166 'A Plummet for Bottom's Dream', The Fortnightly Review, New series 111 (1922), 836; see also his 1919 article cited in note 2 above. 167 Welsford, The Court Masque. 168 Peter Holland (ed.), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Oxford, 1994), p. 113 n.4. 169 'Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Modern Philology, 21 (1923), 53-87,133-54. 170 'The Central Theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream', University of Toronto Quarterly, 20 (1951), 237. 171 The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), pp. 74-5, 79. 172 Shakespeare and his Comedies (London, 1957), pp. 12, 87, 90. 173 'The Moon and the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream', University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (1955), 238. 174 'The Argument of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Quarterly, 8 (1957), 308, 310. 175 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage', ELH, 24 (1957), 95-6. 176 'The Mature Comedies', in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, 3 (London, 1961), p. 214. 177 'Imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 115. 178 See, for example, Goddard, Meaning, Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies, Fisher, 'Argument', Barber, Festive Comedy and Hunter, Later Comedies. 179 See, for example, James L. Calderwood, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream: the Illusion of Drama', Modem Language Quarterly, 26 (1965), 506-22; David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (New Haven, 1966); A.C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, California, 1967); Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967); William J. Martz, Shakespeare's Universe of Comedy (New York, 1971). 180 The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, 1974), p. 219. 181 Shakespeare's Defense of Poetry (Lanham, Maryland, 1985). 182 A Natural Perspective: the Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965), pp. 76-8, 81, 106ff, 142. 183 Barber, Festive Comedy. 184 See for example T.M. Evans, 'The Vernacular Labyrinth: Mazes and Amazement in Shakespeare and Peele', Shakespeare Jahrbuch (Heidelberg), (1980), 165-73; Terence Hawkes, 'Comedy, Orality, and Duplicity: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night', in Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Maurice Charney (New York, 1980), pp. 155-63; Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York, 1985); and two translated works: Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, edited by Robert Schwartz (Baltimore, 1978) and Francois Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, translated by Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1991). 185 The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (London, 1960), p. 110; Young, Something of Great Constancy. 186 The Landscape of the Mind (Oxford, 1969), p. 127.

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187 Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream (London, 1968). 188 The Words of Mercury: Shakespeare and English Mythography of the Renaissance (Salzburg, 1974). 189 '"Vnkinde" Theseus: A Study in Renaissance Mythography', English Literary Renaissance, 4 (1974), 276-98; this essay comes under heavy fire from Richard Levin in his attack on ironic readings: New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago, 1979), pp. 80, 89, 93, 109. 190 'A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth', Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 39-52. 191 Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955), p. 421. 192 'Ovidian Elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Huntington Library Quarterly, 6 (1963), 165-78. 193 'Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare and Ovid: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Metamorphoses 4.1-166', in Creative Imitation and Latin Literature, edited by David West and Tony Woodman (Cambridge, 1979), p. 193. 194 'Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis', English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 317-59; Charles Martindale has some important reservations about The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven, 1986) in his review in Comparative Literature, 41 (1989), 177-82. 195 Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London, 1990); Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993). 196 (Indianapolis, 1971), p. 105. 197 Psychoanalytic Review, 60 (1973), 169-204. 198 'Bottom's Dream', American Imago, 9 (1952), 251-305. 199 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Copyright London, 1964), translated by Boleslaw Taborski, University Paperbacks (London, 1967); as Carroll and Williams point out in the Annotated Bibliography (Item 239, p. 76), the chapter on Dream, 'Titania and the Ass's Head', appeared as a separate essay in various languages in 1964. 200 Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York, 1966); see also Gerald F. Jacobson, 'A Note on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream', American Imago, 19 (1962), 21-6; Morton Kaplan, 'The American Imago in Retrospect', Literature & Psychology, 13 (1963), 112-16; Robert A. Ravich, 'A Psychoanalytic Study of Shakespeare's Early Plays', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 33 (1964), 388-410. 201 'Hermia's Dream', The Annual of Psychoanalysis, 7 (1979), 369-89. Richard Dutton reprints the essay in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks (London, 1996) pp. 61-83, and comments upon it pp. 7-9. 202 Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven, 1974). 203 Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, 1974). See also Stanley Wells's New Penguin edition (London, 1967), pp. 35-7; Michael Taylor, 'The Darker Purpose of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Studies in English Literature, 9 (1969), 259; Rose A. Zimbardo, 'Regeneration and Reconciliation in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1972), 35-6; John Arthos, Shakespeare's Use of Dream and Vision, (London, 1977), pp. 91-5; Anthony B. Dawson, Indirections: Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion (Toronto, 1978), p. 64; Elliott Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (London, 1979), p. 65 and pp. 172-3 note 5. 204 Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), p. 205. 205 Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis, 1971); the chapter on Dream is a reworking of his 1965 essay cited in note 179 above. 206 'Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream', in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist criticism, edited by Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, New York, 1979), pp. 189-212; this essay first appeared in Harry F. Camp Memorial Lectures (Stanford

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207 208

209

210

211

212 213

214 215

216

217

University, 1972), pp. 1-17. See also Girard's A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York, 1991). Berkeley, California, 1987; first published in 1963 as part of a two-volume set, the second volume being a musical setting of Pericles by Celia Zukofsky. Early Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 3 (London, 1961), pp. 165-85; see also his Shakespeare and the Artist (London, 1959). 'Shakespeare and Opera. 3. The Comedies'; 'Shakespeare in the Concert Hall. 1. Mendelssohn and Berlioz', in Shakespeare and Music, edited by Phyllis Hartnoll (London, 1964), pp. 104-41; 178-97. See, for example, Stanley Wells's New Penguin edition of 1967 p. 8 and David Bevington's Bantam edition of 1988 p. xvii. Graham Bradshaw has offered a counter-analysis to Fiske's in Shakespeare's Scepticism (Brighton, 1987), pp. 66-9. '"But We Are Spirits of Another Sort": The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies Summer 1975, edited by Siegfried Wenzel (Chapel Hill, 1978), pp. 80-92. (London, 1979), p. ix. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition; for a severe critique of Weimann's theories and methods, see Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven, 1993), pp. 386-93, 405ff. (London, 1979), p. 65. Representations, 1 (1983), 61-94 (previously given at four seminars or conferences between 1980 and 1982); page references here given are to the essay as it appeared in slightly revised form under the title 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form' in Reuniting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago, 1986), pp. 65-87, 329-34. The essay is reprinted in Representing the English Renaissance, edited by Stephen Jay Greenblatt (Berkeley, California, 1988), and in Dutton, Contemporary Critical Essays. For example, Leonard Tennenhouse, 'Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIIF, in Political Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 109-28, incorporated into Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York, 1986); James H. Kavanagh, 'Shakespeare in Ideology', Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis (London, 1985), pp. 144-65; John Gordon Sweeney III, Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater (Princeton, 1985); Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, 1985); Susan Wells, The Dialectics of Representation (Baltimore, 1985); Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1986); Theodore B. Leinwand, '"I believe we must leave the killing out": Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Renaissance Papers 1986, edited by Dale BJ. Randall and Joseph A. Porter (Durham, North Carolina, 1986), pp. 11-30; Annabel Patterson, 'Bottom's Up: Festive Theory in A Midsummer Night's Dream', in Renaissance Papers 1988, edited by Dale BJ. Randall and Joseph A. Porter (Durham, North Carolina, 1988), pp. 25-39; Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Richard Wilson, 'The Kindly Ones: The Death of the Author in Shakespearean Athens', Essays and Studies 1993, edited by Nigel Smith (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1-24. For example, Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London, 1981); Shirley

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Nelson Garner, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill'", Women's Studies, 9 (1981), 47-63; Edward Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites (Cambridge, 1984); William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton, 1985); James L. Calderwood, A Midsummer Night's Dream, (New York, 1992). The idea of liminality has been transported to the stage, for example in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Benjamin Britten's operatic version of Dream, where the 'wood' was represented by a series of door frames, through which the lovers crawled and chased; the production, which premiered on 25 November 1996, was directed by Tim Albery, with sets and costumes designed by Antony McDonald. 218 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes: A Reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Gradiva 2 (1981-2), 11-29. 219 'The Indian Boy's Dream Wherein Every Mother's Son Rehearses His Part: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Studies, 20 (1988), 21. 220 Shakespeare's Hidden World: A Study of His Unconscious (Copenhagen, 1989), pp. 133, 143-5. 221 'The Changeling in A Dream', SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 28 (1988), 261, 270. 222 Meaning By Shakespeare (London, 1992), p. 39. 223 Cf. Barbara Hodgdon, 'Gaining a Father: The Role of Egeus in the Quarto and the Folio', Review of English Studies, 37 (1986), 534-42; Philip C. McGuire, 'Hippolyta's Silence and the Poet's Pen', Chapter 1 of Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (Berkeley, California, 1985). 224 See Trevor R. Griffiths's edition (Cambridge, 1996), especially pp. 86-7, 94, 202. 225 Our Moonlight Revels, pp. 47, 54, 86-7; despite the lack of indications in the quarto or folio texts of the Indian boy's onstage presence, Williams believes that he probably appeared even in productions of Shakespeare's time (24). 226 See Charles Marowitz, 'Reconstructing Shakespeare or Harlotry in Bardolatry', Shakespeare Survey, 40 (1988), 8-9 and Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Reveb, pp. 201-2; the homosexual possibilities of the Indian Boy are also commented on by Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, 1991, reprinted 1994), pp. 199-200, and developed fictionally by Angela Carter in 'Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream', in Saints and Strangers (New York, 1986), pp. 85-96. Race and empire are explored by Margo Hendricks, '"Obscured by dreams": Race, Empire, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Quarterly, 47 (1996), 37-60, an article prompted by a production by the Shakespeare Santa Cruz repertory company. 227 For example, in this volume: Hazlitt, Morley, Jerrold, Montgomery, Wedgwood, Shaw (Nos.10, 31, 32, 60, 61, 67). Among modern examples see: Barbara Hodgdon, 'Looking for Mr. Shakespeare after "The Revolution'", in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, edited by James C. Bulman (London, 1996), pp. 68-91; Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels; the editions of R.A. Foakes (Cambridge, 1984) and Peter Holland (Oxford, 1994); Jay L. Halio, A Midsummer Night's Dream: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester, 1994), which covers television and film as well as stage performance. 228 Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature (London, 1982); Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 (Columbus, Ohio, 1985). See also notes 88 and 89 above, Holland's 1994 essay cited in note 44 above, and Judith M. Kennedy, 'Bottom Transformed by the Sketching Society', Shakespeare Quarterly, 47 (1996), 306-18. 229 For example, Christina F. Burridge, '"Music, Such as Charmeth Sleep": Benjamin

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Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream', University of Toronto Quarterly, 51 (1981/2), 149-60; Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (Oxford, 1990), especially pp. 287-91; William Godsalve, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Making an Opera from Shakespeare's Comedy (London and Toronto, 1995). 230 (Chicago, 1996), pp. 1, 114. 231 The Forms of Things Unknown: Renaissance Metaphor in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, (Pittsburgh, 1995), p. 3. 232 Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1957-75), I, 365-422; Shakespeare's Sources: Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1957). See also the section 'Sources, Background, Date' in Carroll and Williams, A Midsummer Night's Dream: An Annotated Bibliography. 233 See J.J.M. Tobin, Shakespeare's Favorite Novel: A Study of The Golden Asse as Prime Source (Lanham, Maryland, 1984); Harold Brooks, ed. cit., especially pp. lix-lx, bdi-bdii. 234 See Ann Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool, 1978); E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well (New Haven, 1985). 235 See Richard Cody, Landscape; Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974); Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven, 1989). 236 Maurice Hunt, 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the School of Night: An Intertextual Nexus', Essays in Literature, Macomb, Illinois, 23 (1996), 4; large claims can be made for the method, as Louis Adrian Montrose says: 'My intertextual study of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and symbolic forms shaped by other Elizabethan lunatics, lovers, and poets construes the play as calling attention to itself, not only as an end but also as a source of cultural production', '"Shaping Fantasies'" (1986), p. 69. 237 Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1981), p. 41. 238 'Hands, Feet, and Bottoms: Decentering the Cosmic Dance in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 342, 326, 342. 239 Latham, Elizabethan Fairies; among Briggs's many publications see especially The Anatomy of Puck. William Empson's uncompleted essay 'The spirits of the Dream', an expanded version of his 1979 review of Harold Brooks's edition of Dream, is in Essays on Renaissance Literature. Volume Two: The Drama, edited by John Haffenden (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 170-248, 271-87. 240 Shakespeare's Almanac: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (Cambridge, 1993). 241 'Bottom's Children: the Fallacies of Structuralist, Post-structuralist and Deconstructionist Literary Theory', in Reconstructing Literature, edited by Laurence Lerner (Totowa, New Jersey, 1983), pp. 20-35; Appropriating Shakespeare (New Haven, 1993). 242 Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies: An Essay on Comedies (Chicago, 1993), p. xii. 243 Shakespeare's Early Comedies: Myth, Metamorphosis, Mannerism (Uppsala, 1993). 244 The Shakespeare of the Comedies: A Multiple Approach (Bern, 1996), p. 9. 245 Louis A. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago, 1996), p. xii; James L. Calderwood, A Midsummer Night's Dream (New York, 1992), p. 85.

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1 Elizabeth Griffith, moral conventions and human sympathy 1775

From The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (London, 1775). Mrs. Elizabeth Griffith (1727?-93), novelist, essayist, playwright, actress, speaks of herself in her dedication to the second edition of the popular letters exchanged with her husband during their courtship (A series of genuine letters between Henry and Frances, 6 vols, London, 1786) as 'a woman, who may be suspected of having marched a volunteer into print', a charge she seeks to vindicate herself from. The tension between conventional decorum and the expression of her own impulses is evident in much of her writing, though the moral attitudes of the time prevail. The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated is dedicated to Garrick, who had assisted her playwriting career. She died in her native Ireland, at the seat of her son Richard, whom she had laboured to support, and who, in the tradition of novelistic romance, made a fortune in India.

[From the chapter entitled ' The Tempest1} This Play, and the Midsummer Night's Dream, which in all the latter editions immediately follows it, are considered by Dr Warburton, 'as the noblest effort of that sublime and amazing imagination, peculiar to Shakespeare, which soars above the bounds of Nature, without forsaking Sense; or, more properly, carries Nature along with it, beyond her terrestrial limits.'W He has, indeed, in both these exhibitions, created Beings out of all visible existence; or, as he has himself most beautifully expressed it, 'Given to airy Nothing / A local habitation, and a name' [5.1.16ff.]. Yet by the powers of his genius has he contrived to make these chimeras of his brain think, act, and speak, in a manner which appears so suited to the anomalous personages his magic has conjured up, that we readily adopt them into the scale of Nature, from a presumption, that were they really to exist, they would probably resemble the characters which his wand has endowed them with. These two plays are generally supposed to have been the first and second of his writing; though I believe there are no dates remaining, to confirm this opinion; which can therefore be founded only on the idea, that his youthful imagination

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must naturally be thought to have been more sportive and exuberant, than his riper judgment might have permitted the indulgence of. And here, indeed, She wantons, as in her prime, And plays at will her virgin fancies:^ though, if I may be allowed the liberty of a criticism about this matter, I should be rather inclined to suppose this Play [The Tempest] to have been one of his latter performances, as all the unities are so strictly preserved in it. (1-2) [From the chapter entitled 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'] I shall not trouble my readers with the Fable of this piece, as I can see no general moral that can be deduced from the Argument; nor . . . is there much sentiment to be collected even from the Dialogue. But whatever harvest can be gleaned from this unfruitful field, I shall endeavour to pick up, as becomes a faithful steward of the farm.

ACT I. SCENE I. [Quotes 1.1.47-51: 'To you your father should be as a God. . . .'] In this speech, the pious notion of the Antients, with regard to this relation, while genuine Nature was their sole Preceptor, is fully expressed. Here the duty of children to their parents, is indeed carried to the height; and yet, methinks, not at all too far. They are the objects of our earliest affections, of our first deference, of our primary obligations. Even superstition, in this case, as far at least as implicit obedience extends, exceeds not true devotion. The Decalogue was originally written on Two Tables; five in each. The first refers solely to Religion; the second, to Morality, only. To honour our parents, therefore, as falling within the former line of obligations, is, by this distinction, made one of our pious duties; as through them we honour the Creator, who ordained this relation between us. This precept, then, should seem to have a double tie upon us, as partaking both of piety and morals; and therefore, however the latter bond may chance to be cancelled, the first ought never to be dispensed with. In fine, there is something so fond and endearing in the idea and exercise of a child's obedience and deference towards a parent, that how rotten must the root be, or how blighted the branches, if such a tree should fail of producing its natural fruit! Thus far, by way of general reflection, only; for I must, notwithstanding, admit, that the particular instance of the daughter's compliance, exacted by the father, in this piece, of resigning an husband of her own choice, upon equal terms, and accepting another, chosen arbitrarily for her, by caprice merely, was too severe a trial of obedience. Egeus here, like Abraham, would sacrifice his child at the altar, not only without the command of God, but contrary to his express purpose, proclaimed aloud by the voice of Nature, and further confirmed from the deductions of virtuous affection, free will, and rational election.

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When I said that the duty of a child was natural, I did not mean to invest the parent with an authority which was not so; and I cannot blame Hermia, therefore, upon the severe laws of Athens being declared to her, for the chaste and spirited resolution she frames to herself on that occasion. [Quotes 1.1.79-82: 'So will I grow, so live, so die.

SCENE III. In this scene we are charmed with that mildness, modesty, and generous eulogium, with which the fond and unhappy Helena accosts a rival beauty, and woo'd by the man she loves. [Quotes 1.1.180-93: 'Hermia. God speed, fair Helena! Whither away? / Helena. Call you me fair. . . .']. Hermia had used no arts, no coquetry, to allure her lover from her; for, as she expresses it, just after, in the same dialogue, 'His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine' [1.1.200]. She had, indeed, happened to have done her an injury, but no wrong; and therefore the forsaken maid shews her justice in plaining her own ill fortune, only, without expressing the least manner of resentment against her unoffending rival. Hermia, in the same scene, alludes to the magic power of love, which concenters all our ideas in one, making us prefer a cottage to a palace, and a desert to a grove, according to the situation or circumstances of the object of our affections. After having declared the purpose of flying her country with her lover, she adds, [Quotes 1.1.204-7: 'Before the time I did Lysander see . . . . ' ] . And Helena, afterwards, carries on the same idea, . . . [Quotes 1.1.232-9: 'Things base and vile. . . .']. Theseus too . . . accords with the above sentiment: [Quotes 5.1.10-11: 'While [sic] the lover all as frantic. . . .']. And Shakespeare has hinted a moral, on this latter subject, with regard to irregular or ill-placed affection . . . in the last line of the following speech . . . ; the whole of which I shall transcribe here, in order to shew how justly and poetically he has pointed to the different effects of passion upon busy and contemplative minds, as well as on idle and dissipated ones. [Quotes Oberon's description of the genesis of the 'little western flower', 'Love-in-idleness': 2.1.155-68.]

ACT V. SCENE I. . . . Among the brief of sports, as it is called, to be exhibited before Theseus, on his wedding-day, this is the title of one: 'The thrice three Muses mourning for the death / Of Learning, late deceased in beggary' [5.1.52ff.]. Mr. Warton imagines this passage to have alluded to a poem of Spenser's, stiled The Tears of the Muses, on the Neglect and Contempt of Learning, in his timeJ3! Though this was not properly a complaint of that age, only; it has been so much the grievance of all times, that it has, long since, obtained into a proverb, As poor as a poet.W The case of such unfortunate persons, 'Of those whom Phoebus, in his ire, Hath

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blasted with poetic fire,' is certainly very hard. Persons who apply their minds to letters, must unavoidably neglect their temporal concerns; and those who employ their time in the reformation or entertainment of the world, should be supported by it — Not by merely accidental and precarious emoluments, but upon some more permanent foundation; like the Clergy, who have had a provision made for them, for the same reason as above; and the name of Clerk, tho' now appropriated to the latter, was formerly the common appellation of both. The honour of such an establishment would be considerable to a State, and the expence but small — for the numbers are but few. . . .

POSTSCRIPT This Play is perfectly picturesque, and resembles some rich landscape, where palaces and cottages, huntsmen and husbandmen, princes and peasants, appear in the same scene together. (15-21)

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2 Samuel Felton, artists' interpretations of dramatic effects 1787

From Imperfect Hints towards a New Edition of Shakespeare, written chiefly in the year 1782 (London, 1787). Samuel Felton (active 1782-1829) is known only through his publications. Besides the above, they are: An Explanation of Several of Mr. Hogarth's Prints (1785); Testimonies to the Genius and Memory of Sir J. Reynolds (1792); On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening (1828); and Gleanings on Gardens, chiefly respecting those of the Ancient Style in England (1829).

[Felton begins his comments on A Midsummer Night's Dream by quoting 5.1.12-17: 'The poet's eye. . . .']

Vignette. In page 78,^] I have taken the liberty of hinting at one artist designing the portraits of Helena and Hermia. And there could not be a more pleasing Vignette (nor a more sweet portrait of infantine fondness) than what the same artist would form of the same persons, at a different age from what they will appear at, in page 78, viz. at their age of childhood-innocence, or at that early period, when with their needles they created both one flower, both on one sampler, 'sitting on one cushion; / Both warbling of one song, both in one key' [3.2.205ff.]. The same artist is as capable of painting the tender loveliness of innocence, as of producing a sublime and most expressive portrait from the lines of : The poet's eye. —

Head-piece. A Fac-simile of M. de Loutherbourg's Vignette print to Bell's last edition,PI might be given for this department. Should not the airy spirits however, have had less of mortal grossness about them? - Puck is rather too fat to go swifter than the wind [3.1.160-1; 3.2.94].

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Scene-Prints. True love was never better painted than by Shakespeare. . . . Some of the interviews of Hermia and Lysander are tenderly interesting. And it requires an artist of the feeling soul of Cypriani^ to express the tender designs which Shakespeare has left us.4 I will first mention the several pages from which (in my opinion) Hermia might be drawn to most advantage, and I will then recommend such few of them, as strike me, as being most proper to be selected from the rest, for the purpose of ornamenting some of the pages with her portrait. [Quotes 1.1.79-82; 1.1.128-9; 1.1.168-9; 1.1.214-16; 1.1.220; 2.2.41-2; 2.2.45-9; 3.2.198-9] Those pathetic touches of nature which are given in all the above scenes with Hermia, render it impossible to determine, which of them would furnish to an artist the best designs. Were I to select, I would give the following portraits of her: [Cites 1.1.79E: 'So will I grow ']. A portrait from these lines, with somewhat of the same kind of sweet expression which is in the print of Mrs. Barryt5] in Constance, in Bell's first edition of King John. The arms and the attitude will be of course somewhat altered: expressive of her addressing herself to heaven, as well as to the Duke; and there should be imprinted in her face, the marks of that generous love, that prompted her to risk all for Lysander — and of that firm attachment to him, who had bewitched her bosom, and who had stol'n the impression of her fantasy with bracelets of his hair, and other messengers of strong prevailment in unharden'd youth [1.1.32ff.]. . . . [Quotes 1.1.128-9: 'How now my love. . . .']. The above lines will give an opportunity of introducing Lysander with Hermia. They may be drawn at half-length — or their portraits only may be taken. And this page will exhibit Hermia in a very different light from what she appears in, in the last page; and somewhat different from what she will appear in, at p. 52. Her appearance may be somewhat similar to that of Helena, as described in A. 3, Sc. 6 And Helena of Athens see thou find, All fancy sick she is, and pale of cheer, With sighs of love that cost the fresh blood dear. [3.2.95ff] [For p. 52. Felton suggests illustrating 2.2.41: 'One turf shall serve. . . .' or 2.2.47: 'I mean that my heart unto yours is knit'.] If somewhat of the same neat wildness of romantic scenery, and the same kind of engraving were introduced, as appears in the beautiful prints of Celia, by Kaufirnan, and of Marcella by Shelley:^ the above page might be pleasingly ornamented with half-lengths of Lysander and Hermia as met in the wood, a league without the town, where he met her once with Helena to do observance to the morn of May [1.1.167]; and the time they meet (a midsummer's night) is at that time,

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when Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the watry glass, Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass. [1.1.209ff.] . . . (97-102)

Page 61. The curious interlude performed by the clowns, will furnish a very comic design. I will select such passages as relate to that wise stage projector Bottom, and to Quince, and the rest of their dramatis personae, and which strike me as offering the best situations to draw them from. [Quotes 1.2.29-30,66-7, 76-8; 3.1.13-15,23-4, 31-2, 98-100,7 118-19; 4.1.214-15; 4.2.3-4, 42-4.] At his injunction against the onions, they might be all drawn as staring at him. If the preference be given to the lines in p. 61 [i.e. 3.1.98-100: 'Ninus' tomb, man. . . .'], it will admit of all the other clowns being drawn (except Bottom); and the figure of Robin Goodfellow may be introduced in the back-ground. Either one of the figures of this merry wanderer of the night [2.1.43] which Dr. Piercyt8! has preserved, may be given; or else some fancy sketch might be drawn. The Queen of the Fairies may be lying asleep near them; and the scene is in a wood, near to an hawthorn brake [3.1.4], and under the Duke's oak [1.2.110]. If it were not for the Fairy Queen being introduced as well as Puck, the characters might have been etched in the manner of some of Mr. Bunbury's prints.!9] And may no artist attempt to design any character from Shakespeare, who does not possess some sparks of Mr. Bunbury's genius.10 I do not know what effect the figure of a Fairy would have; but as they are harmless merry sprites, their looks might exhibit an archness of surprize, or merriment, at the figure of Bottom. (118-20)

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3 Edmond Malone, commentary on A Midsummer Night's Dream 1790

From The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; Collated Verbatim with the Most Authentick Copies, and Revised: with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; to Which are Added, An Essay on the Chronological Order of His Plays; An Essay Relative to Shakespeare and Jonson; A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI.; An Historical Account of the English Stage; and Notes; by Edmond Malone (10 vols in 11, London, 1790). Edmond Malone (1741-1812), one of the greatest of Shakespearean editors, was born in Dublin, went to Trinity College there in 1756, then to London to study law in 1763, and returned to Ireland in 1767 to practise law for a few years. His real vocation, however, was the study of literary history, and his first endeavour was his edition of the works of Goldsmith, published in 1777. He then left Ireland for London where he met Dr. Johnson and, through him, George Steevens who encouraged him to concentrate on Shakespeare, and he contributed to the Johnson-Steevens edition of 1778. He supplied a two-volume Supplement to this edition in 1780, and in 1783 an additional volume. For seven years he prepared his own edition of ten volumes, which appeared in November of 1790. Much of the rest of his life he spent on the variorum edition which was edited posthumously by James Boswell the younger in 1821 (see No. 11 below). Along with his Shakespearean studies he helped Boswell revise his life of Johnson through six editions from 1791 to 1811, published Sir Joshua Reynolds's writings with a memoir (1797), exposed the literary forgeries of Thomas Chatterton and Samuel Ireland, and edited the prose of John Dryden (1800).

[From An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written1]

4. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1592.P] The poetry of this piece, glowing with all the warmth of a youthful and lively imagination, the many scenes which it contains of almost continual rhyme,3 the

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poverty of the fable, and want of discrimination among the higher personages, dispose me to believe that it was one of our authour's earliest attempts in comedy.4 It seems to have been written, while the ridiculous competitions, prevalent among the histrionick tribe, were strongly impressed by novelty on his mind. He would naturally copy those manners first, with which he was first acquainted. The ambition of a theatrical candidate for applause he has happily ridiculed in Bottom the weaver. But among the more dignified persons of the drama we look in vain for any traits of character. The manners of Hippolyta, the Amazon, are undistinguished from those of other females. Theseus, the associate of Hercules, is not engaged in any adventure worthy of his rank or reputation, nor is he in reality an agent throughout the play. Like King Henry VIII he goes out a Maying. He meets the lovers in perplexity, and makes no effort to promote their happiness; but when supernatural accidents have reconciled them, he joins their company, and concludes his day's entertainment by uttering some miserable puns at an interlude represented by a troop of clowns. Over the fairy part of the drama he cannot be supposed to have any influence. This part of the fable, indeed, (at least as much of it as relates to the quarrels of Oberon and Titania,) was not of our authour's invention.5 — Through the whole piece, the more exalted characters are subservient to the interests of those beneath them. We laugh with Bottom and his fellows, but is a single passion agitated by the faint and childish solicitudes of Hermia and Demetrius, of Helena and Lysander, those shadows of each other? — That a drama, of which the principal personages are thus insignificant, and the fable thus meagre and uninteresting, was one of our authour's earliest compositions, does not, therefore, seem a very improbable conjecture; nor are the beauties with which it is embellished, inconsistent with this supposition; for the genius of Shakespeare, even in its minority, could embroider the coarsest materials with the brightest and most lasting colours. Oberon and Titania had been introduced in a dramatick entertainment exhibited before Queen Elizabeth in 1591, when she was at Elvetham in Hampshire; as appears from A Description of the Queene's Entertainment in Progress at Lord Hartford's, &c. printed in quarto in 1591. Her majesty, after having been pestered a whole afternoon with speeches in verse from the three Graces, Sylvanus, Wood Nymphs, &c. is at length addressed by the Fairy Queen, who presents her majesty with a chaplet, Given me by Auberon (Oberon) the fairie king-M A Midsummer Night's Dream was not entered at Stationers' hall till Oct. 8, 1600, in which year it was printed; but is mentioned by Meres in 1598. From the comedy of Dr. Dodipoll Mr. Steevens has quoted a line, which the authour seems to have borrowed from Shakespeare: 'Twas I that led you through the painted meads, Where the light fairies danc'd upon the flowers, Hanging in every leaf an orient pearl.\7^ So, in A Midsummer Night's Dream: [Quotes 2.1.15; 4.1.53-6].

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There is no earlier edition of the anonymous play in which the foregoing lines are found, than that in 1600; but Dr. Dodipowle is mentioned by Nashe, in his preface to Gabriel Harvey's Hunt is up, printed in 1596. The passage in the fifth act, which has been thought to allude to the death of Spenser,8 is not inconsistent with the early appearance of this comedy; for it might have been inserted between the time of that poet's death, and the year 1600, when the play was published. And indeed, if the allusion was intended, which I do not believe, the passage must have been added in that interval; for A Midsummer Night's Dream was certainly written in, or before, 1598, and Spenser, we are told by Sir James Ware (whose testimony with respect to this controverted point must have great weight) did not die till 1599:. . . .9 The passage in question, however, in my apprehension, has been misunderstood. It relates, I conceive, not to the death of Spenser, but to the nine Muses lamenting the decay of learning, in that authour's poem entitled The Tears of the Muses, which was published in 1591: and hence probably the words, 'late deceas'd in beggary'. This allusion, if I am right in my conjecture, may serve to confirm the date assigned to A Midsummer Night's Dream. (I, part 1, 283-8)

[From] 5. The Comedy of Errors, 1593. The alternate rhymes that are found in this play, as well as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Romeo and Juliet, are a further proof that these pieces were among our authour's earliest productions. (I, part 1, 289)

[From] 7. Love's Labour's Lost, 1594. In this comedy there is more attempt at delineation of character than in either The Comedy of Errors or A Midsummer Night's Dream; a circumstance which inclines me to think that it was written subsequently to those plays. (I, part 1, 296)

[From] 8. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1595. This comedy . . . bears strong internal marks of an early composition. The comick parts of it are of the same colour with the comick parts of Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and A Midsummer Night's Dream; and the serious scenes are eminently distinguished by that elegant and pastoral simplicity which might be expected from the early effusions of such a mind as Shakespeare's, when employed in describing the effects of love. (I, part 1, 297-8)

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[From the commentary notes to A Midsummer Night's Dream] [1] [On 1.1.27: This man hath bewitch'd the bosom of my child'] This hath bewitch'd—] The old copies read — This man hath bewitch'd —. The emendation was made for the sake of the metre, by the editor of the second folio. It is very probable that the compositor caught the word man from the line above. (II, 443) [2] [On 2.1.249: 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows'] - where —] is here used as a dissyllable. The modern editors unnecessarily read whereon. (II, 473) [3] [On 3.2.257ff.: 'No, no; he'll / Seem to break loose -'] No, no, he'll — Sir,] This passage, like almost all those in these plays in which there is a sudden transition, or the sense is hastily broken off, is much corrupted in the old copies. The present text is formed from the quarto printed by Fisher and the first folio. The words 'he'lf are not in the folio, and Sir is not in the quarto. Demetrius, I suppose, would say, No, no; he'll not have resolution to disengage himself from Hernia. But turning abruptly to Lysander, he addresses him ironically: - Sir, seem to break loose; &c. (II, 500-1) [4] [On 4.1.104: 'For now our observation is perform'd.' In his 1765 edition Johnson had been puzzled by the discrepancy between the Midsummer's night of the tide, and this reference to May morning. Farmer in a note first appearing in the Appendix to the 1773 variorum edition had pointed out that similarly the tide of The Winter's Tale did not correspond to the time of the action, the season of sheep-shearing.] The same phrase has been used in a former scene: To do observance to a morn of May. [1.1.167] I imagine that the title of this play was suggested by the time it was first introduced on the stage, which was probably at Midsummer. 'A Dream for the entertainment of a Midsummer-night.' Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale had probably their titles from a similar circumstance. (II, 513-14) [5] [On 4.1.192ff.: 'Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me. . . .'] Sure is here used as a dissyllable: so sire, fire, hour, &c. The word now (That we are now awake?) seems to be wanting, to complete the metre of the next line. (II, 518)

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4 Charles Taylor, Bottom as coxcomb 1792

From The Shakespeare Gallery; containing a Select Series of Scenes and Characters, accompanied by Criticisms and Remarks adapted to the Works of that Admired Author: on Fifty Plates. Calculated to form separate Volumes; or to be bound up in Editions of Shakespeare's Works (London: Charles Taylor, 1792). Charles Taylor (1756-1823), engraver, writer on art, literature, morals and religion, published under the name of Francis Fitzgerald. The earlier part of his career was devoted mainly to producing books of engravings, the first being The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare, Being A Selection of Scenes, from the Works of that great Author (1783), a large elegant quarto of engravings of illustrations by Thomas Stothard and Robert Smirke, each plate accompanied by a brief scene from one of the six plays illustrated, but without critical remarks.

[From Shakespeare Gallery. Plate II. No. XL BOTTOM. Designed by H. Singleton.W Directed and engraved by C. Taylor. (The engraving illustrates 3.1.123ff., and shows ass-headed Bottom with two shadowy figures of frightened mechanicals cowering in the background.)] Success in delineating some kinds of characters, as in some kinds of writing, is more striking to general observation than in others: but this is not always therefore the most meritorious success: some productions also are more highly finished than others; nevertheless there are sketches so exquisitely adjusted, that it is not easy to ascertain the parts where additional finishing would not hazard at least as much injury as advantage: they may be changed and varied, but not thereby improved, they may be corrected, but what they gain in correctness they lose in vigour. Though it be true, that the hand of judgment by passing and repassing over former labours may approximate them more nearly to a supposed standard of excellence; yet many spirited productions have been spoilt by an overweening care in revisal, and on the other hand, the instances are not few, wherein a happy, though rapid, copy of Nature has possessed that kind and degree of merit, which was best left in its original state. These reflections seem applicable to the character before us; in its line it is excellent, but then its line is not very exalted: and in its execution, though it be not highly finished, it is difficult to say in what respects it needs improvement. Not every man can make a coxcomb; yet there are coxcombs in all states and ranks of life: they are most noticed in high life, because every thing is most noticed there,

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but they no less exist in lower stations, where they usually exhibit equal force, and sometimes greater sprightliness. It would be hard indeed to suppose that high life had monopolized the ingredients of coxcombism;[2] a frivolous mind, a conceited disposition, a vain estimate of self, and a handsome person, are to be found, where the bon ton^ is unknown; and they often shew themselves, by a supposed merit, or imagined ability, in things not regularly attached to them, nor connected with their direct path of life, and their allotted circumstances of situation. If a military coxcomb would restrain himself to military affairs, he might be endured by men of sense, as supposed to be in his element: if a law coxcomb, were merely a coxcomb in law, little offence would ensue from his impertinence: but while such (and numerous others equally coxcombs though of different casts) quitting the line of their professions, seek to render themselves conspicuous in other departments, while they wish by vociferation or by obstinacy to lead, or to overbear, the opinions of better judges than themselves, or to display their self-supposed merit, in matters wherein no merit is expected from them, because foreign from their professions, — let them learn a lesson from Bottom the weaver. Bottom the weaver, was a personable man, a sweet singer, and a professed wit: so speak his brother players respecting him, when lamenting his supposed 'transportation.' [Quotes 4.2.7-24]. Thus endowed, he assumes a consequence correspondent to his opinion of himself, and to others' opinion of him: Peter Quince is hardly so much director, as he is, though Peter Quince be the manager in office. In the first act, the vivacity of his opinion outruns his means of judgment, and before he knows the nature of the characters in 'the most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby' [1.2.1 Iff.], he pronounces it — 'a very good piece of work, and a merry' [1.2.13ff.]; with the same alacrity he answers, when called, 'Ready; name what part I am for; and proceed' [1.2.18ff] — the confidence expressed in this single sentence is admirable; and is heightened in its effect by his after enquiry 'what is Pyramus? a lover? or a tyrant?' [1.2.22]. When told he is a lover and kills himself for love, he scruples not to foresee his notable discharge of this lover's character; yet turns "with glee to play 'Ercles; a part to tear a cat in' [1.2.29ff.]: — his conception of the lover's part as 'condoling' [1.2.41] is highly humourous. 'If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes; I will move storms; I will condole in some measure' [1.2.26ff.]. Then, though fixed for Pyramus, he offers himself for Thisby, and the great representative of the great Ercles, wishes to speak in a 'monstrous little voice, Thisne, Thisne, Oh Pyramus, my lover dear!' [1.2.52ff.]. Veering again directly opposite, and desirous of undertaking the Lion, he proposes to 'roar that it would do any man's heart good to hear me; I will roar that I will make the Duke say, let him roar again; let him roar again [1.2.70ff.]; afterwards 'I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gentry as any sucking dove; I will roar you an 'twere any nightingale' [1.2.81ff.]. The joke is augmented by his proposing to play these characters at once; 'let me play Thisbe too' [1.2.51ff.]: 'let me play the Lion too' [1.2.70]. Conceited ambition has a thousand ways of shewing itself: Proteus must yield to Bottom; and of this Bottom is proud: the labours of the loom are forgotten, the warp, and the woof, and the shuttle, are erased from memory; and now, whatever be his merit or his diligence as a weaver,

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he looks forward to the applauses bestowed on the dying Pyramus. This part he undertakes: but the Poet has thought proper previously to shew (extremely justly in my opinion) his openness to flattery; though it be gross, no matter, it coincides with his own conceptions of his own sweet self, and thus he maintains his character of a coxcomb. Quince. You can play no part but Pyramus: for Pyramus is a sweet-fac'd man; a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day; a most lovely, gentleman-like man; therefore you must needs play Pyramus. [1.2.85ff.] Bottom's wit shews itself in his dextrous obviating of supposed difficulties; he objects to the sword of Pyramus, but removes the objection by a prologue, in answer to the very characteristic fears of Starveling the Taylor; he obviates also the obstacles about the Lion; finds out moonshine, by the calendar; and shews his readiness to forward the business in hand, and to play his part. Had not Shakespeare here a fair opportunity to introduce the Author of this 'tedious brief play; this tragical mirth' [5.1.56ff.]? might he not have shewn ignorant pertness different from Bottom's by such a character? — what withheld him? not consciousness of his own pretensions; those he knew he could justify: was it tenderness to his brethren of the quill? had he experienced the perplexity occasioned by the vanity of the players, but not that arising from ignorant jealousy in authors? I suspect, indeed, that he had already felt the rivalship, if not the envy of his brother playwrights. If this part of his comedy was not the retort courteous upon them, it was probably an attempt to expose their inability. Shakespeare wanted to introduce sense on the stage; to this purpose he was obliged to ridicule that nonsense which was too prevalent. Judicious reasoning had been lost on this subject: an exposure of it in caricatura was more likely to prove effectual. Certain theatrical mishaps he exhibits in Love's Labours Lost; - but there he draws diversion from them; in the present play he exposes them; and in the character of Pistol he renders them a standing object of laughter; this seems to have been all the conflict he condescended to maintain, and seems also to mark the course of his progress in popularity, and the success of his well directed attacks. . . . If ever a trick of Puck's could be vindicated, if ever enchantment and a monster were pleasant - Bottom with the ass's head on is the instance: it has furnished the Poet with an opportunity of mingling with Bottom's former pertness, those asinine ideas which force a smile: these occur during his captivity by the fairy Queen; and his descant on awaking from that condition is admirable. [Quotes 3.1.112-24, the moment of Bottom's return to the rehearsal with his ass's head; 4.1.19-39, Bottom's discussion of food and music with the attendant fairies; 4.1.200-19, Bottom's monologue when he awakes.] One would have thought that Bottom should have repressed his vivacity at any rate, when performing his part before the Duke; but even here his vanity overcomes his prudence, and he corrects the Duke's criticism. [Quotes 5.1.182-7: 'The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again. . . .']. His double dying he may lay to the charge of his author: once dying is usually

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thought sufficient, but that this is unquestionably a great improvement, I appeal to every undertaker of character. W Determined to have the last word, he again corrects the Duke: and after twice dying, re-assumes his former flippancy with his last resurrection. [Quotes 5.1.348-54]. Is Bottom singular in being a coxcomb? in preferring extra-professional applause? in wearing an Ass's head without knowing it? And by perpetual reference to this fact exciting the notice of others to that of which himself was ignorant? Is he singular in the modest estimate he makes of his own abilities, and his modest assurance of his own powers, as able to act any part allotted him? or in his jumping from part to part as the whim of momentary fancy impels him? - A moral somewhat serious might be drawn from his versatility: how few are competent judges of their own powers as adapted to the part allotted them to act in life! they imagine they could gain more applause by changing their characters: they quit the weaver for Pyramus, Pyramus for Thisby, Thisby for the Lion: they commence as ranting fools, and end as roaring brutes. — Steady attention to one thing may expect success; and if that one thing be well chosen, and truly honorable, it will also be more satisfactory both at present, and in future, than all the fancied honours, or 'six-pence a day' emoluments, of 'sweet bully Bottom' [4.2.19ff.] and his 'condoling lover Pyramus' [1.2.40ff.]. F. F. (159-166)

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5 George Steevens, response to Malone 1793

From The Plays of William Shakespeare. In Fifteen Volumes. With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators. To Which are Added, Notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. The Fourth Edition. Revised and Augmented (with a Glossarial Index) by the Editor ofDodsley's Collection of Old Plays [Isaac Reed] (15 vols, London, 1793). George Steevens (1736-1800) studied at Eton and Cambridge, but left the University without a degree in 1756. He settled in London and soon found that his vocation was editing Shakespeare, and in 1766 he published a collection of twenty Shakespearean quartos, with the sonnets, in four volumes. Dr. Johnson admired the meticulously accurate work and agreed to Steevens's proposal for a revision of his edition of 1765. This, which came to be known as the first variorum edition, appeared in 1773 in ten volumes. The additions were mostly by Steevens. He produced the second variorum of 1778, but committed the editing of the third one of 1785 to Isaac Reed. When Malone brought out his 1790 edition, Steevens re-entered the editorial competition in the hope of outdoing his rival, and collaborated with Reed on the 1793 variorum, now augmented from ten to fifteen volumes.

[From the commentary notes to A Midsummer Night's Dream] [1] [On 2.1.249: 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows'] - whereon -] The old copy reads - where. Mr. Malone supposes where to be used as a disyllabic; but offers no example of such a pronunciation. (V, 61) [2] [On 3.2.257ff.: 'No, no; he'll / Seem to break loose -'] No, no, sir. — he will, &c.] [Quotes Malone's note] No critical remedy is nearer at hand, than a supposition that obscure passages are sentences designedly abrupt and imperfect. — Lysander calls Hermia an '^thiop'. 'No, no, sir:' replies Demetrius; i.e. she is none; and then ironically speaks to her of Lysander, as of one whose struggle to break loose is merely a pretended effort. He next addresses his provocation personally to Lysander. - I have left the text as I found it; only reading (for the sake of metre) he will, instead of he'll. (V, 106)

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[3] [On 4.1.104: 'For now our observation is perform'd'. Steevens offers an alternative to Malone's interpretation of the meaning of the title] In Twelfth Night, Act III. sc.iv. Olivia observes of Malvolio's seeming frenzy, that it 'is a very Midsummer madness.' That time of the year we may therefore suppose was anciently thought productive of mental vagaries resembling the scheme of Shakespeare's Play. To this circumstance it might have owed its title. (V, 127) [4] [On 4.1.192-3: 'Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me. . . .'] It seems to me,] Thus the folio. The quartos begin this speech as follows: — Are you sure That we are awake?

I had once injudiciously restored these words; but they add no weight to the sense of the passage, and create such a defect in the measure as is best remedied by their omission. [Quotes Malone's note] I cannot accede to a belief that sure was ever employed as a disyllabic, much less at the end of a verse. Fire (anciently spelt fier) and hour (anciently spelt hower) might be disyllabically used, because the duplicate vowels in each of them were readily separated in pronunciation. Our author might have written— But are you sure That we are now awake?— Having exhibited this passage, however, only in my note on the hemistich that follows it, I have little solicitude for its reformation. ^ (V, 134-5)

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6 Walter Whiter, commentary on some passages 1794

From A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare. Containing I. Notes on As You Like It //. An Attempt to Explain and Illustrate Various Passages, on a New Principle of Criticism, Derived from Mr. Locke's Doctrine of The Association of Ideas (London, 1794). Walter Whiter (1758-1832) attended Clare College, Cambridge, and graduated B.A. in 1781, and M.A. in 1784. He was a fellow of his college from 1783 to 1797, when he assumed a country rectory in Norfolk which he held until his death. Most of his life was devoted to the study of philology: in 1800 he published the first part of his Etymologicon Magnum, and in 1822-5 a related work on different principles, the three-volume Etymologicon Universale. Although a few observations from Whiter's study of Shakespeare were cited in commentaries, his book was mostly ignored for over a century, when gradually it became clear that he anticipates modem critical approaches to imagery and language in scholars like Spurgeon, Clemen, Armstrong, and even John Livingston Lowes. (See the introduction to the edition of Whiter by Alan Over and Mary Bell [London, 1967].)

And never since the middle summer's spring Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind But with thy brawls thou hast disturb 'd our sport. [2.1.82ff.] I am firmly persuaded, that in this passage the quarrels of Oberon with Titania were denominated by the word brawls from its affinity in one sense with the sport and the ringlet dances, which these brawls or quarrels had interrupted. Brawl is a species of dance; and what is singular in the present case, it is that particular species (according to Philips^) in which several persons danced together in a ring. (See Old Plays, Vol. IV, p. 72.t2]) — There is another passage in our Author, where brawls and sports are connected as in the instance before us, accompanied even by the same idea of interruption, which the one had received from the other. 'Thou say'st his sports were hinder'd by thy brawls' [The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.77]. Of this dance, our ancient writers afford us no precise or intelligible account. Every

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one recollects that Sir Christopher Hatton was much celebrated for his ability in conducting these dances: The grave Lord Keeper led the brawls.^ I am disposed however to imagine from the principles of our theory, that the excellence of this dance consisted in its intricacy, and that the performers displayed their dexterity by mingling with another company of dancers, and preserving their own figure distinct and separate amidst all the mazes of apparent interruption. A passage in Shelton's Don Quixote may induce us to suppose that the performance was accompanied with some significant actions: 'After this there came in another artificiall dance,of those called Brawles, &c.' (Part II., p. 129.M) Tras esta entro otra danza de artificio y de las que llaman habladas.' (Bowie's Edit.,[5^ III, 153 [lines 25-6].) 'Danza hablada. La compuesta de personages vestidos alproposito de alguna Historia.' (Bowie's Note, V, 56 [sig. Cc3v].) If Brawl be an exact translation of the Hablada; it corresponded in some cases with those Dramatic Dances, which are exhibited with such exquisite effect by the performers of the present days — By a passage in Love's Labour's Lost, we might be led to conjecture that the Brawl was sometimes a burlesque dance, accompanied with ridiculous sounds and gestures. [Quotes Love's Labour's Lost, 3.1.8-25: 'Moth. Master, will you win your love with a French brawt? . . .'] (102-5) My gentle Puck, come hither: Thou remember'st Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song; And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid's musick. [2.1.148ff.] When I have considered the singular imagery in this celebrated passage, and the abrupt mode, in which it is apparently introduced, I was ever accustomed to regard it as one of those wild excursions of the fancy, which seem totally independent of any kindred notions to supply or suggest the materials for its existence. I have since, however, discovered that all this is very naturally derived from the Masque and the Pageant, which abounded in the age of Shakespeare; and which (as I have before observed^]) would often quicken and enrich the fancy of the Poet with wild and original combinations. The frolic beings, which were now exercising the invention of our bard — these creatures of a distemper'd Dream in a Midsummer Night; and the preposterous devices in the Interlude of Pyramus (where the absurdities of scenic artifice are burlesqued) would naturally impress upon his mind the various and extraordinary objects of the masque or the pageant. The following narrative will convince us that a representation of the dolphin bearing a singer on his back was not uncommon in these spectacles; and it adds strength to my hypothesis, that the quotation has been produced by our Commentators on another occasion in this very play, though they have not been aware of its application to the instance before us.

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There was a spectacle presented to Queen Elizabeth upon the water, and among others Harry Goldingham was to represent Avion upon the DOLPHIN's BACKE; but finding his voice to be very hoarse and unpleasant, when he came to perform it, he tears off his disguise and swears he was none ofArion, not he, but even honest Harry Goldingham; which blunt discoverie pleased the queen better than if it had gone through in the right way: yet he could order his voice to an instrument exceeding well.7 (Merry Passages andjeasts, MS. Had. 6395.) Mr. Warton has referred to this incident. H[istory\ ofE[nglish] P[oetry] [vol.] 3. [1781] p. 414. In the present example we may perhaps be inclined to suspect that Shakespeare in this whole description of the mermaid, the dolphin, the vestal and Cupid, directly alludes to some actual exhibition, which contained all these particulars and which had been purposely contrived and presented before Elizabeth to compliment that princess at the expence of her unfortunate rival. So favourite a representation does the riding on a dolphin appear to have been in the time of our Poet, that it was sometimes introduced among the quaint devices in the art of cookery. In Jonson's Masque of Neptune's Triumph, the Cook says, I conceive you. I would have had your isle brought floting in now In a brave broth, and of a sprightly green, Just to the colour of the sea; and then Some twenty syrens, singing in the kettel, With an Arion mounted on the back Of a grown conger, but in such a posture, As all the world should take him for a dolphin8. (Page 638. Ed. [London,] 1692.) The same idea occurs nearly in the same words in the Staple of News [(London, 1692), p.] 445. As a further illustration that the sea-maid's musick is to be referred to the source, which I have suggested, we find in another Masque of Jonson [The Masque of Blacknesse] presented before the court on Twelfth Night 1605, 'One of the Tritons with the two SEA-MAIDS began to SING.'Pl (Page 324.) The back of the dolphin is deeply associated in the mind of Shakespeare with the splendid scenery of the pageant or the procession. Would the reader believe that the following idea in Antony and Cleopatra is to be referred to this source? His delights Were DOLPHIN like; they shew'd his BACK above The element they liv'd in. [5.2.88ff] . . . (185-9) [He goes on to comment on Antony and Cleopatra at some length, then ends with two pages on the 'insubstantial pageant' of The Tempest, 4.1.155.]

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7 Charles Dibdin, his fertile and creative fancy 1800

From A Complete History of the English Stage. Introduced by a . . . Review of the Asiatic, the Grecian, the Roman, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the German, the French, and Other Theatres and . . . Biographical Tracts and Anecdotes. . . . The Whole Written, with the Assistance of Interesting Documents, Collected in the Course of Five and Thirty Years, by Mr. Dibdin (5 vols, London, [1800]). Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) began his versatile theatrical career as a boy by singing and playing the organ in churches, then writing ballads at sixteen, acting professionally at seventeen, and composing an operetta for the London stage at nineteen. From 1765 to 1800 he wrote plays, interludes, sketches, entertainments, pantomimes, novels — such as Hannah Hewit; or the Female Crusoe (1796) —, and over nine hundred songs. He had some association with Isaac BickerstafFe, George Colman, and David Garrick, mainly in writing songs for them. Following his History of the Stage in five volumes in 1800, he published his own Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin . . . with the Words of Six Hundred Songs in four volumes in 1803.

[From Book V, chapter III: 'Shakespeare's Plays'] [Dibdin looks at Titus Andronicus, Love's Labour's Lost, 1, 2, 3 Henry VI, Pericles, Locrine, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter's Tale, dating them from 1589 to 1594, then A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1595, following exactly Malone's chronology of 1778. He pauses in the middle of his three paragraphs on The Two Gentlemen of Verona to present the following paragraph on his chronology.] The chronological order, which I pursue right or wrong in this account of Shakespeare's productions, even if it should be deficient in veracity, has certainly the appearance of good sense in its favour, for it seems to lay before the reader that sort of rotation in which a well wisher to his reputation would desire that he had written them. The redundant luxuriance, in which, in the wilds of Shakespeare's abundant and productive imagination, one cannot sometimes see the wood for trees, begins as he goes on to be more and more got under. The underwood is better cleared out and the plants, intended to swell and enlarge, have more room and better air to accelerate their approach to maturity. (Ill, 39)

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[He devotes the next two paragraphs to The Winter's Tale, then considers A Midsummer Night's Dream.] A Midsummer Night's Dream came out in 1595. Shakespeare, having ranged so far through the fields of nature, began now to feel an inclination to explore the regions of fancy; which he did to so good a purpose, that all the critics, even the most sarcastic, have agreed, that in this wild and beautiful play, if the fairies do not speak the language of common nature no one can pronounce that they do not speak their own. Every writer, equal to the task, compliments his country by displaying all the poetic fare of which his genius is capable. Here has Shakespeare in one instance paid his country this compliment. Common tradition had familiarized^ the idea of fairies, and many a ballad and poem had made them the lares of the English. His fertile and creative fancy, therefore could not, to shew its extent and variety, have been better employed. Spenser had trod the ground before him, with prodigious felicity and sterling excellence; but Shakespeare, born to soar above all others, represented what his great predecessor only narrated. We come now to consider Shakespeare every moment in a superior light, for great and admirable as his talents have hitherto appeared, they are yet growing considerably into much more strength and improvement. Romeo and Juliet his next play, which was produced also in 1595, is a wonderful performance; and how we can possibly understand that, so soon after his mind had been entangled in the labyrinths of enchantment, and his fancy frolicking over the imaginary beauties of Fairy land, he could calmly set down exquisitely to describe literal nature, will be difficult, if not impossible. (Ill, 41-2)

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8 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, on metre, invention, and a unified whole 1815

From A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, by Augustus William Schlegel. Translated by John Black [1815]. . . . Revised, According to the last German Edition, by the Reverend A.J.W. Morrison, M.A. (London, 1846). August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), German poet, translator, and literary critic, and one of the main forces in early Romanticism, studied at the University of Gottingen from 1786 to 1791. Then he wrote some poetry, began his translating of Dante and Shakespeare, and contributed critical essays to journals. From 1797 to 1801 he published his translations of sixteen of Shakespeare's plays into blank verse. He also translated Calderon, wrote on Racine in French, and in later life his translations of two Indian epics began Sanskrit studies in Germany. His most influential work was a greatly expanded version of his 1808 lectures in Vienna, Uber dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809-11), translated into French and Italian, and into English as A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1815; revised 1846).

[From Lecture XXIV: 'Criticisms on Shakespeare's Comedies'] Shakespeare's Iambics are sometimes highly harmonious and full sounding; always varied and suitable to the subject, at one time distinguished by ease and rapidity, at another they move along with ponderous energy. They never fall out of the dialogical character, which may always be traced even in the continued discourses of individuals, excepting when the latter run into the lyrical. They are a complete model of the dramatic use of this species of verse, which, in English, since Milton, has been also used in epic poetry; but in the latter it has assumed a quite different turn. Even the irregularities of Shakespeare's versification are expressive; a verse broken off, or a sudden change of rhythmus, coincides with some pause in the progress of the thought, or the entrance of another mental disposition. As a proof that he purposely violated the mechanical rules, from a conviction that too symmetrical a versification does not suit with the drama, and on the stage has in the long run a tendency to lull the spectators asleep, we may observe that his earlier pieces are the most diligently versified, and that in the later works, when through practice he must have acquired a greater facility, we find the strongest deviations from the regular structure of the

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verse. As it served with him merely to make the poetical elevation perceptible, he therefore claimed the utmost possible freedom in the use of it. The views or suggestions of feeling by which he was guided in the use of rhyme may likewise be traced with almost equal certainty. Not unfrequently scenes, or even single speeches, close with a few rhyming lines, for the purpose of more strongly marking the division, and of giving it more rounding. This was injudiciously imitated by the English tragic poets of a later date; they suddenly elevated the tone in the rhymed lines, as if the person began all at once to speak in another language. The practice was welcomed by the actors from its serving as a signal for clapping when they made their exit. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, the transitions are more eas all changes of forms are brought about insensibly, and as if of themselves. Moreover, he is generally fond of heightening a series of ingenious and antithetical sayings by the use of rhyme. We find other passages in continued rhyme, where solemnity and theatrical pomp were suitable, as, for instance, in the mask, as it is called, in The Tempest, and in the play introduced in Hamlet. Of other pieces, for instance, the Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, the rhymes form a considerable part; either because he may have wished to give them a glowing colour, or because the characters appropriately utter in a more musical tone their complaints or suits of love. In these cases he has even introduced rhymed strophes, which approach to the form of the sonnet, then usual in England. W. . . . (376-7) A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, may be in so far compared together that in both the influence of a wonderful world of spirits is interwoven with the turmoil of human passions and with the farcical adventures of folly. A Midsummer Night's Dream is certainly an earlier production; but The Tempest, according to all appearance, was written in Shakespeare's later days: hence most critics, on the supposition that the poet must have continued to improve with increasing maturity of mind, have honoured the last piece with a marked preference. I cannot, however, altogether concur with them: the internal merits of these two works are, in my opinion, pretty nearly balanced, and a predilection for the one or the other can only be governed by personal taste. In profound and original characterization the superiority of The Tempest is obvious: as a whole we must always admire the masterly skill which he has here displayed in the economy of his means, and the dexterity with which he has disguised his preparations, - the scaffoldings for the wonderful aerial structure. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, on the other hand, there flows a luxuriant vein of the boldest and most fantastical invention; the most extraordinary combination of the most dissimilar ingredients seems to have been brought about without effort by some ingenious and lucky accident, and the colours are of such clear transparency that we think the whole of the variegated fabric may be blown away with a breath. The fairy world here described resembles those elegant pieces of arabesque, where little genii with butterfly wings rise, half embodied, above the flower-cups. Twilight, moonshine, dew, and spring perfumes, are the element of these tender spirits; they assist nature in embroidering her carpet with green leaves, many-coloured flowers, and glittering insects; in the human world they do but make sport childishly and waywardly with their beneficent or noxious influences. Their most violent rage dissolves in good-natured raillery; their passions, stripped of all

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earthly matter, are merely an ideal dream. To correspond with this, the loves of mortals are painted as a poetical enchantment, which, by a contrary enchantment, may be immediately suspended, and then renewed again. The different parts of the plot; the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, Oberon and Titania's quarrel, the flight of the two pair of lovers, and the theatrical manoeuvres of the mechanics, are so lightly and happily interwoven that they seem necessary to each other for the formation of a whole. Oberon is desirous of relieving the lovers from their perplexities, and greatly adds to them through the mistakes of his minister, till he at last comes really to the aid of their fruitless amorous pain, their inconstancy and jealousy, and restores fidelity to its old rights. The extremes of fanciful and vulgar are united when the enchanted Titania awakes and falls in love with a coarse mechanic with an ass's head, who represents, or rather disfigures, the part of a tragical lover. The droll wonder of Bottom's transformation is merely the translation of a metaphor in its literal sense; but in his behaviour during the tender homage of the Fairy Queen we have an amusing proof how much the consciousness of such a head-dress heightens the effect of his usual folly. Theseus and Hippolyta are, as it were, a splendid frame for the picture; they take no part in the action, but surround it with a stately pomp. The discourse of the hero and his Amazon, as they course through the forest with their noisy hunting-train, works upon the imagination like the fresh breath of morning, before which the shapes of night disappear. Pyramus and Thisbe is not unmeaningly chosen as the grotesque play within the play; it is exactly like the pathetic part of the piece, a secret meeting of two lovers in the forest, and their separation by an unfortunate accident, and closes the whole with the most amusing parody. [Two paragraphs describe The Tempest, then he continues.] In the zephyr-like Ariel the image of air is not to be mistaken, his name even bears an allusion to it; as, on the other hand, Caliban signifies the heavy element of earth. Yet they are neither of them simple, allegorical personifications but beings individually determined. In general we find in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Tempest, in the magical part of Macbeth, and wherever Shakespeare avails himself of the popular belief in the invisible presence of spirits, and the possibility of coming in contact with them, a profound view of the inward life of nature and her mysterious springs, which, it is true, can never be altogether unknown to the genuine poet, as poetry is altogether incompatible with mechanical physics, but which few have possessed in an equal degree with Dante and himself. (393-6)

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9 Nathan Drake, unity of feeling and of imagery, and the fairies 1817

From Shakespeare and His Times: Including the Biography of the Poet; Criticisms on His Genius and Writings; A New Chronology of His Plays; A Disquisition on the Object of His Sonnets; and a History of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements, Superstitions, Poetry, and Elegant Literature of His Age. By Nathan Drake, M.D. Author of 'Literary Hours,' and of 'Essays on Periodical Literature' (2 vols, London, 1817). Nathan Drake (1766-1836), physician and writer, was an honorary associate of the Royal Society of Literature, but spent most of his life quietly removed from the city, in Suffolk. He published several collections of miscellaneous essays, but his chief labour was expended on these encyclopedic volumes illustrative of Shakespeare, which draw together and present in elegant and readable form the results of the labours of many scholars of the preceding century. A companion volume serves something of the same purpose for Shakespeare's critics: Memorials of Shakespeare; or, sketches of his character and genius by various writers, now first collected with a prefatory and concluding essay, and notes (London, 1828).

[From Part II, Chapter IX] The Midsummer-Night's Dream . . . is the first play which exhibits the imagination of Shakespeare in all its fervid and creative power; for though, as mentioned in Meres's catalogue,!1! as having numerous scenes of continued rhyme, as being barren in fable, and defective in strength of character, it may be pronounced the offspring of youth and inexperience, it will ever in point of fancy be considered as equal to any subsequent drama of the poet. There is, however, a light in which the best plays of Shakespeare should be viewed, which will, in fact, convert the supposed defects of this exquisite sally of sportive invention into positive excellence. A unity of feeling most remarkably pervades and regulates their entire structure, and the MidsummerNight's Dream, a tide in itself declaratory of the poet's object and aim, partakes of this bond, or principle of coalescence, in a very peculiar degree. It is, indeed, a fabric of the most buoyant and aerial texture, floating as it were

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between earth and heaven, and tinted with all the magic colouring of the rainbow, The earth hath bubbles as the water has, And this is of them. [Macbeth 1.3.79ff.] In a piece thus constituted, where the imagery of the most wild and fantastic dream is actually embodied before our eyes, where the principal agency is carried on by beings lighter than the gossamer, and smaller than the cowslip's bell, whose elements are the moon-beams and the odoriferous atmosphere of flowers, and whose sport it is 'To dance in ringlets to the whistling wind' [2.1.86], it was necessary, in order to give a filmy and consistent legerity to every part of the play, that the human agents should partake of the same evanescent and visionary character; accordingly both the higher and lower personages of this drama are the subjects of illusion and enchantment, and love and amusement their sole occupation; the transient perplexities of thwarted passion, and the grotesque adventures of humorous folly, touched as they are with the tenderest or most frolic pencil, blending admirably with the wild, sportive, and romantic tone of the scenes where 'Trip the light fairies and the dapper elves,'t2] and forming together a whole so variously yet so happily interwoven, so racy and effervescent in its composition, of such exquisite levity and transparency, and glowing with such luxurious and phosphorescent splendour, as to be perfectly without a rival in dramatic literature. Nor is this piece, though, from the nature of its fable, unproductive of any strong character, without many pleasing discriminations of passion and feeling. Mr. Malone asks if'a single passion be agitated by the faint and childish solicitudes of Hermia and Demetrius, of Helena and Lysander, those shadows of each other?'3 [No. 3 above]. Now, whatever may be thought of Demetrius and Lysander, the characters of Hermia and Helena are beautifully drawn, and finely contrasted, and in much of the dialogue which occurs between them, the chords both of love and pity are touched with the poet's wonted skill. In their interview in the wood, the contrariety of their dispositions is completely developed; Hermia is represented as 'keen and shrewd: / . . . a vixen, when she went to school, / And, though but little, fierce' [3.2.323ff.], and in her difference with her friend, threatens to scratch her eyes out with her nails, while Helena, meek, humble, and retired, sues for protection, and endeavours in the most gentle manner to deprecate her wrath: [Quotes 3.2.299-303: 'I pray you, though you mock me. . . .' and 306-8, 314-17: 'Good Hermia, do not be so bitter with me. . . .']. And in an earlier part of this scene, where Helena first suspects that her friend had conspired with Demetrius and Lysander to mock and deride her, nothing can more exquisitely paint her affectionate temper, and the heartfelt pangs of severing friendship, than the following lines, most touching in their appeal, an echo from the very bosom of nature itself:- [Quotes 3.2.195, 198-212, 215-19: 'Injurious Hermia! most ungrateful maid ]. (II, 299-302) [Drake proceeds to discuss the Fairy Mythology, finding its origins not in the literature of Spain, Italy, and France, whose ideas about fairies he believes derived

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from Persian and Arabian influences, but in the Gothic mythology of Scandinavia. He finds this mythology treated by Chaucer 'with a pleasant vein of ridicule' (II, 313), but argues that the tradition continued strongly in the North, and especially in Scotland.] [I]n 1593, when the Midsummer Night's Dream was presented to the public, nearly the whole of this Mythology which, as founded on the Scandick superstitions, had been, though with a few modifications, so long prevalent both in England and Scotland, seems to have received such vast additions from the plastic imagination of our bard, as, though rebuilt on the traditions of the 'olden time,' justly to merit, by their novelty and poetic beauty, the title of the English System, in contradistinction to that which still lingers in the wilds of Scotland. The Fairies of Shakespeare have been truly denominated the favourite children of his romanticfancy,^ and, perhaps, in no part of his works has he exhibited a more creative and visionary pencil, or a finer tone of enthusiasm, than in bodying forth 'these airy nothings,' and in giving them, in brighter and ever-durable tints, once more 'A local habitation and a name' [5.1.16fF.]. Of his unlimited sway over this delightful world of ideal forms, no stronger proof can be given, than that he has imparted an entire new cast of character to the beings whom he has evoked from its bosom, purposely omitting the darker shades of their character, and, whilst throwing round them a flood of light, playful, yet exquisitely soft and tender, endowing them with the moral attributes of purity and benevolence. In fact, he not only dismisses altogether the fairies of a malignant nature, but clothes the milder yet mixed tribe of his predecessors with a more fascinating sportiveness, and with a much larger share of unalloyed goodness. The distinction between the two species he has accurately marked where Puck, under some apprehension, observes to Oberon, that the night is waning fast, that Aurora's harbinger appears, and that the 'damned spirits all' are flitting to their beds, adding, that For fear lest day should look their shames upon, They wilfully themselves exile from light, And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night: [3.2.385ff.] to which Oberon immediately replies,- [Quotes 3.2.388-93: 'But we are spirits of another sort. . . .'].5 Of the originality of Shakespeare in the delineation of this tribe of spirits, or Fairies, nothing more is required in proof, than a combination or grouping of the principal features; a picture which, when contrasted with the Scandick system and that which had been built upon it in England and Scotland previous to his own time, will sufficiently show with what grace, amenity, and beauty, and with what an exuberant store of novel imagery, he has decorated these phantoms of the Gothic mythology. The King and Queen of Faiery, who, in Chaucer, are identified with the Pluto and Proserpina of hell,6 are, under the appellations of Oberon and Titania,7 drawn by Shakespeare in a very amiable and pleasing light; for, though jealous of each

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other, they are represented as usually employed in alleviating the distresses of the worthy and unfortunate. Their benign influence, indeed, seems to have extended over the physical powers of nature; for Titania tells her Lord, that, in consequence of their jealous brawls, a strange distemperature had seized the elements:- [Quotes 2.1.107-17: 'The seasons alter. . . .']. It appears even that the fairy-practice of purloining children, which, in every previous system of this mythology, had been carried on from malignant or self-interested motives, was in Titania the result of humanity and compassion: thus, when Oberon begs her 'little changeling boy' to be his henchman [2.1.120ff.], she answers - [Quotes 2.1.121-37, the description of her relationship with the boy's mother, now dead]. [In the next paragraph Drake briefly engages in the dispute over the immortality of the fairies.] Like the Lios-alfar or Bright Elves of the Goths, the Fairies of Shakespeare delighted in conferring blessings, in prospering the household, and in rendering the offspring of virtuous love, fortunate, fair, and free from blemish; thus the first fruit of the re-union of Oberon and Titania, is a benediction on the house of Theseus [Quotes 4.1.87-90]; an intention which is carried into execution at the close of the play, where this kind and gentle race, entering the mansion at midnight — 'Hand in hand, with fairy grace' [5.1.399] — receive the following directions from their benevolent monarch:- [Quotes 5.1.401-6, 409-18]. How different this from the conduct and disposition of their brother elves of Scotland, of whom Kirk tells us, that 'they are ever readiest to go on hurtfull Errands, but seldom will be the Messengers of great Good to Men.'8 [In the next paragraph Drake quotes from The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5. to show the fairies' 'love of virtue and abhorrence of sin' (340).] If the moral and benevolent character of these children of fancy be, in a great degree, the creation of Shakespeare, the imagery which he has employed in describing their persons, manners, and occupations, will be deemed not less his peculiar offspring, nor inferior in beauty, novelty, and wildness of painting, to that which the magic of his pencil has diffused over every other part of his visionary world. [He then illustrates the diminutive size of the fairies, and their ring-dancing, with references to A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet.] But the most astonishing display of the sportive and illimitable fancy of our poet on this subject, will be found in the ministration and offices ascribed to those Fairies who are employed about the person, or executing the mandates, of their Queen. It appears to have been the business of one of her retinue to attend to the decoration of her majesty's pensioners, the cowslips tall [2.1.10]; [Quotes 2.1.11-15: 'In their gold coats. . . .']. Another duty, not less important, was to lull their mistress asleep on the bosom of a violet or a musk-rose:— [Quotes 2.1.249-54: 'I know a bank. . . .']. And again, with still greater wildness of imagination, but with the utmost propriety and adaptation of imagery, are they drawn in the performance of similar functions:— [Quotes 2.2.1-8, where Titania disposes her retinue and asks to be sung to sleep]. The song is equally in character, as it forbids, in admirable adherence to poetical

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truth and consistency, the approach of every insect or reptile, that might be deemed likely to annoy the repose of such a delicate and diminutive being, while Philomel is invoked to add her delicious chaunt to the soothing melody of the fairy voices:— [Quotes 2.2.9-26]. This scene, beautiful and appropriate as it is, is yet surpassed, in originality and playfulness of fancy, by the passage in which Titania gives directions to her attendants for their conduct to Bottom, to whom she had previously offered their assistance, promising that they should fetch him 'jewels from the deep' [3.1.158]:— [Quotes 3.1.164-74]. The working of Oberon's enchantment on Titania, who 'straightway lov'd an ass' [3.2.34], and led him to 'her close and consecrated bower' [3.2.7], and the interview between Bottom, her fairy majesty, and her train, though connected with so many supernatural imaginings, have been transferred to the canvas by Fuselit9! with a felicity which has embodied the very thoughts of Shakespeare, and which may on this subject be said to have placed the genius of the painter almost on a level with that of the poet, so wonderfully has he fixed the illusive creations of his great original. [Drake next illustrates the fairies' love of cleanliness by references to A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Romeo and Juliet. He then moves to consider attributes of Puck derived from Gervase of Tilbury, Lavater (in the English translation of 1572), and Reginald Scot, including mention of the trick with the ass's head.] But to these traits of customary character, Shakespeare has added some which greatly modify the picture, and which have united to the 'drudging goblin/t10! and to the demon of mischievous frolic, duties and functions of a very different cast. He is the messenger,11 and trusty servant12 of the fairy king, by whom, in these capacities, he is called gentle13 and good,14 and he combines with all his hereditary attributes, the speed, the legerity, and the intellectual skill of the highest order of the fairy world. Accordingly when Oberon says— 'Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again, / Ere the leviathan can swim a league;' he replies, Til put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes' [2.1.173ff.];15 and again, on receiving commission from the same quarter :Obe. About the wood go swifter than the wind: Puck. I go, I go: look, how I go; Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow. [3.2.94; lOOff.]16 Upon the whole we may be allowed, from the preceding dissertation, to consider the following series of circumstances as entitled to the appellation of facts: namely, that the patria of our popular system of fairy mythology, was the Scandinavian Peninsula; that, on its admission into this country, it gradually underwent various modifications through the influence of Christianity, the introduction of classical associations, and the prevalence of feudal manners; but that, ultimately, two systems became established; one in Scotland, founded on the wild and more terrific parts of the Gothic mythology, and the other in England, built, indeed, on the same system, but from a selection of its milder features, and converted by the genius of

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Shakespeare into one of the most lovely creations of a sportive imagination. Such, in fact, has been the success of our bard in expanding and colouring the germs of Gothic fairyism; in assigning to its tiny agents, new attributes and powers; and in clothing their ministration with the most light and exquisite imagery, that his portraits, in all their essential parts, have descended to us as indissolubly connected with, and indeed nearly, if not altogether, forming, our ideas of the fairy tribe. (II, 337-53)

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10 William Hazlitt, Bottom, Puck, and the incompatibility of poetry and the stage 1817

From Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1817). William Hazlitt (1778-1830), lecturer, journalist, reporter, critic, essayist, contemplated following his father as a Unitarian minister, but after meeting Coleridge in 1798 turned to thoughts of philosophy and writing. Still unresolved on a profession, he emulated his brother in pursuing, in Paris and England, a career as a painter, including portraits of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Lamb. In 1812, needing an increased income for his wife and child, he settled in London, making a living by lectures, theatrical criticism, and parliamentary reporting. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, one of the most influential works of Romantic Shakespearean criticism, was his first major book; it aroused the ire of William Gifford partly by its attack on Samuel Johnson, and partly because of its enthusiastic style (The Quarterly Review, 18 (January 1818), 458-66). Possibly Gifford was also offended by Hazlitt's praise of Schlegel, who is elevated above all English critics of Shakespeare except Pope. The chapter on A Midsummer Night's Dream draws on two earlier publications: a review of Frederick Reynolds's Covent Garden production (The Examiner, January 21, 1816, 44-5); and an essay in The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1817, I, 202-9).

Bottom the Weaver is a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has - Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows-mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles;^] and there is something in this play which looks very like it. Bottom the Weaver, who takes the lead of 'This crew of patches, rude mechanicals, / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls' [3.2.9ff], follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as conceited, serious, and fantastical. He is ready to undertake any thing and every thing, as if it was as much a matter of course as the motion of his loom and shuttle. He is for playing the tyrant, the lover, the lady, the lion. 'He will roar that it shall do any man's heart good to

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hear him' [1.2.70ff.]; and this being objected to as improper, he still has a resource in his good opinion of himself and 'will roar you an 'twere any nightingale' [1.2.83ff.]. Snug the Joiner is the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things. You see him with his rule and compasses in his hand. 'Have you the lion's part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.' — 'You may do it extempore,' says Quince, 'for it is nothing but roaring' [1.2.66fF.]. Starveling the Tailor keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword. 'I believe we must leave the killing out when all's done' [3.1.14fF.]. Starveling, however, does not start the objections himself, but seconds them when made by others, as if he had not spirit to express his fears without encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this intentional: but it very luckily falls out so. Nature includes all that is implied in the most subtle analytical distinctions; and the same distinctions will be found in Shakespeare. Bottom, who is not only chief actor, but stage-manager for the occasion, has a device to obviate the danger of frightening the ladies: [Quotes 3.1.17-22: 'Write me a prologue. . . .']. Bottom seems to have understood the subject of dramatic illusion at least as well as any modern essayist. If our holiday mechanic rules the roast among his fellows, he is no less at home in his new character of an ass, 'with amiable cheeks, and fair large ears' [4.1.2,4]. He instinctively acquires a most learned taste, and grows fastidious in the choice of dried peas and bottled hay. He is quite familiar with his new attendants, and assigns them their parts with all due gravity. 'Monsieur Cobweb, good Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a red-hipt humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag' [4.1.1 Off.]. What an exact knowledge is here shewn of natural history! Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band. He is the Ariel of the Midsummer Night's Dream; and yet as unlike as can be to the Ariel in The Tempest. No other poet could have made two such different characters out of the same fanciful materials and situations. Ariel is a minister of retribution, who is touched with a sense of pity at the -woes he inflicts. Puck is a mad-cap sprite, full of wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads — 'Lord, what fools these mortals be' [3.2.115]! Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists: but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this race of beings contrasted with the men and women actors in the scene, by a single epithet which Titania gives to the latter, 'the human mortals' [2.1.101]! It is astonishing that Shakespeare should be considered, not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy and heavy writer, who painted nothing but 'gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire.'PI His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a celebrated person of the present day said that he regarded him rather as a metaphysician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the Midsummer Night's Dream alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together. What we mean is this, that we will produce out of that single play ten passages, to which we do not think any ten passages

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in the works of the French poets can be opposed, displaying equal fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolyta's description of a chace, or Theseus's answer? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers. Titania's exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which is remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the rhymes, is as follows:— [Quotes 3.1.164-74]. The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more distinct than the poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the conversation between Theseus and Hippolyta. [Quotes 4.1.103-27, their discussion of hunting hounds.] Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and lusty, and so near the first ages of the world as this.— It has been suggested to us, that the Midsummer Night's Dream would do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of his great talents. He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to play the lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion like 'the most fearful wild-fowl living' [3.1.32]. The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it was thought, would hit the galleries. The young ladies in love would interest the side-boxes: and Robin Goodfellow and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school. There would be two courts, an empire within an empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants, and with all their finery. What an opportunity for processions, for the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears! What a fluttering of urchins' painted wings; what a delightful profusion of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them! Alas, the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of Mr. Listen, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of things. The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime.^ All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.— Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective: every thing there is in the fore-ground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a

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fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage, it is an ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at mid-day, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the Midsummer Night's Dream be represented without injury at Covent-garden or at Drury-lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing. (126-34)

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11 James Boswell and Edmond Malone, Malone's last words. 1821

From The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators: comprehending A Life of the Poet, and An Enlarged History of the Stage, by the Late Edmond Malone. With a New Glossarial Index (21 vols, London, 1821). James Boswell the younger (1778-1822), son of Samuel Johnson's biographer, was only seven when his father's acquaintance with Edmond Malone developed into the intimacy which lasted until his death in 1795. Malone was one of the elder Boswell's literary executors, and also became a close friend of his son. Young Boswell was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1805; he pursued a career as a lawyer and as commissioner for bankrupts at the same time as contributing to literary and scholarly endeavours for the Roxburghe Club, and assisting Malone in collecting materials for the 21-volume 'third variorum', which he carried to completion in 1821, nine years after Malone's death. Peter Martin, Malone's most recent biographer, has rightly claimed that the influence of this edition 'would extend throughout the nineteenth century and into the era of modern scholarship' (Edmond Malone Shakespearean Scholar [Cambridge, 1995], p. 276).

[From Advertisement to the present edition. By Mr. Boswell\ It was the object of Mr. Malone, from which he never deviated, to furnish the reader, as far as it was possible, with the author's unsophisticated text. In acting upon this principle he had at first the concurrence and even the example of Mr. Steevens to guide him. They both professed to follow the old copies with scrupulous fidelity, except where a clear necessity compelled them to depart from the readings which they supplied. To this plan it will be found Mr. Malone has still steadily adhered, while his rival critick has latterly adopted maxims directly contrary to the opinions which he formerly maintained. Corruptions have been supposed to exist in the phraseology of Shakespeare, which, in some instances, are not altogether obsolete in the present day; and the free versification of the poet has been lengthened or curtailed as suited the commentator's caprice, to bring it within the strict regularity which has been enjoined by the school of Pope. In proposing these corrections, as Mr. Steevens

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endeavours to represent them, and in pointing out the fancied errors of the earlier copies, he has generally had recourse to ridicule, a weapon of which he was as fond, as he was skilful in its use. This mode of discussion gave him great advantages when the passages upon which it arose were scattered throughout a number of volumes, from which a great proportion of readers would be unwilling to take the pains of collecting a system of criticism for themselves; but would rather be content with acquiescing in opinions so pleasantly and humorously conveyed. Mr. Malone, to obviate this effect (in some measure, I believe, at my recommendation), determined to bring these topicks into one connected view, and therefore prepared materials for an express Essay on the Metre and Phraseology of Shakespeare, in which he had made considerable progress, but which, I am sorry to say, he did not live to complete. I have taken some pains upon this subject, and have ventured to add the result of my reading to what my friend has left behind him. (I, vii-xi) [From Essay on the Phraseology and Metre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries] [1] The liberties which have been taken by Mr. Steevens in re-modelling the diction of Shakespeare, and reducing it to a modern standard, though sufficiently daring, are trivial, compared with those in which he has indulged on the subject of versification. Not a single play has escaped from being 'carved like an apple tart,' with 'snip and nip, and cut and slit, and slish and slash;' so that the poet of Elizabeth's reign, if he were to behold the new garb in which his editor has clothed him, might well exclaim with his own Petruchio, 'Why, what o' devil's name call'st thou this?' [The Taming of the Shrew, 4.3.89ff.] It is impossible, by the utmost stretch of candour, to believe that one who was so thoroughly versed in old English literature, could have been unconscious how unfounded his positions were, or that he was misleading the reader. Mr. Gifford has justly, as well as humorously, designated him the Puck of commentators. (I, 534-5) [2] One class of verses have hitherto been considered as defective, but erroneously in my opinion. In the first scene of Macbeth this passage occurs. See vol. xi. p. 12: 1 Witch. Where the place? 2 Witch. Upon the heath. 3 Witch. There to meet with Macbeth. The second of these having been considered imperfect, the reader will see, at the page referred to, the remedies which have been proposed. In Love's Labour's Lost, vol. iv. p. 371, I have mistakingly printed She for whom even Jove would swear Juno but an Ethiop were. [4.3.115ff.] In the old copies even is omitted, and thus we find it also in the Passionate Pilgrim, see vol. x; and in England's Helicon. I am satisfied that our ancestors had a measure consisting of only six syllables, and that both the lines quoted were perfectly correct as they originally stood. I have come to this conclusion, not only because other instances

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are to be found in Shakespeare's plays, but in many of his contemporaries. Thus, in A Midsummer Night's Dream: [Quotes 2.1.2-7: 'Over hill, over dale. . . .' and 3.2.396-7: 'Up and down, up and down. . . .'J.W (I, 571) [From the commentary notes to A Midsummer Night's Dream] [I] [On 1.1.27: 'This man hath bewitch'd the bosom of my child'. Boswell retains Malone's reading 'This hath bewitch'd . . .' despite his disagreement.] As the reading, 'This man hath bewitch'd,' is found in all the old copies, and as the two quartos were printed in the same year, abounding in variations, and probably sent forth by persons who were washing to outrun each other at the press, it is surely improbable that they should chance upon the same error, t2! A redundant syllable, at the commencement of a verse, perpetually occurs in our old dramatists. See the Essay upon Shakespeare's Versification. BOSWELL. (V, 177-8) [2] [On 2.1.249: 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows': answering Steevens's objection to reading where as a disyllabic.] If similar usages are shown in Shakespeare and other writers of his time, it is sufficient without producing express authority in every instance. Mr. Steevens saw no objection to desire as a trisyllable in Cymbeline, Act I. Sc.VII: Should make desire vomit emptiness. [1.6.45] Yet no other example has been given. MALONE. (V, 232) [3] [On 3.2.257ff.: 'No, no; he'll / Seem to break loose —'. Malone replies to Steevens's 1793 objection to Malone's 1790 text and note] My assertion that abrupt sentences not attended to have been the cause of much obscurity, does not rest on conjecture or fancy. Mr. Steevens has adopted my suggestions in many other places; when he says he has left the text as he found it, he cannot mean, as he found it in any of the old copies. MALONE. (V, 274-5)

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12 Augustine Skottowe, mainly on the fairies 1824

From The Life of Shakespeare; Enquiries into the Originality of his Dramatic Plots and Characters; and Essays on the Ancient Theatres and Theatrical Usages. By Augustine Skottowe (2 vols, London, 1824). Augustine Skottowe (1790P-1851) spent forty-three years in the Paymaster General's Office, much of that time in Portsmouth, where he may have been acquainted with the family of Charles Dickens (see Philip F. Skottowe, The Leaf and the Tree: The Story of an English Family, London, 1963, pp.44-5). He is remembered for his book on Shakespeare. In the Prefatory Essay of his Memorials of Shakespeare (1828) Nathan Drake praised Skottowe as having 'the taste and discriminating tact of the elegant and enlightened critic'. His book found favour with editors like Thomas Campbell (No. 17), Bryan Waller Procter (No. 23) - who cites him lengthily four times in the company of such authors as Coleridge, Schlegel, Johnson, and Hazlitt —, and Furness (No. 65). Ulrici (in his preface; No. 26) and Hudson (No. 29) allude to him, and in his History of Shakespearean Criticism (1932) Augustus Ralli devotes more space to him than to Johnson or Hallam. Skottowe's only other book was A Memoir of the Life and Writings of Charles Mills (London, 1828). Mills (1788-1826) was a minor historian and a close friend, to whom he had dedicated his Life of Shakespeare. Adolph Wagner translated the Life of Shakespeare into German — abbreviated — in 1825, and it appeared subsequently in the German version of the Works of Shakespeare by A.W. Schlegel and others (43 vols, Vienna, 1825-7).

[From the chapter entitled 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'] Few plays consist of such incongruous materials as A Midsummer Night's Dream. It comprises no less than four histories: — that of Theseus and Hippolyta; — of the four Athenian lovers; - the actors; - and the fairies. It is not indeed absolutely necessary to separate Theseus and Hippolyta from the lovers; nor the actors from the fairies; but the link of connection is extremely slender. Nothing can be more irregularly wild than to bring into contact the Fairy-mythology of modern Europe, and the early events of Grecian history; or to introduce Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Starveling, 'hard-handed men, which never laboured in their minds till now' [5.1.72ff.], as amateur actors in the classic city of Athens.

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Of the characters constituting the serious action of this play Theseus and Hippolyta are entirely devoid of interest. Lysander and Demetrius, and Hermia and Helena, scarcely merit notice except on account of the frequent combination of elegance, delicacy, and vigour, in their complaints, lamentations, and pleadings, and the ingenuity displayed in the management of their cross-purposed love through three several changes. In the first place, there is a mutual passion between Lysander and Hermia: Demetrius loves Hermia, he having previously loved Helena, who returned his love. In the second stage, Lysander deserts Hermia, and urges his suit to Helena, \vho remains faithful to Demetrius; and, thirdly, Lysander disclaims his love for Helena, and renews his vows to his first love, Hermia; Demetrius relinquishes Hermia, and renews his affection for Helena. Bottom and his companions are probably highly drawn caricatures of some of the monarchs of the scene whom Shakespeare found in favour and popularity when he first appeared in London, and in the bickerings, jealousies, and contemptible conceits which he has represented, we are furnished with a picture of the green-room politics of the Globe. . . . [He looks at some possible sources of the Interlude, and, drawing extensively on Drake (No. 9 above), discusses the origin and the lore of fairies.] Of all spirits it was peculiar to fairies to be actuated by the feelings and passions of mankind. The loves, jealousies, quarrels, and caprices of the dramatic king, give a striking exemplification of this infirmity. Oberon is by no means backward in the assertion of supremacy over his royal consort, who, to do her justice, is as little disposed, as any earthly beauty, tacitly to acquiesce in the pretensions of her redoubted lord. But, knowledge, we have been gravely told, is power,W and the animating truth is exemplified by the issue of the contest between Oberon and Titania: his majesty's acquaintance with the secret virtues of herbs and flowers, compels the wayward queen to yield what neither love nor duty could force from her. Let it not be too hastily inferred from the diminutiveness of these testy beings, that their quarrels are indifferent to the sons of men. Alas! mortals know not how deep is their interest in the domestic harmony of the fairy court! Shakespeare has given an elegant summary of the calamities believed to be attendant on the dissensions of the king and queen of Fairy: 'the winds,' [Quotes 2.1.89-117] [He describes the mischievous doings of fairies, especially pucks, and then the good acts they performed, such as the blessing at the end of the play. He quotes Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale on fairies.] To a belief in magic, witchcraft, and the agency of spirits, was always superadded that of the power of charms both to create love, and cause infidelity and hatred. The singular tergiversations of the lovers Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena, are all effects of such a power: the love of Titania for Bottom, with his ass's head, is a similar instance, and it was, doubtless, by the same means that the queen had led Theseus [Quotes 2.1.77-80: 'through the glimmering night. . . .']. The whole circle of poetry does not contain a passage richer in poetical beauties and of sweeter versification, than that wherein Shakespeare describes the power

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of the heart's-ease to create love. Elizabeth never received a more graceful compliment. [Quotes 2.1.148-68: 'Thou rememb'rest / Since once I sat upon a promontory. . . .']. Among other mischievous propensities which were attributed to fairies, was that of stealing the unbaptized infants of mortals, and leaving their own progeny in their stead. Before they put a new-born child into the cradle, the Danish women were accustomed to place either there, or over the door, garlick, salt, bread, and also steel, or some cutting instrument made of that metal, as preventives against so great an evil. The child of a pagan was lawful game for every waggish sprite, and, in a pilfering excursion to the East, Titania found no obstructions to her success from precautions similar to those of the northern matron. She had for her attendant 'A lovely boy' [Quotes 2.1.22-7]. The poet has not left it to this exploit of Titania, nor to the return of Oberon 'from farthest steep of India' [2.1.69], to proclaim that celerity of motion by which the fairies were distinguished. The king boasts that they 'the globe can compass soon, / Swifter than the wand'ring moon' [4.1.97ff.]. Puck undertakes to 'Put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes' [2.1.175ff.]; and the following lines seem almost to invest the fairy tribe with the power of ubiquity: [Quotes 2.1.2-7: 'Over hill, over dale ']. The tribe of fairies generally was deemed mischievous, and Puck, RobinGoodfellow, or Hobgoblin, as he was variously called, enjoyed the reputation of being the master-spirit of wickedness among them. Delighted by every combination of the preposterous, his never-wearying pursuit of mischief rendered his name universally terrific. If he met a person returning home at night, his delight was to lead him by a feigned voice out of his way: such is the exploit of Puck when he entangles Lysander and Demetrius in the mazes of a wood, and separates them from each other: [Quotes 3.2.396-9: 'Up and down. . . .']. At other times he assumed the shape of an animal, making his metamorphosis the vehicle of a prank: [Quotes 3.1.108-11: 'Sometime a horse I'll be. ...']. It would be tedious to recapitulate the whole of Robin's gambols, and useless also, as Shakespeare has given an elegant summary of his frolics. [Quotes 2.1.32-57: 'Either I mistake your shape. . . .']. The subject of darkness and night, as connected with the appearance of spirits, will demand so much of our attention in Hamlet, that nothing more is necessary here than to notice the several allusions to the same superstition in the present play. [Quotes 5.1.371-87: 'Now the hungry lion roars. . . .']. It was an indication of the comparative purity of the fairies that they delighted most to celebrate their revels in 'spangled star-light sheen' [2.1.29] or beneath the mild effulgence of the moon. But the slight relation which they bore to demoniacal spirits is more decisively proclaimed, by the superior privilege they enjoyed of protracting their gambols till day-light actually broke upon them. [Quotes 3.2.378-93: 'My fairy lord, this must be done with haste. . . .']. An air of peculiar lightness distinguishes the poet's treatment of this extremely fanciful subject from his subsequent and bolder flights into the regions of the spiritual world. He rejected from the drama on which he engrafted it, every thing

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calculated to detract from its playfulness, or to encumber it with seriousness, and giving the rein to the brilliancy of youthful imagination, he scattered, from his superabundant wealth, the choicest flowers of fancy over the fairies' paths: his fairies move amidst the fragrance of enameled meads, graceful, lovely, and enchanting. It is equally to Shakespeare's praise, that A Midsummer Night's Dream is not more highly distinguished by the richness and variety, than for the propriety and harmony which characterises the arrangement of the materials out of which he constructed this vivid and animated picture of fairy mythology. (I, 255-75)

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13 George Daniel, the fairy world, the clowns, the poetry 1828

From A Midsummer Night's Dream. A Comedy, In five Acts, by William Shakespeare. Printed from the Acting Copy, with Remarks, Biographical and Critical, by D. -G. To which are Added, A Description of the Costume, - Cast of the Characters, Entrances and Exits, — Relative Positions of the Performers on the Stage, and the Whole of the Stage Business. As performed at the Theatres Royal, London. Embellished with a Fine Engraving, By Mr. Bonner, from a Drawing Taken in the Theatre, by Mr. R. Cruikshank (London, 1828). George Daniel (1789-1864) joined a stockbroker's firm as a young man and spent most of his life in commerce, but gave his leisure time to the pursuit of literature. He published his first poem when he was sixteen, a humorous novel at twenty-three, some satirical poetry - such as The Modem Dunciad (1814) -, an operatic interlude, some farces, and, later in life, numerous essays in literary magazines such as Bentley's Miscellany. His major literary task was the writing of prefaces for the almost three hundred plays in Cumberland's British Theatre (1823-31) and it is from volume twenty of this series that the following excerpt comes.

[From the prefatory 'Remarks'] A Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's first attempt on fairy ground. . . . The characters represented are spirits, exercising their magic influence over the material agents, and producing the delusion of a wild fantastic dream. To look for strong passion and force of character, where the scene passes nature's bounds, and the actors are ethereal essences flitting in the moonbeams, is to expect them where they can never be consistently found — in the regions of enchantment. But, however barren in fable, and deficient in that interest which arises from a well-drawn picture of real life - in sportive invention and appropriate imagery, it yields to none of the most celebrated productions of Shakespeare. The imagination is held captive by scenes of high creative power and exquisite poetry, interspersed with much delicate feeling, and enlivened by humour the most frolic and grotesque. It is strictly a midsummer night's dream - a fairy vision that may be supposed to pass before the mind during that luxuriant and romantic season. A tale of sadness was in ancient times considered

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best adapted to winter; and where shall we find, in any language, two dramas with more appropriate titles than A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale? . . . [He devotes three paragraphs to the fairy mythology, drawing heavily on Drake (No. 9 above).] What a delightful study is this fine play for the closet, or 'the pleached bower, / Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, / Forbid the sun to enter!' [Much Ado About Nothing, 3.1.7ff.] — a play, in which the imagination of the most imaginative of poets seems to have run riot! The brilliant creatures of it burst forth from the rich treasure-house of his fancy; his pencil is dipped in the dews of heaven; and his language, according with the dazzling imagery, falls on the ear in all the silver melody of sound. Great pains have been taken to show from which mythology, the Oriental or the Gothic, Shakespeare borrowed his fairies; but we say from neither. Shakespeare's fairies are his own: his juvenile reading had given him an idea of an airy being between man and angel — a being so far connected with humanity as to hover o'er us in our vocations by day, and our dreams by night; to help us in our need; or, as his humour pleased, to thwart us in our amusements, or more intricately entangle us in our perplexities — 'to haunt, to startle, and waylay.'M But when, in after years, he brought this creature of fancy into action, to animate his dramas, and shed its spells o'er their magic scenes - although glimpses were retained of that which had charmed him in youth, the characters of his fairies, like all that passed through the alembic of his brain, came forth enriched, adorned, exalted; nor can any mythology, whether northern or eastern, produce a being comparable to Ariel. His very Puck, his 'Lob of spirits' [2.1.16], — he who delights in 'things that befall preposterously' [3.2.120ff.], in his hands, is not the 'lubber fiendj't 2 ] he is the 'merry wanderer of the night' [2.1.43], the genius of harmless mirth and mischief. Titania, even in her 'dotage' [4.1.47], breathes nothing that should not fall from lips that feed on dew and honey. Shakespeare's is indeed fairy-land; its spirits flitting about amidst violets, musk-roses, and eglantines; their occupation to hang pearls of dew in the 'tall cowslip' [2.1.15], to keep fresh the magic circle of their dance; their whole existence one course of midnight revelry. How delightful to dream out a summer season in — Some bright little isle of our own, In a blue summer ocean far off and alone; Where a leaf never dies in the still-blooming bowers, And the bee banquets on through a whole year of flowers! PI And there dwell with such beings as Shakespeare's fairies, to - [Quotes and adapts 3.1.165-8: 'Hop in his walks ', and 3.1.172-4: 'And pluck the wings '] Want of interest has been attributed to this drama W; but has it not all the interest that a fairy tale will bear? The loves and crosses of Hermia and Helena are sufficient for a midsummer night's dream. It is not intended for a history of deep passion. A human being enduring the pangs of such a passion, whether of love, hatred, jealousy, or revenge, would be out of keeping with the 'dapper elves';t5] his presence would be sufficient to blight the flowers that form the couch of the fairy queen. Besides,

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the happiness, as also the mischances, of the lovers are partly due to the intervention of Oberon; and it is one of our most firmly established canons of criticism, that no profound interest can be felt for the victim of any human misery, from -which the author has no means of relieving him but that which is superhuman. The Greek and the French stage are both against us in this respect; but we have a better authority than either in the example of Shakespeare, who has nothing of this kind. Events that are purely human are, with him, left to proceed and end in their natural course. Murder brings its own remorse and punishment. The ghost in Hamlet, and the witches in Macbeth, although giving the mainspring to the action, never interfere with the actual carrying on of the plot. They impel their hero; but they neither assist nor retard his enterprises: the results would be the same without as with them. The underplot or episode of the 'hard-handed men that work in Athens' [5.1.72], is one of those rich pieces of humour in which Shakespeare luxuriates. Can imagination conceive a more whimsical company of comedians than Quince, Starveling, Bottom, and their fellows'? - with their stage-directions and properties, their cast of characters, their tender regard for the feelings of the ladies, as exemplified in the histrionic weaver and his precautionary prologues; in which he informs his audience that he is not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver, and that Snug the joiner is no lion, but a man as other men are! [3.1.20ff. and 42ff.] — This is not the only hit at the heroes of the sock and buskin that is to be found in the writings of Shakespeare; — their ignorance and buffoonery are satirized pretty severely in Hamlet; while their vanity and presumption are admirably illustrated in Bottom, who as top actor would engross every capital part himself, and, though 'a sweet-faced man, a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day — a most lovely gentleman-like man' [1.2.86ff.], would roar in the lion as gently as any sucking dove, rather than Snug the joiner, who is slow of study, should fright the duchess and her ladies into applause by his extemporaneous roaring; and so versatile is his genius, that he volunteers to play Thisby in 'a monstrous little voice' [1.2.52], rather than let Francis Flute the bellows-mender, who has 'a beard coming' [1.2.48], speak small, and 'make the grove harmonious I'M This play has been thrice revived since the year 1763: first, by David Garrick; secondly, by George Colman; and, thirdly, by Mr. Reynolds, the dramatist, at Covent-Garden Theatre. In no instance has the revival been successful. A Midsummer Night's Dream is written not to the eye, but to the imagination; — its aerial beings shrink from mortal touch; and Wall and Moonshine would be represented with more true effect by Bottom and his compeers, than would Oberon and Robin Goodfellow by the most skilful actor that ever trod the stage. There is a charm about the personification of a good acting play, that identifies in our minds the idea of the theatre, and 'the well-graced actor' [Richard II, 5.2.24], with the play itself; and, however delightful it may be to contemplate this drama as the fairy tale of our youth, or, in after-life, as a beautiful dramatic poem, we miss the charm just alluded to. The poet may give 'to airy nothing a local habitation and a name' [5.1.16ff.], and we can accompany him in his wildest flights; but no 'mortal creature of earth's mould' W can ever personify his lovely fairies. They are too true to their own identity — too airy — too impalpable, to be represented by the sons of dull earth; and, however splendid the attempt to revive

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them in our theatres, — whatever histrionic talent may be brought to the task, no art can ever approach an embodying of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The chief characteristics of the language are, as the subject requires, sweetness and delicacy. The similes are taken from flowers, from stars, from dews, from fruits - from all that is brightest and loveliest in nature. Amidst Titania's flowers, which shall we select? They crowd upon us — they dazzle us: — [Quotes 1.1.76-8: 'Earthlier happy. . . .'; 1.1.183-5: 'Your eyes are lode-stars. . . .'; 2.1.107-11: 'The seasons alter. . . .']. But even this midnight fancy Shakespeare makes a vehicle for some of those profound observations on life, men, and manners, that mark all his productions. What a beautiful comment on the master-passion of our youth is the following: — [Quotes 1.1.132-4: 'Ah, me! for aught. ...']. The pathetic lines on female friendship, beginning 'Injurious Hermia' [3.2.195], and Theseus's noble description of his hounds [4.1.119ff.], are full of poetic rapture; but the most celebrated passage, which no poet that ever lived has equalled, and which Shakespeare himself has not surpassed, is, — [Quotes 5.1.7-17: 'The lunatic, the lover. . . .']. The 'fine phrenzy' [5.1.12] here described receives its noblest illustration from the poet's own description; and 'the imagination all compact' [5.1.8] that could produce a piece of such high inspiration, may well claim to soar above every other to the end of time. (5-10)

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14 Thomas Keightley, new actors on the mimic scene — the fairies 1828

From The Fairy Mythology (2 vols, London, [1828]) Thomas Keightley (1789-1872) was born in Ireland and entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1803, but took no degree. In 1824 he went to London where he helped Thomas Croker with his Fairy Legends of South Ireland (1825). His own Fairy Mythology, published anonymously in two volumes in 1828, was reprinted in 1833 with a few additions to the preface, and appeared in the popular Bohn's 'Antiquarian Library', with the author identified, in 1850. He produced a number of handbooks for schools or for popular consumption, such as his histories of Greece (1835), England (1837-9), Rome (1840), and India (1846-7); his Notes on the Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil (1846); and his editions of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Milton from 1847 to 1859. His unannotated six-volume Shakespeare (1864) is still considered a notable text, and his Shakespeare-Expositor: an Aid to the Perfect Understanding of Shakespeare's Plays (1867) a useful work.

[From the chapter entitled 'England'] [Before beginning his examination of fairies in English literature, Keightley looks at Robin Goodfellow, the puck.] As the merry spirit, Puck, is so prominent an actor in the scenes forming our next division, this may be deemed no unfitting place for the consideration of his various appellations: these are Puck, Robin Good-fellow, Robin Hood, Hob-goblin. Puck is perhaps the same with the old word Pouke, the original meaning of which would seem to be devil, demon, or evil spirit.l We first meet it in the Vision of Pierce Plowman, where it undoubtedly signifies 'the grand adversary of God and man'.PJ When, in this poem, the Seer beholds Abraham, the personification of Faith, with his 'wyde clothes, within which lay a Lazar,' Wyth patriarkes and prophetes, playinge to gedres, and asks him what was there,

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Loo, quath he, and leet me seo, lord mercy ich seide Hit is precious present, quath he, ac the pouke hit hath attachede, And me ther wyth quath he wye, may no wed ous quite Ne no berne be our borghe, ne bringe ous out of daunger Fro the poukes pondfolde, ne maynpryse may ous fetche Till he come that ich carpe of, Crist is his name, That shall delyvery ous some day oute of the develes powereJ3! Golding must have understood Pooke in the sense of devil, when in his translation of Ovid, he, unauthorised however by the original, applies it to the chimera, The country where Chymaera, that same pooke With goatish body, lion's head and breast, and dragon's tail.W Spenser employs the word, and he clearly distinguishes it from hob-goblin: Ne let housefires nor lightenings helpless harms, Ne let the pouke5 nor other evil sprites, Ne let mischievous witches with their charms, Ne let hob-goblins, names whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not. Epithalamion [340-4]. These terms are also distinguished in the Scourge of Venus: And that they may perceive the heavens frown, The poukes and goblins pull the coverings downJ6] The truth perhaps is, that the poets, led by the inviting conciseness of the term, applied it to the house-spirit, or hob-goblin. Shakespeare appears to have been the original offender. . . . 7 The other appellations are all properly those of the house-spirit: Robin Goodfellow answers to the Nisse God-dreng of the Norwegians. He was called Robin Hood, because, like the Nis and the Brownie, he wore a hood. Goblin is the same as the German Kobold and Hob, or Rob, the abbreviation of Robert. The Germans call him Knecht Ruprecht, or Robert (II, 118-21) [Keightley examines Chaucer's allusions to fairies, and finds their size to be indeterminate - they are not of 'a diminutive stature' -, and other details are scant except for the one trait of their love for dance. There was little else about fairies in the literature between Chaucer and Spenser.] But in Elizabeth's days, 'Fairies', as Johnson observes, 'were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great'.M A just remark, though Johnson fell into the common error of identifying Spenser's Fairies -with the popular ones. The three first books of the Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and as Warton remarks, Fairies became a familiar and fashionable machinery with the poets and poetasters, t9] Shakespeare, well acquainted, from the rural habits of his early life, with the notions of the peasantry respecting these beings, and highly gifted with

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the prescient power of genius, saw clearly how capable they were of being applied to the production of a species of the wonderful, as pleasing, or perhaps even more so, than the classic gods; and in the Midsummer Night's Dream he presented them in combination with the heroes and heroines of the mythic age of Greece. But what cannot the magic wand of genius effect? We view with undisturbed delight the Elves of Gothic mythology sporting in the groves of Attica, the legitimate haunts of Pans and Satyrs. Shakespeare having the Faerie Queene before his eyes, seems to have attempted a blending of the Elves of the village with the Fays of romance. His Fairies agree with the former in their diminutive stature, — diminished, indeed, to dimensions inappreciable by village gossips, - in their fondness for dancing, their love of cleanliness, and their child-abstracting propensities. Like the Fays, they form a community, ruled over by the princely Oberon, and the fair Titania.10 There is a court and chivalry: Oberon would have the queen's sweet changeling to be a 'Knight of his train to trace the forest wild' [2.1.25]. Like earthly monarchs, he has his jester, 'the shrewd and knavish sprite, / Called Robin Good-fellow' [2.1.33ff.]. The luxuriant imagination of the poet seemed to exult in pouring forth its wealth in the production of these new actors on the mimic scene, and a profusion of poetic imagery always appears in their train. Such lovely and truly British poetry cannot be too often brought to view; we shall therefore insert in this part of our work several of these gems of our Parnassus, distinguishing by a different character [i.e., italicising] such acts and attributes as appear properly to belong to the Fairy of popular belief. [Quotes 2.1.1-57: 'How now, spirit. . . .', italicising 35-41, and 45-6.] The haunts of the Fairies on earth are the most rural and romantic that can be selected. They meet [Quotes 2.1.83-6: 'on hill, in dale. . . .']. And the place of Titania's repose is [Quotes 2.1.249-56: 'A bank whereon the wild thyme blows. . . .']. The powers of the poet are exerted to the utmost, to convey an idea of their minute dimensions; and time, with them, moves on lazy pinions. 'Come,' cries the queen, [Quotes 2.2.1-5: 'Come, now a roundel. . . .']. And when enamoured of Bottom, she directs her Elves that they should [Quotes 3.1.165-73: 'Hop in his walks. . . .']. Puck goes 'swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow' [3.2.101]; he says, he'll 'put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes' [2.1.175ff.]; and 'We,' says Oberon - [Quotes 4.1.97-8: 'We the globe ']. They are either not mortal, or their date of life is indeterminately long; they are of a nature superior to man, and speak with contempt of human follies. By night they revel beneath the light of the moon and stars, retiring at the approach of 'Aurora's harbinger' [3.2.380], but not compulsively like ghosts and 'damned spirits' [3.2.382]. [Quotes 3.2.388-93: 'But we are spirits of another sort. . . .']. (II, 126-32)

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15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, marginalia and other notes 1836

From The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Collected and Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Esq. M. A. (4 vols, London, 1836-9). Volume 2, 1836. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) lectured on Shakespeare many times in the twelve years from 1808 to 1819, but disappointingly little about A Midsummer Night's Dream has survived. Henry Crabb Robinson stated in his Diary for 19 December 1811 that he attended Coleridge's lecture on Dream, but nothing remains of that talk. There was a lecture on the play announced for the series of 1813-14 at Bristol but this was apparently never given, and, aside from some scant references to the title in outlines of the chronology of the plays and elsewhere, and the few jottings given here, Coleridge left nothing on the comedy for posterity. Critics, however, have seized on the few insights that remain and have repeated them like prophetic verses from the Bible: see, for example, among the selections given here, Knight, Halliwell, Verplanck, Hudson, Gervinus, Latimer, Porter and Clarke, and Woodberry (Nos. 19, 21, 27, 29, 37, 58, 73, and 78). H.N. Coleridge's edition of The Literary Remains constituted the chief source for these various writings of Coleridge until T.M. Raysor rehabilitated the text in 1930 in his two-volume Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism. The definitive edition of the lectures is by R.A. Foakes, Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature, and of the Marginalia by George Whalley, volumes 5 (1987) and 12 (1980, 1984) of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, c.1969-).

[From 'SHAKESPEARE: Recapitulation, and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakespeare's Dramas'] 6. Interfusion of the lyrical — that which in its very essence is poetical — not only with the dramatic, as in the plays of Metastasio^1^ where at the end of the scene comes the aria as the exit speech of the character, — but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in Shakespeare are introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beautifully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for them, as

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Desdemona's 'Willow,' and Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You like It. But the whole of the Midsummer Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical.PI (II, 81-2) [From 'SHAKESPEARE: A Midsummer Night's Dream'M] ACTi. sc. 1. Her. O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low — Lys. Or else misgraffed, in respect of years; Her. O spite! too old to be engag'd to young — Lys. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends; Her. O hell! to chuse love by another's eye! (1.1.136fF.) There is no authority for any alteration; — but I never can help feeling how great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted; - the third and only appropriate one would then become a beauty, and most natural. M Ib[id]. Helena's speech: — I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight, &c. [1.1.246] I am convinced that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this too after the witty cool philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection, and loss of character than men, — their natures being almost wholly extroitive.t5] Still, however just in itself, the representation of this is not poetical; we shrink from it, and cannot harmonize it with the ideal. Act ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition. Through bush, through briar — ****** Through flood, through fire — [2.1.3, 5] What a noble pair of ears this worthy Theobald must have had! The eight amphimacers or cretics, —t6] Over hUl, over dale, Thoro' bush, thoro' briar, Over park, over pale, Thoro'flood,thoro' fire - [2.1.2ff.]

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have a delightful effect on the ear in their sweet transition to the trochaic, — I do wander ev'ry where Swifter than the moones sphere, &c. — [2.1.6ff] The last words as sustaining the rhyme, must be considered, as in fact they are, trochees in time. . . . Ib[id]. sc. 2.

Titania's speech: — (Theobald adopting Warburton's reading). Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Follying (her womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, &c. [2.1.130ff.]

Oh! oh! Heaven have mercy on poor Shakespeare, and also on Mr Warburton's mind's eye! Act v. sc. 1. Theseus' Speech: — (Theobald.) And what poor [willing\ duty cannot do, Noble respect takes it in might, not merit.[5.1.90ff.] To my ears it would read far more Shakespearean thus: — And what poor duty cannot do, yet would, Noble respect, &c. Ib[id]. sc. 2. Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon; Whilst the heavy ploughman snores All with weary task foredone, &c.[5.1.371-4] Very Anacreon in perfectness, proportion, grace, and spontaneity! So far it is Greek; — but then add, O! what wealth, what wild ranging, and yet what compression and condensation of, English fancy. In truth, there is nothing in Anacreon more perfect than these thirty lines, t?] or half so rich and imaginative. They form a speckless diamond. (II, 110-14)

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16 William Maginn, Bottom the lucky man 1837

From 'Shakespeare Papers.—No. IV. Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom, the Weaver', Bentley's Miscellany, 2 (October 1837), 370-80. William Maginn (1794-1842), a youthful prodigy of scholarship, had a brilliant and controversial career as a journalist. After receiving his B.A. from the University of Dublin in 1811, he taught for some years at his father's school in Cork; in 1819 he was the youngest person ever to receive the degree of LL.D. from Dublin. Having contributed pseudonymously for some years to the Literary Gazette and Blackwood's Magazine, he decided to devote himself to journalism, and in 1824 settled in London. His most famous venture was the founding in 1830, with Hugh Fraser, of Fraser's Magazine, which attracted the contributions of such luminaries as Southey, Hogg, Carlyle, Thackeray, and the artist Daniel Maclise. A review in 1836 led to a duel, and to his leaving the staff of Fraser's. His personal habits contributed to his decline and early death, but the Shakespeare papers he contributed to Bentley's Miscellany and to Fraser's Magazine show his continuing brilliance. These were collected by Dr. Shelton Mackenzie as The Shakespeare Papers of the late William Maginn, LL.D. (New York, 1856), and were also published by Richard Bentley in London in 1859 and 1860.

It has often been remarked that it is impossible to play the enchanted scenes of Bottom with any effect. In reading the poem we idealize the ass-head; we can conceive that it represents in some grotesque sort the various passions and emotions of its wearer; that it assumes a character of dull jocosity, or duller sapience, in his conversations with Titania and the fairies; and when calling for the assistance of Messrs Peas-blossom and Mustard-seed to scratch his head, or of the Queen to procure him a peck of provender or a bottle of hay, it expresses some puzzled wonder of the new sensations its wearer must experience in tinglings never felt before, and cravings for food until then unsuited to his appetite. But on the stage this is impossible. As the manager cannot procure for his fairies representatives of such tiny dimensions as to be in danger of being overflown by the bursting of the honey-bag of an humble-bee, so it is impossible that the art of the property-man can furnish Bottom with an ass-head capable of expressing the mixed feelings of humanity and asinity which actuate the metamorphosed weaver. It is but a paste-board head, and that is all. The jest is over the first moment after his appearance; and, having

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laughed at it once, we cannot laugh at it any more. As in the case of a man who, at a masquerade, has chosen a character depending for its attraction merely on costume, - we may admire a Don Quixote, if properly bedecked in Mambrino's helmet and the other habiliments of the Knight of La Mancha, at a first glance, but we think him scarcely worthy of a second. So it is with the Bottom of the stage; the Bottom of the poem is a different person. Shakespeare in many parts of his plays drops hints, 'vocal to the intelligent,' that he feels the difficulty of bringing his ideas adequately before the minds of theatrical spectators. In the opening address of the Chorus of Henry V he asks pardon for having dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or, may we cram Within this wooden O, the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? [Henry V, Prologue lOff.] and requests his audience to piece out the imperfections of the theatre with their thoughts. This is an apology for the ordinary and physical defects of any stage, — especially an ill-furnished one; and it requires no great straining of our imaginary forces to submit to them. Even Ducrow himself, with appliances and means to boot a hundred-fold more magnificent and copious than any that were at the command of Shakespeare, does not deceive us into the belief that his fifty horses, trained and managed with surpassing skill, and mounted by agile and practised riders, dressed in splendid and carefully-considered costumes, are actually fighting the battle of Waterloo, HI but we willingly lend ourselves to the delusion. In like manner, we may be sure that in the days of Queen Elizabeth the audience of the Globe complied with the advice of Chorus, and, 'Minding true things by what their mockeries be,' were contented that 'Four or five most vile and ragged foils / Right ill-disposed, in brawl ridiculous,' [Henry V, 4. Chorus. 53, 50ff] should serve to represent to their imagination the name of Agincourt. We consent to this just as we do to Greeks and Romans speaking English on the stage of London, or French on that of Paris; or to men of any country speaking in verse at all; or to all the other demands made upon our belief in playing. We can dispense with the assistance of such downright matter-of-fact interpreters as those who volunteer their services to assure us that the lion in Pyramus and Thisbe is not a lion in good earnest, but merely Snug the joiner. But there are difficulties of a more subtle and metaphysical kind to be got over, and to these, too, Shakespeare not unfrequently alludes. In the play before us, - Midsummer Night's Dream, - for example, when Hippolyta speaks scornfully of the tragedy in which Bottom holds so conspicuous a part, Theseus answers, that the best of this kind (scenic performances) are but shadows, and the worst no worse if imagination amend them. She answers that it must be your imagination then, not theirs. He retorts with a joke on the vanity of actors, and the conversation is immediately changed. The meaning of the Duke is, that, however we may laugh at the silliness of Bottom and his companions in

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their ridiculous play, the author labours under no more than the common calamity of dramatists. They are all but dealers in shadowy representations of life; and if the worst among them can set the mind of the spectator at work, he is equal to the best. The answer to Theseus is, that none but the best, or, at all events, those who approach to excellence, can call with success upon imagination to invest their shadows with substance. Such playwrights as Quince the carpenter, - and they abound in every literature and every theatre, - draw our attention so much to the absurdity of the performance actually going on before us, that we have no inclination to trouble ourselves with considering what substance in the background their shadows should have represented. Shakespeare intended the remark as a compliment or a consolation to less successful wooers of the comic or the tragic Muse, and touches briefly on the matter; but it was also intended as an excuse for the want of effect upon the stage of some of the finer touches of such dramatists as himself, and an appeal to all true judges of poetry to bring it before the tribunal of their own imagination; making but a matter of secondary inquiry how it appears in a theatre, as delivered by those who, whatever others may think of them, would, if taken at their own estimation, 'pass for excellent men' [5.1.216]. His own magnificent creation of fairy land in the Athenian wood must have been in his mind, and he asks an indulgent play of fancy not more for Oberon and Titania, the glittering rulers of the elements, who meet —on hill, on dale, forest, or mead, By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or on the beached margent of the sea, To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind, [2.1.83fF.] than for the shrewd and knavish Robin Goodfellow, the lord of practical jokes, or the dull and conceited Bottom, 'the shallowest thick-skin of the barren sort' [3.2.13], rapt so wondrously from his loom and shuttle, his threads and thrums, to be the favoured lover of the Queen of Faery, fresh from the spiced Indian air, and lulled with dances and delight amid the fragrance of the sweetest flowers, filling with their luscious perfume a moonlighted forest. [Maginn expatiates on Bottom's self-conceit, especially of his prowess as an actor, and after a digression contrasting the transitory fame of the actor with 'the author, neglected in his life, and working for immortal renown' (374), returns to Bottom.] It was necessary for his drama to introduce among his fairy party a creature of earth's mould,PI and he has so done it as in the midst of his mirth to convey a picturesque satire on the fortune which governs the world, and upon those passions which elsewhere he had with agitating pathos to depict. As Romeo, the gentleman, is the unlucky man of Shakespeare, so here does he exhibit Bottom, the blockhead, as the lucky man, as him on whom Fortune showers her favours beyond measure. This is the part of the character which cannot be performed. It is here that the greatest talent of the actor must fail in answering the demand made by the author upon our imagination. The utmost lavish of poetry, not only of high conception, but of the most elaborate working in the musical construction of the verse, and a somewhat recondite searching after all the topics favourable to the display of poetic

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eloquence in the ornamental style, is employed in the description of the fairy scenes and those who dwell therein. Language more brilliantly bejewelled with whatever tropes and figures rhetoricians catalogue in their books is not to be found than what is scattered forth with copious hand in Midsummer Night's Dream. The compliment to Queen Elizabeth, 'In maiden meditation fancy free' [2.1.164], was of necessity sugared with all the sweets that the bon-bon box of the poet could supply; but it is not more ornamented than the passages all around. The pastoral images of Corin 'Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love / To amorous Phillida' [2.1.67ff.]; the homely consequences resulting from the fairy quarrel [Quotes 2.1.93-97, describing the ox and the ploughman]; and so on, are ostentatiously contrasted with misfortunes more metaphorically related: We see The seasons alter; hoary-headed frosts Fall on the fresh lap of the crimson rose; And on old Hyems' chin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. [2.1.106ff.]

The mermaid chaunting on the back of her dolphin; the fair vestal throned in the west; the bank blowing with wild thyme, and decked with oxlip and nodding violet; the roundelay of the fairies singing their queen to sleep; and a hundred images beside of aerial grace and mythic beauty, are showered upon us; and in the midst of these splendours is tumbled in Bottom the weaver, blockhead by original formation, and rendered doubly ridiculous by his partial change into a literal jackass. He, the most unfitted for the scene of all conceivable personages, makes his appearance, not as one to be expelled with loathing and derision, but to be instantly accepted as the chosen lover of the Queen of the Fairies. The gallant train of Theseus traverse the forest, but they are not the objects of such fortune. The lady, under the oppression of the glamour cast upon her eyes by the juice of love-in-idleness, reserves her raptures for an absurd clown. Such are the tricks of Fortune. Oberon himself, angry as he is with the caprices of his queen, does not anticipate any such object for her charmed affections. He is determined that she is to be captivated by 'some vile thing,' but he thinks only of'Ounce, or cat, or bear, / Pard, or boar with bristled hair' [2.2.34, 30ff.], animals suggesting ideas of spite or terror; but he does not dream that, under the superintendence of Puck, spirit of mischief, she is to be enamoured of the head of an ass surmounting the body of a weaver. It is so nevertheless; and the love of the lady is as desperate as the deformity of her choice. He is an angel that wakes her from her flowery bed; a gentle mortal, whose enchanting note wins her ear, while his beauteous shape enthralls her eye; one who is as wise as he is beautiful; one for whom all the magic treasures of the fairy kingdom are to be with surpassing profusion dispensed. For him she gathers whatever wealth and delicacies the Land of Faery can boast. Her most airy spirits are ordered to be kind and courteous to this gentleman, — for into that impossible character has the blindness of her love transmuted the clumsy and conceited clown. Apricocks and dewberries, purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries, are to feed his coarse palate; the thighs of

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bees, kindled at the eyes of fiery glow-worms, are to light him to his flower-decked bed; wings plucked from painted butterflies are to fan the moonbeams from him as he sleeps; and in the very desperation of her intoxicating passion she feels that there is nothing which should not be yielded to the strange idol of her soul. She mourns over the restraints which separate her from the object of her burning affection, and thinks that the moon and the flowers participate in her sorrow. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye, And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. [3.1.198ff.] Abstracting the poetry, we see the same thing every day in the plain prose of the world. Many is the Titania driven by some unintelligible magic so to waste her love. Some juice, potent as that of Puck, — the true Cupid of such errant passions, — often converts in the eyes of woman the grossest defects into resistless charms. The lady of youth and beauty will pass by the attractions best calculated to captivate the opposite sex, to fling herself at the feet of age or ugliness. Another, decked with graces, accomplishments, and the gifts of genius, and full of all the sensibilities of refinement, will squander her affections on some good-for-nothing roue, whose degraded habits and pursuits banish him far away from the polished scenes which she adorns. The lady of sixteen quarters will languish for him who has no arms but those which nature has bestowed; from the midst of the gilded salon a soft sigh may be directed towards the thin-clad tenant of a garret; and the heiress of millions may wish them sunken in the sea if they form a barrier between her and the penniless lad toiling for his livelihood, 'Lord of his presence, and no land beside' [King John, 1.1.137]. Fielding has told us all this in his own way, in a distich, (put, I believe, into the mouth of Lord Grizzle; but, as I have not the illustrious tragedy in which it appears, before me, I am not certain, and must therefore leave it to my readers to verify this important point). Love 'Lords into cellars bears, / And bids the brawny porter walk up stairs'.t3! Tom Thumb and Midsummer Night's Dream preach the one doctrine. It would be amusing to trace the courses of thought by which the heterogeneous minds of Fielding and Shakespeare came to the same conclusion. Ill-mated loves are generally but of short duration on the side of the nobler party, and she awakes to lament her folly. The fate of those who suffer like Titania is the hardest. The man who is deprived of external graces of appearance may have the power of captivating by those of the mind: wit, polish, fame, may compensate for the want of youth or personal attractions. In poverty or lowly birth may be found all that may worthily inspire devoted affection — 'The rank is but the guinea's stamp, / The man's the gowd for a' that.'M In the very dunghill of dissipation and disgrace will be raked up occasionally a lurking pearl or two of honourable feeling, or kind emotion, or irregular talent, which may be dwelt upon by the fond eye, wilfully averting its gaze from the miserable mass in which they are buried. But woe unto the unhappy lady who, like Titania, is obliged to confess, when the enchantment has passed by, that she was 'enamoured of an ass!' She must indeed 'loathe his visage' [4.1.77, 79], and the memory of all connected with him is destined ever to be attended by a strong sensation of disgust.

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But the ass himself of whom she was enamoured has not been the less a favourite of Fortune, less happy and self-complacent, because of her late repentance. He proceeds onward as luckily as ever. Bottom, during the time that he attracts the attentions of Titania, never for a moment thinks there is anything extraordinary in the matter. He takes the love of the Queen of the Fairies as a thing of course, orders about her tiny attendants as if they were so many apprentices at his loom, and dwells in Fairy Land unobservant of its wonders, as quietly as if he were still in his workshop. Great is the courage and self-possession of an ass-head. Theseus would have bent in reverent awe before Titania. Bottom treats her as carelessly as if she were the wench of the next-door tapster. Even Christopher Sly,5 when he finds himself transmuted into a lord, shows some signs of astonishment. He does not accommodate himself to surrounding circumstances. The first order he gives is for a pot of small ale; and after all the elegant luxuries of his new situation have been placed ostentatiously before him, — after he has smelt sweet savours, and felt soft things, — after he begins to think he is 'A lord indeed, / And not a tinker nor Christopher(o) Sly' [The Taming of the Shrew, Induction 2.72ff.]; even then nature - or habit, which stands in the place of nature, — recurs invincible, and once more he calls for a pot of the smallest ale. (I may again cite Fielding in illustration of Shakespeare; for do we not read, in the Covent Garden tragedy, of the consolation that 'Cold small beer is to the waking drunkard; '^ and do we not hear the voice of Christopher Sly praying, for God's sake, in the midst of his lordly honours, for a draught of that unlordly but long-accustomed beverage?) In the Arabian Nights' Entertainments a similar trick is played by the Caliph Haroun Al-raschid upon Abou Hassan,^] and he submits, with much reluctance, to believe himself the Commander of the Faithful. But having in vain sought how to explain the enigma, he yields to the belief, and then performs all the parts assigned to him, whether of business or pleasure, of counsel or gallantry, with the easy self-possession of a practised gentleman. Bottom has none of the scruples of the tinker of Burton-heath, or the bon vivant of Bagdad. He sits down amid the fairies as one of themselves without any astonishment; but so far from assuming, like Abou Hassan, the manners of the court where he has been so strangely intruded, he brings the language and bearing of the booth into the glittering circle of Queen Titania. He would have behaved in the same manner on the throne of the caliph, or in the bedizened chamber of the lord; and the ass-head would have victoriously carried him through. Shakespeare has not taken the trouble of working out the conclusion of the adventure of Sly; and the manner in which it is finished in the old play where he found him, is trifling and common-place. The Arabian novelist repeats the jest upon his hero, and concludes by placing him as a favourite in the court of the amused caliph. This is the natural ending of such an adventure; but, as Bottom's was supernatural, it was to conclude differently. He is therefore dismissed to his ordinary course of life, unaffected by what has passed. He admits at first that it is wonderful, but soon thinks it is nothing more than a fit subject for a ballad in honour of his own name. He falls at once to his old habit of dictating, boasting, and swaggering, and makes no reference to what has happened to him in the forest. It was no more than an ordinary passage in his daily life. Fortune knew where to bestow her favours.

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Adieu then, Bottom the weaver! and long may you go onward prospering in your course! But the prayer is needless, for you carry about you the infallible talisman of the ass-head. You will be always sure of finding a Queen of the Fairies to heap her favours upon you, while to brighter eyes and nobler natures she remains invisible or averse. Be you ever the chosen representative of the romantic and the tender before dukes and princesses; and if the judicious laugh at your efforts, despise them in return, setting down their criticism to envy. This you have a right to do. Have they, with all their wisdom and wit, captivated the heart of a Titania as you have done? Not they - nor will they ever. Prosper therefore, with undoubting heart despising the rabble of the wise. Go on your path rejoicing; assert loudly your claim to fill every character in life; and you may be quite sure that as long as the noble race of the Bottoms continues to exist, the chances of extraordinary good luck will fall to their lot, while in the ordinary course of life they will never be unattended by the plausive criticism of a Peter Quince.

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17 Thomas Campbell, critics refuted 1838

From The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. With Remarks on His Life and Writings, by Thomas Campbell (London, 1838). Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) won early fame for his poem The Pleasures of Hope (1799), for which, together with Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), he is best remembered. His major critical work was Specimens of the British Poets; with Biographical and Critical Notices, and an Essay on English Poetry (7 vols, London, 1819). His reputation both in Britain and in Europe was high; among his friends and acquaintance were numbered Scott, Byron, Klopstock, the Schlegels, and the Kembles. His Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834) and his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1838) were the products of his later years and were less esteemed than his earlier works; however, his introductory essay on Shakespeare, translated as 'Remarques sur la vie et les ouvrages de William Shakespeare', was prefixed to the 1839 translation of Shakespeare by Francisque Michel (3 vols, Paris), appearing also in later editions of this translation.

[From the prefatory 'Remarks on the Life and Writings of William Shakespeare', Chapter VII] . . . Of all his works, the Midsummer Night's Dream leaves the strongest impression on my mind, that this miserable world must have, for once at least, contained a happy man. This play is so purely delicious, so little intermixed with the painful passions from which poetry distils her sterner sweets, so fragrant with hilarity, so bland and yet so bold, that I cannot imagine Shakespeare's mind to have been in any other frame than that of healthful ecstacy when the sparks of inspiration thrilled through his brain in composing it. I have heard, however, an old cold critic^ object that Shakespeare might have foreseen it would never be a good acting play, for where could you get actors tiny enough to couch in flower blossoms? Well! I believe no manager was ever so fortunate as to get recruits from Fairy-land, and yet I am told that A Midsummer Night's Dream was some twenty years ago revived at Covent Garden, though altered, of course not much for the better, by Reynolds,PI and that it had a run of eighteen nights: a tolerably good reception. But supposing that it never could have been acted, I should only thank Shakespeare the more that he wrote here as a poet and not as a playwright. And as a birth of his imagination, whether it was to suit the stage or not, can we suppose the poet himself to have been insensible

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of its worth? Is a mother blind to the beauty of her own child? No! nor could Shakespeare be unconscious that posterity would dote on this, one of his loveliest children? How he must have chuckled and laughed in the act of placing the ass's head on Bottom's shoulders. He must have foretasted the mirth of generations unborn at Titania's doating on the metamorphosed weaver, and on his calling for a repast of sweet peas. His animal spirits must have bounded with the hunter's joy, whilst he wrote Theseus's description of his well-tuned dogs and of the glory of the chase. He must have been happy as Puck himself whilst he was describing the merry Fairy, and all this time he must have been self-assured that his genius 'was to cast a girdle round the earth1 [2.1.175], and that souls, not yet in being, were to enjoy the revelry of his fancy. But nothing can be more irregular, says a modern critic, Augustine Skottowe [No. 12 above], than to bring into contact the fairy mythology of modern Europe and the early events of Grecian history. Now, in the plural number, Shakespeare is not amenable to this charge; for he alludes to only one event in that history, namely the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta; and, as to the introduction of fairies, I am not aware that he makes any of the Athenian personages believe in their existence, though they are subject to their influence. Let us be candid on the subject. If there were fairies in modem Europe, which no rational believer in fairy tales will deny, why should those fine creatures not have existed previously in Greece, although the poor blind heathen Greeks, on whom the gospel of Gothic mythology had not yet dawned, had no conception of them? If Theseus and Hippolyta had talked believingly about the dapper elves, there would have been some room for critical complaint; but otherwise the fairies have as good a right to be in Greece in the days of Theseus, as to play their pranks any where else or at any other time. There are few plays, says the same critic, which consist of such incongruous materials as A Midsummer Night's Dream. It comprises four histories, — that of Theseus and Hippolyta, that of the four Athenian Lovers, that of the Actors, and that of the Fairies, and the link of connexion between them is exceedingly slender. In answer to this, I say that the plot contains nothing about any of the four parties concerned approaching to the pretension of a history. Of Theseus and Hippolyta my critic says, that they are uninteresting; but when he wrote that judgment, he must have fallen asleep after the hunting scene. Their felicity is seemingly secure, and it throws a tranquil assurance that all will end well. But the bond of sympathy between Theseus and his four loving subjects is any thing but slender. It is, on the contrary, most natural and probable for a newly-married pair to have patronized their amorous lieges during their honey-moon. Then comes the question, what natural connexion can a party of fairies have with human beings? This is indeed a posing interrogation; and I can only reply, that fairies are an odd sort of beings, whose connexion with mortals can never be set down but as supernatural. Very soon Mr Augustine Skottowe blames Shakespeare for introducing common mechanics as amateur actors during the reign of Theseus in classical Athens. I dare say Shakespeare troubled himself little about Greek antiquities; but here the poet happens to be right, and his critic to be wrong. Athens was not a classical city in the days of Theseus; and, about seven hundred years later than his reign, the players

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of Attica roved about in carts, besmearing their faces with the lees of wine. I have little doubt that, long after the time of Theseus, there were many prototypes of Bottom the weaver and Snug the joiner, in the itinerant acting companies of Attica, (xxxvi-viii)

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18 Henry Hallam, originality in structure, machinery, and language 1839

From Introduction to the Literature of Europe, in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. By Henry Hallam, F.R..A.S. Corresponding Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in the French Institute (4 vols, London, 1839-40). Henry Hallam (1777-1859), educated at Eton and Oxford, began his career as a practising barrister, but on his father's death in 1812 had sufficient means to devote himself to the study of history. Besides the Introduction to the Literature of Europe, his major works are the View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (2 vols, London, 1818) and The Constitutional History of England from the accession of Henry VII to the death of George II (2 vols, London, 1827); all three are ambitious in scope and thorough in execution, and were frequently reprinted. The breadth of his learning allied with educated taste gave his views weight. What should have been a peacefully productive long life was marred by personal tragedy: of the four of his eleven children who survived infancy, three predeceased him. The Introduction to the Literature of Europe was completed in some sense as a memorial to his son Arthur Henry (the subject of Tennyson's In Memoriam) who died in 1833, and his daughter Ellen, who died in 1837.

[From Vol. II, Chapter VI] 39. The beautiful play of Midsummer Night's Dream is placed by Malone as early as 1592; its superiority to those we have already mentioned affords some presumption that it was written after them.f1] But it evidently belongs to the earlier period of Shakespeare's genius; poetical as we account it, more than dramatic, yet rather so, because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses till we can hardly observe any thing else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For in reality the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity of Shakespeare, as much as in any play he has written. No preceding dramatist had attempted to fabricate a complex plot, for low comic scenes, interspersed with a serious action upon which they have no influence, do not merit notice. The

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Menaechmi of Plautus had been imitated by others as well as by Shakespeare; but we speak here of original invention. 40. The Midsummer Night's Dream is, I believe, altogether original in one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet, the fairy machinery. A few before him had dealt in a vulgar and clumsy manner with popular superstitions; but the sportive, beneficent, invisible population of the air and earth, long since established in the creed of childhood, and of those simple as children, had never for a moment been blended with 'human mortals' [2.1.101] among the personages of the drama. Lily's Maid's Metamorphosis is probably later than this play of Shakespeare, and was not published till 1600.2 It is unnecessary to observe that the fairies of Spenser, as he has dealt with them, are wholly of a different race. 41. The language of Midsummer Night's Dream is equally novel with the machinery. It sparkles in perpetual brightness with all the hues of the rainbow; yet there is nothing overcharged or affectedly ornamented. Perhaps no play of Shakespeare has fewer blemishes, or is from beginning to end in so perfect keeping; none in which so few lines could be erased, or so few expressions blamed. His own peculiar idiom, the dress of his mind, which began to be discernible in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, is more frequently manifested in the present play. The expression is seldom obscure, but it is never in poetry, and hardly in prose, the expression of other dramatists, and far less of the people. And here, without reviving the debated question of Shakespeare's learning, I must venture to think, that he possessed rather more acquaintance with the Latin language than many believe. The phrases, unintelligible and improper, except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in his plays, seem to be unaccountable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. In the Midsummer Night's Dream, these are much less frequent than in his later dramas. But here we find several instances. Thus, 'things base and vile, holding no quantity' [1.1.232], for value; rivers, that 'have overborn their continents' [2.1.92], the continente ripa of Horace^3!; 'compact of imagination' [5.1.8]; 'something of great constancy' [5.1.26], for consistency; 'sweet Pyramus translated there' [3.2.32]; 'the law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate' [1.1.119ff.]. I have considerable doubts whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less overrun by pedantry than that of her successor; but, could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one, who did not understand their proper meaning, would have introduced them into poetry. It would be a weak answer that we do not detect in Shakespeare any imitations of the Latin poets. His knowledge of the language may have been chiefly derived, like that of schoolboys, from the dictionary, and insufficient for the thorough appreciation of their beauties. But, if we should believe him well acquainted with Virgil or Ovid, it would be by no means surprising that his learning does not display itself in imitation. Shakespeare seems now and then to have a tinge on his imagination from former passages; but he never designedly imitates, though, as we have seen, he has sometimes adopted. The streams of invention flowed too fast from his own mind to leave him time to accommodate the words of a foreign language to our own. He knew that to create would be easier, and pleasanter, and better.4 (II. 387-90)

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19 Charles Knight, the Pictorial Edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream 1839

From The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare (8 vols, London, 1838-43). Comedies. Volume I. Two Gentlemen of Verona; Love's Labour's Lost; The Merry Wives of Windsor; The Comedy of Errors; The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Merchant of Venice (1839). Charles Knight (1791-1873), author, editor, and publisher, was self-educated. As a young man he wrote a few literary pieces, then became a journalist, and in 1820 began the Plain Englishman, an attempt to dispense useful knowledge to the masses. When that periodical ended in 1823, he tried various other ventures in the same vein. Almost all his life was dedicated to the education of the working class by the dissemination of knowledge through cheap, attractive, and popular publishing. His most successful venture of this kind was the Penny Magazine (1832-45), an illustrated weekly with an early readership of over two hundred thousand. Realizing the value of illustration he produced the Pictorial Bible (1826), the Pictorial History of England (1837-44), and in 1838 the fulfillment of a young ambition, the first number of his Pictorial Shakespeare, which was issued in parts over five years, and then in eight volumes. It had many subsequent editions. He issued many more popular and cheap educational works such as the Penny Cyclopaedia (1833-44), in weekly, then monthly, parts, and, later, a popular history of England in eight volumes (1862). His unselfish dedication to the education of the labouring class caused his friends to call him 'Good Knight'.

[From the 'Introductory Notice' to A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'State of the Text, and Chronology'] A Midsummer Night's Dream was first printed in 1600. In that year there appeared two editions of the play; - the one published by Thomas Fisher, a bookseller; the other by James Roberts, a printer. The differences between these two editions are very slight. Steevens, in his collection of twenty plays, has reprinted that by Roberts, giving the variations of the edition by Fisher. M It is difficult to say whether both of these were printed with the consent of the author, or whether one was genuine and the other pirated. If the entries at Stationers' Hall may be taken as evidence of a proprietary

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right, the edition by Fisher is the genuine one, 'A booke called A Mydsomer Nyghte Dreame' having been entered by him Oct. 8, 1600. One thing is perfectly clear to us — that the original of these editions, whichever it might be, was printed from a genuine copy, and carefully superintended through the press. The text appears to us as perfect as it is possible to be, considering the state of typography in that day. There is one remarkable evidence of this. The prologue to the interlude of the Clowns, in the fifth act, is purposely made inaccurate in its punctuation throughout. The speaker 'does not stand upon points' [5.1.118]. It was impossible to have effected the object better than by the punctuation of Roberts' edition; and this is precisely one of those matters of nicety in which a printer -would have failed, unless he had followed an extremely clear copy, or his proofs had been corrected by an author or an editor. The play was not reprinted after 1600, till it was collected into the folio of 1623; and the text in that edition differs in very few instances, and those very slight ones, from that of the preceding quartos. Malone has assigned the composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the year 1594 [No. 3 above].!2! We are not disposed to object to this, - indeed we are inclined to believe that he has pretty exactly indicated the precise year, as far as it can be proved by one or two allusions which the play contains. But we entirely object to the reasons upon which Malone attempts to show that it was one of our author's 'earliest attempts in comedy.' He derives the proof of this from 'the poetry of this piece, glowing -with all the warmth of a youthful and lively imagination, the many scenes which it contains of almost continual rhyme, the poverty of the fable, and want of discrimination among the higher personages.' Malone would place A Midsummer Night's Dream in the same rank as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Comedy of Errors; and he supposes all of them written within a year or two of each other. We have no objection to believe that our poet wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream when he was thirty years of age, that is in 1594. But it so far exceeds the three other comedies in all the higher attributes of poetry, that we cannot avoid repeating here the opinion which we have so often expressed, that he had written these for the stage before his twenty-fifth year, when he was a considerable share-holder in the Blackfriars' company, some of them, perhaps, as early as 1585, at which period the vulgar tradition assigns to Shakespeare — a husband, a father, and a man conscious of the possession of the very highest order of talent - the dignified office of holding horses at the theatre doorJ3] The year 1594 is, as nearly as possible, the period where we would place A Midsummer Night's Dream, with reference to our strong belief that Shakespeare's earliest plays must be assigned to the commencement of his dramatic career; and that two or three even of his great works had then been given to the world in an unformed shape, subsequently worked up to completeness and perfection. But it appears to us a misapplication of the received meaning of words, to talk of 'the warmth of a youthful and lively imagination' with reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Shakespeare of thirty. We can understand these terms to apply to the unpruned luxuriance of the Venus and Adonis; but the poetry of this piece — the almost continual rhyme — and even the poverty of the fable, are to us evidences of the very highest art having obtained a perfect mastery of its materials after years of patient study. Of all the dramas of Shakespeare there is

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none more entirely harmonious than A Midsummer Night's Dream. All the incidents, all the characters, are in perfect subordination to the will of the poet. 'Throughout the whole piece,' says Malone, 'the more exalted characters are subservient to the interests of those beneath them.' Precisely so. An unpractised author — one who had not in command 'a youthful and lively imagination' - when he had got hold of the Theseus and Hippolyta of the heroic ages, would have made them ultra-heroical. They would have commanded events, instead of moving with the supernatural influence around them in perfect harmony and proportion. 'Theseus, the associate of Hercules, is not engaged in any adventure worthy of his rank or reputation, nor is he in reality an agent throughout the play.' Precisely so. An immature poet, again, if the marvellous creation of Oberon and Titania and Puck could have entered into such a mind, would have laboured to make the power of the fairies produce some strange and striking events. But the exquisite beauty of Shakespeare's conception is, that, under the supernatural influence, 'the human mortals' [2.1.101] move precisely according to their respective natures and habits. Demetrius and Lysander are impatient and revengeful; - Helena is dignified and affectionate, with a spice of female error; — Hermia is somewhat vain and shrewish. And then Bottom! Who but the most skilful artist could have given us such a character? Of him Malone says, 'Shakespeare would naturally copy those manners first, with which he was first acquainted. The ambition of a theatrical candidate for applause he has happily ridiculed in Bottom the weaver.' A theatrical candidate for applause! Why, Bottom the weaver is the representative of the whole human race. His confidence in his own power is equally profound, whether he exclaims, 'Let me play the lion too' [1.2.70]; or whether he sings alone, 'that they shall hear I am not afraid' [3.1.123ff.]; or whether, conscious that he is surrounded with spirits, he cries out, with his voice of authority, 'Where's Peas-blossom' [4.1.5]? In every situation Bottom is the same, - the same personification of that self-love which the simple cannot conceal, and the wise can with difficulty suppress. Malone thus concludes his analysis of the internal evidence of the chronology of A Midsummer Night's Dream: — 'That a drama, of which the principal personages are thus insignificant, and the fable thus meagre and uninteresting, was one of our author's earliest compositions, does not, therefore seem a very improbable conjecture; nor are the beauties with which it is embellished inconsistent with this supposition.' The beauties with which it is embellished include, of course, the whole rhythmical structure of the versification. The poet has here put forth all his strength. We venture to offer an opinion that if any single composition were required to exhibit the power of the English language for purposes of poetry, that composition would be the Midsummer Night's Dream. This wonderful model which, at the time it appeared, must have been the commencement of a great poetical revolution, — and which has never ceased to influence our higher poetry, from Fletcher to Shelley - was, according to Malone, the work of'the genius of Shakespeare, even in its minority.' Mr. Hallam has, as might be expected, taken a much more correct view of this question than Malone. He places A Midsummer Night's Dream among the early plays; but having mentioned The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew, he adds, 'its superiority to those we have

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already mentioned affords some presumption that it was written after them' [No. 18 above]. A Midsummer Night's Dream is mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598. The date of the first publication of the play, therefore, in 1600, does not tend to fix its chronology. Nor is it very material to ascertain whether it preceded 1598 by three, or four, or five years. The state of the weather in 1593 and 1594, when England was visited with peculiarly ungenial seasons, may have suggested Titania's beautiful description in Act II, Scene I [2.1.88-114] The allusion of two lines in Act IV is by no means so clear: — The thrice three muses mourning for the death Of learning, late deceas'd in beggary. [5.1.52ff.] This passage was once thought to allude to the death of Spenser. But the misfortunes and the death of Spenser did not take place till 1599. Even if the allusion were inserted between the first production of the piece, and its publication in 1600, it is difficult to understand how an elegy on the great poet could have been called — 'Some satire keen and critical' [5.1.54]. T. Warton suggested 'that Shakespeare here, perhaps, alluded to Spenser's poem, entitled "The Tears of the Muses, on the Neglect and Contempt of Learning." This piece first appeared in quarto, with others, 1591.'W We greatly doubt the propriety of this conjecture, which Malone has adopted. Spenser's poem is certainly a satire in one sense of the word; for it makes the Muses lament that all the glorious productions of men that proceeded from their influence had vanished from the earth. All that — was wont to work delight Through the divine infusion of their skill, And all that els seemd fair and fresh in sight, So made by nature for to serve their will, Was turned now to dismall heavinesse, Was turned now to dreadful uglinesse. Clio complains that mighty peers 'only boast of arms and ancestry;' Melpomene that 'all man's life me seems a tragedy;' Thalia is 'made the servant of the many;' Euterpe weeps that 'now no pastoral is to be heard;' and so onJ5J These laments do not seem to be identical with the ' — mourning for the death / Of learning, late deceas'd in beggary.' These expressions are too precise and limited to refer to the tears of the Muses for the decay of knowledge and art. We cannot divest ourselves of the belief that some real person, and some real death, was alluded to. May we hazard a conjecture? - Greene, a man of learning, and one whom Shakespeare in the generosity of his nature might wish to point at kindly, died in 1592, in a condition that might truly be called beggary. But how was his death, any more than that of Spenser, to be the occasion of 'some satire keen and critical?' Every student of our literary history will remember the famous controversy of Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, which was begun by Harvey's publication, in 1592, of 'Four Letters, and certain Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene, and other parties by him abused.' Robert Greene was dead; but Harvey came forward, in revenge of an incautious

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attack of the unhappy poet, to satirize him in his grave — to hold up his vices and his misfortunes to the public scorn — to be 'keen and critical' upon 'learning, late deceas'd in beggary.' The conjecture which we offer may have little weight, and the point is certainly of very small consequence. (I, 331-3) [From the 'Supplementary Notice' to A Midsummer Night's Dream] 'This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard' [5.1.210], says Hippolyta, when Wall has 'discharged' his part. The answer of Theseus is full of instruction: — 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them' [5.1.21 Iff.]. It was in this humble spirit that the great poet judged of his own matchless performances. He felt the utter inadequacy of his art, and indeed of any art, to produce its due effect upon the mind unless the imagination, to which it addressed itself, was ready to convert the shadows which it presented into living forms of truth and beauty. 'I am convinced,' says Coleridge, 'that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout' [No. 15 above]. The poet says so, in express words: — [Quotes 5.1.423-9: 'If we shadows have offended. . . .']. But to understand this dream — to have all its gay, and soft, and harmonious colours impressed upon the vision — to hear all the golden cadences of its poesy — to feel the perfect congruity of all its parts, and thus to receive it as a truth — we must not suppose that it will enter the mind amidst the lethargic slumbers of the imagination. We must receive it — 'As youthful poets dream / On summer eves by haunted stream.'M Let no one expect that the beautiful influences of this drama can be truly felt when he is under the subjection of the literal and prosaic parts of our nature; or, if he habitually refuses to believe that there are higher and purer regions of thought than are supplied by the physical realities of the world. In these cases he will have a false standard by which to judge of this, and of all other high poetry — such a standard as that possessed by a critic — acute, learned, in many respects wise — Dr. Johnson, who lived in a prosaic age, and fostered in this particular the real ignorance by which he was surrounded. He sums up the merits of A Midsummer Night's Dream, after this extraordinary fashion: — 'Wild and fantastical as this play is, all the parts in their various modes are well written, and give the kind of pleasure which the author designed. Fairies, in his time, were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great.'^ It is perfectly useless to attempt to dissect such criticism: let it be a beacon to warn us, and not a 'load-star' to guide us. Mr. Hallam accounts A Midsummer Night's Dream poetical, more than dramatic; 'yet rather so, because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses, till we can hardly observe anything else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For, in reality, the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity, of Shakespeare, as much as in any play he has written' [No. 18 above]. Yet, certainly, with all its harmony of dramatic arrangement, this play is not for the stage — at least not for the modern stage. It may reasonably be

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doubted whether it was ever eminently successful in performance. The tone of the epilogue is decidedly apologetic, and 'the best of this kind are but shadows'[5.1.211], is in the same spirit. Hazlitt has admirably described its failure as an acting drama in his own day: — [Quotes from No. 10: 'The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted . . . to personate Wall or Moonshine'.] And yet, just and philosophical as are these remarks [of Hazlitt], they offer no objection to the opinion of Mr. Hallam, that in this play there is no deficiency of dramatic excellence. We can conceive that, with scarcely what can be called a model before him, Shakespeare's early dramatic attempts must have been a series of experiments to establish a standard by which he should regulate what he addressed to a mixed audience. The plays of his middle and mature life, with scarcely an exception, are acting plays; and they are so, not from the absence of the higher poetry, but from the predominance of character and passion in association with it. But even in those plays which call for a considerable exercise of the unassisted imaginative faculty in an audience,such as The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the passions are not powerfully roused, and the senses are not held enchained by the interests of a plot, he is still essentially dramatic. What has been called of late years the dramatic poem - that something between the epic and the dramatic, which is held to form an apology for whatever of episodical or incongruous the author may choose to introduce — was unattempted by him. The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher — a poet who knew how to accommodate himself to the taste of a mixed audience more readily than Shakespeare — was condemned on the first night of its appearance. Seward, one of his editors, calls this the scandal of our nation.t8] And yet it is extremely difficult to understand how the event should have been otherwise; for The Faithful Shepherdess is essentially undramatic. Its exquisite poetry was therefore thrown away upon an impatient audience - its occasional indelicacy could not propitiate them. Milton's Comus is in the same way essentially undramatic; and none but such a refined audience as that at Ludlow Castle could have endured its representation. But the Midsummer Night's Dream is composed altogether upon a different principle. It exhibits all that congruity of parts - that natural progression of scenes — that subordination of action and character to one leading design - that ultimate harmony evolved out of seeming confusion - which constitute the dramatic spirit. With 'audience fit, though few,'t9] -with a stage not encumbered "with decorations, — with actors approaching (if it were so possible) to the idea of grace and archness which belong to the fairy troop — the subtle and evanescent beauties of this drama might not be wholly lost in the representation. But under the most favourable circumstances much would be sacrificed. It is in the closet that we must not only suffer our senses to be overpowered by its 'indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry,' but trace the instinctive felicity of Shakespeare in the 'structure of the fable.' If the Midsummer Night's Dream could be acted, there can be no doubt how well it would act. Our imagination must amend what is wanting. Schlegel has happily remarked upon this drama, that 'the most extraordinary combination of the most dissimilar ingredients seems to have arisen without effort by some ingenious and lucky accident; and the colours are of such clear transparency, that we think the whole of the variegated fabric may be blown away

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with a breath' [No. 8 above]. It is not till after we have attentively studied this wonderful production that we understand how solidly the foundations of the fabric are laid. Theseus and Hippolyta move with a stately pace as their nuptial hour draws on. Hermia takes time to pause, before she submits — 'To death, or to a vow of single life' [1.1.121], — secretly resolving 'through Athens' gates to steal' [1.1.213]. Helena, in the selfishness of her own love, resolves to betray her friend. Bottom the weaver, and Quince the carpenter, and Snug the joiner, and Flute the bellows-mender, and Snout the tinker, and Starveling the tailor, are 'thought fit through all Athens to play in the interlude before the Duke and Duchess on his wedding-day, at night' [1.2.5ff.]. Here are, indeed, 'dissimilar ingredients.' They appear to have no aptitude for combination. The artists are not yet upon the scene, who are to make a mosaic out of these singular materials. We are only presented in the first act with the extremes of high and low — with the slayer of the Centaurs, and the weaver, who 'will roar you an 'twere any nightingale' [1.2.83ff.], — with the lofty Amazon, who appears elevated above woman's hopes and fears, and the pretty and satirical Hermia, who swears — 'By all the vows that ever men have broke, / In number more than ever woman spoke' [1.1.175ff.]. 'The course of true love' does not at all 'run smooth' [1.1.134] in these opening scenes. We have the love that is crossed, and the love that is unrequited; and worse than all, the unhappiness of Helena makes her treacherous to her friend. We have little doubt that all this will be set straight in the progress of the drama; but what Quince and his company will have to do with the untying of this knot is a mystery. To offer an analysis of this subtle and ethereal drama would, we believe, be as unsatisfactory as the attempts to associate it with the realities of the stage. With scarcely an exception, the proper understanding of the other plays of Shakespeare may be assisted by connecting the apparently separate parts of the action, and by developing and reconciling what seems obscure and anomalous in the features of the characters. But to follow out the caprices and illusions of the loves of Demetrius and Lysander, — of Helena and Hermia; — to reduce to prosaic description the consequence of the jealousies of Oberon and Titania; - to trace the Fairy Queen under the most fantastic of deceptions, where grace and vulgarity blend together like the Cupids and Chimeras of Raphael's Arabesques; and, finally, to go along with the scene till the illusions disappear — till the lovers are happy, and 'sweet bully Bottom' [5.1.19] is reduced to an ass of human dimensions; — such an attempt as this would be worse even than unreverential criticism. No, — the Midsummer Night's Dream must be left to its own influences. . . . (I, 381-3)

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20 William Spalding, the poet's dream 1840

From 'Recent Shakespearean Literature', The Edinburgh Review, 71 (July, 1840), 446-93. William Spalding (1809-1859) was successively professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres in the University of Edinburgh (from 1840) then professor of logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics in the University of St. Andrews (from 1845). His History of English Literature received 14 editions between 1853 and 1883, and two German translations in 1854 (in Halle and Breslau). His three-volume work on Italy and the Italian Islands (Edinburgh, 1830) also went through numerous editions. Apart from essays in the Edinburgh Review, his major contribution to Shakespearean studies was A Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of the "Two Noble Kinsmen" (Edinburgh, 1833; reprinted by the New Shakespeare Society, London, 1876).

The Midsummer Night's Dream is what its title indicates — a dream over which broods the magical dimness of a summer night, half hiding and half revealing scenes where nature slumbers in her most luxuriant beauty. But it is also the dream of a poet — such a dream as no poet save one ever dreamt. Every thing is visionary, every thing unreal, but unreal and visionary as the shapes are which Sleep brings on its wings from the world of Thought; and visionary and unreal in the sense and manner in which those images are so, which would visit thus the fancy of one, whose waking meditations were equally at home in the turmoil of crowded life and by the solitary edge of the haunted stream. The characters who step forward, the feelings they evince, the acts they do, all partake of the same aerial nature. Four groups of figures, in themselves incongruous, and scarcely by any invention capable of being united in actual life, mingle in the tumult of this witching night of Saint John;M and as we gaze on them through the shadowy moonlight, they become harmonized to the mind's eye as completely as the wildest apparitions are harmonized in the fancy of the sleeper. The fairy band who hover half unseenBy paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or on the beached margent of the sea;— [2.1.84ff.] the two heroic figures of the vision, heroically and gorgeously coloured, the Grecian hero of a thousand tales and his warrior-love, the buskined Amazon — the Athenian lovers, poetical in their fancy, but real in the weakness and inconstancy of their

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affection — the cluster of ambitious artisans, unconsciously holding up poetry, and dramatic art, and the tragedy of life itself, as a theme of merriment — where did such groups ever encounter, where did such ever act upon each other, except in the young dreamer's brain? And where did such groups ever appear in successful dramatic combination, except in this one work, the most purely poetical of all its author's compositions, and also one of the most highly finished? (479-80)

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21 James Orchard Halliwell, anachronisms, Nick Bottom as Midas, and stage representation 1841

From An Introduction to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (London, 1841). James Orchard Halliwell (1820-1889), a prodigiously industrious scholar and indefatigable collector of manuscripts and books, had already published three books and several essays before he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Society in 1839, before his nineteenth birthday. His first three works on Shakespeare all appeared in 1841: this Introduction, an essay on Falstaff, and a catalogue of early editions and commentaries. The chief Shakespearean fruit of his middle years was his copiously annotated and lavishly produced folio edition of Shakespeare's works (16 vols, London, 1853-65). In later years his interest in Shakespeare was biographical: his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare appeared in five ever-enlarged editions between 1881 and 1887. In 1874 he added his wife's name to his, in order to be able to administer her estate, and is now generally known as Halliwell-Phillipps. The three hundred volumes of correspondence that he left to Edinburgh University attest that not even Christmas Day was allowed to interrupt the exchange of letters among Victorian Shakespearean scholars.

[From Chapter I: 'Introduction — Title — Anachronisms'] We shall not here pause to consider those, if any there be, who despise even the most minute illustration of the works of our great dramatist. The merits of those works are beyond the reach of criticism, in the common acceptation of the term, and an unanimous voice has pronounced every thing relating to them and their author, hallowed and sacred. The judgment of time has classed them amongst the noblest productions of human genius, and nothing now remains for us, but to hail them as the immortal progeny of an immortal author. But the high privilege to which such an author may lay claim, by no means descends to his editors or commentators; and we predict, that many years must yet elapse, ere that complete inquiry into Shakespeare's language and allusions, without which the spirit of his writings can never be fully understood or appreciated, can be presented to the view of the general reader by means of a commentary. It is with

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this conviction, that we venture to place the following observations on one of the most remarkable of his plays before the notice of the public. The very name of A Midsummer Night's Dream has furnished a subject for discussion. The time of the action is on the night preceding May-day. Theseus goes out a maying, and when he finds the lovers, he observes:— 'No doubt they rose up early, to observe / The rite of May' [4.1.132ff.]. 'I am convinced,' says Coleridge, 'that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout' [No. 15 above]. Such was no doubt the case, and may we not conclude, that the first idea of the play was conceived on Midsummer Night? . . . The title doubtlessly refers to the whole piece, and not to any particular part of it. The poet himself says:— [Quotes 5.1.423-9: 'If we shadows have offended. . . . ' ] . . . . Malone [No. 3 above] thinks that the title of the play was suggested by the season in which it was introduced on the stage. The misnomer, however, if it is one, does not imply a greater anachronism than several which the play itself presents. For instance, Theseus marries Hippolyta on the night of the new moon; but how does this agree with the discourse of the clowns at the rehearsal? [Quotes 3.1.51-8: 'Doth the moon shine that night. . . .']. Again, the period of action is four days, concluding with the night of the new moon. But Hermia and Lysander receive the edict of Theseus four days before the new moon; they fly from Athens 'to-morrow night' [1.1.209]; they become the sport of the fairies, along with Helena and Demetrius, during one night only, for, Oberon accomplishes all in one night, before 'the first cock crows' [2.1.267]; and the lovers are discovered by Theseus the morning before that which would have rendered this portion of the plot chronologically consistent. For, although Oberon, addressing his queen, says, Now thou and I are new in amity; And will, to-morrow midnight, solemnly, Dance in Duke Theseus' house triumphantly. [4.1.87-9] yet Theseus, when he discovers the lovers, asks Egeus, 'is not this the day / That Hermia should give answer of her choice' [4.1.135ff.]? and the answer of Egeus, 'It is, my Lord,' coupled with what Theseus says to Hermia in the first Act — [Quotes 1.1.83-90: 'Take time to pause. . . .'] proves that the action of the remaining part of the play is not intended to consist of two days. The preparation and rehearsal of the interlude present similar inconsistencies. In Act i., Sc. 2, Quince is the only one who has any knowledge of the 'most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe' [1.2.1 Iff.], and he selects actors for Thisby's mother, Pyramus's father, and Thisby's father, none of whom appear in the interlude itself. In Act iii., Sc. 1, we have the commencement of the play in rehearsal, none of which appears in the piece itself. Again, the play could have been but partially rehearsed once; for Bottom only returns in time to advise 'every man look o'er his part' [4.2.37ff.]; and immediately before his companions were lamenting the failure of their 'sport' [4.2.17]. How then could the 'merry tears' [5.1.69] of Philostrate be shed at its rehearsal?

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But all these merely tend to prove that Shakespeare wrote with no classical rules before him, and do not in the least detract from the most beautiful poetical drama in this or any other language. Shakespeare was truly the child of nature, and when we find Hermia, contemporary with Theseus, swearing 'by that fire which burn'd the Carthage queen, / When the false Trojan under sail was seen' [1.1.173fE], the anachronism is so palpable to any one of classical acquirements, that the evident conclusion is, that we must receive his works as the production of a genius unfettered by the knowledge of more philosophical canons, and of a power which enabled the bard to create, assisted only by the then barren field of his country's literature, that which 'was not of an age, but for all time.'W This, we are convinced, must be the conclusion of all who read the works of Shakespeare in a proper spirit, unbiassed by the prejudices of a prosaic age; and it is only then that they can really hear him, as 'Fancy's child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild.'Pl (1-5) [From Chapter III: ' . . . Midas — Bottom the Weaver'] [He treats some sources, such as Chaucer, and Golding's Ovid, and prints in full a ballad of Ovid's tale of Midas's ass's ears (Metamorphoses, 11.146-92).] We consider this tale of the transformation of the ears of Midas to have furnished Shakespeare with the notion of causing a similar change to take place in the appearance of Bottom the weaver. We would be understood not to refer to any portion of his plot, but merely to the single idea of the transformation; and even if our conjecture be right, we think it possible that Shakespeare might only have been influenced in his choice by a slight recollection of it. The only verbal similarity is in the last line of the ballad — 'Even so I would they had hysfayre long eares.' and Titania's invitation to the WeaverCome, sit thee down upon this flowery bed, While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy^atV large ears, my gentle joy.' [4.1.Iff.] There is perhaps nothing very remarkable in this coincidence; but let us read a little further on:Tita. What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love? Bot. I HAVE A REASONABLE GOOD EAR IN MUSIC: let us have the tongs and the bones. [4.1.27fF.] How pointless is Bottom's answer taken separately, and yet how full of rich satire and humour, if the speaker be considered a second Midas! Bottom had not, like Midas, received the asses head, as a punishment for his presumption, ignorance, and self-conceit; but, even in that point of view, the metamorphosis would have been justifiable; and, at the risk of being thought to overstep the bounds of probability, we are glad to convict our poet of one very good joke.3 The tale of Midas is of course to be found in Golding's Ovid, a book with which

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Shakespeare was, beyond all doubt, very intimately acquainted. The ballad we have given, moreover, if it fail to convince our readers of the correctness of the view we have taken, will serve as a striking example of the popular manner in which the mythological tales of the ancients were then made current among all classes. Before we change the subject, we will take the opportunity of saying a few words relative to the character of Bottom the weaver. There is a connexion between this name and the trade, which the obsoleteness of the term has caused to escape the commentators. A ball of thread wound upon any cylindrical body was formerly called A BOTTOM OF THREAD. How appropriate a name then for a weaver! We can furnish our readers with an allusion to this mode of designation. It occurs in a rare little book, called Grange's Garden, 4to. Lond. 1577:A bottome for your silke it seemes, My letters are become, Whiche, with oft winding off and on, Are wasted whole and some. Nick Bottom was the name of our weaver. We suspect, from the following contemporary epigram, that the first name was common for professors of that trade:'Nicke, the weaver's boy, is dead and gone, / Surely his life was but a thrume.'4 Our readers will immediately call to mind the invocation of Bottom, in the part of Pyramus, while reciting his 'last dying speech:' — 'O fates! come, come; / Cut thread and thrum' [5.1.285ff.]. (19-21) [From Chapter V: 'Representation on the Stage'] We agree with Mr. Heraud in his opinion, that the alleged unfltness of the Midsummer Night's Dream for representation on the stage is founded on incorrect dataJ5! In fact, the success that has attended its recent production at Covent Garden Theatre entirely controverts Mr. Knight's assertion, that 'this play, with all its harmony of dramatic arrangement, is not for the stage — at least, for the modern stage' [No. 19 above]. It must, however, be admitted, that for a length of time the revivals of this drama have not been by any means eminently successful; but to attribute this to the play itself being too etherially poetic for the stage, is, we conceive, adopting too hasty a conclusion. 'There is no drama,' observes Mr. Heraud, 'but what is so strictly considered;'^] and does not the poet himself say — 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if our imagination amend them' [5.1.211ff.]. It is most probable, that the extreme difficulty of personating the characters of Oberon and the four lovers with advantage, and of procuring, at the same time, actors fitted by their peculiar talents for those parts, are the principal causes of failure. Even in the present unrivalled cast of the play as performed at Covent Garden Theatre, where Oberon is very charmingly represented by Mrs. Charles Mathews, one of the most distinguished actresses of our time; yet it is no disparagement to say of the four who personate the lovers, and who are all in excellent repute, that only one is really fitted for the complete realization of Shakespeare's ideas.7 [Halliwell touches on performances and adaptations from the seventeenth century to Reynolds in 1816.]

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But all these representations of the Midsummer Night's Dream must give place to its present revival at Covent Garden Theatre. Every thing that fine taste, a most liberal management, and an excellent cast could accomplish, have been called into action; and its success must have equalled the most sanguine expectations of the projectors. The alterations from the original version of the play are few, and made with that good judgment which characterizes every thing that Mr. Planche undertakes. We would, however, suggest that the omission which is made of a portion of Hermia's speech, when she loses Lysander, destroys the climax, and causes the whole to fall languidly on the ear; it is better as it is in the original:— [Quotes 2.2.151-6: 'Lysander! what, remov'd ']& We would also ask how Theseus, unassisted by the Prologue's description of the dumb show, which Mr. Planche has omitted, can recognize the representation of moonshine? We are afraid that few of us possess so penetrating a vision; but perhaps the heroes of old excelled the moderns in this as in other attributes. (45-52)

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22 Nicholasjohn Halpin, Oberon's Vision allegorized 1843

From Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer-Night's Dream, Illustrated by a Comparison with Lylie's Endymion (London, 1843). Nicholasjohn Halpin (1790-1850) received his B. A. from Dublin University in 1815, became a clergyman, and then editor of Dublin's main Protestant newspaper, the Evening Mail. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy. During his life he wrote several essays on religious matters, and, beside his main book on Shakespeare, two papers — one on Juliet's soliloquy, and one on the dramatic unities in the plays. Halpin's interpretation of Oberon's vision was first suggested by James Boaden in On the Sonnets of Shakespeare (London, 1837).

[Halpin interprets Oberon's vision [2.1.148-69] as an allegory, W with the 'fair vestal' as Queen Elizabeth (who is also associated with the Moon, and 'Dian's bud'), Cupid as Leicester, the flower 'love in idleness' as Lettice Knollys -wife of the Earl of Essex, and the event the entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575. He finds a close allegorical parallel in Lyly's Endymion (1591) where he casts Endymion as Leicester, Cynthia (the Moon) as Queen Elizabeth, Tellus as Lady Douglas Countess of Sheffield, and Floscula as Lettice Knollys. After 90 pages he summarizes:] The story is an eventful one. It involves the fate of princes, statesmen, and nobles, and is therefore fitly ushered in with portents, which, in the universal belief of the time, omened the fortunes of the great. The mermaid singing her enchantments — a superstition descended from the ancient fable of the syrens — was the old and apposite type of those female seductions generally so fatal to their objects. The 'stars shooting madly from their spheres' [2.1.153] were, in that stage of the march of intellect, the prodigies which foreboded disasters to the great. The whole literature of that period abounds with allusions to those 'skiey influences' [Measure for Measure, 3.1.9]. On this occasion, the phenomenon seems to have signified a Star — a high and mighty potentate — wildly rushing from the sphere of the bright and lofty Moon — a princess of the highest rank - darting beneath the attractions of the Earth - another lady, but of inferior grade — and falling in a jelly, as falling stars are apt to do, on the lap of Love in idleness, an emblematic flower, signifying, in the typical language of the day, a mistress in concealment. The time and place of such prodigies would properly indicate the time and place of the events which they foreboded. We must recollect that, in this case, the prodigies are poetical - imaginary;

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the artificial portents caught by the Poet's eye from the actual pageantry which accompanied the real transactions. Let us now compare the poetical allegory (in juxtaposition) with a simple paraphrase of the literal meaning which has been assigned to it; and if the result be not a conviction that the parallel is too exact to be the offspring of chance, and the harmony too unconstrained and natural to be the accord of any thing but truth, I shall freely confess that my imagination has very grossly imposed upon my senses. Text. OBERON My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest, When once I sat upon a promontory2, And saw

a mermaid on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious sounds, That the rude sea grew civil at her song;

And certain stars shot madly

from their spheres

To hear the sea-maid's music. PUCK.

/ remember.

Paraphrase. OBERON Come hither, Puck. You doubtless remember when, once upon a time, sitting together on a rising ground, or bray2, by the side of a piece of water, we saw what to us appeared (though to others it might have worn a different semblance) a mermaid sitting on a dolphin's back, and singing so sweetly to the accompaniment of a band of music placed inside of the artificial dolphin, that one could very well imagine the waves of the mimic sea before us would, had they been ruffled, have calmed and settled themselves down to listen to her melody; and, at the same time, there "was a flight of artificial fireworks resembling stars, which plunged very strangely out of their natural element down into the water, and, after remaining there a while, rose again into the air, as if wishing to hear once more the sea-maid's music. PUCK. I remember such things to have been exhibited amongst the pageantry at Kenilworth Castle, during the Princely Pleasures given on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1575.

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OBERON. That very time I saw —

(but thou couldst not,)

Flying between the cold Moon and the Earth, Cupid (if the reading of Warburton be right) [alarmed]

(or, if the old reading be preferred) all-armed,

A certain aim he took At a fair Vestal throned by the West; And loosed a love-shaft madly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams

ofthewat'ry Moon; And the imperial Votaress passed on,

OBERON. You are right. Well, at that very time and place, I, (and perhaps a few others of the choicer spirits,) could discern a circumstance that was imperceptible to you (and the meaner multitude of guests and visitants): in fact, I saw — wavering in his passion between (Cynthia, or) Queen Elizabeth, and (Tellus, or) the Lady Douglas, Countess of Sheffield, (Endymion, or) the Earl of Leicester,

[either alarmed at the progress of his rival, the Duke of Alencon, with the Queen, or]

all-armed, in the magnificence of his preparations for storming the heart of his Royal Mistress. He made a predetermined and a well-directed effort for the hand of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of England; and presumptuously made such love to her — rash under all the circumstances — as if he fancied that neither she nor any woman in the world could resist his suit: but it was evident to me, (and to the rest of the initiated,) that the ardent Leicester's desperate venture was lost in the pride, prudery, and jealousy of power, which invariably swayed the tide of Elizabeth's passions; and the Virgin Queen finally departed from Kenil-

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In maiden meditation, fancy-free,

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white;

now purple with Love's wound:

And maidens

call it Love in Idleness3.

Fetch me that flower. (90-5)

worth Castle unshackled with a matrimonial engagement, and as heart-whole as ever. And yet (continues Oberon), curious to observe the collateral issues of this amorous preparation, I watched (whatever others may have done) and discovered the person on whom Leicester's irregular passion was secretly fixed: it was fixed upon Lettice, at that time the wife of Walter Earl of Essex, an Englishwoman of rank inferior to the object of his great ambition; who, previous to this unhappy attachment, was not only pure and innocent in conduct, but unblemished also in reputation; after which she became not only deeply inflamed with a criminal passion, and still more deeply (perhaps) stained with a husband's blood, but the subject, also, of shame and obloquy. Those, however, who pity her weakness, and compassionate her misery, still offer a feeble apology for her conduct, by calling it the result of her husband's voluntary absence, of the waste of affections naturally tender and fond, and of the idleness of a heart that might have been faithful if busied with honest duties, and filled with domestic loves. You cannot mistake, after all I have said — Go - fetch me that flower.

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. . . But I cannot leave the subject without returning to the post from which I started. Whether I have hit the true secret or not, it is indisputable that the whole of the Endymion and that part of the Midsummer Night's Dream distinguished as Oberon's Vision, relate to some romantic adventure, some affair of the heart, in which that coy Princess, Queen Elizabeth, was deeply and personally interested. The objection to personalities cannot reach my side of the question till it has passed throught the ribs of this; for, whatever be the story allegorised, -whether mine or any other, the fact of the poet's having crossed the threshold of domestic life, and presumed in her own presence to depict the character and private circumstances of the reigning sovereign, is beyond dispute. (107)

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23 Bryan Waller Procter, fairy drama and human nature 1843

From The Works of Shakespeare Revised from the best Authorities: with a Memoir, and Essay on his Genius, by Barry Cornwall: also, Annotations and Introductory Remarks on the Plays, by many Distinguished Writers: Illustrated with Engravings on Wood, from Designs by Kenny Meadows (3 vols, London, 1843). Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), poet, playwright, songwriter, biographer, editor, published under the name of Barry Cornwall (the addition of Peter makes the anagram on his real name complete). From Byron (with whom he attended Harrow), Hunt and Lamb to Dickens, Browning and Swinburne, he was the friend and supporter of many of the eminent writers of the century. His congenial personality perhaps won for him praise beyond the merits of his writings (his daughter Adelaide's poem 'A Lost Chord', especially in its musical setting 'The Lost Chord', remains more famous than any of his). However, his tragedy of Mirandola had a successful run at Covent Garden in 1821 (with Charles Kemble in a leading role), his songs were long admired on both sides of the Atlantic, his biography of Charles Lamb remains valuable, and his very popular edition of Shakespeare was frequently reprinted.

[From 'A Memoir of and Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare'] There is no space here to go through the tragic and comic plays seriatim, and shew their manifold wonders. They are each beyond rivalry in their way: although the tragedy is superior to the comedy, by so much as that which is serious is superior to that which is jocose. This has been already insisted upon by other writers. But let us not forget the fairy dramas. The Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream deserve a better defender than I can hope to be. The supernatural machinery which Shakespeare has adopted in these and other plays has been decried, as being little better than that of nursery fables. This, as it appears to me, is mistaking the quality and object of a play. The supernatural is a legitimate portion of the drama. It is as much so as any circumstance which we are apt to call improbable or unnatural, but which in every instance has been outdone by facts. All depends on the mode of introducing the supernatural, and on the use made of it by the poet. Whatever affects the imagination, and excites the sympathies of an audience, may be pronounced fit

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for the stage. It is only when the childish and ignorant are wrought upon, leaving the mature mind unaffected, that the supernatural becomes absurd. It is, in short, the quantity of intellect thrown into fictions of this order, which determines their general fitness to appear before the world. Taking into consideration the mechanism and general exterior of a represented play, all plays commence as improbabilities. No one begins by being deluded. He knows at the outset that a wooden stage is before him, and that actors are about to represent a fiction. But if, with this indispensable disadvantage, the poet succeeds in exciting the sympathy of the spectator, and makes him for awhile forget the humble appliances of his art, then the drama may be said to be triumphant. In reference to this subject, it should not be forgotten that many characters and effects have been brought upon the stage, which certainly never had any existence in the history of human affairs. These are as essentially opposed to fact as the fairies and ghosts of Shakespeare; and yet we do not object to them, because we say that they are 'natural.' But, are not Titania and Oberon natural? Is not Ariel natural? Is not Caliban natural? nay, is he not a thousand times more natural and more impressive than the pompous perfections and inflated heroes of the French stage? (I.xx-xxi) [From 'Introductory Remarks' to A Midsummer Night's Dream] Variegated, light, and splendid as though woven in the woof of Iris, the wondrous texture of this enchanting Dream is yet of stamina to last till doomsday. 'Such tricks hath strong imagination' [5.1.18]! Like gravitation in the substantial world, its influence pervades the whole domain of moral nature, and compels materials apparently the most discordant to revolve in harmony round one bright vivifying centre. Never was this divine impulsive property of intellect more finely exemplified than in the Elysian scene that here presents itself. The stately heroes and heroines of Grecian story move in soft unison with the beautiful creations of the Gothic mythology—quaint, rich, and fantastic as the ornaments of our matchless Gothic fanes; while all are bound up and blended with a plenteous exhibition of the joys and the sorrows, the constancy and the faithfulness,^ the sense and the absurdity, that in every age and every clime have characterized our inconsistent, yet exalted human nature. Theseus and his Amazonian love, although invested, for the most part, with an air of classic coldness, at times give indications of being instinct with Shakespearian fire. There is a fine touch of feminine feeling in Hippolyta's expressed dislike 'to see wretchedness o'ercharged, and duty in his service perishing' [5.1.85ff.]. The answer of Theseus breathes the very spirit of a generous philosophy. Their conversation, too, while preparing for the chace, is animated with a glowing sense of animal enjoyment that rises into strenuous poetry. Altogether, these warlike lovers present a very gratifying specimen of the heroic character in repose. The language of the amorous 'human mortals' [2.1.101], while doomed to illustrate the pathetic adage that 'the course of true love never did run smooth' [1.1.134], is fraught with sweetness gathered from the purest flowers of Parnassus. The pains and pleasures, the exalting and debasing influences of the universal

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passion, are delineated with surpassing truth and beauty. Under its resistless spell, the charming Helena betrays her friend, for the sake of a short-lived interview with her revolted and contemptuous lover. Her subsequent unshaken patience, however, and exquisite expostulation with Hermia, amply atone for the solitary error springing from that intoxication of the heart and brain which deprives its victims of discretion, and too often of their self-respect, at the precise moment when they have most occasion for support and admonition. While basking in the moonlight fairy scenes, the luxurious fancy seems to inhale the very odours of'the spiced Indian air' [2.1.124]; or, sweeter still, to drink the balmy influence of that 'luscious woodbine' [2.1.251] which forms Titania's most appropriate canopy. - Puck, the 'shrewd and knavish sprite' [2.1.33], who finds a sport in lovers' agonising janglings, is beautifully discriminated from Ariel, who pities mortal miseries, and instigates his master to relieve them. Still the 'merry wanderer of the night' [2.1.43] is delightful and exhilarating company: his sportive malice, controlled by the beneficent Oberon, is productive of infinite diversion; we easily forgive his elvish ridicule of pangs and raptures he is alike incapable of feeling, and for the moment heartily subscribe to his satiric dictum, — 'Lord, what fools these mortals be' [3.2.115]! The 'hempen homespuns' [3.1.77] who are so marvellously intermixed with the superior intelligences of the drama, are all admirable workers in their tiny spheres, — from Peter Quince, the business-like manager, who really seems to have half an idea in his head, and contents himself with the humble role of Thisbe's father - up (or down) to ostentatious 'Bully Bottom' [3.1.8], the twinkling cynosure of all his meek competitors. The union of broad humour with poetic fancy was never perhaps so admirably effected as in the scenes in which this 'shallowest thickskin of that barren sort' [3.2.13] receives, as a mere thing of course, the enthusiastic courtship of the Queen of Fairyland. — 'A very good piece of work, and a merry' [1.2.13ff.]. (I. 381)

144

24 Leigh Hunt, Poet of the Fairies 1844

From Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from the English Poets, Illustrative of those First Requisites of their Art; with Markings of the Best Passages, Critical Notices of the Writers, and an Essay in Answer to the Question 'What is Poetry?' (London, 1844). [James Henry] Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), poet, essayist, playwright, critic, journalist, attended Christ's Hospital School in London, as had Coleridge and Lamb before him. The poems he wrote in his schooldays, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, were published by his father as Juvenilia in 1801. He collaborated with Hazlitt in the essays of The Round Table, and with his brother John edited for many years The Examiner. The integrity shown by the brothers in going to prison rather than retracting their criticism of the prince regent won Leigh Hunt the friendship of Shelley, and later of Byron. Hunt was also a friend of Keats, to whom he was introduced by Charles Cowden Clarke. Imagination and Fancy, published after the deaths of most of these famous friends, shows the continuing influence of Hazlitt, and Hunt's admiration for the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. He appears to have had a gentle and sweet temperament, which Edmund Gosse finds reflected in his love of Spenser and the Italian poets (see Gosse's introduction to the London, 1907 edition of Imagination and Fancy).

[From the 'Preface'] The object of the book is threefold; - to present the public with some of the finest passages in English poetry, so marked and commented; — to furnish such an account, in an Essay, of the nature and requirements of poetry, as may enable readers in general to give an answer on those points to themselves and others; — and to show, throughout the greater part of the volume, what sort of poetry is to be considered as poetry of the most poetical kind, or such as exhibits the imagination and fancy in a state of predominance, undisputed by interests of another sort. Poetry, therefore, is not here in its compound state, great or otherwise (except incidentally in the Essay), but in its element, like an essence distilled. All the greatest poetry includes that essence, but the essence does not present itself in exclusive combination with the greatest form of poetry. It varies in that respect from the most tremendous to the most playful effusions, and from imagination to fancy through all their degrees; - from Homer and Dante, to

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Coleridge and Keats; from Shakespeare in King Lear, to Shakespeare himself in the Midsummer Night's Dream; from Spenser's Faerie Queene to the Castle of Indolence;^ nay, from Ariel in the Tempest, to his somewhat presumptuous namesake in the Rape of the Lock, (v-vi) [From 'An Answer to the Question "What is Poetry'"] Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy: Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest, the Faerie Queene, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. (31) [From 'Shakespeare'] . . . But the critical distinction between Fancy and Imagination was hardly determined till of late. Collins himself, in his Ode on the Poetical Character, uses the word Fancy to imply both, even when speaking of Milton; PI and so did Milton, I conceive, when speaking of Shakespeare. The propriety of the words "native wood-notes wild," is not so clear.PI I take them to have been hastily said by a learned man of an unlearned. But Shakespeare, though he had not a college education, was as learned as any man, in the highest sense of the word, by a scholarly intuition. He had the spirit of learning. He was aware of the education he wanted, and by some means or other supplied it. He could anticipate Milton's own Greek and Latin; Tortive and errant from his course of growth— [Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.9] The multitudinous seas incarnadine— [Macbeth, 2.2.59] A pudency so rosy, &c. [Cymbeline, 2.5.11] In fact, if Shakespeare's poetry has any fault, it is that of being too learned; too over-informed with thought and allusion. His wood-notes wild surpass Haydn and Bach. His wild roses were all twenty times double. He thinks twenty times to another man's once, and makes all his serious characters talk as well as he could himself, - with a superabundance of wit and intellligence. He knew, however, that fairies must have a language of their own; and hence, perhaps, his poetry never runs in a more purely poetical vein than when he is speaking in their persons; - I mean it is less mixed up with those heaps of comments and reflections which, however the wilful or metaphysical critic may think them suitable on all occasions, or succeed in persuading us not to wish them absent, by reason of their stimulancy to one's mental activity, are assuredly neither always proper to dramatic, still less to narrative poetry; nor yet so opposed to all idiosyncrasy on the writer's part as Mr Coleridge would have us believe. . . . If Shakespeare, instead of proving himself the greatest poet in the world, had •written nothing but the fanciful scenes in this volume, he would still have obtained

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a high and singular reputation, — that of Poet of the Fairies. For he may be said to have invented the Fairies; that is to say, he was the first that turned them to poetical account; that bore them from clownish neighbourhoods to the richest soils of fancy and imagination. (150-52) [From 'The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania: A Fairy Drama'] I have ventured to give the extract this title, because it not only contains the whole story of the fairy part of the Midsummer Night's Dream, but by the omission of a few lines, and the transposition of one small passage (for which I beg the reader's indulgence), it actually forms a separate little play.M It is nearly such in the greater play; and its isolation was easily, and not at all injuriously effected, by the separation of the Weaver from his brother mechanicals. (169) [Note to 'But as the fierce vexation of a dream'. 4.1.69] This fine stray verse comes looking in among the rest like a stern face through flowers. (179) [Note to 'Come from the farthest steep of India', 2.1.69] Shakespeare understood the charm of remoteness in poetry, as he did everything else. Oberon has been dancing on the sunny steeps looking towards Cathay, where the Chineses drive Their cany waggons light. ^ (180)

147

25 Joseph Hunter, a comment, with some explanatorynotes 1845

From New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare. Supplementary to All the Editions. By Joseph Hunter, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and an Assistant Keeper of the Public Records (2 vols, London, 1845). Joseph Hunter (1783-1861) became a Presbyterian minister in 1809 and served at Bath for twenty-four years, when, in 1833, he was appointed to a post in the public records office where he spent the rest of his life. A member of the Society of Antiquaries, he published many volumes of local histories, records, and historical documents. He also left behind a large manuscript collection, now at the British Library, the main works of which are his 'Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum', six volumes of notes on English poets through the seventeenth century, and 'Collections concerning Shakespeare and his Works'. His book on Shakespeare was the fruit of many years of historical and textual study.

[From the chapter entitled 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'] At the sight of such a tide we naturally ask — Who is the dreamer? The poet, any of the characters of the drama, or the spectators? The answer seems to be that there is much in this beautiful sport of imagination which was fit only to be regarded as a dream by the persons whom the fairies illuded:^ and that, as a whole, it comes before the spectators under the notion of a dream. [Quotes 5.1.423-9: 'If we, shadows, have offended. . . .']. Shakespeare was then but a young poet, rising into notice, and it was a bold and hazardous undertaking to bring together classical story and the fairy mythology, made still more hazardous by the introduction of the rude attempts in the dramatic art of the hard-handed men of Athens. By calling it a dream he obviated the objection to its incongruities, since it is of the nature of a dream that things heterogeneous are brought together in fantastical confusion. Yet, to a person who by repeated perusals has become familiar with this play, it will not appear so incongruous a composition that it requires such an apology as we find in the Epilogue and in the title. It cannot, however, have been popular, any more than Comus is popular when brought upon the stage. Its great and surpassing beauties would be in themselves a hinderance to its obtaining a vulgar popularity. The finest poetry is heavy in repetition on the

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stage. Only the repeating the long and beautiful passages in recitative gave this play a temporary popularity when it was revived in better times. Many, no doubt, have felt what few besides Pepyst2] would have cared to record. . . . There is no apparent reason why it should be called a dream of Midsummer Night in particular. Midsummer night was of old in England a time of bon-fires and rejoicings, and in London of processions and pageantries. But there is no allusion to anything of this kind in the play. Midsummer night cannot be the time of the action, which is very distinctly fixed to May-morning and a few days before. May-morning, even more than Midsummer night, was a time of delight in those times which, when looked back upon from these days of incessant toil, seem to have been gay, innocent, and paradisaical. See in what sweet language and in what a religious spirit the old topographer of London, Stowe, speaks of the universal custom of the people of the city on May-day morning, 'to walk into the sweet meadows and green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of birds praising God in their kinds.'PI We have abundant material for a distinct and complete account of the May-day sports in the happy times of old England; but they would be misplaced in illustration of this play: for though Shakespeare has made the time of his story the time when people went forth 'To do observance to the morn of May' [1.1.167], and has laid the scene of the principal event in one of those half-sylvan, half-pastoral spots which we may conceive to have been the most favourite haunts of the Mayers, he does not introduce any of the May-day sports, or shew us anything of the May-day customs of the time. Yet he might have done so. His subject seemed even to invite him to it, since a party of Mayers with their garlands of sweet flowers would have harmonized well with the lovers and the fairies, and might have made sport for Robin Goodfellow. Shakespeare loved to think of flowers and to write of them, and it may seem that it was a part of his original conception to have made more use than he has done of May-day and Flora's folio wers. To an extravagant commentator this play might open the whole subject of the Fairy Mythology, just as The Tempest might be made to call for whatever can be collected respecting that so-called philosophy in which Prospero was so accomplished an adept. But both these subjects are subjects for distinct treatises, and to say much concerning them in reference to these plays is, to say the least, a misplacing of the curious learning. The following note from a pleasant little work printed in 1828, entitled Fairy Mythology, seems, however, almost essential to the right understanding a material circumstance, and to the justification of the author: The Shakespearean commentators have not thought fit to inform us why the poet designates the fairy queen Titania. It, however, presents no difficulty. It was the belief of those days that the fairies were the same as the classic nymphs, the attendants of Diana, 'That fourth kind of sprites,' says King James, 'quhilk be the gentiles was called Diana and the wandering court, and among us called the Phaeries.' The fairy-queen was therefore the same as Diana, whom Ovid frequently styles Titania. Vol. ii. p. 127 [Thomas Keighdey: No. 14]

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We shall be the less surprised to find Diana in such company when we recollect that there is much in the Fairy Mythology which seems but a perpetuation of the beautiful conceptions of primeval ages, of the fields, woods, mountains, rivers, and the margin of the sea being haunted by nymphs, the dryades and hamadryades, oreades, and naiades. It is a little noticed fact, and one which would serve as some defence of the poet for having introduced Theseus and Hippolyta, and Demetrius and the other Athenians into this fairy tale, that the fairies as they are depicted in this play are as well known in the Greek islands (or at least were so two hundred years ago)4 as they are or ever were on the Great or Little Almas Cliff of Yorkshire, or on any hill-side or in any woody dell of Britain, if hill or dell there be where these innocent and amusing superstitions are still lingering. The modern Greeks have also their Puck or Robin Goodfellow, with attributes closely resembling those given to him in this play, and in the popular notions of former England [He now begins his examination of some passages from the play.]

I.l.[132ff.]LYSANDER. AH ME! for aught that ever I could readj5] Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth. There is a reading in this passage, presented by the second folio, which has not I think received the slightest notice from any of the editors, and yet it appears to me to have a point and pathos even beyond what the passage, as usually printed, possesses. HERMIA! for aught that ever I could read, &c. A skilful actor might give great effect to the name; and we ought always to remember, what Shakespeare never forgot, that he was writing for spokesmen, not in the first instance for students in their closets.

I.l.[145ff.]LYSANDER. Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That in a SPLEEN unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man has power to say, - Behold! The jaws of darkness do devour it up. The word spleen is laid under suspicion by Warburton, and is not justified by the later commentators. Nares says, 'We do not find it so used by other writers.'M This is a mistake: and it will be seen that a happier choice could not have been made than the poet has made of this word. Like winter fires that with disdainful heat

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The opposition of the cold defeat; And in an angry spleen do burn more fair The more encountered by the frosty air. Verses by Poole, before his England's Parnassus. Svo., 1657t7].

So in [William] Lithgow's Nineteen Years' Travels, 4to. 1632, p. 61, 'All things below and above being cunningly perfected, and every one ranked in order with his harquebuse and pike, to stand in the centinel of his own defence, we recommend ourselves in the hands of the Almighty, and in the meanwhile attended their fiery salutations. In a furious spleen, the first holla of their courtesies, was the progress of a martial conflict, thundering forth a terrible noise of gaily-roaring pieces,' &c. See further uses of the word in Grim the Collier of Croydon, 3.1.[5];f8l and in Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt, p. 22;P1 and by Shakespeare himself, King John, 2.1.[448],and5.7.[50]

II. 1. [220ff.] HELENA. Your virtue is my privilege for thatJ10] It is not night, when I do see your face, Therefore I think I am not in the night. I cannot pass over this, which is one among the innumerable deteriorations of the old text in the Variorum; and which more recent editors, who have proposed to reconsider the text, and to give it in its virgin purity, have not corrected. The old copies give with one consent — Your virtue is my privilege: for that It is not night when I do see, &c. A reading infinitely superior to that which is palmed upon us

III. 2. [236ff.] HERMIA. — I understand not what you mean by this. HELENA. - AY, DO, persever, counterfeit sad looksj11! Make mouths upon me. This bad reading is found in all modern editions. One of the quartos, namely that printed by Fisher, gives what is the true reading. Hermia says, I understand not what you mean by this; to which Helena replies in a grave and serious tone, / do\

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IV. 1. [32ff.] BOTTOM. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of HAY; Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow. We have here an instance how imperfectly any printing can convey with fulness and precision all that a dramatist has written to be spoken on the stage. Bottom, half man, half ass, is for a bottle of a; hay,or ale, for the actor was no doubt to speak in such a manner that both these words should be suggested. The snatch of an old song that follows is in praise of ale not hay. Bottom sings, stirred to it by the rural music, the rough music,[12] as it is called, which we leam from the folio was introduced when Bottom had said 'Let us have the tongs and the bones' [4.1.28fF.]J13] . . .

V. 1. [423ff.] PUCK. If we shadows have offended Think but this and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here, While these visions did appear. This simple epilogue forms a graceful close to this beautiful drama; but I refer to it for the sake of remarking that in the first line we have a reference back to a sentiment in the play: 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them' [5.1.21 Iff.], an apology for the actor and a compliment to the critic. What the poet had put into the mouth of one of the characters in respect of the poor attempts of the Athenian clowns, he now by the repetition of the word 'shadows,' in effect says for himself and his companions. 'Shadows' is a beautiful term by which to express actors, those whose life is a perpetual personation, a semblance but of something real, a shadow only of actual existences. The idea of this resemblance was deeply inwrought in the mind of the poet and actor. When at a later period he looked upon man again as but 'a walking shadow,' his mind immediately passed to the long-cherished thought, and he proceeds A poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. Macbeth, 5.5.[24ff.] (I, 282-98)

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26 Hermann Ulrici, the theme of self-parody 1846

From Shakespeare's Dramatic Art. History and Character of Shakespeare's Plays. By Dr. Hermann Ulrici. Translated from the Third Edition of the German, with Additions and Corrections by the Author. By L. Dora Schmitz (2 vols, London, 1876). Hermann Ulrici (1806-84), German philosopher, was a professor at Halle from 1834 until his death. A Christian thinker, he sought to prove the existence of God from a scientific basis, but his earlier work was in literary criticism. Ueber Shakespeares dramatische Kunst und sein Verhdltnis zu Calderon und Goethe (Halle, 1839) was translated into English in 1846 by A.J.W. Morrison. The second edition was called Shakespeares dramatische Kunst. Geschichte und Charakteristik des Shakespeareschen Dramas (Leipzig, 1847), with a third edition in 1868-9, the source of L. Dora Schmitz's translation of 1876. The general aim of his book is perhaps best summed up in this statement from the preface to the 1846 translation: 'I have therefore confined myself to set forth the profundity and sublimity of his poetical view of life, which was simply on this account sublime and profound, because it was Christian, and Christian also, even because it was profound and sublime. For this reason, my first endeavour has been to point out the organic gravitating centre of each of his dramas, i.e. to discover in each that inmost secret spark of life, that unity of idea, which preeminently constitutes a work of art a living creation in the world of beauty' (I, x-xi).

[From Book III, Chapter VIII: 'Shakespeare's Idea of Tragedy and Comedy'] But even among comedies, in the narrower sense of the word, there is a considerable difference in form, character, and composition, between plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, As You Like It, and those of another species, such as All's Well that Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, etc. But this difference, also, is explained by the general conception of the comic upon which Shakespeare's comedies are founded. If, as has been said,^ Shakespeare's idea of the comic is essentially nothing but the dialectics of irony, which make the represented world of caprice and chance the instrument of its own dissolution, by the contradictions it itself contains, then accordingly it is clear that comedy can comprehend and represent human life in its two principal but different aspects. Either it exhibits human life more in its inner subjective aspect, as born and shaped by the doings and endeavours, the desires and passions, plans and freaks, of the different

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characters, in short, as dependent upon and determined by human wishes and endeavours, which in Comedy is always represented in the many forms of caprice2 — and this species may be called comedy of character or intrigue. (Its usual prosaic form of reality must, in accordance with its nature, remain unchanged; its object being rather to reflect reality as faithfully as possible, and to represent it externally in precisely the same manner as, under the given conditions of time and place, under prevailing circumstances and relations, it must be formed naturally and empirically.) Or, it conceives human life more in an objective manner, so that chance and caprice, as general forces which embrace the kingdom of nature as well as the world of man, govern it like a kind of destiny. Caprice and accident, however, are in themselves thoroughly fantastic; for the fantastic is, in fact, nothing but the caprice of fancy, the groundlessness and incoherency of the images which go beyond the order and laws of nature, and thus injure, confound, and transform them. This results in the fantastic comedy, in which consequently the external, natural form of common reality seems to be done away with, or, at all events, appears permeated by strange, wonderful phenomena, mere creations of the fancy, or beings of an entirely different nature and sphere of life — precisely such as are brought before us in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in The Tempest. Only, the representation must invariably maintain this form, as one actually existing, and treat all fantastic singularities and wonders which it displays before us, exactly like the most ordinary occurrences of everyday life; then it will readily produce the highest comic effect. (I, 369-70) [From Book V, Chapter III: '2. A Midsummer Night's Dream'] . . . At a first glance we are almost more puzzled here than in the case of The Tempest as to what — from an aesthetic point of view — to make of the strange airy creatures which are presented to us in A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is here such a wanton play of fancy and merriment, such a gay succession of pranks, that upon a first impression we might be inclined to deny that the piece possesses any deeper significance, any rational meaning. [He describes the four sets of characters in the play, the Duke and his Queen, the four lovers, the fairies, and the mechanicals, then continues.] . . . In face of these not merely perfectly heterogeneous elements, but elements that are apparently strung together without either order or arrangement, it seems a hopeless undertaking to answer the question, as to what is the centre and gravitating point upon which the drama here turns, and in how far - in accordance with the first requisite of art — does it form a living, harmonious whole. In the first place it is self-evident that the play is based upon the comic view of life, that is to say upon Shakespeare's idea of comedy. This is here expressed without reserve and in the clearest manner possible, in so far as it is not only in particular cases that the maddest freaks of accident come into conflict with human capriciousness, folly and perversity, thus thwarting one another in turn, but that the principal spheres of life are made mutually to parody one another in mirthful irony. This last feature distinguishes A Midsummer Night's Dream from other comedies. Theseus and Hippolyta appear obviously to represent the grand, heroic, historical side of human nature. In place, however, of maintaining their greatness, power and dignity, it is

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exhibited rather as spent in the common every-day occurrence of a marriage, which can claim no greater significance than it possesses for ordinary mortals; their heroic greatness parodies itself, inasmuch as it appears to exist for no other purpose than to be married in a suitable fashion. The band of mechanics - the carpenter, joiner, weaver, bellows-mender and tinker - in contrast to the above higher regions of existence, represent the lowest sphere in the full prose of every-day life. But even they — in place of remaining in their own sphere and station, where they are fully justified, and even somewhat poetical — force themselves up into the domain of the tragic muse, wishing not only to appear more poetical, but to make poetry, and accordingly not merely exhibit themselves in an exceedingly ludicrous light, but are, as it were, a parody on themselves as well as on the higher sphere of the tragic and the heroic. Midway between these two extremes stand the two loving couples, who belong to the middle stratum of human society. But in place of endeavouring to regard life from its inner and central point - in accordance with their position - they also lose themselves in the fantastic play of their own selfish love, and thus they too are a parody on themselves and their station in life. Lastly the king and queen of the fairies and their interference in the action appears to represent that higher power which guides the life of men by invisible threads. But even this over-ruling power is not depicted in its true grandeur, in its highly important significance, and quiet mysterious activity; but, like all the other parts of the piece, is also carried along in the general whirl of humour. It is represented in palpable, bodily forms, and exhibits itself only as the merry bantering play of the personified powers of nature, that is, it parodies itself in so far as it too appears subject to the caprice of accident and to its own waywardness; this is clearly evident in Titania's passion for the ass-headed Bottom. . . . [He describes the complications of the various love tangles.] But the purport of the piece is not to give a comic representation of love — this is not the actual theme of the poem. On the contrary, the action exhibits the serious side of the passion of love only so as to parody this seriousness by representing love itself as a mere plaything, a mere illusion; in short, the action in reality parodies itself. This is why love here does not appear as an inward fascination of the heart, proceeding from the imagination or from the force of the involuntarily changing disposition of the lovers, but that it, at the same time, appears subject to the outward magic interference of higher beings, who carry on their bantering play with them. Oberon's magic herbs cause Lysander and Demetrius suddenly to become madly in love with Helena, and Titania to dote upon Bottom; but the spell is as rapidly dissolved and the right relation restored. The acting mechanics are therefore not without reason woven into the adventures of the magic forest. For, on the one hand, their burlesque comedy is intended to remind us that the seriousness of these adventures is, after all, not meant to be so very serious, and, on the other hand, the representation of Pyramus and Thisbe draws the tragic pathos of love down to the level of the ludicrous, and thereby, at the same time, parodies the apparently tragic significance of love which is depicted in the piece itself. . . . [He quotes Adolf Scholl^ on how the Interlude mocks the two male lovers, as Bottom's actions mock Puck, and says that the play even makes game of the audience.1

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In the first place this tendency of one part parodying the other, and the identity of the theme — which the action carries out with an equal tendency to parody in a variety of ways — brings all the different groups of the dramatic characters into close community, inasmuch as all appear to be animated by the same spirit. The play of the mechanics ridicules, in the gayest manner, not only the contents of the piece itself, but all dramatic art as well; in the end, however, the piece which parodies everything and is again a parody on itself, carries this tendency to a climax, and is thus the means of rounding off the whole, by, as it were, giving the drama its point. Further, there is no want of external connection between the several parts of the action, which connection is certainly slight and loose but has been arranged by a skilful hand. The marriage festival of Theseus and Hippolyta forms, so to say, a splendid golden frame to the whole picture,^] with which all the several scenes stand in some sort of connection. Within it we have the gambols of the elves among one another, which, like a gay ribbon, are woven into the plans of the loving couples and into the doings of the mechanics; hence they represent a kind of relation between these two groups, while the blessings which they at the beginning intended to bestow, and in the end actually do bestow, upon the house and lineage of Theseus make them partakers of the marriage feast, and give them a well-founded place in the drama. The play within the play, lastly, occupies the same position as a part of the wedding festivities. If we look at the whole from these points of view and reflect upon the impression which the piece leaves upon us, it seems to me that there cannot be any doubt as to what was the spirit in which Shakespeare conceived it, and what was the intention and view which guided him in its composition. The title again intimates this. Human life appears conceived as a fantastic midsummer night's dream. As in a dream, the airy picture flits past our minds with the quickness of wit; the remotest regions, the strangest and most motley figures mix with one another, and, in form and composition, make an exceedingly curious medley; as in a dream they thwart, embarrass and disembarrass one another in turn, and - owing to their constant change of character and wavering feelings and passions — vanish, like the figures of a dream, into an uncertain chiaro-scuro; as in a dream, the play within the play holds up its puzzling concave mirror to the whole; and as, doubtless, in real dreams the shadow of reason comments upon the individual images in a state of half doubt, half belief— at one time denying them their apparent reality, at another again, allowing itself to be carried away by them — so this piece, in its tendency to parody, while flitting past our sight is, at the same time, always criticising itself. (II, 71-6)

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27 Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, introductory remarks 1847

From Shakespeare's Plays: With His Life. Illustrated with many Hundred Wood-cuts, Executed by H. W. Hewet, after Designs by Kenny Meadows, Harvey, and Others. Edited by Gulian C. Verplanck, LL.D. with Critical Introductions, Notes, Etc., Original and Selected (3 vols, New York, 1847). Volume II. — Comedies. Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786-1870) graduated from Columbia University at fourteen, then became a lawyer. He entered politics, and eventually spent four terms in Congress. He also was engaged in literary pursuits, wrote for Washington Irving's Analectic Magazine, and collaborated with William Cullen Bryant, who later wrote his biography. Among the twenty books he published, his edition of Shakespeare was deemed his greatest accomplishment. This work appeared first in parts, starting probably in May, 1844, but since the plays were issued in haphazard order, and only a few original copies have been located, a certain date of publication for any one play cannot yet be assigned.

[From the 'Introductory Remarks' to A Midsummer Night's Dream]

Peculiar Characteristics, Date of Composition, State of the Text, etc. This is, in several respects, the most remarkable composition of its author, and has probably contributed more to his general fame, as it has given a more peculiar evidence of the variety and brilliancy of his genius, than any other of his dramas. Not that it is in itself the noblest of his works, or even one of the highest order among them; but it is not only exquisite in its kind — it is also original and peculiar in its whole character, and of a class by itself. For, although it be far from rivalling As You Like It, or The Merchant of Venice, in the varied exhibition of human character, or the gravity or the sweetness of ethical poetry — though it stand in no rank of comparison with Othello, or Lear, in the manifestation of lofty intellect or the energy of passion, or in unresisted sway over the reader's deeper emotions — yet Lear or Othello, or any one of Shakespeare's most perfect comedies, might have been lost by the carelessness of early editors, or the accidents of time, without any essential diminution of the general estimate of their author's genius. Possessing Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and the

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Roman tragedies, we could place no assignable limit to the genius which produced them, if exerted on any similar themes of fierce passion or tragic dignity. So, again, As You Like It is but another and most admirable exhibition of the same prolific comic invention, which revels as joyously in Falstaff and Mercutio — of the same meditative poetic spirit, in turns fanciful, passionate, philosophical, which pours forth its austerer teachings in Measure for Measure, or more sweetly comes upon the ear, 'with a dying fall,' [Twelfth Night, 1.1.4] in the intervals of the loud jollity of the Twelfth Night. But the Midsummer Night's Dream stands by itself, without any parallel; for The Tempest, which it resembles in its preternatural personages and machinery of the plot, is in other respects wholly dissimilar, is of quite another mood in feeling and thought, and with, perhaps, higher attributes of genius, wants its peculiar fascination. Thus it is that the loss of this singularly beautiful production would, more than that of any other of his works, have abridged the measure of its author's fame, as it would have left us without the means of forming any estimate of the brilliant lightness of his 'forgetive' [2 Henry IV, 4.3.99] fancy, in its most sportive and luxuriant vein. The Poet and his contemporaries seem to have regarded this piece, as they well might, as in some sort a nondescript in dramatic literature; for it happens that, while the other plays published during their author's life are regularly denominated, in their title-page, as 'the pleasant comedy,' 'the true dramatic history,' or 'the lamentable tragedy,'M this has no designation of the kind beyond its mere title, in either of the original editions. It has, in common with all his comedies, a perpetual intermixture of the essentially poetical with the purely laughable, yet is distinguished from all the rest by being (as Coleridge has happily defined its character) 'one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical' [No. 15 above]. Its transitions are as rapid, and the images and scenes it presents to the imagination as unexpected and as remote from each other, as those of the boldest lyric; while it has also that highest perfection of the lyric art, the pervading unity of the poetic spirit — that continued glow of excited thought — which blends the whole rich and strange variety in one common effect of gay and dazzling brilliancy. There is the heroic magnificence of the princely loves of Theseus and his Amazon bride, dazzling with the strangely gorgeous mixture of classical allusion and fable with the taste, feelings, and manners of chivalry; and all embodied in a calm and lofty poetry, fitted alike to express the grand simplicity of primeval heroism, and 'the high thoughts in a heart of courtesy,'PI which belong to the best parts of the chivalrous character. This is intertwined with the ingeniously perplexed fancies and errors of the Athenian lovers, wrought up with a luxuriant profusion of quaint conceits and artificial turns of thought, such as the age delighted in. The Fairy King and Queen, equally essential to the plot, are invested with a certain mythological dignity, suited to the solemn yet free music of the verse, and the elevation and grave elegance of all their thoughts and images. Their fairy subjects, again, are the gayest and most fantastic of Fancy's children. All these are relieved and contrasted by the grotesque absurdity of the mock play, and still more by the laughable truth and nature of the amateur 'mechanicals'[3.2.9.] who present it. The critics have, indeed, been disposed to limit the praise of truth and nature, in this part of the play, to the portraiture of green-room jealousies or vanity,PI such as the Poet might have observed in his own

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professional life. But in truth he has here contrasted to the finer idealities of heroic and of playful fancy, a vivid delineation of vulgar human nature — not confined to any one occupation or class in life, but such as often displays itself in the graver employments of real life, and the higher as well as the lower castes of society. Bottom, for instance, may be frequently found in high official or representative stations, among the legislative and municipal bodies of the world; and so near (according to Napoleon's well-known adage)M is the sublime to the ridiculous, that it depends entirely upon external circumstances, with a little more or a little less sense in himself and his hearers, whether the Bottom of the day is doomed to wear the ass's head for life, or becomes the admiration of his companions, and roars 'like a nightingale' [1.2.83fE], in his own conceit, from the high stations of the law or the state. This clustering of the sweetest flowers of fanciful and of heroic poetry around the grotesque yet substantial reality of Bottom and his associates, gives to the whole play that mixed effect of the grotesquely ludicrous with the irregularly beautiful, which the Poet himself has painted in his picture of Titania, 'rounding the hairy temples' of the self-satisfied fool — 'With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers' [4.1.5 Iff.]. All this profusion of pure poetry and droll reality is worked up with the dramatic skill of a practised artist, in embodying these apparently discordant plots and personages into one perfectly connected and harmonious whole, out of which nothing could well be removed without injury to the rest. This artistic skill, though it may not be an excellence of the very highest order, is yet one that results only from practice and experience; and connected, as it is here, with great variety and richness of allusion, and knowledge — as well of life and nature as of books — indicates that the play cannot have been the production of a youth of limited experience of life, and little exercise of his dramatic talent. Yet it has been most commonly classed among the author's more youthful works, and it must be allowed that there is a good deal in the play to support this conjecture. It was first printed in 1600, but Meres mentioned it in his list before 1598; and the remarkable allusion to the ungenial summer and confusion of seasons which occurred in England, in 1594, (see note on act ii. scene 2 — 'Therefore the winds, piping,' etc.,t5J) affords evidence that the play, as it first appeared in print, must belong to a period about 1595, or 1596. This would place it in its author's thirty-first or thirty-second year, when, as his Romeo and Juliet shows, he had acquired a familiar freedom of poetic diction, in its widest range, and a mastery of metrical power and sweetness, far more bold and varied than is seen in his first dramatic efforts; and to this period the Midsummer Night's Dream, as it was printed in 1600, certainly belongs. Yet the comparison of this beautiful poem with those of his other dramas, (which we know, from the collation of the successive old editions of some, or from the title-pages of others, were first written in a comparative immaturity of the author's genius, and afterwards received large alterations and additions) strongly impresses me with the opinion that such was also the history of this drama. Malone [No. 3 above] places the whole of it as contemporary with Love's Labour's Lost, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, etc. Without agreeing to this arbitrary assignment of its date, I yet think that the rhyming dialogue and the peculiarities of much of the versification in those scenes, the elaborate elegance, the quaint conceits,

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and artificial refinements of thought in the whole episode (if it may be termed so) of Helena and Hermia, and their lovers, do certainly partake of the taste and manner of those more juvenile comedies; while, in the other poetic scenes, 'the strain we hear is of a higher mood/M and belongs to a period of fuller and more conscious power. It, therefore, seems to me very probable, (though I do not know that it has appeared so to any one else) that the Midsummer Night's Dream was originally written in a very different form from that in which we now have it, several years before the date of the drama in its present shape - that it was subsequently remoulded, after a long interval, with the addition of the heroic personages, and all the dialogue between Oberon and Titania, perhaps with some alteration of the lower comedy; the rhyming dialogue and the whole perplexity of the Athenian lovers being retained, with slight change, from the more boyish comedy. The completeness and unity of the piece would indeed quite exclude such a conjecture, if we were forced to reason only from the evidence afforded by itself; but, as in Romeo and Juliet (not to speak of other dramas) we have the certain proof of the amalgamation of the products of different periods of the author's progressive intellect and power, the comparison leads to a similar conclusion here. . . .

Source of the Plot, Costume, Manners, etc. This play has all the merit of entire originality of plot and incident - a merit which we know that Shakespeare soon learnt to hold very cheap, regarding such originality, very justly, as the humblest part of dramatic invention. Here, however, where he meant to carry the invention of his characters, with the language and thoughts, beyond the bounds of real life, or of traditional story, novelty of plot became necessary to the higher originality of effect he wished to produce otherwise. The traditions of all Europe, and the East, had given him the leading idea of fairy character, in the legends of puny immortals, whose interference in human affairs had always a mixture of waggish malice and good-nature. But the peculiar poetic colouring of that character is purely his own, as the reader may satisfy himself by comparing the fairy scenes with the materials to which the industry of the commentators has referred, as the sources of his invention: [Quotes two paragraphs on sources from J. P. Collier's introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Works (London, 1842), II, 388-9.] The heroical personages are not original, in name or history, but quite so in the peculiar combination with fairy lore, as well as in their poetical decoration, and more especially in the beautiful spirit of philosophical thought with which Theseus is rilled — to whom the Poet has given a sort of regal family-likeness to Hamlet, both in the kind and thoughtful courtesy of disposition, and in the meditative cast of thought, though not, like Hamlet's, forced by painful inquiries, but employed in cheerful considerations upon man's noblest tastes and faculties. The splendid confusion of the classical and mythological with the tastes and habits of mediaeval chivalry, will strike modern readers as discordant. But such was the traditionary and customary poetical costume of the heroes of Homer and Ovid, when

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they appeared in the songs or tales of romance. This arose at first from the ignorance of the old romancers and historians, and their readers, who conformed the habits and manners of the classical heroes to those of their own days. But afterwards, when these topics were used by more cultivated authors, they from choice continued the same confusion of times and manners. Boccaccio and Chaucer were familiar at least with Latin literature; but (the one in his Teseide, and the other in his Knight's Tale) both introduced Duke Theseus in the same romantic and conventional costume, without any attempt to invest him or his times with a dress more congruous to Grecian tastes and habits. There was then no reason why a dramatist, writing for popular effect, should throw away the manifest advantage of adopting the ideas of his personages which were already familiar to his audience; nor does he betray any ignorance in conforming to them. Thus, the Athens of this play, like that of Chaucer and Boccaccio, is not a city of early Greece, but the capital of a principality which, in every thing but its religion, resembled the Ghent and Bruges of the dukes of Burgundy, or the capitals of any of the princely chiefs of the days of chivalry. If, however, the artist thinks it expedient for the stage, or for pictorial illustration, to resort to a stricter external costume than the Poet thought necessary, he may find materials of the choicest kind, (where Mr. Planchef7! directs him) in the frieze of the Parthenon, the Etruscan vases, and other exquisite relics of classic taste and form. (II, 5-7)

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28 Henry James Sumner Maine, the sister arts, and the play's structural balance 1848

From 'The Midsummer Night's Dream', The Edinburgh Review, 87 (April, 1848), 418-29. Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822-88), eminent professor and practitioner of jurisprudence, is best known for his pioneering and influential Ancient Law: its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (London, 1861). He was a brilliant classical scholar at Cambridge, where he knew Henry Hallam's younger son Henry Fitzmaurice, upon whose sadly premature death he published a memoir (1851). Besides his professorial duties at Cambridge, and later Oxford, Maine found time to contribute to London periodicals. This essay, occasioned by the publication of J. O. HalliwelTs An Introduction to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (1841) and Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of a Midsummer Night's Dream (1845), was his only venture into Shakespearean studies; it is indicative of the broad interests of a cultivated man of his time.

. . . Our own attention has been lately drawn to a play, "which we are hardly accustomed to rank among the miracles of genius just alluded to [i.e., Othello and Hamlet]. But there is surely something not a little singular in the influence exercised by the Midsummer Night's Dream. Its external effects, so to speak, are quite out of proportion to the merits, or to what are commonly considered the merits, of its internal structure. No other production of the Master is apparently so fitted to excite the sympathetic chords which unite poetry with its sister arts. The genius of Mendelssohn was first evoked by it. The compositions with which it inspired him, wonderful as they are in their own harmony, are not less so in their correspondence with their original. The spirit of the Midsummer Night's Dream breathes through them. The late Exposition at Westminster Hall charmed us with another instance of its fruitful and suggestive power. Nobody who saw there Mr. Paton's picture of the 'Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania/t1^ can have forgotten it. It will abide by them as a fairy frontispiece to an ideal edition of the Midsummer Night's Dream, — more properly so, perhaps, than Sir Joshua's Puck,PI inasmuch as its canvass introduces us more fully into the nature of the subject, and its vast and bewildering variety. We do not hesitate to avow our fears that the fairy race have of late been in danger

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of losing caste, and falling from the high estate which Shakespeare had assigned them. One conception, rather oriental and very French, has been gradually changing them into the Ladies Bountiful of interesting princes and embarrassed princesses, — into the supernatural machinery of a much materialised literature. Another would seem to be silently metamorphosing them into the nondescript personages, spoken of in various ways in drawing-room ballads. It is fortunate, therefore, that a painter of the genius of Mr. Paton3 should step in to take us back to higher points of view, and seek to re-establish their ancient lineage and ancient faith. The subjects of Oberon, in his hands, retain no mark of a connection either with the drawing-room fairy or with the creatures of Madame d'Anois and the Cabinet des FeesM — with nonsense or stage tinsel. The artist has painted them as belonging entirely neither to the domain of fancy nor to that of reality. We have them half human, half superhuman, bearing with them the indications of their heterogeneous origin, Greek, Romantic, and Teutonic — just such as the veritable 'good people' (to use the timid old euphemism) might be, hanging loosely on the confines of existence, annually recruited from mankind, and annually tythed by Satan. Moreover, as reviewers, we owe a debt to Mr. Paton. His picture has served us as a point d'appui for sundry vagrant speculations in which we have been indulging respecting the Midsummer Night's Dream. He seems to have experienced precisely the same difficulty which is felt by every intelligent reader of that wonderful play a doubt regarding the exact position of the 'elf-king and his jolie compagnie't5^ in relation to the other characters who move in turn over the stage, — the stately figure of the great Athenian legislator, the mythic Amazon, the lovers, the inimitable troup of artizans, nay, even Pyramus, Thisbe, Wall, and Moonshine. We say nothing of the various stature of his fairy groups. We think it quite allowable that some should be small enough to The honey-bags steal from the humble bees, And, for night tapers, crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worms eyes: [3.1.168ff] others large enough to be maids of honour to that queen whom her lord accused of flirting with man born of woman, and whose appearance and advances did somehow or other not astonish honest Bottom. But the human passion — the mockery of human passion, if you will — in their countenances, does certainly bewilder the spectator; it constitutes a standard of comparison, to which we involuntarily refer the mortal and supernatural personages; and the effect is, that the sleeping weaver looks like an overtaken Cyclops, and Helena like a giantess of the old world. . . . Nor does the scenery strike us as equally suited to both - it is either on too large a scale for one group, or too small for the other, since trees and sticks, pools and puddles, have not the same proportions. There is certainly a difficulty somewhere. Taking a regretful leave of Mr. Paton, . . . we propose to devote a few pages to the drama itself. To analyse thoroughly its structure - to determine its purpose to settle the due position and mutual analogies of its elementary groups - those four distinct and incongruous aggregates of figures which, drawn from the four quarters of the circle of imagination, seem to mingle indifferently together in its action, while

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they forward it till its close — each of these would be a worthy achievement for the shaping fantasies (as Theseus calls them [5.1.5]) of Shakespearean critics. . . . . . . [W]e are convinced that there is always a great advantage in attempting to trace the thread of purpose which runs through every play of Shakespeare. As in waters which swarm with life and riches, something, well worth letting down the net for, will be drawn up at every cast, even if it be not exactly that which we are seeking: some admirable unison of thought will be manifested — some latent beauty of connection made plain — some supposed discrepance demonstrated to belong to the higher harmonies. In this point of view, the Midsummer Night's Dream is peculiarly tempting to critical ingenuity: since, it is a play from whose perusal it is hardly possible to rise without an undefmable impression, that there is some law of regularity holding together and reconciling its seeming confusion. [Maine disclaims the ability to determine what design may have been in the mind of the poet. He argues that recent critics have come to this play with predetermined ideas of unity which are not appropriate to its character.] The play consists, as we have said, of several groups, which at first sight appear to belong not so much to the same landscape as to different compartments of the same canvass. Between them, however, a coherence and connection are soon discovered, of which we have rather hints and glimpses and a general impression than full assurance. We do not say that this connection is not cheerfully admitted on all hands; but it is noticed as a kind of paradox, as though it were not the result of obedience to any discernible law. And we are bid to wonder at it, as one of the greatest miracles of Shakespeare's genius, that he has succeeded in uniting several distinct incoherent and equivalent actions into one consistent whole, — and has produced a perspective without subduing any one part of the picture. [Qu _»ces, with a couple of small deletions, Knight: 'With scarcely . . . own influences'. (No. 19 above.)] Is this so? Is the Midsummer Night's Dream a scherzo and not an aria? Surely a definite melody — sometimes, it may be, lost in a variation, or diguised by a florid accompaniment — falls nevertheless most unmistakeably on the ear. [Maine reviews other critics, and considers the possibility of a structure based on four groups, either dividing the young lovers from Theseus and Hippolyta, or seeing the actors of the Interlude as differentiated from the artizans in their own persons. Dismissing these versions, he settles on] the old division of the characters into three parties, the Heroes (the Lovers being included), the Fairies, and the Artizans. But of these three equivalent, incoherent elements, which is the principal? Whose action is the main action? We look for a key to the composition; on which set of figures are we to set the eye? . . . Let us examine the two groups, first presented to our notice. The first of these consists, according to the arrangement we have adopted, of the Heroes, — Theseus, and his very unhistorical court. These are themselves fanciful and unsubstantial — not, indeed, creatures of the elements, yet still scarcely the men and women of flesh and blood with whom Shakespeare has elsewhere peopled his living stage. We cannot but suspect that there is a meaning in their mythological origin. Shakespeare has neither drawn them from history, his resource when he wished to paint the broader realities

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of life, nor from the lights and shadows, the gay gallantry and devoted love, of the Italian novel. They are apparently selected purely for their want of association. Their humanity is of the most delicately refined order; their perplexities the turbulence of still life. Moreover, the components of the group, the pairs of Athenian lovers, seem only to be so distributed in order to be confused. There are no distinctive features in their members. Lysander differs in nothing from Demetrius, Helena in nothing but height (iii. 2.) from Hermia. Finally, they speak a great deal of poetry, and poetry more exquisite never dropped from human pen; but it is purely objective, and not in the slightest degree modified by the character of the particular speaker. Turn we now to the second group. If the first were as far as possible removed from every-day experience, these are types of a class ever ready to our hand. They are of the earth, earthy. Bottom sat at a Stratford loom, Starveling on a Stratford tailoring-board; between them, they perhaps made the doublet which captivated the eyes of Richard Hathaway's daughter, or the hose that were torn in the park of the Lucys. If the former personages were all of one coinage, the characters of the latter are stamped with curious marks of difference. The 7CoX,1)7Cp(X'yjJ,O
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with two strongly marked extremes of human nature; the instruments by which they influence them being, aptly enough, in one case the ass's head, in the other the 'little western flower' [2.1.166]. It is necessary to this idea, that the two actions of the Heroes and Artizans should be considered completely subordinate, and their separate relations among themselves as not having been created relatively to the whole piece, but principally to the intended action of the Fairies upon them. We shall then have the singular arrangement of the first act purposely designed to exhibit successively the characteristics of the two groups in marked opposition, before exposing them to the influence of the Fairies. Finally, the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe is the ingenious machinery by which, after the stage has ceased to be occupied by the fairy action, these two otherwise independent groups are wrought together and amalgamated. Some difficulty may yet present itself as to the form of the piece, furnished as it were with a preface and supplement; but we think this can be satisfactorily accounted for. We are not aware, whether the time employed in the Midsummer Night's Dream has been generally noticed. The Midsummer Night's Dream is a dream on the night of Midsummer Day: a night sanctified to the operations of the fairies, as Hallowe'en was to those of the witches. The play is distributed into three distinguishable portions, those included in Act i. — in Acts ii. iii. and the first scene of Act iv. — and in the last scene of Act iv. together with Act v. The second, and far the most important division, comprehends all the transactions of the Midsummer Night; its action is carefully restricted to the duration of these twelve witching hours (Oberon having, as he says, to perform all before 'the first cock crow' [2.1.267]), while those of the first and third portions take place at distances of two days and one day respectively. Here then we have a stringent reason for Shakespeare's arrangement. He could not introduce us to the two subordinate groups, show us their intended relations, and in the end interweave them by a consistent process, without separating them, when operating per se, from the main action. He could, for instance, neither account for the appearance of the lovers in the wood without a previous exposition of their difficulties, and of the agreement to fly on 'morrow deep midnight' [1.1.223], nor for that of the stage-struck artizans, without some intimation of the intention to act a play, which made a rehearsal necessary. He could not follow his usual practice of developing together the relations and position of all his characters, because the limitation to twelve hours would not admit it - and out of these twelve hours he could not remove the fairy action. So that the first and last sections of the drama, in which the main action does not proceed and only the subordinate groups appear, have nothing to do with the Midsummer Night's Dream, but are merely exegetical of it. There are some minor indications of the truth of our theory. The very tide, for instance, solely applicable as it is to that part of the drama in which the fairies appear, seems not a little significant. Also, when the stage is cleared at the close, and the fairies return to bless the bridal bed of Theseus, — a practice of theirs quite distinct from their pranks on Midsummer Night, - the words of Puck in the epilogue are, 'If we shadows have offended,' &c. [5.1.423]. Nor is the distribution of the blank and rhymed verse unobservable. Mr. Hallam has said that this play is poetical rather than dramatic

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[No. 18 above]. We ourselves have occasionally fancied that, where the objectively poetical part prevails, the dialogue is mostly written in rhyme: where the dramatic, in the ordinary blank verse of Shakespeare. Both Heroes and Fairies speak in blank and rhymed verse, but not indifferently. The relations of the subordinate group are generally, though not invariably, conveyed through the imaginative rhymed lines, while the Fairies — the dramatic personages — rarely quit the vigorous versification we are so well accustomed to. We are desirous that the Fairies should assume in this play a position commensurate with the influence they must always exercise over English literature. Great as is the direct importance of combined purity and beauty in a national mythology, the indirect value is even greater. We have escaped much, as well as gained much, if our imagination has conversed with a more delicate creation than the sensuous divinities of Greece, or the vulgar spectres of the Walpurgis-Nacht. But whether the entente cordials between England and Fairyland be for good or for evil, we must at any rate acknowledge that the connection virtually began on that very Midsummer Night which witnessed the quarrel between Oberon and Titania — a quarrel fruitful in perplexities to other people beside Bottom and the Athenian Lovers.

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29 Henry Norman Hudson, a festival of dainties 18511

From The Works of Shakespeare: The Text Carefully Restored According to the First Editions; with Introductions, Notes Original and Selected, and a Life of the Poet; by the Rev. H. N. Hudson, A. M. In Eleven Volumes (11 vols, Boston and Cambridge, 1851-6). Volume II (1851). Measure for Measure; Much Ado About Nothing; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Love's Labour's Lost. Henry Norman Hudson (1814-86) studied at Middlebury College in Vermont, taught school for a few years, then, in 1844, started giving public lectures on Shakespeare, which rapidly gained favourable attention. These were published in two volumes as Lectures on Shakespeare (New York, 1848). In 1849 he was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, and in 1865 became a professor at Boston University. From 1851 to 1856 he edited The Works of Shakespeare in eleven volumes, and from 1876 on produced a number of editions of the plays expurgated and 'Prepared for Use in Schools, Clubs, Classes, and Families'. What has been called his 'major critical achievement' appeared in 1872, Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters. Parts of this were rewritten from his introductions to the plays of 1851-6. For at least half a century his editions were the most widely used in the schools and universities of North America.

From 'Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream'] [Hudson reviews the early printing history of the play, the date of composition and contemporary allusions, Verplanck's suspicion of passages from a much earlier period, the unactability of the play, the sources in Chaucer, and the originality of Shakespeare's fairies. Then he proceeds.] Coleridge says he is 'convinced that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout' [No. 15 above]. And elsewhere he remarks that 'the whole of A Midsummer Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical' [No. 15 above]. These observations, both of which spring out of one and the same idea, undoubtedly hit the true centre and life of the performance; and on no other ground can its merits be rightly estimated. This it is that explains and justifies the distinctive features of the work, such as the constant subordination of the dramatic elements, and the free playing of the action unchecked by the laws and conditions of outward fact and reality. A sort

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of lawlessness is indeed the very law of the piece: the actual order of things giving place to the spontaneous issues and capricious turnings of the mind; the lofty and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque, the worlds of fancy and of fact, all the strange diversities that enter into 'such stuff as dreams are made of [The Tempest, 4.1.156ff.], every where running and frisking together, and interchanging their functions and properties: so that the whole seems confused, flitting, shadowy, and indistinct, as fading away in the remoteness and fascination of moonlight. The very scene is laid in a sort of dream-land, called Athens indeed, but only because Athens was the greatest beehive of beautiful visions then known; or rather, it lies in an ideal forest near an ideal Athens, — a forest peopled with sportive elves, and sprites, and fairies, feeding on moonlight, and music, and fragrance: a place where nature herself is supernatural; where every thing is idealized, even to the sunbeams and the soil; where the vegetation proceeds by enchantment; and where there is magic in the germination of the seed and secretion of the sap. Great strength of passion or of volition would obviously be out of place in such a performance: it has room but for love, and beauty, and delight, — for whatsoever is most poetical in nature and fancy; and therefore for none but such tranquil stirrings of thought and feeling as may flow out in musical expression: any tuggings of mind or heart, that should ruffle and discompose the smoothnesses of lyrical division, would be quite out of keeping with a dream, especially a midsummer-night's dream, and would be very apt to turn it into something else. The characters, therefore, are appropriately drawn with light, delicate, vanishing touches; some of them being dreamy and sentimental, some gay and frolicsome, and others replete with amusing absurdities, while all are alike dipped in fancy or sprinkled with humour. And for the same reason the tender distresses of unrequited or forsaken love here touch not the moral sense at all, but only at most our human sympathies; for love is represented as but the effect of some visual enchantment, which the king of fairies can undo or suspend, reverse or inspire, at pleasure. The lovers all seem creatures of another mould than ourselves, with barely enough of the fragrance of humanity about them to interest our human feelings, and whose deepest sorrow wears upon its face a flush and play of inward happiness. Even the heroic personages are fitly represented with unheroic aspect: we see them but in their unbendings, when they have daffed their martial robes aside, to lead the train of day-dreamers, and have a nuptial jubilee. In their case great care and art were required, to make the play what it has been censured for being, — that is, to keep the dramatic sufficiently under, and lest the law of a part should override the law of the whole. So, likewise, in the transformation of Bottom and the dotage of Titania, all the resources of fancy were needed, to prevent the unpoetical from getting the upper hand, and thus swamping the genius of the piece. As it is, what words can fitly express the effect with which the extremes of the grotesque and the beautiful are here brought together; and how, in their meeting, each passes into the other without leaving to be itself? What an inward quiet laughing springs up and lubricates the fancy at Bottom's droll confusion of his two natures, when he talks, now as an ass, now as a man, and anon as a mixture of both, his thoughts running at the same time upon honey-bags and thistles, the charms of music and of good dry oats! Who but another nature could have so interfused the lyrical

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spirit, not only with, but into and through a series or cluster of the most irregular and fantastical drolleries? But indeed this embracing and kissing of the most ludicrous and the most poetical, the enchantment under which they meet, and the airy, dream-like grace that hovers over their union, are altogether inimitable and indescribable. In this unparalleled wedlock the very diversity of the elements seems to link them the closer, •while this linking in turn heightens that diversity; Titania being thereby drawn on to finer issues of soul, and Bottom to larger expressions of stomach. The union is so very improbable as to seem quite natural: we cannot conceive how any thing but a dream could possibly have married things so contrary; and that they could not have come together save in a dream, is a sort of proof that they were dreamed together. And so, throughout, the execution is in strict accordance with the plan: the play, from beginning to end, is a perfect festival of whatsoever dainties and delicacies poetry may command, — a continued revelry and jollification of soul, "where the understanding is put asleep that fancy may run riot, and wanton in unrestrained carousal. The bringing together of four parts so dissimilar as those of the Duke and his warrior Bride, of the Athenian ladies and their lovers, of the amateur players and their woodland rehearsal, and of the fairy bickerings and overreaching; and the carrying of them severally to a point where they all meet and blend in lyrical respondence; - all this is done in the same freedom from the rules that govern the drama of character and life. Each group of persons is made to parody itself into concert with the others, while the frequent intershootings of fairy influence lift the whole into the softest regions of fancy. At last the Interlude comes in as an amusing burlesque on all that has gone before, as in our troubled dreams we sometimes end with a dream that we have been dreaming, and our perturbations sink to rest in the sweet assurance that they were but the phantoms and unrealities of a busy sleep. Ulrici, [No. 26 above] — whose criticisms generally appear too something, perhaps too profound, to be of much use, — rightly considers this reciprocal parody the basis and centre where the several parts coalesce and round themselves into an organic whole. Yet, as if this vital coherence of all the parts were not enough, the several threads are collected and bound together; the nuptial doings at the close winding up whatsoever might else seem scattered and uncomposed, thus setting a formal knot upon an unity that was real before. Partly for the reasons already stated, and partly for others that we scarce know how to state, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a most effectual poser to criticism. Besides that its very essence is irregularity, so that it cannot be fairly brought to the test of rules, the play forms a complete class by itself: literature has nothing else like it; nothing therefore with which it may be compared and its merits adjusted. For the Poet has here exercised powers apparently differing even in kind, not only from those of any other writer, but from those shown in any other of his own writings: elsewhere, if his characters be penetrated with the ideal, their whereabout lies in the actual, and the work may in some measure be judged by that life which it claims to represent: here the whereabout is as ideal as the characters; all is in the land of dreams, - a place for dreamers, not for critics. The whole thing, moreover, swarms with enchantment: all the sweet witchery of Shakespeare's sweet genius is concentrated into it, yet disposed with so subtle and cunning a hand, that we can as little grasp it as get away from it: its

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charms, like those of a summer evening, are such as we may see and feel, but cannot locate or define; cannot say they are here, or they are there: the moment we yield ourselves up to them, they seem to be every where; the moment we go to master them, they seem to be nowhere. Though, as already remarked, the characterization be here quite secondary and subordinate, yet the play probably has as much of character as is compatible with so much of poetry. Theseus has been well described as a classic personage drawn with romantic features and expression. The name is Greek; but the nature and spirit are essentially Gothic. Nor does the abundance of classic allusion and imagery in the story call for any qualification here, because whatsoever is taken is thoroughly steeped in the efficacy of the taker. This species of anachronism, common to all modern writers before and during the age of Shakespeare, seems to have risen in part from a comparative dearth of classical learning, which left men to contemplate the heroes of antiquity under the forms into which their own minds and manners were cast. Thus all their delineations became informed with the genius of romance: the condensed grace of ancient character gave way to the enlargement of chivalrous magnanimity and honour, with its 'high-erected thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy. '^ Such appears to have been the no less beautiful than natural result of the 'small Latin and less Greek,'t2J so often smiled and sometimes barked at, by those more skilled in the ancient languages than in the mother-tongue of nature. Puck is apt to remind one of Ariel, though they have little in common, save that both are supernatural, and therefore live no longer in the faith of reason. Puck is no such sweet-mannered, tender-hearted, music-breathing spirit, there are no such delicate interweavings of a sensitive moral soul in his nature, he has no such soft touches of compassion and pious awe of goodness, as link the dainty Ariel in so sweetly with our best sympathies. Though Goodfellow by name, his powers and aptitudes for mischief are quite unchecked by any gentle relentings of fellow-feeling: in \vhatsoever distresses he finds or occasions he sees much to laugh at, nothing to pity: to tease and vex poor human sufferers, and then to think 'what fools these mortals be' [3.2.115], is pure fun to him; and if he do not cause pain, it is that the laws of Fairydom forbid him, not that he wishes it uncaused. Yet, notwithstanding his mad pranks, we cannot choose but love him, and let our fancy frolic with him, his sense of the ludicrous is so exquisite, he is so fond of sport, and so quaint and merry in his mischief: while at the same time such is the strange web of his nature as to keep him morally innocent. . . . But of all the characters in this play, Bottom descends by far the most into the realities of common experience, and is therefore much the most accessible to the grasp of prosaic and critical fingers. It has been thought the Poet meant him as a satire on the envies and jealousies of the green-room, as they had fallen under his keen yet kindly eyeJ3^ Surely the qualities uppermost in Bottom had forced themselves on his notice long before he entered the green-room. It is indeed curious to observe the solicitude of this Protean actor, and critic, and connoisseur, that all the parts of the forthcoming play may have the benefit of his execution; how great is his concern lest, if he be tied to one, the others may be 'overdone or come tardy off [Hamlet, 3.2.24ff.]; and how he would fain engross them all to himself, to the end of course

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that all may succeed to the honour of the stage and the pleasure of the spectators. But Bottom's metamorphosis is the most potent drawer-out of his genius. The sense of his new head-dressW stirs up all the manhood within him, and lifts his character into ludicrous greatness at once. Hitherto the seeming a man has made him content to be little better than an ass; but no sooner does he seem an ass than he tries his best to be a man; and all his efforts that way only go to approve the perfect fitness of his present seeming to his former being. Schlegel ingeniously remarks, that 'the droll wonder of Bottom's metamorphosis is merely the translation of a metaphor in its literal sense' [No. 8 above]. The turning a figure of speech thus into visible form is a thing only to be thought of or imagined; so that probably no attempt to paint or represent it to the senses can ever succeed. We can bear, we often have to bear, that a man should seem an ass to the mind's eye; but not that he should seem so to the eye of the body. A child, for example, takes great pleasure in fancying the stick he rides to be a horse, when he would be frightened out of his wits were the stick to quicken and expand into an actual horse. In like manner, we often delight in indulging fancies and giving names, when we should be shocked, were our fancies to harden into facts: we enjoy visions in our sleep, that would only disgust or terrify us, should we wake up and find them solidified into things. The effect of Bottom's transformation can scarce be much otherwise, if brought upon the stage. Delightful to think, it is intolerable to look upon: exquisitely true in idea, it has no truth, or even verisimilitude, when reduced to fact; so that, however gladly imagination receives it, sense and understanding revolt at it. (II, 259-63)

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30 John Ruskin, the Dream and Art 1851, 1872, 1883, 1884

From The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E.T. Cook and A. Wedderbum (39 vols, London, 1903-12). John Ruskin (1819-1900), student and historian of the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, social economist and reformer, and champion of the working man, was educated privately at home and at Oxford, and travelled extensively in Europe. The first volume of his first major work, Modem Painters, appeared in 1843; volume two in 1846; The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849; The Stones of Venice in 1851-3. In 1854 he helped found the Working Men's College in London, and lectured there; in 1869 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Among his numerous publications are two series of his Oxford lectures, Aratra Pentelici and The Eagle's Nest (1872), and a series of monthly letters to the 'Workmen of England' titled Fors Clavigera (1871-84). One of his last books was The Art of England (1883), more of his Slade lectures. Ruskin was very fond of A Midsummer Night's Dream and mentions the play at least twenty-seven times in his writings between 1851 and 1885.

[From The Stones of Venice, Volume One: The Foundations (1851), chapter IV: 'The Wall Base'] § 1. Our first business, then, is with Wall, and to find out wherein lies the true excellence of the 'Wittiest Partition' [5.1.167]. For it is rather strange that, often as we speak of a 'dead' wall,M and that with considerable disgust, we have not often, since Snout's time, heard of a living one. But the common epithet of opprobrium is justly bestowed, and marks a right feeling. A wall has no business to be dead. It ought to have members in its make,t2] and purposes in its existence, like an organised creature, and to answer its ends in a living and energetic way; and it is only when we do not choose to put any strength nor organisation into it, that it offends us by its deadness. Every wall ought to be a 'sweet and lovely wall' [5.1.176]. I do not care about its having ears; but, for instruction and exhortation, I would often have it to 'hold up its fingers' [3.1.69-70]. What its necessary members and excellences are, it is our present business to discover. (IX, 79)

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[From Aratra Pentelid: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture 'Likeness', section 142]

(1872), lecture IV:

1. Not only sculpture, but all the other fine arts, must be for the people. . . . 3. And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts — that is to say, the drama and sculpture — are to teach what is noble in past history, and lovely in existing human and organic life. . . . 5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfil the words of their greatest Master, THE BEST, IN THIS KIND, ARE BUT SHADOWS [5.1.211] (XX, 299-300) [From The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art (1872), lecture III: 'The Relation of Wise Art to Wise Science', paragraphs 39-40] [Ruskin asks his audience to read the last few sentences quoted from Aratra Pentelid, above, then quotes again Theseus's words about 'shadows' and comments.] That is Shakespeare's judgment of his own art. And by strange coincidence, he has put the words into the mouth of the hero whose shadow, or semblance in marble, is admittedly the most ideal and heroic we possess, of man; yet, I need not ask you, whether of the two, if it were granted you to see the statue by Phidias, or the hero Theseus himself, you would choose rather to see the carved stone, or the living King. Do you recollect how Shakespeare's Theseus concludes his sentence, spoken of the poor tradesmen's kindly offered art, in the Midsummer Night's Dream. 'The best in this kind are but shadows: and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them' [5.1.211-12]. It will not burden your memories painfully, I hope, though it may not advance you materially in the class list, if you will learn this entire sentence by heart, being, as it is, a faultless and complete epitome of the laws of mimetic art. 40. 'BUT SHADOWS!' Make them as beautiful as you can; use them only to enable you to remember and love what they are cast by. If ever you prefer the skill of them to the simplicity of the truth, or the pleasure of them to the power of the truth, you have fallen into that vice of folly, . . . which concludes the subtle description of her given by Prodicus, that she might be seen continually . . . to look with love, and exclusive wonder, at her own shadow. . . . &] [Ruskin concludes his seventh lecture, 'The Relation to Art of the Sciences of Inorganic Form', with this comment.] 148. III. Having learned to represent actual appearances faithfully, if you have any human faculty of your own, visionary appearances will take place to you which will be nobler and more true than any actual or material appearances; and the realization of these is the function of every fine art, which is founded absolutely, therefore, in truth, and consists absolutely in imagination. And once more we may conclude with,

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but now using them in a deeper sense, the words of our master — 'The best in this kind are but shadows' [5.1.211]. It is to be our task, gentlemen, to endeavour that they may be at least so much. (XXII, 152, 221) [From Fors Clavigera, volume VIII, Letter 92, November, 1883] [In this letter Ruskin discusses Sir Walter Scott's deep sense of the supernatural and then describes four stages 'by which fancy rises towards faith', the final stage being an assured faith in God.] (I.) The lowest stage is that of wilfully grotesque fancy, which is recognized as false, yet dwelt upon with delight and finished with accuracy, as the symbol or parable of what is true. Shakespeare's Puck, and the Dwarf Goblin of the Lay, are precisely alike in this first level of the imagination. Shakespeare does not believe in Bottom's translation; neither does Scott that, when the boy Buccleugh passes the draw-bridge with the dwarf, the sentinel only saw a terrier and lurcher passing out.W Yet both of them permit the fallacy, because they acknowledge the Elfin power in nature, to make things, sometimes for good, sometimes for harm, seem what they are not. Nearly all the grotesque sculpture of the great ages, beginning with the Greek Chimaera,!5] has this nascent form of Faith for its impulse. (XXIX, 458) [From The Art of England (1884), lecture IV: 'Fairy Land. Mrs. Allingham and Kate Greenaway'M] . . . I return to my proper subject of to-day, — the art which intends to address only childish imagination, and whose object is primarily to entertain with grace. With grace: — I insist much on this latter word. We may allow the advocates of a material philosophy to insist that every wild-weed tradition of fairies, gnomes, and sylphs should be well ploughed out of a child's mind to prepare it for the good seed of the Gospel of— Disgrace: but no defence can be offered to the presentation of these ideas to its mind in a form so vulgarized as to defame and pollute the masterpieces of former literature. It is perfectly easy to convince the young proselyte of science that a cobweb on the top of a thistle cannot be commanded to catch a honey-bee for him [4.1.10-14], without introducing a dance of ungainly fairies on the site of the cabstand under the Westminster clock tower, or making the Queen of them fall in love with the sentry on guard. W 97. With grace, then, assuredly, — and I think we may add also, with as much seriouness as an entirely fictitious subject may admit of, — seeing that it touches the border of that higher world which is not fictitious. We are all perhaps too much in the habit of thinking the scenes of burlesque in the Midsummer Night's Dream exemplary of Shakespeare's general treatment of fairy character: we should always remember that he places the most beautiful words descriptive of virgin purity which English poetry possesses, in the mouth of the Fairy King, and that to the

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Lord of Fancies he entrusts the praise of the conquest of Fancy, - 'In maiden meditation, - Fancy free' [2.1.164]. Still less should we forget the function of household benediction, attributed to them always by happy national superstition, and summed in the closing lines of the same play, — With this field-dew consecrate,^ Every fairy take his gait; And each several chamber bless, Through this palace, with sweet peace. [5.1.415ff.] (XXXIII, 332-3)

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31 Henry Morley, a most charming entertainment of the stage 1853

From The Journal of a London Playgoer from 1851 to 1866 (London, 1866). Henry Morley (1822-94) studied in Germany and at King's College, London, and in 1848 became a schoolmaster. Some of his satirical essays attracted the attention of Charles Dickens, who invited him to come to London to help manage Household Words and its successor All the Year Round (1850-65). He also wrote for The Examiner. In 1857 he began his career as a lecturer in several colleges in London, culminating in his appointment as Professor of English language and literature in Queen's College in 1878. In his later years he brought out several series of'English Classics', the largest being Cassell's National Library (1886-90) which had 214 volumes, each with an introduction by Morley. His review of Samuel Phelps's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which first appeared in The Examiner October 15, 1853, is here reprinted from his Journal of a London Playgoer (1866; reprinted 1891 and 1974), slightly revised.

[From 1853 'October 15'] Every reader of Shakespeare is disposed to regard the Midsummer Night's Dream as the most essentially unactable of all his plays. It is a dramatic poem of the utmost grace and delicacy; its characters are creatures of the poet's fancy that no flesh and blood can properly present — fairies who 'creep into acorn-cups' [2.1.31], or mortals who are but dim abstractions, persons of a dream. The words they speak are so completely spiritual that they are best felt when they are not spoken. Their exquisite beauty is like that of sunset colours which no mortal artist can interpret faithfully. The device of the clowns in the play to present Moonshine seems but a fair expression of the kind of success that might be achieved by the best actors who should attempt to present the Midsummer Night's Dream on the stage. It was, therefore, properly avoided by managers as lying beside and above their art; nor was there reason to be disappointed when the play some years ago furnished Madame VestrisM with a spectacle that altogether wanted the Shakespearean spirit. In some measure there is reason for a different opinion on these matters in the Midsummer Night's Dream as produced at Sadler's Wells by Mr. Phelps. Though stage fairies cannot ride on blue bells, and the members of no theatrical company now in

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existence can speak such poetry as that of the Midsummer Night's Dream otherwise than most imperfectly, yet it is proved that there remains in the power of the manager who goes with pure taste and right feeling to his work, enough for the establishment of this play as a most charming entertainment of the stage. Mr. Phelps has never for a minute lost sight of the main idea which governs the whole play, and this is the great secret of his success in the presentation of it. He knew that he was to present merely shadows; that spectators, as Puck reminds them in the epilogue, are to think they have slumbered on their seats, and that what appeared before them have been visions. Everything has been subdued as far as possible at Sadler's Wells to this ruling idea. The scenery is very beautiful, but wholly free from the meretricious glitter now in favour; it is not so remarkable for costliness as for the pure taste in which it and all the stage arrangements have been planned. There is no ordinary scene-shifting; but, as in dreams, one scene is made to glide insensibly into another. We follow the lovers and the fairies through the wood from glade to glade, now among trees, now with a broad view of the sea and Athens in the distance, carefully but not at all obtrusively set forth. And not only do the scenes melt dream-like one into another, but over all the fairy portion of the play there is a haze thrown by a curtain of green gauze placed between the actors and the audience, and maintained there during the whole of the second, third, and fourth acts. This gauze curtain is so well spread that there are very few parts of the house from which its presence can be detected, but its influence is everywhere felt; it subdues the flesh and blood of the actors into something more nearly resembling dream-figures, and incorporates more completely the actors with the scenes, throwing the same green fairy tinge, and the same mist, over all. A like idea has also dictated certain contrivances of dress, especially in the case of the fairies. Very good taste has been shown in the establishment of a harmony between the scenery and the poem. The main feature — the Midsummer Night — was marked by one scene so elaborated as to impress it upon all as the central picture of the group. The moon was just so much exaggerated as to give it the required prominence. The change, again, of this Midsummer Night into morning, when Theseus and Hippolyta come to the wood with horn and hound, was exquisitely presented. And in the last scene, when the fairies, coming at night into the hall of Theseus, 'each several chamber bless' [5.1.417], the Midsummer moon is again seen shining on the palace as the curtains are drawn that admit the fairy throng. Ten times as much money might have been spent on a very much worse setting of the Midsummer Night's Dream. It is the poetical feeling prompting a judicious but not extravagant outlay, by aid of which Mr. Phelps has produced a stage-spectacle more refined and intellectual, and far more absolutely satisfactory, than anything I can remember to have seen since Mr. Macready was a manager. PI That the flesh and blood presentments of the dream-figures which constitute the persons of the play, should be always in harmony with this true feeling, was scarcely to be expected. A great deal of the poetry is injured in the speaking. Unless each actor were a man who combined with elocutionary power a very high degree of sensibility and genius, it could hardly be otherwise. Yet it cannot be said even here that the poet's effects entirely failed. The Midsummer Night's Dream abounds

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in the most delicate passages of Shakespeare's verse; the Sadler's Wells pit has a keen enjoyment for them; and pit and gallery were crowded to the farthest wall on Saturday night with a most earnest audience, among whom many a subdued hush arose, not during, but just before, the delivery of the most charming passages. If the crowd at Drury Lane is a gross discredit to the public taste, the crowd at Sadler's Wells more than neutralizes any ill opinion that may on that score be formed of playgoers. The Sadler's Wells gallery, indeed, appeared to be not wholly unconscious of the contrast, for, when Bottom volunteered to roar high or roar low, a voice from the gallery desired to know whether he could 'roar like Brooke.'PI Even the gallery at this theatre, however, resents an interruption, and the unexpected sally was not well received. A remarkably quick-witted little boy, Master F. Artis^, plays Puck, and really plays it with faithfulness and spirit as it has been conceived for him by Mr. Phelps. His training has evidently been most elaborate. We see at once that his acts and gestures are too perfect and mature to be his own imaginings, but he has been quick-witted enough to adopt them as his own, and give them not a little of the charm of independent and spontaneous production. By this thoughtfulness there is secured for the character on the stage something of the same prominence that it has in the mind of closet-readers of the play. Of Miss Cooper's Helena we cannot honestly say very much. In that as in most of the other characters the spirit of the play was missed, because the arguing and quarrelling and blundering that should have been playful, dreamlike, and poetical, was much too loud and real. The men and women could not fancy themselves shadows. Were it possible so far to subdue the energy of the whole body of actors as to soften the tone of the scenes between Theseus, Hippolyta, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena, the latter character even on the stage might surely have something of the effect intended by the poem. It is an exquisite abstraction, a pitiful and moving picture of a gentle maid forlorn, playfully developed as beseems the fantastic texture of the poem, but not at all meant to excite mirth; and there was a very great mistake made when the dream was so worked out into hard literalness as to create constant laughter during those scenes in which Helena, bewildered by the change of mood among the lovers, shrinks and complains 'Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born' [2.2.123]? The merriment which Shakespeare connected with those scenes was but a little of the poet's sunlight meant to glitter among tears. It remains for us only to speak of the success of Mr. Phelps as Bottom, whom he presented from the first, with remarkable subtlety and spirit, as a man seen in a dream. In his first scene, before we know what his conception is, or in what spirit he means the whole play to be received, we are puzzled by it. We miss the humour, and we get a strange, elaborate, and uncouth dream-figure, a clown restless •with vanity, marked by a score of little movements, and speaking ponderously with the uncouth gesticulation of an unreal thing, a grotesque nightmare character. But that, we find, is precisely what the actor had intended to present, and we soon perceive that he was right. Throughout the fairy scenes there is a mist thrown over Bottom by the actor's art. The violent gesticulation becomes stillness, and the hands are fixed on the breast. They are busy with the unperceived business of managing the movements of the ass's

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head, but it is not for that reason they are so perfectly still. The change of manner is a part of the conception. The dream-figure is dreaming, there is dream within dream, Bottom is quiet, his humour becomes more unctuous, but Bottom is translated. He accepts all that happens, quietly as dreamers do; and the ass's head we also accept quietly, for we too are in the middle of our dream, and it does not create surprise. Not a touch of comedy was missed in this capital piece of acting, yet Bottom was completely incorporated with the Midsummer Night's Dream, made an essential part of it, as unsubstantial, as airy and refined as all the rest. Quite masterly was the delivery by Mr. Phelps of the speech of Bottom on awakening. He was still a man subdued, but subdued by the sudden plunge into a state of an unfathomable wonder. His dream clings about him, he cannot sever the real from the unreal, and still we are made to feel that his reality itself is but a fiction. The preoccupation continues to be manifest during his next scene with the players, and his parting 'No more words; away; go away' [4.2.45], was in the tone of a man who had lived with spirits and was not yet perfectly returned into the flesh. Nor did the refinement of this conception, if we except the first scene, abate a jot of the laughter that the character of Bottom was intended to excite. The mock play at the end was intensely ludicrous in the presentment, yet nowhere farcical. It was the dream. Bottom as Pyramus was more perfectly a dream-figure than ever. The contrast between the shadowy actor and his part, between Bottom and Pyramus, was marked intensely; and the result was as quaint a phantom as could easily be figured by real flesh. Mr. Ray's Quince was very good indeed, and all the other clowns were reasonably well presented. It is very doubtful whether the Midsummer Night's Dream has yet, since it was first written, been put upon the stage with so nice an interpretation of its meaning. It is pleasant beyond measure to think that an entertainment so refined can draw such a throng of playgoers as I saw last Saturday sitting before it silent and reverent at Sadler's Wells. (66-72)

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32 Douglas William Jerrold, Samuel Phelps's Bottom 1853

From 'Bully Bottom', Punch; or The London Charivari, No. 640 (October 16, 1853), p. 165. Douglas William Jerrold (1803-1857) — friend of Dickens, Thackeray, and almost all the significant men of letters from 1830 to 1857, popular dramatist, short story writer, novelist, essayist, journalist, satirist, wit, and radical reformer — received little formal schooling, and at ten years of age went to sea for two years. He rejoined his family in London in 1816, and was apprenticed to a printer. Studying on his own, he began writing, publishing some verse, having a play produced in 1821 by Sadler's Wells, and contributing to various newspapers. He enjoyed considerable success as a playwright, composing over fifty dramatic pieces for the London stage, but gradually turned to fiction and journalism, publishing in the Athenaeum, the Morning Herald, the New Monthly Magazine, and Blackwood's. In 1832 he started Punch in London, which lasted only seventeen weeks, but in 1841, inspired by the French satirical journal Charivari, he and some other reform-minded writers founded Punch; or the London Charivari, to which he was a constant contributor till his death. From 1852 to 1857 he was the successful editor of Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper. A collection of his chief works was published in eight volumes in 1851-8.

BULLY BOTTOM. Bully Bottom is, in truth, 'translated' [3.1.119] by Mr. Phelps. Translated from matter-of-fact into poetic humour - translated from the commonplace tradition of the playhouse to a thing subtly grotesque — rarely, and heroically whimsical. A bully Bottom of the old, allowed sort, makes up his face — even as the rustic wag of a horse-collar — to goggle and grin; and is as like to the sweet bully of Phelps — bears the same relation in art to the Bottom of Sadler's Wells — as the sign-post portrait on the village green to a head, vital by a few marvellous dots and touches of Pvichard Doyle t1]. In these days we know of no such translation! Translate a starveling Welsh curate into a Bishop of London, and Phelps's translation of Bottom the weaver shall still remain a work of finer art, and — certainly to all humanising intents of man-solacing humour — of far richer value. We have had, plentiful as French eggs, translations of facile, delicate French, into clumsy, hobbling British; and now, as some amends, we

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have Bottom translated by Phelps from dull tradition into purest, airiest Shakespeare. Mr. Phelps has not painted, dabbed, we should say, the sweet bully with the old player's old hare's-foot^; but has taken the finest pencil, and, with a clean, sharp, fantastic touch, has rendered Bottom a living weaver — a weaver whose brain is marvellously woven, knitted up, with self-opinion. Now this, we take to be the true, breathing notion of Shakespeare, and this notion has entered the belief of the actor, and become a living thing. Bottom is of conceit all-compact. Conceit flows in his veins — is ever swelling, more or less, in his heart; covers him from scalp to toes, like his skin. And it is this beautiful, this most profitable quality - this human coin, self-opinion, which, however cracked, and thin, and base, may be put off as the real thing by the unfailing heroism of the utterer — it is this conceit that saves Bottom from a world of wonderment when he finds himself the leman dear, clipp'd by the Queen of Faery. Bottom takes the love — the doting of Titania — as he would take the commanded honey-bag of the red-lipped [i.e., red-hipped: 4.1.11] humble-bee - as something sweet and pleasant, but nought to rave about. He is fortified by his conceit against any surprise of the most bountiful fortune: self-opinion turns fairy treasures into rightful wages. And are there not such Bottoms - not writ upon the paper Athens of the poet; not swaggering in a wood watered of ink-drops - but such sweet bullies in brick and mortar London - Bottoms of Fortune, that for sport's sake plays Puck? The ingenuous Bottom of the play has this distinction from the Bottoms of the real, human world — he, for the time, wears his ass's head with a difference; that is, he shows the honest length of his ears, and does not, and cannot abate the show of a single hair. His head is outwardly all ass: there is with him no reservation soever. Mr. Phelps has the fullest and the deepest sense of the asinine qualities of Bottom from the beginning. For Bottom wants not the ass's head to mark him ass: the ass is in Bottom's blood and brain; Puck merely fixes the outward, vulgar type significant of the inward creature. When Bottom in the first scene desires to be Wall, and Moonshine, and Lion, his conceit brays aloud, but brays with undeveloped ears. But herein is the genius of our actor. The traditional bully Bottom is a dull, stupid, mouthing ass, with no force save in his dullness. Bottom, as played by Mr. Phelps, is an ass with a vehemence, a will, a vigour in his conceit, but still an ass. An ass that fantastically kicks his heels to the right and left, but still ass. An ass that has the most prolonged variations of his utterance — nevertheless, it is braying, and nothing better. And there is great variety in braying. We never heard two asses bray alike. Listen — it may be the season of blossoming hawthorns — and asses salute asses. In very different tones, with very different cadence, will every ass make known the yearning, the aspiration that is within him. We speak not frivolously, ignorantly, on this theme; for in our time we have heard very many asses. And so return we to the Bottom of merry Islington - to the Golden Ass of Sadler's Wells. That ass has opened the playhouse season of 1853-4 very musically — would we could think hopefully, and with prophetic promise. At present, however, Bottom is the master-spirit: and, in these days of dramatic pardonnez-mois, it is a little comforting — not that we are given to the sanguine mood in things theatrical — to know that folks are found ready to make jocund pilgrimage to Sadler's Wells, where a man with a real

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vital love for his art has now for many seasons made his theatre a school; and more, has never wanted attentive, reverent, grateful scholars. In this, Mr. Phelps has been a national school-master; and — far away from the sustaining, fructifying beams of the Court — for hitherto our Elizabeth has not visited our BurridgeP^ — has popularly taught the lessons left to England by Shakespeare — legacies everlasting as her cliffs. As yet, Her Majesty has not journied to the Wells. But who knows, how soon that 'great fairy'[Antony and Cleopatra, 4.8.12] may travel thither, to do grace to bully Bottom! If so, let Mr. Phelps — if he can — still heighten his manner on his awakening from that dream. Let him — if he can — more subtly mingle wonderment with struggling reason, reason wrestling with wonder to get the better of the mystery! [Quotes 4.1.205-9, 211-14.] We do not think it in the wit or power of Mr. Phelps — under any newer inspiration, to give a deeper, finer meaning to this than he has done. But, if Her Majesty command the play, as a loyal subject, he will doubtless make the essay. In these words, Bottom - as rendered by the actor - is taken away from the ludicrous; he is elevated by the mystery that possesses him, and he affects our more serious sympathies, whilst he forbids our laughter. One of the very, very few precious things of the stage — of this starved time — is an Ass's head, as worn by the manager of merrie Islington. We hope, at least, the Queen will command that head to be brought — with due solemnity — to Windsor Castle. Let Bottom be made to roar again before Her Majesty, the Prince, the heir-apparent, and all the smaller childhood royalties. Let Bottom be confronted with the picked of the Cabinet - the elect of Privy Councillors. And — as we have Orders of Eagles and Elephants, why not the ingenuous out-speaking significance, the Order of the Ass? As a timid beginning, we have the Thistle — wherefore not the Ass himself? In which case, the Order established, the Bottom of Sadler's Wells ought rightfully to be the Chancellor thereof. (165)

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33 Richard Grant White, dramatic and poetic art 1854

From Shakespeare's Scholar: Being Historical and Critical Studies of His Text, Characters, and Commentators, with an Examination of Mr. Collier's Folio of 1632 (New York, 1854). Richard Grant White (1821-85) was proud of his descent from one of the founding families of New England, and was a lifelong anglophile. Though trained as a lawyer, his interests were in music and the arts. When his family suffered financial reverses he became the music critic for the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, publishing in various periodicals on music, visual arts, poetry, and politics. From 1861-78 he served (like Chaucer) as chief clerk of Customs. His great love of Shakespeare was manifested by major publications through the course of his life. Shakespeare's Scholar laid the groundwork for the edition which appeared, in 12 volumes, between 1857 and 1866; in 1865 he published Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare, With an Essay Toward the Expression of His Genius, and an Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Drama (Boston); in 1886 Studies in Shakespeare collected his periodical essays (Boston and New York).

[From the chapter entitled 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'] The high place which the poetry of this play holds even among the poetry of Shakespeare, is admitted by all who are capable of appreciating it. There is perhaps not another production of the human mind which so has the power to make us forget the realities of life, and live for a time in the realms of fancy. . . . But universally as the poetic charm of this play has bound us of the present century, who have returned to the appreciation of Shakespeare which existed in his own day, it has been regarded by some very able critics as unfit for representation. [Quotes Hazlitt, 'The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted . . . unmanageable reality'. No. 10 above.] . . . I venture to doubt the truth of the dogma, that 'poetry and the stage do not agree well together;' and to object, that although it is self-evident that 'the ideal can have no place upon the stage,' it will not do to apply that truth as a test to the fitness of a dramatic composition for the theatre. All characters in the higher drama are ideal; and the more truthful they are, the more nearly do they approach the true ideal, the conditions of which are the absence of all that is peculiar to the individual, with the

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presence of all that is characteristic of the species. Exclude any play from the stage, because the ideal is not there attainable, and you strike the whole of Shakespeare's dramatic works from the list of acting plays. . . . It is impossible to admit the inconsistency of poetry and the stage, without admitting at the same time that all the greatest dramas which the world has seen . . . are unfit for the stage; an absurdity which Mr. Hazlitt could not have intended to assert. But if he meant. . . that the recitation of long passages of merely descriptive or didactic poetry clogs dramatic progress, he has asserted an undeniable truth, and one which has a bearing upon the fitness of this play for representation. There are many passages in it which, enchantingly beautiful as they are when read, might, if recited without curtailment upon the stage, be listened to impatiently by a modern audience. But it should be remembered that Shakespeare wrote to please a public which rather craved than eschewed such passages. Men whose fathers, or who themselves in their early days, had listened by the hour to the didactic doggerel of Moralities and Mysteries, and even that of the comedies and tragedies written by Shakespeare's predecessors, would find the longest and least impassioned speech which he has put into the mouth of any character, lively and inspiriting. Accustomed, too, as the audiences of that time had been, to the utter absence of scenery and stage effect, a change of scene having been indicated to them simply by rubbing the name of one place off a board and writing that of another on it, and also even to seeing men play women's parts, they would not find fault with the impossibilities of this drama. Bearing this in mind, we can imagine A Midsummer Night's Dream played with no less effect now than in Shakespeare's day.1 We should not forget that when it was brought out, Oberon and Titania as well as Hermia and Helena were played by men; and that no one of our many contrivances for stage effect were known to the managers who first produced it. We have only now to realize the poet's conception to the extent of our ability, as they did to the extent of theirs, and let our imagination supply the rest, to find that this play possesses the power to awake an absorbing interest, though not a profound emotion, in the minds of men in any age of the world. [White devotes a paragraph to praise of Shakespeare's genius in bringing together so many incongruous elements.] But besides, and beyond this, although the construction of the comedy is no less fraught with the proofs of genius than its poetry, it is yet evident that the dramatic progress and interest of A Midsummer Night's Dream, if it have any, are totally unlike those of any other dramatic composition which holds possession of the stage. We feel from the beginning, that the fate or even the fancied happiness of not one of the characters is at stake. Theseus and his buskined mistress are well content when the play opens; and we know that the confusion which Puck makes with his love-in-idleness is to be mere perplexity, not intended by the dramatist to cause us even an instant's concern, and to be unravelled again by a momentary exercise of the same capricious power which caused it. The Athenian lovers are mere puppets for Puck to play with; and we feel no more troubled when Lysander is faithless to Hermia and loves Helena, than when Titania deserts Oberon for Bottom. The comedy is entirely one of incident. With the emotions of the characters we do not

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concern ourselves; they have nothing to do with the progress and determination of the action, and, in fact, are very rarely obtruded upon us by the author. To this want of ordinary dramatic interest is added the difficulty of accepting ordinary mortals as the representatives of the principal characters of the play. We have an ideal demi-god, an ideal Amazon, an ideal Oberon, Titania and Puck in our minds; and where indeed is Cobweb to come from, he whom good-natured Nick Bottom fears to see 'overflowed with the honey-bag' [4.1.16] of an humble-bee? What mortal voices can sing, 'You spotted snakes, with double tongue' [2.2.9]? These are all practical impossibilities; but they were even less possible in Shakespeare's day than in ours; and A Midsummer Night's Dream was then, as it is now, a successful acting play There has ever been among modern managers a propensity to make this comedy merely a brilliant spectacle. They have seemed to doubt its intrinsic power to interest, and have put it on the stage only on account of the occasion they found in it to display the labors of the scene painter, the costumer, and the machinist; to which they have added a crowd of pretty people who have no business in it. I remember one of these performances.^ The scenery was very beautiful, — some of it quite grand. Puck and Titania's attendant Fairy made their first appearance on the shore of a fairy lake which stretched far into the distance. Puck was on the back of a peacock, which, when he dismounted, instantly changed into a large tropical flower and disappeared. Titania came on, drawn by swans and surrounded by a troop of fairies. Oberon, crowned and gorgeously dressed in a gold tunic with a scarlet robe, met her, and when she retired after their little 'tiff,' called up, by a motion of his wand, a gorgeous aquatic equipage, consisting of a huge shell drawn by dolphins. After singing a part of his speech, 'I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows' {sic} [2.1.249], as a duet with a fairy, he took his seat, and instead of sailing off, waved his wand, and a panorama of Fairy-land passed before him. This was a very splendid and elaborate affair, and must have occupied ten minutes in passing. The scenery in the second Act was hardly less striking and beautiful; and in this act a corps de ballet was introduced, and a French dancer danced a pas seul, and with them, a shawl dance^ while Titania slept. . . . Among the characters, Puck was, perhaps, the favorite with the audience. This was not surprising; for the part was given to one of the most charming little children who ever exchanged the caresses of the nursery for the plaudits of a theatre. . . . [N] either she, nor the fine dresses, nor the dances, nor the beautiful scenery, had any thing to do with Shakespeare. The piece thus played is a grand fairy spectacle: it is not Shakespeare's enchanting Comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Such a Puck, pleasing as he may be in himself, is no more like Shakespeare's Puck than he is like Jupiter Tonans [Jupiter the Thunderer]. Here we had a pretty little creature, whose trim body was gayly dressed, and whose dainty limbs were snugly encased in stockinet and terminated as to the lower extremities in gaiter boots of a cerulean tint. He delivered his speeches in a sweet childish treble, and was altogether the tenderest and most exquisitely constituted creature in the fairy band. Is this Shakespeare's llob of spirits' [2.1.16], . . . whose 'shape and making' [2.1.32] were so unlike those of his fellow fays that a stranger fairy knew him by

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those alone? . . . Who that has read the play (and who has not), cannot call the urchin before his mind's eye as instantly as Oberon commanded his real presence! — a rough, knurly-limbed, fawn-faced, shock-pated little fellow, — a very Shetlander among the gossamer-winged, dainty-limbed shapes around him; and strong enough to knock all their heads together for his elvish sport. . . . Fairy lakes and panoramas of Fairy-land are just as much out of place as a dandy Puck. There is not the slightest warrant in the text for either. The scene of the fairy business is 'A Wood near Athens;' and the only changes are from one part to 'Another part of the Wood.'W Pas seuls, shawl dances, and the people who dance them, are no less foreign to the design of Shakespeare. . . . The text gives no hint of any of these things. That tells of fairy gambols and pranks which form a part of the movement of the play. Shakespeare brings on the stage just such fairies as Mary Arden had told him of when he stood at her knee, like any other mortal child. . . . There is nothing there of fairy lakes and panoramas, and people tying themselves and each other up in rose-colored shawls while they stand with infinite pain upon the extremity of one toe, and untying themselves by standing on the other. True, there have been fairy ballets composed in which there are pas of all kinds; but in those, motion, the dance, is the medium of expression. It is not so in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Nothing is there set down to be performed which has not to do with the progress of the piece; and to arrest that for the movement of a panorama or the evolutions of a ballet, is to stifle Shakespeare with a paint-brush, and to trample poetry under foot with entrechats and bore it through and through with pirouettes. Shakespeare has preserved a unity in this fanciful composition, which the spectacle-making managers only mar by changing the last scene to Fairy-land. It is to be present at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta that Oberon and Titania have left Fairy-land and come to Athens, as we learn from their mutual reproaches at their first meeting; and the events which form the movement of the three progressive acts of the play, the second, third and fourth, are but the fruit of accident and mischief. The fifth Act, like the finale of a finely wrought musical composition, placidly resumes the theme which was announced at its commencement, and simply blends with it the counter-theme with which it has been intricately worked up during the body of the piece. The poet ends the fairy freaks which have harassed the mortals through this dream, by turning the tormentors into benefactors, and bringing them into the house to bless the place and the children born of the marriages celebrated on that night. After the grotesque fun and broad humor of the interlude, the dream resumes its fanciful and graceful form, and fades upon the mind, a troop of shadowy figures, singing benisons. [White praises Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream,^ but expresses doubts about the composer's originality and creative genius.] The overture, the march and the dances, written by Mendelssohn for this play, are the finest productions of his pen. It is paying them the highest possible compliment to say that they are thoroughly informed with the spirit of Shakespeare's poetry. The same may be said of all the music which the German composer has written to A Midsummer Night's Dream. But as to a part of it, there is a great aesthetic error, which

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however has not to do with its intrinsic merits, and for which the fashion of the stage and not the composer is accountable. — In many passages the thoughts of the musical composer and the poet are heard together. This is false Art. The mingling of two forms of expression is inadmissible, because it must be fatal to the full and just effect which properly belongs to either. Let Music or Poetry take possession of our souls; but do not call upon our emotions to serve the bidding of two masters. . . . Dramatic poetry can receive no more aid from Music, than dramatic music can receive from Poetry. All that the musician can do for the dramatist is to embellish his work: all that the poet can accomplish for the musician is to furnish him with dramatic situations, and suggestive thoughts, of which his music is to be the sole exponent, to the entire disregard of all except the mere dramatic conception of the poet; whose words, as words, are in this case to be considered the mere vehicles of musical sounds. . . . In truth, Music and Poetry more than any two other Arts must be enjoyed apart; because they both appeal to the mind through the same sense, — the ear, which, otherwise, is called upon to receive at the same time two impressions, one transmitting thought, the other awakening emotions. . . . In a play, where words are the vehicles of thought and expression, music may properly precede or follow the Acts, or be interspersed through the poetry, but cannot properly accompany it: in an opera, where music is the medium of expression, we want words only for the situation or emotion which they furnish, as a subject to the composer, and for the purposes of articulation. He who needs, or can suffer the music of Mendelssohn while he is listening to the verse of Shakespeare, or who longs to hear the verse of Romani while he is enjoying the music of Bellini,M might with greater propriety ask that St. Luke's narrative should be plainly written across the face of Raphael's Transfiguration^ so that he might enjoy the story and the picture together, or complain that Virgil did not write his description of Venus appearing to ./Eneas^ with such an arrangement of his lines that they would present the form of the beauty they described. No, — neither Music, Painting, Sculpture, nor Poetry will accept divided homage. Art, like FalstafFs sack, must be 'simple, of itself [The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.5.31], a draught not of mingled pleasures; but pure, — unmixed even with kindred delights. (196-208) [Quotes 2.1.148-54: 'Thou remember'st . . . the sea maid's music'.] How strangely felicitous the choice of epithet by Shakespeare! and yet there is conveyed, I know not how, an ipression that the epithets are not chosen, but rise spontaneously with the thought. He says the maid uttered 'dulcet and harmonious breath.' Not 'notes,' as any other poet would have said, but 'breath;' as if the marvellous creature exhaled music; as if from her lovely parted lips nothing could come which did not take from them a form of beauty. Let any one put 'notes' or 'tones' in the place of 'breath,' in this line, and see how the bloom on its rich beauty vanishes. The passage is beautiful, charmingly beautiful, whichever word is there; but take away the word which Shakespeare wrote, and that which is exquisite, ethereal, and really transcendent in its beauty is gone, utterly and hopelessly.

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How much, too, is there in the alliteration of the line, 'In maiden meditation fancy-free' [2.1.164]. The alliteration, it may be said, adds nothing to the thought. True; but it does add to its charm. Without it, the line would not be that which always flashes on the memory when we think of a maiden who has lived till now with the depths of her heart untroubled. (214-15)

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34 Edward Strachey, dialogue with a sceptic 1854

From 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Fraser's Magazine, 50 (December, 1854), 677-82. Sir Edward Strachey (1812-1901), man of letters and (after succeeding to his uncle's baronetcy and estates in 1858) benevolent landlord and magistrate, published a variety of books and essays, especially in the fields of biblical and religious studies, and literature. His chief Shakespearean work is Shakespeare's Hamlet: an Attempt to Find a Key to a Great Moral Problem, by Methodical Analysis of the Play (London, 1848). He also published a dialogue on Love's Labour's Lost (Fraser's Magazine, January 1858). He incorporated a revised version of his Midsummer Night's Dream essay, no longer in dialogue form, into an essay on 'Shakespeare's Ghosts, Witches, and Fairies' for the Quarterly Review (July 1890,91-121).

Friend. What do you take to be the 'idea' of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream? Author. Goethe told Eckermann that he could not well say what was the 'idea' of his own Wilhelm Meister, when he was asked the question.^] But if he did not solve, he superseded, the difficulty, and I think we may possibly do the same here. F. How so? A. Shakespeare, like every other true poet, is a 71OIT|TT|£, a maker; he makes real men and women in real situations, in which they say and do real things. Don't ask what he meant, but what he has made. You ask what the people in the street, or in the newspaper, are doing, and what they mean by their doings; but not what their fathers intended them to do and mean. Treat Shakespeare's characters in the same way, if you would either enjoy or understand him. F. But surely of all his plays there is none for which it is so little possible to claim reality as this! Its creations are as fantastic as they are beautiful. A. Granting the situation, the whole action of the play seems to me to proceed exactly as in real life. F. What do you mean by 'granting the situation?' A. I mean what Puck means when in the epilogue he says,— Think but this (and all is mended) That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear. [5.1.424ff.]

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The title - A Midsummer Night's Dream - is the clue to the whole play. By its help you may trace a coherent design and execution from first to last (and so get at your wished-for 'idea' after all) in what without it seems but a succession of fanciful though every way splendid pictures. None of your gabble about 'unbridled imagination' and 'irregular genius;' the fault is in ourselves if we do not discover that here, as elsewhere, Shakespeare's intellect was the master of his poetic faculty, and subject to the strict laws of reason even when most it seems to 'wander at its own sweet will.' The play then is 'such stuff as dreams are made of [The Tempest 4.1.156ff.]. Sleep and dreams are facts, phenomena of our actual human existence— F. Ay, but facts which are so fantastical, so hardly to be realized, arranged, and made the subjects of scientific deduction and verification, that the attempt is like that of catching a butterfly in your hat. A. Yet I presume you are not sceptic enough to doubt the matter-of-fact existence of butterflies? You do not take them for 'projected forms' of your own or your hat's imagination? F. Well; granted that sleep and dreams are facts. A. Which facts Shakespeare apprehends and employs for the purposes of his art with just the same faithfulness to nature as he does the graver facts of love, hate, or ambition. Only follow the clue he has put into our hands in his tide, and then see whether it does not lead us 'over hill over dale, thorough bush thorough briar' [2.2.2ff], to as satisfactory a conclusion as Puck, with all his pranks, leads his followers to. F. I appoint you my Puck for the nonce, but take care I do not end by pronouncing like another Oberon, 'Still thou mistak'st, / Or else committ'st thy knaveries wilfully' [3.2.345ff.]. [The Author invites the Friend to see Shakespeare's Athens as a place of medieval romance, as in Chaucer's Knight's Tale. To the Friend's objection that Chaucer's characters are more dignified and serious, he replies:] A. True; but Shakespeare is not Chaucer, and did not live in Chaucer's age, though he knew how to make good use of his materials. In the reign of Queen Bess the popular faith in the classico-chivalry romance had become much what the faith in Robin Goodfellow is in that of Queen Victoria — very good stuff for the substratum of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Shakespeare uses it accordingly. And that exuberance of poetical fancy in every scene throughout the piece, which you have already noticed, and that pervading musical tone which gives it more of the character of an opera than is found in any of Shakespeare's other plays, are but helps to lull the spectator, or rather the reader, into the appropriate dreamy state required for perfect apprehension as well as enjoyment. F. Why 'or rather the reader?' [The Author expatiates on the inadequacies of stage representation, until urged to return to the subject.] A. Well: 'Act i., scene 1.' Here we have the waking personages of the play; for you must consider that while the whole is a dream, and dreamy, in relation to us, it has its waking and its sleeping parts as regards the dramatis personce themselves. Theseus, the prince and soldier, Hippolyta, with a characteristic difference of sex

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which I will notice presently, and Egeus, with his doctrine of parental rights and privileges, represent the sensible and practical in life — people who sleep soundly without dreaming when they go to bed. F. And the two pairs of lovers are, I suppose, the fit subjects of Oneiros, the dream-godjt2] — as Theseus himself says, — 'Lovers and madmen have such seething brains-' [5.1.4] A. Stop a little. Let us first look at the said lovers in their waking state, and then we shall have a better chance of making out the method of their madness when their brains begin to seethe in sleep. Now, bear in mind that they are all real people, and give me your diagnosis of the cases of Lysander and Demetrius. F. Stand forth, Demetrius: My noble lord, (bowing to Author, who bows in return) This man- [1.1.24ff.] is at present courting Hermia, and has the sanction of old Egeus, her father; but I have not only the authority of his rival, Lysander, but also that of Duke Theseus who 'confesses he has heard so much' [1.1.111], that he - the said Demetrius before his advances to Hermia, had — 'Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena, / And won her soul' [1.1.107ff.]; nay, was actually 'Betrothed to her, ere he saw Hermia' [4.1.172]. Nor has he now a word to say in denial of the charge, that in this his recent conduct he has had no better motives than those of an 'inconstant man' [1.1.110]. A. So let him go to the 'private schooling' [1.1.116] with which Duke Theseus is about to treat him and Egeus, now that he remembers the rights of the affair; and presently we may see whether the said 'schooling' produces any effect. If it does, we may expect it to be gradual and indirect; for Duke Theseus has warned us, along with 'fair Hermia' [1.1.67], that he is a constitutional ruler; and if he cannot persuade them to give up their legal rights, he will not 'extenuate the law of Athens' [1.1.119ff.] by any mere order. Now for Lysander. F. Well, I have always taken Lysander for a very paragon of a lover, till he was befooled by Puck in a fashion no mere 'human mortal' [2.1.101] is ever exposed to. A. Nonsense; Lysander is a plain, average, flesh-and-blood youth, like yourself or your next neighbour. Take his whole language and acts, and interpret them by the ordinary laws of human conduct, and this will be plain enough. First, you may see that his love is so hot, and so excited by opposition, as to make a reaction very possible. Then notice his youth; and though you may agree with him in his general proposition, that — 'Things growing are not ripe until their season' [2.2.117], you will not be surprised if he should make some very unripe application of it before long. And, lastly, he has so much opportunity, or rather necessity, for pondering on the fact, which (still generalizing, as youths do) he says is known to him by 'all that he has ever read or heard in tale or history' — the fact that 'The course of true love never did run smooth' [1.1.132ff.], but is at last 'devoured by darkness and confusion' [1.1.148ff] - that we should not suppose him a better, but simply a less real man, if we suppose that he has never been tempted to ask himself whether he will be able to face the obstacles to his union with Hermia; whether reasons might not be adduced

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in favour of such conduct as that of his rival, whom, notwithstanding it, the world will hardly think the less entitled to the character of'a worthy gentleman' [1.1.52]; and whether the tall and gentle Helena, whose wrongs had awakened in him the pity which is akin to love, might not, after all, suit him better than Hermia; and Hermia, too, be better off by marrying Demetrius than by persisting in a disobedience to her father's will, which would end, not in the wished-for union with himself, but, in her being— [Quotes 1.1.71-3: 'For aye in shady cloister. . . .']. F. I see what you are at: do you mean to anatomize poor Hermia and Helena in like manner? A. Hermia is full of hope and courage in the first scene; but she, too, must feel the reaction presently, when bodily fatigue and a night spent in the woods give full scope for maidenly and filial remorse and fear of consequences. She is much too clever a girl, and too familiar with Helena, not to have already thought at times whether her poor friend's fate may not be her own too; whether the example of that faithless Demetrius may not prove contagious, and the vows of Lysander himself find a place among those — 'That men have broke / In number more than women ever [sic] spoke' [1.1.175ff.]. These very words, which in a gayer moment did but playfully express her confidence that her own lover was the exception to the general rule, would, in the hour of depression, serve equally well to express thoughts of real alarm or despondency. Helena, again — But if you accept my method, you will see its application to the details without the tedium of any comment. Do you then go along with me thus far? F. Let me understand exactly how far that is? A. You grant, then, that we are discussing real people with real, ordinary passions and thoughts, and not fantastic, incredible, impossible chimeras existing only in 'a playbook;' you grant that these people have lost their way, and fallen asleep, in a wood near Athens, on a midsummer night; you grant that the time and place belong to that golden age of romance in which the intercourse with fairy-land was real and unrestricted for poets and for lovers even in their waking, and much more in their sleeping hours — F. Stay; how do you get in fairy-land? A. Only remember the part that the fairies play in woods and among flowers, according to Chaucer's poetical faith (as in The Flour and the Leafe,^ for instance), and then you will, I think, see that the whole fairy life which Shakespeare brings before us in the various scenes of this play, and which to our nineteenth century understandings has an entirely foreign, or at least extraneous character, even when we are most sensible of its consummate beauty as a work of art, is the natural, internal, unquestioning faith of the personages before us. The four lovers then, with their minds and hearts under these various impressions and influences, have gone on a midsummer night, — [Quotes 1.1.209-11: 'When Phoebe did behold . . .'], into a wood associated in their minds with the observance of the morn of May, with other love-meetings, and with sweet counsels often held on primrose-beds: a wood which has banks - [Quotes 2.1.249-52: 'whereon the wild thyme blows. . . .']; and banks where we may be certain that their youthful imaginations would be ready enough to recognize the tokens that — 'There sleeps

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Titania some time of the night, / Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight' [2.1.253ff.], and that with her haunt Oberon and Puck, and the whole fairy court, with all their traditional quarrels and sports among themselves, and their helpful or mischievous pranks, played upon any human lovers they might fall in with. What then, I ask, would be the dreams, the real, natural dreams of these four lovers during that night? F. You mean that the whole of the second and third Acts is their mere dream? A. Excluding for the present the party of Quince and Bottom, I do; for it is only what Shakespeare himself asserts in the plainest possible terms. First, Oberon predicts that — 'When they next wake, all this division M / Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision' [3.2.370fF.], just because it was a dream and vision, and no more real than Oberon himself; and then the contrast between this night of fantastic dreams and the returning light of common day is marked by the appearance of Theseus and his party preparing to 'hear the music of his hounds, uncoupled in the western valley' [4.1.106ff.]. Only listen to the sound of the hunting horns and the talk of Theseus and Hippolyta, and you feel at once the transition from sleep to waking. . . . And, in the opening scene of the next act, when they have not only recounted and discussed their dreams together, but have 'told over all the story of the night' [5.1.23] to Theseus and Hippolyta, the practical-minded Duke, whom (as I have said) we may call the representative of commonsense throughout this play, gives precisely that explanation of the whole matter which I have been attempting to make out in detail: — [Quotes 5.1.1-22: "Tis strange, my Theseus. . . .'] Here Oberon and Puck are clearly indicated to be creations of the imagination of the romantic maidens, in their desire to find some bringer of a joyful solution of their difficulties; and while the suggestion that in the night each bush is easily taken for a bear, seems to imply that Lysander and Demetrius were actually on foot during some part of the night, in random pursuit of each other, we are evidently to take the words as the matter-of-fact counterpart and interpretation of the high-flown language of the rivals themselves, and their invisible interlocutor from the bushes:—[quotes 3.2.401-2; 405-8: 'Where art thou, proud Demetrius. . . .]—and so on. F. I must object, with Hippolyta herself, thatAll the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy. [5.1.23ff.] If, as you say, we are to consider the characters as real people, it will bring us to the very verge of reasonable possibility to admit that such a dream, with the previous events and circumstances which it grew out of and illustrated, should have been sufficient to cure the lovers of their cross purposes, so that — 'Jack should have Jill, / And nought should go ill' [3.2.461ff.]. But you must not only do this, but also assume that the dream, or series of dreams, was the same for all four lovers, and indeed for the party of clowns also. A. This is no more than the ordinary and inevitable difference between an event in nature and a work of art;—

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For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion.^ We do not complain of a landscape of Claude, that it is unreal or untrue, because miles of solid mountain or moving sea, nay, the illimitable blue sky and the sun itself, are represented by some dabs of paint on a few feet of flat canvas. Or if you like Shakespeare's own account of this matter, refer to the chorus at the opening of Henry V. Nay, Hippolyta's reply is required to complete the speech of Theseus: the two together make up Shakespeare's assertion of his right to 'create and rule a world,' according to the laws — laws, not license, mind you — of poetic art, and of his having actually done so. The view of Theseus alone would be too merely matter-of-fact; and with Shakespeare's wonted regard to appropriateness, it is a woman who supplies the requisite balance. Hippolyta, though the dramatic counterpart of Theseus, shows in this (as in various traits throughout the play) the characteristic difference of sex, both in more lively sympathy with the exuberant imagination of the lovers, and in a feminine readiness to leave the matter as something 'strange and admirable' [5.1.27], such as could not be expected from the 'cool reason' of the man who has just pronounced it to be 'more strange than true' [5.1.6, 2]. F. If this is the real interpretation of this play of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it ought to prove its truth by being equally applicable to the history of Snug, Bottom, and their company. A. I accept the test willingly; 'you shall see it will fall pat as I told you' [5.1.186ff.], if you only go carefully enough into the details. F. Let me have a few hints. A. The clowns met 'in the palace-wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight' [1.2.101ffJ, to rehearse their 'most lamentable comedy' [1.2.1 Iff.]. When Pyramus had spoken his speech he went into the hawthorn-brake, which Peter Quince had appointed for their tiring-house; he re-enters at the prompter's summons, and the party of'hempen homespuns' [3.1.77], whose histrionic propensity is the voucher for the activity of their imaginations, fancy that there is something monstrous in the appearance of Bottom, as he emerges from the bushes and among the moonlight shadows, at the moment when — with that half-belief in the reality of their play which characterizes childish and half-educated minds — they were expecting that 'fearful wild-fowl' [3.1.32], the lion, to rush out of the same bushes. They all run home, while Bottom, who believes that this is done 'to make an ass of him' [3.1.120ffj, resolves to stay there and show he is not afraid. He falls asleep, and, by a process which we all know to be a natural one in dreams, those words of his — 'to make an ass of me' — combine themselves with the image of the lion's head in which Snug was to play his part, with the exclamations of Quince and his fellows the moment before, and with all the thoughts which the darkness, the wood, and the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, unite to conjure up; and thus is produced a result which is described correctly enough in his own words, when, on waking up next morning, he says, 'I have had a most rare vision, I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was' [4.1.204ff.]. That he has been asleep all the time is farther marked by the fact (true to Nature, like all Shakespeare's facts) that his first thought on waking connects itself

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with the real business on which he was engaged before he fell asleep: 'When my cue comes call me, and I will answer. My next is, Most fair Pyramus' [4.1.200ff.]. After this his mind recurs to the dream. The moderate and matter-of-fact, if not very wise, manner in which Bottom's absence is discussed, and his arrival greeted, at Quince's house next day, shows that neither Bottom nor they had any real deliberate belief that he had actually and visibly worn an ass's head, during the past night. — There! you have my notion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, with Master Peter Quince, 'I hope here is a play fitted' [1.2.64fT.]. F. I must consider before I decide.

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35 William Watkiss Lloyd, critical remarks on the play 1856

From The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. The Text Carefully Revised with Notes by Samuel Weller Singer F. S. A. The Life of the Poet and Critical Essays on the Plays by William Watkiss Lloyd M. R. S. L, etc. etc. (10 vols, London, 1856). Volume II. William Watkiss Lloyd (1813-93) was a classical and Shakespearean scholar who was put in his cousins' tobacco manufacturing firm at age fifteen, and worked there for thirty-six years. He devoted all his leisure time to the study of Greek and Latin and several modern languages, ancient archaeology, art (including Michelangelo and Raphael), and literature, writing an enormous number of articles, essays, and books on these subjects. He contributed essays on the life and the plays of Shakespeare to Samuel Singer's second edition of the dramatist in 1856 (other editions in 1869, 1875, 1879-81, and 1880); a collection of these essays was published in 1858, and again in 1875 and 1888. He also published Much Ado About Nothing in 'fully recovered Metrical Form' in 1884, and bequeathed to the British Museum, among other works, a manuscript 'Shakespeare's Plays metrically arranged', for he believed that all the plays were written in blank verse.

[From 'Critical Essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream'] This play is the shortest of the collection — the least marked in delineations of personal character — the least charged with moral significance — the most musical or lyrical. It is picturesque, imaginative, playful, and droll. Still it is a drama, and not a poem - it was written for representation, and unhesitatingly the writer allowed himself all the advantages which good representation placed at his command, without consideration how readers might fare who should lack the aid and comment of living personification. Yet, physically speaking, a large portion of the characters are more difficult of adequate impersonation than those of any other play. Before imitation of sentiment or passion is thought of, we are met at the outset with the impossibility of donning the costume. The words set down belie the claim of any actor of mortal mould to utter them; the delicate, ethereal, diminutive, yet energetic fairies, move and speak in measures and proportions that are out of all harmony with

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any conceivable subject histrionic. Nevertheless, with these difficulties Shakespeare coped, and not ignoring but admitting and improving them, making them the very theme and groundwork of his fanciful contrasts and ludicrous incongruities, he wrote a drama and not a poem, and, I have no doubt, brought it forth with an effect corresponding to the 'right happy and copious industry'^ he had thereon bestowed. . . . [He gives a summary of the play in two paragraphs.] The cross purposes and vain strivings, impediments, and disappointments that form 'the fierce vexation of a dream' [4.1.69], are intertwined with the stuff of all these incidents; inability to fly, inability to pursue, struggles with the difficult, acceptation as mere matter of fact of the impossible, forebodings and sudden frights, these are the entertainments of uneasy sleep, and when we wake we have relief of just the same kind as that enjoyed by the lovers when they are roused by the hunting horn of Theseus, and find that vexation had vanished with drowsiness, and that their troubles were all groundless, or that, at any rate, the fairies have arranged them while they slept. Thus the play is a dream dramatized, and the fairies are introduced as the agents who transform the real into the fantastic, and then the fantastic back to the real. Bottom, semi-asinine, semi-virile, is a versed typeP] of the play, with its fairy crown and halo fitted enchantingly on the mundane and the gross, and his oscillating identity images those of the half-possessed lovers — of Lysander with the fool's head of his bewitching, and of Demetrius with that of his own original fickleness. The very incongruity of the heroic Theseus with romantic incidents and accidents, of the classic with the Gothic elements, is parodied and excused in adaptation of a story still more remote, of Pyramus and Thisbe, by journeymen clowns so contemporary to the habits of the groundling audience. Titania has her own fool's head clapped on no less than her lover, and Helena and Hermia lose head metaphorically in excited bickering. The similarity of Bottom's adventure to FalstafFs stag-headed disguise, and the transformation of Puck to a 'headless bear' [3.1.109], seem to indicate the popular currency of some milder form of lycanthropy. In any case, the efflorescence of Bottom's own nowU3] into that of a veritable ass, is one of those realized metaphors that lie at the root of the supernatural in every form, from the Aristophanic Wasps and Clouds, as personifications of litigious citizens and hazy philosophers, to the grandest inventions of Homer himself. The leading movement of what intrigue the play possesses starts from the unaccountable caprice of Demetrius, in leaving the maid he had courted and won to pursue the betrothed of another — a whim, a maggot of inconstancy, bred from no deeper feeling than a tendency to sudden liking, quick of change, and pertinacious — while it lasts. It is precisely the same infirmity that makes bully Bottom grasp at any part but that set down for him; to desire to play a tyrant rather than a lover, to play the mistress instead of, or rather in addition to, the lover, or to double the lion's part -with that of Pyramus, and roar in whatever key may be desired, to do any man's heart good to hear him, or gently as a sucking dove, and who will have great conflict of spirit before he quite determines the colour of the beard in which he will discharge the part that he is at last reconciled to.

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As a matter of fact in psychology, the assumption of fairy or other supernatural influence is a suggestion of incidents that bear characteristics of passion, without the intervention of human or other observable passionate agents. Joyous revelry breathes over the fair sward of summer lit by the moonbeams, freak and prank and frolicsome hoax lurk in the management of a harmless mishap, testy spite in a little misfortune or personal blemish, and kindness and help in unexpected good luck and work readily got through. Small hopes and fears, and little virtues and little lapses, had seemed acted on and attended to often consistently, as often with palpable caprice, and the simple-minded were content to account for such things by handing over a share at least, in the minor moral governance of the world, to the fairies. As a matter of poetry, Faerie, like any other supernatural agency, is usually connected by Shakespeare with incidents which may easily occur naturally, but are the ordinary causes of the belief in such agency, not effects of its reality. If Macbeth meet ill-suggesting witches on the blasted heath, his own ambitious thoughts and superstitious promptings gave the hint and materials for them. So in our play the King of the fairies easily turns the affection of Demetrius to Helena, and we acquiesce in the prospect of its permanence, forasmuch as there is no more in question than the revival of an old passion; and as the elopement of Hermia had demonstrated the hopelessness of the new love, philosophy might find in the companionship of Helena in the moonlight search, sufficient opportunities and occasions for the revival of the old. The subject of dispute between Oberon and Titania seems one degree more serious than that of the lovers, for there is no hint that Titania's attachment to her page was a changeful caprice; so however it turns out to be, and a charm dissolves a predilection in fairyland effectually, though in the case of mortal lovers it is not trusted to do more than relax an infatuation by recovery of an original sentiment. Bottom has a strange transformation and adventure enough, but we have seen enough of him to be sure that if he fell asleep in his briery tiring-room, he was ass-headed enough naturally to believe in a dream that he was beloved of the Queen of the fairies. The transformation of the pansy by the bolt of Cupid, — not unsuggested to Shakespeare by the metamorphosis wrought by the blood of the lovers in Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, — has in like manner a natural base in the double variety of the flower. Such is the fine yet firm thread by which the imaginative creation is linked to our feeling and faith in nature, and relying on this covert annexment, the invention of the poet develops the fantastic germ adopted, with endless profusion of imagery and illustration. The fairy world becomes as diversified as the natural, and we find degrees and orders among the flimsy population, from the robed and circleted Oberon and his Queen, the humorsome but observant Puck, the deft fairy mistress of robes and dewer of floral orbs, to the cloud of graceful dancers, and the small elves not disdainful of dapper jerkins from leather of rear-mice. The diminutiveness and delicacy ascribed to the quaint spirits are leading characteristics of the poetical ideal portrayed, and at the same time appear most difficult of dramatic rendering. Yet the poet appears to make no concession from consideration of the player; he rather insists, with recurring emphasis, on the tiny and airy essence of the beings

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he imagines, and demands that details as fragile and minute as those which, in mere license of unlimited description, are ascribed to Queen Mab's equipage in Romeo and Juliet, shall here be bodily set forth. Peasblossom, Cobweb, and their compeers, are as defined personalities as courtiers and gold sticks, lords in waiting, yeomen of the guard, and gentlemen pensioners ever can be. Answering to quaint names, but speaking little else, they execute sedulous and unquestioning, and with no sense of incongruity, all commands of their sovereign, and with equal zeal watch round 'her close and consecrated bower' [3.2.7], or scratch the ass's nowl of any anamorphosed fool who happens to be a royal favourite. Yet they attend and answer with the heart of elves not too big to find a full suit in a bat's wing, but able-bodied for warfare singly against the red-hipped humble-bee, only wary withal of the bursting honey bag — or even, in phalanx, against the hooting owl with its broad wondering eyes, but scared when the voices of their sovereigns rise in domestic debate, and happy to dive, more than two together, into the depths of a concealing acorn cup. Delicately they can transfer and handle a dew-drop, - a fairy ring on the grass affords space for a multitude of them, and for time, a minute requires micrometrical division — 'Then for the third part of a minute hence' [2.2.2] - for the apportionment of their most complicated undertakings. Such, however, is the perfect harmony of imagery and allusion, that, while the fairies are alone on the stage, it might be easy for the eye to mistake the scale of the actors, with slight assistance of sex and age in the cast. Some aid may be gained by a moderated disproportion in the forest scenery, flowers, turf, mushrooms, &c. and the trunk of the 'Duke's oak' [1.2.110]. Add to this careful attention to contrast the fairy costume with that of even the female characters of the play, to illuminate the stage sufficiently for the play of countenance to be discovered through the long night scenes, otherwise vexatious, and stage resources will have done all that is necessary, and the rest may be left to the force of the poetry, which will solicit, will exact, prompt acquiescence in all its postulates, and to the gradation of relief from the bewildered lovers to the amateur actors and their translated coryphaeus. It is the fault of the actors, — let it be said without reserve and without offence, — if the refined substance and delicate outlines of the fairy world are not heightened in representation, by the palpable contrast of the crew of patches, with far more effect than can be achieved by the unaided imagination of the multitude of readers. An advantage may thus be achieved that would cover many shortcomings, and these are further masked by relief against the grossly ridiculous personations of the boors both in rehearsal and representation. It may be left to the last act of the play to apologize for lapses in so adventurous personifications; this act is of the nature and purpose of an epilogue, and inculcates the noble-minded moral of good intent received for fair performance. The application is clenched by the play of the clowns being a travestie of the very incidents of the dream, in a luckless rendezvous of lovers, and a scaring disturbance and flight from Bottom ass-headed, or from Snug the joiner announcing his identity through the jaws of the lionskin. What the act is to the play at large, that is the concluding fairy scene with its elfin dance, following the uncouth Bergomask, to the act, and the epilogue itself has its proper wind-up in the appeal and leave-taking of Robin Goodfellow.

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A detailed analysis with reference to stage arrangements of the long second scene of the third act, would best prove, were this the place, how entirely the play was planned for representation; with the aid of grouping and interchange of position, the play and sequence of the dialogue, which is apt to appear to the reader a tangled skein, will be found to arrange itself into a lucid and well-ordered web. The harshness which might be expected to result from the contrast of such dissimilar elements as we have considered, is obviated and resolved with wonderful art; the play throughout is amusing, imaginative, musical, fantastic, moving with the vagaries of caprice or fitful infatuation, rather than steady purpose or passion. The strongly marked lines which are necessary to relieve and combine the flitting shadows, are given rather by irony than seriousness, in the mock heroic strain of the high-debating fairies, and in the periods of similar stateliness and in the deliberate dignity of Theseus and his Queen. The airs of the Sovereigns of Faerie are in harmony with those of the Athenian Court, while Puck is equally at home jesting to, not with, Oberon in the land of shadows, or waylaying and misleading the gross material of benighted handicraftsmen. Peter Quince, and his company, are the only possible butts that could give the most amusing illustration of the quality of Puck; he is the elfin king of transformations and personations, and while in their forest greenroom they are contriving clumsy stage makeshifts and disguises, and anxiously planning to counteract the alarm of a too well imitated lion by exposing the face of the actor, Robin turns loose upon them the translated weaver, and with less consideration for the consequences of his cleverness, he puts lovers, lion, wall, and presumptive moonshine to flight, and sets them an example of illusion that sends them home half crazy. [Quotes 3.1.106-11: Til follow you, I'll lead you about a round. . . .']. * * * [He now discusses the belief in fairies, the fairies of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's indebtedness to Chaucer, then the origins of the names of Oberon and Titania, the mediaeval background of Theseus, the certainty of Warburton's interpretation of Oberon's Vision, and, lastly, the dating of the play, ending with the following final paragraphs.] I cannot admit for a moment that this play exhibits the slightest signs of juvenility, as implying inferiority, as compared with The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV. Comparing it with Romeo and Juliet, I think there are some marks of a more perfectly developed taste, and of more free as well as skilful execution. The genius of the poet is at full and open range throughout, and not more absolute in the certainty with which it ever reaches, than in the self-control of never overpassing the limits of the proprieties, the requirements, and the capabilities of the theme. The command of language, of rhythm, of versification, is perfect, multifarious, musical throughout. Music has wedded some of its lines to happy notes, but the passages are many more that would seem to solicit and prompt invention as importunately. The cadence of the couplet - 'And mark the musical confusion, Of hounds and echo in conjunction' [4.1.11 Off.] has frequent precedent in Chaucer; who also set examples, scarcely to be surpassed, of Oberon's rhymes wreathing and returning like

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a fairy ring: [Quotes 4.1.85-92: 'Sound, music! come, my Queen, take hands with me ']. (II, 423-36)

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36 Anonymous, Celtic elements 1859

From New Exegesis of Shakespeare: Interpretation of His Principal Characters and Plays on the Principle of Races (Edinburgh, 1859).

The author of this work is unidentified, but as John Duns (himself Scottish) said, 'We judge, from internal evidence, that the author is himself a Celt. It is clear, from the mode in which he deals with Hamlet, that he is no Teuton, and that he is under all those strong prejudices against the Saxon, which find their broadest expression in the ardent Irish Celt' (The North British Review, 31 (November 1859), 481).

[The author's concern is to praise the Celtic at the expense of the Roman/Italian and Teutonic (or Gothic)/English, to exalt the female over the male, and the intellectual and spiritual over the material. His comments on A Midsummer Night's Dream form part of a lengthy disquisition on the nature of fairies.] In fact, the fairy is a syncretism of the witch and the ghost; not wholly human like the former, nor wholly spectral like the latter; not concocting intrigues, poisons, assassinations, like the witches and the race that gave the witches their European character; nor prowling, sulky and solitary, to keep watch of some hidden treasure, . . . They are beautiful and playful, and indefinitely young. . . . They sometimes interfere in the business of mankind, to vindicate the wrongs of the friendless and helpless. So regardful are they held to be of the economy of their own community, and the perfection, both corporeal and mental, of the members, that any mortal of more than ordinary intellect, stature, beauty is in danger of being filched away, . . . In fine, the form of the fairy commonwealth is neither popular nor oligarchical; it is monarchical, but directed by an aristocracy of'capacities.' And that the monarch should have been, not a king, but a queen, is assuredly a curious comment on the doctrine now established, of the mental and social eminence of the sex in this race, and thus might suffice of itself to prove the fairies of Celtic origin. In fact, these beings, in constitution, habits, sentiments, aspirations, are such precisely as should result from the distinctions of the Celtic race — a race of order, generosity, sociability, art, intelligence. *** [Only the Celts truly understand fairies; the Teutons and Italians have a distorted 'factitious' idea of them, filtered through literature. This is equally true of the

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English. Spenser had some genuine knowledge of Celtic fairies, but he distorted it with Teutonic and Italian conceptions. His choice of a female monarch is a major proof of true understanding.] . . . So the Celts were first, in religion, to view the soul as an essence, and give to it the circular migration of mortality. So, in politics, the female monarchy imports not only the Celtic eminence above established of the sex, which is indeed a strict concomitant; but chiefly that it suits the aristocracy of intellect which is the destination, as the yearning, of this race. For what the intellect instinctively detests and shuns the most is the obstruction of a brutal and self-willed muscularity; and this is typified by man in comparison with woman. The latter has the softness, the ductility, the grace that fit her for the sole requisite in such a government, a badge of unity. Hence the Celts have not alone assigned a Queen to their fairy polity, but have been always so inclined . . . in their real history. So with their tendency to aristocracy, in the proper sense of mind or merit. . . . [He sees dependence on a priesthood as a primitive form of aspiration towards this ideal, but one that the Teutons failed in.] . . . the Teutons, upon breaking from their Romish leading strings, fell over into the muscular aristocracy of war and wealth. And hence, in England, the necessity of 'the Church by law established,' understanding by established, of course, wealthily endowed. . . . To attach to them some reverence, they must be decked with wealth, like the lay aristocracy, who are respected on the same ground. [Celts, on the other hand, govern themselves on the principle of merit.] . . . as the Celts reduced the element of force in the government to its minimum expression in the person of a female, so the Greeks of glorious Athens took for their patroness a goddess, and still more explicitly, the goddess of the intellect. Not only did his Irish residence not open Spenser to seize these characters, but long later the most intelligent perhaps of English critics, the learned Warton, shews the national proficiency in fairy history. 'As to Spenser's original and genealogy of the fairy nation (says he), I am inclined to conjecture that part of it was supplied by his own inexhaustible imagination, and part from some fabulous history.'1 However, under favour of the Gothic alliance aforesaid, and its due consequence of making the affiliated fairies a conquering, colonising, and all but a commercial people, the poem of Spenser had the effect of obtaining for these beings a species of naturalization with the English multitude, besides bringing them into fashion with the Elf-Queen on the throne. Shakespeare, like a shrewd playwright, took this cue of the court and crowd, and prepared them The Midsummer Night's Dream. He drew upon his Celtic sympathies and reminiscences for the fairies, - transferring them from Irish vicinage, and for the magic of distance, to the other end of Europe on the classic Aegean sea; drew upon his direct English observation for the 'mechanicals' [3.2.9], Snug, Bottom, etc., whose very names announce the soil, and upon Spenser or others for the kindred Puck and Oberon; drew, in fine, upon his waifs of classic reading in translation for the genteel class of people that compose the third action; and thus exhibited in what is still so crudely deemed a mere fancy-piece, a precise image of the three

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contemporary elements of civilization; the Graeco-Roman, - royal, amatory, elegant and festive, placed in proper line of history as the frame or foundation; the Teutonic — rude, mechanical, grasping, arrogant, 'go-ahead'; the Celtic, with its fairy agencies of intellect and polity conducting mystically those antagonists to the great European unity. It was only since this drama that the English could see fairies, on the hills and vales and meadows of theatrical perspective. A curious token of the genuine or Celtic source of Shakespeare's fairies is, that he dates the action of the Midsummer Night's Dream, as the title itself declares, upon St. John's Eve, PI still a festival of fairy and fire worship with the Irish. . . . Another point of confirmation in the action of Shakespeare's piece, is the quarrel of the Teuton Oberon with his Celtic spouse, the Fairy Queen, who gentilitiallyt3] retrudes him to his place of Prince Consort, and insists upon being wearer of the breeches as well as crown. Also the occasion of the quarrel, which is a changeling. How large a part this kidnapping of young or gifted humanity is held to play in the economy of the Irish fairies was seen above; with also its social reason of improving their people. To this may be now added the logical reason of vindicating the consistency of our providence or of nature, from the shocking incongruity of blasting its own handiwork, in the morning of their bloom, by decrepitude or death. (354-71)

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37 Georg Gottfried Gervinus, genre and inner purpose 1863

From Shakespeare Commentaries by Dr. G.G. Gervinus, Professor at Heidelberg. Translated under the Author's Superintendence by F.E. Bunnett, Author of 'Louise Juliane, Electress Palatine and Her Times', etc. (2 vols, London, 1863). Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805-71), German scholar and nationalist, is valued today by students of German history for his insights into political and cultural historical movements as they bear upon the formation of national character and institutions. His ideas, and his occasional engagement with political affairs, made him during his lifetime controversial as well as influential. In England Gervinus was celebrated for his monumental study of Shakespeare's plays, which was first published in 4 volumes in German (Leipzig, 1849-50). The translation by Bunnett was revised in 1875 and published in one volume; this was reissued in 1877 with an introduction by FJ. Furnivall, and reprinted many times: it is still in print. For Gervinus Shakespeare was the Homer of modern dramatic literature, and his works a secular Bible; he was not only a poetical genius, but our guide to morality (I, 2-3). Gervinus's belief in the natural kinship between England and Germany is also affirmed in his Handel und Shakespeare (Leipzig, 1868).

[From the chapter entitled 'Second period of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry. I. Erotic pieces'] . . . The basest and most exalted phases of this fierce passion are to be found in Troilus and Cressida, in the highly ironical picture of the Trojan contest, in the parody of the immortal song on that love, which was the cause of so long a war and such frightful deeds. And then, in contrast to this excited drama stands a thoroughly spiritual picture: how love works up the senses and the spirits, how it is the creator and the created of fancy, the perpetual subject and the source of poetry, in what charming touches and symbols is this interwoven with the magic pictures of the Midsummer Night's Dream! (I, 215)

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[From the sub-section entitled 'Midsummer Night's Dream'] If All's Well that Ends Well be read immediately between Love's Labour's Lost and the Midsummer Night's Dream, we feel how in the one the matured hand of the poet was at work, while between the two other pieces there exists a closer connection. The mere performance of the comic plays by the clowns affords a resemblance between the two pieces, but still more so the mode of diction. Apart from the fairy songs, in which Shakespeare, in a masterly manner, preserves the popular tone of the style which existed before him, the piece bears prominently the stamp of the Italian school. The language, picturesque, descriptive, and florid with conceits, the too apparent alliterations, the doggrel passages which extend over the passionate and impressive scenes, the old mythology well suited to the subject, all this places the piece in a close, or at least not remote, relation to Love's Labour's Lost. As in this play, the story, the original combination of the figures of ancient, religious, and historical legends with beings of the popular Saxon myths, is the property and invention of the poet. As in Love's Labour's Lost, utterly unlike what we have just seen of characteristic touches in All's Well that Ends Well, the acting characters are separated from each other only by a very general outline; there is a stronger distinction between the little, pert Hermia, shrewish and irritable even at school, and the slender, yielding Helena, distrustful and reproachful of herself; and a fainter one between the upright, open Lysander and the somewhat malicious and inconstant Demetrius. . . . The piece is a masque, one of those dramas for special occasions, appointed for private representation, which Ben Jonson especially brought to perfection. In England, this species of drama has as little a law of its own as the historical drama. . . . As in the historical drama, almost every mark of distinction from the free drama arises from the nature and the mass of the matter, in the masque, it proceeds from the occasion of its origin, from its prescribed reference to it, and from the allegorical elements which are here introduced. . . . Upon the most superficial reading, we perceive that the actions in the Midsummer Night's Dream, still more than the characters themselves, are treated quite differently to those in other plays of Shakespeare. The great art of an underlying motive, his true magic wand, the poet has here quite laid aside. Instead of reasonable inducements, instead of natural impulses flowing from character and circumstance, caprice is master here. We meet with a double pair, who are entangled in strange mistakes, the motives to which we, however, seek for in vain in the nature of the actors themselves. . . . [He summarizes the action of the love-plot to emphasize caprice, frivolity, and confusion.] . . . These delusions of blind passion, this jugglery of the senses during the sleep of reason, these changes of mind and errors of'seething brains' [5.1.4], these actions without the higher centre of a mental and moral bearing, these are compared, as it were, to a dream, which unrolls before us with its fearful complications, from which there is no deliverance but in awaking and in the recovery of consciousness. The piece is called a Midsummer Night's Dream; the Epilogue expresses satisfaction, if the spectator will regard the piece as a dream; as in a dream, time and locality are obliterated; a certain twilight and dusk is spread over the whole; Oberon desires that

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all shall regard the matter as a dream, and so it is. Titania speaks of her adventure as a vision, Bottom of his metamorphosis as a dream, all the rest awake at last out of a sleep of weariness, and the events leave upon them the impression of a dream. The sober Theseus esteems their stories as nothing else than dreams and fantasies. Indeed these allusions in the piece must have suggested to Coleridge and others the idea that the poet had intentionally aimed at letting the piece glide by as a dream'. We only wonder that with this opinion, they have not reached the inner kernel in which this purpose of the poet really lies enshrined, a purpose, which has not only given a name to the piece, but has called forth as by magic a free poetic creation of the greatest value. For it is indeed to be expected from our poet, that such an intention on his side were not to be sought for in the mere shell. If this intention were only realized in those poetical externals, in that fragrant charm of rhythm and verse, that harassing suspense, that dusky twilight, then this were but the shallow work of an outward dexterity with which a poet like Shakespeare would have never dreamt of accomplishing anything worth the while. Let us revert to our first examination of the piece and its contents, and taking a higher, more commanding view, let us seek actually to reach that aim, which Coleridge in truth only divined. We mentioned then, that the play of amorous humour proceeded from no inner impulse of the soul, but from outer powers, from the influence of gods and fairies, among whom Cupid, the demon of the old mythology, only appears behind the scenes, while, on the other hand, the spirits of later superstition, the fairies, occupy the main place upon the stage. If we look at the functions which the poet has committed to both, to the god of love and to the fairies, we find to our surprise, that they are perfectly similar. The workings of each upon the passions of men are the same. The infidelity of Theseus towards his many forsaken ones, Ariadne, ^gle, Antiopa, and Perigenia, which we, according to the ancient myth, would ascribe to Cupid, to the intoxication of sensuous love, are imputed in the Midsummer Night's Dream to the elfin king. Even before the fairies appear in the piece, Demetrius is prompted by the infatuation of blind Love, and Puck expressly says that not he but Cupid originated this madness of mortals; as may be inferred also with Titania and the boy. The fairies then pursue these errors still further, in the same manner as Cupid had begun them; they increase and heal them; one means, the juice of a flower, Dian's bud, is to cure the perplexities of love in both Lysander and Titania; the juice of another flower (Cupid's) had caused them. This latter flower had received the wondrous power from a wound by Cupid's shaft. The power conveyed by the shaft, was perceived by the elfin king, who knew how to use it; Oberon is closely initiated into the deepest secrets of the Love-God, but not so his servant Puck. . . . [He quotes Oberon's mermaid speech, 2.1.148-69.] This passage has recently . . . received an interpretation full of spirit by Halpin . . . [No. 22 above], which evidences to us that in this poet scarcely too much can be sought for, that even in the highest flight of his imagination, he never leaves the ground of reality, and that in every touch, however episodical it may appear, he ever inserts the profoundest allusions to his main subject. . . . How should he not naturally have been impelled, to give to just such a sweet allegory as this, the firmest possible

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basis of fact? To us, therefore, Halpin's interpretation of this passage is all the more unquestionable, as it gives the most definite relation to the innermost sense of the whole piece. . . . [He rehearses Halpin's historical allegory of the relations between Leicester, Queen Elizabeth, and Lettice Knollys.] How significant then does this little allegorical episode become, which, regarded only as a poetic ornament, is full of grace and beauty! Whilst Spenser at that very time had extolled Elizabeth as the 'fairy queen,' Shakespeare, on the contrary, places her as a being, unapproachable rather by this world of fancy. His courtesy to the queen is transformed into a very serious meaning: for contrasting with this insanity of love, emphasis is placed upon the other extreme, the victory of Diana over Cupid, of the mind over the body, of maiden contemplativeness over the jugglery of love. . . . But it is time that we should return from this digression. We have said before, that the piece appears designed to be treated as a dream; not merely in outer form and colour, but also in inner signification. The errors of that blind intoxication of the senses, which form the main point of the piece, appear to us to be an allegorical picture of the errors of a life of dreams. Reason and consciousness are cast aside in that intoxicating passion as in a dream; Cupid's delight in breach of faith, Jove's merriment at the perjury of the lovers, causes the actions of those, who are in the power of the god of love, to appear almost as unaccountable as the sins which we commit in a dream. We have further discovered that the actions and occupations of Cupid and of the fairies throughout the piece are interwoven or alternate. And this appears to us to confirm most forcibly the design of the poet to compare allegorically the sensuous life of love with a dream-life; the exchange of functions between Cupid and the fairies is therefore the true poetic embodiment of this comparison. For to Shakespeare's fairies is the realm of dreams assigned; they are essentially nothing else than personified dream-gods, children of the fancy, which not alone, as Mercutio says, is the vain producer of dreams, but also of the caprices of superficial love. Vaguely as in a dream, this significance of the fairies rests in the ancient popular belief itself of the Germanic races, and Shakespeare has for a moment, with the instinctive touch of genius, fashioned this idea into exquisite form. . . . . . . [H]e has clothed in bodily form those intangible phantoms, the bringers of dreams of provoking jugglery, of sweet soothing, and of tormenting raillery; and the task he has thus accomplished we shall only rightly estimate, when we have taken into account the severe design and inner congruity of this little world. If it were Shakespeare's object, expressly to remove from the fairies that dark ghost-like character (Act III. sc. 2.), in which they appeared in Scandinavian and Scottish fable, if it were his desire to pourtray them as kindly beings in a merry, harmless relation to mortals, if he wished, in their essential office as bringers of dreams, to fashion them in their nature as personified dreams, he carried out this object in wonderful harmony both as regards their actions and their condition. The kingdom of the fairy beings is placed in the aromatic flower-scented Indies, in the land where mortals live in a half-dreamy state. From hence they come, 'following darkness,' as Puck says, 'like a dream' [5.1.386]. Airy and swift, like the moon, they circle the earth, they avoid the sunlight without fearing it and seek the darkness, they

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love the moon and dance in her beams, and above all they delight in the dusk and twilight, the very season for dreams, whether waking or asleep. They send and bring dreams to mortals. . . . Full of deep thought is it then, how Shakespeare has fashioned their inner character in harmony with this outer function. He depicts them as beings without delicate feeling and without morality, just as in dreams we meet not with the check of tender sensations and are without moral impulse and responsibility. Careless and unscrupulous, they tempt mortals to infidelity; the effects of the mistakes, which they have contrived, make no impression on their minds; they feel no sympathy for the deep affliction of the lovers, but only delight and marvel over their mistakes and their foolish demeanour. The poet further depicts his fairies as beings of no high intellectual development. Whoever attentively reads their parts, will find that nowhere is reflection imparted to them. Only in one exception does Puck make a sententious remark upon the infidelity of man, and whoever has penetrated into the nature of these beings, will immediately feel that it is out of harmony. Directly, they can make no inward impression upon mortals; their influence over the mind is not spiritual, but throughout material, effected by means of vision, metamorphosis, and imitation. Titania has no spiritual association with her friend, but mere delight in her beauty, her 'swimming gait' [2.1.130], and her powers of imitation. When she awakes from her vision, there is no reflection, . . . she is only affected by the idea of the actual and the visible. There is no scene of reconciliation with her husband; her resentment consists in separation, her reconciliation in a dance; there is no trace of a reflection, no indication of feeling. . . . They are represented, these little gods, as natural souls, without the higher human capacities of mind, lords of a kingdom not of reason and morality, but of imagination and ideas conveyed by the senses; and thus they are uniformly the vehicle of the fancy, which produces the delusions of love and dreams. Their will, therefore, only extends to the corporeal. They lead a luxurious, merry life, given up to the pleasure of the senses; the secrets of nature, the powers of flowers and herbs are confided to them. To sleep in flowers, lulled with dances and songs, with the wings of painted butterflies to fan the moonbeams from their eyes, this is their pleasure; the gorgeous apparel of flowers and dewdrops are their joy; when Titania wishes to allure her beloved, she offers him honey, apricocks, purple grapes, and dancing. This life of sense and nature, they season, by the power of fancy, with delight in, and desires after all that is most choice, most beautiful, and agreeable. They harmonize with nightingales and butterflies; they wage war with all ugly creatures, with hedge-hogs, spiders, and bats; dancing, play, and song are their greatest pleasures; they steal lovely children, and substitute changelings; they torment decrepit old age, toothless gossips, aunts, and the awkward company of the players of Pyramus and Thisbe, but they love and recompense all that is clean and pretty. . . . The sense of the beautiful is the one thing which elevates the fairies not only above the beasts, but also above the low mortal, when he is devoid of all fancy and uninfluenced by beauty. . . . The only pain which agitates these beings, is jealousy, the desire of possessing the beautiful sooner than others; they shun the distorting quarrel; their steadfast aim and longing is for undisturbed enjoyment. But in this sweet jugglery they neither appear constant to mortals, nor do they carry on intercourse among themselves in monotonous harmony. They are full also of wanton

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tricks and railleries, playing upon themselves and upon mortals, pranks which never hurt but which often torment. This is especially the property of Puck, . . . a roguish but awkward fellow, skilful at all transformations, practised in wilful tricks, but also clumsy enough to make mistakes and blunders contrary to his intention. We mortals are unable to form anything out of the richest treasure of the imagination, which we have not learnt from actual human circumstances and qualities. So even in this case, it is not difficult to discover in society the types of human nature which Shakespeare deemed especially suitable as the original of his fairies. There are, particularly among women of the middle and upper ranks, such natures, which are not accessible to higher spiritual necessities, who take their way through life with no serious and profound reference to the principles of morality or to intellectual objects, but who have a decided inclination and qualification for all that is beautiful, agreeable, and graceful, without even in this province being able to reach the higher attainments of art. They grasp this tangible world, as occasion offers, with ingenious designs; they are ready, dexterous, disposed for tricks and raillery, ever skilful at acting parts, at assuming appearances, at disguises and deceptions, because they seek to season life only with festivities, pleasures, sport, and jest. These light, agreeable, rallying, and sylph-like natures, which live from day to day, and have no spiritual consciousness of a common object in life, whose existence may be a playful dream full of single charms, full of grace and embellishment, but never a life of higher aim, these has Shakespeare chosen with singular tact as the originals, from whose fixed characteristics he gave form and life to his airy fairies. We can now readily perceive, why, in this work, the 'rude mechanicals' [3.2.9] and clowns, the company of actors with their burlesque piece, are placed in such rough contrast to the tender and delicate play of the fairies. The contrast of the material and the clumsy to the aerial, of the awkward to the beautiful, of the utterly unimaginative to that which, itself fancy, is entirely woven out of fancy, this contrast gives prominence to both. The play acted by the clowns is, as it were, the reverse of the poet's own work, which demands all the spectator's reflective and imitative fancy to open to him this aerial world, whilst in the other nothing at all is left to the imagination of the spectator. . . . These rude doings, the fairy chiefs disturb with their utmost raillery, and the fantastical company of lovers mock at the performance. Theseus, however, is placed between these contrasts in quiet and thoughtful contemplation. He draws back incredulous from the too-strange fables of love and its witchcraft; he enjoins that imagination should amend the play of the clowns, devoid, as it is, of all fancy. The real, that in this work of art has become 'nothing' [5.1.16], and the ideal nothing, which in the poet's hand has assumed this graceful form, are contrasted in the two extremes; in the centre is the intellectual man, who participates in both, who regards the one, the stories of the lovers, the poets by nature, as art and poetry, and who receives the other, presented as art, only as a thanksworthy readiness to serve and as a simple offering. It is the combination of these skilfully obtained contrasts into a whole, which we especially admire in this work. . . . [He discusses the division of Dream into farce or fairy play in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the effect of the play on fairy literature.]

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We refer so frequently to the necessity of seeing Shakespeare's plays performed, in order to be able to estimate them fully, based as they are upon the joint action of poetic and dramatic art. . . . If we would perform dramas, in which such an independent position is assigned to the dramatic art as here, we must before everything possess a histrionic art, an art independent and complete. But this art has with us declined with poetic art, and amid the widely distracting concerns of this time, it will scarcely soon recover itself. A rich, art-loving prince, endowed with feeling for the highest dramatic delights and ready to make sacrifices on their behalf, could possibly procure them, were he to invite together to one place, during an annual holiday, the best artists from all theatres, to cast the parts of a few of the Shakespearean pieces. Even then a profound judge of the poet must take the general management of the whole. And if all this were done, a piece like the Midsummer Night's Dream might be at last attempted. This fairy play could be brought upon the English stage, when they had boys early trained for the characters; without this proviso, it is quite ridiculous to wish to command the most difficult parts with powers utterly inappropriate. When a girl utters Oberon's part in a high treble, a character justly represented by painters with abundant beard, in all the dignity of the calm ruler of this hovering world, when the rude goblin Puck is performed by an affected actress, when Titania and her suit appear in ball-costume without beauty or dignity, for ever moving about in the hopping motion of the dancing chorus, in ballet-fashion, the most offensive style, that modern unnaturalness has created, — what then becomes of the sweet charm of these scenes and of these figures, which should appear in pure aerial drapery, which in their sport should retain a certain elevated simplicity, which in the affair between Titania and Bottom, far from unnecessarily pushing the awkward fellow forward as the principal figure, should understand how to place the ludicrous character at a modest distance and to give the whole scene the quiet charm of a picture, not too violently agitated. If it be impossible to act these fairy forms at the present day, it is equally so with the clowns. The common nature of the mechanics, when they are themselves, is perhaps intelligible to our actors; but when they perform their work of art, where, in an actor of the present day, is the self-denial to be found, that would lead him to represent this most foolish of all follies with the most solemn importance, as if in thorough earnestness, instead of overdoing its exaggeration, instead of self-complacently working by laughter and smiling at himself? Unless this self-denial be observed, the first and greatest object of these scenes, that of exciting laughter, is inevitably lost. Finally, the middle class of mortals, moving between the fairies and the clowns, those lovers, who are driven about by bewildering delusions, what sensation do they excite, when we see them in the frenzy of passion wandering through the wood, in kid-gloves, in knightly dress, with the customary tone of conversation belonging to the refined world, devoid of all warmth, and without a breath of this charming poetry! How can this Theseus, the kinsman of Hercules, and the Amazonian Hippolyta, become the knightly accoutrements of the Spanish comedy? Certain it is that in the fantastic play of an unlimited dream, from which time and place are effaced, we should not suffer these characters to appear in the strict costume of Greek antiquity, but still less, while we avoid one fixed attire, should we pass over to the other, and transport to

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Athens a knighdy dress, and a guard of Swiss halberdiers. We can only compare with this mistake one equally great, the adding of a disturbing musical accompaniment, inopportunely impeding the rapid course of the action, which roughly disturbs this work of fancy, this delicate and refined action, this ethereal dream, with a march of kettledrums and trumpets, even there where Theseus utters his thoughts upon the unsubstantial nature of these visions? . . . Elements thus contradictory, thus injudiciously united, tasks thus beautiful, thus imperfectly discharged, must always make the friend of Shakespearean performances desire, that under existing circumstances, they would rather utterly renounce them. (I, 259-82)

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38 Charles Cowden Clarke, intuitive power of characterization 1863

From Shakespeare-Characters; Chiefly Those Subordinate (London, 1863). As a teenager, Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877) tutored the young Keats at his father's school, and later was the friend of Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb and Coleridge. Upon his father's death in 1820 he became a bookseller and publisher, entering into business with the music publisher Alfred Novello, and in 1828 marrying Mary Victoria (1809-98), eldest daughter of Alfred's son Vincent. Their partnership in life and Shakespeare studies lasted nearly fifty happy years. In 1834, while Mary was still engaged on the Shakespeare concordance which she published in 1845, he began a series of very successful public lectures on Shakespeare and other poets, which he continued until his retirement to Nice in 1856 (and thence to Genoa in 1861). ShakespeareCharacters is one of the products of those lectures. His other major contributions to Shakespeare studies, both in collaboration with his wife, are an edition of the works (Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare, 3 vols, London, 1864-68) and The Shakespeare Key: unlocking the treasures of his style, etc. (London, 1879, and still being reprinted). Earlier in his career he published several books for children, including original tales, stories from Chaucer, and a manual on cricket.

[From Chapter IV] In [A Midsummer Night's Dream], the 'subordinate' agents pre-occupy the mind, by reason of their great potency and surpassingly beautiful creation; or by the engrossing demand that others make on our attention, on account of their fine dramatic nature and verisimilitude, with side-shaking broad humour. Really and truly, Demetrius and Lysander, Hermia and Helena, with their love-crosses and perplexities, constitute the chief agents in the drama. Their way of life is the 'plot' - disturbed, it is true, by the madcap sprite Puck, whose mischievous agency is so admirably employed to distort the course of their true love; and, with a two-handed scheme to befool poor little Titania, becomes not only the important movement in the machinery, but, in fact, we scarcely think of any other in conjunction with him; he and his fellow-minims of the moon's watery beams are the great (though little) people of the drama. Bottom and his companions are the cap and bells; and the classic stateliness of Theseus and

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Hippolyta, with their sedate and lofty nuptialities, form - as Schlegel happily observes - 'a splendid frame to the picture' [No. 8 above]. . . . It was a happy thought of the poet, in introducing the play within the play, got up by the 'Athenian mechanicals,' in honour of Duke Theseus's marriage, to make a travesty of the old tragic legend of'Pyramus and Thisbe,' and thereby turning it, as it were, into a farce upon the serious and pathetic scenes that occur between the lovers in the piece — Demetrius and Helena, and Lysander and Hermia. But what a rich set of fellows those 'mechanicals' are! and how individual are their several characteristics! Bully Bottom, the epitome of all the conceited donkeys that ever strutted and straddled on this stage of the world. . . . He is a choice arabesque impersonation of that colouring of conceit which, by the half-malice of the world, has been said to tinge the disposition of actors, as invariably as the rouge does their cheeks. . . . Peter Quince . . . displays the part of an experienced manager, in tickling the conceit of his first trout-tragedian, and moulding it to his purpose when he declares, [Quotes 1.2.85-9: 'You can play no part but Pyramus. . . .']. *** Then, there is Snug, the joiner, who can board and lodge only one idea at a time, and that tardily. . . . To him succeeds Starveling, the tailor, a melancholy man, and who questions the feasibility and the propriety of everything proposed. Being timid, he thinks the lion's part had better be omitted altogether: 'Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion? I fear it, I promise you' [3.1.27ff.]W If, as some writers have asserted, Shakespeare was a profound practical metaphysician, it is scarcely too much to conclude that all this dove-tailing of contingencies, requisite to perfectionate these several characters, was all foreseen and provided in his mind, and not the result of mere accident. ^ By an intuitive power, that always confounds us when we examine its effects, I believe that whenever Shakespeare adopted any distinctive class of character, his 'mind's eye' took in at a glance all the concomitant minutiae of features requisite to complete its characteristic identity. . . . I believe that he did nothing without anxious premeditation; and that they who really study — not simply read him, must come to the same conclusion. Not only was he not satisfied with preserving the integrity of his characters while they were in speech and action before the audience; but we constantly find them carrying on their peculiarities — out of the scene — by hints of action, and casual remarks from others. Was there no design in all this? no contrivance? no foregone conclusion? — nay, does it not manifest consummate intellectual power, with a sleepless assiduity? And now, what can we say, worthy to be said, of those tiny beings of the elements - those substantial shadows of poetical fancy - those transparent and aether-like forms, that glanced hither and thither, as moonlight on the water's ripple?. . . . What can we say of those lovely denizens of the fairy mythology? What of the feminine waywardness and sweet humanity of the little queen, Titania, with that pretty story of the Indian mother and her babe? And what of Oberon, with his ape-like mimicry of mortal royalty, grudging and restless, till he had beguiled her of her infant page? . . . And oh! more than all, what of that madcap, will-o'-the-wisp - that spiritualisation of fun, frolic, and mischief— immortal Puck? . . .

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The echo of his laugh has reverberated from age to age, striking the promontories and headlands of eternal poetry: and to those whose spirits are finely touched, it is still heard through the mist of temporal cares and toils - dimly heard, and at fitful intervals; for the old faith in that fairy presence has ceased forever, and exists only in the record of those other elegant fancies that were the offspring of the young world of imagination. We have passed into an age of practicality and demonstrative knowledge — great, and even wonderful in its results; but perhaps somewhat too exclusive in its occupation of the human faculties. We lack the Holy-day- the Sabbath of the Fancy. We have been divinely told that 'man cannot live by bread alone;'P] the mind of man cannot go straining on from utility to utility, from practicality to practicality; nevertheless, as Keats says, 'The poetry of earth is never dead:'M poetry, like the fiery element, exists through all created Nature, animate and inanimate, waiting only for the Promethean touch of the magician's wand to give it form and action. The Fairies are gone: - Oberon and Titania, with all their train, lie embalmed in the winding-sheet of the poet's fancy: - but he who contemplates his fellow-beings with the eye of imagination, will raise up to himself a vision of beauty and heart-stirring truth that will compensate him for all the turmoils of world-cares and anxieties. Look at those fairy beings of the material world - those tender buds of humanity — the little children around us. What creation of the poet's brain can compare with those lovely little creatures for tricksy waywardness and pretty caprices? Talk of Robin Goodfellow's laugh! what a genuine thing is the laugh of a child! it is as if sorrow never had been, and never could be, the companion of that soul. There we have the spirit of Puck in our homes and in our streets — the spirit of irrepressible and unaffected merriment. The creative power of the fancy is a blessed gift in itself; but he substantiates that gift who converts it into the ordinary occurrences of daily life, drawing from them the honey-bag of sweet and joyous thought; and I am one who, having had my sorrows, can still believe that there is a sunny side to almost all the events of our life, if we will but turn to it with a sincere and trusting heart. (96-107)

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39 Thomas Kenny, the play's limitations 1864

From The Life and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1864). Thomas Kenny (fl.1864) revives some of the eighteenth-century complaints against A Midsummer Night's Dream, and is notable among critics of his own day in his resistance to the charms of the play. In general, however, Augustus Ralli praises his book because 'its ultimate effect is to enlarge our conception of Shakespeare' (A History of Shakespearean Criticism (2 vols, London, 1932,1, 311).

The Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's most characteristic invasion of the world of pure enchantment. In it he has found a voice and a form for the idlest and most undefmable movements of the human fancy. But there are manifest, and perhaps to some extent inevitable, limitations to the success with which he has accomplished this wonderful task. The versification, more particularly in the rhyme, is often more or less languid and negligent. The human characters are for the most part feebly drawn, and the incidents through which they pass seem occasionally, as in the case of Bottom for instance, unnecessarily mean and trivial. We are unprepared, too, to feel any magical interest in the unrelieved humiliation of the poor players amidst scenes so generally playful. We are aware, however, at the same time, that the wonderful ease and freedom with which this incident is managed has given to it an enduring place in the world's comedy. The fancies of the poet are no doubt bright and vivid, but they still seem wanting in some expected charm. They are hardly, after all, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. t1! Most probably, however, those were not the sights that Shakespeare sought to recall. He had to produce an acting, and not a purely lyrical work; and he had to submit to the somewhat hard conditions which this design necessarily imposed. The light, careless temper in which he regards his characters helps to maintain the dramatic illusion of the whole fairy scene. The 'human mortals' [2.1.101] are throughout treated by the poet with a distant and half-mocking disdain: 'Lord, what fools these mortals be' [3.2.115]! This self-possessed impartiality saves him from the enfeebling languor and insipidity which the passionate indulgence of any mere

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dreamy sensibility must almost inevitably have entailed. The Midsummer Night's Dream is not, perhaps, the perfection of frolicsome grace. It certainly is not the most rapt form of 'harmonious madness'^ which it is possible to conceive. But in it we find the world of phantasy and the world of reality brought together with an ease and a truthfulness which had previously been unknown in any work of human hands. It was a new phenomenon in the manifestations of genius. It showed that a poet had at length arisen who, by the unaided force of imagination, and apparently without any intellectual effort, or the gratification of any personal predilection, could give an outward form to the most shadowy and fugitive images of the mind; and in this bright power he had neither predecessor nor follower among men. (179-80)

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40 John Abraham Heraud, the sacred mysteries in the play 1865

From Shakespeare: His Inner Life as Intimated in His Works (London, 1865). John Abraham Heraud (1799-1887) was both a creative writer and a drama critic. In his lifetime he published seven volumes of poetry, from sonnets to minor epics, and wrote several plays. Among his literary friends were Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and the Carlyles. At nineteen he began writing for literary journals, such as The Monthly Magazine (see Halliwell [No. 21 above], who quotes him), and in the early 1840s joined the Athenaeum, serving as its dramatic critic for twenty-five years. He held the same post with the Illustrated London News from 1849 to 1879. His book views Shakespeare as intensely Protestant, especially in his advocacy of marriage and his opposition to celibacy.

[From 'Part II. Fantastic and Historical Period. 1591-1598. Chapter II. Fancy and Memory — The Merchant of Venice - The characters of Shylock and Portia — A Midsummer Night's Dream — Shakespeare's theory of poetic creation'] In the arrangement of his subject Shakespeare starts at once with the marriage of the noble couple, who serve as the motive-spring and exciting occasion by which his Fancy is stimulated to extraordinary effort. This is an exceedingly natural and graceful way of opening his dramatic epithalamium, and secures attention and sympathy from an audience interested in the actual solemnity. With his feelings concerning marriage, such a work as this must have been exceedingly grateful to the poet, and we may esteem it as intended by him to be in honour of the 'holy estate' which he has been at so much pains to recommend to the truly noble-minded in so many eloquent sonnets. The nature of the work, too, set him at liberty to indulge in his choice of topics, and his mode of treating them; and accordingly, more or less allegorically, we obtain in this poem numerous and most important glimpses into the inner life of the poet. How musical are the commencing verses in this exquisite drama! And even in the complaint of Demetrius the utmost care is bestowed on the diction and movement of the lines. Theseus, in advising Hermia to wed according to her father's will, and so avoid the penalty of death, uses language of great poetic

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sublimity: [Quotes 1.1.46-51: 'Be advised, fair maid. . . .']. On such topics such is the dignified strain in which Shakespeare always writes, with philosophical freedom and without mock-delicacy. He dares to be Nature's mouth-piece, and is of no kin to those who are ashamed of her truths. Equally explicit is Theseus in explaining to the maiden the alternative penalty allowed by the law, in case the sentence of death be remitted: [Quotes 1.1.65-73: 'Either to die the death. ...']. Glorious simplicity of the olden time, when such things could be said without offence to modesty! Here, too, he makes a slight concession to the elder superstition, but immediately recovers it in favour of natural impulse: [Quotes 1.1.74-8: 'Thrice-blessed they that master so their blood. . . .']. Still the prominent thought! recurring — still recurring — never to be absent from the mind of the anti-celibate poet. It is with the same simplicity and openness of thought that Hermia replies to the Athenian Duke. Whereupon he gives her time for reflexion, and even takes part against Demetrius, who he has heard had already 'Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena' [1.1.107]. And then considerately withdraws Egeus and Demetrius from the scene, that he may leave the lovers to themselves. How beautiful the colloquy that ensues! replete with immortal lines, inexpedient to quote, for every reader remembers them. And now enters Helena, tenderly reproaching Hermia for having bewitched her Demetrius, and wishing for her rival-friend's attractions. They comfort her by revealing their intention of flying from Athens to-morrow evening, previously appointing a wood beyond the gates as their try sting-place. This purpose poor love-sick Helena fondly betrays to Demetrius, and thus originates the amorous complications which make the interest of the drama. And now a change comes over the poet's dream, ruled as it is by the tricksy spirit of fancy. The mechanics of Athens have undertaken an important charge, nothing less than to enact a play in honour of their Duke's wedding before him and his lovely bride. Enter therefore a grotesque group, Bottom the weaver, Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, Flute a bellows-mender, Snout a tinker, and Starveling a tailor; Athenian citizens, with English names. Why not? May they not be right translations of their Grecian ones? A grotesque group, indeed! Each man has a separate and disparate character, — for each is a most imperfect specimen of man, and distinctive character represents degrees of individual imperfection, the particular partial development which marks one man from another. Rich in character, therefore, are these abortions of humanity, and differing from one another as the ass from the emeu, and the ape from the elephant; yet all aiming, like the inferior creatures, to become types of man, - 'the paragon of animals' [Hamlet, 2.2.307]. Among these stands prominently forth Bottom the weaver; a soul so comprehensive in its self-esteem, that he would do his own business and every other man's, never doubting his capacity to fulfil any task, however impossible. . . . [Heraud emphasises that humans keep their free wills even though temporary spells are cast on them. Then he gives, without acknowledgement, Halpin's allegorical reading of Oberon's Vision (No. 22 above) and summarizes the action of the play to the end of Act III.] The fourth act is brief and simple. Oberon has obtained his purpose, and secured the 'changeling child' [4.1.59] which he was so ambitious to possess. Time it is,

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therefore, that he should undeceive Titania; and having re-anointed her eyes, he awakens her, and they are reconciled. In like manner the lovers awake, and pair off according to their likings. They have been roused from sleep by the horn of the hunter, for Theseus, Hippolyta, Egeus, and train are in the woods; and now are on the spot to question the quondam sleepers, and hear the strange story of their several dreamings. Bottom also awakes, and vainly essays to collect his sleep-wanderings. In doing this, he parodies a text of Holy WritJ1^ for which the poet has been accused of profanity. What he meant by it himself was quite the opposite. The quotation is made in a religious spirit, and for the purpose of suggestion. Shakespeare thereby intended to imply, that by the 'changing' and 'translating' [3.1.114,119] ofBottom, he meant to shadow forth the manner in which we shall be transformed in the future life to which we are destined; but to have done this directly would have been undramatic and otherwise objectionable. He therefore does it indirectly, and under a thin veil of humour, so that while it is there, for the benefit of those who will seek his meaning, it may not be obtruded on the attention of those who are not qualified for its reception. In the same way, in All's Well That Ends Well, he puts the description of virginity into the mouth of Parolles, before quoted in his conversation with Helena, P] which, though true in itself and indeed the moral of the play, he desired to keep half-hidden as an under-current only to be detected by those who are in the secret of such mysteries — the master masons of the craft. At the beginning of the fifth act, we find Theseus speaking as the poet's expounder, and explaining the process by which such dreams as the one he had been dramatising are produced: Lovers and madmen, have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. [5.1.4ff.] The philosophical reader will do well to consider here the nice propriety with which these two words, 'apprehend' and 'comprehend' are used. To pass on: The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. [5.1.7ff.] For the proper understanding of this all depends on the sense in which the term Imagination is applied, and also the difference in meaning between the words 'forms'

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and 'shapes.' The former are ideas, the latter sensations. The 'airy nothing' is the protheticP] intuition, . . . which — originating in the procreative faculty, and that highest moral power of the human intelligence which we term conscience or self-knowledge, and which, in reference to the lower intelligence is indeed a Prescience or Foreknowledge — transfers itself as a pure or a priori motive to the Will, and thus commences a series of rational and intellectual acts which conduct finally to the projection of a work of imagination. Such intuition in the beginning is an obscure suggestion, a mere vague impulse, which gradually only generates a distinct idea, that powerfully proceeds to assimilate to itself and subordinate to its use such experiences of the mind as are fittest for its purpose, and thus produces in the consciousness such a synthesis of the ideal and the actual as we recognise for an artistic composition. Such is the process described by Shakespeare in these philosophical lines, not idly here inserted, but anxiously and of a forethought, in the most fitting place that could be found for them, that the poet might be self-justified both in the conception and execution of his delightful theme. In this exercise of what Wordsworth has since called 'the Vision and the Faculty Divine,'W the poet-eye first directs its glance to heaven, next to earth, and last to heaven again; nor till then may imagination project the forms or ideas of the work contained in the original intuition, albeit awaiting the full development of what it only suggested, as it may be manifested in a distinct or concrete shape, and then gives to such final shape its appropriate appellation and its proper dwelling, so that it may be identified as a certain picture or poem with a specific title, and referring to a specific time and a specific place, as the date and scene of the argument which has been so elaborately determined and realised. We must expect, therefore, in such a poem, so distinguished by the great poet himself, not only terrestrial references but celestial. In proposing a faery drama, therefore, the poet proposed also a prior purpose — not, as Gervinus [No. 37 above] appears to think, to popularise the belief of the German races, or to mould it into a better form — but to make it the vehicle of doctrines and ideas which it was his mission, and that of his age, to promulgate. We must regard, therefore, his faery people as emblematical, and not as beings having a correlate objective reality, and of whom it can be predicated that they have intellect and no morality. Nor in the letter of the text, or the dramatic conduct of Puck and Oberon, can we find any sanction for the opinion of the great German critic [No. 37 above], that they are incapable of sympathy for human suffering. Titania, in the speech which we have quoted, expresses her regret that their dissensions should influence with such sad fatalities the operations of'human mortals' [2.1.101]; and Puck, though he is fond of sport, proves himself deserving the name of Robin Goodfellow by his ascription of gentleness to the lover, and of prettiness to the sleeping Hermia, as well as by his reflections on man's inconstancy [3.2.452,2.2.76,3.2.92-3]. So far is it from being true that Oberon betrays no compassion for the misfortunes of mortals, that throughout the play he is portrayed as taking the most considerate care of their interests, and solicitously providing in the end a remedy for the inconveniences occasioned by Puck's errors. Moreover, at the end of the play they are brought in to pronounce a blessing on the noble wedded pair and their household. It is, I feel, this human element in Shakespeare's fantastic creations which recommends them to our affections, nay,

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confirms an affinity between them and our better selves. What he really considered them admits of no doubt, since he has told us in Titania's speech above referred to. His theological classical predilections fixed this point for him. Like the Grecian genius and nymph, they are the spirits of nature, the intelligences that are implied in all physical operations and configurations. They are the noumena of all phenomena,!5] and belong to the world of causes and principles. They are also symbols of sacred mysteries such as are hinted at in the Sacred Writings, which contain a mythology, too, as peculiar to the Hebrews, though not generally recognised. Spenser had already led the way in his Faerie Queene, where such applications of scriptural types abound. That, having communicated such ideas to the faery mythology, Shakespeare may therewith have communicated a new life, which has quickened the creations of others, such as Drayton and Ben Jonson, and thus led the way to a new development of faery fiction, is highly probable. For an idea is essentially a power, creative, generative; — it originates and modifies; — it is productive and regulative; — it renovates and germinates; and re-produces itself in countless forms, passing from mind to mind, like the light from torch to torch, until the intellectual world is thoroughly illuminated with the wisdom of which it is the bearer and the witness. And, like Wisdom, it is not only a power, but immortal, an offspring of eternity. The Midsummer Night's Dream is especially remarkable for its beauty as a composition. The theme throughout is treated with care as well as felicity. In structure, in diction, in characterisation, and poetical elegance, it is, we may boldly say, faultless. Nor is it less fitted for the stage than for the closet. However it may be acted, whether as a ballet with a favourite cantatrice in the part of Oberon, or otherwise as a Scandanavian legend with the faery monarch properly bearded, its histrionic representation is always charming. Its execution is as exquisite as its conception is delicate. The faery world is an ideal world in the actual — a second spirit-world, in fact, corresponding to that in man. Yes — there are two spirit-worlds, and unhappy and incomplete is the artist who fails to recognise both. On the one hand, there is the human soul, as the source of Ideas, which ideas, only to be gained by self-contemplation, symbolise all that is immortal, spiritual, divine; and on the other, there is the correspondent kingdom of Laws, which exist as it were at the back of natural phenomena, as also under and within them, — supporting and pervading, as spiritual forces, the visible universe. That visible universe we properly call the realm of the apparent, or the actual; — but it is the invisible behind it, and within ourselves, that eminently merits the appellation of the Real. Would you paint a true picture of the Real, endeavour to combine these two spirit-worlds — the world of ideas and the world of laws, subordinating altogether the sphere of sensationalism, the ever-vanishing fact of a time-existence, and thus impart to your work that permanence which intrinsically belongs to your subject. Those systems and philosophies therefore which would demonstrate ideas and laws, should enter into the studies of the poet, as they evidently did with Shakespeare, and since with Goethe and Schiller. Such studies ought not to be wholly engrossed in the copy or even imitation of material shapes and configurations in nature, or of conventional characters in society, or of the external relations of either. Sublime art is only to

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be attained by mental enlargement. The enfranchiser of the mind is the Ideal, as manifested in both spirit-worlds. Nor is the Ideal confined to the most elevated strata, it permeates the entire Kosmos. It is no less present to the Beautiful than it is to the Sublime soul. Thus, in a sister-art, we find that Raffaelle was not insensible to the greatness of Michael Angelo, but was wont to aver that he 'thanked God, he was born in his days.'M Moreover, the name of Michael Angelo was the last word pronounced in the Royal Academy by Sir Joshua Reynolds, another votary of the Beautiful. The Beautiful is the Sublime after a less strict manner, - in a less intense development, that is all. Compare, for an illustration of this point, the Midsummer Night's Dream with The Tempest. The Beautiful has more variety in the expression, but the idea is the same. Raffaelle never sacrificed conception to treatment, careful as he was of propriety, whether in invention, composition, or expression. Neither has Shakespeare, who is nevertheless the Raffaelle or Sophocles of English drama. Beautiful as all these are, they are scarcely less grand or sublime than Michael Angelo, or jEschylus, themselves, as ideal artists. To attain either Beauty or Sublimity, the Art-Poet must unreluctantly ascend to their source: Mind — mind alone — (bear witness, Heaven and Earth!) The Living Fountain[s] in itself contains Of Beauteous and Sublime. W He must be willing, like Akenside whom I have just quoted, or Shakespeare who is the pervading theme of this entire book, to thread 'the dim-discovered tracts of mind't8] — to soar with Plato or to travel •with Humboldtt9! — interpreting the secret of the universe by the oracle of the individual soul. We must know first what belongs to ourselves; what treasures are hidden in the depths of our own being. Self-knowledge is the root of all other knowledge. (171-88)

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41 Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the secret meaning of the Interlude 1865

From Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare; with the Sonnets. Showing that they belong to the Hermetic Class of Writings, and Explaining their General Meaning and Purpose (New York, 1865). Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) graduated from the Military Academy at West Point in 1817 and spent fifty years in the military service, rising to the rank of general, serving mainly on the American frontiers and in the Civil War. His early interest in religion and philosophy led him to write on Spinoza (1846), alchemy (1857), and Swedenborg as a hermetic philosopher (1858); his interest in literature produced works on Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dante.

[From 'Chapter VII'] [Hitchcock says that the doctrine, or mystery, concealed in the Sonnets is that the spirit of man is one with the spirit of nature, and this sense of unity brought a secret joy to the poet, which he called love. But there was an obstacle which intervened between him and the Beauty of nature, called in Sonnet 44 the 'dull substance of the flesh'. He continues.] The 'dull substance' is the canopy of the spirit of the 125th Sonnet, which the poet wishes to throw aside, that he might live in that unity of the spirit, which 'is not mixed with seconds,' and, in its own simple truth, 'knows no art' [125.11]; or, as expressed in the 78th Sonnet, it is the poet's 'only art' [78.13: 'all my art'] — evidently that of truth and beauty, or 'truth in beauty dy'd' [101.2]. Sonnets 54, 101. The object addressed in the Sonnets is essentially conceived as a unity, designated in the 1st Sonnet, by a figurative expression, as Beauty's Rose; but it is unavoidably realized as double, and is thence called, in the 20th Sonnet, the master-mistress of the poet's passion, or love; the master side, so to say, being the spirit, in which the unity is seen, while the 'addition' [20.11], or dull substance of the flesh, is regarded as the separating something which the poet struggles to lose sight of in the spirit. It appears, at times, clothed with the beauty of the spirit, and then, at another time, it wears a gloomy aspect — 'as dark as night, as black as hell' [147.14: 'as black as hell, as dark as night'.].

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Here are three, the spirit in man, the dull substance of the flesh, and the over-soul,W 'and these three are conceived as one,'PI but with a disturbing sense of the body interposed, as it were, between the two spirits, where it stands like a wall of separation, the wall being now conceived of as the man, and then as the vestment of the universe itself— which, as we read, is to be rolled up like a scroll, PI etc., when God shall be all in all.M This consummation does not appear in the Sonnets themselves, though, as a doctrine, it is everywhere implied by the poet's deep sense of the unity. It is mystically shown, however, in the ancient fable of Pyramus and Thisbe, as the reader is expected to see by the manner in which the poet uses that fable in the Interlude introduced in the closing Act of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It may not be amiss to remind the reader of the dramas that it was usual with our poet to express the most profound truths through dramatic characters, and yet partially screen them from common inspection by the circumstances, or the sort of character made the vehicle of them - such as Jaques and others. The reader need not be surprised therefore to find the dramatis personce of the 'merry and tragical' [5.1.58] Interlude to be boorish and idiotic, while it is worth remarking that even the wall, as also the other parts, are all represented by men, unconscious of their calling. We now turn to the drama, and remark, that it was designed by the poet that a secret meaning should be inferred by the reader. This appears from several very decisive passages, besides the general inference to be drawn from the fact, that the Interlude in the 5th Act of the drama, more than all the rest of the play, if taken literally, is what Hippolyta says of it - the silliest stuff that was ever seen [5.1.210]. No reasonable man can imagine that the author of so many beauties as are seen in this drama, could have introduced the absurd nonsense of the Interlude without having in his mind a secret purpose, which is to be divined by the aid of the reader's imagination — according to the answer of Theseus to the remark of Hippolyta, just recited. But the imagination must here be understood as a poetic creative gift or endowment, and not limited to mere 'fancy's images' [5.1.25]; for Hippolyta herself, though here speaking of the play, gives us a clue to something deeper than what appears on the surface. She, in allusion to all the marvels the bridal party had just heard, observes, But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy. [5.1.23ff.] This is plainly a hint that these 'fables and fairy toys' [5.1.3], as Theseus calls them, may be the vehicle of some constant truth or principle. Again: Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show; But wonder on, till truth make all things plain. [5.1.127ff.]

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That is, when the truth, signified in the 'show,' becomes manifest, all wonder will cease, for the object of its introduction "will be understood. When Hippolyta pronounces the show 'silly stuff,' which, of course, it is, unless there be a secret purpose, Theseus answers: 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them' [5.1.211ff.]; that is, as we have said, the 'show' calls for the exercise of the poetic or creative imagination to bring the kernel out of the husk or shell in which it is presented by the show. The poet himself has told us, in the drama itself, the action of the so-called gift, when he describes the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, as glancing from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and 'gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name' [5.1.16ff.]. But in these airy nothings of the poet are to be found some of the truest revelations of life. We consider now, that we have no need to dwell upon the points in detail suggested by the closing Act of the drama, which contains the doctrine we have set out as mystically contained in the Sonnets. The curious reader, who desires to exercise his own thought, while following that of the poet, expressed through the imprisoning forms of language, will see, with the indications we have given, the purpose of the 'mirthful tragedy' [5.1.57: 'tragical mirth'] of Pyramus and Thisbe. He will see the signification of the two characters or principles, figured in Pyramus and Thisbe, with the wall, 'the vile wall which did these lovers sunder' [5.1.132]. Through this wall (the dull substance of the flesh), the lovers may indeed communicate, but only by a 'whisper, very secretly' [5.1.160]; because the intercourse of spirit with spirit is a secret act of the soul in a sense of its unity with the spirit. The student will readily catch the meaning of the 'moon-shine,' or nature-light, in this representation, the moon being always taken as nature in all mystic writings. He will see the symbolism of the 'dog' [5.1.259] - the watch-dog, of course, — representing the moral guard in a nature-life; as also the bush of thorns, ever ready to illustrate the doctrine that the way of the transgressor is hard. The student will notice the hint that the lovers meet by moonlight and at a tomb - a symbolic indication of the greatest mystery in life (to be found in death); and he will understand the office of the lion, which tears, not Thisbe herself, but only her 'mantle' [5.1.268], or what the poet calls the 'extern' [Sonnet 125.2] of life; and finally will observe that the two principles both disappear; for the unity cannot become mystically visible, until the two principles are mystically lost sight of. It should not escape notice that the two principles are co-equal; that 'a mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisbe, is the better' [5.1.318ff.] - simply figured as man and woman. The student of A Midsummer Night's Dream may observe two very marked features in the play; one, in the 1st Scene of the 2nd Act, where the 'juice' [2.1.170], which induces so many absurdities, cross-purposes, and monstrosities, is described as the juice of (a certain flower called love-in-) idleness: the other, in the 1st Scene of the 4th Act, where we see that all of the irregularities resulting from idleness are cured by the simple anointment of the eyes by what is called 'Dian's bud' - which has such 'force and blessed power' [4.1.73, 74] as to bring all of the faculties back

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to nature and truth, - of which Dian is one of the accepted figures in all mystic writings. The readers of this play, who look upon these indications as purely arbitrary and without distinct meaning, may, indeed, perceive some of the scattered beauties of this fairy drama, but must certainly miss its true import. (94-100)

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42 Abner Otis Kellogg, the perfection of imbecilic clowns 1866

From Shakespeare's Delineations of Insanity, Imbecility, and Suicide (New York, 1866). Abner Otis Kellogg (1818-88), whose occupation is explained in the 'Prefatory notice' below, is praised by Augustus Ralli for his application of modern facts of psychology and physiology to the interpretation of Shakespeare's characters: though 'his standard for Shakespeare's characters is the wellestablished social order of the moral world, none the less . . . he uses his special knowledge to make us realize more fully how complex was Shakespeare's artistic faculty' (A History of Shakespearean Criticism, London, 1932,1, 316).

[From prefatory 'Notice'] These Essays were published in the American Journal of Insanity, at various intervals between 1850 and 1864. A better acquaintance with the delicate shades of mental disease as seen in the wards of a large Hospital for the Insane, has tended to modify the earlier views of the writer respecting some of Shakespeare's insane characters, and enabled him better to appreciate the fidelity of the great dramatist's delineations. No other excuse, therefore, is deemed necessary for the alterations that have been made in the original essays. A. O. K. State Lunatic Asylum, Utica, April, 1866. [From 'PART II. Shakespeare's delineations of imbecility'] . . . In the illustration of the varied and innumerable shades of folly, mental obtuseness, and mental imbecility naturally incident to humanity, our poet is incomparably rich, and every degree and order of mental manifestation is represented with a truthfulness and vigor which has never been equalled, and perhaps never will be to the end of time. . . . Of imbeciles and clowns -fools as they are generally termed - he has an almost

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endless variety, and the very names which he gives them are sometimes so strikingly significant and characteristic, that the mere mention of them forces a smile. Let us take a few examples by way of introduction, and see if we can suppress a smile when the mere name of some of them is called out from the presentation role. Bottom the Weaver, Peter Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Snout the Tinker, Flute the Bellows-mender, Starveling the Tailor, Christopher Sly the Tinker, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Ague-cheek, Froth, Dogberry, Malvolio, Launcelot Gobbo, Touchstone, Simple, Slender, Shallow, Speed, Dull, Costard, Caliban, Elbow, Lucio, Moth, Mouldy, Shadow, Feeble, Bull-calf, and Wart; and lastly, as the curious procession must end somewhere, comes Launce, leading his interesting dog Crab. Here we have presented to us a galaxy of fools such as is nowhere else to be found, and every shade of folly, imbecility, and mental obtuseness is represented; and the portraiture of each, as delineated by the bard, is well worthy of the cognomen bestowed. First in the motley procession we see Bottom the Weaver, the very embodiment and quintessence of self-conceit, and of everything, in short, necessary to constitute a perfect human ass. It was not sufficient for him simply to be 'writ down an ass' [Much Ado About Nothing, 4.2.87] in the record, like Dogberry, but the diadem which crowned him prince of all his tribe must be placed in due form upon his head, and when first led in by Puck after his coronation, the poet must certainly have chuckled over his own workmanship, and said quietly to himself, - 'O all ye tribes of human asses, that are, ever have been, or ever will be, behold your king! from this time henceforth and forever, let no one of you deny my anointed.' And to all posterity he seems yet to say, 'Behold the perfection of conceited blockheads, the asinorum asinalissimus,^ par excellence! From henceforth and forever let no man dispute my workmanship. Doubt if you will that moonshine can be personated by a man holding a lantern behind a thorn-bush; that a lion can modulate his voice so sweetly that he shall roar you as 'twere any nightingale or sucking dove; that a wall can be personated by a man plastered over with lime and rough cast; but while Bottom, wearing his ass's head, can, by his conceit which makes all things possible, believe this, let no one deny that he is the crowned and anointed king of Donkeys.' And by what a court is this strange potentate surrounded and worshipped! First we see Peter Quince the Carpenter and Playwright. If Bottom is prince of donkeys, Quince takes the first place of honor in his court, and his tide, prince of playwrights, like that of Bottom, cannot be disputed. O all ye tribes of playwrights, wherever ye are, — ye Knowleses, and Shees, and Maturins; ye Grillparzers, Klingemanns, and Kotzebues;f2] many of you cunning men in your handicraft, — behold your king, Peter Quince, the anointed of the poet! And whomsoever he anoints and crowns let none of you seek to depose. And you, ye 'periwig-pated players,' who, whether amateur or professional, can 'tear a passion to tatters,' to very rags; ye who are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show, and noise to 'split the ears of the groundlings'; who 'strut and bellow, having neither the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christians, pagans, or men, - products of Nature's journeymen,' those mechanics who 'imitate Nature

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so abominably' [Hamlet, 3.2.9-11, 31-5], remember your great antecessors, those histrionic mechanicals of the poet, Snug the Joiner, Starveling the Tailor, Flute the Bellows-mender, and Snout the Tinker. (117-20)

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43 Mary Preston, not critics, but lowly worshippers of the Beautiful 1869

From Studies in Shakespeare. A Book of Essays (Philadelphia, 1869). Nothing is known of Mary Preston except the information in this publication, from which it may be inferred that she lived in or near Philadelphia (the publishers are Claxton, Remsen & Haefelfmger of Market Street). The book is 'Inscribed to John F. Preston, Esq. A token of sisterly affection', and the Preface offers some of the treasures of Shakespeare's plays 'as an offset to the quantity of worthless currency which is debasing modern taste and morals in literature'. Some of the choices for her fourteen essays are unusual: one is devoted to Timon of Athens, and one each to Queen Katharine and Cardinal Wolsey; The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of the four comedies treated; Coriolanus and Richard III figure among the tragedies, but not Hamlet.

[From 'Essay XIII. Midsummer Night's Dream'] [She begins by praising the beauty of fairy tales, and questioning who would wish to banish them from a child's reading.] . . . For my part, I do not envy the ultra-practical man who shuts his eyes to the beautiful, and only opens them upon the dry commonplaces of existence. Such a man may be very rich, be very successful — in business! Such a man may be very accurate — in statistical details! Such a man may be very profound — in matters of fact! Reason may descend from her mountain heights to guide such a man through the low valleys of his thoughts and inclinations! But, such a man can never be a Sir Walter Scott! But, such a man can never be a Lord Erskine! . . . t1] . . . A truly interesting man is one who, while he is ever practical in the routine of the cares and of the duties of life, is also a man awake to all the influences of the Beautiful, be they in Nature or in Art. He is a man of feeling, though his pilot be reason and his pole-star be truth! It is only the dreamers through the long night we call Life! - it is only those who esteem the sense of beauty at least as highly as the sense of touch, of taste, of smell, of hearing! — it is only this order of men who can read with unspeakable rapture that most exquisite dream of our poet embodied in the play now before us. The Midsummer

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Night's Dream should be read on a moonlight summer night, with the twinkling stars sparkling above us as we read, and around and about us the mysterious whisperings of nature and our own weird fancies engendered by the pensive beauty of such a contemplative season. On such a night of celestial, as well as terrestrial loveliness, this play will chime in with our thoughts and fancies like sweet voices we have heard stealing over the heart with gentle witchery, and making it a willing captive. Let us, then, meditate upon this play with all the faith which in childhood held us spellbound over a book of fairy tales. Let us consider this dream not as critics, but as lowly worshippers of the Beautiful, be it in Nature or be it in Art. There is an excellent moral in our fairy stories, which our poet (who never neglects an opportunity of pointing the moral of his tale) has been careful to preserve in the Midsummer Night's Dream, namely, that the fairies bestow their gifts on the deserving. The fairies never, like fortune, shower their gifts upon the mean, the unkind, the vicious. No. The fairies choose the brave, the suffering but noble heart, the virtuous, the soaring spirit, to be the recipients of their charities. The fairies flutter about the hearths where domestic worth is seated; they hover around the persons whose lives are as pure as the limpid spring. These fairy attributes are an evidence of mankind's instinctive sympathy with all that makes life 'poetry and beauty;' and that there is latent in each breast an antipathy for the evil. *** . . . We are taught, incidentally, in this play, by the royal dispute, that there is no station, however exalted, secure from wordy wars and unhappiness. It is strange that we should see, on reflection, so many reasons why we should have a gentle pity for every one, even for the most degraded of our species (for who can estimate the number or the strength of a man's temptations?) . . . King Oberon, thwarted by his Queen, determines on revenge, and he desires, at the same time, to settle a love difficulty that has forced itself on his notice and sympathy. His Majesty's Prime Minister Puck (a very Bismarck in all matters of intrigue and diplomacy) is given the royal orders to execute vengeance on the Queen, and bring the refractory lovers to reason. . . . [She describes the love tangle that Puck is supposed to unravel.] Hermia and Lysander, after the silly fashion of Cupid in all ages and in all his victims, have lost their interest in everything but each other. There is no egotism to compare with the egotism of love. . . . Sensible people will let such insane ones alone; for time is the only cure in such violent cases. Helen, however, is another maniac, and in her anxiety to propitiate her idol, betrays the lovers' flight to Demetrius. He, with Helen for guide, pursues the runaways. Strange, that we should value what does not and cannot justly belong to us, and hunt, through affection, what can never give us satisfaction. . . . [She describes Puck's errors with the juice.] Thus matters are made even worse by the fairy interposition, as, in real life, we find those who meddle in love affairs seldom do any good by such interference. Two women are now •wretched where only one had been formerly. . . . [She praises the sympathetic understanding of women's feelings that Shakespeare shows in the jealousy of Hermia.] Hermia then, though a wit, a beauty, and (what is often the result of neither of these attributes, but of the management of friends or the peculiarities of position) a belle, — Hermia, though thus possessing the object of most women's ambition, is very sensitive on one point, —

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she is 'dwarfish' [3.2.295]. It is this weakness of Hermia's mind that makes her regard Helen's successful rivalry not as caused by any of Helen's virtues, her gentleness, her kind heart, or even by Helen's beauty. No, Hermia ascribes the catastrophe entirely to Helen's superiority in height. She taunts Helen with it. [Quotes 3.2.291-93: 'She hath urg'd her height. . . .'] It is to be noticed in this play, as in so many others of this same poet, how much higher friendship stands in Shakespeare's estimation than love. The former feeling is always dwelt upon in terms of respect and admiration. The latter feeling is ushered in as if regarded half-contemptuously, half-tenderly. The language of friendship is constant. [Quotes 3.2.208-214: 'So we grow together, / Like to a double cherry. . . .'PI] How differently, yet how correctly is love described: [Quotes 1.1.232-41: 'Things base and vile. . . .'] (156-66)

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44 Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, the theme is love 1871

From History of English Literature. By H.A. Taine, Translated by H[enri\ Van Laun. One of the masters at the Edinburgh Academy. With a Preface by the Author (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1871). Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-1893) French critic, historian, aesthetician, and positivist philosopher, first achieved fame from a series of articles on French philosophers of the nineteenth century, which were collected in a volume in 1857. In his greatest work, Origines de la France Contemporaine, he judged the French revolution to have caused the ills of his country. In 1863 he published his Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise, translated into English in 1871. In this book he saw Shakespeare as a 'sympathetic genius' who 'knew how to forget himself and become transfused into all the objects which he conceived (I, 303)'. Taine believed the dramatist was driven by passion, and mostly the passion of love, as exemplified , for instance, in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

[From Book II, Chapter IV: 'Shakespeare'] As You Like It is a half-dream. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a complete one. The scene, buried in the far-off mist of fabulous antiquity, carries us back to Theseus, Duke of Athens, who is preparing his palace for his marriage with the beautiful queen of the Amazons. The style, loaded with contorted images, fills the mind with strange and splendid visions, and the airy elf-world diverts the comedy into the fairy-land from whence it sprung. Love is still the theme; of all sentiments, is it not the greatest fancy-weaver? But we have not here for language the charming tittle-tattle of Rosalind; it is glaring, like the season of the year. It does not brim over in slight conversations, in supple and skipping prose; it breaks forth into long rhyming odes, dressed in magnificent metaphors, sustained by impassioned accents, such as a warm night, odorous and star-spangled, inspires in a poet who loves. Lysander and Hermia agree to meet: [Quotes 1.1.209-15, 216: 'Lys. To-morrow night, when Phoebe doth behold. . . .']. They get lost, and fall asleep, wearied, under the trees. Puck squeezes in the youth's eyes the juice of a magic flower, and changes his heart. Presently, when he awakes, he will become enamoured of the first woman he sees. Meanwhile Demetrius, Hermia's rejected lover, wanders with Helena, whom he rejects, in the solitary wood. The magic flower changes him in turn: he now loves Helena. The lovers flee and pursue

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one another, beneath the lofty trees, in the calm night. We smile at their transports, their complaints, their ecstasies, and yet we join in them. This passion is a dream, and yet it moves us. It is like those airy webs which we find at morning on the crest of the hedgerows where the dew has spread them, and whose weft sparkles like a jewel-casket. Nothing can be more fragile, and nothing more graceful. The poet sports with emotions; he mingles, confuses, redoubles, interweaves them; he twines and untwines these loves like the mazes of a dance, and we see the noble and tender figures pass by the verdant bushes, under the radiant eyes of the stars, now wet with tears, now bright with rapture. They have the abandonment of true love, not the grossness of sensual love. Nothing causes us to fall from the ideal •world in which Shakespeare conducts us. Dazzled by beauty, they adore it, and the spectacle of their happiness, their emotion, and their tenderness, is a kind of enchantment. Above these two couples flutters and hums the swarm of elves and fairies. They also love. Titania, their queen, has a young boy for her favourite, son of an Indian king, of whom Oberon, her husband, wishes to deprive her. They quarrel, so that the elves creep for fear into the acorn cups, in the golden primroses. Oberon, by way of vengeance, touches Titania's sleeping eyes with the magic flower, and thus on waking the nimblest and most charming of the fairies finds herself enamoured of a stupid blockhead with an ass' head. She kneels before him; she sets on his 'hairy temples a coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers:' [Quotes 4.1.53-6: 'And that same dew. . . .']. She calls round her all her fairy attendants: [Quotes 3.1.164-73: 'Be kind and courteous to this gentleman. . . .']. Come wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently. [3.1.197-201] It was necessary, for her love brayed horribly, and to all the offers of Titania, replied with a petition for hay. What can be sadder and sweeter than this irony of Shakespeare? What raillery against love, and what tenderness for love! The sentiment is divine: its object unworthy. The heart is ravished, the eyes blind. It is a golden butterfly, fluttering in the mud; and Shakespeare, whilst painting its misery, preserves all its beauty: [Quotes 4.1.1-4, 40, 42-5: 'Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed. . . .']. At the return of morning, when [Quotes 3.2.391-3: 'The eastern gate, all fiery red. . . .'], the enchantment ceases, Titania awakes on her couch of wild thyme and drooping violets. She drives the monster away; her recollections of the night are effaced in a vague twilight: [Quotes 4.1.187-8: 'These things seem small and undistinguishable. . . .']. And the fairies [Quotes 2.1.14-15: 'Go seek some dew drops. . . .']. Such is Shakespeare's fantasy, a light tissue of bold inventions, of ardent passions, melancholy mockery, dazzling poetry, such as one of Titania's elves would have made. Nothing could be more like the poet's mind than these nimble genii, children of air and flame, whose flights 'compass the globe' [4.1.97] in a second, who glide over the foam of the waves and skip between the atoms of the winds. Ariel

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flies, an invisible songster, around shipwrecked men to console them, discovers the thoughts of traitors, pursues the savage beast Caliban, spreads gorgeous visions before lovers, and does all in a lightning-flash: [Quotes The Tempest, 5.1.88-9, 93-4, 102-3: 'Where the bee sucks. . . .']. Shakespeare glides over things on as swift a wing, by leaps as sudden, with a touch as delicate. (I, 347-50)

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45 Daniel Wilson, Bottom — an ass, but no fool 1873

From Caliban: The Missing Link (London, 1873). Sir Daniel Wilson (1816-1892), artist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, literary critic, educator, and University administrator, was born in Edinburgh. He spent one year at University there, then left to study art and engraving in London, where he wrote on literature and art for various magazines. In 1848 he published Memorials of Edinburgh, a two-volume history of the city, illustrated by himself, and, in 1851 The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, a study of early man in Scotland. In 1853 he was appointed to the Chair of History and English Literature in University College, Toronto. His interest now focussed on the native peoples of North America, and he wrote several volumes on them. In 1869 appeared his Chatterton: a Biographical Study. He became involved in administration, and rose to the presidency of the University of Toronto in 1887.

[From 'Chapter XIV. A Midsummer Night's Dream'] [Wilson spends the first two-thirds of this chapter giving conjectural readings, and the last third, mainly, on Bottom. He observes how the play blends the incongruous realms of the lovers and the fairies, and then considers Bottom.] But there is one character least of all seemingly fitted to consort with beings light as air: that most prosaic of'rude mechanicals' [3.2.9] and 'human mortals' [2.1.101], Nick Bottom. Yet what inimitable power and humorous depth of irony are there in the Athenian weaver and prince of clownish players! Vain, conceited, consequential: he is nevertheless no mere empty lout, but rather the impersonation of characteristics which have abounded in every age, and find ample scope for their display in every social rank. Bottom is the work of the same master hand which wrought for us the Caliban and Miranda, the Puck and Ariel, of such diverse worlds. He is the very embodiment and idealisation of that self-esteem which is a human virtue by no means to be dispensed with, though it needs some strong counterpoise in the well-balanced mind. . . . Nick Bottom is thus a representative man, 'not one, but all mankind's epitome'.!1] He is a natural genius. If he claims the lead, it is not without a recognised fitness to fulfil the duties he assumes. He is one whom nothing can put out. 'I have a device to

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make all well' [3.1.16], is his prompt reply to every difficulty, and the device, such as it is, is immediately forthcoming. A duke is but a duke after all; and we may be well assured, when Theseus tells the Queen of the Amazons of his welcomers collapsing in 'the modesty of fearful duty' [5.1.101], Nick Bottom had no place in his thoughts: — [Quotes 5.1.93-9: 'Where I have come, great clerks have purposed / To greet me. . . .']. As to Bottom, were he the duke, and Theseus the clown, he could not take it more coolly. He comes back from the fairy brake, ready as ever for the minutest details, and prompt for action. No time for talk now. 'The duke hath dined; get your apparel together, good strings to your beards' [4.2.35fE], — for a pretty thing it were, if your aptly-chosen orange-tawny or French-crown-coloured beard were to drop off in the very crisis of the tragedy! 'In any case let Thisby have clean linen' [4.2.39ff.]; and poor Snug, the extempore lion, beware of paring his nails. [Quotes 4.2.42-4: 'And, most dear actors, eat no onions. . . .']. Bottom is as completely conceived, in all perfectness of consistency, as any character Shakespeare has drawn: ready-witted, unbounded in his self-confidence, and with a conceit nursed into the absolute proportions which we witness by the admiring deference of his brother clowns. Yet this is no more than the recognition of true merit. Their admiration of his parts is rendered ungrudgingly, as it is received by him simply as his due. Peter Quince appears as responsible manager of the theatricals, and indeed is doubtless the author of'the most lamentable comedy' [1.2.1 Iff.]. For Nick Bottom, though equal to all else, makes no pretensions to the poetic art. He is barely awakened out of his fairy-trance, when he begins to cudgel his brains. [Quotes 4.1.207-17: 'Methought I was — there is no man that can tell what. . . .']. Here there is no mistaking the poet of the company. All due recognition of his powers is conceded as a matter of course; but the result leads none the less to Bottom's own pre-eminence. The ballad is to be 'Bottom's Dream' [4.1.215ff.], and with it he is to come in as the climax of the whole performance, before the admiring duke. . . . [He describes Bottom's brashness in Act I, scene 2, and at the rehearsal.] But fully to appreciate the ability and self-possession of Nick Bottom in the most unwonted circumstances, we must follow the translated mechanical to Titania's bower, where the enamoured queen lavishes her favours on her strange lover. His cool prosaic commonplaces fit in with her rhythmical fancies as naturally as the dull grey of the dawn meets and embraces the sunrise. His valiant song awakes Titania from her flowery bed amid the fragrance of the wild thyme and the nodding violets, while woodbine, sweet musk-roses and the eglantine overcanopy her couch; and to her charmed eye the transformed weaver, with his ass's nowl, appears an angel. 'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering [here] / So near the cradle of the fairy Queen' [3.1.77ff.]? is Puck's exclamation when he first gets sight of Quince's company. Titania, on the contrary, awakened by Bottom's carol, exclaims, 'What angel wakes me from my flowery bed' [3.1.129]? and so she forthwith addresses him: - [Quotes 3.1.137-41: 'I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again. . . .']. 'Methinks, mistress,' he replies, - in no way put out by such advances, - [Quotes 3.1.142-6: 'you should have little reason for that. . . .']. He is at home at once with the whole fairy court, and condescends to his airy attendants with an easy gracious familiarity worthy

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of one to whom the favours of Queen Titania come as though they were his by right. 'I shall desire more of your acquaintance, good Master Cobweb' [3.1.182ff.], he says, with a play upon his name. Turning to another of the fairy train, 'Your name, honest gentleman' [3.1.184]? is his easy salutation. . . . Here we cannot but note the quaint blending of the ass with the rude Athenian 'thick-skin' [3.2.13]: as though the creator of Caliban had his own theory of evolution; and has here an eye to the more fitting progenitor of man. . . . Yet though Bottom is an ass, he is no fool. He is indeed wrapped up in the supremest ignorance of 'rude mechanicals / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls' [3.2.9ff.]. Of such wisdom as belongs to the schools, or was taught in the porch, he makes no pretence; but of mother wit he has his full share. His sublime conceit rests in part on a certain consciousness of innate power. He is unabashed by rank, undaunted by difficulties, ready at a moment's notice for all emergencies, thoroughly cool and self-reliant. No wonder that he can look a duke in the face. He has been accustomed to take the lead among his fellow mechanics, and to have his counsels followed as a matter of course. Nick Bottom is a natural genius, of a type by no means rar$. There is a consequential aldermanic absolutism about him, familiar to many a civic council-board. He gives his opinions on the play, in all its intricacies and perplexities, with an infallibility which no Shakespearean commentator could surpass. 'Tis a very good piece of work, and a merry' [1.2.13ff.]; though his own part 'will ask some tears in the true performing of it' [1.2.25ff.]. Duke Theseus, when witnessing the actual performance, ventures on a comment; but Bottom, in the midst of his most tender Pyramus-vein, is ready with his 'No, in truth, sir' [5.1.184], and will play, not only actor, but commentator too. There are Bottoms everywhere. Nor are they without their uses. Vanity becomes admirable when carried out with such sublime unconsciousness; and here it is a vanity resting on some solid foundation, and finding expression in the assumption of a leadership which his fellows recognise as his own by right. If he will play the lion's part, 'let him roar again' [1.2.73]! Look where we will, we may chance to come on 'sweet bully Bottom' [4.2.19]. In truth there is so much of genuine human nature in this hero of A Midsummer Night's Dream, that it may not always be safe to peep into the looking-glass, lest evolution reassert itself for our special behoof, and his familiar countenance greet us, 'Hail fellow, well met, give me your neifl't2! (262-71)

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46 Karl Elze, A Midsummer Night's Dream as masque 1874

From Essays on Shakespeare. Translated with the author's sanction by L. Dora Schmitz (London, 1874). Karl (Carl Friedrich) Elze (1821-89), German scholar and critic, educated in classical philology and modern literature at Leipzig University, was professor of English philology at the university of Halle from 1875. His first Shakespearean work was an edition of Hamlet in 1857; in 1867 he was appointed Editor of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, where the essays here translated were first published (1868-72). Schmitz also translated Elze's 1877 literary biography of Shakespeare (London, 1888). In her preface to the 1874 volume Schmitz considers it 'almost superfluous' to comment that Elze enjoyed 'a wide reputation in Germany for his extensive researches and studies in the English language and literature' (p. v), because his work had been for several years well known in England. His views, especially those concerning the date and historical allegory of A Midsummer Night's Dream, generated interest and controversy in both countries.

[From Essay II.: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream. (1868.)'] In Germany, as well as in England, it has repeatedly been pointed out that A Midsummer Night's Dream in its character resembles a masque. It is true that we possess comparatively few indications for forming a correct estimate of the earlier state of masques, yet these few are sufficient to enable us to judge of the resemblance between them and Shakespeare's most charming comedy. We know that masques undoubtedly arose out of'dumb shows,' whose chief attraction consisted in splendid costumes and decorations, in music and dances, and which were only gradually furnished with dialogue. From the fact that the object of masques was to celebrate marriages in high life and similar occasions, it is obvious that it was not their aim to solve a dramatic problem; in them the carrying out of an action and the delineation of characters always remained a secondary object, not to say that they were excluded. On the other hand allegories and mythological subjects predominated. . . . [He notes that masques attained their peak under James I, through Ben Jonson.] It is, of course, out of the question to suppose that Jonson's masques influenced A Midsummer Night's Dream; it could more readily be conceived that the latter exercised an influence upon Jonson. At least in A Midsummer Night's Dream the two main portions, masque and anti-masque, are divided in an almost Jonsonian manner. The

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love-stories of Theseus and the Athenian youths — to use Schlegel's words — 'form, as it were, a splendid frame to the picture. Theseus and Hippolyta only represent, but with stately pomp' [No. 8 above]. Into this frame, which corresponds to the actual masque, the anti-masque is inserted, and the latter again is divided into the semi-choruses of the fairies (for they too belong to the anti-masque) and the clowns.1 Shakespeare has, of course, treated the whole with the most perfect artistic freedom. The two parts do not, as is frequently the case in masques, proceed internally unconnected by the side of each other, but are most skilfully interwoven. The anti-masque, in the scenes between Oberon and Titania, rises to the full poetic height of the masque, while the latter, in the dispute between Hermia and Helena, does indeed not enter the domain of the comic, but still diminishes in dignity, and Theseus in the fifth act actually descends to the jokes of clowns. The Bergomask dance performed by the clowns forcibly reminds us of the outlandish nothingness of the anti-masque, as pointed out by Jonson. Moreover, we feel throughout the play that like the masques it was originally intended for a private entertainment. Oberon's song at the conclusion — [Quotes 5.1.401-8, &c.: 'Now, until the break of day. . . .'] evidently contains the poet's congratulations upon a marriage; the lines can scarcely be understood otherwise. The resemblance with the masques is still heightened by the completely lyrical, not to say operatic stamp of the Midsummer Night's Dream. . . . [He cites the handling of the plot and the characters as other masque-like features.] These points of comparison sufficiently show the correctness of one of Halpin's remarks, namely, that in the Midsummer Night's Dream the masque imperceptibly has passed over into comedy. . . . 2 Yet however imperceptible the transition may be, Shakespeare's play stands far above all masques, those of Jonson not excepted, and differs from them in essential points. Above all, it is obvious that Shakespeare has transferred the subject from the domain of learned poetry into the popular one, and thus has given it an imperishable and universally attractive substance. Just as he has transformed the vulgar chronicle-histories into truly dramatic plays, so in the Midsummer Night's Dream he has raised the masque into the highest form of art, as in fact his greatness in general consists in having carried all the existing dramatic species to the highest point of perfection. The difference between learned and popular poetry can nowhere appear more distinct than in comparing the Midsummer Night's Dream withjonson's masques. B. Jonson has also made Oberon the principal character of a masque;3 but what a contrast! Here almost all the figures, all the images and allusions, are the exclusive property of the scholar, and can neither be understood by, nor touch a chord of sympathy in the minds of the people. . . . Hence Jonson found it necessary to furnish his masques with copious notes, which would do honour to a German philologer; whereas Shakespeare never penned a note. Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream has by no means effaced the mythological background and the fabulous world of spirits peculiar to the masque, but has taken care to treat it all in an intelligible and charming manner. . . . [He details the connections of Shakespeare's diverse materials in popular and familiar English literature.] *** [Assuming that the similarity between A Midsummer Night's Dream and masques is granted, he seeks to establish the occasion of the play. He first dismisses claims for

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Southampton's wedding to Elizabeth Vernon in 1598, then advances the claims of the wedding of Essex to Sir Philip Sidney's widow, Frances Walsingham, in 1590.] . . . The Midsummer Night's Dream is evidently the production of that happy period of life when fancy is most lively and unrestrained in its creations; everything in it is lyrical effusion, unclouded cheerfulness, exempt from reflection; in a word, all is youth. This lyrical period Shakespeare had in all probability already passed in 1598. *** [From pp. 41-55 he examines the history and character of Essex and of Frances Sidney in support of his theory, and suggests that the compliment to the queen was intended to make her look more favourably on Essex's marriage. He also takes into account the references that various commentators had seen to the wedding of Leicester to Essex's mother, Lettice Knollys, kept secret from the queen until 1579. He believes such references would have been unobjectionable, particularly since they are restrained and oblique.] . . . The poet, nevertheless, at the end of the play does not forget to bring forward an excuse in case that, contrary to his expectation, one should be needed. Puck in the concluding speech says:—[Quotes 5.1.423-30: 'If we shadows have offended. . . .'] These lines would be flat and meaningless if they had not been spoken at Essex's wedding. The pardon asked for will certainly have been granted the more readily, as it could scarcely have escaped those interested in the play that, as we have shown, the object of the passage in question was to put in a good word for them with the queen. We have said that in the Midsummer Night's Dream the love affairs of the aristocracy are represented as in a mirror. This will be understood in its full significance when we take the anti-masque into consideration. While the aristocracy make love partly a frivolous amusement in idleness, partly a sensual caprice, the lower classes on the contrary regard it from its tragic side. The 'hempen homespuns' [3.1.77] know of no other theme for their masque than the melancholy story of 'Pyramus and Thisbe;' with them love is bitter earnest; they know its pathos only, although or perhaps because, they do not understand it. How deeply this tragic conception of love is rooted in the minds of the people is proved by innumerable popular songs and ballads of all nations. We here confront the question as to the fundamental idea of the play, but cannot enter on it, as our task has nothing to do with what Shakespeare — like every true poet — has expressed unconsciously in his poetry; we only speak of what he has consciously put into it. Only this much may be said, that we nearly agree with A. Peters, who has demonstrated the 'transition both from the actually tragic infidelity in the principal play, and from the tragic fidelity in the counter-play into the comic,' to be the fundamental idea of A Midsummer Night's Dream.4 That the contrast between the views of love and life in the aristocracy and in the working classes was intentional, cannot be mistaken; the poet refers the one party to the other, and though he is no lecturer on morals, he yet makes us perceive that each party may learn from the other. Both their views are wrong in their one-sidedness, their mutual penetration alone results in what is right. The tragic conception of love — standing as it does in contrast to the education and social position of its representatives — in their hard hands and thick skulls produces an involuntary comic effect, and serves for the amusement of

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the aristocracy. But the mechanics are likewise influenced by the lighter atmosphere of life and love in the Duke's palace, and they go home contented. All at last resolves itself into a deeply poetical and delightful play, satisfying all hearts. (30-57)

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47 Denton Jacques Snider, self-reflexive structure: the Real, the Ideal, and the Representation 1874

From 'Midsummer Night's Dream', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 8 (April, 1874), 165-86. Denton Jacques Snider (1841-1925), author and educator, began his career teaching Greek and Latin in the College of the Christian Brothers in St. Louis, Missouri, and became one of the original members of the St. Louis Philosophical Movement. Several books, some in prose and some in verse, attest his love of Greece and Rome. He was also throughout his career a devotee of Hegelian philosophy; many publications of his later years concern philosophy and psychology. In mid-career his major works were commentaries on Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, and Goethe. His essay on 'Midsummer Night's Dream' was first published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, (vol 8, April 1874, 165-86). It was republished with minor variants in phrasing and punctuation in System of Shakespeare's Dramas (2 vols, St. Louis, 1877), and then in expanded form in The Shakespearean Drama. A Commentary: The Comedies (St. Louis, 1887). The following is from the 1874 text; some of the additions and variations in the 1887 text are indicated in the notes.

Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the most popular of Shakespeare's comedies. Its weird ethereal scenery captivates the purely poetical nature, its striking sensuous effects impress the most ordinary mind, while its faint rainbow-like outlines of the profoundest truths entice the thinker with an irresistible charm to explore the hidden meaning of the poet. There is no work of our author that is so universal, that appeals so strongly to high and low, to old and young, to man and woman. Its shadowy forms appear, disappear, and reappear in the wildest sport, and the critic may sometimes doubt his ability to track them through all their mazy hues. Nor can it be denied that there is a capricious play of fancy over and around the underlying elements of the drama. Still, like all of Shakespeare's pieces, it is based on thought, and must look to the same for its justification. Our attempt, therefore, will be to seize and fix these fleeting iridescent shapes in the abstract forms of thought. To be sure, the poetry of the play is thus destroyed; but criticism is not poetry, but prose. For if criticism were poetry, it had better keep silent in the presence of this piece, and not vainly attempt to imitate that which is inimitable, or say over again that which the Poet has already

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so adequately said. The only justification of the critic, therefore, is that he expresses the content of this drama in a new form — the form of thought — for his reader, instead of the imaginative form which the dramatist has chosen, and in fact must choose. I am aware that not a few people will regard any attempt to make out a consistent unity in this play as wanton and absurd refinement. Moreover, the great interpreters of Shakespeare will be pointed to, who call it a caprice, a dream without necessary connection in thought of its various parts. That is, the work is a chaos. But every person who reads this playW with admiration must grant that there is a profound harmony pervading it throughout, that he feels all its essential parts to be in perfect unison with one another, that the effect of the whole is not that of a discordant and ill-assorted poem. . . . The procedure of this essay will be twofold. First, it will attempt to state the phases or stages of the entire action and their transition into one another; secondly, it will seek to trace the various threads which run through the whole play. The former divides the total movement of the drama into a certain number of parts, the latter unites the characters together into groups. . . . But after such preparatory labor of method, the chief part of the critic's work remains to be done. All the above-mentioned stages must be explained for thought; the transitions must be shown to be logically necessary; the different characters, if important, but particularly the different groups of characters, must be elucidated in their unity, in their fundamental idea. In other words, the language of imagination, which is that of the poet, must be translated into the language of thought, which is that of the critic. Following the principles above laid down, we are now ready for the statement of the various phases or divisions of the total movement of the play. These are three: 1st, the Real World, which is embraced in the first Act, and which is called real because its mediations and its collisions are those of common experience, and are based upon the self-conscious Reason of man; 2nd, the Fairy World, the Ideal Realm which terminates in the course of the fourth Act — so named because its mediations and collisions are brought about through the agency of supernatural beings, the creatures of the Imagination; 3rd, the Representation in Art, which, together with the return from Fairyland to the world of reality, takes up the rest of the drama, except the final scene. In this last part, then, the first two parts mirror themselves, the action reflects itself, the play plays itself playing, it is its own spectator, including its audience and itself in one and the same movement. Thus there is reached a totality of Representation which not only represents something, but represents itself in the act of Representation. The very limits of Dramatic Art are touched here; it can go no further. In this reflection of the play by itself is to be found the thought which binds together its multifarious and seemingly irreconcilable elements. . . . [Characterization is of subordinate interest.] The chief interest is centered in the groups, in the transitions, in the different phases which are above called worlds, as the Real World, the Fairy World, and their Representation. .. . Our object will be to unfold and connect these various parts and threads logically, and unite them into one central thought. For the work of the poet moves in images, in individual forms which are apparently independent; but thought must unify all these distinct elements, and

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thus must free itself from the pictures of the imagination by exhibiting the underlying ground of their order and connection. We shall, therefore, begin with the Real World, and carefully separate the various threads of which it is composed. The first of these threads is the part of Theseus and Hippolyta, whose love hovers over the whole drama, the beautiful arch which spans the entire action. In them there is no diremption,P] no collision; the unity is perfect from the start, and remains undisturbed to the end. They are thus the type of that harmony in which all the difficulties of the lovers must terminate, and in which all the complications of the play must be solved. PI But the essential function of Theseus is that he is the head of the State. He, therefore, represents the highest rational institutions of man — he is both judge and ruler — through him the Real World is seen to be controlled by an organized system of law and justice — such is the atmosphere which surrounds him everywhere. Hence he stands above the rest and commands them, but does not himself become involved in their collisions. At first he sides with Egeus and asserts absolute submission to parental authority, but in the end he alters his mind and commands the daughter to be united to her chosen lover. The grounds for this change of judgment are carefully elaborated by the poet, and indeed the movement from strife to harmony lies just between the two decisions of Theseus. . . . [The second thread is Egeus and the young lovers, which shows discord between child and parent, and in the thwarted loves. The flight of the lovers is seen as a necessary transition.] It must be borne in mind that the lovers do not run away from the world of organized wrong; on the contrary, it is the authority of the parent and of the law — certainly a valid authority — from which they are fleeing. Hence they abandon the world of institutions, in which alone man can enjoy a free and rational existence, and they go to the opposite, for it is just these institutions and the law which have become insupportable to them. They cannot enter another State, for it is the State as such with which they have fallen out, and hence the same collision must arise. Thus the nature of their place of refuge must be determined by what they reject. The next place we find them is in a new and strange world, called by the poet a 'wood near Athens.' . . . W [Snider draws a parallel with As You Like It, but notes that there the flight is from an unjust society.] On their entrance into the wood, the lovers must therefore leave behind them the realized world of Reason, the State, the Family, and the other institutions of society. . . . [Only in these institutions can man find true freedom and security.] For in the State all action is determined ultimately through Reason in the form of laws and institutions — in other words, is determined through man himself; thus it is his true abode, in which he sees everywhere the work of his own Intelligence, whose mediations are therefore perfectly clear to his mind, and not the work of some dark extraneous power. It is Theseus who represents such a world in the drama before usJ5l The lovers, therefore, enter a place where all these mediations of Intelligence no longer exist, but they are brought into direct contact with the mediations of Nature which determine them from without. Such a place is hence represented by the Poet

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as a wood dark and wild, a pure product of Nature, inhabited by a race of beings foreign to man and unknown in the world of Reason. . . . [Snider questions how the world of external determination can be represented by the poet, and answers that this is historically the function of mythology. A further question then arises of which mythology Shakespeare will choose for his purpose.] It is known as an historical fact that the belief in fairies was common, at the time of the writing of the play, throughout England. To this consciousness already existent the Poet appeals, and at the same time portrays it to itself. But there are two more characteristics which follow from this one fundamental principle. In the first place, the Fairy-world is not the product of Reason, which is here the State and has been left behind, but of the Imagination, which objectifies the processes of Nature and Spirit in the form of images and external activities. . . . Hence when it takes complete possession of the mind, all occurrences are transferred to the realm of the Supernatural. But the content of the Imagination is, nevertheless, the genuine expression of the consciousness of a nation, its statement and solution of the profoundest problems of existence. But, in the second place, this is also the world of poetry, since everything is transfused into images and external influences; the prose of real life, with its means and ends, its wants and utilities, is banished, man seems to live in a perpetual dream. . . . These are the essential qualities with which the Poet has endowed his 'wood near Athens.' It is a world of external determination; it has a Mythology which is the product of Imagination, and thus resembles dream-land, where all rushes in without cause; it is poetic as contradistinguished from the prosaic life in society. . . . The third thread is the learning and representation of the theatrical piece by the clowns. This is motived on the first page of the play, in an external manner, by Theseus calling upon his Master of Revels to stir up the Athenian youth to merriments, to produce something for the entertainment of the court. That is, a demand for Art has arisen. For man's highest want is, after all, to know himself; he desires to behold his own countenance as it were in a mirror which Art holds up before him. . . . The theme will therefore be that which gives a picture of the Court, of its chief thought and business at this time, which is love. The content of the drama of'Pyramus and Thisbe' is thus a love-collision. M [But the clowns lack the necessary skill of professional actors, and are ridiculed.] . . . The idea of the third thread now before us may therefore be given in the statement: Prose is trying to be Poetry. The result is a burlesque of the legitimate kind, for it is not Poetry or any other high and holy thing which is wantonly caricatured, but the prosaic conception of Poetry. . . . But we have also the True alongside of the Burlesque; genuine Poetry is to be found just here in the same piece; thus the Poet does not leave us with a negative result. . . . In this connection, another distinction must be noticed. . . . It is not the cultivated, refined, prosaic Understanding which is here represented; that will be shown hereafter, and has quite a different manifestation. But it is the dull, uneducated, prosaic consciousness of low life, of mechanical employments, with a feeling only for the most gross sensuous effects, without even cultivated taste, not to speak of

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artistic sense. The lowest form of prosaic life thus proposes to undertake to represent the very highest form of the highest Art, namely, Dramatic Poetry; hence the clowns, too, must go to the poetic Fairyland, the mystic wood of the Imagination. . . . [He claims that the world of Theseus is incompatible with the world of the fairies.] They work upon man, deceive him, lead him about by appearances, victimize his senses, in general manifest external determination. But it must not be forgotten that they only exhibit man himself; they are simply a portraiture of his own unfree stage of consciousness, his own delusions. Such must be their interpretations, they are symbols of some phase of Spirit. . . . [He next details the various types of fairy, and examines the effects and causes of the breach in Oberon and Titania's marriage. He places the blame on Titania, and states that Oberon is merely seeking to restore peace in his marriage and his realm. Her punishment is to fall in love with Bottom the ass (174-6).] It is the Poetic under the yoke of Prose, the natural result of her separation from her husband, since she has abandoned for the time the beautiful world of the fairies and its monarch. In this service she undergoes the deepest indignity — in vain she lavishes her choicest love — her ideal perfections are soiled and unappreciated by the gross clown. The cause of the quarrel being at last removed by the submission^] of the wife, Oberon takes pity on her like a dutiful husband, releases her from her thraldom, and restores her to his bosom. Thus the conflict which harassed Fairyland has been harmonized, and peace reigns. . . . Night flies away, the darkness of the Wood is driven off by the light of the day, the Fairy World disappears with its own reconciliation, the Real World dawns. But this is not all. Theseus the monarch is on hand, ready to judge - Egeus is here with his former collision — all transpires in the clear sunlight of consciousness — external mediation has ceased. . . . [Snider returns to the lovers in the wood, where their real life problems are reflected in the external mistakes imposed on them.] The internal state of the lovers is thus pictured in the world of the Imagination, which was before said to be this Fairyland, the poetic abode of such forms. . . . [Exhausted by the effects of the powers represented by the flowers and Puck's errors, the lovers sleep.] The solution of the collision is also external, and is brought about by command of Oberon, the central power, whose highest object has been all along the unity of the Family in his own case, and hence, to be true to his character, he must manifest the same trait to the lovers who have wandered into his realm. The separation cannot, therefore, continue, for . . . the highest point and goal of Nature is the unity of the two sexes in which the two are made into a mysterious one. . . . The lovers awake, and, their difficulty being harmonized, Fairyland disappears like a dream. Not that they have actually dreamed; on the contrary, the contrast is very distinctly drawn - they sleep, but do not dream, in this realm. In their waking state, they compare their night's experience to a dream on account of the external mediation. . . . The lovers now find themselves again in the world of institutions, before Theseus the ruler and Egeus the parent. But now the two pairs are in perfect harmony, their love is reciprocal; hence the rational basis of the union is present in both couples. Theseus, therefore, reverses his former sentence; he decides in

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favor of the Right of Choice on the part of the daughter against the will of the parent. . . . The third thread must now be resumed, the Clowns in Fairyland. Why are they, too, here? The question comes up, for this would seem to be a place most uncongenial to them. And so it is; the poetic world is certainly not their natural abode. But in the present instance they have left their prosaic occupation, they are transcending their own sphere, and are trying to represent a play, a work of Art, which lies far out of their comprehension. The attempt, however, brings them into the Fairyland of Poetry, which is soon found full of strange beings, and they are compelled by terror to leave it with precipitation. . . . [He discusses the ways in which the clowns reduce poetic form to prose, and their reduction of the real to the literal. He also considers the infatuation of Titania for Bottom in terms of the subjection of Poetry to Prose (178-80).] Her rapt poetic utterances are reduced to grovelling common-places, her ambrosial food seems to excite no desire, her sweet caresses are turned into grossness, she has at last to tie up his tongue. When she returns to her first love, how she hates the brute. The result, therefore, of the clowns' visit to Fairyland, the realm of Art, is that they have produced and also beheld a picture, but a picture of their own assininity, and that they have been rudely driven off from the mystic Wood by its inhabitants. Thus they also have returned to the Real World. . . . [He notes that at this point, with harmony restored, the comedy might end.] But in the play before us [Shakespeare] has chosen to make a higher synthesis; he wishes not only to portray an action to the spectators, but also to make the action portray itself. Hence we must now pass to the third division of the piece, . . . the Representation. . . . The two actions which have hitherto run alongside of each other are now to be brought up before Theseus and his company, who henceforth assume the part of audience and critics. The poem, therefore, after beholding and reflecting itself, is to criticise itself. . . . The main point dwelt upon by the Poet is the criticism of Theseus. How will he treat the Poetic as it was shown in the strange tale of Fairyland? His conception is purely prosaic; hence in him Prose again appears, but it is now altogether different from the grovelling sensuous form which was manifested in the 'rude mechanicals' [3.2.9]. Here we see education, refinement, abstract culture. Theseus, therefore, represents in this connection the Prose of the cultivated Understanding, whose skepticism assails all poetic conception and tears its forms to pieces. He derides the 'antic fables'; he scoffs at 'the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,' placing them in the same category; the Imagination itself is made the subject of his sneers — it is full of 'tricks,' and is placed in striking contrast with 'cool reason.' The poet's function is to 'give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name' [5.1.3 etc.]; that is, the poet's work is without any actual or rational content. Old Theseus was a downright Philister, as the Germans sayJ8] It is the prosaic Understanding attempting to criticise Poetry, whose essence is totally outside of its horizon. Theseus will not acknowledge that under this fabulous form may be found the profoundest meaning; it is not his form, and hence worthless. The reader will perhaps be surprised at this interpretation of the famous speech of Theseus, since the passages above mentioned . . . have been quoted by critics of the

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highest authority as the most adequate definitions of Poetry and of the Imagination that have ever been given. The fact is, however, that Theseus intends to ridicule both, and his language, on a careful examination, will be found to be that of skeptical derision. Look, too, at the answer of his wife and see how she understands him. This wife, Hippolyta, is of quite a different character; she, with all the appreciation inherent in the female nature, is inclined to gently dissent from the negative judgments of her husband. She mildly suggests that there may be some content in these wild poetic forms of Fairyland; that the story of the night More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. [5.1.25ff.] With this quiet remark she ceases; she does not pursue the subject further, for she is a woman, and possesses perhaps the immediate feeling and appreciation of Poetry rather than the ability to give the grounds of her judgment. . . . [He describes the presentation of the clowns, and its reception.] It will be observed that the clowns have fared hard in their artistic efforts. After a very uncomplimentary picture of Bottom, and, in fact, of themselves, they are frightened out of Fairyland, and thus excluded from the world of Poetry; and now their work is torn piece-meal by the critical Understanding. Neither Gods nor Men, Poetry nor Prose, can endure mediocrity in ArtJ9! much less stupidity. It will also not escape the attention of the reader that the Poet has portrayed in the drama before us the two essential phases of the prosaic Understanding in its attempt to attain the beautiful realm of Poetry. Theseus and the clowns have thus a common element. The three pairs of lovers retire to rest in perfect happiness and peace, and the Poet again allows the Fairy World to flit for a moment across the stage, as if to give one more hint of its meaning. This world is now, too, in harmony; Oberon and Titania, the ideal couple, beside the three real ones, enter with their train and sing an epithalamium whose content is the prosperity and concord of the Family. Thus Fairyland has done its last duty: it has reflected the peaceful solution of the struggle, whereas previously it had imaged the strife. At this point the drama must end; its three divisions with their various threads have been wrought out to their natural conclusion. My reader will probably consider some of the above explanations to be far-fetched, and it must be confessed that the faintest hint of the Poet has often been expanded in full. Such, however, is the duty of criticism; it gives what Poetry cannot, and Poetry gives what it cannot. Besides, in the present drama I feel satisfied that Shakespeare did not always adequately realize his conception; he wrestles with his idea, and sometimes does not succeed in embodying it with clearness and completeness. Especially the third part, the Representation, caused him great difficulty, and is the least perfect of the three parts. The thought of making the play reflect itself in the course of its own action never lost hold of him during the whole period of his dramatic career. The poem has other inequalities of execution, and bears numerous traces of the youthfulness of the author. But the conception is one of his grandest, though not always clear and definite in his own

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mind, and hence the work is marred with some imperfections. It has been attempted in the foregoing essay to develope the complete idea of the Poet, not in his own beautiful poetic form, but in the abstract form of Thought. (165-184)

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48 George Wilkes, Shakespeare differentiated from Bacon 1875

From Shakespeare, from an American Point of View; Including an Inquiry as to His Religious Faith, and His Knowledge of Law: with the Baconian Theory Considered (London, 1877; New York, 1877). George Wilkes (1817-85), journalist and publisher, co-founded the National Police Gazette, a popular men's weekly which sometimes sensationally attacked corruption in New York city, and published it from 1845 to 1866. Among other journalistic works he wrote a History of Oregon, a travel book called Europe in a Hurry, and an account of a civil war battle. His final work, on Shakespeare, was written primarily to confute the Baconians: he argues that Shakespeare knew legal language because he had worked as a boy in a lawyer's office; that, unlike Bacon, he favoured Roman Catholicism; that he had contempt for the working man which stemmed from the 'servility he always shows to rank or birth', whereas Lord Verulam was not servile; and that Shakespeare had an intimate knowledge of the stage which showed him to be a professional playwright. A secondary theme was that because of his anti-democratism and his Catholicism Wilkes felt he was a danger to American society. The work first appeared in 1875, from February to September, in Wilkes's own weekly journal entitled The Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Field Sports, Agriculture, and the Stage. It was carefully revised, published as a book in 1877, and reprinted in 1882.

[From Chapter XII: '"The Comedy of Errors": "A Midsummer Night's Dream."'] The first thing which appears in this play touching the points of our inquiry, is a legal expression that falls from the father of Hermia in the first scene of the first act, when he appeals to the duke to require his daughter to obey his wishes by marrying with Demetrius, or else to grant against her, for the sin of disobedience, — 'Her death, according to our law, / Immediately provided in that case' [1.1.44-5]. Both Steevens and Lord Campbell^] receive this expression as a proof that Shakespeare had served in an attorney's office; and the latter remarks that 'there is certainly no nearer approach in heroic measure to the technical language of an indictment.'

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This legal incident is then immediately followed by the following reverent allusion to the Roman Catholic religion, though the scene of the play is laid in early Greece. The duke, Theseus, thus impresses upon Hermia the necessity of conforming to her father's will: - [Quotes 1.1.65-81: 'Either to die the death. . . .']. One cannot help remarking here that a threatened imprisonment of Hermia for life in a state prison would have been fully adequate to all the necessities of the scene, instead of bringing in a nunnery. So also would a prison have equally served the purposes of the last act of the Comedy of Errors, in place of the abbey; but Shakespeare evidently wanted to patronize the Catholic religion. The next evidence we have bearing on our points are the lines at the conclusion of the same act, which show Shakespeare's intimate knowledge of stage business; first, in Snug's inquiry if the lion's part has been written out (i.e. copied) for him; and next, in the arrangements made by Bottom and his mates in the distribution of the written (copied) parts for the actors; likewise in the provision of a 'bill of properties' [1.2.105] needed for their play before the duke. All of this throws Bacon out of our consideration, so far as this composition is concerned, and at the same time disposes of the fiction of Shakespeare's 'fair round hand,'PI which the players reported of his manuscript, and which, according to many of his critics, showed that his mind flowed with such a smooth felicity 'that he never blotted out a line.'!3] This idea serves the purposes of the Baconians by making it appear that Shakespeare merely copied out the manuscript of Bacon. The course of our scrutiny now brings us to the first distinct illustrations of Shakespeare's low estimation of the mechanical and labouring classes — the classes •which, in the United States, are justly esteemed to be not the least honest, virtuous, and patriotic of the community. This tendency of our poet appears in the underplot of Bottom and the Athenian mechanics who have been selected to perform before the newly-married pair on the classical subject of Pyramus and Thisbe, upon the calculation that their ignorance would certainly burlesque it. We have already had an introduction to these simple-hearted fellows in the second scene of the first act, on the occasion of the distribution of their several dramatic parts; and we now find them, at the opening of the third act, ready for rehearsal, in the wood, near where the fairies are lying around asleep. While the working men are thus engaged, Puck, the fairy messenger and factotum, enters from behind, and in a tone of contempt which must have been graciously appreciated by Essex and the rest of the Elizabethan company, Master Puck thus characterizes the hard-handed men who are doing their best to please their lordly patrons: — PUCK. What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here, So near the cradle of the fairy queen? [3.1.77ff.] Puck, in the next scene, reports to Oberon the laughable metamorphosis he had made of Bottom, and his still more ludicrous exploit of having caused Titania to fall in love with him:—

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PUCK. My mistress with a monster is in love. Near to her close and consecrated bower, While she was in her dull and sleeping hour, A crew of patches, rude mechanicals, That work for bread upon Athenian stalls, Were met together to rehearse a play, Intended for great Theseus' nuptial day. The shallow'st thick-skin of that barren sort, Who Pyramus presented, in their sport Forsook his scene, and enter'd in a brake: When I did him at this advantage take, An ass's nowl I fixed on his head. [3.2.6-17] Puck continues his report, as to the way he had carried out Oberon's other orders concerning Demetrius and Helena; but he changes his contemptuous tone at once to one of severe respect when he refers to the la dies and gentlemen of the story. This treatment of the case by Shakespeare is explainable either through the spontaneous servility he always shows to rank and birth, or, perhaps, to the more excusable object of having to cater to audiences of a people who are born worshippers of wealth and station, and the masses of whom to this day seem to like nothing so much as to look upon a lord. (110-13)

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49 Edward Dowden, Theseus as the central figure 1875

From Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875).

Edward Dowden (1843-1913), critic and scholar, was educated at Queen's College, Cork, and Trinity College, Dublin. Four years after his graduation, in 1867, he was appointed to the newly founded chair of English literature at Trinity, and held this post till his death. His first book, Shakespeare, His Mind and Art (1875), has been called his most influential, and his next book, the Shakespeare Primer (1877), his most popular, though it is perhaps best known today because its first sentence is mockingly paraphrased by Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses (Penguin, p. 204). He was one of the most widely quoted and respected Shakespearean scholars of his time. He contributed individual introductions to Shakespeare's plays in the Complete Works edited by W.J. Craig (9 volumes, Oxford, 1910-11). Among his many other literary studies are biographies of Southey, Browning, and Montaigne, and his most ambitious project, the two volume Life of Shelley (1886).

[From Chapter II: 'The Growth of Shakespeare's Mind and Art'] [After a brief look at the tide, date, and occasion of the play, Dowden considers Theseus.] . . . The central figure of the play is that of Theseus. There is no figure in the early drama of Shakespeare so magnificent. His are the large hands that have helped to shape the world. His utterance is the rich-toned speech of one who is master of events — who has never known a shrill or eager feeling. His nuptial day is at hand; and while the other lovers are agitated, bewildered, incensed, Theseus, who does not think of himself as a lover but rather as a beneficent conqueror, remains in calm possession of his joy. Theseus, a grand ideal figure, is to be studied as Shakespeare's conception of the heroic man of action in his hour of enjoyment and of leisure. With a splendid capacity for enjoyment, gracious to all, ennobled by the glory, implied rather than explicit, of great foregone achievement, he stands as centre of the poem, giving their true proportions to the fairy tribe upon the one hand, and upon the other to the 'human mortals' [2.1.101]. The heroic men of action, Theseus, Henry V, Hector, — are supremely admired by Shakespeare. Yet it is observable that as the total Shakespeare is superior to Romeo, the man given over to passion, and to

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Hamlet, the man given over to thought, so the Hamlet and the Romeo within him give Shakespeare an infinite advantage over even the most heroic men of action. He admires these men of action supremely, but he admires them from an outside point of view. 'These fellows of infinite tongue,' says Henry, wooing the French princess, 'that can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do always reason themselves out again. What! a speaker is but a prater, a rhyme is but a ballad' [Henry V, 5.2.155fT.]. It is into Theseus's mouth that Shakespeare puts the words which class together 'the lunatic, the lover, and the poet' [5.1.7] as of imagination all compact. That is the touch, which shows how Shakespeare stood off from Theseus, did not identify himself with this grand ideal (which he admired so truly), and admitted to himself a secret superiority of his own soul over that of this noble master of the world. Comments by Shakespeare upon his own art are not so numerous that we can afford to overlook them. It must here be noted that Shakespeare makes the 'palpable gross' [5.1.367] interlude of the Athenian mechanicals serve as an indirect apology for his own necessarily imperfect attempt to represent fairy land, and the majestic world of heroic life. Maginn writes, 'When Hippolyta speaks scornfully of the tragedy in which Bottom holds so conspicuous a part, Theseus answers that the best of this kind (scenic performances) are but shadows, and the worst no worse, if imagination amend them. She answers' (for Hippolyta has none of Theseus's indulgence towards inefficiency, but rather a woman's intolerance of the absurd), 'that it must be your imagination then, not theirs. He retorts with a joke on the vanity of actors, and the conversation is immediately changed. The meaning of the Duke is that, however we may laugh at the silliness of Bottom and his companions in their ridiculous play, the author labours under no more than the common calamity of dramatists. They are all but dealers in shadowy representations of life, and if the worst among them can set the mind of the spectator at work, he is equal to the best' [No. 16 above]. Maginn has missed the more important significance of the passage. Its dramatic appropriateness is the essential point to observe. To Theseus, the great man of action, the worst and the best of these shadowy representations are all one. He graciously lends himself to be amused, and will not give unmannerly rebuff to the painstaking craftsmen who have so laboriously done their best to please him. But Shakespeare's mind by no means goes along with the utterance of Theseus in this instance any more than when he places in a single group the lover, the lunatic, and the poet. With one principle enounced by the duke, however, Shakespeare evidently does agree, namely, that it is the business of the dramatist to set the spectator's imagination to work, that the dramatist must rather appeal to the mind's eye than to the eye of sense, and that the co-operation of the spectator with the poet is necessary. For the method of Bottom and his company is precisely the reverse, as Gervinus [No. 37 above] has observed, of Shakespeare's own method. They are determined to leave nothing to be supplied by the imagination. Wall must be plaistered; Moonshine must carry lanthorn and bush. And when Hippolyta, again becoming impatient of absurdity, exclaims, 'I am aweary of this moon! would he would change!' [5.1.25Iff.] Shakespeare further insists on his piece of dramatic criticism by urging, through the duke's mouth, the absolute necessity of the man in the moon being within his lanthorn. Shakespeare as much as says, 'If you do not approve my dramatic method of presenting fairy land and

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the heroic world, here is a specimen of the rival method. You think my fairy-world might be amended. Well, amend it with your own imagination. I can do no more unless I adopt the artistic ideas of these Athenian handicraftsmen.'1 It is a delightful example of Shakespeare's impartiality that he can represent Theseus with so much genuine enthusiasm. Mr. Matthew Arnold has named our aristocrats with their hardy, efficient manners, their addiction to field sports, and their hatred of ideas, 'the Barbarians.'PI Theseus is a splendid and gracious aristocrat, perhaps not without a touch of the Barbarian in him. He would have found Hamlet a wholly unintelligible person, who, in possession of his own thoughts, could be contented in a nutshell. When Shakespeare wrote The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which, with little dramatic propriety, the Duke of Milan celebrates 'the force of heaven-bred poesy' [3.2.71], we may reasonably suppose that the poet might not have been quite just to one who was indifferent to art. But now his self-mastery has increased, and therefore with unfeigned satisfaction he presents Theseus, the master of the world, who, having beauty and heroic strength in actual possession does not need to summon them to occupy his imagination - the great chieftain to whom art is a very small concern of life, fit for a leisure hour between battle and battle. Theseus, who has nothing antique or Grecian about him, is an idealized study from the life. Perhaps he is idealized Essex, perhaps idealized Southampton. Perhaps some night a dramatic company was ordered to perform in presence of a great Elizabethan noble - we know not whom - who needed to entertain his guests, and there, in a moment of fine imaginative vision, the poet discovered Theseus. A Midsummer Night's Dream is, as its name implies, a phantasmagory; a mask of shadows full of marvel, surprises, splendour, and grotesqueness. (68-71)

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50 Adolphus William Ward, a comedy of incident 1875

From A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (2 vols, London, 1875). Sir Adolphus William Ward (1837-1924), historian, critic, teacher and administrator, received his early education in Leipzig, where his father was consulgeneral; he retained a warm interest in Germany and admiration for German scholarship. After graduating from Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was elected a fellow in 1861, but in 1866 moved to Owens College, Manchester, as professor of history and English language and literature. For his services to the college, especially in promoting its institution as an independent university, he received the freedom of the city upon his retirement in 1897. In London he continued to publish works on English and German history, until in 1900 he was appointed master of Peterhouse. In Cambridge he embarked on the editorship of the vast projects of the Cambridge Modern History and Cambridge History of English Literature. He remained a productive scholar well into his eighties. His History of English Dramatic Literature was his first major scholarly work, and, particularly in the revised version (3 vols, London, 1899), remains valuable. The selection below is not substantially altered in the 1899 edition.

[From Volume I., Chapter IV.: 'Shakespeare'] Shakespeare's comedies . . . are mainly, though far from wholly, comedies of incident; i.e. their main interest lies not in the characters which their action developes, or in the manners which it furnishes opportunity for depicting, but in the story of the action itself. But the incident of Shakespearean comedy is of a peculiar kind; and it is here that we arrive at a distinctive characteristic of our poet, the origin of which is due to the creative power of his genius. His comedies are romantic in the widest sense of the term; i.e. they treat of subjects far away from the ordinary course of human experience, they range into domains which the power of the dramatist alone can bring into living relation with the mind of the spectator, in which he alone can make the reader at home, as the poet is at home there himself. The conditions of the action are thus removed beyond the control of moral or even social laws of cause and consequence, though the art of the poet conciliates our sympathy for its agents.1 This difference between the dramatist's intention in his tragedies and comedies

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respectively — and on consideration a play so mixed in species as The Merchant of Venice will be found as an exception to prove the rule - is very clearly indicated by the titles which he gave to them. Nothing can be more futile than to endeavour to seek a deep meaning in the tides lighdy bestowed, it cannot be doubted, upon these romantic comedies. Again and again Shakespeare takes a story which he has found in some Italian novel or in its French or English version; combines it most usually with one or more other stories from similar sources; as he with marvellous though not infallible dramaturgic skill developes the action of his play, its characters frequently, though not always, become lifelike realities in his hands; the wondrous combination of reading, fancy, humour, and wit is rapidly accomplished; and then it is christened by a pleasant name - All's Well that Ends Well, As You Like It, What You Will, The Winter's Tale. He invented no sonorous phrases as names for his tragedies, after the fashion of some of his brother-dramatists, Thomas Heywood e.g.; he did not, like Ben Jonson, seek to distil the essence of his comedies into their titles; yet what more appropriate than his simplicity in the one case, and his felicitous audacity in the other? A single example must suffice to illustrate the meaning of the above remarks. Is there any one of Shakespeare's comedies in which he has more thoroughly compassed the end of all art, by which he has given greater and more constant delight in the closet or on the stage, than the Midsummer Night's Dream"? Of its beauties of diction — in the dialogue as well as in the lyrical passages — I am not at present speaking; but what is the source of its dramatic effectiveness? Is this to be sought in its characters, or rather is it to be sought mainly in them? First we have Theseus and Hippolyta, whose marriage is the occasion so to speak of the action of the piece (to which some commentators have accordingly ascribed a festive design). In them there is nothing but the pleasant dignity of Duke and Duchess. Egeus again, the afflicted father of Hermia, is very slightly drawn; and between the two pairs of lovers, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, there are indeed distinctions and differences, - but these are only very lightly indicated; it is clear that the poet's intention was not to mark the effect of the lovers' adventures upon their characters, but merely to present suitable figures for carrying on the strange story. Next, we have the delectable group of tradesmen who furnish forth the anti-mask, in their study and performance of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. Surely it is only jesting criticism to find in these fancifully-sketched figures the embodiment of a deep design. The strange situation in which Bottom is placed gives him a superior importance, but together with the situation the humorous play of character, the opportunity for which Shakespeare was certain not to neglect, is at an end; and in the height of the fun characterisation has become quite out of the question. There is enough realism about these oddities to produce the designed effective contrast with the fairy world; but to suppose that Shakespeare in these humorous creations intended to create types of character, is to credit him with a design which if communicated to him would have caused him to stay his fantastic pen in wonderment as it poured forth the Carneval nonsense of this inimitable company of dilettanti.2 Lastly, take the fairy world itself, as it appears before us in Oberon and Titania, with Puck and the rest of the frolicsome company. An eminent critic3 speaks of

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them as 'beings without the finer feelings and without morality. The effects of the confusion which they produce cause no mental impression in themselves. They are without a higher intellectuality: they never reflect: there is no trace in them either of contemplation, or of the expression of a sentiment. They are without the higher intellectual capacities of human nature. Their joy is to couch in flowers, while the wings of butterflies fan them to rest. Their thoughts are merely directed towards the physical. Their sympathies are with butterflies and nightingales; it is upon hedghogs, toads, and bats that they make war; their chief delights are dance, music, and song. It is only the sense of the Beautiful which elevates them above mere animal life.' If we accept this analysis, if we acknowledge that the few incidents which occur among the fairy crew neither produce, nor are intended to produce, any moral effect whatever, - what then is the result? The whole dramatis personae of this play, the merely conventional figures of the Duke and Duchess and the pairs of lovers, the realistic oddities in the company of tradesmen, and the fanciful impossibilities of the fairy court, are merely a felicitous machinery for carrying on the action. The whole play is essentially a romantic comedy of incident; and it is the fancy which is mainly active in the enjoyment of it. (I, 495-9)

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51 Algernon Charles Swinburne, consummation of Shakespeare's lyrical genius 1876

From 'The Three Stages of Shakespeare', The Fortnightly Review, [Part Two] 19, NS, No. 109 (January, 1876), 24-45. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), equally impassioned as poet and critic, received his early education privately, at the topographically contrasted homes of his father, Admiral Charles Swinburne, in the Isle of Wight, and of his grandfather, Sir John Edward Swinburne, in Northumberland. He attended Eton and Balliol, but left Oxford without completing his degree, and settled in London at the height of the pre-Raphaelite movement, engaging himself folly and emotionally in writing plays, poetry and criticism. The publication of the first part of'The Three Stages of Shakespeare' in May, 1875, initiated a war of words with Shakespearean critics, and especially F. J. Furnivall, one product of which was 'Report of the Proceedings on the First Anniversary Session of the Newest Shakespeare Society' (The Examiner [April 1, 1876], 381-3), a spoofing argument that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written by George Chapman. Both this and the two parts of 'The Three Stages of Shakespeare' were reprinted in A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1880): Swinburne's true opinion of the play was reaffirmed in his references in 1880 to its 'moon-charmed circle', and to the lines of'sweet and radiant simplicity' in 'that all-heavenly poem' (124); and by his tribute to it in Shakespeare (London, 1909) [No. 80 below].

[Swinburne discusses The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, particularly in terms of their verse, and lyrical style.] . . . But in the final poem which concludes and crowns the first epoch of Shakespeare's work, the special graces and peculiar glories of each that went before are gathered together as in one garland 'of every hue and of every scent.' The young genius of the master of all poets finds its consummation in the Midsummer Night's Dream. The blank verse is as full, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron's or Romeo's; the rhymed verse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest and truest melody of Venus and Adonis or the Comedy of Errors. But here each kind of excellence is equal throughout; there are here no purple patches on a gown of serge, but one seamless

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and imperial robe of a single dye. Of the lyric and the prosaic part, the counterchange of loves and laughters, of fancy fine as air and imagination high as heaven, what need can there be for anyone to shame himself by the helpless attempt to say some word not utterly unworthy? Let it suffice to accept this poem as the landmark of our first stage, and pause to look back from it on what lies behind us of partial or of perfect work. The highest point attained in this first period lies in the domain of comedy or romance, and belongs as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry; its sovereign quality is that of sweetness and springtide of fairy fancy crossed with light laughter and light trouble that end in perfect music. (25)

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52 John Weiss, Bottom, a self-made man 1876

From Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare. Twelve Essays (Boston, 1876).

John Weiss (1818-79) graduated from Harvard and became a Unitarian clergyman who soon made a reputation as a fiery orator, a wit, a practical joker, and a translator of Schiller and Goethe. He wrote a great deal on religious matters, enjoyed literature and was a member of Bronson Alcott's literary club. His major work appeared in 1864, a two-volume Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, the eminent Unitarian clergyman (1810-1860). His book on Shakespeare had several editions, the latest in 1974.

[From Essay III: 'Dogberry, Malvolio, Troilus and Cressida (Ajax), Bottom, Touchstone'!

BOTTOM. When Malvolio is trying to break up the midnight revel, the mischievous Maria fleers at him with, 'Go shake your ears' [Twelfth Night, 2.3.125]. That is a performance for which Malvolio is still too distant from his congener. But self-sufficiency succeeds in preserving that structure in Bottom, who is so deep and rich with harmless vanity that he sprouts into the auricular appendages, and he shakes them in the most amiable, frisky way through the Dream of a Midsummer Night. But there is nothing sour about Bottom. . . . He is hail-fellow with all his mates who appreciate the small gifts which belong to him, and which he good-naturedly strives to render serviceable. Though he is a better fellow than Malvolio, he has all that precisian's ambition; for as the steward could be Olivia's husband as well as any other man, - forsooth, why not? - so Bottom thinks he can play all the parts, rises to their glittering bait, and would appropriate the whole interlude. He is one of those self-made men who occasionally discredit their own bringing up and help us to recover our respect for a liberal education. Like the man of whom Sydney Smith said that he was ready at any moment to undertake the command of the Channel Fleet or run a factory,!1! they have elbowed their way into a conviction that they can fill all the offices from constable to President in a style to astonish men of disciplined intelligence. And they frequently succeed in doing that. Men who unfortunately enjoyed early advantages, and whose lives have perhaps been a protracted training in the virtue as well as wit

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which lifts state-craft above gambling, have the proper kind of admiration for these chevaliers of industry. But a highly successful deficiency of education does not make Bottom arrogant. As Athenian dicast,PJ foreman of an English jury, republican officer under investigation, his suavity would be unimpeachable. He is good-tempered, and the first tap of flattery cracks his whole pretension; so that the crafty Quince manages to cast him for Pyramus, who was just such another sweet-faced and destructive lady's man. Dogberry's malapropisms are inflations made by his vanity to float him into an appearance of sagacity, donkeys' hides blown up to take him across the stream of intercourse. But Bottom miscalls his words from sheer rusticity, and not from any effort to borrow the language of his superiors. The word 'alleviate' which he has sometimes heard has been dribbling from brain-cell to cell, and so struggles unconsciously into 'aggravate' [1.2.81] at last. He uses genteel words which have stayed out of town so long as to be countrified; he has not picked them up, but they have blown into his mind and lodged there, like mallow-seeds. So we see that he is in most senses a born natural, proprietor by birth of the crest which at last he wears. But he is not all fool, for when he wakes out of his exposition of sleep and says he has had a dream, we notice that he is reluctant to expound it. He begins, 'Methought I was' [4.1.207], - but a feeling of self-respect interrupts him; he tries it again, to say if he can that he had been wearing asses' ears, but his lips refuse that indignity and he gives it up, much to Shakespeare's credit. A student of Shakespeare often finds himself wandering waterless and foodless in the sage-brush of aesthetic criticism. Heraud, in his book entitled Shakespeare: His Inner Life [No. 40 above], suggests that when Bottom 'transmogrified'PI the text, 'The eye of man hath not seen,'W &c., so that the new gospel according to Bottom ran thus, 'The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste' [4.1.211fF.] &c., Shakespeare intended to imply that the changing and translating of Bottom shadowed forth the manner in which we shall be transformed in the future life; 'but to have done this directly would have been undramatic and otherwise objectionable.' This affronts and takes advantage of Bottom's want of intelligence, who might well caution the critic: [Quotes 4.1.10-16: 'Monsieur Cobweb! good Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee. . . .']. But this surfeiting freshet of the modern revival spreads all over Shakespeare's meadows of daisies and forget-me-nots. Heraud's notion spoils the humor of Bottom's snarl of words which represents perplexity so profound that it must recur to Scripture for relief in expression. . . . [Weiss digresses here to criticize Heraud's view of a passage of Cymbeline.] All the scenes of the Midsummer Night's Dream, which depend upon the desire of the Athenian mechanicals to amuse their prince, are merely comical when taken alone. The characters thus constructed, by passing into the serious portions of the play, infect it with the element of humor; for the simple earnestness of all their clownishness fraternizes in no offensive way with the more poetical moods of high society, and we feel the charm that equalizes all mankind. The pomp of a court is concentrated at a fustian play that is poorly propertied with bush, lantern, and a fellow daubed with lime. Simpleness and duty tender this contrast, and it comes not amiss.

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Their crude parody of the fate of Pyramus and Thisbe, done in perfect good faith, is a claim that humble love may have its fortunes too, as well as that of the proud and over-conscious dames who have been roaming through the woods, sick with fancies. What a delightful raillery it is! Yes, we take the point: 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them' [5.1.211-12]. It is also a suggestion of the subtlest humor when Titania summons her fairies to wait upon Bottom; for the fact is that the soul's airy and nimble fancies are constantly detailed to serve the donkeyism of this world. 'Be kind and courteous to this gentleman' [3.1.164]. Divine gifts stick musk-roses in his sleek, smooth head. The world is a peg that keeps all spiritual being tethered. . . . Bottom's want of insight is circled round by fulness of insight, his clumsiness by dexterity. In matter of eating, he really prefers provender: 'good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow' [4.1.33fF.]. But how shrewdly Bottom manages this holding of genius to his service! He knows how to send it to be oriented with the blossoms and the sweets, giving it the characteristic counsel not to fret itself too much in the action. You see there is nothing sour and cynical about Bottom. His daily peck of oats, with plenty of munching-time, travels to the black cell where the drop of gall gets secreted into the ink of starving thinkers, and sings content to it on oaten straw. Bottom, full-ballasted, haltered to a brown-stone-fronted cribj5! with digestion always waiting upon appetite, tosses a tester to Shakespeare, who might, if the tradition be true, have held his horse^ in the purlieus of the Curtain or Rose Theatre: perhaps he sublet the holding while he slipped in to show Bottom how he is a deadly earnest fool; and the boxes crow and clap their unconsciousness of being put into the poet's celestial stocks. All this time Shakespeare is divinely restrained from bitterness by the serenity which overlooks a scene. If, like the ostrich, he had been only the largest of the birds which do not fly, he might have wrangled for his rations of ten-penny nailsf7] and leather, established perennial indigestion in literature, and furnished plumes to jackdaws. But he flew closest to the sun, and competed with the dawn for a first taste of its sweet and fresh impartiality. The humor in this play meddles even with love; for that, too, must be the sport of circumstance and superior power, yet always continue to be the deepest motive of mankind. The juice of love's flower dropped on the eyelids of these distempered lovers makes the caprices of passion show and shift; love in idleness becomes love in earnest, as Puck distils the drops of marriage or of mischief. Titania herself is possessed with that common illusion which marries gracious qualities to absurd companionship. Says Puck, - 'Those things do best please me / That befall preposterously' [3.2.120ff.]. But this is fleeting. Shakespeare soon breaks the spell in which some of his most delicate and sprightly verses have revelled. The whole play expresses humor on a revel, and brings into one human feeling the supernature, the caprice and gross mischance, the serious drift of life. (104-11)

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53 Frederick James Furnivall, the full glow of fancy and fun 1877

From The Leopold Shakespeare. The Poet's Works, in Chronological Order, from the Text of Professor Delius, with 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' and 'Edward III,' and an Introduction by F.J. Furnivall. Illustrated (London, 1877). Frederick James Furnivall (1825-1910) attended the Universities of London and Cambridge, then studied law, but never practised it. As a young man he joined the Christian Socialists, helped found the Working Men's College in London, and was active in it all his life. He joined the Philological Society in 1847, and later began work on a new dictionary which eventuated in the present Oxford English Dictionary. To foster the study of literature he founded several societies, among which were: the Early English Text Society (1868) which published 247 volumes under his aegis; the Ballad Society (1868); the New Shakespeare Society (1873); the Browning Society (1881); and the Shelley Society (1886). His six volume edition of Chaucer in 1868 was a monument of scholarship. The Leopold Shakespeare (1877), with a very full introduction by Furnivall, was often reprinted and sold over 100,000 copies.

[From the 'Introduction'] A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. - Here at length is Shakespeare's genius in the full glow of fancy and delightful fun. The play is an enormous advance on what has gone before. But it is a poem, a dream, rather than a play; its freakish fancy of fairy-land fitting it for the choicest chamber of the student's brain, while its second part, the broadest farce, is just the thing for the public stage. E. A. Poe writes, 'When I am asked for a definition of poetry, I think of Titania and Oberon of the Midsummer Night's Dream.'W And certainly anything must be possible to the man who could in one work range from the height of Titania to the depth of Bottom. The links with the Errors are, that all the wood scenes are a comedy of errors, with three sets of people, as in the Errors (and four in Love's Labour's Lost). Then we have the vixen Hermia to match the shrewish Adriana, the quarrel with husband and wife, and Titania's 'these are the forgeries of jealousy' [2.1.81] to compare with Adriana's jealousy in the Errors. Adriana offers herself to Antipholus of Syracuse, but he refuses her for her sister Luciana, as Helena offers herself to Demetrius and he refuses her for

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her friend Hermia. Hermia bids Demetrius love Helena, as Luciana bids Antipholus of Syracuse love his supposed wife Adriana. In the background of the Errors we have the father ^geon with the sentence of death or fine pronounced by Duke Solinus. In the Dream we have in the background the father Egeus with the sentence of death or celibacy on Hermia pronounced by Duke Theseus. In both plays the scene is Eastern: in the Errors, Ephesus; and in the Dream, Athens. We have an interesting connection with Chaucer, in that the Theseus and Hippolyta are taken from his Knight's Tale, and used again in The Two Noble Kinsmen; also the May-day and Saint Valentine, and the wood birds here, may be from Chaucer's Parlament ofFoules. The fairies too are in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale.2 As links with Love's Labour's Lost we notice the comedy of errors in the earlier play, the forest scene, and the rough country sub-play, while as opposed to the Love's Labour's Last's 'Jack hath not Gill' [5.2.875], the fairies tell us here 'Jack shall have Gill' [3.2.461]. The fairies are the centre of the drama; the human characters are just the sport of their whims and fancies, a fact which is much altered when we come to Shakespeare's use of fairy-land again in his Tempest, where the aerial beings are but ministers of the wise man's rule for the highest purposes. The finest character here is undoubtedly Theseus. In his noble words about the countrymen's play, the true gentleman is shown. His wife's character is but poor beside his. Though the story is Greek, yet the play is full of English life. It is Stratford which has given Shakespeare the picture of the sweet country school-girls working at one flower, warbling one song, growing together like a double cherry, seeming parted, but yet a union in partition. It is Stratford that has given him the picture of the hounds with [Quotes 4.1.121-5: 'ears that sweep away the morning dew. . . .']. It is Stratford that has given him his out-door woodland life, his clowns' play, and the clowns themselves, Bottom with his inimitable conceit, and his fellows, Snug and Quince, &c. It is Stratford that has given him all Puck's fairy lore, the cowslips tall,3 the red-hipt humble-bee, Oberon's bank, the pansy love-in-idleness, and all the lovely imagery of the play. But wonderful as the mixture of delicate and aerial fancy with the coarsest and broadest comedy is, clearly as it evidences the coming of a new being on this earth to whom anything is possible, it is yet clear that the play is quite young. The undignified quarrelling of the ladies, Hermia with her 'painted may-pole' [3.2.296], her threat to scratch Helena's eyes, - Helena with her retort She was a vixen when she went to school, And though she is but little she is fierce; [3.2.324ff.] and

Your hands than mine are quicker for a fray, My legs are longer though to run away, [3.2.342ff.] the comical comparison of the moon tumbling through the earth incongruously put into an accusation of murder, [Quotes 3.2.52-5: 'I'll believe as soon / That the whole earth may be bored. . . .'], the descent to bathos in Shakespeare's passage about his own art, from 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' to 'how easy is a bush supposed a bear' [5.1.12, 22], would have been impossible to Shakespeare in his later development. Those who contend for the later date of the play, from the beauty of

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most of the fancy, and the allusion to the effects of the rains and the floods, which they make those of 15944 (see Stowe, and Dr. King's Sermons on JonaW5]), must allow, I think, that the framework of the play is considerably before the date of King John and The Merchant of Venice. Possibly two dates may be allowed for the play, tho' I don't think them needful. Note in this Dream the first of those inconsistencies as to the time of the action of the play that became so markt a feature in later plays, like The Merchant of Venice, where three months and more are crowded into 39 hours.6 Here Theseus and Hippolyta say that 'four happy days' and 'four nights' are to pass before 'the night of our solemnities' (1.1.2, 8, 11]; but, in the hurry of the action of the play, Shakespeare forgets this, and makes only two nights so pass. Theseus speaks to Hippolyta, and gives judgment on Hermia's case, on April 29. 'To-morrow night' [1.1.164], April 30, the lovers meet, and sleep in the forest, and are found there on May-day morning by Theseus. They and he all go into Athens and get married that day, and go to bed at midnight, the fairies stopping with them till the break of the fourth day, May 2. It is likely that the Dream was written for a performance in honour of some May-day marriage. This is, too, the first play with an Epilogue. . . . [In a paragraph he lists possible sources in Plutarch and Golding's Ovid, and mentions the three earliest editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream.] With the Dream I propose to close the first Group of Shakespeare's Comedies, those in which the Errors arising from mistaken identity make so much of the fun. And the name for the Group may well be 'the Comedy of Errors or Mistaken-Identity Group.' No doubt this mistaken-identity or personation of somebody else, is in The Two Gentlemen, as it is in all Shakespeare's other comedies, but Julia's pageship is not a leading feature of The Two Gentlemen, and that play is rather a preparation for Romeo and Juliet than one of the Errors Group, tho' to the latter it is strongly linkt. I therefore keep The Two Gentlemen by itself, treating it as the link-play between the Errors and Passion Groups.t?]

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54 Charles Ebenezer Moyse, the wood is the world 1879

From The Dramatic Art of Shakespeare, with Especial Reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream: Being an Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the McGill University, Montreal, by Charles E. Moyse, B. A. (Lond.), Professor of History and Associate Professor of the English Language and Literature (Montreal, 1879).

Charles Ebenezer Moyse (1852-1924) received his B.A. from University College, London in 1872, then served as headmaster of St. Mary's College, Peckham. In 1879 he went to Canada as Professor of English Literature at McGill University in Montreal where he taught for forty-one years, retiring in 1920. His first publication was his inaugural lecture at McGill, from which selections are given below. In 1882 he published another lecture, Poetry as a Fine Art, and in 1889 a humorous play, under the pseudonym of 'Belgrave Titmarsh', Shakespeare's Skull and Falstaffs Nose. In the early 1900s two collections of his verse were printed.

. . . It is probable that the only comedies of Shakespeare preceding this are Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. A Midsummer Night's Dream is, therefore, one of the earliest of Shakespeare's plays, and it is the first in which the mind of the dramatist seems conscious of its powers. The title at once suggests that we have something rare before us, but, curiously enough, the commentators are at variance concerning its meaning. Their quibbling, however, seems a little forced when we make the drama itself an interpreter. The light of the play reveals the aptness and significance of the name very clearly. The poet is the dreamer. His mind gives itself up entirely to a waking reverie or a sleeping dream, choose which you will. It is unfettered by any reality of the outside world. No physical sensation checks its flow of thought, and, as in a dream, the events of years are compressed into a few minutes, and types from the great circle of humanity, from kings down to base mechanicals, 'That work for bread upon Athenian stalls' [3.2.10], pass before the mental eye of the sleeper. So much for the Dream. But why A Midsummer Night's Dream? The wood of the Second, Third and Fourth Acts is the central framework of the machinery of the drama, and the occurrences which take place in that wood preclude a possibility of their happening at any other season of the year than summer. The actors are to sleep on the ground, and the beauty of a summer night is to call forth the fays, without whom the play would stand still, to meet 'in grove or green, / By fountain clear, or

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spangled starlight sheen' [2.1.28fF.]. Not because Midsummer eve was a traditional time for the fancy to run riot, or because certain people, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, were sometimes afflicted with 'very midsummer madness' [3.4.56], was the title A Midsummer Night's Dream chosen. It is more elastic than to imply the eve before Midsummer day, and we ought not to be surprised when we find that the action of the comedy takes place within the three days preceding the midnight of Mayday. As I have already hinted, the centrepiece of the mechanism of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a wood - 'A wood near Athens' [2.1.1JJ1] That wood is the world. The poet's metaphor is a very old one, and the reader not only of English but also of other literature soon gets familiar with it. At the commencement of the Inferno, Dante, midway upon the journey of our life, full of slumber, enters a forest dark. His forest in its widest meaning signified the world, in a narrower the poet's distracted fatherland. Again and again do the old English poets, Chaucer among them, lose their way on a May morning and find themselves in woods — their worlds — where they lie down to dream. The great courtly allegory of English literature, The Faerie Queene of Spenser, opens with Una and the Red Cross Knight wandering in the 'shadie grove' PI whose diversity of trees shows the metaphor, for no mortal eye ever beheld the pine, the cedar, the myrtle growing in such proximity. There Spenser's two adventurers were destined to meet with such mischances as the hero who bears the symbol of the Christian — the Red Cross — must expect to encounter on earth. So in Shakespeare. The woods near Athens are simply 'A local habitation and a name' [5.1.17], and we shall soon discover that these need qualification before the designs of the play are made manifest. Let me further substantiate my previous statement by appeal to the Dream itself. I find, firstly, that all the incidents where the tide waves of action run high and fast happen in this wood, and, secondly, that every character in the play is brought therein if Philostrate be supposed to follow in the train of Egeus, as naturally he ought to do. I have already alluded to the far-reaching and far-wandering mental eye of the poet as exemplified by the range of the characters found in A Midsummer Night's Dream. That eye, 'in a fine frenzy rolling,' did glance 'from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven' [5.1.12ff.] as Theseus has it. We see on the stage the fays, beings from the unseen universe, unseen except by the dreamer, and, moreover, invisible to those who are brought under their influence, and mortals of our earth who find themselves strangely acted upon, they know not how. Observe the careful parallelism maintained between the representatives of either universe. Oberon and Titania are the monarchs of the fairies. Earthly empire is set forth in the persons of Theseus, Duke of Athens — Shakespeare loves a Duke — and his wife Hippolyta. Next come a band of the folk of everyday life, Egeus, Lysander, Demetrius, Philostrate, Hermia, Helena. We have, lastly, the world of servitors — a Fairy, Puck, Pease-blossom, Cobweb, Moth, Mustard-seed, to do the behests of fairy royalty, and Bottom, Quince, Flute, Snug, Snout, Starveling, the toilers of the world, who pay court to Theseus. The order in which they enter into the wood is significant. The instruments by which the mechanism of the play is set in motion appear first, the fairies. After them the mortals who are affected by the deeds of the fairies. Then, the regal Theseus, through whom

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Shakespeare, with true dramatic art, performs the last act which restores harmony where discord reigned supreme. . . . (12-14) Lysander and Hermia, whose friends will not consent to their union, have determined to go out into the world — the poet's wood — and to fight out the battle of life for themselves. Demetrius finds himself drawn thither by love of Hermia also. Helena, despised by Demetrius, but loving him devotedly, follows, the fourth of the little band. Thus is there a state of strife among the ordinary folk similar to that of Titania and Oberon. The emotions of these men and women are wrought up to the highest pitch. Their intense mental strain finds an outlet in quick and violent physical action. Mark the running, the breathless haste, the impassioned cries in which this play abounds. Rapidity is the key by which to unlock the inner meaning of A Midsummer Night's Dream. . . . How can we pourtray the rude, rough men, the homespun of humanity, whom Shakespeare always draws so lovingly? His mechanics and his clowns, one and all, have an undoubted earnestness of speech that assures us the writer's affection welled up from its depths as he penned their sayings. . . . We have a planet - Bottom the weaver, Bully Bottom as they jovially and endearingly call him - and five satellites. The lesser orbs feel that they are nothing without the central luminary. When his mental sun has for the nonce disappeared, the carpenter utters his verdict, 'You have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he' [4.2.7ff.]; the bellows-mender his, [Quotes 4.2.19-24: 'O sweet Bully Bottom. . . . ' ] . . . . These are their estimates of the weaver's character, but they are not Shakespeare's. The name Bottom implies this; Bottom, the shallow man, the man whose depth is easily seen by all who have discernment. Shakespeare's names are not meaningless. They not only denote persons, but they also tell us somewhat of the qualities those persons possess. . . . (18-23) All the time that Titania and the weaver are together, Shakespeare does his best to make the contrast of their natures as vivid as possible. Titania speaks in verse that is music itself; she is answered in prose. She introduces to the 'shallowest thickskin' [3.2.13] three servants to pay him the most delicate attentions. Thus are two of them greeted. To Cobweb the transformed says, 'If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you' [3.2.183ff.]; to Mustardseed, 'I promise you your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now' [3.2.194ff.]. Fingers and eyes! How the gross, the physical side of human nature, comes to the front! And those fingers and eyes have other senses to match them, - ears that delight in the tongs and the bones, taste that has 'great desire to a bottle of hay,' for 'good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow,' and to 'a handful or two of dried peas' [4.1.32ff.]. Yet, in spite of all this grossness, there is, obscure in the depths of the weaver's mind, shallow as they are, a kindly nature, which the world has rightly deemed characteristic of its giants. [Quotes 4.1.13-16: 'Do not fret yourself too much. . . .'] he says to Cobweb, and elsewhere this goodness or rather absence of malice and spiteful temper is dimly visible. . . . Theseus was a knight of Shakespeare's day, Shakespeare's ideal of chivalric nobility. Who is shadowed under the name it is difficult to say. Some are of opinion that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written on the occasion of the Earl of Southampton's marriage, in 1598; others think that our play formed a part of the wedding festivities

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of the Earl of Essex, in 1590. PI Theseus may have been an Earl of Southampton or an Earl of Essex - neither suggestion is entitled to much weight - but without doubt he was some noble Englishman to whom Shakespeare intended to pay high compliment. When the dramatist disguised him as Theseus he thought of the warrior who slew the Minotaur, who conquered the Amazons, who battled with the Centaurs, who made Athens the capital of the commonwealth Attica, where, before, there had been twelve townships; of him whose bones were brought by honouring citizens from lovely Scyros to the city he founded and placed in a beautiful temple called Theseum from the name of the hero whose remains it enshrined. . . . And as this play was written for Theseus, so Shakespeare has made him perform the last act for setting right the confusion and enmity into which the experience of life has brought the four lovers. We left them sleeping, and while they slept Puck rectified his former misdeed by streaking their eyes, not with Cupid's flower, as before, but with Dian's, the classic antidote. Theseus, seeing them, commands Egeus to 'bid the huntsmen wake them with their horns' [4.1.138], and straightway they are awakened only to speak in language hesitating, confused, vague, about what had just transpired. Demetrius' words of wonderment disclose the inner meaning of A Midsummer Night's Dream, when he says: — My love to Hermia, Melted as the snow, seems to me now As the remembrance of an idle gaud Which in my childhood I did dote upon. [4.1.165ff.] Smile if you will; persuade yourselves that this comedy is only a pretty amusement to while away some three hours, but I cannot be convinced that Shakespeare used mankind as puppets, to sleep and to wake, to be charmed and anon to be free from charm, to swear affection only to forswear it the next moment, and all this at a master's caprice. No! the stage whereon the Dream is played is the outside world of thought and of action, diminished but intensified. It is noteworthy, also, that Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, brought their troubles upon themselves. Hermia, quick-tempered, self-willed, firm in resolve, lacked filial affection; Demetrius, in his fickleness, proved inconstant to Hermia; Helena, distrustful and reproachful, forsook her bosom friend; Lysander, resolute, over-bold, candid to a fault, made light of his father-in-law's authority. They all fled into the world and they suffered. . . . (25-7) To summarize the main points to which your attention has been directed: It has been stated that A Midsummer's Night's Dream is allegorical; that its wood is the world; that its dramatis persona are Athenians in fiction, Englishmen in fact; that some members of all groups save the earthly-imperial are similarly affected; that the hero of earthly empire performs, as in a Masque, the last, though comparatively unimportant, act which restores harmony; that the dream is simply the experience of years narrowed to a span by the active mind of the dreamer, and intensified; finally, that the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe is the diapason which swells out and completes the whole. (32-3)

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55 Thomas Spencer Baynes, Titania and Ovid 1880

From 'What Shakespeare learnt at School. II', Fmser's Magazine, NS 21 (January, 1880), 83-102. Thomas Spencer Baynes (1823-87) had a busy and varied career in academia and journalism, at first mainly in London and Edinburgh, with occasional respites in his native Somerset. In 1858 he became assistant editor of The Daily News, where he wrote extensively in support of such liberal causes as 'the dealings of Russia and Austria in Poland, the settlement of Italy, the relations of Prussia and Denmark, and the American War of Emancipation' (Shakespeare Studies (London, 1894), p. viii). Exhausted by overwork, in 1864 he accepted election to the chair of logic, metaphysics, and English literature in the University of St. Andrews. From this time more of his attention was given to the study of literature and Shakespeare. In 1873 he accepted the general editorship of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, to which he contributed the article on Shakespeare, but he died before the edition appeared. His articles on Shakespeare were collected in Shakespeare Studies and Essay on English Dictionaries, with a biographical preface by Professor Lewis Campbell (London, 1894).

. . . So far as I know . . . Mr. Keightley is the only critic who has connected the name [of Titania] with Ovid; and he does so very generally, without bringing out in any detail the meaning and value of the fact. His statement is that Titania occurs once in the Metamorphoses as a designation of Diana. W But in reality the name occurs not once only, but several times, not as the designation of a single goddess, but of several female deities, supreme or subordinate, descended from the Titans. On this ground it is applied to Diana, to Latona, to Circe, to Pyrrha, and Hecate.PI As Juno is called by the poets Saturnia, on account of her descent from Saturn, and Minerva, on less obvious or more disputed grounds, is termed Tritonia, so Diana, Latona, and Circe are each styled by Ovid Titania. This designation illustrates, indeed, Ovid's marked power of so employing names as to increase both the musical flow and the imaginative effect of his verse. The name Titania, as thus used, embodies rich and complex associations connected with the silver bow, the magic cup, and the triple crown. It may be said, indeed, to embrace in one comprehensive symbol the whole female empire of mystery and night belonging to classical mythology. Diana, Latona, Hecate are all goddesses of night, queens of the shadowy world, ruling over its mystic

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elements and spectral powers. The common name thus awakens recollections of gleaming huntresses in dim and dewy woods, of dark rites and potent incantations under moonlit skies, of strange aerial voyages, and ghostly apparitions from the under-world. It was, therefore, of all possible names the one best fitted to designate the queen of the same shadowy empire, with its phantom troops and activities, in the Northern mythology. And since Shakespeare, with prescient inspiration, selected it for this purpose, it has naturally come to represent the whole world of fairy beauty, elfin adventure, and goblin sport connected with lunar influences, with enchanted herbs, and muttered spells. The Titania of Shakespeare's fairy mythology may thus be regarded as the successor of Diana and other regents of the night belonging to the Greek Pantheon. Shakespeare himself appears to support this view in a line over which a good deal of critical ink has been shed. It occurs in the invocation to the Fairies in the Merry Wives of Windsor— Fairies, black, grey, green, and white, You moonshine revellers, and shades of night, You orphan heirs of fixed destiny,

Attend your office, and your quality. [5.5.37fF.] The deities of the Greek mythology were instruments of destiny or fate, in other words, of the ultimate powers of the universe. In the current belief of the Middle Ages, still firmly held in Shakespeare's day, the beings of the Northern mythology were the representatives and successors of the old Greek divinities. Shakespeare indirectly favours this relation not only by the selection of the name Titania for the fairy queen, but in giving to Oberon the designation consecrated by Ovid to Pluto. 'Umbrarum dominus,' 'umbrarum rex,' are Ovid's phrases for the monarch of the lower world, P] and Oberon is by Shakespeare styled 'King of Shadows' [3.2.347]. But the great Pan was long since dead, and with him the Titanic brood and Olympian circle of pagan deities. In this point of view, as offshoots of the Greek mythology, and in relation to their traditionary parents and predecessors, the fairies might well be called orphan, while, as still representing the dark powers and primary forces known as Fate, they might be appropriately styled 'heirs of fixed destiny.' Ariel, in the Tempest, it will be remembered, says explicitly, 'I and my fellows are ministers of Fate' [3.3.60E]. Reverting to the name Titania, however, the important point to be noted is that Shakespeare clearly derived it from his study of Ovid in the original. It must have struck him in reading the text of the Metamorphoses, as it is not to be found in the only translation which existed in his day. Golding, instead of transferring the term Titania, always translates it, in the case of Diana, by the phrase 'Titan's daughter,' and in the case of Circe by the line - 'Of Circe, who by long descent of Titans' stocke am borne.'M Shakespeare could not therefore have been indebted to Golding for the happy selection. On the other hand, in the next translation of the Metamorphoses by Sandys, first published ten years after Shakespeare's death, Titania is freely used. Sandys not only uniformly transfers the name where it occurs in the original, but sometimes employs it where Ovid does not. In Medea's grand invocations to the powers of night, for example, he translates 'Luna' by 'Titania.'K But this use of

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the name is undoubtedly due to Shakespeare's original choice, and to the fact that through its employment in the Midsummer Night's Dream it had become a familiar English word. Dekker, indeed, had used it in Shakespeare's lifetime as an established designation for the queen of the fairies.M It is clear, therefore, I think, that Shakespeare not only studied the Metamorphoses in the original, but that he read the different stories with a quick and open eye for any name, incident, or allusion that might be available for use in his own dramatic labours. (101-2)

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56 William Francis C. Wigston, a Platonic reading 1884

From A New Study of Shakespeare: An Inquiry into the Connection of the Plays and Poems, with the Origins of the Classical Drama, and with the Platonic Philosophy, through the Mysteries (London, [1884]). William Francis C. Wigston (active 1883-92) began his literary life with the publication of a verse play called Cinq-Mars; an historical tragedy, in five acts (London, 1883), based on Alfred de Vigny's novel Cinq-mars (1826). His New Study of Shakespeare, published anonymously in 1884, was followed by a volume of privately printed Poems (London, 1885). Then Wigston became a convert to the Baconian faith and his next five works were devoted to supporting the claim that Lord Verulam was Shakespeare. Among these works were Hermes Stella; or Notes and Jottings upon the Bacon Cipher (London, 1890), which tried to bolster the theories of Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888), and his last book The Columbus of Literature: or, Bacon's New World of Sciences (Chicago, [1892]), whose sixth chapter examines the influence of Rosicrucianism on A Midsummer Night's Dream. To-day his writings have faded into obscurity.

[From Chapter XII: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'] . . . Suppose Shakespeare has typically pourtrayed through Helena and Hermia, Nature or art in their two-fold character of signification, and corresponding visible object. It will be granted that everything has a corresponding signification, or meaning, to its appearance. In short, we behold objects, and we explain them, or suppose an explanation possible. This relationship of Hermia to Helena would correspond to the relation existing between object and subject, or aesthetic, - in short it would present in full force, that paradox of nature, which defies separation and yet escapes unity. Shakespeare has exquisitely summed up this paradox of nature in the words, 'an union in partition [3.2.210], whereby he expresses the relationship of Hermia and Helena to each other. There are three text keys, in our opinion, that give entrance to the philosophic unity of the play. The first of these is at the opening of the first act. Theseus. — What say you, Hermia? Be advised fair maid: — To you your father, should be as a God; One that composed your beauties, yea and one

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To whom you are but as a. form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure or disfigure it [1.1.46ff.]. The reader is asked to compare passages in Plato's Timceus {passim), where matter is represented, as receiving the imprint of ideas, even as wax,W which receives a form under the hand that presses it. This is so favourite a parallel with Plato, to express the participation of ideas with matter, that every student of his dialogues will at once remember it. And let it be noted that, with Plato, this parallel or illustration is connected with creation, and therefore with God. The reader will see, in the passage quoted, that Theseus compares Hermia's father to a God. . . . The next passage we desire to call attention to is the following: — Helena. — We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one and crowned with one crest [3.2.203fF.]. Let us at once call attention to the simile of'artificial gods.' The paradox of some dual unity, is reiterated in the above passage, with extraordinary force and clearness. No pains have been spared to give this double unity, special and significant exposition through the text. We are at once reminded of the duo-uno paradox contained in the poem of 'The Phoenix and the Turtle' — which we have already discussedJ2! And we must ask ourselves if this is not the 'union in partition' of nature, and of Shakespeare's own art imitative of nature also? We desire to make our theory very clearly understood. Plato's philosophy, or theory of ideas, strives to reduce everything to unity. Nevertheless, although we may arrive at this unity by thought, matter still reasserts her sway from an objective point of view. For example, let us suppose that this dual unity exists in some of Shakespeare's plays. Just to make our theory unambiguous, we will ask the reader to grant that some play of Shakespeare, like most of Greek Myth and all high art, has an inner spiritual meaning, or unity, through which it was created, and through which it should be revealed. This is an art that the poet terms 'secretly open' [Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.24]. It is, indeed, nature's own art, for she hides nothing except from the incapable. Then, such art, like nature, is dual unity. For, just as Greek myth has a subjective as well as an objective side, so all high art is imitation of the organic vitality of nature that unites soul to body — or idea to form. Such 'union' is of the nature of a paradox - for it is, indeed, an 'union in partition,' for the educated intellect but not for the outward common sense.

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Let us not create differences where there are none. We assert that Nature and art of such order are no mere metaphorical parallels, but identical (if we are idealists). And whatever in such sense applies to nature, applies to the art that imitates nature from this idealistic standpoint. What is this standpoint? We reply unity of spiritual meaning, obscured by phenomenal delusion, and this we assert is the nature of Shakespeare's art. Let it be remarked that Hermia and Helena, never swerve in their affections for their respective lovers. And this is in strict accordance with Nature. For it is man, who has to 'square his guess by shows' [All's Well That Ends Well, 2.1.150]. Outward nature (as science teaches us) is incapable of alteration — 'it is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken' [Sonnet 116.5-6]. . . . [He considers the significance of moonlight, of Theseus and the labyrinth, and Theseus's visit to hell in Virgil.] The philosophic student may now apprehend our theory of the relationship of Helena to Hermia. They are so alike, so identical through essence, that the confusion in the woods, is the conjlict of the phenomenal with the intellectual. If Lysander, under the influence of delusion or error (Puck), falls in love with Helena, it is because the magic of this art is such, that aesthetic is confounded for signification. It is because this 'union in partition' is so perplexing that, under the influence of darkness and reflection, 'everything seems double' [4.1.190]. Under the influence of the magic, of art or Nature, Lysander transfers his affections from Hermia to Helena. And we consider that the following passage fully proves our theory: — Transparent Helena! Nature here shows Art. That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart. [2.2.104ff] The poet here identifies Nature with Art, in the same way as he does in The Winter's Tale. But more than this. Helena is unquestionably connoted here with Nature and Art, as being 'transparent' — viz., to be interpreted! Do we not here at once obtain a profound key to the relationship of Helena to Hermia? Lysander has mistaken Helena for Hermia, — the external for the internal — for he sees through the external or transparent Helena, the internal Hermia! The poet evidently desires us to understand that these errors are the result of Nature's art, — which art, is to hide the hermetic signification of existence, under phenomenal expression, and yet to reveal it too, as transparency] It is the magic of Creation, divine or poetic, that causes these errors, i. e., the influence of moonlight, fantasy, (produced by darkness) or ignorance. Supposing Lysander and Demetrius to be ourselves, as spiritual and material tendencies, or lovers, we can at once apprehend the profound intention of the poet to be, to show us, at cross purposes with Nature or art, through the conflict of the intellectual with the Material or Phenomenal. We simply mistake one for the other. And it is just here that we touch the key of the entire play. For the essence of idealism, or the contemplation of life as a dream, turns upon this relationship of the Spiritual to the Phenomenal. It is the magic of Creation, that produces these cross purposes — viz., the art by which things have been put together, so as to produce illusion and error. And the opening speech of Theseus to Hermia, distinctly hints at this creative art, in the full Platonic sense of participation — viz., the impression of archetypal ideas upon matter, as a form

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imprinted upon wax. The result is dual unity - 'an union in partition' - and this, we maintain, is the secret of the cross purpose in the woods. . . . These errors, then, resemble the errors of the soul in the labyrinth of Nature or art. Theseus, as an historical ideal art soul, seems to be in the Hades of this art. The descent of ^neas into hell is a portrait that pictures initiation — or the descent of the soul into matter. It seems to us that there is close affinity between Theseus and Bacchus. But of this elsewhere. It seems to us that this play is a philosophic reflected portrait of its own creative principles. All is mind in this art! Life is a dream! And, like a dream within a dream, the poet presents us with a play that is, as it were, a prophetic dream of our relationship to his art. . . . (308-12)

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57 Grace Latham, interpreting the spoken verse 1885

From 'The Dramatic Meaning of the Construction of Shakespeare's Verse, with Especial Reference to the Use of the Run-on Line, and of the Extra Syllable', a paper read at the Hundred and Fourth Meeting of the New Shakespeare Society on February 13, 1885, and printed in shortened form in the Monthly Abstract of Proceedings, The New Shakespeare Society's Transactions 1880-1886. Series I, nos. 8-10 (London, 1886; reprinted Vaduz, 1965), pp. 127*-141*. Grace Latham (fl. 1882-1893) is known only through her publications. Her participation in discussions of the New Shakespeare Society is first recorded in the proceedings of the 78th meeting, April 14, 1882; the last paper she delivered, on 'Some of Shakespeare's Metaphors, and His Use of Them in the Comedies', was read on April 8, 1892 and printed in full in the Transactions 1887-92. Of the ten papers she gave to the Society, six were printed in full (five of them being on female characters in Shakespeare), and the rest were generously represented in the Monthly Abstracts. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts speculate that she may have worked in the theatre, since she contributed an essay on 'The Stage' to Ladies at Work. Papers on Paid Employment for Ladies by Experts in the Several Branches. With an Introduction by Lady Jeune [i.e., Charlotte M. Yonge] (London, 1893), (Women reading Shakespeare 1660-1900: An anthology of criticism, Manchester, 1997, p. 165).

Roughly speaking, we may divide Shakespearean students into two classes, one which honours him as our greatest literary light, and by patient research gathers together all kinds of archaeological details to explain obscure passages, counts each irregular line to decide on the probable chronology of his plays, and rejoices at leisure over the wonderful characterization, the deep philosophy, and the exquisite poetry contained in them; the other devotes its energies to learn how to speak these plays, so that the audience, from the most ignorant to the most cultivated man in it, may apprehend in a moment, through their sense of hearing, those very beauties which the man of letters can observe at his leisure. This is no easy task; the player must study as deeply as the literary man, though with a different object, and must then give the result of his labours to the public by means of his voice, and if he fail there and then to convey his ideas, there can be no return upon a difficult passage, as in the case of a solitary student; the ears of the audience are engaged with the next scene,

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and his opportunity is gone for ever. However, Shakespeare and his contemporaries have written with such a thorough knowledge of the means of dramatic effect, that, having once penetrated their meaning, its expression is comparatively easy. Perhaps it is only actors and reciters who realize the enormous difference which there is in the construction of writings intended to be spoken, and those meant, as the children put it, to be read to oneself. This latter class addresses itself to the mind through the eye only, and its initial merit is perfect clearness in the arrangement of its words and sentences, so that, grasping at once the succession of facts, the mind can proceed to the leisurely consideration of the ideas conveyed to it. The former class uses the ear as its passage to the brain, and the human voice as its agent, and on this fact the play or poem to be spoken is built. The same symbols of letters, words, and stops, are used for both, but their choice, number, and arrangement all differ when they are to be addressed, not to the eye, but to the ear. The stops cease to be mere divisions of sentences; they often occur in defiance of grammar, and become pauses and vehicles of expression, as do the very sounds of the words themselves. Coleridge recognizes this when he says that the speech of Hamlet:— Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables [1.2.180-1] —shows by its hissing sound the scorn of which his mind is full;^] and when we study Shakespeare to represent him, we shall find that the words we have to speak are chosen so that the necessary intonation can be easily given, to carry distinctly over a large space. Thus in scorn the voice becomes sharper and clearer, and when Shakespeare intends us to employ it, he selects words with sharp-sounding consonants, and clear, short vowels. Again, in tenderness or pathos the tone we use is round, soft, and full, and for such passages Shakespeare provides us with soft, round vowels, like o and ou, and the broader forms of a; while the consonants are rich and heavy. Then, again, we often succeed in conveying much to an audience by speaking a few words more quickly or more slowly, so as to draw attention to them, and we shall find that Shakespeare's lines vary considerably in length, especially to the ear, though nominally alike. This is managed, not only by the actual addition of syllables at the end or in the body of the line, but by the choice of words which take a long or a short time to pronounce. Thus bun, burn, and burnt are all words of one syllable, and would each be counted as half a foot; but they are not spoken in the same space of time, and we see at once that a line with several syllables in it as short as bun, would be ended far more quickly, and would sound to the listeners far shorter than one which chiefly contained such as burnt, though the absolute number of syllables might be the same in each. All this was evidently studied from the speech of daily life, for ordinary conversation conveys its meaning through little pauses, little quickenings and slackenings of speech, and the tone and method of the articulation of the important words; but they are not chosen as being best fitted to convey a special intonation over a large space, or as possessing force and dramatic power. This

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selection is the work of the dramatist, when, taking some passion or incident of real life, he prepares for its representation on the stage. The metre which the Elizabethans preferred is the pentameter line composed of ten syllables divided into five feet of two syllables each, the accent falling on the second of every pair of syllables, while a pause marks the end of the line. Taking this as their standard, they introduced numberless variations into it for the purpose of expressing the thoughts and feelings of their characters, as well as to avoid the excessive monotony which such regularly accented lines would give. Sometimes the line has no stop at its end, and it is then called by students the run-on line, as the pause may often then be omitted, and the next line commenced at once, giving an effect of hurry. But more often the pause is kept, though it breaks the sentence right across; and, if we examine the context, we shall see that it is intended either to draw attention to some word immediately after or before it, or to give the actor the opportunity of conveying to the audience some idea for the expression of which a break in the sentence is necessary. Thus it is much used when a tale is told, an order given, an argument propounded, or a statement made, whenever, in short, a fact or a series of facts have to be set clearly forth; and it is in such cases usually so placed as to give a superior emphasis immediately after or before the chief facts of the phrase. In this manner it is often used in metaphor. Again, we often find it when the current of feeling necessitates a voluntary or involuntary pause; in the latter case we meet with it in the most unexpected parts of the sentence, and it is often combined with extreme irregularity of metre. Thus it accompanies tears, great anger, terror, grief, love, adoration, supernatural awe, which will all stop the breath to a greater or less extent, necessitating a momentary pause for its recovery, and when violent will throw such trouble into the mind as to unbalance it, causing the speaker to pause for thought, or, perhaps, to lose the thread of his argument altogether, thus making his speech faltering and confused. Shame and conscious or discovered deceit are often expressed in this way. Depression, too, will produce a pause in the midst of a sentence, caused by the physical feeling of languor which accompanies it, especially when it follows great mental excitement. Then, again, we find the run-on line marking the pauses which express deference to superiors, submission, or courtesy; and in these cases the metre is usually smooth and regular. Another very important vehicle of expression is found in the extra syllables which are so constantly added to the line; we often find one at the end, occupying part of the pause, and then the slight variation in the rhythm attracts the ear, and the word is thereby accentuated without being brought prominently forward, often a most desirable thing in a level passage. When this extra syllable has a soft, weak sound, it can be used so as to give the effect of indecision or doubt, for at such moments we often let our voices rest on the ends of our words with uncertain weak intonation, from which a listener may learn much as to our state of mind. A line with an extra syllable has often in it some such unimportant words as, 'I have,' 'I will,' which we in real life habitually contract into one, making: 'I've,' 'I'll,' and by saying these very rapidly, though we may not abbreviate them, lest they should lose their power of carrying over a large space, time is gained for the extra syllable to be included in the

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line, and to be pronounced with great deliberation and emphasis. This is especially characteristic of Shakespeare's later style, where the presence of the extra syllables often marks the words to be accentuated. Again, the last half of the last foot of a line is often divided between two syllables, the additional one being usually very sharp in sound, and intended to be said very rapidly, that it may be got into the quarter of the foot, producing a sharp snapping sound, often most characteristic of the person employing it, or of his state of mind. All this not only gives great variety to Shakespeare's verse, but enables the actor to use the constant changes of tone, time, and articulation, which are his chief means of shadowing forth the thoughts and emotions of the characters he represents, and •without which the stately roll of blank verse soon becomes so monotonous to the ear that its full meaning is often lost. For in studying Shakespeare we should never lose sight of the fact that he wrote in the first instance to be heard, not to be read, and that he relied on the sound as well as the sense of his verse, for conveying his meaning to an audience. . . . [As an example of the ways in which Shakespeare's contemporaries used such means to express ideas, Latham analyses passages of Peele's The Arraignment of Paris.] When we come to the works of Shakespeare himself, it is most remarkable how he gradually, as time went on, dropped the purely conventional means of dramatic expression, employing in preference those which can be used so as to reproduce our ordinary speech dramatically. In Love's Labour's Lost we can almost imagine we are reading a play of Greene's; it begins with the long set speech with which he often opens a play, and the extra syllable and the run-on line, though freely used, indicate trivial accents and intonations, and have not the forcible effect, and strong dramatic intention, which they possess in Shakespeare's later writings. . . . Two years and a half passed over Shakespeare's head, during which he gained great experience as a dramatist by seeing and acting in many plays, wrote several others, and was engaged on the remodelling of Henry VI, being thus brought into closer connection with the authors of whom we have just spoken. By this time he already writes his blank verse with a full knowledge of the effects he wishes to produce, and their dramatic meaning, though he has not yet attained to the ease and freedom which characterizes his matured style. In the opening scene of Midsummer Night's Dream Theseus is talking with his betrothed. Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace: four happy days bring in Another moon; but, oh, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, Like to a step dame, or a dowager, Long withering out a young man's revenue. [1.1.Iff.] The three run-on lines with which it begins have each a different intonation and meaning. The first after 'hour' indicates a quick taking off of the voice, which has almost the sound of an exclamation, but cannot on account of the sense be marked by a note of admiration. This species of pause is constantly used in ordinary conversation

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to give a sharp emphasis to a single word, whether of anger, determination, joy, etc. Here tempered by the soft sound of 'hour,' almost a dis-syllable, it expresses the delight with which Theseus contemplates the approach of his wedding. The next run-on line after in is simply the pause of narrative, which tone should be used for the five words preceding it, shaded by the prevailing sentiment of tenderness. The short syllables of the word 'another,' which begins the third line, repeats in a less degree the earlier exclamative effect, and the whole line, broken up as it is by three commas, and ending without a stop in the midst of a sentence, shows us the restless longing of the Athenian Prince, while the length of the last syllable 'slow,' combined with the pause after it, makes the sound and sense echo and interpret each other. The speech ends with a line containing four long syllables and one extra one, the er in 'withering;' the decrease of speed thus gained both expressing the poor old lady's gradual decay, and making a period to the speech, like the rallentando which often concludes a musical phrase, to mark the entire change of feeling which meets us in the next. Hippolyta is not nearly so much in love as Theseus; she is not looking forward towards her wedding day, and we almost feel that with her the marriage was a political one, and that she is still thinking of the 'injuries' Theseus has done her; to which he alludes in the next speech; for throughout the play she is courteous and pleasant, but no more, and her words sound as though spoken by a charming woman bent on being agreeable to an indifferent acquaintance. Therefore her lines are much lighter, and the two which are unstopped are rather narrative pauses, such as we use when telling a story, or making a statement, than vehicles of feeling. Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities. [1.1.7fE] Her indifferent tone has stopped Theseus' outpouring of affection, as perhaps she desired, and in bright regular lines all end-stopped, and with but one extra syllable, he speaks first to his master of the revels and then again to her. Go, Philostrate, Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments; Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth: Turn melancholy forth to funerals, The pale companion is not for our pomp — Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, And won thy love doing thee injuries; But I will wed thee in another key, With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling, [l.l.llff] Again, the last line of the speech is drawn out by long-sounding syllables to express his exultation, and to form the period. He is interrupted by the entrance of an old Athenian gentleman, Egeus, his daughter Hermia, and two young men. The movement of the lines now entirely

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changes; we leave the soft, round syllables artfully combined into a sweet music, and pass to more ordinary but weightier ones; we leave the love-making to go to the administration of justice, the business of Theseus' daily life. Egeus speaks first, his opening line is a run-on one. Full of vexation come I, with complaint Against my child, my daughter Hermia. [1.1.22fF.] This is intended to emphasize the word very strongly, it is a serious charge, that against a daughter by a father, and it is also intended to attract the attention of the audience to the plot of the human portion of the play, which this long speech contains. The dashes in the following lines give Egeus time to turn from one person to another. Stand forth, Demetrius — My noble lord, This man hath my consent to marry her — Stand forth Lysander; - and, my gracious Duke, This hath bewitch'd the bosom of my child. [1.1.24fF.] Notice how the very comma after the sonorous 'and,' before 'gracious duke,' indicates the rage of the old man, who hesitates and stammers from anger, as does the scornful 'This hath bewitch'd.'[3 The contraction of sentences by omission is greatly used by Shakespeare, for he knew well that in real life our sentences are rarely complete; our eagerness to get through them making us drop out many of our words; our manner of doing so being often most characteristic. When Theseus speaks he is no longer the lover, but the judge; notice the effect of the two unstopped lines in his exhortation to Hermia. What say you, Hermia? Be advis'd, fair maid. To you your father should be as a God; One that compos'd your beauties; yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure or disfigure it. [1.1.46-51] The sonorous 'yea, and one' with its long semicolon before, its comma in the midst, and its pause after it, seems as though it would compel the girl's serious attention. So does the pause after 'power,' which falls on our ears with a warning emphasis, its extra syllables drawing special attention to it, by its deviation from the regular time of the metre. In Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare has made the greatest use of the rhyming-couplet in contrast to blank verse, evidently feeling it a less artificial means of expression than the absolute change of metre, which he used so freely in Love's Labour's Lost. When Hermia has received her sentence of death, a convent, or the husband she detests, she and her lover bemoan their fate in blank verse; but the moment she perceives a gleam of hope her spirits rise, and she promises to meet her Lysander in the wood, and takes her leave of him in soft, playful verse, and it is also used to express the passioning of Helena, as it is not suffered to attain to any great intensity. The dainty, fairy talk with which the Second Act opens is given in

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rhyming-couplets, and for a short space in lines of four accents; but the quarrel of Oberon and Titania is to them very serious, and is conducted in the graver blank verse; except when Oberon inquires with conventional courtesy, 'How long within this wood intend you stay?' and she replies in the same tone, 'Perchance, till after Theseus' wedding day' [2.1.138ff.]. The less natural form being used to express their formal politeness to each other. Again, in the Fifth Act, where Theseus is speaking of those who 'are of imagination all compact' [5.1.8], with whom his strong practical nature has but little in common, we find an approach to a rhyming-couplet, embodying one of those trite sentiments which people use when they talk about things they do not understand, and for which they have accepted a ready-made, cut and dried explanation. Lovers, and madmen, have such seething brains, Such shaping phantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. [5.1.4fF.] Again, when two bright emphatic lines are needed, as for an exit speech, they are given the form of a rhyming-couplet, that the sudden transition from the blank verse may call attention to them, as in the speech of Helena to Demetrius. We cannot fight for love, as men may do; We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo. I'll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the hand I love so well. [2.1.241fF.] But as a general rule throughout the play we find that when the speeches are graver and more deeply in earnest, and when the scene is to be taken seriously by the audience, blank verse is used; when it is softer, sweeter, tenderer, or more vehement, but with less real feeling, then we have rhyme. Thus the wooing of the lovers after their eyes have been charmed is in rhyme, but the quarrel scene is in blank verse, as is also the lovely appeal of [Helena to Hermia], that on the ground of their old friendship she will not join with men in scorning her poor friend.

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58 Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, observations on the lovers and the mechanicals 1886

From Familiar Talks on Some of Shakespeare's Comedies (Boston, 1886). Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer (1822-1904), novelist, popular historian, translator, was well placed to observe life and historical events in the Western world. Her father was a Virginian who was raised in England and became a Rear Admiral in the British Navy, and her mother the daughter of an East India Merchant of Boston. Born in England, Latimer grew up in London, Paris, Boston, Newport, and Virginia; after her marriage she lived in Maryland, where she raised a family, and during the Civil War cared for wounded soldiers. The writing career that she had begun in her early thirties was resumed in her sixties and maintained into her eighties. Of her many publications the most highly praised are her lively, anecdotal histories, informed by personal observation (France in the Nineteenth Century (1892), and similar volumes on Russia and Turkey (1893), England (1894), Spain (1897), and more).

[From the 'Preface'] These Parlor Lectures were given in Baltimore, to a large and appreciative class of ladies. In examining great masses of Shakespearean criticism during their preparation, I was surprised to find how little of the same kind of work has been done. We have (besides Hudson and Dowden) Hazlitt's characters, which are very brief; Coleridge's inestimable notes, which too often are mere jottings; Maginn's papers, which I find a little strained; Gervinus, who writes with Teutonic care, insight, and heaviness; Richard Grant White, whose most finished essay is on a play not included in this volume; Christopher North, whose sparklets of Shakespearean criticism are scattered up and down old volumes of Blackwood; Mrs. Jameson's most excellent Characteristics of Women; Lady Martin's recent letters on some of Shakespeare's female characters; and a series of papers, still incomplete, in the English 'Monthly Packet' (edited by Miss Yonge), called 'Shakespeare Talks with Uncritical People,' by Constance O'Brian [sic].M There are also notes to all editions of the plays; besides which a great deal of fugitive Shakespearean criticism — of the kind I wanted — can be found in magazines, inaccessible for the most part to the general reader. To all these I acknowledge the greatest obligations, in trying to do for each play as a whole what

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Mrs. Jameson and Lady Martin have done for its heroine. To the erudite who write for University men, I leave all points of what is called Shakespearean criticism. I have attempted nothing but to bring out obvious points of dramatic interest, and to enable those whom I addressed to get a clear view of the story and the characters. If I can do anything towards opening the 'mighty book' for those who have not time or facilities for searching out what I have done from various sources, I shall feel very glad that I undertook a task which at first I shrank from as beyond my powers. I found however, that my habit, as a novelist, of studying characters, and, as it were, working in fiction, gave me a certain insight even into Shakespeare's mind. I feel very sure that his characters started from some germ, and evolved themselves as he wrote; that they grew, in short, beneath his hand, and were not laid down by line and rule beforehand. He had an inner sense which made it impossible for him to make any of his creatures (unless it may be Oliver, in As You Like It) act 'out of character.' (v-vi) [From the chapter entitled 'Midsummer Night's Dream'] No play was ever named more appropriately than this; it is a 'Dream,' — a dream composed of elves, mistakes, wild fantasies, and the grotesque. . . . Shakespeare may have dreamed it, lying on some cowslip bank. And, what is most remarkable in this play, written by a master of character, there are almost no human characters in it that we can take an interest in. We care little for Helena, or Hermia; Lysander, or Demetrius; Theseus, or Hippolyta: our interest is in the loveliness, and gracefulness, and grotesqueness of the dream. . . . [B]ut even here, Shakespeare could not create human beings without enduing them with life. We have the good-natured, appreciative Theseus, who makes the best of everything; the proud, fastidious Hippolyta; the tall, fair, spiteful, cowardly, exasperated Helena; the petite, sprightly, dark, confiding, outraged Hermia, — brave, but with a will and temper of her own; Lysander, the true gentleman and lover; Demetrius, who was no gentleman, but at once hot-tempered and a sneak. Just as in newspaper illustrations, a French artist, with half a dozen random scratches of the pen, makes his sketch instinct with life and meaning, so Shakespeare, in his merest sketches, gives the spirit of a finished and elaborated portrait; and nowhere do we see this more plainly than in the Midsummer Night's Dream. Observe, in contrast, that the fairies, and the clown-fairy, Puck, have no characters at all. Oberon is possessed by the spirit of jealousy; Titania, by a spirit of tormenting; Puck delights in putting his finger into every pie, for frolic's sake, be it to mar or mend; but we do not feel in the least that Oberon is of a jealous disposition, or that Titania is a fairy Cressida, or that Puck is steeped in malignity. Their jealousy, their caprices, or their mischief, are mere surface qualities. (91-93) [After brief general comments on the fairies, on early editions, and on the setting, Latimer proceeds to scene-by-scene commentary. Following quotation of Theseus's ultimatum to Hermia [1.1.65-90], she comments:—] Demetrius, at the close of this speech, is insolent and peremptory with Lysander, and pitiless to Hermia. Lysander, as a gentleman, could not yield up the woman

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who had just made a declaration of her love for him. He answers old Egeus with self-constraint and dignity, bringing however, a perfectly true accusation against Demetrius, that he had, while courting Hermia, made love to Nedar's daughter Helena, and 'won her soul' [1.1.108]; which accusation has considerable effect on Theseus, who, notwithstanding his stern words, contrives that the lovers shall have an uninterrupted interview. He leads off Hippolyta, saying, 'What cheer, my love' [1.1.122]? At first sight it seems as if this question indicated that Hippolyta was saddened by Hermia's sad case, but as we come to know her better I think we shall conclude that she was simply vexed at having her lord's time and attention drawn away from her by a matter of business. Lysander and Hermia being left alone, here is what they say to each other . . . . [Quotes 1.1.128-180: How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale?' to Hermia's greeting of Helena.] Helena is not disposed to receive her rival's courtesy with any amiability. Demetrius had won her heart, while earnest only in pursuit of Hermia. She was a shrew by nature, and is now petulant and soured by jealousy and misfortune. Why Lysander and Hermia thought it best to tell her, as they do, their plan for elopement I cannot imagine. The speeches are very pretty in which they announce it to her. [Quotes 1.1.208-221.] After receiving this kindly sweet farewell Helena resolves to make mischief by telling Demetrius the lovers' plans. Perhaps she thinks he will be pleased with her for telling him, perhaps that he will turn in disgust from Hermia; anyhow, she will enjoy the highly indecorous privilege of following him by night into the wood. We may mark here the difference shown throughout the play in the sense of modesty between Helena and Hermia.

Scene 2. This is one of Shakespeare's most inimitable comic scenes, and on it the whole play turns. Shakespeare's vulgar folk have none of the exaggeration of those of Dickens; they are like Hardy's or George Eliot's, - comic because they are simply themselves. Shakespeare was no lover of mobs, nor of'mechanicals' [3.2.9], - he was not imbued with our modern spirit of democracy; but the English vulgar now, and still more in Shakespeare's time, were not like the great body of the American working-classes, with whom stupidity is not the danger, but such a keen sense of class interests as will make them easy to be led by demagogues or bosses, while all the time they flatter themselves they rule. It is a crude intelligence, combined with self-will and a little knowledge (just enough to mislead the judgment), that is the danger with our working-classes. In Shakespeare's day (and with the ordinary English mob) the danger lay in brutishness, and a sort of impassive stupidity. A French mob may be led by a sentiment; an English mob is blind, and fierce, and brutal; an American mob means business, and in all its excitement, keeps its own self-interest - the main chance it has in contemplation — well in mind. There is a double satire in these scenes with the play-acting mechanics. First, they

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are satirized as a class, and secondly, there is a satire on the goings-on in a dramatic company. . . . (96-101) [In commentary on 2.2., Latimer says of Demetrius and Helena's exchange (2.2.188-242):-] Demetrius is as little like a gentleman in his conduct to the poor girl as he can well be. He is harsh, rude, cruel. She repels us by the want of self-respect she shows, and her lack of modesty. With this want of modesty, even Demetrius reproaches her,—a lesson out of Shakespeare to any girl whom any young man, rightly or wrongly, supposes to be 'running after him.' . . . [The action is described to the point of entry of Lysander and Hermia.] They contrast most favorably with Demetrius and Helena. Lysander is a gentleman by nature, and Hermia is charming in her tenderness, and trust, and modesty. (106-108) [Commentary on the 'wild confusion' (118) of 3.2. completes Latimer's view of the young lovers. She concludes: — ] It gives me a bewildering conception of Shakespeare's mighty power of creation when I think that the same hand that made Portia, Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda, fashioned these two commonplace excitable girls. Yet, ill as they behave, neither quite loses our sympathy, and unladylike as much of their conduct is, we do not lose all sense of their being ladies. Very little comment, so far as I know, has been bestowed on Hermia and Helena. To me the skill that wove their flimsiness seems wonderful. Many writers seem to look on Helena as the most wronged, and the most worthy; in which estimate of their characters I cannot myself agree. Helena from the first was mean, cowardly, treacherous, and lacking in modesty. In the end, Hermia, aggravated and excited, turns upon her, and when both have lost their tempers and their dignity there is little to choose between them. (118-19)

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59 Francis Albert Marshall, poet rather than dramatist 1888

From The Works of William Shakespeare. Edited by Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall. With Notes and Introductions to Each Play by F. A. Marshall and Other Shakespearean Scholars, and Numerous Illustrations by Gordon Browne (8 vols, London, 1888-90; 8 vols, New York, 1888-90). Volume II. 2 Henry VI; 3 Henry VI; The Taming of The Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Richard 11(1888). Francis Albert Marshall (1840-89), dramatist, dramatic critic, and editor, was educated at Harrow and Oxford, but left the University before taking a degree. He became drama critic for the London Figaro around 1868, and also wrote eleven plays, mostly comedies and farces. He also published A Study of Hamlet (1875) and Henry Irving, Actor and Manager (1883). Together with his friend Irving and a number of unnamed scholars, he edited the eight-volume Works of Shakespeare (1888-90), a significant and handsomely illustrated edition. Marshall wrote the introduction to each of the plays.

[From the Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'Critical Remarks'] This is the only play of Shakespeare's, besides The Tempest, in which supernatural or non-human characters are introduced as taking an important part in the dramatic action.1 For we cannot include the disembodied spirits or ghosts introduced in Henry VI, Richard III, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, or the pagan deities in Cymbeline and Pericles, or the apparitions in Macbeth, as characters essential to the action of those plays. A comparison of A Midsummer Night's Dream with The Tempest will serve to show us, better than any amount of essays, the enormous advance which Shakespeare made in intellectual and dramatic power during the period that he was writing for the stage. How much more subtle, from a mere psychological point of view, how much more effective, from a dramatic point of view, are Ariel and Caliban, compared with Oberon and Titania and even Puck; to say nothing of the fairy supernumeraries who figure in this play! It is somewhat remarkable that though Shakespeare has represented the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as beings of diminutive size, he has endowed them with all the weaknesses, and vices, we may almost say, of human nature. How infinitely inferior in conception is Puck to Ariel! The earlier creation is simply the embodiment, poetical to a certain degree, of the Robin Goodfellow who figured as a mischievous elf in so many old women's tales. The latter creation is an

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ethereal if not spiritual being, whose intense yearning for liberty, the characteristic of all pure creatures, is so pathetic. Some writers have pointed out the contrast between the vulgar clowns who furnish the comic element of this play, and the fairy beings who make such sport of the human lovers, and, it may be added, of one another. But, granting that the tiny elves, who minister to Bottom's wants, are more refined than his fellow-actors in the Interlude, yet, as regards the highest moral qualities, there is surely little to choose between the fairies and the mortals in this play. Oberon and Titania are perpetually quarrelling; and are actuated by as contemptible motives indeed we may say by more contemptible ones — than Lysander and Hermia, or Demetrius and Helena. Puck is quite as successful in debasing the nature of Titania as he is in corrupting the fidelity of Lysander or Demetrius. Wrangling between the Fairy King and Queen is not a whit more dignified or refined than the quarrels of the human lovers. It is in the essentially human characters which he gives to the superhuman beings in this play, that the evidence of Shakespeare's earlier work is manifested, quite as much as in any defects in the construction or language of the play. The constant use of rhyme must be regarded as incidental to the nature of the subject, and not as indicative of the author's being still in a state of transition as regards the management or form of his verse. As far as the human characters of this play are concerned, with the exception of 'sweet-faced' [1.2.86] Nick Bottom and his amusing companions, very little can be said in their praise. Theseus and Hippolyta, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena are all alike essentially uninteresting. Neither in the study, nor on the stage, do they attract much of our sympathy. Their loves do not move us; not even so much as those of Biron and Rosaline, Proteus and Julia, Valentine and Silvia. If we read the play at home, we hurry over the tedious quarrels of the lovers, anxious to assist at the rehearsal of the tragi-comedy of'Pyramus and Thisbe.' The mighty dispute, that rages between Oberon and Titania about the changeling boy, does not move us in the least degree. We are much more anxious to know how Nick Bottom will acquit himself in the tragical scene between Pyramus and Thisbe. It is in the comic portion of this play that Shakespeare manifests his dramatic genius; here it is that his power of characterization, his close observation of human nature, his subtle humour make themselves felt. Of pathos, in this play, there is little or none; in fact there is no room for it; but there would have been, had he written it later on in life, more enthusiasm, more powerful grasp of character in his mortal heroes and heroines, than there is at present. Of poetical language there is much, as there cannot fail to be in anything that Shakespeare wrote; but of his higher qualities we may say, in spite of the extravagant praise which has been bestowed by some critics upon this fairy-comedy, there is little to be found. . . . [He devotes one paragraph to Bottom as 'the gem of this work'.] While insisting on the comparative ineffectiveness of this play from a dramatic point of view, we are not prevented from appreciating the many beautiful descriptive passages, the countless graceful touches, which render this work one of the favourite studies of those who love Shakespeare as a poet rather than as a dramatist; passages which linger sweetly in our memory, as we stroll through some woodland scene, greeting with loving eyes the wild flowers familiar to us from childhood, endeared

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to us by countless associations, and once peopled by our budding imaginations with some such fairy beings as those which waited on Titania and her 'gentle joy' [4.1.4]. Although the lovers' quarrels, and the various complications which arise from the mistakes of Puck, or from the designs of Oberon, do not excite our sympathy when presented in action; yet they furnish us with very delightful reading. Nor can we fail to admire the skill with which the incongruous elements of Fairyland and Clownland — if we may use the expression — are blended together; and the subtle manner in which the difficulty of portraying the lives of immortal and superhuman beings is contrasted with the difficulty, experienced by the rude Athenian countrymen in their attempts at what we now call realism in the scenic portion of the Interlude which they present. The drawback, pointed out by Hazlitt [No. 10 above] and by many other critics, which besets A Midsummer Night's Dream as a stage play, namely, that the Fairies, whom our imagination pictures as diminutive beings, have to be represented by men and women, will always tend to render this play ineffective from an acting point of view. Although this play cannot be called a pastoral drama, yet it is impossible to help comparing it with The Sad Shepherdess PI of Beaumont and Fletcher, which shares with A Midsummer Night's Dream the honour of having suggested to Milton the most delightful of all his poems, Comus. Shakespeare has the advantage of his rivals in that dramatic insight, which taught him to blend with the Fairy story the humorous underplot in which Bottom and his companions are involved. But there is, perhaps, nothing in Shakespeare's play so beautiful in conception as the characters of the Satyr, of Amoret, and of Clorin in Beaumont and Fletcher's play; on the other hand there is no blot in Shakespeare's comedy like Cloe, the wanton shepherdess. (II, 324-6)

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60 George Edgar Montgomery, source of the play's popularity 1888

From 'A Revival of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream', The Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine, 5 (April, 1888), 91-104. George Edgar Montgomery (1855-98) was best known as a writer for children. His poems appeared in the Boston periodical The Youth's Companion, and were often anthologized. His comments arising from Augustin Daly's important production in New York in 1888 (seen later in London) foreshadow twentieth-century interest in the relationship between script and medium, and the nature of audience response.

Every one has his theory as to whether or not Shakespeare is really popular now with the mass of playgoers. It is contended by some that his apparent popularity — as illustrated in the very successful revivals effected by Mr. Irving, Mr. Booth, Mr. Barrett, Miss Anderson, Mr. Daly, and others — W is in fact misleading; that this popularity is attained outside of the poet. Again, a Shakespearean revival is often meant for the eye more than for the imagination; in that case, it is a beautiful production, rather than a work of Shakespeare's, which stimulates curiosity and delight. There is, without doubt, a good deal of truth in all this. The age runs to realism, and our most successful plays are those which come closest to real life; Shakespeare made real, made obvious, to us, has a firmer grasp upon the stage than Shakespeare who is simply a great poet. Nevertheless, the theory that Shakespeare is only popular when he is projected, as it were, through popular mediums, can easily be carried too far. The character of Hamlet, for example, is potential in itself; misconstrued and mutilated by an actor of small intelligence, it loses much of its potency. Of the many popular plays by Shakespeare it seems to me that Midsummer Night's Dream should be one of the most popular; not merely because it is a brilliant show-piece, as demonstrated in Mr. Augustin Daly's recent revival of it, but above all on its own merits. It is, in the first place, a fairy story; and is there any one, no matter how sapient he may be, that does not dote on a fairy story? Moreover, Midsummer Night's Dream is no common fairy story. All good and lovable fairies have something of our everyday humanity in them; but the fairies of Shakespeare might almost be described as human beings, with supernatural qualities. They have

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the grace and elusiveness of spirits; on the other hand, they have the frailties, passions, tendernesses, of men and women. The quarreling of Titania and Oberon may be regarded properly as an excuse for the quarreling of the four lovers in Midsummer Night's Dream. The gentle nature of Oberon has its more material match in the equally gentle nature of Theseus, one of the most imposing and noble characters in Shakespearean drama. Fairyland and humanity are, in fact, blended like sunlight and air in this enchanting play. It is Puck alone who retains a touch of the old evil demon-spirit, although the Puck of Shakespeare is angelic in comparison with those dwarfed and elfish mischief-makers who were his progenitors. Yet if Puck could have his way in Midsummer Night's Dream, it is quite probable that Hermia and Helena would still be at odds with love, and that Bottom would still be wearing an ass's head. Aside from the fact that Midsummer Night's Dream is a fairy story which, with all its magic and ethereal charm, is very human, it is a thoroughly well-made play. Only slight effort is needed to give it the symmetrical construction of a smart piece written in our own time. Mr. Daly's version of it, for example, is singularly smooth and coherent, without doing the slightest injustice either to Shakespeare's fancy or text. Mr. Daly has simply employed the resources of a skilled stage-manager in fitting the play, written for one kind of theater, to another kind of theater. The work thus adapted remains strictly Shakespearean. . . . In watching this play, as performed at Daly's Theater, one could not fail to perceive that, although the spectator's attention was strongly directed to scenic display — perhaps over-directed — his sympathy with the play itself was spontaneous and sincere. It is a delightful and, from its own whimsical point of view, rational combination of the supernatural, the poetic, and the grotesque; and it offers an astonishing contrast of typical characters. What memorable groups are found here! There are Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the fairy band; there are Theseus and Hippolyta, figures of imperial dignity; there are Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander, creatures of our own flesh and blood, illustrative of our own weaknesses and idiosyncrasies; then there are Bottom and his neighbors, unconscious wits, unconscious fools, hard-handed men of Athens — though even Shakespeare must have smiled when, through some rare freak of fancy, he dropped these boorish British peasants into the color and glory of Athens. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the joyous exhibition of youthful and versatile genius — a genius outgrowing the fetters of false style and leaping toward maturity of power. Its contrasts of character are not less boldly striking than its contrasts of diction. One might suggest that Shakespeare saw here, as in a dream, the whole of life — its philosophic serenity, its largeness and pettiness of passion, its pinnacles of poetic feeling, its possibilities, its deformities. And every element of this life has its own speech — the pretentious vaporings of Bottom being set down with as much care as the eloquent wranglings of Hermia and Helena, the murmurous music of the fairies rippling into the wise and glowing utterance of Theseus. The doggerel of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is, by itself, nothing more than doggerel; but its significance, as a luminous exposition of life, is understood when it is placed in comparison with the

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thought of Theseus: [Quotes 5.1.2-17: 'I never may believe / These antique fables '] The revival of such a play as Midsummer Night's Dream is something more than a theatrical incident, important only while it holds the stage; when done with earnestness and artistic feeling — as it has undoubtedly been done at Daly's Theater — it is something to be treasured in the memory. The play is intrinsically one which could not fail to be popular. Yet managers have, as a rule, stood aloof from it with marked timidity. That is because the average manager believes, with Hazlitt [No. 10 above] and some other critics, that an essentially poetic work cannot be put upon the stage prosperously. This sophistical opinion is hammered into us year after year, and it is not surprising, therefore, that many of us accept it as just and final. Once in a while, however, the prejudice against poetic plays is swept aside by practical demonstration of the fact that poetic plays may be successful — more successful, occasionally, than plays which abound in those crudities that are supposed to hit 'popular taste.' It is quite true that the rarefied atmosphere of a piece like Midsummer Night's Dream can not be reproduced on the stage. But we do not go to the theater for perfect illusion; we do not expect to find there the real Hamlet, a real fairy, a real sky, a real moon. The limits of the theater are the limits of human skill, and before preparing ourselves for enjoyment of the theater, we must recognize this truth. One can get pleasure enough out of a stage performance of Midsummer Night's Dream, even if one does not get all that pure imagination discovers in the play. (91-6)

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61 Julia Wedgwood, classical and modern 1890

From 'The Midsummer Night's Dream', The Contemporary Review (April, 1890), 580-7. (Frances) Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913) abandoned her budding career as a novelist in deference to her father's wishes, but wrote extensively for various periodicals on literature, and on social issues (such as female suffrage, vivisection, and ethics and science). Her father was brother-in-law to Charles Darwin, who admired her critique of On the Origin of Species (Macmillan's Magazine, 2 (June 1860), 134-8; 4 (July 1861), 237-47). From 1863-70 she maintained an intimate correspondence with Robert Browning, an acquaintance probably formed through her brother and deepened by his death in 1864; its outcome was not happy (Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as revealed in their Letters, edited by Richard Curie (London, 1937)). Her book-length publications are mainly religious and moral. The posthumously published life of her great-grandfather Josiah Wedgwood may also be seen as a pious duty.

[Wedgwood begins by referring to Frank R. Benson's Globe Theatre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (in December 1889), and urging readers to acquaint themselves with Shakespeare as he intended, on stage. She finds the true interest of the play in fairyland.] Its queen is the central figure, and it is interesting to watch her grow in Shakespeare's imagination, from 'that very Mab' of Mercutio [Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.88] - the elf half-hidden in a hazel nut, charioteered by a gnat, whose sole business it is to inspire mortals with fantastic dreams — to the Titania beloved by Theseus, and jealous of Hippolyta, who seems as much of a goddess as a fairy, and whose quarrel with her spouse might come straight from Homer. She has, in the change, grown as much in outward form as in character; instead of the midge-like Mab, appears a stately queen, for whom a human child is a fitting page; and we see the little hand within that jealous clutch, with which, in the representation at the 'Globe,' we fully sympathised. She is full of human preference, human jealousy; she cherishes her page from the recollection of his mother, her faithfulness to whom puts to scorn the fitful friendship of Helena and Hermia. Her 'young squire' [2.1.131], too, has a faint affinity, with classic mythology, but he is more of a modern on the whole.

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With him the modem fairy tale is born; he survives in that enchanted land where we have all wandered in years gone by; where the happy boy or girl awakens from some mysterious slumber, and finds himself or herself at home amid a quaint bright throng where earth is forgotten. That Indian princeling is the Columbus of fairyland, and all who have trodden its soil since, down to Ah'ce in Wonderland, are followers in his track. . . . [She explores the ways in which Greek and northern, classical and renaissance mythology have been melded by Shakespeare.] The genius of Hellas expands the legends of the north, but does not fade into them. Yet something there is akin in the two; the spring-time of the Renaissance, we feel as we read, was the budding time of a mythology that found a new Olympus at the Court of Oberon, and a new Cupid in Robin Goodfellow. And when we turn to the human court, so much less interesting than that of Oberon, we feel the influence of the same spirit which lights up the legends of heathen mythology and renders natural on the page of Shakespeare much classic allusion which would be intolerably pedantic in any similar utterance of our own day. The picture of the Athenian prince, as compared with the authorities from which Shakespeare drew it, manifests very clearly the charm possessed by every classic name in the world of the poet. The reader who will peruse that laborious piece of antiquarianism, Plutarch's 'Life of Theseus,' will probably allow that the tiresome half-hour so spent has yielded no single distinct or vivid conception whatever. Yet from this hortus siccusW of withered legends, Shakespeare has drawn the ideal of a princely and finished gentlemen, which seems to stand in some relation to this legendary lore, because it has a certain similarity to the only picture of Theseus worthy of being placed by its side, and which was painted 2,000 years previously. We suppose it must be mainly accident that Theseus in the Midsummer Night's Dream recalls here and there Theseus in the (Edipus at Colonus. Shakespeare can hardly have read Sophocles, and Sophocles certainly never read Plutarch. And yet there is something in the prince who shelters the weary OEdipus, and the prince who defends and counsels the runaway lovers, which seems to point to a common type. To one who is familiar with the earlier conception, the later one seems to point backwards. And then, on the other hand, in the attitude of Theseus towards the supernatural, there is something essentially modern. It is very much in the manner of Scott, or rather there is something in it that reminds one of Scott himself. We see, wherever our great novelist enters the world of magic and legend, that he regards it through the medium of a cool, shrewd, eighteenth-century scepticism. He is ready to turn an unbelieving ear to the best accredited instance of the supernatural the moment it appears under the guise of history; yet, on the ground of imagination, he welcomes it with an impulse of taste and sympathy so deeply seated that we can hardly speak of the logical denial as amounting to unbelief. He thought that any contemporary who believed himself to have seen a ghost must be insane; yet when he paints the appearance of the grey spectre to Feargus Maclvor, or what seems to us his most effective introduction of the supernatural, that of Alice to the Master of RavenswoodJ2! we feel that something within him believes in the possibility of that which he paints, and that this something is deeper than his denial, though that be expressed with all the force of his logical intellect. It seems to us that the

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eighteenth-century element in this is exactly what is given in the well-known speech of Theseus:— "Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers tell of [5.1.1.], says Hippolyta; and he replies:- [Quotes 5.1.2-6, 18-22: 'More strange than true, . . .'] The genius of Shakespeare takes in the genius of Scott, what the lesser was the greater imagined. Theseus, explaining away the magic of the night, is Scott himself when he drew Dousterswivel, or when he describes the Antiquary scoffing at a significant dream. PI And the other half of Scott - that in which the legendary beliefs of his ancestors survived in some dim region of his being and swayed his imagination towards all that enriches our human world with a border-land of the invisible — this is here too and fills the whole foreground of the picture. The dual impulse gives exactly the right point of view for an artistic representation of the supernatural. To paint it most effectually, it should not be quite consistently either disbelieved or believed. Perhaps Shakespeare was much nearer an actual belief in the fairy mythology he has half created than seems possible to a spectator of the nineteenth century. And yet Theseus expresses exactly the denial of the modern world. And we feel at once how the introduction of such an element enhances the power of the earlier views; the courteous, kindly, man-of-the-world scepticism somehow brings out the sphere of magic against which it sets the shadow of its demand. The belief of the peasant is emphasised and defined, while it is also intensified, by what we feel the inadequate confutation of the prince. The play of the tradesmen which at first one is apt to regard as a somewhat irrelevant appendix to the rest of the drama, is seen, by a maturer judgment, to be as it were a piece of sombre tapestry, exactly adapted to form a background to the light forms and iridescent colouring of the fairies as they flit before it. But this is not its greatest interest, to our mind. It is most instructive when we watch the proof it gives of Shakespeare's strong interest in his own art. . . . [Wedgwood discusses the exchange in which Philostrate tries to dissuade Theseus from hearing the mechanicals' play, and his response defending the claims of simpleness and duty, 5.1.72-83.] And his rebuke to his bride is in the same strain as that to the courtier. 'This is the silliest stuff I ever heard,' says Hippolyta, and his answer, while it calls up deeper echoes, is full of the pathos that belongs to latent memories. 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination mend them' [5.1.210-12]. Here the poet is speaking to the audience; in Hamlet, when he addresses the players, his sympathy naturally takes the form of criticism; what the Athenian prince would excuse the Danish prince would amend. But in both alike we discern the same personal interest in the actor's part, and feel ourselves listening as much to a confidence as to a creation. We learn that the greatest genius who ever lived was the one who could show most sympathy with incompleteness and failure. There is nothing scornful, nothing merely critical in his delineation of the rough clowns who shadow forth the loves of Pyramus and Thisbe. On the contrary, almost every touch has a certain delicacy. . . . We catch the accent not only of the immortal poet, but of one who has felt himself 'in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,' who has 'troubled deaf Heaven with his bootless cries, desiring this man's art, and that man's scope' [Sonnet 29. 1, 3, 7]. Whatever be the feeling which inspired the lament of the Sonnets, it is not wholly out of relation to

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the art which delineates the performance of the Athenian tradesmen, the criticism of the unsympathetic spectators, and the pleading in which the Prince unites the canons of the truest art with those of the widest courtesy, and the deepest human kindliness. For Shakespeare's sympathy with the members of his special craft is as a window, whence he looks on life as a whole, and sees in its hurry, its transiency, its strange misfit of capacity to claim, of knowledge to impulse, a repetition of the experience of the player. That truth, which is wrought into the very structure of language, whereby the Latin name for a mask has become the modern person, reminding us that there is within each of us that which 'sounds through,' not only our outward surroundings, but much that in the eyes of other men makes up ourselves; this could not but haunt the mind of one who knew the players' part both from within and without. 'All the world's a stage' [As You Like It 2.7.139]; every man is in some sense an actor, most often an untrained actor, ill at ease in his part, and often tempted to exclaim;— 'The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That I was ever born to set it right' [Hamlet 1.5.188ff.]. The sense of all that is difficult in the part of the actor passes into a type of life's vain efforts, and varied futilities:— 'We are such stuff as dreams are made of [The Tempest 4.1.156ff.]. That line haunts us all through the Midsummer Night's Dream. We feel the adventures of the night no mere play of fancy, but a parable of the confusions, the mistakes, the shifting vicissitudes, the inexplicable changes of human attraction and repulsion. 'The course of true love never did run smooth' [1.1.134], seems a bitter theme for so sweet and fanciful a setting, but it is the theme of the whole play. Theseus and Hippolyta have begun with conflict, they may perhaps have a serene interval before them, but we doubt even so far as to Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, Oberon and Titania. Even poor Pyramus and Thisbe, murdered by the clowns, how does their history in its caricature repeat the lesson of misfit, barriers, impediments; and then when these are removed, mistakes and misunderstandings, which have just been set before us in the adventures of the night. Was the whole play an expansion of that compliment to Elizabeth, which naturally links itself with the lament over the course of true love? Did Shakespeare mean to imply that 'the imperial votaress who passed on in maiden meditation, fancy free' [2.1.163ff.], had chosen the better part? Was he repeating the lesson which his hero receives from the weary OEdipus in the other play, in which a kindred genius has given a representation so curiously similar? Oh Theseus, gods alone know nought of death. All else Time, the victorious, withereth. Faith fades and perishes, distrust is born: What man or State has loved, each learns to scorn. The sweet grows bitter, then again a joy, And lightest touch can firmest bond destroy. M Doubtless the instability of all human relation was in his mind, the feeling which led Madame de Stael to exclaim mournfully in reviewing her life: 'J'ai aime qui je n'aime plus, j'ai estime qui je n'estime plus.'I5! But we hear the voice of Bottom, wakening

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from his metamorphosis, 'Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound my dream' [4.1.206ff.]. What can the wisest of us add to that reflection of the awakened clown, reviewing the part he has unawares been called on to play, so strangely contrasted with the heroic character he has chosen? As the time of awakening draws near, do we not all with the most varied memories and anticipations echo those words of his? Do we not feel the summary of all the confessions, all the vain hopes, all the bitter disappointments, and then the wonderful revivals of our human experience gathered up in that decision, 'The dream needs some wiser exponent than he who has dreamed it, or than any son of man.' (580-7)

302

62 Charles Downing, reason and desire in Oberon and Titania 1890

From God in Shakespeare. The Course of the Poet's Spiritual Life with his Reflections thereon and his Resultant Conception of his World-Personality Inductively Established from his Text (London, 1890). Charles Downing (active 1890-1913) published most of his seven known works under the pseudonym 'Clelia'. His first, lengthiest, and most important book was God in Shakespeare (London, 1890; reprinted, with a revised preface, in 1901) wherein he maintained that 'William Shakespeare was the son of man. In him the truth and love of Christ were re-incarnated. . . . Christ and Shakespeare are both absolutely the Messiah' (pp. 375-6). This theme is also found in his other books, such as Great Pan Lives: Shakespeare's Sonnets. 20-126. With paraphrase and references by Clelia (London, 1892) and The Messiahship of Shakespeare, sung and expounded by Clelia (London, 1901). In the latter he attempts to show that Shakespeare presents himself as Pan in the Sonnets, and as Christ in The Tempest. His other four publications are pamphlets.

[From Chapter I: 'Ambition, Scepticism, Illusion, Art'] [After examining love in Love's Labour's Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona Downing sums up Shakespeare's idea of love as expressed in A Midsummer Night's Dream.} The poet's thought took this course. Love has its origin in desire. Then the inflamed imagination endows the object of desire with infinite perfections, and the man loves. If the man be virtuous, he is constant. But if he be not virtuous, and be idle, the desire being ever present, but not the object, then the desire may attach itself to a new object, and therewith the imagination, the fancy, the love. And the end of inconstancy is, that desire attaches itself to some altogether unworthy object, which the reason knows to be unworthy, but which the inflamed imagination idealises, and upon which the man dotes, so that 'it is not in his virtue to amend' [Othello, 1.3.318] his folly. But these conflicting agents, virtue, or reason working for good, and desire, the

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poet naturally 'turned to shapes' [5.1.16] and the method of their operation to an allegory. The fairies were the shapes that he could best employ in accordance with the humorous, fanciful way in which he regarded the passion of love. But these were elemental spirits; and would it not be rather forcing their nature to make them stand for reason and desire? But, on consideration, . . . is not this conflict between reason working for good and desire but one example of the conflict which rages throughout nature between law working for good and force? The fairies, elemental spirits, might justly represent this elemental conflict in general, and justly at the same time represent it in man in particular - in the man Demetrius in particular. Oberon, king of the fairies, could be law, and at the same time, and in particular, reason working for good. Titania, queen of the fairies, could be force, and at the same time, and in particular, desire. Oberon would be Ormuzd, only that Titania is not AhrimanJ1] a principle of evil; on the contrary she is good, united to the law which makes for good. The relation of Oberon to Titania is indeed nought else but the idea of the relation of God to nature. Oberon is an original fancy of the poet's, which corresponds to the popular anthropomorphic conceptions of God. But such conceptions of God lack justification. The poet of truth paused and considered how to make his fancy a dream. Since fairies only appear at night, and dreams are of the night, it could be left an open question whether all the supernatural part of the play were not the combined dreams of the various characters, or partly their dreams, partly their imaginations, and partly their inferences: [Quotes 5.1.18-20: 'Such tricks hath strong imagination. . . .']. But the fairies haunt the woods at night. The scene of the play therefore must be chiefly in the woods at night. The human characters must go to the woods. But it would be difficult to put fairies on the stage satisfactorily. Large demands would have to be made upon the imagination of the audience. But this difficulty could be met in a very direct way - by actually instructing the audience in the play itself that the author depended upon their imagination. Already in Love's Labour's Lost clowns had been introduced acting an interlude. There the other characters gave them a very contemptuous reception. But in this play clowns acting might be introduced again, and the other characters might be made to give them a very friendly reception, and might preach the lesson of amending defects with the imagination. Moreover the clowns, by their ludicrous clumsiness, would serve as a foil to those who acted the fairies, and make them seem more fairy-like. Costard was the name of the chief clown in the Love's Labour's Lost interlude. Costard, — head, top. Bottom might be a good name for the chief clown in the new interlude. And, by the way, inconstant desire was to be represented as touching bottom, as doting upon a most unworthy object; and force, in its revolt against the law which makes for good, was to be represented as touching bottom, as arriving at most 'preposterous conclusions' [Othello, 1.3.329] and 'mere oppugnancy' [Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.111]. Titania, therefore, must love Bottom; and Bottom must be the lowest, the most uncouth and mindless of men. Bottom must be an ass; ay, and with a veritable ass's head. Puck must see to it. Puck! the

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very genius of illusion! He might act more parts in this play upon the great illusion oflove (43-6) [Inconstancy is found in Demetrius, Lysander, and Titania. The flower helps to dispel wrong loves, and desire is reunited to reason.] Oberon applies the flower to Titania, because it is natural law that inconstancy should find a term in an unworthy object of desire. And this is law working for good, if thereafter reason and virtue can reassert their supremacy. Oberon does not send Puck for Dian's herb, or chastity; for, being reason, he has it in his possession, and applies it to Titania or desire. Titania accuses Oberon that he 'In the shape of Corin sat all day / Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love / To amorous Phillida' [2.1.66fT.], which simply means that Corin loved virtuously, with reason or conscience, his being the innocent and ideal love of Arcadia. Titania upbraids her lord also, thus: — Why art thou here, Come from the farthest steep of India But that forsooth the bouncing Amazon, Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love, To Theseus must be wedded? [2.1.68ff.]. In other words, before she loved Theseus the chaste Hippolyta loved virtue, and in doing so she 'had reason,' as the French say. She was reason's buskined mistress and warrior love. . . . [Oberon accuses Titania of having loved Theseus. She is 'lawless desire'. Now she dotes on Bottom, but Oberon pities her and after she gives him the changeling will disenchant her eyes.] Desire is at last submissive to reason, because she now knows that in reason is her sole salvation. And reason at last restores chastity, and destroys her illusion. [Quotes 4.1.71-4: 'Be as thou wast wont to be. . . .']. But the conflict between Oberon and Titania is not merely the conflict between reason and desire, it is the more universal conflict between the law which makes for good, and the forces of nature. The Indian boy is not merely lawless passion in Demetrius, or in the world at large, where, as Bottom says, 'Reason and love keep little company nowadays' [3.1.143ff.], he is also representative of a disordered will in nature, of force in revolt against the law which makes for good, and so destructive. It is not at the beginning as at the end of the play, where Oberon and Titania enter hand and hand the palace of Theseus upon the wedding night, and Oberon, by his reunion with Titania, has nature once again under his control, and can shower blessings upon man: — [Quotes 5.1.401-6, 409-14: 'Now until the break of day. . . .']. But when Titania, of whom it is said, 'The cowslips tall her pensioners be' [2.1.10], and who says of herself, 'I am a spirit of no common rate / The summer still doth tend upon my state' [3.1.154ff.], and who is the vis generatrix [creative force] in nature: Alma Venus Coeli subter labentia signa Quae mare navigerum quae terras frugiferentes

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Concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne animantum Condpitur, visitque exortum lumina solisl2! LUCRETIUS [De Rerum Naturae, I, 2-5]. when Titania is in revolt against her lord, then there is 'distemperature' [2.1.106]: [Quotes 2.1.88-92,103-5,107-17: 'Therefore, the winds, piping to us in vain. ...']. To these words of Titania, Oberon replies: - [Quotes 2.1.118-21: 'Do you amend it then. . . .']; that is, obey law, and surrender your disordered will to mine which worked for good. Titania refuses; and the result would be the sinking of the world into a condition as chaotic as the mind of Bottom, a mindless state, 'where each thing meets in mere oppugnancy' [Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.11 Off.], an absurd and inconceivable state. But the poet refrains from pressing the more general conception of Oberon and Titania further, or he would have had to Make a sop of all this solid globe. Troilus and Cressida [1.3.113]. At the end of the third act, Puck addresses Oberon as 'king of shadows' [3.2.347], and the aspect of the fairies as dreams is brought into view. Oberon emphasizes it by saying: — 'But we are spirits of another sort; / I with the morning's love have oft made sport' [3.2.388ff.]; as of course dreams last into the morning. At last when Titania awakes from the dream in which she thought she 'was enamoured of an ass' [4.1.77] and cries 'My Oberon' [4.1.76], and reconciliation has taken place between her and her lord, while the four lovers and Bottom are stretched in unconsciousness around beneath the trees, and morning breaks in the east, Oberon says, 'Titania, music call' [4.1.81], and Titania summons it. 'Music! ho! music, such as charmeth sleep' [4.1.83]. But music which proceeds from nature must obey law. Therefore, Oberon: — Sound music! Come, my queen, take hands with me, And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be. [4.1.85ff.] Can any one point in all literature to as many words that contain so much? How sublime, how tender, how humorous, how profound, how exquisite! Besides the poor mortal who is dreaming himself an ass, the youthful lovers lie there sleeping, who all night wandered or dreamed the sport of their imaginations, the sport also of the nature whereof they are composed and of the laws which govern it, by whose beneficent operation, - 'The man shall have his mare again / And all shall be well' [3.2.463]. And as harmony is restored, as errant nature comes again under the law which works for good, as the delicate little creations of the poet, that are also the dreams of the sleepers themselves, so tiny, so gossamer-like, yet the twin embodiments of this universe, join hands and dance, a shock causes nature to tremble, the earth quakes: — They rock the ground whereon these sleepers be [4.1.86]. (50-6)

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63 Sidney Clopton Lanier, the development of morality and art 1891

From 'Chaucer and Shakespeare. The Inter-Relations of Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and The Tempest. By the late Sidney Lanier', The Independent (New York, September 10-24, 1891). Sidney Clopton Lanier (1842-81), poet, novelist, lecturer, scholar, composer, and musician, was born in Macon, Georgia, and entered Oglethorpe College, Atlanta, in 1857. His intention of pursuing a doctorate at Heidelberg was interrupted by his service in the War between the States, and he died from the tuberculosis contracted in a Union prison camp. He is best remembered for his poetry, and for his exploration of the principles of verse in terms of music, in The Science of English Verse (New York, 1880). His Shakespeare criticism, unpublished during his lifetime, belongs to the years 1878-80, when he applied for and was eventually appointed to a lectureship in English at the new university of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Two series of lectures he gave to various audiences were published nearly a quarter of a century later in Shakespeare and his Forerunners. Studies in Elizabethan Poetry and its Development from Early English (2 vols, New York, 1902). At the time he gave these lectures he was also preparing an edition of linked texts by Chaucer and Shakespeare. The introduction he wrote for this volume was published serially in The Independent (New York) in 1891, and reprinted in Music and Poetry: Essays upon some Aspects and Inter-Relations of the Two Arts (New York, 1898). It has been re-edited from manuscript (the only substantive differences being in the introductory paragraphs) by Kemp Malone, in The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, edited by Clarence Gohdes and Kemp Malone (10 vols, Baltimore, 1945), IV, 304-45.

I. [Lanier begins with general remarks on the greatness and continuing power of Chaucer and Shakespeare.] There are three singularly representative works of Shakespeare which, by their remarkable relations to each other and to three corresponding works of Chaucer, besides their intrinsic qualities, are capable of such large and useful applications, in our present system of educational training, to the furtherance of language, of art, and

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of morals, that it would seem a plain service to set them forth compactly together. . . . These six works are: A Midsummer Night's Dream, herein studied in conjunction with Chaucer's Knight's Tale; Hamlet with The Pardoner's Tale; and The Tempest with The Clerk's Tale. A remarkable set of circumstances and connections combine about these three plays of Shakespeare to make them representative of three great Phases or Periods through which the process of every healthy man's growth naturally passes. If we consider in outline the general cycle of this process, it will become easy to understand the extraordinary manner in which (1) the Moral Views, (2) the Actual Dates, and (3) the Artistic Structure, of these three plays converge to illustrate it. ... [He expatiates on the careless joys of youth, which ignores what is grim in life and nature.] Or if indeed the sensitive soul of a youth is impressed with the dread revelations of the underlying reality of things, it is so impressed with a saving clause - namely, with a certain curious doubt which appears to brood beneficially about our dreams. The most painful of dreams affect us but little in comparison with slight actual griefs. . . . No one's heart was ever broken by a dream. And this dream-relation of youth toward the Real brings us immediately to our point; for it is precisely such a relation which the Midsummer Night's Dream expresses in the most ravishing terms of fancy. Death, and the cross of love, and the downward suctions of trade and politics, and the solemn stillness of current criticisms in all ages, and the compromise of creed, and the co-existence of God and misery, and the insufficiency of provision whereby some must die that the rest may live, and a thousand like matters — to these things the youth's senses, made purposely unapprehensive in part, are in a state which is described with scientific accuracy when it is called the state of a dream; and this is the state revealed in the Midsummer Night's Dream. Here we have the cross of love — two mad for one, Oberon quarrelling with his wife, but no thought of heart-break. Here Bottom and his fellow patches show us Shakespeare conscious of the fashionable degradations of his art; but there is no mourning over it, as in the later sonnet, 'Tired of all these, for restful death I cry' [66], and several others. Here we have the stupid ass-worship of contemporary criticism in all times — Titania, or current applause, doting upon the absurd monster; but it is matter for smiles only, not indignation. . . . [Lanier proceeds to Hamlet, where man confronts his relationship with the facts of death, corruption, etc., and then to The Tempest, where all is resolved in man's transcendence of his fate and in his capacity for forgiveness: the 'masterhood of Nature is accompanied by a supreme moral goodness to fellow-man' (1338). These plays represent the Dream Period, the Real Period, and the Ideal Period. He next discusses the chronology of the plays, and claims that those grouped by date around each of these representative plays display similar characteristics.] (September 10,1891, 1337-8) II. Having thus established that the moral advance so clear in these three plays is actually the historic advance of Shakespeare's unfolding spirit, we may now go on to a third series of considerations which not only support this conclusion, but enlarge it

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into a most striking view of the symmetry of the poet's growth throughout the whole mass of his powers. We have seen his growth in moral compass; let us now see if a growth in artistic compass proceeded as, of course, it should in every symmetrical and healthy development — along with the other. . . . Selecting two representative passages from the extremes of the whole period of Shakespeare's work; that is, one from the Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), and one from The Tempest (1612-13), I ask the reader to utter them aloud and to observe the actual phenomena which occur. For one of such representative passages, let us take the following . . . : Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind; Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd. [1.1.234fF.] Upon reciting this passage aloud, perhaps the first and most striking observation is, that between the last word of each line and the first word of the next line the voice made a distinct pause much longer than the pause between any two consecutive words in the body of any one line. The voice, in short, divided off the whole passage into six smaller passages for the ear just as the punctuation marks and the verse-method of printing divide it off into six smaller passages — that is, six 'lines' — for the eye. What is the effect of this sixfold division? Let it be recalled that, in listening to uttered speech, altho the primary constituents of that speech are what we may call alphabetic sounds, or letter-sounds, yet the ear, at the same time that it pays attention to these letter-sounds individually, also pays attention to them in those little groups or discrete masses called 'syllables.' For example, in hearing the first word of this passage, the ear consciously hears first the sound of L, then that of o, then that of v, but the •whole discrete mass Love has nevertheless struck the ear in such quick succession as to be practically simultaneous, and the separate sounds have much the same individual effect with that of each separate tone in a chord of three tones struck on the piano. The ear, therefore, in hearing the sounds of speech, practically hears them in little chords, or groups, each group being that discrete mass of tone called a syllable. From this grouping, commonplace as it seems, proceed the most remarkable effects. If we analyze the passage just read by letter-sounds, the most hopeless confusion results. We can trace no law among the series of sounds. But if we analyze it by syllables, and agree (for reasons not proper to be detailed here, but which any curious reader will find detailed in the author's Science of English Verse, p. 59 and following), to call such syllables 'verse-sounds,' we will find that there are in the passage read exactly sixty of these verse-sounds. The effect of the division into six smaller passages, or lines, by the pause at the end of each line which pause we may here conveniently agree to call the 'end-stop' - may now be clearly seen, when, upon analyzing the first line by verse-sounds (here easily done because each word happens to be one discrete syllable and to constitute, therefore, one verse-sound),

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2

3

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1 0

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, we discover that it consists of exactly ten such verse-sounds, and pursuing the analysis, that the second line 1

2

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9 1

0

And there-fore is wing'd Cu-pid paint-ed blind, consists also of exactly ten such verse-sounds, and so with each of the others. Thus the whole passage reveals itself from this point of view as a large group of sixty verse-sounds, divided into six smaller groups often verse-sounds each. Here the ear has the pleasure of perceiving that in a great mass of tones — which taken by letter-sounds is absolutely patternless, relationless and lawless — there is, nevertheless, a definite pattern which runs through the whole mass, a definite law which reduces the whole confusion to a clear and simple order, a set of relations which binds together all the individual constituents of the mass. Before going on to develop the ear's further management of these patterns, it is worth while remarking that we have here come upon a principle which not only seems to lie at the bottom of all human delight in, and desire for, rhythmic poetry, but which equally inspires every scientific generalization, and every formation of moral law. We have just seen that upon presenting to the ear a long series of letter-sounds, the ear while appreciating them as letter-sounds, eagerly accepts the first indication that this lawless series is capable of an arrangement which is not lawless, eagerly perceives the relations between the verse-sounds just detailed, and traces with delight the pattern of tens and sixes into which it finds the verse-sounds are woven. This stringent search after pattern, relation, law, among confused sounds, this intolerance of chaos (or un-relation), this delight upon discovering a principle which arranges apparently unrelated particulars into an interdependent system; would seem to be at bottom the same presiding passion which fills the scientific searcher with discontent, when he has accumulated a number of scientific facts, until he finds some pattern, some principle of relation, some law, which binds together those facts just as the patterns of tens and sixes, the relation of ten and six to sixty, the law of grouping by groups of ten verse-sounds into six subordinate groups, bound together the whole mass of otherwise chaotic letter-sounds into the organic and related whole of the verse-structure. And lastly this same passion appears to act upon moral facts just as upon scientific facts, and to cause the moralist to search eagerly along any accumulation of moral details for some pattern, or relation, or law, which shall dispose them all into order. . . . [He next considers end-stopped and run-on lines, calling the first 'Regular System' and the second 'Irregular System', and noting that the incidence of run-on lines is far higher in Shakespeare's later plays, as exemplified by The Tempest 2.1.107ff.: You cram these words into mine ears against The stomach of my sense. Would I had never Married my daughter there! . . . ]

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Observing only for the present that the advance in Shakespeare's artistic technic here indicated is always an advance in the direction of the Irregular System; that is, in the direction of Freedom, Largeness and Grace; let us now recur to the two passages under study. If we examine that from Midsummer Night's Dream, Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind; etc. we will find that three very striking particulars all connected with the end of each of these lines, call the ear's attention thereto in such a way as to re-enforce the end-stop in its effect, and to make the line division very prominent to the ear. These three particulars are: (1) The Rhyme, which concentrates the ear's attention upon the last word in every line; (2) the Strong Ending of each line, or important word capable of emphasis in which each line ends, giving a markedly different effect from that of weak-ending lines, or lines in which the last word is a particle like and, if, the, but, and the like, as This is a most majestic vision and Harmonious charmingly, from The Tempest [4.1.118ff.], where and at the end would be more likely to deceive, than to advise, the ear as to the true ending of the line; and (3) the Single Ending or ending in one verse-sound, as opposed to those 'Double Ending,' or 'Feminine Ending' lines, which end in two syllables (to be pronounced in the time of one), like, for example, the second line in the passage first given from The Tempest, The stomach of my sense. Would I had never, [2.1.108] the line being complete at the syllable 'nev-,' or like the following, also from The Tempest, where the double ending, instead of being two syllables of one word ('Feminine Ending') is two words, Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him, [3.2.87] a line complete at the word 'with,' and preserving its rhythmic structure only through the utterance of the two verse-sounds 'with him' in the same time as one.1 . . . [He examines the three particulars in relation to the early and late play, then observes that by these tests Hamlet falls between the other two. He further suggests that it would be fruitful to construct a 'Table of Abnormal Rhythmic Accents in Shakespeare'.] . . . [W]e may now profitably close this part of our investigation by ascending to a point of view from which what were apparently three lines of inquiry - the moral, the historical, the metrical — really resolve themselves into one and place the whole matter before us in a holy and reasonable light. For . . . a great artist, in growing, grows as a whole, and not by parts nor into monstrosities; as he grows (1) in his years (historically), he grows (2) in his grasp of the facts of Life (morally), and (3) in his grasp of the facts of Art (in Shakespeare's case, 'metrically,'2 tho this is a poor term). One of these advances may be said to imply the

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other, with a great artist; it is, indeed, by virtue of this wholeness in growth that the great artist is great. . . . For, closely examined, there is a point where what is called the 'mere technic' of the artist merges into and becomes wholly indistinguishable from his morality. [Knowledge of Pure Beauty prevents him from ugly acts, whether moral or artistic. Moreover,] the power of grasping the contradictory details of our physical and spiritual life and of arranging these contradictions into a tolerable proportion . . . , this power is at bottom the same with that which seizes upon the similar details of verse-structure, which clearly recognizes the Contradiction of what is herein called the Regular System as opposed to the Irregular System, and which instead of absurdly fighting the fact of their opposition finds it to be the very basis of music and employs it to the purposes of formal poetry. To make a moral music out of the antagonistic facts of life; to make a verse music out of the antagonistic facts of letter-sounds; this is so far one problem as that, when we have passed those limits to which mere cleverness can reach in anything and beyond which lies the domain of genius and of art, it may fairly be said that a man with an original gift of poetic expression would surely grow in his faculties for both as if both implied one faculty. It seems at any rate clear . . . that, with Shakespeare, the larger the music of his verse, the larger became the music of his life, and vice versa. And, finally, these plays, possessing these peculiar relations to Shakespeare's entire growth, are carried to a plane of unique interest by the relations they reveal to each other. . . . Observe, then, that in all our three plays we have certain views of man in his relations (1) to Nature, (2) to his Fellow-man, and (3) to Art. (1) In A Midsummer Night's Dream Nature is a capricious Puck, which is man's superior and plays with him; in Hamlet, it is a firm purposed ghost, which is still man's superior, but instead of playing with him, drives him on to terrible ends; in The Tempest it is a servant, Ariel, and man has become lord of it, for benevolent ends. (2) In the Midsummer Night's Dream man's Fellow man is the object of Capricious Love or Gentle Satire; in Hamlet he is the object of Revenge; in The Tempest he is the object of Forgiveness. (3) All have a play-within-the-play, or anti-masque; that is, a work of art as one of the factors of the plot. In the Midsummer Night's Dream this anti-masque is Bottom's Burlesque; in Hamlet it is Hamlet's trap to catch the king's conscience; in The Tempest it is Prospero's art, employed for the delight of two young lovers. These inter-relations exist, of course, by no intent, but solely through the wholeness of Shakespeare's life. Given a play to write, he wrote it from the deepest of his then state of mind. Thus every play not only beats, like the bosom of a human being, but beats with the rate of rhythm belonging to the stage of growth at which it was written. (September 17, 1891, 1371-2) III. [The next section deals with detailed parallels between the Chaucerian and Shakespearean works in each pair. (September 24, 1891, 1401-2)]

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64 Barrett Wendell, a true work of art 1894

From William Shakespeare. A Study in Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1894). Barrett Wendell (1855-1921) graduated from Harvard in 1877, and in 1880 was hired by a former English professor to help teach English composition; thus began his long and successful academic career at Harvard. His chief literary studies were Cotton Mather (1891), his book on Shakespeare (1894), A Literary History of America (1900), the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, published as Hie Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature (1904), and The Traditions of European Literature, from Homer to Dante (1920). He was admired as a sympathetic and thorough scholar, a popular teacher, and an educator.

[From Chapter VII, Part II: 1A Midsummer Night's Dream'] . . . While it is undoubtedly true that, over and over again, Shakespeare stopped far short of such laborious finish as makes the plays of Jonson, whatever else, so admirably conscientious, it is equally true that when Shakespeare chose to take pains his technical workmanship was as artistic as his imaginative impulse. Few works in any literature possess more artistic unity than the Midsummer Night's Dream, few reveal on study more of that mastery whose art is so fine as to seem artless. Alike in spirit and in form, then, — in motive and in technical detail, — this play is a true work of art; its inherent beauty is the chief thing to realize, to appreciate, to care for. If we would understand why the Midsummer Night's Dream seems to belong in Shakespeare's work where we have placed itj1! however, we must for a while neglect this prime duty of enjoyment, and consider the play minutely, attending first to the materials of which it is made, and then to the way in which it handles them. Putting aside, as needless for our purpose, those various and scattered sources which are believed peculiarly its own, we may conveniently recall the fact that in the three comedies already considered we found certain devices and situations which seemed notably effective.2 In Love's Labour's Lost, among other matters, we noted a fresh, open-air atmosphere, a burlesque play performed by characters whose rudeness and eccentricity was in broadly comic contrast to the culture of their audience, and the perennially amusing confusion of identity. In that case, however, the confusion was reached by the unplausible device of masking. A stage mask, covering only the upper features, must leave the mouth free; consequently, it does not transform the

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wearer, and such blunders as the King's or Biron's require an audience conventionally to accept a disguise which really is none. Confusion of identity, however, thus found effective even when not plausible, was repeated and elaborately developed in the Comedy of Errors. Here, again, though, it lacked plausibility; the audience was asked to accept a degree of personal likeness attainable on the stage only by means of such masks as were worn by the Roman actors for whom the plot was originally made. To hasten on, we remarked, among other effective traits in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the love-inspired treason of Proteus, and his instantaneous shifts of affection; though effective, however, these were neither plausible nor sympathetic. To go no further, here are a number of stage devices, already used experimentally by Shakespeare with probable success, but never in a way which could give either writer, spectator, or reader serious artistic satisfaction. In the Midsummer Night's Dream all these are reproduced, but none experimentally. Each has its place in a composition so complete that at sensitive moments one shrinks from dissecting it; and all are plausible. The scene is laid in a mythical world far enough from reality to make the wood-notes seem that of its inevitable atmosphere. The situation of the burlesque play is reproduced with a firmer hand; and this time the burlesque interlude has a plot. . . . The love treason is transferred from a tolerably cool man to an emotionally overwrought girl; thereby, while retaining all its theatrical effect, it becomes at once far less deliberate and far more sympathetic.3 While Proteus tells Valentine's secret to the Duke, too, Helena tells Hermia's only to her lover. Finally, both confusion of identity and protean changes of affection4 are made plausible, like very dreams themselves, by bodily transference to a dream-world, where the fairies of English folk-lore play endless tricks with mortals and \vith one another, making their fellow-beings fantastically their sport. These instances are enough to show why we may reasonably call this play, in Shakespeare's development, a first declaration of artistic consciousness. A confusion of pleasant motives, already used in unsatisfactory form, may be guessed to have gathered in his mind. Whoever has had a gleam of artistic experience — such as the haunting line, for example, which belongs inevitably in some unwritten sonnet — knows that such spirits as these can be laid only by expression. There need be no didactic purpose here; in one sense there need hardly be purpose at all. If we imagine that the Shakespeare we have already defined was thus possessed by creative impulse, we imagine enough to account for the Midsummer Night's Dream. So much for the artistic motive of the play. Turning to the technical art by which this is made manifest, we may conveniently consider it in the three aspects which we have earlier seen to be essential to any narrative or dramatic composition: plot, character, and atmosphere, or background. To a modern reader, the plot of the Midsummer Night's Dream seems to concern itself chiefly with the doings of the fairies, who are so constantly charming, and of the clowns, who are so constantly amusing. Even to-day, however, a sight of the play on the stage reveals at once that, so far as plot is concerned, these matters are accessory; that the real centre of the plot is the love-story of the four Athenians. The artistic purpose of all the rest is simply to make this plausible. With this purpose, the play begins with a statement of the condition of affairs in the romantic Athens of Theseus,

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- not a real world, but a world no further removed from reality than plenty of others which we are accustomed conventionally to accept on the stage. Thence, and not from the actuality of real life, we proceed through the extravagant buffoonery of the clowns — the most grotesque of human beings, but still grotesquely human — to the dreamland of the fairies. This dreamland, after all, is little further removed from the romantic introductory Athens of Theseus than that Athens itself was from the world where it found us. Once in dreamland, the fantastic extravagances of the main plot - in their earlier forms so far from credibility - are kept constantly plausible by the superhuman agencies which direct them; and these in turn are kept plausible by the incessant intermingling and contrast "with the fairies of the equally extravagant, but still fundamentally human clowns. Then, after some three acts of this, the morning horns of Theseus break the dream; the fairies vanish; we come back to our own world through the romantic Athens of Theseus, with which we began. The fifth act recapitulates, almost musically; the final scene of the fairies is not a part of the action, but an epilogue, a convention frequent in the Elizabethan theatre. The fairy scenes, then, - the accessories by means of which the main plot is made artistically plausible , - are themselves made plausible first by deliberate removal from real life; and secondly by deliberate contrast with a phase of real life hardly less extravagant than they. The constructive art here shown is admirable. At first, too, this constructive art seems original. On consideration, however, it proves to be only an adaptation of a convention common on the Elizabethan stage. Though among Shakespeare's works an Induction is found only in the Taming of the Shrew, Inductions — which made the main action a play within a play — were very frequent throughout the early drama. . . . Here it is enough to point out that the first act of the Midsummer Night's Dream is, essentially, a very skilful development of the conventional Induction. The plot of the Midsummer Night's Dream, then, is far superior to anything we have met before. When we come to the characters we find a state of things less favorable to our notion that the play should be placed here in Shakespeare's artistic development. Certainly less individual than those of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, these characters seem almost less so than those of Love's Labour's Lost. Taken by themselves, for example, the Athenians of the court of Theseus seem hardly more individual than the Ephesians of the Comedy of Errors. Considered not by themselves, however, but rather as one of three clearly defined groups, their aspect changes; they stand in marked and strongly dramatic contrast to two other groups, as distinct from one another as from the Athenian courtiers, - the clowns and the fairies. In answer, then, to those critics who, largely on the score of individualized character, would place the Midsummer Night's Dream earlier than the Two Gentlemen of Verona, we may say that, like the other plays considered in the last chapter, the latter is intrinsically experimental, while the former is intrinsically artistic; and that three broadly generalized groups of character, whose mutual relations are skilfully adjusted, fit the general artistic motive of the Midsummer Night's Dream far better than could more individual characters whose individuality should make them a bit unmanageable. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona, furthermore, the individual touches were rather matters of experimental detail than of creative imagination. The contrast defines a general truth: Because a

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writer can individualize character, it does not follow that he can master and manage his own individual creatures. In the perfectly manageable vagueness of character here, then, we have fresh evidence of how careful Shakespeare's art may have been. As we have seen, if our chronology be not all wrong, his power developed slowly. Here, then, we may at least guess that the state of things shows him in a truly artistic mood, too wise even to attempt things at all beyond his certain power. In one scene, though, the juvenility of character seems too great for any such explanation; this is in the child-like squabble between Hermia and Helena.5 On the stage, to be sure, it is still funny; but the fun is crude: grown girls, we feel, never squabble quite in this way. Properly to appreciate the scene, we must remember the circumstances for which it was written: there were no female actors, — a fact which goes far to atone for the coarseness of female character common throughout the lesser Elizabethan drama; Helena was written to be played by a big boy, Hermia by a small one. If we be inclined to wander in our delight with the atmosphere of the Midsummer Night's Dream, a fact like this should recall us to ourselves. Dainty as its atmosphere is, specific too as distinguished from any other in literature, the play itself could never have seemed to its writer only the beautiful poem which it chiefly seems to us. He made it for living actors, — men and boys. The fairy atmosphere was to be conveyed to his audience not only by the lovely lines which remain as fresh as ever, but by the bodily presence of child-actors, whose actual forms should revive among the spectators the familiar old fancies of the little people. Such fancies, far from what arise nowadays as we contemplate in the Midsummer Night's Dream the stout legs of a middle-aged ballet, could be more than suggested on the stage of Shakespeare's time. It was a stage whose conventions allowed Macbeth and Banquo, fifteen years later, to make their entrance on wicker hobby-horses, with dangling false legs;6 whose conventions permitted Cleopatra to wear laced stays, which she orders cut in a moment of agitation.7 On such a stage, the pink limbs of chubby children — and the lesser fairies who serve Bottom have no lines which might not be taught a child of three or four8 - might have seemed almost actually the fairy fancies which remain the folk-lore of Northern Europe. . . . Our study has compelled us to analyze in this play something besides its beauty. If we would understand Shakespeare, however, its beauty, not its anatomy, is what we must think of first, last, and always. (106-115)

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65 Horace Howard Furness, the duration of the action 1895

From A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by Horace Howard Fumess (Philadelphia, 1895). Horace Howard Furness (1833-1912) graduated from Harvard in 1854 and returned to his home in Philadelphia to become a lawyer in 1859. In 1866 he began his life work, sixteen volumes of the New Variorum Shakespeare (Hamlet occupies two volumes). The first play, Romeo and Juliet, appeared in 1871, and the fifteenth, Cymbeline, posthumously in 1913. His editions drew praise for their scholarship, and also for their wit, sense, and geniality. In his later life Furness received honorary degrees from such Universities as Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge.

[From the 'Preface'] [In his consideration of the Duration of the Action Furness asks why the play begins four days before the central action, the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, and gives his answer.] . . . We can, in a case like this, but humbly suggest that as a most momentous issue was presented to Hermia, either of being put to death, or else to wed Demetrius, or to abjure for ever the society of men, Shakespeare may have thought that in such most grave questions the tender Athenian maid was entitled to at least as much grace as is accorded to common criminals; to give her less would have savoured of needless harshness and tyranny on the part of Theseus, and would have been unbecoming to his joyous marriage mood. Therefore to Hermia is given three full days to pause, and on the fourth, the sealing day 'twixt Theseus and Hippolyta, her choice must be announced. Three days are surely enough wherein a young girl can make up her mind; our sense of justice is satisfied; a dramatic reason intimated for opening the play so long before the main action; and the 'four happy days' [1.1.2] of Theseus are justified. . . . [He then sets out the problem, that the four days and nights mentioned at the beginning do not seem to correspond to the actual time of the play, and proceeds to give his solution.] Grant that the play opens on Monday, Hippolyta's four nights are then, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night. Why does Lysander

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propose to elope with Hermia 'to-morrow night' [1.1.164], and Hermia agree to meet him' morrow deep midnight' [1.1.223]? One would think that not only a lover's haste but a wise prudence would counsel flight that very night. Why need we be told with so much emphasis that the Clowns' rehearsal was to be held 'to-morrow night' [1.2.100ff.]? Is it not that both by the specified time of the elopement and by the specified time of the rehearsal we are to be made conscious that Monday night is to be eliminated? If so, there will then remain but three nights to be accounted for before the wedding day, and these three nights are to be made to seem as only one. If while this long night is brooding over the lovers we can be made to see two separate dawns, the third dawn will be May day and the task will be done. We must see Wednesday's dawn, Thursday's dawn, and on Friday morning early Theseus's horns must wake the sleepers. It is not to be expected that these dawns and the days following them will be proclaimed in set terms. That would mar the impression of one continuous night. They will not be obtruded on us. They will be intimated by swift, fleeting allusions which induce the belief almost insensibly that a new dawn has arisen. To be thoroughly receptive of these impressions we must look at the scene through the eyes of Shakespeare's audience, which beholds, in the full light of an afternoon, a stage with no footlights or side-lights to be darkened to represent night, but where daylight is the rule; night, be it remembered, is to be assumed only when we are told to assume it. The Second Act opens in the wood where Lysander and Hermia were to meet at 'deep midnight' [1.1.223]; they have started on their journey to Lysander's aunt, and have already wandered so long and so far that Demetrius and Helena cannot find them, and they decide to 'tarry for the comfort of the day' [2.2.38]. This prepares us for a dawn near at hand. They must have wandered many a weary mile and hour since midnight. Oberon sends for the magic flower, and is strict in his commands to Puck after anointingDemetrius's eyes to meet him 'ere the first cock crow' [2A.267]. Again an allusion to dawn, which must be close at hand or the command would be superfluous. Puck wanders 'through the forest' [2.2.66] in a vain search for the lovers. This must have taken some time, and the dawn is coming closer. Puck finds the lovers at last, chants his charm as he anoints, by mistake, Lysander's eyes, and then hurries off with 'I must now to Oberon' [2.2.83]. We feel the necessity for his haste, the dawn is upon him and the cock about to crow. To say that these allusions are purposeless is to believe that Shakespeare wrote haphazard, which he may believe who lists. This dawn, then, whose streaks we see lacing the severing clouds, is that of Wednesday morning. We need but one more dawn, that of Thursday, before we hear the horns of Theseus. Lest, however, this impression of a new day be too emphatic, Shakespeare artfully closes the Act with the undertone of night by showing us Hermia waking up after her desertion by Lysander. . . . The Third Act begins with the crew of rude mechanicals at their rehearsal. If we were to stop to think while the play is going on before us, we should remember that rightfully this rehearsal is on Tuesday night; but we have watched the events of that night which occurred long after midnight; we have seen a new day dawn; and this is a new Act. Our consciousness tells us that it is Wednesday. Moreover, who of

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us ever imagines that this rehearsal is at night? As though for the very purpose of dispelling such a thought, Snout asks if the moon shines the night of the play, which is only two or three nights off. Would such a question have occurred to him if they had then been acting by moonlight? Remember, on Shakespeare's open-air stage we must assume daylight unless we are told that it is night. Though we assume daylight here at the rehearsal, we are again gently reminded toward the close of the scene, as though at the end of the day, that the moon looks with a watery eye upon Titania and her horrid love. The next scene is night, Wednesday night, and all four lovers are still in the fierce vexation of the dream through which we have followed them continuously, and yet we are conscious, we scarcely know how, that outside in the world a day has slipped by. Did we not see Bottom and all of them in broad daylight? Lysander and Demetrius exeunt to fight their duel; Hermia and Helena depart, and again a dawn is so near that darkness can be prolonged, and the starry welkin covered, only by Oberon's magic 'fog as black as Acheron' [3.2.357], and over the brows of the rivals death-counterfeiting sleep can creep only by Puck's art. So near is day at hand that this art must be plied with haste, 'for night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,/ And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger' [3.2.379ff.]. Here we have a second dawn, the dawn of Thursday morning. All four lovers are in the deepest slumber — a slumber 'more dead than common sleep' [4.1.81fF.], induced by magic. And the First Folio tells us explicitly before the Fourth Act opens that' They sleepe all the Act' [3.2.463]. m Wednesday night has passed, and this Act, the Fourth, through which they sleep, befalls on Thursday, after the dawn announced by Aurora's harbinger has broadened into day. Surely it is only on a midsummer noon that we can picture Titania on a bed of flowers, coying Bottom's amiable cheeks and kissing his fair large ears. Never could Bottom even, with or without the ass's nowl, have thought of sending Cavalery Cobweb to kill a red-nipt humble-bee on the top of a thistle at night, when not a bee is abroad. It must be high noon. But Bottom takes his nap with Titania's arms wound round him; the afternoon wanes; Titania is awakened and disenchanted; she and Oberon take hands and rock the ground whereon the lovers still are lying, and then, as though to settle every doubt, and to stamp, at the close, every impression ineffaceably that we have reached Thursday night, Oberon tells his Queen that they will dance in Duke Theseus's house 'to-morrow midnight' [4.1.88]. But before the Fairy King and Queen trip away, Puck hears the morning lark, the herald of Friday's dawn, and almost mingling with the song we catch the notes of hunting horns. So the scene closes, with the mindful stage-direction that the Sleepers Lye still [4.1.102].PI It was not a mere pretty conceit that led Shakespeare to lull these sleepers with fairy music and to rock the ground; this sleep was thus charmed and made 'more dead / Than common sleep' [4.1.81ff] to reconcile us to the long night of Thursday, until early on Friday morning the horns of Theseus's foresters could be heard. The horns are heard; the sleepers 'all start up' [4.1.138]; it is Friday, the first of May, and the day when Hermia is to give answer of her choice. The wheel has come full circle. We have watched three days dawn since the lovers stole forth into the wood last night, and four days since we first saw Theseus and

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Hippolyta yesterday. The lovers have quarrelled, and slept not through one night, but three nights, and these three nights have been one night. Theseus's four days are all right, we have seen them all; Hippolyta's four nights are all right, we have seen them all. (xxviii-xxxii)

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66 Katharine Lee Bates, life and art 1895

From Shakespeare's Comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited with Introduction and Notes by Katharine Lee Bates, in The Student's Series of English Classics (Boston, 1895). Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) was a teacher, scholar, poet. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1880, she taught high school Greek, Latin, English and mathematics before returning to Wellesley as an instructor in 1885, where during her forty-year tenure she established a large and successful English department. Her most highly praised scholarly work consists of The English Religious Drama (New York & London, 1893) and an edition of two of Thomas Heywood's plays (Boston, 1917), both products of studies undertaken at Oxford in 1891. Besides poetry and children's books, she published many editions of classics of English and American literature, including three of Shakespeare's comedies. She shows herself thoroughly versed in current criticism, in this volume acknowledging a special debt to Furness, and characteristically seeks to engage interest by a personalized and anecdotal method. She is best remembered in the United States as author of the anthem 'America the Beautiful'.

[From 'Introduction. II. Sources'] For the true sources of the poem we must look to Stratford, London, and a young man's heart. It was the lad from the Midlands who knew so well 'a bank where the wild thyme blows' [2A.249]. . . . It was the country-bred boy who remembered in the city din how tuneable is 'lark to shepherd's ear, / When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear' [1.1.184ff.]. . . . Hermia and Helena, for all their palace setting, have the vigorous limbs and untutored manners of lower-class country-girls - such 'maidens of the villagery' [2.1.35] as Will Shakespeare would often have seen busy over their milk-pans, and might sometime have surprised quarrelling with ready nails and fists. Surely if Anne Hathaway courted him as Helena courted Demetrius, he showed himself 'lord of more true gentleness' [2.2.132] than the Athenian. The 'hempen homespuns' [3.1.77] swaggered in Warwickshire; and Shakespeare may have played the hidden Puck at one of their rehearsals. . . . But it was in London that he found his Theseus, the man of rank and of career, half

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contemptuous of poetry, a careless patron of the stage, preferring farce to tragedy or to heroics, and yet so rich and strong and grand a nature that the young Shakespeare bowed his heart before it in something more like hero-worship than the dramas show again. . . . Hippolyta is a court lady, but Shakespeare looks upon her from a distance. As in Love's Labour's Lost, A Comedy of Errors, and Two Gentlemen of Verona, he does not yet understand a noble woman's heart. Hippolyta has dignity of silence, grace of speech, but little ardor, mirth, or power of personality. Theseus is too evidently her conqueror. Even in trifles the man must have his way, and the woman must accept his assurance that she likes it better than her own. Shakespeare's experience in the city theatres doubtless lent edge to his satire upon the all-capable, irrepressible Bottom, and the realistic devices of the stage. Many a touch of burlesque in his 'most lamentable comedy' [1.2.1 Iff.] was appreciated to the full by fellow-actors and fellow-playwrights, where now, with reference-books and commentaries spread like a sea before us, we fish patiently for the jest. The very excellence of his portraiture of the rural life he had left testifies to the wider life and broader vision into which he had entered. If Stratford gave him material, London gave him art. (6-10) [From 'Introduction. IV. Treatment'] [After reviewing some earlier critical summations, she cites Wendell [No. 64 above] as having observed that the characterization of the play is based on groups rather than individuals.] Shakespeare might be said to here anticipate Wagner in giving to each of these groups a musical motive of its own. The strain belonging to Theseus and Hippolyta is deep and royal. Their blank verse, sonorous and most skilfully modulated, is in the richest tone of Shakespeare's second period. . . . 'Sweet Bully Bottom' [4.2.19] and his 'barren sort' [3.2.13] enter to the accompaniment of'the tongs and the bones' [4.1.29]. Over the distorted prose of their puzzle-headed conferences, and the preposterous verse of their 'palpable-gross play' [5.1.367] Shakespeare's fun runs riot. . . . The music that expresses the Athenian lovers has, in general, a dulcet quality; but here it is that we detect the uneven and often unsuccessful style of Shakespeare's very first comedies. There are scenes, notably the good-night duet of Hermia and Lysander, as sweet, almost, as the first delicious converse of Romeo and Juliet at the Capulet festival; but over the page one encounters verse so feeble and so thin, that the wonder grows how the poet of hero-chant and fairy-roundelay could ever have suffered these mawkish lines to stand. * * * The fairy note, as we catch it again and again through the harmonies of the play, 'Music, ho! music, such as charmeth sleep!' [4.1.83] is the purest lyricism. The brief trochaics have the very trip of'dances and delight' [2.1.254]. It is a music heard 'for the third part of a minute' [2.2.2] between Philomel and 'the morning lark' [4.1.94],

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— a music, eerie and jocund, that is gone with the reddening of the east, 'Following darkness like a dream' [5.1.386], but leaving behind it for the weary hearts of mortals a blithe and fragrant waking to a perennial 'morn of May' [1.1.167]. (19-24)

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67 George Bernard Shaw, Mr. Daly and the idea of titivation 1895

From Toujours Daly', The Saturday Review, 80 (13 July 1895), 43-4. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), exponent of pugilism, vegetarian, Fabian socialist, novelist, critic, journalist, author of over fifty plays, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925), was born in Dublin. He left school at fifteen to take a job, then moved to London in 1876 to join his mother and sister. Between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five unsuccessful novels, the best of which is Cashel Byron's Profession (first published serially in 1884 in a socialist magazine called Today), about a prizefighter. During the 1880s he wrote art, literary, music, and dramatic criticism for various journals, and began playwriting. He was music critic for The Star from 1888 to 1890, then for The World from 1890 to 1894. He was drama critic of The Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898 and wrote 151 weekly reviews, many of which (including the selection given below) were reprinted in Dramatic Opinions and Essays by G. Bernard Shaw (2 vols, New York, 1906), and all of which were collected in Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols, London, 1931; New York, 1931).

The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been succeeded at Daly's Theatre by A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mr. DalyW is in great form. In my last article I was rash enough to hint that he had not quite realized what could be done with electric lighting on the stage. He triumphantly answers me by fitting up all his fairies with portable batteries and incandescent lights, which they switch on and off from time to time, like children with a new toy. He has trained Miss Lillian Swaint2] in the part of Puck until it is safe to say that she does not take one step, strike one attitude, or modify her voice by a single inflexion that is not violently, wantonly, and ridiculously wrong and absurd. Instead of being mercurial, she poses academically, like a cheap Italian statuette; instead of being impish and childish, she is elegant and affected; she laughs a solemn, measured laugh, like a heavy German Zamieljt3! she announces her ability to girdle the earth in forty minutes in the attitude of a professional skater, and then begins the journey awkwardly in a swing, which takes her in the opposite direction to that in which she indicated her intention of going: in short, she illustrates every folly and superstition that still clings round what Mr. Daly no doubt calls 'the legitimate.' Another stroke of his is to make Oberon a woman. It must not be supposed that he

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does this solely because it is wrong, though there is no other reason apparent. He does it partly because he was brought up to do such things, and partly because they seem to him to be a tribute to Shakespeare's greatness, which, being uncommon, ought not to be interpreted according to the dictates of common sense. A female Oberon and a Puck who behaves like a page-boy earnestly training himself for the post of footman recommend themselves to him because they totally destroy the naturalness of the representation,and so accord with his conception of the Shakespearean drama as the most artificial of all forms of stage entertainment. That is how you find out the man who is not an artist. Verse, music, the beauties of dress, gesture, and movement are to him interesting aberrations instead of being the natural expression which human feeling seeks at a certain degree of delicacy and intensity. He regards art as a quaint and costly ring in the nose of Nature. I am loth to say that Mr. Daly is such a man; but after studying all his Shakespearean revivals with the thirstiest desire to find as much art as possible in them, I must mournfully confess that the only idea I can see in them is the idea of titivation. As to his slaughterings of the text,M how can one help feeling them acutely in a play like A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Shakespeare, having to bring Nature in its most enchanting aspect before an audience without the help of theatrical scenery, used all his power of description and expression in verse with such effect that the utmost any scene-painter can hope for is to produce a picture that shall not bitterly disappoint the spectator who has read the play beforehand? Mr. Daly is, I should say, one of those people who are unable to conceive that there could have been any illusion at all about the play before scenery was introduced. He certainly has no suspicion of the fact that every accessory he employs is brought in at the deadliest risk of destroying the magic spell woven by the poet. He swings Puck away on a clumsy trapeze with a ridiculous clash of the cymbals in the orchestra, in the fullest belief that he is thereby completing instead of destroying the effect of Puck's lines. His 'panoramic illusion of the passage of Theseus's barge to Athens' is more absurd than anything that occurs in the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in the last act. The stage management blunders again and again through feeble imaginative realization of the circumstances of the drama. In the first act it should be clear to any stage manager that Lysander's speech, beginning 'I am, my lord, as well derived as he' [1.1.99], should be spoken privately and not publicly to Theseus. In the rehearsal scene in the wood, Titania should not be conspicuously exhibited under a limelight in the very centre of the stage, where the clowns have, in defiance of all common sanity, to pretend not to see her. We are expected, no doubt, to assume that she is invisible because she is a fairy, though Bottom's conversation with her when she wakes and addresses him flatly contradicts that hypothesis. In the fourth act, Theseus has to enter from his barge down a bank, picking his way through the sleeping Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena. The four lions in Trafalgar Square are not more conspicuous and unoverlookable than these four figures are. Yet Theseus has to make all his hunting speeches in an impossible unconsciousness of them, and then to look at them amazedly and exclaim, 'But soft, what nymphs are these' [4.1.127]? as if he could in any extremity of absence of mind have missed seeing them all along. Most of these absurdities are part of a systematic policy of

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sacrificing the credibility of the play to the chance of exhibiting an effective 'living picture.' I very soon gave up the attempt to keep a record of the outrages practised by Mr. Daly on the text. Everyone knows the lines: I swear to thee by Cupid's strongest bow, By his best arrow with the golden head, By the simplicity of Venus' doves, By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves, &c. [1.1.169ff.] Mr. Daly's powerful mind perceived at a glance that the second and third lines are superfluous, as their omission does not destroy the sense of the passage. He accordingly omitted them. In the same scene, Shakespeare makes the two star-crossed lovers speak in alternate lines with an effect which sets the whole scene throbbing with their absorption in one another: [Quotes 1.1.134-42: 'The course of true love. . . .']. With a Hermia who knew how to breathe out these parentheses, the duet would be an exquisite one; but Mr. Daly, shocked, as an American and an Irishman, at a young lady using such an expression as 'Oh hell!' [1.1.140] cuts out the whole antiphony, and leaves Lysander to deliver a long lecture without interruption from the lady. At such moments, the episode of the ass's head rises to the dignity of allegory. From any other manager I should accept the excuse that the effects of verse for which I am pleading require a virtuosity of delivery on the part of the actor which is practically not to be had at present. But Mr. Daly has Miss RehanJ5! who is specially famous for just this virtuosity of speech; and yet her lines are treated just as the others are. The fact is, beautiful elocution is rare because the managers have no ears. The play, though of course very poorly spoken in comparison with how it ought to be spoken, is tolerably acted. Mr. George Clarke,!6! clad in the armour of Alcibiades and the red silk gown of Charley's Auntf-7\ articulates most industriously, and waves his arms and flexes his wrists in strict accordance, not for a moment with the poetry, but with those laws of dramatic elocution and gesture which veteran actors are always willing to impart to novices at a reasonable price per dozen lessons. Mr. Lewist8! as Bottom is not as funny as his part, whereas in modern plays he is always funnier than his part. He seemed to me to miss the stolid, obstinate, self-sufficient temperament of Bottom altogether. There is a definite conception of some particular sort of man at the back of all Shakespeare's characters. The quantity of fun to be got out of Bottom and Autolycus, for instance, is about the same; but underneath the fun there are two widely different persons, of types still extant and familiar. Mr. Lewis would be as funny in Autolycus as he is in Bottom; but he would be exactly the same man in both parts. As to Miss Rehan, her scenes in the wood with Demetrius were very fine, although, in the passage where Hermia frightens her, she condescended to arrant clowning. Her treatment of Shakespearean verse is delightful after the mechanical intoning of Sarah Bernhardt.t9] She gives us beauty of tone, grace of measure, delicacy of articulation: in short, all the technical qualities of verse music, along

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with the rich feeling and fine intelligence without which those technical qualities would soon become monotonous. When she is at her best, the music melts in the caress of the emotion it expresses, and thus completes the conditions necessary for obtaining Shakespeare's effects in Shakespeare's way. When she is on the stage, the play asserts its full charm; and when she is gone, and the stage carpenters and the orchestra are doing their best to pull the entertainment through in Mr. Daly's way, down drops the whole affair into mild tedium. (43-4) [Shaw spends the final two pages lecturing Miss Rehan on how she must act and what parts she must play in the future, because she is growing old. Above all she must quit Mr. Daly.]

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68 Andrew Lang, remarks on the play and modern education 1895

From 'The Comedies of Shakespeare. With Illustrations by E. A. Abbey,M and comment by Andrew Lang. XIV.-MIDSUMMER-NIGHTS DREAM', Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 91, No. 543 (August, 1895), 327-38. Andrew Lang (1844-1912), classical scholar, poet, journalist, anthropologist, folk-lorist, historian, teller of myths and fairy tales, was educated at the universities of St. Andrew's, Glasgow, and Oxford. In 1868 he was elected to a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, but after a dangerous illness decided in 1875 to devote himself to journalism. He is remembered today chiefly as translator of Homer and Theocritus, and for the succession of books of fairy tales published under his name, but the wit, charm and breadth of knowledge of his numerous contributions to journals made him appear 'an erudite Puck'. He attacked the Baconians in Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown (London, 1912), and published fourteen articles on Shakespeare's comedies in Harper's between December 1889 and August 1895. His memory of his introduction to Shakespeare, before the age of six, is 'of a small boy reading the Midsummer Night's Dream by firelight in a room where candles were lit, and someone touched the piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. . . . The fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music and the firelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise . . .' (quoted by Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography [Leicester, 1946], pp. 57, 9).

There is no play more absolutely Shakespeare's own, in plot and invention, character and colour, than the Midsummer-Night's Dream. Here he is untrammelled by an earlier canvas, while the original of the story is not extant elsewhere, as far as the researches of the learned have discovered. Here he dwells free in a fairy world, and only copies men where grace is most courtly, as in Duke Theseus, or where nature is most frankly humorous, as in Snug and Quince and their goodly company. . . . The play is practically a tissue woven of three threads: the Athenian lovers at odds; the humorous rustics, and fairydom. Theseus and Hippolyta are but a kind of spectators on the stage. Of the three sets of characters, the lovers are the least amiable. A woman pursuing a man, as Helena persecutes Demetrius — 'Use me but

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as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me' [2.1.205] — is a spectacle equally unwelcome to men and women - 'Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase' [2.1.231]. So much of the lovers' talk is in rhymed verse, as in the author's early pieces, that, dulcet as the verse may be, we turn more readily to the wonderful style of Titania and Oberon, and to the fairy lyrics. Helena holds us most in the charming speech on friendship between girls: [Quotes 3.2.198-210,215-16: 'Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd. . . .']. Hermia, on the other hand, Though she be but little, she is fierce' [3.2.325], as little ladies not unusually are, and we can scarcely hold her in our sympathy. The magic of Puck's flower juice from that 'little western flower' [2.1.166] works almost too cruelly, and Hermia, unamiable even when unenchanted, when bewitched is but too odious. We fall in love, by contrast, with tall Helena: [Quotes 3.2.300-2: 'I was never curst. . . .'; 3.2.342-3: Your hands than mine are quicker. . . .']. Love's tricks are spiteful enough at all times, in all conscience, and do not need Puck to envenom them. We weary for the hour when 'every man should take his own' [3.2.459], though few can envy him whose own is Hermia. . . . The fairies 'in a wood near Athens' ^ are so magically beautiful that even a hardened folk-lorist reluctantly approaches them with his odious comparative science. These sprites are Shakespeare's own, and never elsewhere walked in wood and wold. [He concedes that the Greeks had fairies in nymphs and nereids, and that they can be found among the Romans, the Scottish and the French, and in Sanskrit and Slavonic literature. They may even be seen to this day.] In Mr. Leland's curious book on Tuscan superstitions^ we find many fauns, sportive, lustful forest folk, and, judging by their names, they have come down from Etruscan antiquity. All these are Pucks; and Puck is but a sportive faun, or brownie, that 'frights the maidens of the villagery,' 'misleads night-wanderers, laughing at their harm,' and upsets 'the oldest aunt' [2.1.35, 39, 51W]. Here Shakespeare has a genuine foundation for his elf, in popular belief. Brownies like Puck we read of in Scotland as early as 1520. They pelt people with flights of stones, they make knockings and noises, as they do among the Dyaks^ and other far-off foreign people. . . . Thus mediaeval fairies, in Scotland at least, were neighbours and feudatories of the dead, and thus spirits and fairies blend, the latter, as some deem, thus going back to their original. But there is none of this funereal colour about Shakespeare's elfin court, and no touch of the tomb in Oberon and Titania; and Puck is their court jester, 'a lob of spirits' [2.1.16], but not slow, like other 'lobs.' That Oberon should be jealous of Theseus, Titania of Hippolyta, 'the bouncing Amazon' [2.1.70], is a very quaint invention, to be squared with no mythology. As quaint, and to us barely intelligible, is the historical introduction of Mary Stuart as 'a mermaid on a dolphin's back' [2.1.150]. The learned argue on it, and it is true that, for Mary's sake, 'certain stars shot madly from their spheres' [2.1.153], but we can scarcely believe that the poet was thinking of the murdered Queen of Scots. The fair vestal, Queen Elizabeth, was, by 1594, a very mature vestal indeed, and, by Roman law, might have wedded if she pleased. More than thirty years earlier she had certainly not been 'fancy free' [2.1.164]. Was Elizabeth ever fancy free, or did her loves go deeper than fancy? But a truce to 'scandal about Queen Elizabeth,' always a tempting theme, and abundantly

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accessible. If Shakespeare chose to adulate a sour and dubious virginity, at least he 'turned all to favour and to prettiness' [Hamlet 4.5.189]. It is a splendid line, 'And the imperial vot'ress passed on' [2.1.163], albeit followed by a hackneyed one; and Cupid's fiery shaft, quenched in the cold juice of the western flower, gives the play a fairy motif that is all Shakespeare's own. That his fairies are little folk we learn from the snake's 'enamell'd skin, / Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in' [2.1.255-6]. Thus Shakespeare's fairies, to his fancy, are probably no statelier than Herrick's, which may not be represented on the stage. This makes Titania's infatuation for Bottom as comic as the scandal about Gulliver and the Queen of Lilliput.t6] But 'reason and love keep little company' [3.1.143-4], as Bottom very wisely says. . . . Bottom brings us to the third thread in the warp and woof of the play — the truly English and human thread. Theseus and his 'bouncing Amazon' [2.1.70] are of the blood of gods, and godlike is their speech. The fairies are all of air and fire and dew. But for Quince and his company, their bones were made in merry England before the populace found its life not worth living, before we had cheap science and polluted air in place of mirth and a moderate learning. When one thinks of the difference between popular life in Shakepeare's time, the spirit and temper of it, and popular life to-day, one is inclined to blaspheme science, education, the printing-press, 'progress,' and all their works. Nobody is a penny the better for them, as far as a happy life is concerned, and what else is worth considering? However, these things must be as they may. Bottom, being a weaver, has but an incomplete knowledge as to who Pyramus was. Shocking ignorance! But ask your neighbour at any dinner party, delicately find out whether he or she knows. Try the stout British matron, the young man who prattles of Ibsen, the young lady who is interested in the turf. The first will think that Pyramus was a Roman emperor or a Carthaginian general, the second may suggest a pre-Socratic philosopher, and the third wall be certain that Pyramus is not in the Cambridgeshire. That is the result of all our bluster about education; nobody (roughly speaking) knows anything worth knowing. . . . Observe in Bottom all the cabotin;W he will be both lion and lover, and do all the roaring. He is a born manager. No man can rehearse more 'obscenely and courageously' [1.2.107-8]. His theory of art, the entire absence of mechanical imitation, the frank statement by the lion as to his personal identity, may seem modern, may seem 'impressionist,' but it springs from goodness of heart. His request for the tongs and the bones, by way of fairy music, is democratic, as is right. . . . Mr. Pepys, as we know, thought the Midsummer-Night's Dream 'the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.'M Indeed, Mr. Pepys lived in another world than Shakespeare's, and perhaps the piece is too ethereal for the stage. But no mortal work, in the reading of it, brings us so near to our 'angel infancy,'!9! and so close to the gates of the lost Paradise of innocence. It is charged with no great burden of passion or of wisdom, save in the kind and wise words of Theseus on loyalty; it is all compact of mere beauty and friendly mirth; and, where all is marvellous, as in Shakespeare, contains a new miracle of its own, an imagination glad, gay, and tender, a new mood among the countless, the godlike moods of the greatest of human intellects. Thus reflecting, we think of another great intellect, Darwin's,

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and remembering how this philosopher lived to find Shakespeare intolerable and nauseously dull, we make an easy choice between knowledge and poetry. For wherein is a man advantaged if he discovers that we all grew out of protozoa, or whatever they were, and finds nauseous dullness in the Midsummer-Night's Dream? To this complexion may money-getting and a loose life bring Mr. Pepys, as the grinding of general laws out of piles of facts brought Mr. Darwin to a similar conclusion.t10! Perhaps civilization should lead, or must lead, to these wonderful results. If so, happy are we who were born to other things.

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69 Frederick Samuel Boas, Theseus, Bottom, and the Interlude 1896

From Shakespeare and His Predecessors (London, 1896). Frederick Samuel Boas (1862-1957) read classics and history at Oxford, and taught there till 1901, when he was appointed Professor of History and English Literature at Queen's College, Belfast. In 1905 he left Ireland to serve as inspector in English literature and history for the London County Council, a post he held till 1927. From 1922 to 1955 he edited The Year's Work in English Studies, and was a dedicated member and sometime President of the English Association. Though he published over thirty books and editions, most of them dealing with Renaissance drama, his best known work was his first, Shakespeare and his Predecessors, published in 1896, with many subsequent reprintings.

[From Chapter IX: 'Shakespeare's Poems. The Early Period of Comedy'] . . . Theseus, whose marriage with Hippolyta forms the setting of the story, is no Athenian 'duke,' but a great Tudor noble. He is a brave soldier, who has wooed his bride with his sword, and, strenuous even in his pleasures, he is up with the dawn on May-morning, and out in the woods, that his love may hear the music of his hounds, 'matched in mouth like bells' [4.1.123], as they are uncoupled for the hunt. He is a true Tudor lord also in his taste for the drama, as shown in his request for masques and dances wherewith to celebrate his marriage. He exhibits the gracious spirit common to all Shakespeare's leaders of men in choosing, against the advice of his Master of the Revels, the entertainment prepared by Bottom and his fellows: [Quotes 5.1.81-3: 'I will hear that play. . . .']; and though tickled by the absurdities of the performance, he checks more than once the petulant criticisms of Hippolyta, and assures the actors at the close, with a courteous double-entendre, that their play has been Very notably discharged' [5.1.360fF.]. But it has been urged that Theseus shows the limitations of nature which are found in Shakespeare's men of action, t1! Though dramatic performances serve to while away the time, even at their best they are to him 'but shadows' [5.1.211], and it is he who dismisses the tale of what the lovers have experienced in the wood as 'fairy toys' [5.1.3], and is thus led on to the famous declaration that 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact' [5.1.7ff.]. Only the practical common-sense Theseus, it has been said,

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would think of comparing the poet or lover to the lunatic, and Shakespeare, by putting such words into his mouth, shows by a side-stroke that the man of action fails to appreciate the idealist nature. But such an inference from the passage is hazardous: there is a sense in which Theseus's statement is true, for the artist and the lover do collide, like the madman, with what 'cool reason' [5.1.6] chooses to term the realities of life. The eloquent ring of the words is scarcely suggestive of dramatic irony, while the description of the poet's pen as giving to 'airy nothing a local habitation and a name' [5.1.16ff.], applies with curious exactness to Shakespeare's own method in A Midsummer Night's Dream. . . . [He describes the troubles of the four lovers, the magic aid of Puck and Oberon, the wonders of fairy land, and then the contrasting crew of mechanicals.] In designedly aggressive contrast to the dwellers in the shadow world is the crew of hempen homespuns headed by sweet bully Bottom. Among the many forms of genius there is to be reckoned the asinine variety, which wins for a man the cordial recognition of his supremacy among fools, and of this Bottom is a choice type. In the preparation of the Interlude in honour of the Duke's marriage, though Quince is nominally the manager, Bottom, through the force of his commanding personality, is throughout the directing spirit. His brother craftsmen have some doubts about their qualifications for heroic roles, but this protean actor and critic is ready for any and every part, from lion to lady, and is by universal consent selected as jeune premier of the company in the character of Pyramus, 'a most lovely gentleman-like man' [1.2.87fF.]. Bereft of his services, the comedy, it is admitted on all hands, cannot go forward: 'it is not possible: you have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he' [4.2.7fF.]. Fostered by such hero-worship, Bottom's egregious self-complacency develops to the point where his metamorphosis at the hands of Puck seems merely an exquisitely fitting climax to a natural process of evolution. And even when thus 'translated' [3.1.119], he retains his versatile faculty of adapting himself to any part; the amorous advances of Titania in no wise disturb his equanimity, and he is quite at ease with Peaseblossom and Cobweb. A sublime self-satisfaction may triumph in situations where the most delicate tact or the most sympathetic intelligence would be nonplussed. But Shakespeare, in introducing his crew of patches into his fairy drama, had an aim beyond satirizing fussy egotism or securing an effect of broad comic relief. It is a peculiarity of his dramatic method to produce variations upon a single theme in the different portions of a play. Love's Labour's Lost is an instance of this, and A Midsummer Night's Dream is a further illustration, though of a less obvious kind. For in the rehearsal and setting forth of their comedy, Bottom and his friends enter a debatable domain, which, like that of the fairies, hovers round the solid work-a-day world, and yet is not of it. There is a point of view from which life may be regarded as the reality of which art, and in especial dramatic art, is the 'shadow' [5.1.211], the very word used by Theseus in relation to the workmen's play. Thus in their grotesque devices and makeshifts these rude mechanicals are really facing the question of the relation of shadow to substance, the immemorial question of realism in art and on the stage. The classical maxim that 'Medea shall not kill her children in sight of the audience'PI lest the feelings of the spectators should be harrowed beyond endurance,

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finds a burlesque echo in Bottom's solicitude lest the ladies should be terrified by the drawing of Pyramus's sword, or the entrance of so fearful a wild-fowl as your lion. Hence the necessity for a prologue to say that Pyramus is not killed indeed, and for the apparition of half Snug the joiner's face through the lion's neck, and his announcement that he is not come hither as a lion, but is 'a man as other men are' [3.1.44]. Scenery presents further difficulties, but here, as there is no risk of wounding delicate susceptibilities, realism is given full rein. The moon herself is pressed into the service, but owing to her capricious nature, she is given an understudy in the person of Starveling carrying a bush of thorns and a lanthorn. It is only the hypercriticism of the Philistine Theseus that finds fault with this arrangement on the score that the man should be put into the lanthorn. 'How is it else the man in the moon' [5.1.247ff.]? The 'tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe' [5.1.56ff.], is a more elaborated specimen of those plays within plays, of which Shakespeare had already given a sketch in Love's Labour's Lost, and for which he retained a fondness in all stages of his career. It is a burlesque upon the dramas of the day, in which classical subjects were handled with utter want of dignity, and with incongruous extravagance of style. The jingling metres, the mania for alliteration, the far-fetched and fantastic epithets, the meaningless invocations, the wearisome repetition of emphatic words, are all ridiculed with a boisterous glee, which was an implicit warrant that, when the young dramatist should hereafter turn to tragic or classical themes, his own work would be free from such disfiguring affectations, or, at worst, would take from them only a superficial taint. And, indeed, what potency of future triumphs on the very summits of dramatic art lay already revealed in the genius which, out of an incidental entertainment, could frame the complex and gorgeous pageantry of A Midsummer Night's Dream; and which, when denied, by the necessities of the occasion, an ethical motive, could fall back for inspiration on an enchanting metaphysic, not of the schools but of the stage, whose contrasts of shadow and reality are shot, now in threads of gossamer lightness, now in homelier and coarser fibre, into the web and woof of this unique hymeneal masque. (184-90)

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70 Edmund Kerchever Chambers, the central idea 1897

From A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Warwick Shakespeare (London, 1897). Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1866-1954), scholar and civil servant, having been disappointed in his hopes of a fellowship at Oxford despite a brilliant undergraduate and postgraduate career, joined the Department of Education in 1892. In this capacity he was influential in developing educational policy and structures in Britain, particularly after 1903 when he bacame a close aide to the permanent secretary of the recently formed Board of Education. His work as historian of the English stage, editor and critic began before his entering the civil service, and continued after his resignation from it in 1926. His major publications are still standard reference books: The Medieval Stage (2 vols, Oxford, 1903); The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923); William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols, Oxford, 1930). Among his many editions, besides Shakespeare's plays, two anthologies were particularly influential: The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (Oxford, 1932), and, with Frank Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics (London, 1907). His edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream for The Warwick Shakespeare was reprinted by Heath in America both in The Arden Shakespeare, and in Heath's Classics. Parts of the introduction also formed the basis for the introduction in The Red Letter Series, which was reprinted in Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925).

[From 'Introduction. III. Critical appreciation'] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a dramatic fantasy rather than a drama. It was written, in all probability, not for the public stage, but as an interlude in the festivities of some wedding at court. The conditions of its production were those of the Masque, and to the limits imposed by those conditions it was bound to conform. Now the Masque, unlike the regular drama, was always presented with an abundance of scenery and stage accessories. It was light and amusing in character, making its principal appeal to the senses and the fancy of the audience. It had no need to touch the deeper springs of imagination, nor to win the attention of critical spectators. A profusion of dance and song, picturesque staging and pretty costumes, a sprinkling of courtly compliment, a piquant contrast of poetry and clowning, these things were enough for the entertainment of the nobles and the maids of honour who assembled at Gloriana's

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palace of Greenwich. These things, therefore, we find in full measure in the play. They give it its tone and dramatic character.1 Yet the poet being Shakespeare, we do not, as in a modern burlesque, find these things and nothing more. For in Shakespeare the philosopher and the playwright go hand in hand; he will not write merely to enchant the eye and delight the ear, nor merely for the excitement of a good story, but always and at all times to utter forth the truth that is in him, to give dramatic form to significant ideas, ideas that are a criticism of life. And therefore we may be sure that at the heart even of a dramatic fantasy by Shakespeare, there will lie some such central idea, which will give an inner meaning and unity to the whole, without disturbing the madness of the fun and frolic. . . . The vital question, then, for the student of A Midsummer Night's Dream is: What did the poet mean by it? What central idea, over and above the poetry and the sensuous charm of the presentment, does it contain? We have seen that the plays which fall nearest to this in point of date are Richard the Second, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Romeo and Juliet. In these we find the young poet concerning himself with the two subjects of perpetual interest to youth, Politics and Love. . . . [He considers the portrait of Theseus as part of Shakespeare's exploration of the nature of the successful king; and notes that The Two Gentlemen of Verona, like the Sonnets and A Midsummer Night's Dream, deals with rival claims of love and friendship. Before turning to the theme of love in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he briefly considers its treatment in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.] Now these two tragedies, though not written together, are complementary to each other: they both treat of love as an extremely serious thing, of high significance for life, and closely interwoven with destiny. For in the character of a man's love, in its purity or degradation, lies ultimately the secret of his success or failure. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, and to the comic spirit this Proteus love betrays itself in quite another shape. . . . Love, as interpreted by the comic spirit, is a certain fine lunacy in the brain of youth; not an integral part of life, but a disturbing element in it. The lover is a being of strange caprices and strange infidelities, beyond the control of reason, and swayed with every gust of passion. He is at odds for the time with all the established order of things, a rebel against the authority of parents, a rebel against friendship, a rebel against his own vows. This is love as it figures in comedy, and in the presentation and analysis of this lies the point of A Midsummer Night's Dream. . . . . . . Of course, Shakespeare's treatment of his theme is symbolical, rather than psychological. In Romeo and Juliet, he shows us the difference which love makes, in the actual characters of the lovers as they blossom out before us. But it is a commonplace that the lovers of A Midsummer Night's Dream are but faintly sketched and barely differentiated. . . . They are but the abstract Hes and Shes of the conventional love-story. But this want of characterization is of little importance, because, which is by no means conventional, the story is told symbolically. The transferences of affection which form its principal revolutions are represented as due to supernatural agency, to the somewhat randomly exercised power of the fairies. Moreover, taking perhaps a hint from Lyly, Shakespeare invites us to consider the whole thing as a dream. This is the significance of the tide. It is life seen through

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a glass darkly. . . . And yet it is not all a dream, or, if a dream, it is one which passes very easily into actual life. For these inconstancies of which Oberon's love in idleness is the cause, are after all not really different in kind from the initial inconstancy of Demetrius to Helena, for which no such reason is proposed. And again, when Demetrius is by magic restored to his first love, the effects of this continue on into the waking life as a quite natural thing which provokes no amazement. So that in fact, as far as the story of the lovers is concerned, the introduction of the supernatural element does not bring about anything which would have been impossible or improbable without it. The magical 'love in idleness' [2.1.168] really does nothing more than represent symbolically the familiar workings of actual love-in-idleness in the human heart. Boys in love change their minds just so, or almost just so, without any whisper of the fairies to guide them. Romeo left his Rosaline quite as suddenly as Lysander left his Hermia. It will help us to see the point of the symbolism more precisely, if we consider what use Shakespeare habitually makes of the supernatural in his plays. Always, as it appears to me, he uses it in much the same way, not with a literal faith in the personages or the acts which he depicts, but symbolically as a recognition of a mystery, of an unexplained element in the ordinary course of human affairs on earth. It is his confession of ignorance, of the fact that just there he has come upon something which baffles analysis, something ultimate, which is, but which cannot be quite accounted for. Thus in Macbeth the witches symbolize the double mystery of temptation and of retribution; in The Tempest the magic of Prospero and the spiritual forces which are at his beck and call symbolize the mystery of an overruling providence. Now, in A Midsummer Night's Dream the mystery, so to call it, the inexplicability which is bound up with the central idea of the play, is the existence of that freakish irresponsible element of human nature out of which, to the eye of the comic spirit, the ethical and emotional vagaries of lovers take their rise. And that this element does exist is recognized and emphasized by Shakespeare in his usual way when he takes the workings of it in the story and explains them symbolically as due to the interference of supernatural agency. Now in human life the disturbing element of love in idleness is generally only a passing fever. There is a period of Sturm und Drang, and then the man or woman begins to take life seriously, and is ready to submit to its discipline and to accept its reasonable responsibilities. And so by the side of Lysander and Demetrius we have the grave figure of the Athenian duke, Theseus. Theseus has had his wayward youth; he has 'played with light loves in the portal,'PI with Perigenia and Aegles and the rest, ay, and in the glimmering night even with Queen Titania herself. Moreover, in his passion for Hippolyta he has approached her through deeds of violence; he has 'won her love, doing her injuries' [1.1.17]. But now, like the Henry the Fifth of whom he is a prototype, he has put away childish things; he stands forth as the serene law-abiding king, no less than the still loving and tender husband. Thus the story of Theseus' Wedding not only . . . serves to hold the plot together, but also contributes its share to the illustration of the central idea. When we turn to the Fairies, we find that what enters into human life only as a transitory disturbing element, is in them the normal law of their being. They are

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irresponsible creatures throughout, eternal children. . . . Oberon and Titania will be jealous and be reconciled to each other a dozen times a day, while for culmination of their story you have the absurd spectacle of a fairy in love with an ass. So that in them is represented, as it were in vacuo, the very quality of which it is the object of the play to discern the partial and occasional workings in the heart of humanity. In the story of the Handicraftsmen, the central idea does not find any direct illustration. The story is required, partly to introduce the interlude, but still more to provide that comic contrast which, as has been pointed out, was essential to the masque. It is ingeniously interwoven into the fairy-story by making Bottom the instrument of Oberon's revenge upon Titania. . . . Finally, with the interlude, we come back to the central idea once more. For in the ill-starred loves of Pyramus and Thisbe, their assignation, their elopement, and their terrible end, we have but a burlesque presentment of the same theme that has occupied us throughout. It is all a matter of how the poet chooses to put it. Precisely the same situation that in Romeo and Juliet will ask our tears shall here move unextinguishable laughter. And so the serious interest of the play dissolves in mirth, and while the musicians break into the exquisite poetry of the epithalamium, the playwright stands and watches us with the smile of wise tolerance on his lips. (18-26)

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71 Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the airy dream 1898

From William Shakespeare: A Critical Study. [Translated by William Archer, Mary Morison, and Diana White.] (2 vols, London, 1898). Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842-1927), Danish critic and scholar, graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 1864, travelled in Europe for six years, and in 1871 returned to begin teaching in his alma mater, spreading radical ideas of reform in society and realism in literature. He befriended the Norwegian writers Ibsen and Bj0rnson (No. 84). He wrote studies of Goethe, Voltaire, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare (3 vols, Copenhagen, 1895-6; English translation, 2 vols, London, 1898, with a new edition in 1899 in one volume, reprinted four times to 1907). His comments on the plays, in abbreviated form, served as the introductions to the 'Favourite Classics Edition' of the dramatic works (40 vols, London, 1904; 1912; 1921); and to the 'Garrick Shakespeare' (12 vols, London, 1905); and to the American edition, called 'The Brandes Shakespeare' (40 vols, New York, 1905). From 1898 into the 1920's and beyond Brandes was a force in Shakespearean criticism.

[From Chapter XII: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream — Its Historical Circumstances — Its Aristocratic, Popular, Comic, and Supernatural Elements'] [Brandes follows Elze's assertion (unacknowledged) that the play was written to celebrate the marriage of Essex in 1590. Then he goes on.] How is one to speak adequately of A Midsummer Night's Dream? It is idle to dwell upon the slightness of the character-drawing, for the poet's effort is not after characterisation; and, whatever its weak points, the poem as a whole is one of the tenderest, most original, and most perfect Shakespeare ever produced. It is Spenser's fairy-poetry developed and condensed; it is Shelley's spirit-poetry anticipated by more than two centuries. And the airy dream is shot with whimsical parody. The frontiers of Elf-land and Clown-land meet and mingle. W We have here an element of aristocratic distinction in the princely couple, Theseus and Hippolyta, and their court. We have here an element of sprightly burlesque in the artisans' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, treated with genial irony and divinely felicitous humour. And here, finally, we have the element of supernatural poetry, which soon after flashes forth again in Romeo and Juliet, where

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Mercutio describes the doings of Queen Mab. Puck and Pease-blossom, Cobweb and Mustard-seed — pigmies who hunt the worms in a rosebud, tease bats, chase spiders, and lord it over nightingales - are the leading actors in an elfin play, a fairy carnival of inimitable mirth and melody, steeped in a midsummer atmosphere of mist-wreaths and flower-scents, under the afterglow that lingers through the sultry night. This miracle of happy inspiration contains the germs of innumerable romantic achievements in England, Germany, and Denmark, more than two centuries later. There is in French literature a graceful mythological play of somewhat later date — Moliere's Psyche — in which the exquisite love-verses which stream from the heroine's lips were written by the sexagenarian CorneilleJ2! It is, in its way, an admirable piece of work. But read it and compare it with the nature-poetry of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and you will feel how far the great Englishman surpasses the greatest Frenchmen in pure unrhetorical lyrism and irrepressibly playful, absolutely poetical poetry, with its scent of clover, its taste of wild honey, and its airy and shifting dream-pageantry. . . . [In one paragraph he describes the love in the play as romantic and comic.] It is the love begotten of imagination that here bears sway. Hence these words of Theseus: — [Quotes 5.1.4-8: 'Lovers and madmen have such seething brains. . . .']. And then follows Shakespeare's first deliberate utterance as to the nature and art of the poet. He is not, as a rule, greatly concerned with the dignity of the poet as such. Quite foreign to him is the self-idolatry of the later romantic poets, posing as the spiritual pastors and masters of the world. Where he introduces poets in his plays (as in Julius Ccesar and Timori), it is generally to assign them a pitiful part. But here he places in the mouth of Theseus the famous and exquisite words: — [Quotes 5.1.12-18: 'The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling. ...']. When he wrote this he felt that his wings had grown. . . . [He gives a summary of Halpin's reading of Oberon's Vision, then continues.] A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first consummate and immortal masterpiece which Shakespeare produced. The fact that the pairs of lovers are very slightly individualised, and do not in themselves awaken any particular sympathy, is a fault that we easily overlook, amid the countless beauties of the play. The fact that the changes in the lovers' feelings are entirely unmotived is no fault at all, for Oberon's magic is simply a great symbol, typifying the sorcery of the erotic imagination. There is deep significance as well as drollery in the presentation of Titania as desperately enamoured of Bottom with his ass's head. Nay, more; in the lovers' ever-changing attractions and repulsions we may find a whole sportive love-philosophy. The rustic and popular element in Shakespeare's genius here appears more prominently than ever before. The country-bred youth's whole feeling for and knowledge of nature comes to the surface, permeated with the spirit of poetry. The play swarms with allusions to plants and insects, and all that is said of them is closely observed and intimately felt. In none of Shakespeare's plays are so many species of flowers, fruits, and trees mentioned and characterised. H. N. Ellacombe, in his essay on The Seasons of Shakespeare's Plays? reckons no fewer than forty-two species. Images borrowed from nature meet us on every hand. For example, in

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Helena's beautiful description of her school friendship with Hermia (iii.2), she says: - [Quotes 3.2.208-11: 'So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry. ...']. When Titania exhorts her elves to minister to every desire of her asinine idol, she says: — [Quotes 3.1.164-74: 'Be kind and courteous to this gentleman. . . .']. . . . [Brandes considers some sources, in particular a passage from Lyly that Shakespeare might have imitated, earlier pointed out by Malone. Then he goes on.] The contrast between the rude artisans' prose and the poetry of the fairy world is exquisitely humorous, and has been frequently imitated in the nineteenth century: in Germany by Tieck; in Denmark by J. L. Heiberg, who has written no fewer than three imitations of A Midsummer Night's Dream — The Elves, The Day of the Seven Sleepers and The Nutcrackers. The fairy element introduced into the comedy brings in its train not only the many love-illusions, but other and external forms of thaumaturgy as well. People are beguiled by wandering voices, led astray in the midnight wood, and victimised in many innocent ways. The fairies retain from first to last their grace and sportiveness, but the individual physiognomies, in this stage of Shakespeare's development, are as yet somewhat lacking in expression. Puck, for instance, is a mere shadow in comparison with a creation of twenty years later, the immortal Ariel of The Tempest. Brilliant as is the picture of the fairy world in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the mastery to which Shakespeare had attained is most clearly displayed in the burlesque scenes, dealing with the little band of worthy artisans who are moved to represent the history of Pyramus and Thisbe at the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. Never before has Shakespeare risen to the sparkling and genial humour with which these excellent simpletons are portrayed. He doubtless drew upon childish memories of the plays he had seen performed in the market-place at Coventry and elsewhere. He also introduced some whimsical strokes of satire upon the older English drama. For instance, when Quince says, 'Marry, our play is — The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby' [1.2.1 Iff.], there is an obvious reference to the long and quaint title of the old play of Cambyses: 'A lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth,'4 &c. Shakespeare's elevation of mind, however, is most clearly apparent in the playful irony with which he treats his own art, the art of acting, and the theatre of the day, with its scanty and imperfect appliances for the production of illusion. The artisan who plays Wall, his fellow who enacts Moonshine, and the excellent amateur who represents the Lion are deliciously whimsical types. [Brandes discusses the Interlude briefly.] It is true that A Midsummer Night's Dream is rather to be described as a dramatic lyric than a drama in the strict sense of the word. It is a lightly-flowing, sportive, lyrical fantasy, dealing with love as a dream, a fever, an illusion, an infatuation, and making merry, in especial, with the irrational nature of the instinct. That is why Lysander, turning, under the influence of the magic flower, from Hermia, whom he loves, to Helena, who is nothing to him, but whom he now imagines that he adores, is made to exclaim: — 'The will of man is by his reason sway'd, / And reason says you are the worthier maid.'[2.2.115ff.]

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Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the poet's irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an expression of human reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is only by way of exception that he makes reason the determining factor in human conduct. He early felt and divined how much wider is the domain of the unconscious than of the conscious life, and saw that our moods and passions have their root in the unconscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are latent in the wayward love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream. (63-71)

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72 Max Beerbohm, illusion, realism and imagination 1900

From 'At "Her Majesty's'", The Saturday Review (20 January, 1900), 77-8. Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872-1956), 'the incomparable Max', was educated at Charterhouse, and Merton College, Oxford; his witty perception of Oxford life is immortalized in the fantasy novel Zuleika Dobson (1911). In the 1890s he enjoyed the company of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, and established himself as an essayist, caricaturist, and lively conversationalist. In 1898 he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as dramatic critic for The Saturday Review. The occasion for the essay here reprinted was the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by his elder half-brother, Herbert, who had taken the name Beerbohm Tree when he began his amateur acting career and kept it throughout his professional life as actor-manager. The essay also appears in More Theatres 1898-1903 (New York, 1969 [London, 1968]), pp. 230-3.

Surely, Shakespeare never achieved anything more perfect than the Midsummer Night's Dream. He, the weaver of wonderful brocades, not even in the noblest of his designs, the most gorgeous or sombre, the most illustriously inlaid and weighed down with jewels, ever fashioned anything whose splendour one would exchange for the fragrance of this idly-woven chaplet of little wildflowers. Idly-woven! That is the secret of its charm. The great poet never so absolutely reveals himself as in those idle moments when, laying aside the grand manner, he lolls, forgets, laughs. Smaller men may assume the grand manner, cheating us with high sounds and tremendous flourishes; it is when they come out of the giant's mantle that we see how small they are. It is when Shakespeare doffs his mantle that we see the giant's limbs, the giant rejoicing in his strength, and performing prodigious feats because he cannot help performing them. Yes! The Midsummer Night's Dream is the most impressive of all Shakespeare's works, because it was idly done, because it was a mere overflow of genius, a parergont1] thrown off by Shakespeare as lightly as a modern author would write an article on International Copyright for an American magazine. It is the most impressive of all the plays, and the loveliest, and the most lovable. I do not wonder that Mr. Beerbohm Tree determined to lay hands on it. PI This adventure of his was beset with many dangers, and he is to be congratulated on having evaded them. To produce Julius Caesar was comparatively safe and easy. The play was full of human drama, which had but to be acted for all it was worth to please everyone. King John was more difficult, for it was a dull play, into which

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humanity had to be foisted by the actors, and it was full of voids which had to be filled up with spectacular effects. But even King John was an easy matter in comparison with the Midsummer Night's Dream. Of the three separate elements in the play, the fairy element is, of course, the dominating one. The scenes of the clowns and the scenes of the lovers might be done ill without spoiling the play. But the scenes of the fairies must be done well at all costs. There must be the illusion of fairies, illusion of a true dream. And this kind of delicate illusion is hard to produce through the definite and concrete means of the stage, and may be easily destroyed by them. A poet's words, as you read them, will illude^ you with certain images. But those very images, materialised, may dispel all illusion. Material equivalents for the images made by words are very dangerous things to handle. They must be 'prepared' very cunningly. They must be made faint and mysterious. You remember Pater's gentle rebuke to 'painters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into visible form.'t4] You remember, too, Fuseli's picture of 'Titania and Bottom' in the National Gallery. I5! That picture is a good illustration of Pater's meaning, because it is so very bad an illustration of Shakespeare's. In it all the glamour of the wood near Athens is dispelled. Even the bad light it hangs in fails to imbue it with aught of the mystery it needs. The big fairies look like pupil-teachers, and the little fairies look like freaks in a dime-museum, M and Titania looks merely improper. Yet Fuseli, I think, failed less utterly than would any living painter whose work is known to me. And, if it is so hard for a painter, working in two dimensions, not to affront one's imagination, how much harder must it be for the producer of a play, working in three, with solid, live media of flesh and blood! How much greater the trouble and finer the tact, when so much more lowering and mystifying of the tone is needed! I did not suppose it possible that my imagination would not be at every turn affronted in Her Majesty's (and, since Fate has prejudiced me in Mr. Tree's favour, I was wondering how I should manage to let him down easily without being altogether dishonest to myself). But my forecast was quite wrong. The production was charming. Though now and again, of course, something or other came out of key, I found myself really and truly illuded by the Wood near Athens. All the little fairies there gambolled in a spontaneous and elfin way; the tuition of them had been carried so far as to make us forget that they were real children, licensed by a Magistrate, and that 'at break of day' (5.1.422) they were going to meet, not Oberon, but a certificated Board School teacher. ^ They were dressed like fairies, behaved like fairies - in fact, were fairies, for me. The music to which they were dancing seemed, not to have been incidentally composed by Mendelssohn, but to be the music of the birds in the enchanted wood. Oberon, too, was the King of the Fairies, not Miss Julia Neilson; nor did Titania strike me as being Mrs. Tree. Nor did I notice Mr. Hawes Cravent8] lurking in the bosky shadows of the trees. The only real person who came on to disturb me was Miss Louie Freear. At other times, I have been very glad to see her; but, on this occasion, I resented her presence, especially as it entailed the absence of Puck — dear Puck, whom I really did want to see. . . . However, she was the only discordant person in the wood. The others seemed to 'belong there.'

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I suppose that Mr. Sidney Lee would not praise the production so warmly as I. In the elaboration of the woodland scenery he would see a further pandering to the lamentable decay of the imaginative faculty in modern audiences.t9! But the brief performance of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' would be after his own heart. When Quince comes on, bearing a board with the inscription 'This is a wood,' Mr. Sidney Lee, I can well imagine, would cease to frown and would settle down comfortably to enjoy himself. He would see, in his mind's eye, without any effort, a lovely wood ready-grown upon the stage. Even so, according to him, could the Elizabethans see things. But could they? And, if they could, must not there have been, even in those spacious days, a certain effort, a certain strain of the visual organs, the making of which must have distracted their attention from the play? Mr. Sidney Lee appears to be distracted only by the actual sight of scenery. But why should he be? Surely, if the scenery is well done — that is, kept in the same relation to the figures of the players as real surroundings bear to persons in real life — there need be no distraction of the kind. If the play is good, and well acted, such scenery cannot be intrusive. On the other hand, bad or skimpy scenery is bound to bother one. It bothered the Elizabethans less than us, because they were accustomed to it. Doubtless, too, good modern scenery would be distracting (at first) to a resurrected Elizabethan, because he would never have seen anything like it. Hansom cabs and bicycles would also puzzle him. But it does not follow that, because modes of locomotion were few and primitive in his day, hansoms and bicycles ought to be abolished. They save us a great deal of time and trouble. Nor have they produced decay in our faculty of walking, though there are many occasions when they are more useful to us than our unaided feet. Even so the developments in modern scenery, which are but a means of quickening dramatic illusion, do not signify that the imagination of the race has been decaying. When the average Victorian reads the Midsummer Night's Dream he sees, I am sure, quite as much of a wood as was seen by the average Elizabethan. But reading a play and seeing it acted are two different things. In reading a play, you have to imagine the characters. When you see it acted, the characters are there, as large as life, before your very eyes. Surely, their surroundings ought to be there too. You must imagine either everything or nothing. The only justification for no scenery would be invisible mimes. If the Elizabethans were so imaginative as Mr. Lee supposes, why did they want to see their mimes? The fact that they did want to see them suggests that they did not see scenery which was not there. However, I am quite willing to believe that Mr. Lee has the faculty which he attributes to them. My contention is merely that no one else has it. And that is his contention, too. So all is well. MAX. (77-8)

345

73 Charlotte Endymion Porter and Helen Archibald Clarke, dream visions 1903

From A Midsommer Nights Dreame by William Shakespeare. Edited, with Notes, Introductions, Glossaries, Lists of Variorum Readings, and Selected Criticisms, by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke. First Folio Edition (New York, 1903).

Charlotte Endymion Porter (1857-1942; christened Helen Charlotte) and Helen Archibald Clarke (1860-1926; daughter of John Archibald Clarke), met when Porter as editor of Shakespeareana published an article by Clarke on Shakespeare and music. Both were founding members of the Browning Society of Philadelphia, and their mutual interests led in 1889 to their launching of Poet Lore, a monthly magazine 'devoted to Shakespeare, Browning, and the Comparative Study of Literature'. In 1891 they moved the offices of the magazine to Boston, dividing the rest of their lives between that city and Porter's cottage in Maine's Penobscot Bay. Though their devotion to Shakespeare and Browning never nagged, the magazine was increasingly notable for its translations and reviews of a wide range of recent world literature. Of their Shakespeare editions, the most important is the First Folio Edition (40 vols, 1903-12), which was mainly the project of Porter, though Clarke collaborated in the early volumes. A Midsummer Night's Dream was the first play to be issued.

[From the 'Introduction'] . . . Chaucer's favorite device for spinning enchanting yarns was to fall asleep and dream his whole story — a device borrowed, of course, from his French and Italian predecessors. . . . It is interesting to see the young Shakespeare, in his turn, in the growing glow of the Elizabethan morning, take up the same device . . . but with what strange and beautiful complexities! The merely lyrical simplicity, the direct narrative, of the old-time dream-device is here enriched with an effectiveness altogether dramatic and novel. Instead of dreaming himself, the poet lulls to sleep his dramatis personce and makes them dream dreams and see visions. For prologue and epilogue he introduces — in presenting the persons of his bride and bridegroom, Hippolyta and Theseus - their court train, the

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lovers, and the interlude-players, - just so much of events that may be accepted as real, as shall serve for a framework to his fancy, like an evening and a morning before and after an uncertain space of dreaming. And he so delicately drowses the workaday wits of his audience and readers that they all as one man, barring some Pepys or Orford,W have consented with him to set time at naught, to mingle mythic demigods and Amazons with men, and fairies from farthest India and from nearest Warwickshire with contemporary familiar English artisans, the classic lore of Greece with the homely folk-lore of his own time — all agreeing, moreover, to find in this Dream the convincing lifelikeness readily accepted in dreams, wherein the unexpected and impossible befall without a jar in the very midst of the logical and credible of what seems to be ordinary living and thinking. . . . . . . If we should try to keep ourselves half awake enough amid the charm of the Dream to watch with the artistic sympathy of a lowly pupil the airy passes of the master magician's wand over us, we might accept the ducal pair standing at either portal of the play as the dramatic embodiments coordinating those actualities of consciousness, first, when we lose track of normal mental processes and sink into sleep, and, again, when we rub our eyes and waken to broad day. We might remember, thereupon, that the one problem our minds were blurringly busied with when we were charmed into slumber was the ill of loving at cross-purposes. The sole dramatic task we have set before us in the Dream is, as it were, by unconscious cerebration to set right these thwart pairings of the lovers. Toward that end begins in us the fairy-work of the second act. . . . . . . The fairies hold the play together; without them it would dissolve. Not only do they adorn and mirror the action and cause the denouement; they continuously symbolize the idea that the underworld of the heart where fancy is engendered is elfish and unaccountable — is fairyland itself. And this fairyland of love the fairies help to figure forth is the realm of this drama's magic, the substance of this Dream. Love, fickle and idle, 'momentary as a sound' [1.1.143], plays its pranks upon Titania and Bottom, puzzles the will of Demetrius, mocks the hot heart of Lysander with sudden untruth, and sets the mere friendship of Helena and Hermia ignominiously against itself, unequal to the strain of a tussle with god Cupid. . . . Only the serious and mature love of Theseus and Hippolyta, too sure to be impatient, and the travesty of the romance-writers' love in the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe, too artificial to be disturbed, lie outside the sway of Oberon's stratagem. . . . If Oberon is the spring of the dramatic action, the very center of his dramaturgy dwells in 'Dian's bud and Cupid's flower' [4.1.73]. More important, therefore, as an element of the conjuring Shakespeare does with us, than the incidents and coloring he derived from Plutarch and Chaucer's 'Knightes Tale' for his Theseus and Hippolyta, or from Ovid and elsewhere for his amusing interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe, or from folk-lore and culture-lore for his fairy protoplasm, are the flower-symbols wherewith he wrought his dramatic marvels. These he found nearly ready to his hand, needing but his molding to his purpose, in one of Chaucer's poetic dreams, 'The Flower and the Leaf.' Then and long after, at least, it was supposed to be Chaucer's, although modern scrutiny conjectures it to be the work of a nameless French woman poetJ2! In this poem the flower and the

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leaf are opposed to each other, as emblems the one of light and unenduring love, the other of loyal love, outlasting the heat of the day and the rigor of tempests. Of the two bands of knights and ladies rendering homage to each quality in love imaged forth by these two tokens, the one company, in green, whose ensign was the flower, and whose lady was Flora, were made up of such folk as 'loved idleness' (575); while the other company, in white, who bore twigs of the 'chaste-tree' (475), or the laurel, as their emblem, were such as never were untrue in love, nor for 'pleasaunce' nor fear, 'But ay steadfast' (487), and their lady was 'Diane, goddess of chastity' (472). . . . Chaucer refers in his Prologue to 'The Legend of Good Women' to these allegoric conceits of opposite elements in love in such a way as to indicate that they were accepted poetic symbols familiar to lovers of the 'gay science,' whether writers or readers of verse. . . . Greene, in his Friar Bacon, makes clumsy and superficial use of a similar image, devoting it utterly to compliment of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare may have been aware of Greene's 'Dian's rose,'W but the same poetic sources for such emblem-writing as were open to Greene were open to Shakespeare to use more effectively. These allegorical devices of medieval poesy he employed in this drama when he wanted a suitable bit of fairy enginery for Oberon to wield, with the like transmutation to his purpose as he wrought in the favorite dream-device of Chaucer. As he made the lyric and narrative effects of the old-time dream-poems dramatic and altogether novel in this play, so he makes the rigid allegorical emblemizing of the fabliau organic, dramatically concrete, and causative. . . . Instead of the 'douce margarete,' and the 'chapelets of red and white'M that betoken the company of those who loved in idleness, he sways us, his lovers, and his plot with the flower maidens may still in real life call 'love-in-idleness' [2.1.168] — Cupid rather than Flora being the god over it; the flower once indeed 'milk white,' but thenceforth, since he has touched the old poetic emblem, 'purple with love's wound' [2.1.167]. The too-precise agnus-castus, or 'chaste-tree,' bough borne by Dian's lady gains indefinably by the indefinite allusion to it as merely 'another herb' [2.1.184], albeit one of'blessed power' [4.1.74], whose liquor hath 'vertuous propertie' [3.2.367] to take from bewildered eyes all error. . . . That familiar tool of magic, the love-elixir, is even more completely reimagined to effect original dramatic transformations. Losing its smell of the apothecary's mortar, it becomes simply the juices of these flowers. Montemayor's Diana has been adduced as furnishing Shakespeare with his clue to this, although the closer relation of 'The Flower and the Leaf to the very heart of his theme has been, so far as is known to us, passed over until now. Yet the 'drink' Felicia brings in 'two cruets of fine cristalT in Montemayor's Diana,^ in order to melt changed hearts to love, denotes but the traditional and usual form of the love-elixir, and lacks the link of special likeness. . . . The artistic secret, it would seem, then, of the tenuous unity maintained throughout every quivering shred of the delicate, droll exquisiteness of this play, lurks within the poet's management of this flower-juice spell of Oberon. . . . As if this play were the doorway whence the poet, looking along the vista of his

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life's career, held general command of the dramatic power that marks his maturer work and is in the future more and more destined to absorb his creative faculty, while still lingering with a loving eye upon the near-by view of the more purely lyric facility shown in his poems and less practised plays, so A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to embrace in one creative blend of forecasting and self-conscious art an essentially lyric theme, mood, manner, and music, with a mastery of manipulation indisputably dramatic. The fruit of that mid-moment is a sane madness wherein the lover and the poet, rapt, unite to yield the dramatist such material for his mastery as renders this play unique not only among plays in general, but unique with the book and volume of his own entire work. The creation of the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream partakes of the quality of the play as a whole. Despite the far larger degree of individualization in its persons of the drama than appears in those of the rest of the group of early comedies, not even Bottom or Helena and Hermia are vivified a tint beyond the range of the color-scale predecreed by the continuity throughout the Dream, as Coleridge says, 'of the dramatized lyrical' [No. 15 above]. The supremacy of the dramatic quality shown in the plot and structural unity of the comedy is accompanied, therefore, by a corresponding emergence of power in the character-development; but it is nicely held in hand, prevented either from rising into prominence above the plot to break up its thin tenuity with the warmth and push and interplay of strongly human personality, or from sinking into the visionary floating element of the Dream, since the effectiveness of this visionary element depends upon its contrast with the lifelikeness of the characters and their amazement at its power over them. Bottom alone of his group is modeled with solidity enough to stand out with good coarse human grain. His brag and eager prominence, the smack of his lips over his own bons mots, the air of close attention he bespeaks for his superior penetration, the matter-of-course tribute he takes it to be to unobscurable manly worth when the Queen of Faerie discerns his excellence and falls to doting on him - what so deliciously crass specimen of masculinity as all this contributes to make up was ever devised merely as the foremost figure in an awkward squad forced upon an artist to make the best of, because the groundlings demand buffoonery! But the poet finds, also, for him and his clownish associates still another reason for being. The fay folk will shine out the more ephemerally when weighted thus with humors of the earth alight with the all-loving smile of genius, as spider-webs, more obviously gossamer when heavy with dew, sparkle in morning sunbeams. . . . Hermia and Helena alone assert, above the meshes of the net Fancy has caught them in, the undeniable normal human quality which the fairies only mimic, and Bottom and his group but parody. Hermia, the little, dark, spirited beauty, quick to think, resolve, and speak, like Rosaline and Beatrice, is the best of foils for the fair, tall, dreamy, and poetic Helena. Beside these ardent maidens, prototypes of the girl companions introduced with richer detail and larger influence in later plays, Lysander and Demetrius fall into a lower plane of character-modeling. Their competitive spirit and masculine readiness to taunt and tussle each other belong

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rather to the genus homo than to any special variety capable of being differentiated therefrom. Only when . . . the Puckish love-spell shocks the constant hearts of Helena and Hermia into an exasperated perception of love's caprices and cruelties, do they drop, like their lovers, back into the realm of the generic. Still in the most farcical moment of their jangling they exhibit characteristic differences as to their peculiar gifts for 'shrewishness' and 'right maid's cowardice' [3.2.301ff.]. Their measure of reality and human affectionateness, but momentarily perverted by the fairy trickery, is the anchor of the actual by which the play holds from cutting quite adrift when the dream-charm floats the lovers off upon seas of fancy, where their compasses no longer hold true to the pole-star, where human will in loving is mocked at, where their sympathy in choice is made 'Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, / Brief as the lightning in the collied night,' that 'ere a man hath power to say, behold, / The jaws of darkness do devour it up' [1.1.144ff] so quick the bright ideals come to confusion. The brisk bit of dialogue between Hermia and Lysander in the first scene of the first act forebodes the plot. To be 'enthralled to love' [1.1.136] (Theobald's emendation of 'low' for the First Folio's loveW being brushed aside, as it ought to be), and to have their sympathy in choice made momentary as a sound, short as any dream, is to be the fate of all the lovers in the play, except Theseus and Hippolyta. But not only does this dialogue imply the coming plot; it circumscribes the degree of individuality to be allowed in the play to the central group of characters. Lysander and Demetrius, being the passive channels of the love-charm, cannot develop strong individuality. Hermia, in her spirited opposition both to her actual fate in love and to the change in it wrought by the spell, and Helena, in her steadfastness to her own true, heroic soul whatever luck it wins, attain to all the reality the tether of the plot permits. Wherefore when they strain against its chain in their quarrels we feel its power to sink them into farcical lay figures whose sparring is more interesting to the audience than they themselves are at this conflict of the plot 'with personality. The same subordination of character-development to the requirements of the dramatic design as a whole demands that the angry father, Egeus, bent on frustrating love's will, shall show no such vigorous signs of personal character as Juliet's father or Desdemona's reveals. And Theseus and Hippolyta, although they are given an effective portrayal far beyond that usually accorded by Shakespeare to those ducal or regal figures who from the thrones of life lay down the law or give the nod that ties or frees, yet are made real with much skilful deceptiveness. Surely Dowden is misled by the prominence of Theseus in the spectacle, and by the exaggerated importance traditionally belonging to the 'splendid and gracious aristocrat,' with 'a touch of the Barbarian in him,' when he calls his the central figure of the play [No. 49 above]. The central figure he is, and can be, in the fifth act when the plot is done. In the action, meanwhile, he and Hippolyta are constantly subordinated to the poet's purposes with the other groups over whom they seem to hold such lofty sway. They exist, until the fifth act, outside the scenes, that the fairies may seem more fairy-like; that the 'base mechanicals' may rehearse

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and give an interlude before them, and be fitly on the scene to heighten with their gross extravagance the contrast with the airy superficialities of fairy nature; that the lovers may leave them in despair and meet them in happiness on the May morn of their nuptials. So, despite the pomp and prestige of their entrance, their parts as real persons, in the start at least, are but perfunctory, almost wholly limited to the authoritative embodiment of the decision against Hermia, from which the action takes its rise. It could not be otherwise, in fact, for were they made too real they would either interest us so much that we should not be left free to follow the lovers, whose fortunes, after all, make up the central material of the plot, or else they would demand a more important relationship with them throughout the action. The wise young Shakespeare already knows how to make his negligences of characterization proficiencies. Later, when the fairy bewitchment is done with, and the ducal pair reenter with the morning, they uncouple, as with their Spartan hounds, the actualities of life. And then, deeper indications of their character may be given without detracting from the interest of the plot now drawing to a close. Then, the opinions of the differing personalities of Theseus and Hippolyta upon the story that the lovers have told them serves to enhance the significance of the Dream as well as to render it artistically plausible. Theseus discloses the characteristic impatience of the practical man with the whole world of the imagination during his conference with Hippolyta at the beginning of Act V. But, oddly enough, the contemptuous tone of his famous speech as a whole is commonly lost upon critics of the play. So matchless is the poetic form in which it is couched, so rich in suggestion is the brief he draws against the truth of 'antique fables' and of'fairy toys' [5.1.3], and against the trustworthiness of the poet, that his words are perpetually urged in favor of the poet and in admiration of the seething brains he groups together scornfully as constituting the sufficient inner cause of all the non-existent wonders man may see. The point of the speech from his outlook is that 'strong imagination' plays its tricks with no more truth than fear at night, when how easily is 'a bush supposed a bear' [5.1.18, 22]! With much relish does Shakespeare's Theseus deliver himself of this conclusion. Familiar quotation bereaves his argument of its final hit, because it is so manifestly less beautiful - an anticlimax, wherein 'Shakespeare falls a-twaddling about bushes and bears,' says White. 'Who can believe that these two lines are genuine?'f7] Yet who can fail to see that they are the genuine utterance of Shakespeare's Theseus? Only if we lose ourselves in the verbal beauty and melody of the passage by itself and forget the drift of the person speaking, can we miss the dramatic appropriateness of the whole, including the conclusion, or lose the force of it as an indication of his character. And Hippolyta as characteristically reveals her point of view. She ventures to question the practical man's easy acceptance of external facts as the only possible truth, on the doubtful evidence that the coherence of so many personal experiences lifts the story upon an equal plane of credibility with fact. The poet, non-committal behind them both, seems to assert his quizzical wisdom

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here, insinuating impalpably the truer truth of art to total life, when, by such fancies as this Dream, the dramatic poet puts man's lesser life within the passing presence of'obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,' the 'fallings from us,' 'vanishings and blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized.'t8! (xviii-xxxiii)

352

74 Richard Green Moulton, a comedy of situation and enchantment 1903

From The Moral System of Shakespeare. A Popular Illustration of Fiction as the Experimental Side of Philosophy (New York, 1903). Richard Green Moulton (1849-1924) received degrees from the Universities of London in 1869 and Cambridge in 1874, joined the nascent university extension movement, and travelled widely to lecture and to spread university education among the less wealthy. In 1890 he went to the United States where he helped organize its university extension society, and in 1892 he joined the University of Chicago where he lectured and taught until his retirement in 1916. His lifelong dedication to interpreting the Bible and to disseminating an understanding of it led to his Modem Reader's Bible, in twenty-one volumes in 1896-98, with a one volume edition in 1907. His two studies of Shakespeare were attempts to present criticism as an inductive science. The first one was Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism (Oxford, 1885). The second, The Moral System of Shakespeare (reissued New York, 1907, under the title Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker), attempted to find Shakespeare's philosophy in the plots of the plays. His scientific approach meant that conclusions should be based on evidence and on a close reading of the plays: this helps make his analyses of plots clear and simple.

[From 'Book III: The Forces of Life in Shakespeare's Moral World. Chapter XI: Personality and its Dramatic Expression in Intrigue and Irony'] [This chapter examines how the exercise of personal will leads to intrigue, and, in conflict with other wills, to irony, and to complications of plot in several comedies. Since A Midsummer's Night's Dream is a dramatisation of the supernatural and not a picture of real life (p. 297) it does not bear so directly on Shakespeare's moral system, though it does have an intricate plot.] A Midsummer Night's Dream1 goes beyond even Twelfth Night in intricacy of ironic situations. It well may; for in the Midsummer Night's Dream supernatural machinery is available, and fairy enchantment goes to swell the natural crossing of circumstance. We hear how Cupid's fiery shaft, aimed in vain at a maiden queen, fell upon a little

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western flower which is called love-in-idleness: [Quotes 2.1.170-2: 'The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids. . . .']. But for this sweet poison there is an antidote: Dian's bud prevails over Cupid's flower, if it be crushed into the eye of the deluded lover [4.1.73]: [Quotes 3.2.367-9: 'Whose liquor hath this virtuous property. . . .']. With motive agencies of this kind to draw upon, we are prepared for a plot that will exhibit an ever increasing crescendo of entanglement. The original situation - lying outside the play - was simple: two pairs of mutual loves, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena. When the parties first appear before us in the play [1.1.19], some unknown accident or personal whim has produced a situation of perversity; for Demetrius has transferred his love to Hermia, two men loving the same woman, while Helena is forsaken, yet still loves. This situation is converted into a triple intrigue by the circumstance that Hermia's father Lysander

Hermia

T

Helena

—>

Demetrius

favours the suit of Demetrius, and invokes the authority of the Duke. Accordingly we have, first, the lovers Lysander and Hermia stealing away by night out of Athens; then Helena, admitted to their confidence, betraying their flight to Demetrius [1.1.246]; then again, as Demetrius pursues the lovers, Helena herself pursuing Demetrius [2.2.84]. In this entanglement of perverse intrigue all enter the enchanted wood. Now the King of Fairies interferes: hearing the lamentations of Helena and the scorn of Demetrius, he sends Puck to exercise the virtue of Cupid's flower upon 'an Athenian' [2.1.264] whom he will find in the wood; Puck mistakes his man, and anoints the eyes of Lysander, who, when he awakes, is enchanted into adoration of Lysander

Hermia

Helena

Demetrius

Helena [2.2.78, 103]. We have thus — not, as in Twelfth Night, a triangular duel of fancy — but what may be called a quadrangular duel of perverse affection: Lysander

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in love with Helena, Helena with Demetrius, Demetrius with Hennia, Hermia with Lysander. The mistake being discovered, Oberon himself takes charge of the remedy [3.2.88]: he applies the juice to Demetrius's eyes, while Puck is sent to bring Helena to the side of Demetrius when he shall awake. The charm takes effect, but the Lysander

Hermia

Helena

Demetrius

complication is greater than ever: once more we have two men wooing one woman, with another woman forsaken; but Helena, the doubly-wooed, takes it all for mockery of her forsaken condition; at last she turns upon Hermia, and squabbles between the girls are added to crossings of the lovers.2 [Quotes 3.2.192-202: 'Lo, she is one of this confederacy. . . .']. This is only the mild beginning: in time they come near to personal violence. [Quotes 3.2.299-300, 323-7: 'I pray you, though you mock me, gentlemen. . . .']. Meanwhile the combative spirit has spread to the men: [Quotes 3.2.248-9, 254-5: 'If she cannot entreat, I can compel. . . .']. At last we have the vixenish Hermia chasing the longer-legged Helena, the two lovers with drawn swords chasing one another through the dusky wood; Puck, with mist and mimicking voice, rejoicing to emphasise the confusion. When all lie down from sheer weariness, unconscious of the vicinity of the others, the time has come for applying the antidote. It only needs to squeeze Dian's bud into the eyes of Lysander [3.2.452], and the whole tangle of ironic perversity resolves into the final happy situation: two pairs of loyal lovers, the sundered friendship of the schoolmates and the sundered good-fellowship of the young men entirely restored. As the four awake and leave the enchanted wood, they can hardly persuade themselves that the distracting events of the night have been anything more than a midsummer-night's dream [4.1.139-99]. (229-33) Lysander

Hermia

Helena

Demetrius

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[From the 'APPENDIX: PLOT SCHEMES OF SHAKESPEAREAN

DRAMAS'.]

A Midsummer Night's Dream A Comedy of Situation and Enchantment Plot Enveloping Action: Nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta Enveloping Motive Atmosphere: Enchantment of the Wood on Midsummer-Night - / Complicating: Cupid's Flower r Instruments of / & r Enchantment \ . . , , Resolving: Dian s Bud Main Plot: Clash in common Enchantment, and Disentanglement, of 1. Fancy: the Lovers. (A triple situation of perversity — complicated into quadruple perversity — further complicated into complete mutual hostility — resolved into harmony as two pairs of lovers.) Three Types 2. Fairy Life: Oberon and Titania. (Conjugal quarrel — of Life complicated into distraction of monstrosity — resolved into reconciliation.) 3. Burlesque (unconscious): The Mechanics. (Complicated into distraction of haunting and resolved.) Relief: immanent in plot (342)

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75 Ernest Howard Crosby, Shakespeare's working classes 1903

From Shakespeare's Attitude to the Working Classes (Syracuse, New York, [1903]). Ernest Howard Crosby (1856-1907), author and social reformer, was born into a wealthy family in New York City, and graduated from New York University and Columbia Law School. While a judge of the International Court in Egypt he read Tolstoy, and became a champion of the brotherhood of man. Influenced also by Whitman, he wrote three volumes of poetry; among other works he published a satirical novel and some essays on Tolstoy. His essay on Shakespeare first appeared in the periodical The Craftsman (Syracuse, New York) in 1903, and in the same year as a pamphlet (from which this excerpt is taken): it had several subsequent printings and was translated into French and German.

. . . It is hardly possible to construct a play with no characters but monarchs and their suites, and at the same time preserve the verisimilitudes of life. Shakespeare was obliged to make some use of servants, citizens and populace. How has he portrayed them? In one play alone has he given up the whole stage to them, and it is said that the Merry Wives of Windsor was only written at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wished to see Sir John FalstafF in love.t1] It is from beginning to end one prolonged 'gird at citizens,' and we can hardly wonder that they felt a grievance against the dramatic profession. In the other plays of Shakespeare, the humbler classes appear for the main part only occasionally and incidentally. His opinion of them is indicated more or less picturesquely by the names which he selects for them. There are, for example, Bottom, the weaver, Flute, the bellows-maker, Snout and Sly, tinkers, Quince, the carpenter, Snug, the joiner, Starveling, the tailor, Smooth, the silkmanj2] Shallow and Silence, country justices, Elbow and Dull, constables, Dogberry and Verges, Fang and Snare, sheriffs officers, . . . and various anonymous 'Clowns' and 'Fools.' . . . Such a system of nomenclature as we have exposed is enough of itself to fasten the stigma of absurdity upon the characters subjected to it, and their occupations. Most of the trades are held up for ridicule in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Holofernes, the schoolmaster, is made ridiculous in Love's Labour's Lost, and we are told of the middle-class Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, that 'three such

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antics do not amount to a man' [Henry V, 3.2.31ff.]. But it is not necessary to rehearse the various familiar scenes in which these fantastically-named individuals raise a laugh at their own expense. (5-6) Having . . . a poor opinion of the lower classes taken man by man, he thinks if anything still worse of them taken en masse, and at his hands a crowd of plain working-men fares worst of all. 'Hempen home-spuns' [3.1.77], Puck calls them, and again 'A crew of patches, rude mechanicals, / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls' [3.2.9ff.]. Bottom, their leader, is according to Oberon a 'hateful fool' [4.1.49], and according to Puck, the 'shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort' [3.2.13]. Bottom's advice to his players contains a small galaxy of compliments: In any case let Thisbe have clean linen, and let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion's claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onion or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath, and I do not doubt to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. [4.2.39ff.] The matter of the breath of the poor weighs upon Shakespeare and his characters. . . . (12) . . . In the very year in which Hamlet first appeared, a work was published in Spain which was at once translated into English, a work as well known to-day as Shakespeare's own writings, t^ If the peasantry was anywhere to be neglected and despised, where should it be rather than in proud, aristocratic Spain, and yet, to place beside Shakespeare's Bottoms and Sly's, Cervantes has given us the admirable Sancho Panza, and has spread his loving humour in equal measure over servant and master. Are we to believe that the yeomen of England, who beat back the Armada, were inferior to the Spanish peasantry whom they overcame, or is it not rather true that the Spanish author had a deeper insight into his country's heart than was allotted to the English dramatist? Cervantes, the soldier and adventurer, rose above the prejudices of his class, while Shakespeare never lifted his eyes beyond the narrow horizon of the Court to which he catered. It was love that opened Cervantes's eye, and it is in all-embracing love that Shakespeare was deficient. As far as the common people were concerned he never held the mirror up to nature. But the book of all others which might have suggested to Shakespeare that there was more in the claims of the lower classes than was dreamt of in his philosophy was More's Utopia, which in its English form was already a classic. More, the richest and most powerful man in England after the king, not only believed in the working man but knew that he suffered from unjust social conditions. He could never have represented the down-trodden followers of Cade-TylerW nor the hungry mob in Coriolanus with the utter lack of sympathy which Shakespeare manifests. 'What justice is there in this,' asks the great Lord Chancellor, whose character stood the test of death, - 'What justice is there in this, that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing at all, or at best is employed in things that are of no use to the public, should live in great luxury and splendour upon what is so ill acquired; and a mean man, a carter, a smith, a ploughman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed on labours so necessary that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor

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a livelihood, and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs?' PI How different from this is Shakespeare's conception of the place of the workingman in society! After a full and candid survey of his plays, Bottom, the weaver with the ass's head, remains his type of the artisan and the 'mutable, rank-scented many' [Coriolanus, 3.1.66], his type of the masses. (30-1)

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76 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the atmosphere of the play 1904

From 'A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: Being N° 2 of Studies in Shakespeare', Good Words, 45 (1904), 621-6. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), novelist, poet, journalist, critic, was for many years, with George Bernard Shaw, a dominant figure of the English literary scene. Both these strong personalities were highly opinionated and revelled in controversy. Surprisingly, very little of Chesterton's large corpus (of writings - he was also a notably large man) deals with Shakespeare, but this essay shows his characteristic penetration, vigour, and unabashed nationalism. It is reprinted in the collection of his essays The Common Man (London, 1950), pp. 10-21.

The greatest of Shakespeare's comedies is also, from a certain point of view, the greatest of his plays. No one would maintain that it occupied this position in the matter of psychological study if by psychological study we mean the study of individual characters in a play. No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the sense that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before the psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play is perhaps a greater triumph of psychology than Hamlet itself. It may well be questioned whether in any other literary work in the world is so vividly rendered a social and spiritual atmosphere. There is an atmosphere in Hamlet, for instance, a somewhat murky and even melodramatic one, but it is subordinate to the great character, and morally inferior to him; the darkness is only a background for the isolated star of intellect. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is a psychological study, not of a solitary man, but of a spirit that unites mankind. The six men may sit talking in an inn; they may not know each other's names or see each other's faces before or after, but night or wine or great stories, or some rich and branching discussion may make them all at one, if not absolutely with each other, at least with that invisible seventh man who is the harmony of all of them. That seventh man is the hero of the Midsummer Night's Dream. A study of the play from a literary or philosophical point of view must therefore be founded upon some serious realisation of what this atmosphere is. . . . [He takes issue with George Bernard Shaw's contention that the tide As

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You Like It expresses Shakespeare's cynical attitude towards his comedies and his audience.] Now in the reason for this modern and pedantic error lies the whole secret and difficulty of such plays as A Midsummer Night's Dream. The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all, can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness. That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere, not only through being profoundly sad or meditative, but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstacy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter. Sorrow we know, can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare, can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown. And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school, of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply that their logical and destructive attitudes have rendered impossible the very experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realise As You Like It if we are always considering it as we understand it. We cannot have A Midsummer Night's Dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism. The whole question which is balanced, and balanced nobly and fairly, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, is whether the life of waking, or the life of vision, is the real life, the sine qua non of man. But it is difficult to see what superiority for the purpose of judging is possessed by people whose pride it is not to live the life of vision at all. ... In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their -words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening

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party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole Midsummer night's dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom, and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. 'Suppose we are the realities and they are the shadows.' If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane. It is a trite matter, of course, though in a general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon another point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate manner in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and frustration of the incidents and personalities are well-known to every one who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative of the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more worth remarking that there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an utter discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the stars fall. A Midsummer Night's Dream has in a most singular degree effected this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream. The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of art than the creation of the character of Othello. It is difficult to approach critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom consists of a rich sub-consciousness, and that of Hamlet in the comparatively superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in the present age which has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the victims of a curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have something to do with

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being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool. Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver, men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for ten days to explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth,.because their words were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as large and simple as a great hill. . . . Bottom has the supreme mark of this real greatness in that like the true saint or the true hero he only differs from humanity in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not true, as the idle materialists of to-day suggest, that compared to the majority of men the hero appears cold and de-humanised; it is the majority who appear cold and de-humanised in the presence of greatness. Bottom, like Don Quixote and Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller^ and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and unfathomable weakness, his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows his own trumpet it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. . . . Bottom's sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of literature — 'the raging Rockes, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus' carre shall shine from farre, and make and marre the foolish Fates' [1.2.31ff.], is exceedingly good poetic diction with a real throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy between him and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. . . . [T]he triumph of Bottom is that he loves rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, 'Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.' 'Odours, odours,' says Quince [3.1.82ff.], in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But 'Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete,' Bottom's version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The 'i' which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism. There is another aspect of this great play which ought to be kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade of the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic

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harmony down to such coup-de-maftre [master-stroke] as the name of Bottom, or the flower called Love in Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there is one accidental discord; that is in the name of Theseus, and the whole city of Athens in which the events take place. Shakespeare's description of Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the best description of England that he or any one else ever wrote. Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of hunting, kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity. The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with the queer formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English; to compare them with the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend for instance, is suddenly to discover that we have, after all, a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at least in Shakespeare's day. Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women's ale, or pulling the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant Celtic beauty; his is the horse-play of the invisible world. Perhaps it is some debased inheritance of English life which makes American ghosts so fond of quite undignified practical jokes. But this union of mystery with farce is a note of the mediaeval English. The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase 'merrie England,' though some conception of it is quite necessary to the comprehension of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In some cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of to-day, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism. Amid all the great work of Puritanism, the damning indictment of it consists in one fact, that there was only one of the fables of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous. In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved the Dragon. . . . Shakespeare is English in everything, above all in his weaknesses. . . . He is English in nothing so much as in that noble cosmopolitan unconsciousness which makes him look eastward with the eyes of a child towards Athens or Verona. He loved to talk of the glory of foreign lands, but he talked of them with the tongue and unquenchable spirit of England. It is too much the custom of a later patriotism to reverse this method and talk of England from morning till night, but to talk of her in a manner totally un-English. Casualness, incongruities, and a certain fine absence of mind are in the temper of England; the unconscious man with the ass's head is no bad type of the people. Materialistic philosophers and mechanical politicians have certainly succeeded in some cases in giving him a greater unity. The only question is, to which animal has he been thus successfully conformed? (621-6)

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77 Stopford Augustus Brooke, love, dreamland, and Helena 1905

From On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1905). Stopford Augustus Brooke (1832-1916) graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1856, was ordained an Anglican priest in 1857, and soon moved to London where he distinguished himself for many years as a preacher, even giving some sermons before Queen Victoria. In 1876 he published his Primer of English Literature, a brief history covering the literature from 670 to 1832, which sold over a half million copies. His other works — he published seventeen volumes from 1893 to 1913 — included books on Milton (1879), Tennyson (1894), and Browning (1902), and two studies of Shakespeare's plays (1905 and 1913).

[From Chapter I: 1A Midsummer Night's Dream'] [Brooke sees the joyful and cheerful mood of A Midsummer Night's Dream as arising from Shakespeare's 'delight in life', a delight which persisted through to the late romances. A comedy of love, it has romantic mediaeval, classical, pastoral, and real life elements, and is full of the poetry of love. He then examines some aspects of love.] This play, written for a marriage, is, naturally, concerned with love. Theseus and Hippolyta image the sober love of middle age, with here and there a touch of passion. They have no difficulties, no trouble. The tragedies of love, except those arising from jealousy, belong, for the most part, to youth and the beginnings of old age. In middle age the great outside interests of the world modify into quiet that tyrannic passion. Theseus turns at once from Hippolyta to the business of the state. Hippolyta can philosophise with ease on the vagaries of love. And both, not caring for the loneliness with one another which youthful love desires, are delighted with the pleasures of the chase. They rise early in the morning to follow the hounds. Their talk is not of love, but of bygone hunting, of their dogs, their breed, their musical cry. With the young lovers it is different. Love, as he is in Spenser's mask of Cupid,W is a cruel, capricious god to them. Even Puck disapproves of his conduct - : 'Cupid is a knavish lad / Thus to make poor females mad' [3.2.440ff.]. Lysander loves Hermia,

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and Demetrius Helena. But Demetrius forsakes Helena for Hermia, and hence are born jealousies, furies, quarrels, dissolutions of friendship, death or a convent to Hermia. Under love's cruel driving, Helena betrays Lysander and Hermia to Demetrius, and is a traitor to honour. Under it the friendship of Helena and Hermia is dissolved, and Demetrius and Lysander seek each the other's death. Love sets them into madness and confusion. Then with a sudden turn, in the midst of the dream-night, Shakespeare turns to laugh at the folly of youthful love. He makes it depend on the juice of an herb, as if it were only a chance, as if it lay only in the eye. Lysander hates the woman he loved, Demetrius loves the woman he hated. Helena and Hermia are driven wild with pain. Titania herself is a victim, and falls in love with Bottom crowned with an ass's head. All is mockery of Love as the maddener, the god of unreason. Only Elizabeth escapes, 'the fair vestal throned in the West' [2.1.158]. She is 'fancy free' [2.1.164], and this isolation of her makes the compliment Shakespeare paid her almost as exquisite as the poetry in which it is made. Finally, the play, the rude mechanics' play, is a love-tragedy as deep as that of Romeo and Juliet. But it is turned into laughter, and makes the sorrows of love the tragical mirth of an hour. The note of all this treatment of the subject of love is struck in the first act by Lysander's phrase 'The course of true love never did run smooth' [1.1.134], then by Lysander's statements of the crosses of love, then by Hermia's answers, and then by the soliloquy of Helena at the end of the first scene. Nothing can be more characteristic of the time, of its literary life, of the mastery of love as a subject, of Shakespeare's sportive youthfulness, than this hither and thither of love in various fantasies. 'Nowadays,' says Bottom, 'reason and love keep little company together' [3.1.143fF.]. . . . [He now describes the landscape, nature, some of the 'daylight' characters, and then goes on to consider the dream atmosphere.] Then comes the Night, the magical midsummer Night, and with it the fairy world. The lovers seek the wood, and so do the crew of mechanics to rehearse their play. And they pass into the dream. The daylight has gone; the moonlight rules. Indeed, the moon is the sky-mistress of the play. She is not only the Queen of the Midsummer Night; she is the goddess of the marriage-bed of Theseus and Hippolyta, whose first speeches dwell on her. The lovers talk of her beauty. Oberon and Titania live in her light and breathe its air. Pyramus and Thisbe meet in moonshine. The fairies bless Theseus' bed in her brightness. All the sentiment of moonlight in a million lovers' hearts pervades the play. Shakespeare has, with easy power, brought into these three acts the mystery, the fantasy, the dimness, and the unreason of dreamland. Titania and Oberon resemble the stately, graceful creations of our imagination when we are asleep. The fairies who attend the Queen are like those unfinished, childish fancies, begun and broken off, which we see in dreams. Puck is the representative of the grotesque, unmoral, unhuman creations (for fancy, without will, has no conscience, no humanity) which so strangely go and come in dreams. Then, the changes of scene, the appearance and disappearance of the personages, cross and recross one another with the bewildering rapidity of a dream. We are even borne away in a moment to vast distances, for dreams have no geography, and the fairies move as swift as thought through space.

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Oberon comes from the furthest steep of India. Titania sits with her friend in the spiced Indian air, watching the ships go by. The quarrel is about an Indian boy. The introduction of India (a country on which the English then spent a world of fancies) adds its own mystery to the dream-atmosphere in which the reader moves. Then, too, there is in the wood the confusion, disorder, and unreason of a dream. The lovers fall in and out of love with one another for no cause in the world but the mistakes of a mad spirit, who is himself the plaguing grotesque of a dream. And time and periods of thought are also huddled into confusion. Theseus and Elizabeth are living together; romance and the classic world jostle one another. Hippolyta has been Oberon's mistress; Titania the cause why Theseus betrayed Ariadne. We may add to this the wild grotesquerie often characteristic of dreams. The ass's head placed on Bottom's thick skull; the elemental Queen embracing the clown; the contrast between the lovely delicacy of Titania's language and the clownish wit of Bottom; the way in which he employs the dainty fairies; his own unthinking acceptance of the new world into which he has come — the most fantastic of Shakespeare's dream-imaginings - are all of a fine grotesque. Puck is its image, that 'lob of spirits' [2.1.16]. He tells of his practical jokes with humanity, of his good nature when it is his humour. He does no fatal mischief, but he is quite out of sympathy with the sorrows of mankind. The jangling of the lovers amuses him, though it wins the pity of Oberon, the higher spirit. It is he who, in the grotesque of the dream, places the ass's head on Bottom and hurries the coarse mechanic into the fine-spun life of fairyland. The dream reaches its height when the Queen of Dreamland herself is set dreaming. Even dreams dream that they dream; and Titania cries — [Quotes 4.1.76-7: 'My Oberon! what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamour'd of an ass' [4.1.76ff.]. . . . (8-17) [He now surveys at length the dream world of the four lovers, the fairy realm, Bottom, then the fine poetry of the play as spoken by the fairies, Theseus and Hippolyta, and, finally, by the lovers, especially by Helena.] The lovers too have their own poetry. A different note fills it, the note of youthful, inexperienced love, in its joy and its trouble, full of fast-changing fancies, none of them deep or penetrating. Even in the madnesses of the dream their thoughts live only on the surface of things. Passion's touch on the four lovers is slight, claps them on their shoulder, but does not close round their heart. Nature, who, when love is profound, disappears from the lover's eyes, is used by these lovers to illustrate and enhance their love. Helena, being unhappy, is she in whose mouth Shakespeare places the finest love-poetry. Her sorrow adds substance to her fancy. It is she who cries in words which sing themselves [Quotes 1.1.182-5: 'O happy fair! / Your eyes are lode-stars. . . .']. It is she who describes the school-days' friendship, the childhood innocence of herself and Hermia, in a passage which, in spite of its elaborate beauty, has always seemed to me a little out of tune with the confusion and the wildness of the Dream in which she is then involved. ^ It brings us too much into reality. But this impertinent reproach to Shakespeare is perhaps undeserved. Helena is far the most tormented of the four lovers, and the height of her misery would, in Shakespeare's mind, lift her above the magic of the dream into her natural self. (33)

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78 George Edward Woodberry, the theme of illusion 1907

From The Complete Works of Shakespeare. With Annotations and a General Introduction by Sidney Lee. The Renaissance Edition (40 vols, New York, 1907-9). Volume VI. A Midsummer Night's Dream. With a Special Introduction by George E. Woodberry and an Original Frontispiece by C. Wilhelm (New York, 1907).

George Edward Woodberry (1855-1930), teacher, poet, critic, was influenced by his colonial New England heritage, and by his admiration for the classical and modern cultures of the Mediterranean countries. Between 1891 and 1904 he was an inspiring professor of literature at Columbia University; then until 1918 he lectured at various universities across the United States. In 1911 devoted disciples founded the Woodberry Society. He published several volumes of poetry, and many studies and editions of American and English authors. His introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream for Sir Sidney Lee's edition was included in his collected essays Studies of a Litterateur (New York, 1921; reprinted 1968).

[From 'Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream'] Character, plot, incident, situation, dialogue, - it is plain that the interest of the play, the charm that has made it a marvel of fantasy and beauty, does not lie in these, but in the diffused dream-atmosphere in which all of life is breathing in the enchanted night. Illusion is the theme to which the play returns in Protean shapes. In its grossest form, the illusion of the senses, which is such a stumbling-block to the hard-headedt1] workingmen of Athens, it is given only by the instrumentality of Puck, the mischief-maker; he transforms Bottom to his marvellous self, the ass-headed one, and he misleads the angry lovers, keeping them apart in the tangled wood. The illusion of the heart appears at every turn and in various disguises: humanly speaking, love is the only interest of the play, and love is the illusion of the heart. . . . . . . But the great illusion is the illusion of art. It is stated with philosophical precision in the front of the last act, which is its sphere; Such tricks hath strong imagination; That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy. [5.1.18ff.]

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It is described as the function of the poet:- [Quotes 5.1.14-17: 'And, as imagination bodies forth. . . .']. It is put forth by Theseus as the essence of all art: 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them' [5.1.21 Iff.]. This is that great shadow-idea, one of the few that are constant in Shakespeare, whose persistence through all his thought is so marked a characteristic. King Richard's mirror is an early example [Richard II, 4.1.276-98]; and here, in this play, Oberon, who is a prophecy of Prospero, is named 'King of Shadows' [3.2.347]. Thus Oberon, who controls the action of the play, is the master spirit of its idea. Illusion in these various forms, involving the whole compass of life, is strongly supported on all sides by the lyrical element which is also omnipresent. It appears, characteristically, in that opening song-dialogue of Lysander and Hermia; it is the natural speech, song-speech, of Puck and the fairies in the induction to the fairy world; and it governs the close in those songs of blessing which Coleridge thought the English notes of a better Anacreon [No. 15 above]. But it is more pervasive than this; its pastoralism gives the atmosphere, and detail as well, to the rural description, and absorbs all nature in its own point of view in the account of the blight that had fallen on the land: it yields those idyl pictures of girlhood friendship, Cupid shooting his bolt into the West, Hermia's awaking, the Indian boy's mother, the hounds of Theseus, which enamel the verse; and throughout it inspires the infinite touches of golden word and melodious cadence which make the language of such surpassing beauty and pure vocal charm. It is in such a garment of lyricism that the theme of illusion is clothed, and it is thrown over the humour as well as the beauty of the play, (xvi-xix)

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79 Frank Sidgwick, the nature and sources of the play 1908

From The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' (London, 1908). Frank Sidgwick (1879-1939) was the son of Arthur Sidgwick, a Classics master at Rugby and later an Oxford don, and the nephew of Henry Sidgwick, the eminent Cambridge professor of Moral philology; he was educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge. A career in publishing brought him in contact with several eminent scholars. While working for A.H. Bullen at the Shakespeare Head Press, he collaborated with E.K. Chambers on Early English Lyrics (1907); then and later, both with Chambers and on his own, he edited various compilations of ballads and early lyrics. In 1908 he founded his own press, Sidgwick and Jackson Ltd., of which R.B. McKerrow became a co-director in 1917.M Apart from editions, he published a novel, three volumes of original verse, and a memoir of the headmaster of the Dragon School at Oxford, which he attended before going to Rugby. His influential book on the sources of A Midsummer Night's Dream has perhaps been accorded more respect than it deserves; it is heavily dependent on Chambers's Warwick edition [No. 70 above], and considerably less well-documented.

[From the 'Introduction'] [Sidgwick accepts a date for the play of the winter of 1594-5.] So placed, it is the latest of the early comedies of Shakespeare, who makes an advance on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but has not yet attained the firmness of hand which fills the canvas of The Merchant of Venice with so many well-delineated figures. Once arrived at this conclusion, we need not let ourselves again be led away into vagueness or critical polemics by an attempt to find any aristocratic wedding which this masque-like play seems designed to celebrate; such theorising, however interesting in other ways, does not concern and will not avail us now. It is none the less of value to recognise at the outset that A Midsummer Night's Dream is more of a masque than a drama — an entertainment rather than a play. The characters are mostly puppets, and scarcely any except Bottom has the least psychological interest for the reader. Probability is thrown to the winds; anachronism is rampant; classical figures are mixed with fairies and sixteenth-century

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Warwickshire peasants. The main plot is sentimental, the secondary plot is sheer buffoonery; while the story of Titania's jealousy and Oberon's method of curing it can scarcely be dignified by the title of plot at all. The threads which bind together these three tales, however ingeniously fastened, are fragile. The Spirit of Mischief puts a happy end to the differences of the four lovers, and by his transformation of Bottom reconciles the fairy King and Queen, while he incidentally goes near to spoiling the performance of the 'crew of patches' [3.2.9] at the nuptials of Theseus by preventing due rehearsal of their interlude. It is perhaps a permissible fancy to convert Theseus' words 'the lunatic, the lover, and the poet' [5.1.7], to illustrate the triple appeal made by the three ingredients - the grotesque, the sentimental, and the fantastic. Each part, of course, is coloured by the poet's genius, and the whole is devoted to the comic aspect of love, its eternal youth and endless caprice, laughing at laws, and laughed at by the secure. 'What fools these mortals be!' [3.2.115] is the comment of the immortal; the corollary, left unspoken by those outside the pale, being 'What fools these lovers be!' . . . [He notes that of Shakespeare's plays only three, The Tempest, Love's Labour's Lost, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, do not have easily recognizable sources.] The problem - given the play - is to discover what parts of it Shakespeare conveyed from elsewhere, and to investigate those sources as far as is compatible with the limits of this book. [He reiterates the division of the play into 'The main (sentimental) plot of the four lovers at the court of Theseus', 'The grotesque plot, with the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe', and 'The fairy plot'.] It may be observed that for these three plots Shakespeare draws respectively on literature, observation, and oral tradition; for we shall see, I think, that while there can be little doubt that he had been reading Chaucer, North's Plutarch and Golding's Ovid, not to mention other works, probably including some which are now lost, it is also impossible to avoid the conclusion that much if not all of his fairy-lore is derived from no literary source at all, but from the popular beliefs which must have been current in oral tradition in his youth. (2-5) [In the section on the main plot, Sidgwick gives some parallels with North's Plutarch, relying mainly on Chambers's Warwick Shakespeare edition of the play [No. 70 above], and then summarizes Chaucer's The Knightes Tale. He comments on Shakespeare's hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen, then, in a passage closely resembling that on pp. xx-xxi of A.W. Verity's edition of A Midummer Night's Dream for The Pitt Press Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1893), continues:-] We must now consider what justification there is for believing that the main plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream was suggested by The Knightes Tale. Firstly, as has already been pointed out, the nuptials of Theseus form the beginning of both play and poem. . . . Secondly, the wedding-day is the first of May, and there are two references to that 'observance of May'2 which is given by Chaucer as the reason both for Emilia's walking in the garden and for Arcite's seeking of the grove where Palamon lay hid.3 Thirdly, it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare took the name of Philostrate from Chaucer; Egeus he would find also in North's Plutarch as the name of the father of Theseus; and it is possible that Chaucer's names for the champions Ligurge and Emetreus, may have suggested Lysander and Demetrius.

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Finally, there are two or three minor indications; Lysander and Demetrius fight, or attempt to fight, for Helena, in the 'wood near Athens,' just as Palamon and Arcite fight for Emilia in the grove;4 Theseus is a keen huntsman both in the poem and in the play;5 and he refers6 to his conquest of Thebes, which, as we have seen, is described in The Knightes Tale. Apart from these details, I do not think Shakespeare is indebted to Chaucer. It is conceivable that the story of Palamon and Arcite affected, but did not supply, the plot of the four lovers in A Midsummer-Night's Dream; but Shakespeare has added a second woman. This completion of the antithesis is characteristic of his early work; with a happy ending in view, the characters must fall into pairs, whereas with Palamon, Arcite, and Emilia, one of the men must be removed. (23-5) [In the section on the grotesque plot, Sidgwick states that the mechanicals are drawn from life, and the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe from a well-known classical story. He notes possible parallels for Bottom's transformation recorded in Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft.] From these instances a literary origin for Bottom's transformation seems probable; but Shakespeare may himself have fallen in with a survival of the witch-superstition. Almost while "writing these words I receive first-hand evidence that such a tradition is not yet extinct in Welford-on-Avon, a village, four miles from Stratford, with which Shakespeare must have been perfectly familiar. The witch, as usual, was an old woman, credited with the 'evil eye' and the power of causing death of cattle and farm-stock by 'overlooking' them; and the native of Welford, from whom the story was communicated to me, would be prepared to produce eye-witnesses of various transformations of the old woman into some kind of animal — transformations effected not only at Welford, but even in the centre of Stratford on market-day! (30-1) [In the section on the fairy plot, Sidgwick rehearses the etymology of the names of Oberon, Titania, and Puck, then turns to consideration of literary sources. His chief interest is in medieval parallels, in for example the romances or lays such as Thomas ofErceldoune, Sir Launfal, and Sir Orfeo. He also gives some attention to ballads, and contemporary references. He is again largely drawing on The Warwick Shakespeare, Appendix A. 'The Fairy World'.] Thus we see ... that the fairy-superstition and the elf-superstition were melted together in the popular pre-Shakespearean mind, and that Shakespeare himself, making a new division of the characteristics of the two, yet re-welded the whole into one realm by putting the Puck in subjection under the fairy king. [He summarizes the characteristics of the fairies as given by Chambers in The Warwick Shakespeare, pp. 142-4.] The fairy of folk-lore in Shakespeare's day is nearly everything that the fairies of A Midsummer-Night's Dream are; we may possibly except their exiguity, their relations in love with mortals, and their hymeneal functions. His conception of their size as infinitesimal at least differs from that of the popular stories, where (as far as can be ascertained) they are shown to be about the size of mortal children. (64-5)

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80 Algernon Charles Swinburne, the most beautiful work of man 1909

From Shakespeare: Written in 1905 and now first published (London, 1909). For Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), see No. 51 above. Swinburne's life-long admiration of A Midsummer Night's Dream is consonant with the praise accorded Swinburne himself by Edmund Gosse: 'no one, among his contemporaries, pursued the poetic calling with so sincere and resplendent an allegiance to the claims of absolute and unadulterated poetry. . . . Swinburne always remained an artist absorbed in a lyrical ecstacy, a singer and not a seer' (Encyclopedia Britannica. Eleventh Edition, New York, 1910-11, XXVI, 235).

A Midsummer Night's Dream is outside as well as above all possible or imaginable criticism. It is probably or rather surely the most beautiful work of man. No human hand can ever have bequeathed us anything properly or rationally comparable with this. Beauty pure and simple as the spring's 'when hawthorn buds appear' (1.1.185) informs every verse with life as lovely and as happy as the life of flowers when 'every flower enjoys the air it breathes.'t1! The lyric part is hardly and only lovelier than the rest because the lyric is of its very nature the sweetest and most perfect form of poetry. The fresh and matchless fragrance of Shakespeare's inborn and everliving and ever present lovingkindness imbues with something of April life the very interludes of farce. Were this the one surviving work of Shakespeare, his place would still be high in the first order of poets: but all words fall short of our thanksgiving when we remember that the same hand which gave us this gift gave us likewise Othello and King Lear. (33-4)

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81 Ernest de Selincourt, Shakespeare's conception of his art 1911

From Summary of Papers Read before the Shakespeare Club, 1911 (Stratford-uponAvon, 1911). Ernest de Selincourt (1870-1943) graduated in 1894 from Oxford where he taught until he was elected professor of English at the University of Birmingham in 1908. There, except from 1928 to 1933 when he was professor of poetry at Oxford, he served until his retirement in 1935. He produced important critical editions of Keats (1905) and Spenser (1912), but his major work was on William and Dorothy Wordsworth. He edited The Prelude (1926), their Letters (six volumes, 1935-9), and other works. The selection presented here is a newpaper reporter's account of a lecture, 'Shakespeare and Realism', given at a meeting of the Shakespeare Club of Stratford-upon-Avon in March, 1911, published in The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald March 24, 1911, and reprinted in the Summary of Papers Read before the Shakespeare Club, 1911.

[From THE SHAKESPEARE CLUB. Professor de Selincourt on "Shakespeare and Realism." Reprinted from the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, March 24th, 1911'] [He begins by asserting that Shakespeare is alive today, especially on the stage.] It was true that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, but it was also true that he wrote for a stage very different from ours, and many of the conditions of the theatre at the present day militated against an entirely satisfactory stage representation of the plays. He wrote for a stage without scenery, in which place was merely indicated by the barest suggestion, on which all machinery and contrivances were of the most elementary kind, on which those effects of light which added so much to the effects of mystery and romance were impossible of achievement. Consequently he took an entirely different view of his art from that which was taken by the modern dramatist, or from that which he would himself take if he were alive to-day. And we could only realise this properly and understand his conception of drama aright if, side by side with our attendance at Shakespearean performances at the theatre — for we could not afford to dispense with these — we attended and, if possible, took our part in dramatic readings of his plays, in which the absence of scenery and accessories called

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upon us to exercise our imaginations in the way in which Shakespeare intended us to exercise them. For our conception of drama had naturally enough developed, or at least changed, with the development of stage machinery, and we must learn to put ourselves back to Shakespeare's conception of his art. What that conception was we could, perhaps, understand most fully if we approached it by a consideration of the remarks which he put into the mouths of certain of his dramatis personce, remembering, of course, that it was not Shakespeare himself that was speaking, but a man who represented a typical point of view. And first let the great passage put into the mouth of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream be considered — [quotes 5.1.7-22: 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet. ...']. Some critics had seen in Theseus a veiled representation of the personality of Shakespeare, and still more had accepted this speech as Shakespeare's own conception of art. But, shorn of its beauty of expression, what did it amount to? It told us that the imagination of madman, lover, and poet led alike to misrepresentation, and that, just as the lover thought his ill-favoured mistress a Helen, so did the poet extol what to saner intelligence was a mere nothing. This was no more the view of art taken by the author of Cymbeline, Othello, and King Lear than it was the view of love taken by the creator of Imogen and of Desdemona. It was the view of the Philistine of every age, and Shakespeare took an ironic pleasure in giving him that nationality which stood in the history of the world for all that was cultured and refined. It was the view of the serious, practical man of the world, kindly, tolerant, a good citizen, even up to a point educated, but quite devoid of artistic sensibility, and slightly contemptuous of those who had it. How such a man would approach the drama we knew already from the action of his descendants of to-day. He was its worst enemy, and far more deadly to its healthy development than the Puritan who condemned it altogether. For, regarding it at its best as a pardonable relaxation from the serious interests of life, he would frequent the farce and the comic opera because they made no demand upon his intelligence: he would view with distrust, even with alarm, any attempts to deal upon the stage with the vital things of life, and he would support a censorship which, as he fondly imagined, would save him the trouble of thinking for himself. And the less there was in the play the more he would like it. Even such were the intellectual offspring of Theseus. And so when Hippolyta, with the pose of a somewhat exclusive art critic, burst out, as she watched the rustic play of Bottom, 'This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard' [5.1.210], Theseus replied with lofty condescension, 'The best in this kind (that was, the dramatic kind) are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them [5.1.21 Iff]. The idea thus conveyed was that art at its best was only make-believe, that its realism must break down sooner or later, and, seeing that it was make-believe, what did it matter how absurd it was? To this we could well conceive of Shakespeare himself replying, 'Nay, Master Theseus; it is only the worst of this kind that you are competent to judge. For, if you were only able to see a little further than the end of your own nose, you would be startled into the discovery of a world of obstinate questionings, of exalted passion, beside which your own existence is itself but a pale shadow'. Diametrically opposed to the position assumed by Theseus towards the drama was that of Hamlet. Hamlet had never despised the stage. Far from it. His friends

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well-remembered his love of the players and the eagerness with which he used to watch their performances; so that Polonius was able to assume an air of even more than usual importance when he announced to him, 'The actors are come hither, my lord' [Hamlet, 2.2.392], and, not to be put offby Hamlet's hardly encouraging reply, 'Buz, buz!' he recounted, till he was fairly out of breath, the different types of drama which the players were prepared to produce. But on the entrance of the players we discovered that Shakespeare's dramatic taste was not coincident with Hamlet's. [Quotes Hamlet, 2.2.434-40: 'I heard thee speak me a speech once. . . .'] and he went on to quote from memory — a proof of the impression it had made upon him — a long passage in the decorative and bombastic style of composition admired by the early Elizabethan; on which we might remark that it was natural such a passage should appeal to a man like Hamlet. But Hamlet was not Shakespeare, and, as for the play, we were told it 'pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general' [2.2.436-7]. Shakespeare made it his object to please the million, and he would have thought that play a failure which only appealed to a cult of intellectuals. Here, then, in the persons of Theseus and Hamlet, we had two antagonistic attitudes to the drama. To the one it was worth little, because, whatever its attempts at realism, it could never be more than make-believe of a very obvious kind. The other was apparently careless of reality, and delighted in a florid rhetoric which, to a sober judgment, narrowly escaped absurdity. And similarly the two plays presented to them were Shakespeare's implicit satire upon the types of drama then in vogue. Yet Shakespeare was at least nearer to Hamlet than to Theseus; for the speech of the player, unreal as it was, was at least capable of arousing a real emotion. Artistic truth, as Shakespeare saw it, did not lie in a crude realism -which, in its elaboration of detail, lost sight of essentials, nor yet in the use of an instrument so far from reality as to awaken a sense of unreality. It lay in the judicious employment of a recognised artistic medium freed from those defects which were the necessary accompaniment of an inadequate mastery of that medium. Shakespeare's main object as an artist was fidelity to the essentials of life and character, and this to him was only to be achieved by adopting a medium far enough removed from real life, but which, as he handled it, was able to express real life as no other had ever done. He had what had well been called a rich feeling for concrete positive fact, but in the communication of that feeling he had recourse of necessity to methods which, if considered superficially, seemed unnatural, even artificial. In order to give us the true impression of life he must employ art. He saw things in their true relation with one another, but he represented them not as they would naturally appear to us, not as they appeared to him, but in such a way that they might appear to us as they appeared to him. His art was, so to speak, the medium which he used to draw us into sympathy with his point of view, the lens by which he focussed our eyes -with his. And to accomplish this he worked of necessity upon a different plan from that which we were inclined to-day to describe as realistic. In the first place Shakespeare worked upon the principle of selection. The other great artistic principle was just as fundamental in all art, but was often forgotten, or, if not forgotten, at least misconceived. It was the recognition of the fact that art, however natural in its effects upon us, was art, and was never identical with nature. . . .

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[The report gives more of de Selincourt's remarks on the difference between art and reality, then proceeds.] Shakespeare saw that, though in life and on the stage we made ourselves known by language and by gesture, neither words nor gesture were the same both on the stage and off it. They bore a close relation to one another, but were not the same. Shakespeare, and with him his great contemporaries, recognised that what people wanted in drama was a crystallisation of the essential part of their lives, and not a mechanical reproduction of the trivial and the unimportant; and he sought to express that subtle play of thought and feeling that was called out in special relations and situations, but which was never actually expressed, or, if it were, was expressed in language ridiculously inadequate. And so he used another medium, and that medium was poetry, wherein alone the highest feeling could adequately be expressed. It was a recognised conventional medium, and it served its purpose. It kindled the imagination of his spectators; raised them above the sordid and petty interests of their daily life; above, too, their sordid surroundings in an Elizabethan theatre, and brought them into relation not with a dream world that had no existence, but with the higher realities of life and with their true selves. . . . Shakespeare's attitude to realism was of necessity different from the prevalent attitude of to-day. The modern stage had developed on the lines aimed at by Bottom the Weaver. It could represent Wall and Moonshine realistically, and was very fond of doing it. (3-9) [He concludes not by condemning the modern stage but by appealing for a better understanding of true realism.]

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82 Harley Granville Barker, screeds of word-music 1914

From Shakespeare's Comedy of A Midsummer-Night's Dream: An Acting Edition with a Producer's Preface by Granville Barker (London, 1914).

Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946) had little formal education. He began acting at fourteen, and was writing plays when he was twenty, producing some notable successes from 1902, in his twenty-fifth year, to 1910. However, his talents were best employed in directing and in writing criticism. His productions of The Winter's Tale and Twelfth Night in 1912, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1914 brought about a small revolution in the history of Shakespearean performance because they presented almost the full texts of the plays, emphasized the poetry, and provided imaginative sets and costumes which contributed to the overall effect of the play. The selection given below is from the preface to A Midsummer Night's Dream: An Acting Edition (London, 1914) which he published after the production of that play. From 1927 through 1947 he published in five series his famous Prefaces to Shakespeare, including a new one for A Midsummer Night's Dream which first appeared in 1924. In 1934 he collaborated with G. B. Harrison to produce A Companion to Shakespeare Studies. His blending of fine scholarship with a deep experience of the theatre gives originality to his work.

[From the 'Preface'] . . . Why waste time in proving that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a bad play, or proving otherwise, since to its deepest damnation one must add:— Written by a man of genius for the theatre, playwright in spite of himself? Does not vitality defeat doctrine? The opening of the play may be bad. The opening speech surely is even very bad dramatic verse. There is nothing much in the character of Theseus; there's nothing at all in Hippolyta. The substance of the opening scene is out of keeping both with its own method and with the scope of the play. But before the end of it, earlier than usual even in his later days, Shakespeare has begun to get into his stride. If he couldn't yet develop character he could write poetry, and - [Quotes 1.1.182-5: 'O happy fair! / Your eyes are lode-stars. . . .']. At the sound of that we cease to demand from Helena — for the moment, at least — any more material qualities. How he could and seemingly couldn't help but flower into verse! It was still a question, I suppose, whether he remained a poet or became a dramatist. He was, in every sense, nearer to

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Venus and Adonis than Macbeth. If he hadn't been a man of the people, if he hadn't had his living to earn, if he hadn't had more fun in him than the writing of lyric poetry will satisfy! If it was he made the English theatre, did not the theatre make him what he is — what he might be to us? Next come the clowns. It is necessary, I am ashamed to say, to remark, that Clown does not, first of all, mean a person who tries to be funny. A clown is a countryman. Now, your Cockney audience finds a countryman comic, and your Cockney writer to this day often makes him outrageously so. Shakespeare presumably knew something about countrymen, and he made the simple discovery and put it into practice for the first time in this play, that, set down lovingly, your clown is better fun by far than mocked at; if, indeed, apart from an actor's grimaces, he had then been funny at all. Later on Shakespeare did this, as he did most other things, better, but he never did it so simply. If Shallow and Silence are finer, they are different; moreover, though countrymen, they are not clowns. If Dogberry is as good, he hasn't, for me, quite the charm. There are little sketches in the last plays; that delightful person, for instance, at the end of Antony and Cleopatra with his 'I wish you joy of the worm' [5.2.279]. But from the moment Bottom, gloweringly mistrustful of poor Snug, asks, 'Let me play the lion too' [1.2.70], from that moment they have my heart, all five, for ever. It is a little puzzling to discover just how bad their play is meant to be. Did Quince write it? If he is guilty of 'Now am I dead' [5.1.301], then is not the prologue a plagiarism? But a good deal of more respectable playwriting than this was plagiarism, as who knew better than Shakespeare? I suspect he was of two minds himself on the point, if any at all. Then come the fairies. Can even genius succeed in putting fairies on the stage? The pious commentators say not. This play and the sublimer parts of King Lear are freely quoted as impossible in the theatre. But, then, by some trick of reasoning they blame the theatre for it. I cannot follow that. If a play, written for the stage, cannot be put on the stage, the playwright, it seems to me, has failed, be he who he may. Has Shakespeare failed or need the producer only pray for a little genius, too? The fairies are the producer's test. Let me confess that, though mainly love of the play, yet partly, too, a hope of passing that test, has inspired the present production.!1] Foolhardy one feels, facing it. But if a method of staging can compass the difficulties of A Midsummer Night's Dream, surely its cause is won. . . . [He discusses using children as fairies, and the problem of speaking verse.] What else was Shakespeare's chief delight in this play but the screeds of word-music to be spoken by Oberon, Titania, and Puck? At every possible and impossible moment he is at it. For Puck's description of himself there may be need, but what excuse can we make for Titania's thirty-five lines about the dreadful weather except their sheer beauty? But what better excuse? Oberon is constantly guilty. So recklessly happy in writing such verse does Shakespeare grow that even the quarrel of the four lovers is stayed by a charming speech of Helena's thirty-seven lines long. It is true that at the end of it Hermia, her author allowing her to recollect the quarrel, says she is amazed at these passionate words, but that the passage beginning, 'We, Hermia, like two artificial gods' [3.2.203], is meant by Shakespeare to be spoken otherwise than with a meticulous regard to its every beauty

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is hard to believe. And its every beauty will scarcely shine through throbbing passion. No, his heart was in these passages of verse, and so the heart of the play is in them. And the secret of the play — the refutation of all doctrinaire criticism of it — lies in the fact that though they may offend against every letter of dramatic law they fulfil the inmost spirit of it, inasmuch as they are dramatic in themselves. They are instinct with that excitement, that spontaneity, that sense of emotional overflow which is drama. They are as carefully constructed for effective speaking as a messenger's speech in a Greek drama. One passage in particular, Puck's 'My mistress with a monster is in love' [3.2.6], is both in idea and form, in its tension, climax, and rounding off, a true messenger's speech. Shakespeare, I say, was from the first a playwright in spite of himself. Even when he seems to sacrifice drama to poem he — instinctively or not - manages to make the poem itself more dramatic than the drama he sacrifices. And once he has found himself as a playwright very small mercy has he on verse for its own sake. He seems to write it as the fancy takes him, badly or well, broken or whole. Is there a single rule he will not break, lest his drama should for a moment suffer? Is there a supreme passage in the later plays but is supreme more in its dramatic emotion than its sheer poetry? Take for an extreme instance the line in King Lear 'Never, never, never, never, never' [5.3.309]. Can you defend it as poetry any more than you can defend 'Oh, Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh'?t2] As a moment of drama what could be more poignantly beautiful? Whence comes the tradition that a blank verse play is, merely by virtue of its verse, the top notch of achievement? Shakespeare's best work, seen alive in the theatre, gives, I maintain, no colour to it. Verse was his first love, his natural medium — the finest medium for the theatre in general of his day, I'll admit. But how far he was, in principle and practice, from those worthy disciples who have for these centuries and do indeed still attempt to drag us wearily up their strictly decasyllabic pathway to Parnassus, only a placing of their work and his side by side in the living theatre will show. It has all come, I suppose, from learned people elevating him to the study from the stage. Despise the theatre; it revenges itself, (iii-ix)

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83 Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, three types of fairies: Puck, Oberon and Titania 1916

From Shakespeare's Industry (London, 1916). Charlotte Carmichael Slopes (1841-1929), scholar, critic, and supporter of women's suffrage, trained as a teacher at Edinburgh Normal School, and for a time taught privately and wrote stories for Chambers' Juvenile Series. She also wrote for The Attempt, the journal of an Edinburgh women's society, and was the first woman to take a Certificate at Edinburgh University. Her British Freewomen: their historical privilege (London, 1894), went through three editions; several of her sixteen books of Shakespearean criticism and background studies also received more than one edition. She was an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her accomplishments have been overshadowed by the fame of her daughter, scientist and birth-control pioneer Marie Charlotte Carmichael Slopes (1880-1950).

[From Chapter X: 'The Midsummer Night's Dream'] . . . There were supposed to be many kinds of fairies, Shakespeare only gives us three well known types, and a background of obedient subordinates. The best known type was that which was familiar to the people as Robin Goodfellow, here called 'for short' Puck, though he sometimes acknowledges his popular name. He was not wicked, but very mischievous; while he sometimes did kind deeds, he was easily offended, and then he could be very unpleasant [Quotes 2.1.34-44: 'Robin Goodfellow, are not you he / That frights the maidens. . . .']. He goes on to dwell with relish on his practical jokes, not pleasant to the sufferer, a fairy of no sympathy and all whim. The other type, his king, of higher breed, more stately, more poetic, more learned, more powerful, had still some fairy flaws. He is self-willed, determined to have what he himself wants, not free from the taint of spite, willing to punish those who ruffle him. He wants the lovely boy that his wife cherishes, she will not yield it to him, and he recklessly quarrels with her, tracks her steps when she flies from him, breaks up her pastimes, and finally resolves to play a humiliating trick upon her to secure his end. . . . Oberon had not chivalric feeling enough to keep his quarrels to himself, 'and chastise with the valour of his tongue' [Macbeth, 1.5.27] the fairy wife who had a will and a spirit of her own. Even Puck could judge his master's faults,

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for he says, 'And jealous Oberon would have the child' [2.1.24]. Yet he was kindly enough and sympathetic with the sweet Athenian maids in a new situation which interested him. Shakespeare makes Titania the very best type of fairy. She is not mischievous like Puck, she is not jealous like Oberon. Her tendencies seem to be pacific, hers is the beneficent ideal of fairy character. A daughter of Ceres, she helps agriculture, she watches the woods and the flowers. The sports of her Court keep Nature healthful. She appeals to Oberon to cease troubling. He had disturbed their sports with brawls, therefore in revenge the winds have sucked up fogs, and the rivers have overflowed; the ploughman had lost his sweat, the green corn has rotted, the folds stand empty in the drowned fields, crows are fatted with the murrain flock. Human mortals want food. Games and music cease, therefore the moon, pale in her anger, washes all the air, rheumatic diseases abound, the seasons alter. Titania sympathises with all who suffer, and in her sympathy strikes the highest note that all the realm of fairies had conceived; and only Theseus in the play could have understood. She also realises something of responsibility. [Quotes 2.1.115-18, 120: 'And this same progeny of evils ']. But Titania had also the higher gift of love, even for humanity, and of fidelity to love. She was faithful to her mortal friend. 'And for her sake, I will not part with him' [2.1.137]. She was quite willing to forgive Oberon his past quarrels, if he would come and 'patiently dance in our round' [2.1.140]. Nothing would satisfy Oberon but that boy. Titania will not yield in what she thinks is right. So Oberon determines if he cannot get his will by fair means he will get it by foul, for which he gets little blame from the audience; or even from the critics, because it all works out on such amusing lines. But Titania, who had been in the right in the dispute, now being wronged, is made to be in the right in Oberon's ruse. After he had got his own way, he had some heart of grace for his bewildered Queen, and releases her, and how gentle she is. 'My Oberon, what visions I have seen' [4.1.76]. She, a fairy, did not know this juice of love-in-idleness. For a while the spirit of knowledge triumphed over the spirit of Love. But not for ever. (177-9)

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84 Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson, the dream's validity 1917

From Martin B. Ruud, An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway (Menasha, Wisconsin, 1917). Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson (1832-1910), the great Norwegian poet, novelist, and playwright, was Ibsen's successor as director at the Bergen theatre in 1857, and in 1865 became director of the Christiania Theatre. Here one of his earliest productions, A Midsummer Night's Dream, aroused considerable controversy. This essay, his response to two long articles in the newspaper Morgenbladet, first appeared in Aftenbladet, April 28, 1865. Bj0rnson was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1903.

[Ruud paraphrases the start of Bj0rnson's article thus: 'He begins with an analysis of the play: The play is called a dream. But wherein lies the dream? "Why," we are told, "in the fact that fairies sport, that honest citizens, with and without asses' heads, put on a comedy, that lovers pursue each other in the moonlight." But where is the law in all this? If the play is without law (Lov = organic unity), it is without validity. But it does have artistic validity. The dream is more than a fantasy. The same experiences come to all of us'. Ruud then translates:] The play takes place, now in your life, now in mine. A young man happily engaged or happily married dreams one night that this is all a delusion. He must be engaged to, he must marry another. The image of the 'chosen one' hovers before him, but he can not quite visualize it, and he marries with a bad conscience. Then he awakens and thanks God that it is all a bad dream (Lysander). Or a youth is tired of her whom he adored for a time. He even begins to flirt with another. And then one fine night he dreams that he worships the very woman he loathes, that he implores her, weeps for her, fights for her (Demetrius). Or a young girl, or a young wife, who loves and is loved dreams, that her beloved is fleeing from her. When she follows him with tears and petitions, he lifts his hand against her. She pursues him, calls to him to stop, but she cannot reach him. She feels all the agony of death till she falls back in a calm, dreamless sleep. Or she dreams that the lover she cannot get comes to her in a wood and tells her that he really does love her, that her eyes are lovelier than the stars, her hands whiter than the snow on Taurus. But other visions come, more confusing. Another, whom she has never given a thought, comes and tells her the same story.

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His protestations are even more glowing — and it all turns to contention and sorrow, idle pursuit and strife, till her powers fail (Helena). This is the dream chain of the lovers. The poet causes the man to dream that he is unfaithful, or that he is enamored of one whom he does not love. And he makes the woman dream that she is deserted or that she is happy with one whom she cannot get. And together these dreams tell us: watch your thoughts, watch your passions, you, walking in perfect confidence at the side of your beloved. They (the thoughts and passions) may bring forth a flower called 'love in idleness' — a flower which changes before you are aware of it. The dream gives us reality reversed, but reversed in such a way that there is always the possibility that it may, in an unguarded moment, take veritable shape. And this dream of the lovers is given a paradoxical counterpart. A respectable, fat citizen dreams one night that he is to experience the great triumph of his life. He is to be presented before the duke's throne as the greatest of heroes. He dreams that he cannot get dressed, that he cannot get his head attended to, because, as a matter of fact, his head is not his own excellent head, but the head of an ass with long ears, a snout, and hair that itches. 'This is exactly like a fairy tale of my youth,' he dreams. And indeed, it is a dream! The mountain opens, the captive princess conies forth and leads him in, and he rests his head in her lap all strewn with blossoms. The lovely trolls come and scratch his head and music sounds from the rocks. It is characteristic of Shakespeare that the lovers do not dream fairy tales of their childhood. Higher culture has given them deeper passions, more intense personal relations; in dreams they but continue the life of waking. But the good weaver who lives thoroughly content in his own self-satisfaction and in the esteem of his neighbors, who has never reflected upon anything that has happened to him, but has received each day's blessings as they have come — this man sees, the moment he lays his head on the pillow, the fairies and the fairy queen. To him the whole circle of childhood fantasy reveals itself; nothing is changed, nothing but this absurd ass's head which he wears, and this curious longing for dry, sweet hay. This is the dream and the action of the playJ1! Superficially, all this magic is set in motion by the fairies; Theseus and his train, with whom come hunting horn and hunting talk and processional - are, in reality, the incarnation of the festival. And the comedy at the close is added by way of counterpiece to the light, delicate fancies of the dream. It is the thoughts we have thought, the painfully-wrought products of the waking mind, given in a sparkle of mocking laughter against the background of nightly visions. See the play over and over again. Do not study it with Bottom's ass's head, and do not be so blase that you reject the performance because it does not command the latest electrical effects. [In Ruud's partial summary, Bjornson proceeds to defend specific aspects of his production from the criticisms of reviewers. He particularly defends eschewing excessive scenic effects, instead calling on audiences to exercise their imaginations. He also defends having Puck played by a woman, rather than an adolescent boy incapable of handling difficult speeches. He concludes by explaining his personal relationship to the play.] Of all the poetry I have ever read, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream has,

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unquestionably, had the greatest influence upon me. It is his most delicate and most imaginative work, appealing quite as much through its intellectual significance as through its noble, humane spirit. I read it first in Eiksdal when I was writing Ame^ and I felt rebuked for the gloomy feelings under the spell of which that book was written. But I took the lesson to heart: I felt that I had in my soul something that could produce a play with a little of the fancy and joy of A Midsummer Night's Dream — and I made resolutions. But the conditions under which a worker in art lives in Norway are hard, and all we say or promise avails nothing. But this I know: I am closer to the ideal of this play now than then, I have a fuller capacity for joy and a greater power to protect my joy and keep it inviolate. And if, after all, I never succeed in writing such a play, it means that circumstances have conquered, and that I have not achieved what I have ever sought to achieve. And one longs to present a play which has been a guiding star to oneself. . . . As soon, therefore, as I had become acclimated as director and knew something of the resources of the theater, I made the venture. . . . The play might doubtless be better presented — we shall give it better next year — but, all in all, we are making progress. You may call this naivete, poetic innocence, or obstinacy and arrogance — whatever it is, this play is of great moment to me, for it is the link which binds me to my public, it is my appeal to the public. If the public does not care to be led whither this leads, then I am not the proper guide. If people wish to get me out of the theater, they may attack me here. Here I am vulnerable. (63-7)

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85 Benedetto Croce, comedy of love 1920

From Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille. Translated by Douglas Ainslie (New York, 1920). Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), the great Italian philosopher, historian, humanist, and critic, founded in 1903 La Critica: rivista di letteratura, storia efilosofia, a journal which gave scope to his wide interests in cultural criticism. The essay on Shakespeare, which Napoleone Orsini in a 1948 edition (Bari) sees as an important stage in the development of Croce's theory of aesthetics, was first published in La Critica, 17 (1919), 129-222.

[From 'Chapter IX. Motives and Development of Shakespeare's Poetry. I. The "Comedy of Love'"] On casting the eye over the rich extent of his works, the attention is at once drawn to certain of them, whose fresh, smiling colours indicate that their principal and proper theme is love. Not the love that becomes joined to other graver passions and unified with them, forms a complex, as in the Othello, or in Antony and Cleopatra, thus acquiring a profoundly tragic quality, but love and love alone, love considered in itself. These passions then are to be found rather in the comedy of love than in the tragedies or dramas: in love, regarded certainly with affectionate sympathy, but also with curiosity, instinct with softness and tenderness, indeed, one might almost say, with the superiority of an expert mind and thus with delicate irony. The mind that accompanies this amorous heart, observes the caprices and illusions, recognising their inevitability and their necessity, but yet knowing them for what they are, imaginings, however irresistible and delicious they be, caprices, though noble and beautiful, weaknesses, deserving of indulgence and of gentle treatment, because human, and belonging to man as he passes through the happy and stormy season of youth. This mode of experiencing love is something that manifests itself only episodically in the Greek, Latin and medieval poets. . . . In the form we have described, it belongs entirely to the mode of feeling of the Renaissance, to one of those attitudes which the antiascetic and realistic view of human affairs developed and bequeathed in a perfected form to modern times. Here we must again note the similarity between Shakespeare and Ariosto, for both painted the eternal comedy of love in the same manner. That love is sincere, yet deceives and is deceived; it imagines itself to be firm and

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constant, and turns out to be fragile and fleeting; it claims to be founded upon a dispassionate judgment of the mind and upon luminous moral choice, whereas, on the contrary, it is guided in an altogether irrational manner by impressions and fancies, fluctuating with these. . . . Of truth, . . . none of these comedies descends altogether to the level of farce, not even those that most nearly approach it, such as Love's Labour Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, nor even The Comedy of Errors, where some element of human truth always leads us back to the seriousness of art. Still less is there satire there, intellectual and angular satire, . . . ; always we find there suavity of outline, the soft veil of poetry. Even in the most feeble, as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we enjoy the fresh love scenes, mingled with the saltatory course of the narrative, the abundant dialogues, the misunderstandings and the verbal witticisms. . . . [Croce briefly comments on Love's Labour Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, All's Well that Ends Well, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing.] A light touch permeates the treatment of these characters and suffices to animate them and make them act. The dramatic or indeed tragic situations, which at times arise, are treated as it were with the implied consciousness of their slight gravity and danger, which shall soon be evident and dispel all the apprehensions of those who doubt. . . . Parallelism of personages and symmetry of events also abound in these plays, suitable to the merry teaching that pervades them. The quintessence of all these comedies (as we may say of Hamlet in respect of the great tragedies) is the Midsummer Night's Dream. Here the quick ardours, the inconstancies, the caprices, the illusions, the delusions, every sort of love folly, become embodied and weave a world of their own, as living and as real as that of those who are visited by these affections, tormented or rendered ecstatic, raised on high or hurled downward by them, in such a way that everything is equally real or equally fantastic, as you may please to call it. The sense of dream, of a dream-reality, persists and prevents our feeling the chilly sense of allegory or of apology. The little drama seems born of a smile, so delicate, refined and ethereal it is. Graceful and delicate to a degree is also the setting of the dream, the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the theatrical performance of the artisans, for these are not merely ridiculous in their clumsiness; they are also childlike and ingenuous, arousing a sort of gay pity: we do not laugh at them: we smile. Oberon and Titania are at variance owing to reciprocal wrongs, and trouble has arisen in the world. Puck obeys the command of Oberon and sets to work, teasing, punishing and correcting. But in performing this duty of punishing and correcting, he too makes mistakes, and the love intrigue becomes more complicated and active. Here we find a resemblance to the rapid passage into opposite states and the strange complications that arose in Italian knightly romances, as the result of drinking the water from one of two opposite fountains whereof one filled the heart with amorous desires, the other turned first ardours to iceJ1] In Titania, who embraces the Ass's head and raves about him, caressing and looking upon him as a graceful and gracious creature, the comedy creates a symbol so ample and so efficacious as rightly to have become proverbial. Puck meanwhile, astonished at the effect upon men of the subtle intoxication that he has been himself distributing, exclaims in his surprise 'Lord, what fools these

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mortals be!' [3.2.115]; and Lysander, one of the madmen who are constantly passing from one love to another, from one thing to its opposite, is nevertheless perfectly convinced that 'The will of man is by his reason sway'd; / And reason says you are the worthier maid' [2.2.115ff.]. Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers the time when they were at school together: O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd! She was a vixen when she went to school; And though she be but little she is fierce. [3.2.323ff.] [Croce then moves on to Romeo and Juliet, noting its close connection with A Midsummer Night's Dream in its 'poetical environment' and its treatment of love, and likening the part Friar Laurence plays to that of Puck.] (164-75)

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1 ELIZABETH GRIFFITH

[1] The Works of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1747), I, 3, note 1. [2] Milton, Paradise Lost, V, 295-6. [3] Thomas Warton's note to this effect first appears in The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (London, 1765), VIII, Appendix, [478]. Warburton had already suggested a connection (Works, 1747,1, 159). [4] Cf. Stevenson's Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Familiar Phrases. Selected and arranged by Burton Stevenson (London, 1949), under Poet, III Poets and poverty. 5 Swift. [Jonathan Swift, 'On Poetry: A Rapsody', 11. 41-2.] 2 SAMUEL FELTON

[1] Felton is referring to p. 78 of volume 3 of the edition he is using, The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols (London, 1778). All the page references he makes are to this edition. The artist referred to is Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), most famous portrait painter of the day, writer, friend of Samuel Johnson and with him founder of the Club. Among his contributions to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery is the famous image of'Robin Goodfellow', a chubby naked child seated on a mushroom. [2] Phillippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), painter and member of the Royal Academies of both France and England, settled in London in 1771. As a designer of stage scenery, he was noted particularly for his association with David Garrick at the Drury Lane theatre and for his invention of the system of moving pictures called the 'Eidophusikon'. He also served as an illustrator for John Bell's various editions of Shakespeare and other dramatists. His engraving of Oberon commanding Puck to 'Fetch me this herb . . .' (1.2.173ff.) was published in 1803 (see the Folger Shakespeare Library, Art File S528m5 no. 16). The edition referred to may be that of John Bell in 12 volumes issued in 1785-7. [3] Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727-85) moved to England in 1755. He designed the ornamentation and ceiling paintings in Somerset House, and the allegorical panels for George Ill's state coach. 4 Dr. Armstrong tells us, that some French Abbe has somewhere asserted, that Shakespeare understood every passion but love. [Sketches: or Essays on Various Subjects, by Launcelot Temple (i.e., John Armstrong) (London, 1758; reprinted New York, 1970), p. 82.] [5] In the latter part of the eighteenth century Mrs. Ann Spranger Barry (1734-1801) was one of the most admired actresses for both tragedy and comedy on the Dublin and London stages. [6] [Maria Anna] Angelica Kauffrnan (1741-1807), was an immensely admired artist, a

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Royal Academician, and friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Samuel Shelley (1750-1808) was a popular miniaturist who also painted in watercolours compositions from Shakespeare, Tasso, and other poets. 7 Edwin would speak these lines admirably. This play was performed at the Haymarket a few years ago, under the title of a Fairy Tale; when Edwin played Quince, and Parsons Bottom. The above lines are omitted in this Fairy Tale. The print in Hanmer belongs to this page 61, but possesses a poor share of humour; though the figure of Bottom is a good one, as well as that behind him. The print in Bell's first edition, is taken from the next page, and though the figure of the Tinker is an exceeding good one, and that of Bottom not amiss, yet its general merit is not sufficiently attractive to recommend it wholly. In p. 66, Bottom might have been drawn to advantage in his confab with the Fairies, if the expression of his face had not been lost, by his transformation. [John Edwin and William Parsons appeared in the revival of George Colman's afterpiece A Fairy Tale on 18 July 1777: see The London Stage 1660-1800, edited by Charles Beecher Hogan, 3 vols (Carbondale, Illinois, 1968), Part 5: 1776-1800,1, 94.] [8] Bishop Thomas Percy (born Piercy; 1729-1811), best known for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London, 1765). [9] Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811), amateur artist and caricaturist. 10 There is one line in this play, from which this gentle man might draw a very good print. It is in Puck's recital of his merriments: 'The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale-' [2.1.51]. 3 EDMOND MALONE

1

The first edition of this Essay was published in January 1778 [in Johnson and Steevens, Plays, 1778,1, 269-346]. [2] In 1778 Malone dated A Midsummer Night's Dream 1595; this date is repeated in the 1785 edition. The 1793, 1803, and 1813 variorum editions follow Malone's own edition of 1790 in assigning the date of 1592. In the posthumous edition of 1821 it is dated 1594. 3 See p. 294, n. 5. [The note is to a comment on 'the frequent rhymes with which [Love's Labour's Lost] abounds', and reads: As this circumstance is more than once mentioned, in the course of these observations, it may not be improper to add a few words on the subject of our authour's metre. A mixture of rhymes with blank verse, in the same play, and sometimes in the same scene, is found in almost all his pieces, and is not peculiar to Shakespeare, being also found in the works of Jonson, and almost all our ancient dramatick writers. It is not, therefore, merely the use of rhymes, mingled with blank verse, but theirfrequency, that is here urged, as a circumstance which seems to characterize and distinguish our poet's earliest performances. In the whole number of pieces which were written antecedent to the year 1600, and which, for the sake of perspicuity, have been called his early compositions, more rhyming couplets are found, than in all the plays composed subsequently to that year; which have been named his late productions. Whether in process of time Shakespeare grew weary of the bondage of rhyme, or whether he became convinced of its impropriety in a dramatick dialogue, his neglect of rhyming (for he never wholly disused it) seems to have been gradual. As, therefore, most of

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his early productions are characterized by the multitude of similar terminations which they exhibit, whenever of two early pieces it is doubtful which preceded the other, I am disposed to believe, (other proofs being wanting) that play in which the greater number of rhymes is found, to have been first composed. The plays founded on the story of King Henry VI do not indeed abound in rhymes; but this probably arose from their being originally constructed by preceding writers.] 4

Dryden was of opinion that Pericles,Prince of Tyre, was our authour's first dramatick composition: Shakespeare's own muse his Pericles first bore, The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor. Prologue to the tragedy of Circe by Charles D'Avenant, 1677.

[Malone then discusses the authorship and date of of Pericles.] The learned editor [i.e., Thomas Tyrwhitt] of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, printed in 1775, observes in his introductory discourse (IV, 161) that Pluto and Proserpina in the Marchant's Tale, appear to have been 'the true progenitors of Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania.' In a tract already quoted, Greene's Groatsworth of Witte, 1592, a player is introduced, who boasts of having performed the part of the King of Fairies with applause. Greene himself wrote a play, entitled The Scottishe Historic of James the Fourthe, slaine at Floddon, intermixed with a pleasant Comedie presented by Oberon King of Fayeries; which was entered at Stationers' hall in 1594, and printed in 1598. Shakespeare, however, does not appear to have been indebted to this piece. The plan of it is shortly this. Bohan, a Scot, in consequence of being disgusted with the world, having retired to a tomb where he has fixed his dwelling, is met by Aster Oberon, king of the fairies, who entertains him with an antick or dance by his subjects. These two personages, after some conversation, determine to listen to a tragedy, which is acted before them, and to which they make a kind of chorus, by moralizing at the end of each act. [6] See The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, edited by John Nichols, 3 vols (London, 1823; reprinted New York, n.d.), Ill, 119. [7] The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600), 11. 1088-90. Edited by M.N. Matson (New York, 1980), p. 250. 8 The thrice three muses, mourning for the death Of learning, late deceas'd in beggary. [5.1.52ff.] 9 Preface to Spenser's View of the State of Ireland. Dublin, fol. 1633. [Malone discusses the date of Spenser's death.]

5

4 CHARLES TAYLOR

[1] Henry Singleton (1766-1839) was a popular painter of historical subjects (including Shakespeare) and of portraits, and was also known as a book illustrator. [2] 'Coxcombism' is not listed in The Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), but cf. 'Coxcombity', 'Coxcombry'. Coxcombs of various kinds constituted a popular target of satire in the latter eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. In his Dictionary (1755) Samuel Johnson defined the type as 'a superficial pretender to knowledge or accomplishments'.

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[3] 'Polite or fashionable society; the fashionable world' (OED): here used with ironic intent. [4] One who undertakes to study or sketch character, with a possible pun on one who arranges funerals. 5 GEORGE STEEVENS

[1] In the 1821 edition (See No. 11 below), Boswell prints the notes as Steevens has them, but (without comment) restores the text, thus allowing Malone to prevail in this textual argument (V, 303). 6 WALTER WHITER

[1] In The Newe World of Words (London, 1658; 7th edition 1720) Edward Philips defines 'Brawl' as 'a kind of Dance, in which several Persons dance together in a Ring, holding one another by the Hand' (1706, L4v). OED defines 'brawl' as a 'kind of French dance resembling a cotillon', and derives the word from the French 'branle', citing Love's Labours Lost, 3.1.9. (brawl, sb.3, 2). [2] Robert Dodsley, A Select Collection of Old Plays, 12 vols (London, 1744), IV, 53, has John Marston, The Malcontent, 4.2.Iff., where the word 'brawl' is twice used, and the dance is described: see The Malcontent, edited by G.K. Hunter (Manchester, 1975), 4.2.1-10. [3] The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, edited by H.W. Starr and J.R. Hendrickson (Oxford, 1966), 'A Long Story' (1753), p. 44,1. 11. [4] The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, translated by Thomas Shelton (London, 1612; 1620), part II, p. 129; edited by F.J.H. Darton, 2 vols (London, 1923), Part II, chap, xx, II, 139. [5] Historia del Famoso Cavallero Don Quixote, edited by John Bowie, 6 vols (London, 1781). [6] Earlier Whiter says: 'This pageant of love seems to have been impressed on the mind of our poet'. And he quotes As You Like It, 3.4.52-6: 'Cor. If you will see a pageant truly play'd. . . .', and A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.2.110-14: 'Captain of our fairy band,. . . . Shall we their fond pageant see? . . .' (55-6). 7 Mr. Malone imagines that Shakespeare alludes to this incident, when he makes Bottom advise the actor of the lion to inform the ladies that he 'is a man as other men are — to name his name, and tell them plainly, he is Snug the joiner' [3.1.44ff.]. [The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 10 vols (London, 1790), II, 481. Malone here quotes the same paragraph from MS Harleian 6395 as Whiter.] 8 It is well known that the culinary and confectionary arts were employed on devices similar to those, which composed the Pageant. Mr. Steevens has rightly referred a passage in the Merry Wives of Windsor to this source. [Quotes 5.5.18-21: 'Let the sky rain potatoes. . . .']. On which Mr. Steevens observes. 'Holinshed informs us that in the year 1583, for the entertainment of prince Alasco was performed a "verie statelie tragedie named Dido, wherein the queen's banket (with ^Eneas's narration of the destruction of Troie) was livelie described in a March-paine patterne, the tempest wherein it hailed small confects, rained rose-water, and snew an artificial kind of snow, all strange, marvellous and abundant." On this very circumstance probably Shakespeare was thinking, when he put the words quoted above in the mouth of Falstaffl [STEEVENS]'. [The Plays of William Shakespeare (London, 1785), I, 389]. I

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have not the least doubt but that Shakespeare drew his imagery from a device of this sort, employ'd on the very story of Dido and^neas. [9] The three references to Jonson are in Ben Jonson, edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52), as follows: (a) Neptune's Triumph, VII, 687,11. 184-91; (b) The Staple of News, VI, 339: 3.3.35-40; (c) The Masque of Blacknesse, VII, 172, 11. 93-4. (There is no Masque ofBlacknesse in the 1692 edition.) 7 CHARLES DIBDIN

[1] Dibdin is here echoing Johnson: 'Fairies in his time were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great' (Plays, 1765, VIII, 2H7v): see the Introduction p. 12 above. 8 AUGUST WILHELM VON SCHLEGEL

[1] For example, the ababcc strophes in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.2.122-33, 431-6, and 442-7, and the sonnet in Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.93-106. 9 NATHAN DRAKE

[1] Drake appears to be confusing Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia (London, 1598) with Malone's Attempt to Ascertain the Order . . . (No. 3 above). [2] Milton, Comus,l 118. 3 Reed's Shakespeare, vol.ii. p. 251. [i.e. The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited by Isaac Reed et al., 21 vols (London, 1803). Drake's page references apply equally to the edition of 1813.] [4] Francis Gentleman, note on the tide, in the edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream printed for John Bell (London, 1774), p. 139. 5 Reed's Shakespeare, vol. iv pp. 433, 434. Act iii. sc. 2. 6 Full often time he Pluto and his quene, Proserpina, and alle hir Faerie, Disporten hem and maken melodic.— Pluto, that is the king of Faerie, And many a ladie in his compagnie Folwing his wif, the quene Proserpina. The Marchantes Tale, vide Chalmers's English Poets, vol. i, p. 77. col. 1; p. 78. col. 2. 7 Oberon, or, more properly Auberon, has been derived, by some antiquaries, from 'I'aube du jour;' and Mab his Queen, from amabilis, so that lucidity and amiability, their characteristics, as delineated by Shakespeare, may be traced in their names. 8 Essay on Fairies, pp. 7, 8. [i.e., Robert Kirk, Secret Commonwealth, or, a treatise displaying the chiefe Curiosities as they are in use among diverse of the People of Scotland to this day, written c.1691, published Edinburgh, 1815.] [9] Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Swiss-born artist and writer, known especially for his powerful paintings on subjects drawn from Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, etc. Not all early nineteenth-century viewers were so enthusiastic as Drake: James Gillray satirized Fuseli's paintings and the Boydell Gallery for which they were commissioned

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in Shakespeare-Sacrificed;—or—The Offering to Avarice (see Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830, London, 1989, pp. 48-56). Cf. also Max Beerbohm's strictures on Fuseli, No. 72 below. [10] Milton, 'L'Allegro', 1. 105. 11 Reed's Shakespeare, vol. iv. p. 406. Midsummer-Night's Dream, act iii. sc. 2. Ob. Here comes my messenger. [3.2.4] 12

Ibid. vol. iv. p. 380. Act ii. sc. 3. Puck. Fear not, my lord, your servant shall do so. [2.1.268]

13

Ibid. vol. iv. p. 369. Act ii. sc. 2. Ob. My gentle Puck, come hither: [2.1.148]

14

Ibid. vol. iv. p. 445. Act iv. sc. 1. Ob. Welcome, good Robin. [4.1.46]

15 16

Reed's Shakespeare, vol. iv. p. 374. Midsummer-Night's Dream, act ii. sc. 2. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 415. Act iii. sc. 2.

10 WILLIAM HAZLITT

[1] According to nature; in accordance with the principles of physical and natural science (cf. OED Physiological, a. +1 and Physiologize, v. +2.). [2] Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 628. [3] For a description of Frederick Reynolds's drastic alterations and additions to Shakespeare's play, see Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre (Iowa City, 1997), pp. 77-90. Reynolds in his advertisement to the published text (London, 1816) implied that his alteration was preferable to the unsuccessful Colman/Garrick version of 1763, because his chief object was 'the preservation of all SHAKESPEARE'S beauties;- and though it may be said, that his name is degraded, by his lines being interwoven with those of a modern Dramatist, (for I have not only been compelled to alter, transpose, introduce new Songs, and new Speeches, but also to write the whole of one additional Scene, and part of another); yet I do flatter myself, there is still critical candour enough to acknowledge, that I have made some atonement for my own defects, by restoring to the Stage, the lost, but divine Drama, of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"' (iv). 11 JAMES BOSWELL AND EDMOND MALONE

[1] Boswell later quotes from Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess and from Jonson's Entertainment at Althorpe. [2] Cf. I, 559. The quarto 'Printed by James Roberts, 1600' (Q2) was actually printed by William Jaggard in 1619, but this was not known until the researches of W.W. Greg, A.W. Pollard, and W. Neidig were published in 1908-10 (cf.

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W.W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio, London, 1955, pp. 9-17, especially p. l l n . 3). 12 AUGUSTINE SKOTTOWE

[1] The saying 'knowledge . . . is power' is from Francis Bacon's meditation 'Of Heresies' in Sacred Meditations (first published in Latin as Meditationes Sacrae, 1597; in English, 1598) in A Harmony of the Essays, ETC. of Francis Bacon, edited by Edward Arber, 'English Reprints' series, volume VII (London, 1871; reprinted New York, 1966), p. 129. 13 GEORGE DANIEL

[1] Wordsworth, 'She Was a Phantom of Delight', 1. 10. [2] Milton, 'L'Allegro', 1. 110. [3] Thomas Moore, 'Oh! Had we some bright little isle of our own', Irish Melodies, in Poetical Works, edited by A.D. Godley (Oxford, 1915), pp. 203-4. [4] Malone alleges of the play that 'the fable [is] thus meagre and uninteresting' (No. 3 above). [5] Milton, Comus,\. 118. [6] Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv'd (1682), edited by Malcolm Kelsall (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1969), 2.2.106. [7] Milton, Comus, 1. 244, with 'creature' for Milton's 'mixture'. 14 THOMAS KEIGHTLEY

1

[2] [3]

[4] 5

[6]

7

Puki, in Icelandic, is an evil spirit. The writer in the Quarterly Review, XXII [(1819-20), 357, in a review of six books on the devil, hell, magic, etc. titled 'Popular Mythology of the Middle Ages', 348-80] gives a long list of words which he regards as connected with Puck [such as Robin Hood, Hudken or Hodeken (Saxon), Nisse of Sweden]: the editor of Warton adds German Spuk and Danish Spoge and Spogelse: we will contribute the Scottish Pauky, and the Devonshire Pixies, or Fairies. Milton calls Satan 'the Adversary of God and Man' in Paradise Lost, II, 629. 'Adversary' translates the Hebrew meaning of'Satan'. William Langland, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, edited by Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols (London, 1886; reprinted 1961), I, 495, 497: Passus XIX, 11. 271, 273-4, 277, 279-84. Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, edited by W.H.D. Rouse (London, 1961), p. 197,11. 766-7 (9.647-8). Mr. Todd is right, in reading pouke for ponke: wrong in saying, 'He is the Fairy, Robin Good-fellow, known by the name of Puck'. Robin is the 'hob-goblin' mentioned two lines after. [See The Works of Edmund Spenser, edited by H.J. Todd, 8 vols (London, 1805), VIII, 203.] The Scourge of Venus [1613]. Or, The wanton Lady. With the rare Birth of Adonis. The second Impression corrected and enlarged by H.A. . . . 1614, edited by A.B. Grosart (London, 1876), p. 34. Ben Jonson never makes Puck a Fairy. Pug, the same as Puck, is the appellation of the devil, who gives name to The Devil is an Ass; and the Puck-hairy of the Sad Shepherd is, as Mr. Gifford remarks, 'not the Fairy or Oriental Puck, though often confounded

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with him' [note to the beginning of Act III: see The Works ofBenJonson, edited by W. Gifford, with . . . appendices by F. Cunningham, 9 vols (London, 1875), VI, 279]. We know nothing of the Oriental origin of Puck, and cannot give our full assent to the character of our ancestry, as expressed in the remaining part of Mr. Gifford's note: 'but a fiend engendered in the moody minds, and rude and gloomy fancies of the barbarous invaders of the North.' It is full time to have done with describing the old Gothic race as savages. [8] Johnson, Plays (1765), VIII, 2H7v; and see the Introduction, p. 12 above. [9] Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (London, 1754; 2 vols, revised, 1762, reprinted New York, 1969), I, 59 note, and 65. 10 The derivation of Oberon has already been given ([II], 6). The Shakespearean commentators have not thought fit to inform us why the poet designates the Fairy-queen Titania. It, however, presents no difficulty. It was the belief of those days that the Fairies were the same as the classic Nymphs, the attendants of Diana: 'That fourth kind of spritis,' says King James, 'quhilk be the gentilis was called Diana, and her wandering court, and amongst us called the Phairie [Dcemonologie (1597), Book III, chapter V]. The Fairy-queen was therefore the same as Diana, whom Ovid frequently styles Titania. [Keightley gives the derivation of Oberon thus: 'Elberich, as we have said (I, 59), is Oberon. From the usual change of / into u (as al, au, col, cou, &c.) in the French language, Elberich or Alberich (derived from Alp, All) becomes Auberich; and ich not being a French termination, the usual one of on was substituted, and so it became Auberon, or Oberon; a much more likely origin than that from L'aube dujour, which is entided to no more attention than that of Mab from amabilis'. These derivations had already been referred to by Drake: see No. 9 note 7 above. In his preface to the second edition (1833), I, xiii, Keightley makes two apposite statements: first, 'I forgot to mention at p. 6, that the derivation of Oberon belongs to Dr. Grimm', and, second, 'I believe I am the first who has explained why Shakespeare called the Fairy-queen Titania. In the note at p. 127, omit the word frequently, as I have found but two places in which Ovid calls Diana so. These are, Met., III.173, and Fasti, IV. 943'. Keightley does not note that there are also mentions of Titania in Metamorphoses, 1.395, 6.346, 7.398,14.382, and 14.438, some not referring to Diana. His claims of scholarly originality aroused the scorn of a reviewer: 'We cannot forbear saying a word or two on Mr. Keightley's discoveries, because he makes so much parade of them. . . . He says, that he alone has discovered why Shakespeare gave the fairy queen the name Titania - we can assure him, that a tolerably advanced boy in one of our public schools would stand in peril of dire birch if he could not make the discovery at very short notice' (Thomas Wright, 'The National Fairy Mythology of England', Fraser's Magazine, 10 (July, 1834), 52note).] 15 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

[1] Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782), later called Metastasio, was the most famous Italian poet of his age, and the most frequently set librettist of any age. He had a profound effect on the development of opera. With Coleridge's remark about the 'exit speech' one may compare a modern opinion: 'The main drawback to Metastasian opera seria, and the one which later drew most censure, was the role played by the exit aria. This interfered radically with the progress of the drama. . . .' (John Warrack and Ewan West, The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, Oxford, 1992, p. 467).

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[2] From British Library MS Additional 34,225, fol. 51r. This paragraph may have been part of the first Bristol lecture of October 28, 1813: see T.M. Raysor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols (London, 1960; 1st edn. 1930), I, 199-200 notes 1 and 2; and Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, edited by Mrs. H.N. Coleridge, 2 vols (London, 1849), I, 66, 89, 105. The final phrase in manuscript is 'lyrical dramatized'. [3] The next six comments are from Coleridge's notes in The Works of Shakespeare ... With notes . . . by Mr. Theobald, 8 vols (London, 1773: British Library press mark C.45.a.21), I, 83, 86-9, 90-1, 95, 137, and 146: in Raysor, I, 90-2. [4] William Dodd deletes all three of Hermia's speeches at 1.1.136, 138, and 140 (Beauties of Shakespeare, 2 vols, London, 1752,1, 76). [5] Directed to external objects: Coleridge's neologism. [6] An amphimacer is a metrical foot consisting of one unstressed syllable between two stressed. The words 'or cretics' are not Coleridge's, but were added by his editor. [7] Thirty lines will include not only Puck's speech, but also Oberon's and Titania's [5.1.371-400]. The final phrase in manuscript reads 'a diamond speckless'. There are other variants. 16 WILLIAM MAGINN

[1] The celebrated equestrian Andrew Ducrow (1793-1842) and his company were hired to take part in J.H. Amherst's hippodrama The Battle of Waterloo, first performed on 19 April 1824 at Astley's Amphitheatre (Ducrow himself took over Astley's in June 1824). The spectacle was 'an overwhelming success', and was 'regularly revived, both in England and America, until well into the second half of the nineteenth century'. (See A.H. Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France, New Haven, 1968, pp. 137-41.) [2] See No. 13 note 7 above. [3] Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies: or, the life and death of Tom Thumb the Great, 2.5.11-12; Works, edited by Leslie Stephen, 10 vols (London, 1882), VIII, 379. [4] Robert Burns, 'For a' that and a' that', 11. 7-8. 5 In comparing the characters of Sly and Bottom, we must be struck with the remarkable profusion of picturesque and classical allusions with which both these buffoons are surrounded. I have quoted some of the passages from Midsummer Night's Dream above. The Induction to the Taming of the Shrew is equally rich. There, too, we have the sylvan scenery and the cheerful sport of the huntsman, and there we also have references to Apollo and Semiramis; to Cytherea all in sedges hid; to lo as she was a maid; to Daphne roaming through a thorny wood. The coincidence is not casual. Shakespeare desired to elevate the scenes in which such grovelling characters played the principal part by all the artificial graces of poetry, and to prevent them from degenerating into mere farce. As I am on the subject, I cannot refrain from observing that the remarks of Bishop Hurd on the character of the Lord in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew are marked by a ridiculous impertinence, and an ignorance of criticism truly astonishing. They are made to swell, however, the strange farrago of notes gathered by the variorum editors. The next editor may safely spare them. I have not troubled my readers with verbal criticism in this paper, but I shall here venture on one conjectural emendation. Hermia, chiding Demetrius, says, Act iii. sc.

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2, 'If thou hast slain Lysander in his sleep, / Being o'er shoes in blood, wade in the deep, / And kill me too' [3.2.47ff.]. Should we not read 'knee deep?' As you are already over your shoes, wade on until the bloody tide reaches your knees. In Shakespeare's time knee was generally spelt kne; and between the and kne there is not much difference in writing. [6] Henry Fielding, The Covent Garden Tragedy, 'Her wanton smiles / Are sweeter than a draught of cool small beer / To the scorched palate of the waking sot' (1.3.20-2; ed.dt., IX, 182). [7] 'The story of Abu-L-Hasan the wag, or the sleeper awakened', The Thousand and One Nights, translated by Edward William Lane, 3 vols (London, 1840), II, 352-75. 17 THOMAS CAMPBELL

[1] Possibly referring to Hazlitt (No. 10 above). [2] Frederick Reynolds's production of 1816 was 'written by Shakespeare: with alterations, additions, and new songs'; for Hazlitt's reaction to it, see No. 10 above. In his review in The Examiner, Hazlitt spoke more strongly of the 'full-grown, well-fed, substantial, real fairies' who had destroyed his belief in the 'fantastic tribe' (Sunday, January 21, p. 44). 18 HENRY HALLAM

[1] In paragraphs 36-38 Hallam briefly discusses The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labours Lost. In paragraph 35 he had mentioned the first and second parts of Henry VI, and dismissed Pericles and Titus Andronicus as only partly or not at all by Shakespeare. 2 Collier, iii. 185. [i.e., J. Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 3 vols (London, 1831).] Lily had, however, brought fairies, without making them speak, into some of his earlier plays. Ibid. [3] Odes, II, 22. 4 The celebrated essay by Farmer on the learning of Shakespeare, put an end to such notions as we find in Warburton and many of the older commentators, that he had imitated Sophocles, and I know not how many Greek authors. Those indeed who agree with what I have said in a former chapter as to the state of learning under Elizabeth, will not think it probable that Shakespeare could have acquired any knowledge of Greek. It was not a part of such education as he received. The case of Latin is different: we know that he was at a grammar school, and could hardly have spent two or three years there without bringing away a certain portion of the language. [The former chapter is II.1.51-65, paragraphs 40-52.] 19 CHARLES KNIGHT

[1]

In 1766 George Steevens published Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, Being the whole Number printed in Quarto During his Life-Time, or before the Restoration, Collated where there were different Copies, and Publish'd from the Originals, By George Steevens, Esq; in Four Volumes. The text of the second quarto of James Roberts is in I, sigs. Al-E2v. [2] Malone assigned various dates at various times: 1594 was his final opinion, stated in the posthumous Plays and Poems (London, 1821), II, 333. See No. 3 note 2 above, for further explanation.

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[3] This apocryphal tale was first printed by Johnson in his edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1765), I, clii, sig. K6v. [4] Thomas Warton, in The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols (London, 1773), III, 90n. [5] Spenser, The Tears of the Muses (1591), The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, edited by E.A. Greenlaw et al., 10 vols (Baltimore, 1932-49), II, 64,11. 37-42; Clio, 65,1. 94; Melpomene, 67,1. 157; Thalia, 69,1. 223; Euterpe, 70,1. 280.[6] Milton, 'L'Allegro', 11. 129-30. [7] Johnson, Plays (1765), VIII, Appendix, sig. HH7V. [8] The Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont and Mr. John Fletcher, edited by Thomas Seward, 10 vols (London, 1750), III, 103 note: 'The Faithful Shepherdess is ... one of ... the greatest Scandals of our Nation. . . . [It] was damned at its first Appearance . . . .' [9] Milton, Paradise Lost, VII, 31. 20 WILLIAM SPALDING

[1] The feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24, was traditionally considered Midsummer Day; its vigil was associated with various festivities. For discussion of whether or in what ways Dream is associated with May Day or Midsummer's Eve, see for example Furness's Variorum edition of the play (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. v-viii; C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), pp. 119-24; F. Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 228-30. 21 JAMES ORCHARD HALLIWELL

[1] Ben Jonson, 'To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us'. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. ^5v., 1. 43 [2] Milton, 'L'Allegro', 11. 133-4. 3 L'Estrange has the following fable:— 'There was a question started betwixt a cuckoo and a nightingale, which of the two had the better voice, and the better way of singing. It came at last to a trial of skill, and an ass was to be the judge; who, upon hearing both sides, gave it clearly for the cuckoo.' — Fables, Edit. 1694, No. 414. 4 We find this in a work, entitled Pieces of Ancient Poetry from Unpublished Manuscripts and Scarce Books, edited by [John] Fry, 4to. Bristol, 1814, p. 15. [5] 'What is meant by the stale opinion, that this piece is too ethereally poetic for the stage? There is no drama but what is so, strictly considered'. John Abraham Heraud, 'The Green Room: Covent Garden Theatre', The Monthly Magazine, 4 (December, 1840), 647. [6] See preceding note. 7 We will here give the cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream, as revived at Covent Garden Theatre on the 16th November, 1840, which has already had a run of nearly sixty nights, nor do the public yet appear to be tired of it. Theseus=Cooper; Egeus=Diddear; Lysander=Vining; Demetrius=Brindal; Philostrate=Hemming; Quince=Bartley; Bottom=Harley; Flute=Keeley; Snout=Meadows; Snug=F. Matthews; Starveling=Payne; Hippolyta=Mrs. Brougham; Hermia= Mrs. Nisbett; Helena=Miss Cooper; Oberon=Madame Vestris; Titania=Mrs. Walter Lacy; Puck=Miss Marshall; First Fairy=Miss Rainforth; Second Fairy=Miss Grant. [8] The last three lines, from 'Speak, of all loves! . . .', are omitted, and 'Lysander! Lord

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Lysander!' substituted. A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Comedy, In Five Acts. By William Shakespeare. As Revived at The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, November 16th, 1840 (London: J. Pattie, n. d.), p. 22. 22 NICHOLAS JOHN HALPIN [1] For earlier allegorical interpretations of this passage, see above in the Introduction p. 20 and p. 49 note 106. 2 Probably 'the brayz' mentioned by Laneham as 'linking a fair park with the castle on the south,' and adjacent to the 'goodly pool of rare beauty, breadth, length, and depth.' — See [John] Nichol[s]'s Progresses [and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth . . . 3 vols (London, 1823), I, 427]. 3 There is in this metamorphosis - as in every thing of Shakespeare's - a singular propriety and adherence to nature. 'Love in idleness' is the viola tricolor. But the English flora possesses, likewise, the viola lactea, which, transplanted from the fields into rustic gardens, suffers a metamorphosis, its leaves becoming heart-shaped, and its flowers sky-blue. - [Sir James E.] Smith's Flora Britannica [1800-04], in art. Viola. The change, therefore, of this 'milk-white' violet into one of its congeners, whose petals are frequently 'purple,' is natural, easy, and elegant. 23 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER [1] Should possibly read: 'the constancy and the faithlessness'. 24 LEIGH HUNT [1] James Thomson's Seasons, as well as his Castle of Indolence, had been much admired by the schoolboy Hunt. [2] See particularly 11. 17-19, 63-76 (The Works of William Collins, edited by Pochard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp [Oxford, 1979], pp. 32-4). [3] 'L'Allegro', 1. 134. [4] Hunt prints 2.1.60-185; 2.2.1-34; 3.1.125-9; 3.1.137-96; 4.1.1-102; 5.1.371-422. [5] Milton, Paradise Lost, III, 438-9. 25 JOSEPH HUNTER [1] Illuded means tricked or deceived: now rare. See OED, illude, v. [2] Pepys' entry for 29 September 1662 says, in part: ' ... we saw A Midsummer Nights Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. . . .' The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970-83), III, 208. [3] The identical quotation is in Drake, Shakespeare and his Times, 2 vols (London, 1817), I, 155. See John Stow, A Survey of London, edited by C.L. Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908), I, 98. 4 See the treatise of Leo Allatius, [De Templis Grcecorum Recentioribus, . . . ] De Grcecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus [Cologne], 8vo. 1645: a treatise full of the most curious information respecting the popular superstitions of the Greek islands, which will be found to correspond in a most remarkable manner with those of the west of

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Europe, and especially with those of England. Their fairies, whom they call the KCcXai ap%OVlCTCXl [Allatius, p. 158], the fair ladies, scarcely differ at all from ours: and between their witches and ours there is as close a resemblance. This treatise is never quoted by Brand; nor can I find that it was known to any of the inquirers into the antiquities of the common people of England till I called attention to it in a paper read before the Bath Royal Institute in 1831 [corrected to '1833' in II, 127]. The same close resemblance is found in many minor observances and superstitions; and this in two islands so remote as Scyo and Britain: Under the Levant and the Ponent winds. [Milton, Paradise Lost, X, 704.]

[5]

[6]

[7] [8]

[9] [10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

This is a fact of prime importance, as will be found whenever a philosophical investigation of the origin of these imaginations shall be undertaken. The first folio omits the 'Eigh me' of Quartos 1 and 2, and the second folio, unauthorially, substitutes 'Hermia' which was followed by all subsequent editions to Capell in 1767, except for Johnson, who in 1765 restored the Ql reading as 'Ah me' which all other editions, after Capell, followed, except Grant White in 1858 who put 'Hermia'. Warburton says 'spleen' is 'here employed odly enough' and that sometimes Shakespeare takes 'an uncommon licence' (Works, 1747, I, 99). Robert Nares's Glossary (1822; often reprinted) makes this statement under 'spleen'. Josua Poole, The English Parnassus (1657), 'Proeme', 5-8, sig. A7. This is the play attributed to William Haughton entitled The Devil and His Dame, first performed in 1600 and published in 1662 as Grim the Collier of Croydon, or The Devil and His Dame: see the reprint in Five Anonymous Plays, edited by J.S. Farmer (London, 1908). The word 'spleen' is used at 3.1.5: 'in her angry spleen' (p. 139). George Wither, Abuses Stript and Whipt (London, 1613), p. 22 (sig. C3v): 'Yet for all this looke where I lou'd of late, / I haue not turn'd it in a spleene to hate'. All the major texts from the first quarto to the Variorum of 1773 (Johnson and Steevens) read 'privilege: for' while all substantive editions from 1778 (Johnson and Steevens) to 1856 (Singer) have the emended text. Only the first quarto has the reading Hunter espouses. The second quarto and the four folios have 'I, do,' which Rowe (The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols, London, 1709, II, 498) changed to 'Ay, do,' the reading of all subsequent editions to 1994 (Peter Holland: Oxford). The term 'rough music' is first mentioned in a manuscript note by George Steevens in the Bodleian copy of the 1793 Variorum (V, 120), and published in the Variorums of 1803, 1813, and 1821, and by Singer (1826) and Harness (1830). See also OED, 'Music' sb. 2.3. 'Rough music'. In his note on Bottom's 'bottle of hay' Halliwell politely rejects Hunter's 'somewhat subtle conjecture' (The Works of William Shakespeare, 16 vols [London, 1853-65], V, 189), but Samuel Neil adopts Hunter's explanation totally - with no acknowledgement (Collins School and College Classics, A Midsummer Night's Dream, London, 1878, p. 136).

26 HERMANN ULRICI [1] Ulrici here recapitulates his own words from a few pages earlier (I, 364). 2 This is the usual character of modern comedy, which has been developed to the

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highest point of perfection, more particularly by some Spanish and French poets (Lope, Calderon, Moreto, Moliere, Scribe, etc.). [3] Scholl's article on A Midsummer Night's Dream was published in Blatter fur literarische Unterhaltung, Nos. 4-8, 4-8 January 1844. [4] Cf. Schlegel: 'Theseus and Hippolyta are, as it were, a splendid frame for the picture' (No. 8 above). 27 GULIAN CROMMELIN VERPLANCK [1]

[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Love's Labour's Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor both have 'pleasant' and 'comedy' in their quarto tides; the closest to 'true dramatic history' is King Lear's quarto tide 'True Chronicle Historic'; and both Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet (Q2) have 'lamentable' and 'tragedy' in their quarto tides. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. (The New Arcadia), edited by Victor Skredcowicz (Oxford, 1987), p. 14,11. 2-3. Skottowe alludes to the 'jealousies' of'green-room polities' (No. 12 above). Napoleon said: 'There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous' (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd edition, London, 1953, p. 361.2). The note is at II, 42. Milton, 'Lycidas', 1. 87. James Robinson Planche (1796-1880), dramatist and historian of heraldry and costume, whose History of British Costumes (London, 1834) became a standard work. He had an important influence on stage designs and productions — such as Madame Vestris's of 1840 — as recounted in his two volume autobiography of 1872.

28 HENRY JAMES SUMNER MAINE [1] Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901) was highly popular for his paintings on allegorical, fairy, and religious topics. 'The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania' (1847) and its companion 'The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania' (1846) are in the National Gallery of Scodand, Edinburgh. [2] See No. 2 note 1 above. 3 We have been informed, and it is for many reasons worthy of note, that this most promising young artist began life as a designer for the Paisley weavers. [4] The fairy tales of Marie Catherine La Mothe, Countess d'Aulnoy, Contes nouveaux, ou les Fees <J la mode (Paris, 1698), were sometimes entided Le Cabinet des Fees (e.g. Amsterdam, 1731-35; Brussels, 1785). [5] Adapted from Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, 1. 860. [6] Officiousness, meddlesomeness, curiosity (later developing to a sense of a search after knowledge). See H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, New (ninth) edition completed 1940, reprinted 1948. [7] The wrath of Oberon, echoing the first lines of the Iliad, which announce the wrath of Achilles as the subject of the epic. 29 HENRY NORMAN HUDSON [1] See Verplanck (No. 27 note 2 above) who cites the same saying of Sir Philip Sidney abbreviatedly. [2] Jonson, 'To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And

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what he hath left us', in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. A5,1. 31. [3] See No. 27 note 3 above. [4] Schlegel uses the word 'head-dress' to describe Bottom's ass-head (No. 8 above). 30JOHNRUSKIN [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

[6]

[7] [8]

OED defines a dead wall as one that is 'unbroken, unrelieved by breaks or interruptions; absolutely uniform and continuous' (dead, A adj., V. 25). 'Make' means composition, structure, constitution, or, in humans, build: see OED, make, sb.2, 2.b. Xenophon, Memorabilia, translated by E.G. Marchant (London, 1923), II.i.22. This is the beginning of the description of Hercules at the crossroads of Virtue and Vice. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.1.102; The Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto III, stanza xii. There is a terracotta sculpture of Bellerophon on Pegasus about to kill the Chimaera from the fifth century, B.C., in the British Museum: see the reproduction in Philip Mayerson, Classical Mythology in Literature, Art, and Music (London, 1971), p. 297. Ruskin alludes to the myth in The Queen of the Air, section 29 (Works, XIX, 325). Mrs. Allingham (Helen Paterson: 1848-1926) was a distinguished water colour painter; after she married William Allingham in 1874, she illustrated some of his verse for children. Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) wrote and illustrated children's books, and was a friend of Ruskin from 1882. An allusion to the opening scene of the second act of Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe. In Modem Painters (1856), Part V, chapter xx, Ruskin comments: 'Note the expression "Field dew consecrate." Shakespeare loved courts and camps; but he felt that sacredness and peace were in the dew of the Fields only'. (Works, VI, 445).

31 HENRY MORLEY [1] Elizabeth Vestris staged her famous production in 1840: see William W. Appleton, Madam Vestris and the London Stage (New York, 1974), and Williams, Our Moonlight Revels, pp. 93-103. [2] After 'manager' Morley omits the following sentence from the original 1853 review: 'Even now we cannot quit this topic of the scenery without reverting to the stage effect produced as Robin is bidden Overcast the night — The starry welkin cover thou anon With drooping fog as black as Acheron [3.2.355ff.] when the gathering of mists about the stage was presented with perfect illusion by a singularly dexterous use of painted gauzes'. (The Examiner, 15 October 1853, 661.) William Charles Macready (1793-1873), the renowned English actor, was manager of Covent Garden 1837-39 and of Drury Lane 1841-43. [3] G.V. Brooke was an actor at Drury Lane, mentioned by Morley earlier as 'that "unparalleled tragedian'" (p. 64), whom he judged unqualified to act Shakespeare, but who could act 'a good, ranting, roaring melodrama' (p. 63). [4] Of the three actors mentioned in the next paragraphs, Master Artis has disappeared; Miss Fanny Cooper (Mrs. T.H. Lacy) was Phelps's leading comic actress; and J.W. Ray

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was an accomplished mid-century actor for both Macready and Phelps. See Shirley S. Allen, Samuel Phelps and Sadler's Wells Theatre (Middletown, Connecticut, 1971). 32 DOUGLAS WILLIAM JERROLD [1] Richard Doyle (1824-1883) was an artist and cartoonist who illustrated Punch from 1843 to 1850, and was the creator of the cover of the magazine. [2] This seems to signify a crude paintbrush made from the hairy foot of a hare, but this meaning is not in OED. [3] The last name of Richard Burbage, the great actor of Shakespeare's day, is variously spelt. 33 RICHARD GRANT WHITE 1

[2] [3] [4]

[5]

[6] [7] [8]

It has been. The general public will not soon forget the charm, or the critical, the true Shakespearean flavor of the performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream under the direction of Mr. Burton at his own theatre [New York, February 1854]. Probably Thomas Barry's Broadway Theatre production, which opened three days after Burton's. See Williams, Our Moonlight Revels, pp. 115-20. 'shawl-dance, a dance originating in the East, in which a shawl or scarf is waved' (OED). The location descriptors that White considers authoritative are editorial. Pope was the first editor to specify locations for A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols (London, 1723-5), I). The wording cited by White for 2.1. and 2.2 was first used by Capell (1767), and followed in most editions to the mid-twentieth century. Felix Mendelssohn wrote his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1826, and the incidental music for Tieck's production of the play in 1843. See Bryan N.S. Gooch and David S. Thatcher, A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, 5 vols (Oxford, 1991), II, Items 9618fF. The overture was first used on the English-speaking stage by Alfred Bunn in 1833, and more influentially by Madame Vestris in 1840; the incidental music was probably first heard in Dublin in 1852, despite William Burton's claim that his 1854 New York production was the first to use it (see Williams, Our Moonlight Revels, pp. 92, 99, 117, 297n.42). For commentary on this music's ubiquitous use even to the present, see (for example) Williams passim, especially pp. 103ff., and the edition of the play by Trevor R. Griffiths for the series Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge, 1996), especially pp. 24ff. More than a hundred composers set the libretti of Felice Romani (1788-1865). His most famous collaboration with Vincenzo Bellini is perhaps Norma (1831). Raphael's Transfiguration (1517-20) is in the Vatican Museum. JEneid, I, 314-417.

34 EDWARD STRACHEY [1] 'In his [Schiller's] letters to me, there are most important views and opinions with respect to Wilhelm Meister. But this work is one of the most incalculable productions; I myself scarcely have the key to it. People seek a central point; that is hard, and not even right. I should think a rich manifold life, brought close to our eyes, would be enough without any express tendency; which, after all, is only for the intellect. But if anything

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[2] [3] [4] [5]

of the sort is insisted upon, it will perhaps be found in the words Frederic at the end addresses to the hero: "Thou seem'st to me like Saul, the son of Kish, who went out to seek his father's asses, and found a kingdom." Keep to this; for, in fact, the whole work seems to say nothing more than that man, despite all his follies and errors, being led by a higher hand, reaches some happy goal at last' Conversations of Goethe ivith Eckermann, translated by John Oxenford, edited by J.K. Moorhead, introduction by Havelock Ellis (London, 1930), p. 84. Strachey appears to be applying the Greek word for dream to his own invented god; cf. the Roman god of sleep, Somnus. See Chaucerian and Other Pieces, edited by W.W. Skeat (Oxford, 1897), pp. 361-79. Corrected to 'derision' in 1890. Jonson, 'To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us', Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. A5v., 11. 57-8.

35 WILLIAM WATKISS LLOYD

[1] John Webster, 'To the Reader', The White Devil (1612), edited by John R. Brown (London, 1960; 2nd edition, 1966), p. 4,11. 40-1. [2] Since Bottom's part in his own person is almost entirely in prose, Lloyd's meaning is puzzling. He may be using 'versed' loosely to mean 'poetic' or 'imaginative'; or he may be drawing on obsolete senses of 'to verse', to overturn or upset, or revolve in the mind (OED, v. 2, +2 and +3.b.), in order to suggest the paradoxical nature of the character and the play (cf. 'Arsy-versy', preposterous, OED B. adj.). There may also be wordplay on 'Versed', expert or skilful, OED ppl. a.1. [3] Alternate form of 'noil', meaning head. Samuel Johnson's edition of 1765 is the first to print this variant; earlier editions follow the First Quarto's spelling 'nole'. 36 ANONYMOUS

1

On the Fairy Queen, p. 77. [Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 2 vols (London, 1807) I, 76-7. In the 1762 edition, which is the text reproduced by Haskell House Publishers (New York, 1969), the passage occurs at I, 55.] [2] See No. 20 above, p. 130 and note. [3] OED does not list 'gentilitially', but for 'gentilitiaT suggests '1. Of, pertaining to, or peculiar to a nation; national'. '2. Of or pertaining to a gens or family; family'. '3. Of or pertaining to gentle birth; belonging to the gentry'. All three senses were current in the mid-nineteenth century, and have some relevance to the author's argument. For the obsolete and rare 'retrude', meaning 'to thrust backward', only one example (from 1647) is given. 38 CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE

[1] Clarke's own edition of the play (first issued in parts November to December 1864) correctly divides the question and answer between Snout and Starveling. [2] Compare Coleridge on the moralist, the metaphysician, and Shakespeare's characters (Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton, 1983, II, 185). [3] Deuteronomy 8.3; Matthew 4.4.

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[4] 'On the Grasshopper and Cricket', Sonnet XV in Poems (London, 1817).

39 THOMAS KENNY

[1] Milton, 'L'Allegro', 11. 129-30. [2] Shelley, 'To a Skylark', 1. 103. 40 JOHN ABRAHAM HERAUD

[1] 1 Corinthians 2.9. [2] 1.1.123-64: quoted earlier on p. 58. [3] Prothetic means antecedent: see OED, prothetic, a., 2; see also prothesis, prothetical, a., and prothetically, adv., and the quotations from Coleridge (1812-29) and Fraser's Magazine (1837 and 1838: perhaps by Heraud). [4] The Excursion, I, 79. [5] Noumena - a term introduced by Kant - are objects of intellectual intuition, while phenomena are immediate objects of perception. [6] Reynolds gives the anecdote about Raphael in 'Discourse XV, his last discourse, where the final words are 'MICHAEL ANGELO' (The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, edited by Edmond Malone, 2 vols, London, 1797,1, 345 and 346). [7] Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London, 1744), I, 481-3. [8] Collins, 'The Manners: An Ode' (1747), 1. 2, Works, ed. at., p. 46. [9] Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), German explorer and naturalist, spent five years travelling 6,000 miles in Central and South America, and later covered 9,000 miles in Russia and Siberia. 41 ETHAN ALLEN HITCHCOCK

[1] Earlier Hitchcock described nature as 'the universal spirit, or that which, adopting the happy phrase of Emerson, we may call the Over-Soul' (p. 92). [2] This may be from the First Epistle of John, 5.7-8: '7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father , the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one'. This is the King James version, which agrees with the Vulgate: later translations omit the seventh verse. [3] Revelations 6.14.

[4] 1 Corinthians 15.28. 42 ABNER OTIS KELLOGG

[1] 'most asinine of asses'. [2] James Sheridan Knowles, 1784-1862; Sir Martin Archer Shee, 1770-1850; Charles Robert Maturin, 1782-1824; Franz Grillparzer, 1791-1872; Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, 1777-1831; August von Kotzebue, 1761-1819. All were famous in their day; however, Shee achieved fame as an artist rather than as a playwright, and Maturin is best known as a Gothic novelist. Kotzebue is probably most familiar to English readers as author of Lovers' Vows, the play rehearsed in Jane Austen's

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Mansfield Park. 43 MARY PRESTON

[1] The reference to Scott suggests admiration for his creativity as poet and novelist, and possibly also for his patriotism; Thomas, first Baron Erskine (1750-1823) was also a Scot, and may have won Mary Preston's approval for his famed eloquence in advocacy of liberal causes. [2] Preston's substitution of 'grow' for 'grew' bends the text to fit her argument of constancy. Her subsequent summary of the action concerning the love-juice and Titania, and of Puck's dealings with the mechanicals and Bottom, is similarly approximate. Her summary of the conclusion of the play ignores the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe. 45 DANIEL WILSON

[1] Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 1. 546. [2] The last four words are from 4.1.19. 46 KARL ELZE

1

2

3 4

In Jonson's Love's Welcome (1634) we also meet with 'A Dance of Mechanics,' in which Chesil, the Carver; Dresser, the Plumber; Quarrel, the Glazier; and Fret, the Plaisterer, figure among others. Halpin, Oberon's Vision in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' illustrated by a Comparison with Lylie's 'Endymion.' Published for the Shakespeare Society, 1843, p. 98 seq. [No. 22 above. Eke is referring to note f, pp. 98-9: 'The mask is essentially dramatic; and the distinction which obtains between professional stage-playing and private theatricals will nearly define the specific difference, if any, between it and the regular drama. The one was for general exhibition at the public theatres, the other for particular performance in private dwellings. But I incline to think the difference constitutes a variety rather than a species; and whoever will take the trouble of comparing any of Ben Jonson's Masks with Heywood's mask of Love's Mistress, and that again with Lylie's Midas, or Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, will perceive how imperceptibly the two forms glide into each other, and become indistinguishable by definition, in the same manner and degree as the individuals in the vegetable or animal kingdoms, which naturalists term the varieties of a species. In truth, the Midsummer Night's Dream has all the air and character of a mask got up to honour the nuptial ceremony of some noble and distinguished patron.'] Oberon, the Fairy Prince, a Masque of Prince Henry's. Neuejahrbucherfur Philologie und Pddagogik, 1866, Bd. 94, Heft I., S. 20-9.

47 DENTON JACQUES SNIDER

[1] In the paragraphs added at the beginning of the essay in 1887, Snider claimed that the play 'transcends the limits of the theater' and that in it Shakespeare 'is appealing from that confined theater of spectators to his future constituency, the untold millions of readers' (379-80). [2] Forcible separation or severance, with a secondary meaning referring specifically to the forcible separation of man and wife (OED). [3] In 1887, although stressing the 'mutual love and concord' of the mature lovers, Snider

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[4]

[5]

[6] [7] [8] [9]

acknowledges Theseus's violent past and courtship, and that 'he is still not yet wholly subdued to love, as we shall soon see by his decision, in which harsh law seeks to crush rudely the tender passion' (385-6). Called so by the poet's editors, not the poet. The closest conjunction of 'Athens ' and 'wood' occurs at 1.1.213-14, where Demetrius speaks of stealing through Athens gates and Hermia adds that they are heading to the wood familiar to Helena. Cf. No. 33 note 4 above. Second thoughts in 1887 led Snider to note that the Athenian law is imperfect because at first Theseus's harsh decision fails to recognize 'the emotional element of the Family — which may be called the Right of Love' (390). 1887 adds: 'Moreover it is a myth, and can only be learned by going to the mythical world, which is here Fairy-land' (395). 1887: 'repentance' (403). 1887: 'a downright Philistine, as the Germans would say' (414). Cf. Horace, Ars poetica, 372-3: 'mediocribus esse poetis / non homines, non di, non concessere columnae' ('that poets be of middling rank, neither men nor gods nor booksellers ever brooked' Satires, Epistles, Ars poetica, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, London, 1926).

48 GEORGE WILKES

[1]

George Steevens's note first appeared in The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited by George Steevens and Isaac Reed, 15 vols (London, 1793), V, 8: 'Shakespeare is grievously suspected of having been placed, while a boy, in an attorney's office. The line before us has an undoubted smack of legal common-place. Poetry disclaims it. STEEVENS'. Lord John Campbell, Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered (London, 1859), quotes this remark in full, then comments as Wilkes cites (p. 48). [2] The phrase 'fair round hand' is no contemporary allusion, but seems to be a fabrication of some Baconians who regarded Shakespeare as merely a copyist who 'wrote out the parts in big, round hand' or 'in a fair hand' (Appleton Morgan, The Shakespearean Myth, Cincinnati, 1888, 3rd edition, pp. 304 and 313). [3] Timber, in Benjonson, edited by C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52), VIII, 583.

49 EDWARD DOWDEN

1

On Shakespeare's studies of chivalric mediaeval poetry see some interesting pages in Mr Spalding's [A] Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen' [Edinburgh, 1833], pp. 65-75; the article 'Chaucer and Shakespeare' in the Quarterly Review, January, 1873 [CXXXIV, 225-55]; and Hertzberg's learned discussion of the sources of the Troilus story in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, VI [(1871), 169-225]. [2] Chapter III of Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869) is tided 'Barbarians, Philistines, Populace'.

50 ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD

1

The following observations by Guizot [Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot, 1787-1874] (which I translate from [Claas Hugo] Humbert, {Moliere, Shakespeare und die deutsche

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

2

3

Kritik (Leipzig, 1869)], p.278) will more adequately indicate the point of view of my remarks: 'Shakespeare's comedy is a fantastic and romantic work of the mind, a refuge for all those delightful improbabilities, which from indolence or whim fancy merely strings together by a thin thread, in order out of them to construct a variety of manifold complications, which exhilarate and interest us, without precisely meeting the test of the judgment of reason. Pleasing pictures, surprises, merry plots, curiosity stimulated, expectations deceived, mistakes of identity, witty problems leading to disguises, — such were the materials of these plays innocent and lightly thrown together. — It is not to be marvelled at, that Shakespeare's youthful and brilliant power of imagination loved to dwell on such materials as these; because by means of them it could, free from the severe yoke of reason, at the expense of probability produce all manner of serious and strong effects. — Shakespeare was able to pour everything into his comedies; and in fact he did pour everything into them, with the exception of what was irreconcileable with their system, viz. the logical connexion which subordinates every part of the piece to the intention of the whole; and in each detail attests the depth, greatness, and unity of the work. In the tragedies of Shakespeare it will be difficult to find any single conception, any situation, any deed of passion, any degree of vice or of virtue, which will not be found to recur in one of his comedies; but what in the one reaches into the most abysmal depth, and proves itself productive of consequences of the most moving force, and severely takes its place in a series of causes and results, is in the other barely suggested, merely thrown out for the moment, so as to create a fugitive impression, and to lose itself with equal rapidity in a new complication.' The very essence of romantic comedy seems to me to be here described. I may quote a criticism of Hazlitt's as an example of a kind of comment which, attractive as it is, really misleads:- [Quotes from the first paragraph of No. 10 above, 'It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles . . . honeybag,"; he italicizes the sentence 'It is too much to suppose all this intentional; but it very luckily falls out so'.] I venture to add that Mr. Phelps, one of the last eminent actors of Shakespeare left to adorn the English stage, appears to me in his otherwise admirable representation of Bottom the Weaver to err precisely in the direction of over- characterisation. Gervinus. [Cf. No. 37 above. Ward gives his own, not Bunnett's translation.]

52 JOHN WEISS [1] Smith said this of Lord John Russell, in his "Second Letter to Archdeacon Singleton", The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith, 3 vols (London, 1840, 2nd edition), III, 233; Selected Writings of Sydney Smith, edited by W.H. Auden (New York, 1956), p. 171. [2] A dicast was 'one of the 6,000 citizens chosen annually in ancient Athens to try cases in the several law-courts, where their functions combined those of the modern judge and jury' (OED). [3] Heraud does not use this word. [4] 1 Corinthians 2.9. [5] A 'brown-stone-fronted crib' signifies a manger for the rich. Houses fronted with brown-stone, a type of sandstone, came to designate the well-to-do in some eastern cities of the United States: see OED, brown, a., 7, and quotations. [6] See No. 19 note 3 above. [7] A tenpenny nail is a nail of large size: see OED, tenpenny, a., l.b., where William

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Boghurst's Loimographia (1666; printed 1894) is quoted: 'Stomacks like Ostriches able to digest a tenpenny nail'. 53 FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL

[1] Fumivall paraphrases Poe, who, in a letter to 'Mr. B ' prefacing his poems in 1831, says: 'I demanded of a scholar . . . give me a definition of poetry . . . and he ... brought me a Dr. Johnson, and overwhelmed me with a definition. . . . Think of poetry, dear B—, . . . then think of Dr. Samuel Johnson! Think of all that is airy and fairy-like, and then of all that is hideous and unwieldy; think of his huge bulk, the Elephant! and then - and then think of The Tempest - the Midsummer Night's Dream - Prospero - Oberon - and Titania!' (Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, New York, 1984, pp. 16-17). 2 [Quotes 1, 2-4 from the Wife of Bath's Tale.] 3 The pensioners are London, tho', Queen Elizabeth's, in their smart coats; still, some of them may have been with her at Kenilworth in 1575. She had 50 of 'em in her 'Band of Pencioners,' and their fee was £50 'apeece.' - Household Ordinances, p. 251, col. 1. See the oath they took, ib., p. 277. [A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, Made in Divers Reigns. From King Edward III. to King William and Mary . . . (London, for the Society of Antiquaries, 1790).] If any one urges that Theseus's pack was too good a one for a country town like Stratford, and must have belonged to some nobleman nearer London, I can only answer — May-be. 4 Dyce objects to this strongly: 'To suppose that the words of Titania, "Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain," [2.1.88] &c., allude to the state of the weather in England in 1594 is ridiculous; nor is it less so to suppose that any particular allusion is contained in the lines on the neglect of learning, [Quotes 5.1.52-3: "The thrice-three Muses. . . . "]'. —Shakespeare's Works (London, 1864), II, 263. The epithet 'ridiculous' seems to me too strong, but I cannot let the possible allusion break through the other links of the play. [5] J.O. Halliwell quotes both Stowe's Annals and 'Dr. King's Lectures upon Jonas delivered at Yorke in the yeare of our Lorde 1594' in his Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream in his edition of The Works of William Shakespeare, 16 vols (London, 1856), V, 4-5. 6 See Mr. Halpin's interesting Paper on The Merchant of Venice, and Prof. Wilson's (Christopher North's) Papers on the times of Macbeth and Othello, condenst and reprinted in the Appendix [I] to New Shakespeare Society's Transactions, [Series I, Nos. 3-4] 1875-6 [pp. 388-412; pp. 351-87]. [7] Fumivall assigns four main periods to the poems and plays, and describes the first period (1588-1594) as follows (p. vii): 'a. The Comedy of Errors or Mistaken-Identity Group. . . . Love's Labour's Lost (P1588-9), p. xxii; The Comedy of Errors (?1589), p. xxiv; A Midsummer Night's Dream (P1590-1), p. xxvi. b. Link-play. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (? 1590-1), p. xxvii. c. The Passion Group. Romeo and Juliet (1591-3), p. xxviii; Venus and Adonis (1593), p.xxx; Lucrece (1593-4), p. xxxiii;

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(The Passionate Pilgrim [?1589-99: pr. 1599], p. xxxv.) d. The Early Histories. . . .' 54 CHARLES EBENEZER MOYSE

[1] The location is not given by Shakespeare but by his editors: see No. 33 note 4 above. [2] The Faerie Queene, I.i.7.2. [3] In 1830 Tieck first suggested the marriage of Southampton as the occasion, while Elze (No. 46 above) argued for the wedding of Essex. For a discussion see H.H. Furness's New Variorum Edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Philadelphia, 1895), 259-64 (No. 65 below). 55 THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES

[1] See No. 14 note 10 above. Other critics writing before 1880 who connected Titania with Ovid include the editors James Halliwell and Howard Staunton, both quoting Keightley (Works, 1853-65, V, 87; The Plays of Shakespeare, 3 vols, London, 1858-60, I, 383), and William Sidney Walker (A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, 3 vols, London, 1860,1, 156). [2] For example, to Diana at Metamorphoses, 3.173; to Latona at 6.346; to Circe at 14.382; to Pyrrha at 1.395. Hecate, sister of Latona, is not styled Titania in the Metamorphoses. [3] Metamorphoses, 10.16. [4] Metamorphoses, 14.438; Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, edited by W.H.D. Rouse (London, 1961), p. 283,1. 430. [5] Metamorphoses, 7.207; Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures by George Sandys (1632), edited by Karl Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970), p. 311. [6] The Whore of Babylon (1607), 'Titania the Fairie Queene: under whome is figured our late Queene Elizabeth' ('Drammatis Personae'). 56 WILLIAM FRANCIS C. WIGSTON

[1] In the translations of the Timaeus by Benjamin Jowett (The Dialogues of Plato, 5 vols, 3rd edition revised, London, 1892, III, 437-515) and R.G. Bury (Plato: Timaeus, etc., London, 1929 [Loeb], pp. 17-252) the simile of 'wax' is not used, though Plato does speak of matter (using Bury's translation) as a 'moulding-stufF from which 'copies . . . are stamped' (50C), and uses expressions like 'stamped copy' (SOD), 'to mould figures in any soft material' (51 A), and, later, 'to fashion a mortal body' (69C). [2] In chapter VII, pp. 161-201. 57 GRACE LATHAM

[1] Not located. [2] The comma which Latham finds so significant does not appear in Qq or Ff; it was first added by Rowe in 1709 (Works, II, 468). At 1.1.28 Qq and Fl read 'This man' for 'This': the extra-metrical syllable was deleted in F2, but editorial ingenuity in finding

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excuses for readings to correct the metrical irregularity continues to be exercised well into the late stages of the twentieth century. Cf. Boswell, No. 11 above; Knight commented 'In modern editions man is omitted; and the emphatic repetition of Egeus is in consequence destroyed' (The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, 8 vols, London, 1838-43,1, 338). 58 ELIZABETH WORMELEY LATIMER

[1] For Hudson, Dowden, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Maginn, Gervinus, White, see Nos. 29, 49, 10, 15, 16, 37, 33 above. 'Christopher North', i.e., John Wilson (1785-1854), was a frequent contributor to Blackwood's Magazine. For Anna Jameson (1794-1860), Helena Faucit, Lady Martin (1817-98) and Constance O'Brien (active 1876-1912), see Women reading Shakespeare: An anthology of literary criticism, edited by Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester, 1997). 59 FRANCIS ALBERT MARSHALL

1

Of course the ghost of Hamlet's father, supernatural because he is a ghost, but essentially human in the interest which surrounds him, must be excepted. [2] Marshall is confusing Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess with Jonson's The Sad Shepherd. 60 GEORGE EDGAR MONTGOMERY

[1]

The New York Times Index, under 'Amusements', lists fourteen local Shakespearean productions in the period February to April 1888, besides Augustin Daly's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The noted actor-managers Henry Irving, Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett and Mary Anderson were among the many who successfully performed Shakespeare's plays in New York in the mid 1880s.

61 JULIA WEDGWOOD

[1] An arranged collection of dried plants; a herbarium (OED). [2] In Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, the highland chieftain Fergus Mac-Ivor sees the apparition foretelling calamity or death twice, in chapters 59 and 69; in chapter 22 of The Bride of Lammermoor, the 'old sybil' Alice appears to the doomed hero Edgar just before he discovers her dead body. [3] In The Antiquary, Dousterswivel is a charlatan who attempts to trade on belief in the supernatural; the Antiquary himself, Mr. Oldbuck, Laird of Monkbarns, though gullible in some respects, scoffs at the young hero's account of his dream in the haunted bedroom (Chapter 9). [4] Sophocles, CEdipus at Colonus, 11. 607-15. [5] Not located. 62 CHARLES DOWNING

[1] Ahriman is the devil or principle of evil in Zoroastrianism, who combats Ormuzd, the supreme god and principle of good. [2] 'Life-giving Venus, it is your doing that under the wheeling constellations of the sky

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all nature teems with life, both the sea that buoys up our ships and the earth that yields our food. Through you all living creatures are conceived and come forth to look upon the sunlight'. Lucretius on the Nature of the Universe, translated by Ronald E. Latham (Baltimore, 1951), p. 27. 63 SIDNEY CLOPTON LANIER 1

2

A reader desirous of pursuing the subject will find these phenomena reduced to terms of musical notation and fully explained in the present author's Science of English Verse [New York, 1880], pp. 201 and following. It ought to be added here that, of course, a wholly different line of art-tests is also applicable to Shakespeare. He was not only verse-wright, but play-wright; and his art in constructing a play, in balancing figures, etc., if similarly examined is found to advance in precisely the same direction with the verse-art, that is, toward Freedom, toward the Irregular System.

64 BARRETT WENDELL [1] He divides Shakespeare's works into four parts, placing A Midsummer Night's Dream at the beginning of the second part. 2 See pp. 86, 91, 96. [These pages discuss the devices and situations of the three comedies under consideration.] 3 Cf. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1.1-50 with A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.226ff. 4 Cf. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.4.192ff. with A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.2.103ff.;3.1.13[7]ff., etc.

5

3.2.282-344.

6

See p. 309. [Here Wendell says they 'probably' entered on hobby horses, and that 'such a proceeding . . . might still occur in serious tragedy on the Chinese stage' which is 'very much like the Elizabethan'.] Antony and Cleopatra, 1.3.71 ['Cut my lace. . . .']. 3.1.16[3]ff; 4.1.[6-21].

7 8

65 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS [1] This stage direction is not in the two quartos. It first appears in the First Folio, and is omitted from the Riverside edition. [2] This stage direction, like the one that closes the third act - ' They sleepe all the Act' is not in the two quartos, but first appears in the First Folio. It too is omitted from the Riverside edition. 67 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [1] Augustin Daly's famous production which opened in New York in early 1888, was revived in 1890, and staged in London in the summer of 1895. See Williams, Our Moonlight Revels, 125-31, and Marvin Felheim, The Theatre of Augustin Daly (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). [2] Lillian Swain's name is not in the cast lists for Daly's Dream productions of 1873, 1888, and 1890; she apparently appeared only in the London staging of 1895: see William

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[3]

[4] [5] [6]

[7] [8]

[9]

Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage (New York, 1916), p. 269. No other record of her as an actor has been found. Zamiel, or more familiarly Samiel, is a speaking character in Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischutz who is 'the embodiment of all that is dark and destructive in the elemental German wood spirits' and whose accompanying music was to be 'the lowest register of the violins, violas and basses' etc. (John Warrack, Carl Maria Von Weber, Cambridge, 1968, second edition, 1976, pp. 227 and 221). Shaw had reviewed the opera a year earlier, 18 July 1894: see The Collected Works (New York, 1931), XXVIII, Music in London 1890-94 (3 vols), III, 278-81. Williams estimates the cuts amounted to '558 lines', about one quarter of the complete text (Our Moonlight Revels, p. 131). Ada Rehan was Daly's star performer: see William Winter, Ada Rehan (New York, 1898). George Clarke (1844-1906) acted in Daly's theatre when it first opened in 1869 and was a permanent member of the performing personnel, playing such roles as Malvolio andjaques. Brandon Thomas's highly popular farce Charley's Aunt was first produced in 1892. James Lewis (1837-96), like Clarke, joined Daly in 1869 and was a permanent cast member. Winter (note 2 above) devotes three pages to praise of Lewis as Bottom (pp. 271-3). Three weeks earlier, in his review of Bernhardt in Edmond Rostand's La Princesse Lointaine, published 22 June 1895 in The Saturday Review, Shaw suggested to the renowned actor 'that the shallow trick of intoning which sets so many of my musically neglected colleagues babbling about the "golden voice" should be discarded too. Miss Rehan, who is coming next week, will expose the musical emptiness of Madame Bernhardt's habit of monotonously chanting sentences on one note. . . .' (Dramatic Opinions and Essays by G. Bernard Shaw, 2 vols, New York, 1906,1, 152).

68 ANDREW LANG

[1] The noted American historical and mural painter Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) had a long association with Harper's as an illustrator of literary texts (Herrick, Dickens, Goldsmith etc.), and of the English scene. He provided illustrations for each of Lang's fourteen essays on the comedies; of the five full- and three half-page drawings for A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps the most striking is a queenly Titania endowed with giant butterfly wings, standing as it were on a cloud of little fairy figures. [2] An editorial addition to the text. See No. 33 note 4 and No. 47 note 4 above. [3] Charles Godfrey Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (London, 1892), especially pp. 164-5. [4] i.e., 'wisest aunt'; Lang's memory is at fault. [5] Also Dayaks: aboriginal peoples inhabiting Borneo and Sarawak. [6] Gulliver feels obliged to defend himself against the charge of an affair with the wife of Flimnap, the Lilliputian treasurer, not with the Queen (Gulliver's Travels, Part I, Chapter vi). [7] A low-class actor. The most recent edition of OED (1989) gives 1903 as the first recorded instance of its use. [8] See the Introduction, p. 5 above. [9] Henry Vaughan, 'The Retreat', 1. 2. [10] In the latter part of his life Darwin confessed to having no pleasure in music, pictures,

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and poetry, and to finding the reading of Shakespeare 'so intolerably dull that it nauseated me'. He attributed this 'curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes' to his mind having 'become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts' The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, edited by Nora Barlow (1958; reprinted New York, 1969), pp. 138-9. 69 FREDERICK SAMUEL BOAS

[1] Edward Dowden, who used the phrase 'man' or 'men of action' five times, is the author alluded to here and also a few lines below ('it has been said'): see No. 49 above. [2] Horace, De Arte Poetica, 1. 185. 70 EDMUND KERCHEVER CHAMBERS

1

Probably there was even more singing and dancing in the play than the printed text indicates. See, e.g., the note on v. 1.386 [i.e. 5.1.400: It would appear that a song has been lost here, or perhaps two, one here, and one at line 403 (i.e. 417);. . . ]. I suspect, moreover, that the rhymed trochaic speeches assigned to the fairies were sung or given as recitative. [2] Swinburne, 'Dolores', 1. 53, in Poems and Ballads (London, 1866). 71 GEORG MORRIS COHEN BRANDES

[1] In 1888 F.A. Marshall spoke of'Fairyland and Clownland' being 'blended together' (No. 59 above). [2] Moliere's Psyche, a 'tragedie-ballet', was not, as the preface pointed out, entirely by him; Pierre Corneille wrote part of act III, and acts IV and V, in order to complete the piece for presentation before the king in January, 1671. See The Plays ofMoliere in French With an English Translation and Notes, by A.R. Waller, 8 vols (Edinburgh, 1907), VII, 355-76. 3 New Shakespeare Society's Transactions 1880-86, p. 67. 4 The passion for alliteration in his contemporaries is satirised in these lines of the prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe:- [Quotes 5.1.146-7: 'Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade. . . .'. Thomas Preston's Cambises was first printed in 1561.] 72 MAX BEERBOHM

[1] Subordinate or secondary work; work apart from one's main business or employment. See OED, Parergon, sense 2. [2] Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is often perceived as the culmination of the Victorian taste for scenic display, and has won notoriety for its use of live rabbits in the 1911 revival. See Williams, Our Moonlight Revels, pp. 131-9. [3] Trick or deceive; cf. No. 25 note 1 above. [4] Pater is discussing Botticelli's illustrations of the 1481 edition of Dante's Inferno in his essay 'Sandro Botticelli' in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London, 1873; fourth edition 1893: the 1893 text, edited by Donald L. Hill, Berkeley, 1980, p. 41, 11. 9-12).

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[5] Henry Fuseli's Titania and Bottom (1786-89) is now in London's Tate Gallery. [6] In the USA, a dime-museum is 'a collection of often lurid and sensational curiosities, monstrosities, and freaks exhibited for a low price of admission' (Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1976). [7] The Elementary Education Act of 1870 established school boards to oversee state schools, and made elementary education compulsory. The little fairies would be instructed by a teacher with full certification, not a pupil-teacher. [8] The painter Hawes Craven (1837-1910) was responsible for the production's scenery. [9] Shortly before Beerbohm wrote his review Sidney Lee had deplored the modern use of 'scenic spectacle and gorgeous costume', calling them 'superfluous and inappropriate', in an essay tided 'Shakespeare and the Modern Stage' in The Nineteenth Century (January, 1900, No. 275), 47, 146-56 (reprinted in Shakespeare and the Modem Stage: With Other Essays, New York, 1906, pp. 1-24). Lee attributed part of the cause of this 'spectacular magnificence' to the 'decay . . . of the [English] imagination' and he praised 'the superior imaginative faculty of adult Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers' (Shakespeare and the Modem Stage, pp. 2, 18, and 19). 73 CHARLOTTE ENDYMION PORTER AND HELEN ARCHIBALD CLARKE [1] For the strictures of Samuel Pepys and Horace Walpole, Lord Orford, see the Introduction pp. 5 and 14 above. [2] 'The Flower and the Leaf is printed in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, edited by Walter W. Skeat (Oxford, 1897), pp. 361-79. For authorship, see pp. btiiff. Line numbers of the phrases quoted are given in parentheses in the text. [3] Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Scene XVI, 45-62, edited by J.A. Lavin (London, 1969), p.94. [4] The Flower and the Leaf, 11.350, 331-3. [5] Yong's Translation of George of Montemayor's Diana and Gil Polo's Enamoured Diana, edited by Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968), p. 186. [6] Theobald, Works (1733), I, 83. [7] The Works of William Shakespeare, edited by Richard Grant White, 12 vols (Boston, 1857-66), IV, 121-2. [8] William Wordsworth, 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', 11. 141-5. 74 RICHARD GREEN MOULTON 1 2

Compare the scheme of the play in the Appendix. From 3.2.192 to 447 this acutest phase of the entanglement prevails: dotted lines in the figure suggest the breaking up of amicable relations between the two girls, and again between the two men.

75 ERNEST HOWARD CROSBY [1] This often repeated story was first published in John Dennis's adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor called The Comical Gallant or the Amours of Sir John Falstaff (1702) in the Epistle Dedicatory. See Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers, 6 vols (London, 1974-81), II, 161. [2] Smooth 'the silk-man' is from 2 Henry IV, 2.1.129.

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[3] The first quarto of Hamlet appeared in 1603, but Crosby is probably referring to the second quarto, some copies of which are dated 1605, the same year Don Quixote appeared. [4] Jack Cade's rebellion was in 1450 (and is staged in act 4 of 2 Henry VI), and Wat Tyler led the Peasants Revolt in 1381. [5] St. Thomas More, Utopia, II, in Complete Works, IV, edited by E. Surtz andJ.H. Hexter (Yale, 1965), 239,11. 29-36. 76 GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

[1] He is referring to Uncle Toby in Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Dick Swiveller in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop. 77 STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE

[1] The Faerie Queene, III.xii. 1-26. [2] Both Alexander Gerard and Francis Gentleman, in 1774, voiced similar reservations about Helena's speech: see the Introduction, pp. 9-10. 78 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

[1] Presumably a slip for 'hard-handed' (5.1.72), perhaps indicative of Woodberry's transatlantic attitudes. 79 FRANK SIDGWICK

[1] Biographical information on Frank Sidgwick is drawn from a brief memoir by his daughter Ann Baer, in Frank Sidgwick's Diary and Other Material Relating to A.H. Bullen, & The Shakespeare Head Press at Stratford-Upon-Avon (Oxford, 1975), pp. 89-90. 2 Cf. I. i. 167 and IV. i. 129-30. [1.1.167; 4.1.132-3; Sidgwick's line-numbering indicates that he is keying to The Warwick Shakespeare] 3 It is perhaps fantastic to interpret too literally Arcite's song to May - 'I hope that I som grene gete may' — but, however little of their primitive significance now remains, celebration of the rites of May is by no means extinct. See E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, I. 117: 'their object is to secure the beneficent influence of the fertilization spirit by bringing the persons or places to be benefited into direct contact with the physical embodiment of that spirit'. Shakespeare's apparent confusion of a May-day with a Midsummer-night may seem pardonable to the folk-lorist in the light of the fact that various folk-festivals appear to take place indiscriminately on May-day or Midsummer-day. See Chambers, op. cit. I. 114, 118, 126. 4 Cf. III. ii. 331 and 401, etc. [3.2.331, 401.] 5 Cf. IV. i. 100-183. [4.1.103-86.] 6 InV. i. 51. [5.1.51.] 80 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

[1] Wordsworth, 'Lines Written in Early Spring', 11. 11-12.

417

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION 82 HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER

[1] G.C.D. Odell did not feel that Barker passed the test. His London production of 1914 was staged in New York on February 16, 1915, and Odell objected to the 'coat of bronze paint' on every fairy, and the distracting fact that they 'clanked as they walked'. He also wondered at Puck's 'flaring, flaming hair' ('A Midsummer Night's Dream on the New York Stage', in Shakespearean Studies, edited by Brander Matthews and Ashley Horace Thorndike, New York, 1916, pp. 160-1). [2] Edward M. Moore points out that this line is from James Thomson's Tragedy of Sophonisba (1730), and that it is parodied by Fielding in Tom Thumb (More Prefaces to Shakespeare, By Harley Granville-Barker, edited by Edward M. Moore, Princeton, 1974, p. 38). 84 BJ0RNSTJERNE BJ0RNSON

[1] This sentence is translated by Edward C. Thaden (Shakespeare in Europe, edited by Oscar LeWinter, Cleveland and New York, 1963) 'Notice, the dream is one thing, and the plot of the play is another' (289). [2] The tale Ame was written in 1858. An early English translation (by Augusta Plesner and S. Rugeley-Powers, London, 1866) gives the subtitle 'A sketch of Norwegian country life'. 85 BENEDETTO CROCE

[1] The translation is somewhat loose. Croce's reference in Italian to the effect 'delle due famose e prossime fontane, di cui 1'una empieva il core d'amoroso desio e 1'altra volgeva in ghiaccio il primo ardore' (la Critica, 17 (1919), 153) makes clear that he is referring specifically to (indeed quoting) Ariosto's description of the two fountains that cause the tangle of affections afflicting Rinaldo and Angelica: 'D'amoroso disio 1'una empio il core; / Chi bee de 1'altra, senza amore rimane, / Evolge tutto in ghiaccio il primo ardore' (Orlando Furioso, 1.78, lines 4-6).

418

A Select Bibliography

The bibliography lists all books and articles referred to in the Introduction, a selection of those referred to in headnotes to the extracts reprinted, and in Section (A) a few studies of general interest. Books referred to only in the Notes to the extracts are not listed, but may be located through the General Index. (A) HISTORIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM AND BACKGROUND STUDIES Abbott, E.A. (1869) (and frequently reprinted to the present). A Shakespearean Grammar: An Attempt to Illustrate Some of the Differences between Elizabethan and Modem English for the Use of Schools, London. Babcock, Robert Witbeck (1931) The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry 1766-1799: A Study in English Criticism of the late Eighteenth Century, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (reprinted New York, 1978). Baker, David (1764) The Companion to the Play-House, or an Historical Account of all the Dramatic Writers and their Works . . ., 2 vols, London. Bate, Jonathan (1986) Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, Oxford (revised 1989). (1989) Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830, Oxford. (ed.) (1992) The Romantics on Shakespeare, London. Bell, William (1852-64) Shakespeare's Puck and his folkslore, 3 vols, London. Birch, Thomas (1734-41) entry for 'Shakespeare, William' in Pierre Bayle, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, 10 vols, London, IX, pp.186-99. Black, A. Bruce and Smith, R.M. (1931) Shakespeare Allusions and Parallels, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (reprinted New York, 1971). Boaden, James (1837) On the Sonnets of Shakespeare Identifying the Person to whom they are Addressed; and Elucidating Several Points in the Poet's History, London. Booth, Michael R. (1981) Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910, London. Briggs, Katharine M. (1959) The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors, London. (1967) The Fairies in Tradition & Literature, London. Brown, John Russell (1955) The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900-1953'. Shakespeare Survey, 8: 1-13. Bullough, Geoffrey, (ed.) (1957-75) 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols, London, I, pp.365-422. Bysshe, Edward (1705) The Art of English Poetry (reprinted New York, 1971); 1708, edited by A. Dwight Culler, Los Angeles, 1953. Carroll, D. Allen and Williams, Gary Jay (1986) A Midsummer Night's Dream: An Annotated Bibliography, New York and London. Chambers, E. K. (1930) William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols, Oxford.

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SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Dobson, Michael (1992) The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769, Oxford. Dutton, Richard (ed.) (1996) A Midsummer Night's Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays, New Casebooks, London. Dyer, T.F. Thiselton (1883) Folk-lore of Shakespeare, London. Friedman, Winifred H. (1976) Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, New York. Gildon, Charles (1718) The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols, London (reprinted New York, 1970). Gooch, Bryan W. S. and Thatcher, David (1991) A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, 5 vols, Oxford. Halio, Jay L. (1994) A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester. (1996) 'The Staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1595-1895'. In Mucciolo, John M. (ed.) Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Essays in Honour of IV. R. Elton, Aldershot. Halliwell, James O. (1845) Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, London. Holland, Peter (1994) '"A Midsummer Night's Dream", 1660-1800: Culture and the Canon'. In Faini, Paola and Papetti, Viola (eds) Le Forme del Teatro: Saggi sul teatro elisabettiano e della Restaurazione, Rome. HufEnan, Clifford Chalmers (ed.) (1995) Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice: An Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare Studies 1888-1994, Binghampton, New York. Ingleby, C. M. et al. (eds.) (1909) The Shakespeare Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591 to 1700, 2 vols, New York and London; reissued with a preface by Sir Edmund K. Chambers, 1932. Isaacs, J. (1934) 'Shakespearean Criticism: II. From Coleridge to the Present Day'; 'Shakespearean Scholarship'. In Granville-Barker, Harley and Harrison, G.B. (eds) A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Cambridge, pp. 300-4, 305-24. Jaggard, William (1911) Shakespeare Bibliography, Stratford-on-Avon (reprinted Folkestone and London, 1971). Jorgens, Jack J. (1970) 'Studies in the criticism and stage history of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Ph.D. dissertation, New York University. Keightley, Thomas [1828] The Fairy Mythology, 2 vols, London. Langbaine, Gerard (1691) An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, London. Latham, Minor White (1930) The Elizabethan Fairies: the Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare, New York. May, Susan Hartman (1974) 'A Survey of the Criticism of A Midsummer Night's Dream', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Meres, Francis (1598) Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth, London; facsimile reprint, New York, 1973. Muir, Kenneth (1957) Shakespeare's Sources: Comedies and Tragedies, London. Nutt, Alfred (1900) The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, London. Palmer, D. J. (1973) 'The Early Comedies'. In Wells, Stanley (ed.) Shakespeare: Select Bibliographical Guides, London, pp. 54-73; slightly revised in Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide, Oxford, 1990, pp. 83-105. Poole, Josua (1657) The English Parnassus: or, A Helpe to English Poesie, London; facsimile Menston, 1972. Price, Antony W. (ed.) (1983) A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Selection of Critical Essays, Casebook Series, London.

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Ralli, Augustus (1932) A History of Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols, London. Scott, Sir Walter (1802-3) Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vols, Kelso. Sherbo, Arthur (1986) The Birth of Shakespeare Studies: Commentators from Rowe (1709) to Boswell-Malone (1821), East Lansing, Michigan. (1992) Shakespeare's Midurives: Some Neglected Shakespeareans, Newark, Delaware. Stavisky, Aron Y. (1969) Shakespeare and the Victorians: Roots of Modem Criticism, Norman, Oklahoma. Styan, J. L. (1977) The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge. Thompson, Ann and Roberts, Sasha (eds.) (1997) Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900: An Anthology of Criticism, Manchester. Thorns, William (1847) 'The folk-lore of Shakespeare'. The Athenceum (4 September-11 December) Nos. 1036-41,1043, 1045, 1050. Thorn-Drury, George (1920) Some Seventeenth Century Allusions to Shakespeare and his Works not hitherto Collected, London. (1924) More Seventeenth Century Allusions to Shakespeare and his Works not hitherto Collected, London. Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1974-81) Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623-1801, 6 vols, London and Boston. Wells, Stanley (ed.) (1986) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Cambridge. White, R. S. (1984) 'Criticism of the Comedies up to The Merchant of Venice: 1953-82', Shakespeare Survey, 37: 1-11. Williams, Gary Jay (1997) Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre, Iowa City. Winstanley, William (1687) Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, London. (B) PLAYS, POEMS, AND FICTION (i) Editions and adaptations of Shakespeare in chronological order

Shakespeare, William (1600) A Midsommer nights dreame, London. (1600) A Midsommer nights dreame, n.p. [i.e. London, 1619]. (1623) Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London. Gryphius, Andreas (?1657) Peter Squenz, translated in Brennecke (see below). ?Cox, Robert (1661) The Merry conceited Humors of Bottom The Weaver, London; see also Francis Kirkman (1673) The Wits; or, Sport upon Sport, London. PBetterton, Thomas, and Purcell, Henry (1692) The Fairy-Queen, London. Rowe, Nicholas (ed.) (1709) The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols, London; the 'seventh' volume of this edition (1710) contains Charles Gildon's 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare', which include his observations on A Midsummer Night's Dream (pp. 313-20). Leveridge, Richard (1716) The Comick Masque ofPyramus and Thisbe, London. Johnson, Charles (1723) Love in a Forest, London. Pope, Alexander (ed.) (1723-25) The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols, London. Theobald, Lewis (ed.) (1733) The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols, London. Hanmer, Sir Thomas (ed.) (1743-4) The Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols, Oxford. Lampe, John Frederick (1745) Pyramus and Thisbe. A Mock Opera; edited by Curtis Price and Stanley Sadie with an introduction by Roger Fiske, London, 1988. Warburton, William (ed.) (1747) The Works of Shakespeare, 8 vols, London.

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435

Index

The Index is arranged in three parts: I. References to A Midsummer Night's Dream; II. References to Shakespeare's other works; HI. General Index. In part II references to individual characters that contain no specific mention of a play or plays are not repeated under the relevant works.

I A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Actability (suitability for the stage), xiii, 14, Biographical interpretations, 17, 18-19,27-8, 16-20, 23, 32, 52n., 92-3, 103-4, 11172,118-19,219,242,321-2 12, 113, 118, 127-8, 135-6, 142-3, Bottom, xiii, xiv, xvii, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15, 16, 148-9, 168, 172, 177-80, 184-8, 191, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 197-8, 200-1, 212-13, 223, 267, 293, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41nn., 42n., 295-7, 316, 324-7, 330, 334, 343-5, 44n., 53n., 54n., 55n., 56n., 57n., 65, 374-7, 399n. 67, 70-3, 83, 88, 90-2, 97, 98, 103, 107, 111-17, 119, 120, 125, 129, 132, ^gle, 208, 337 Allegory and symbol, 12, 20, 22, 23, 32, 33, 133, 134-5, 144, 147, 152, 155, 159, 34, 38, 49n., 52n., 57n., 137-41, 207, 163, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171-2, 175, 208-9, 219, 221, 223, 226, 227-8, 243, 179-80, 181-3, 185, 186, 194, 195-6, 248-9, 270-3, 274-5, 304, 326, 336-7, 198,200,204,208,212,214,215,217, 340, 347-8, 387 220, 221, 230, 236, 238-40, 249, 250, Anachronism, 12, 112, 119-20, 134, 143, 251, 254, 255, 257, 260, 264-6, 267, 268, 271, 272, 293, 294, 296, 301-2, 158, 160-1, 171, 198, 364, 370-1 304-6, 308, 312, 316, 319, 322, 325, Antiopa, 208 326, 330, 332, 333-4, 338, 340, 344, ApoUo, 329, 397n. 347, 349, 357, 358, 359, 362-4, 366, Ariadne, 208, 367 Art, see Graphic art 367, 368, 370, 371, 372, 375, 377, 379, 384, 390n., 392n., 397n., 399n., Audience, 17, 20, 24, 31, 36, 92, 11112, 128, 142-3, 155, 179, 185, 219, 401n., 403n., 404n., 407n., 409n., 246, 255, 266, 281-3, 295-6, 300, 414n., 416n., 421, 428, 429, 430, 431, 304, 318, 335, 345, 347, 361, 377, 432, 434, 435 385, 407n. Changeling, 22, 36, 38, 56nn., 87, 92, 99, Aurora, 86, 107, 319

436

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

107, 205, 208, 215, 220, 236, 293, 298-9, 305, 367, 381, 382, 427, 433 Characterization, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 25-7, 31-2, 40, 59, 67, 70-1, 85, 90-1, 98, 101, 109, 125, 169, 171-2, 192-3, 197, 214-16, 217, 220, 229-30, 246, 260-1, 289, 293, 296, 315-16, 321-2, 339, 349-52, 360, 370, 378 Classical elements, 12-13, 18, 19, 23, 34-5, 39, 97, 107, 119, 122, 134-5, 146, 149-50, 160-1, 164, 199, 208, 223, 269, 273, 274-6, 278, 280, 298-9, 371, 396n., 397n., 398n., 403nn., 41 Inn., 425, 432, 433, 435 Cobweb, 90, 91, 186, 200, 240, 265, 271, 272, 319, 333, 340 Conn, 114,305 Cupid, 78, 115, 129, 137, 139-40, 199, 208, 209, 233, 273, 299, 309, 310, 311, 326, 330, 347, 348, 353, 354, 356, 365, 369 Cytherea, see Venus Dance, 2, 5, 23, 30, 40, 76-7, 85, 87, 102, 106, 107, 113, 133, 147, 175, 186-7, 199, 200, 210, 212, 236, 241-2, 260, 306, 319, 322, 332, 335, 382, 391n., 407n., 415n., 426, 429 Daphne, 329, 397n. Date and occasion, 1, 14, 25, 28, 32, 59-60, 66-8, 121, 123-7, 159-60, 168, 242-3, 256, 268-9, 270, 336, 370, 390n., 398n., 410n.,411n.,427 Demetrius, xvi, xvii, 2, 24, 25, 67, 69, 74, 85, 98, 99, 125, 129, 133, 150, 155, 165,179,192,193,194,198,199, 207, 208, 214, 215, 219, 220, 233, 235,253, 255, 260, 267, 268, 271, 272, 273, 279, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291, 293, 296, 301, 304, 305, 317, 318, 319, 321, 325,326, 328, 337, 347, 349, 350, 354-5, 366, 371, 372, 383, 397n., 399n., 408n. Dian, Diana, 33, 35, 54n., 137, 149, 150, 208, 209, 227-8, 273, 274-5, 305, 347, 348, 354, 355, 356, 396n., 41 In., 425 Dream, xiv-xv, 15, 16, 19, 20, 36, 37, 101, 109, 127, 130-1, 148-9, 156, 168-70, 177-80, 191-6, 198, 207-8, 209, 2323, 235, 246, 267, 270, 280, 289, 306,

308, 346-7, 361-2, 366-7, 368, 383-4, 425, 427, 428, 429, 430 Duration, 12, 19, 133, 166, 269, 317-20 Egeus, 13, 38, 56n., 60, 133, 192, 220, 221, 247, 249, 253, 260, 268, 271, 273, 277-8, 285, 286, 290, 350, 371, 399n., 412n., 429 Ercles (Hercules), 71 Eroticism, 34, 35-6, 37, 340 Fairies, 6-9, 13, 16, 17, 22, 32, 37, 40, 57n., 65, 80, 82-3, 84-9, 91-3, 98-100,1014, 105-7, 119, 122, 146, 149-50, 158, 162-3, 165-6, 175-6, 193-4, 199-200, 203-5, 208-11, 215-16, 222-3, 2323, 236-7, 248-9, 260-1, 268, 292-3, 295-6, 298-9, 304-6, 329-30, 337-8, 341, 344, 347, 349, 381-2, 393nn., 395-6nn., 399n., 401n., 419, 420, 422, 430, 432, 434 Fancy, 6, 7, 9, 14, 16, 17, 30, 31, 64, 65, 73, 77, 80, 84, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 99-100, 102,104,110,114,119,130,134,144, 145-7, 154, 158, 163, 169, 171, 175-6, 177,184,191,194, 204, 206, 209,210, 211, 213, 215-16, 217, 219, 220, 226, 243, 245, 251, 260, 261, 263, 267-9, 271, 296, 301, 303-4, 308, 329, 330, 335, 347, 349, 354, 356, 366-7, 385, 409n., 429 Flute, 42n., 90, 97, 103, 129, 220, 230, 231, 271, 357, 399n., 433 Genre, 13, 17, 19, 20, 22-3, 28, 29, 30-1, 32, 33, 34-5, 50n., 68, 101, 102, 108-9, 142, 153-4, 157-8, 170, 177-8, 185-6, 197-8, 204, 207, 212, 241-2, 245, 258, 259-61, 262-3, 267, 269, 293-4, 334, 335, 341, 365, 369, 386, 407n., 409n.; see also Masque Graphic art, 14, 16, 18, 35, 36-7, 39, 635, 70, 88, 123, 162-3, 174, 195, 224, 344, 389-90nn., 391n., 393-4n., 403n., 404n., 406n., 414n., 415n., 416n., 425, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434 Helena, xvi, xvii, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16,

437

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 38, 43n., 61, 63, 64, 67, 85, 92, 98, 102, 109, 125, 129, 133,144,151,155,160,163,165,179, 185,192,193,198,199,207,214,215, 220,233,234,235,242,255,260,267, 268, 271, 272, 273, 277-9, 286, 287, 289,290,291,293,296,298,301,314, 316,318,319,321,325,328,329,337, 341, 347, 349, 350, 354-5, 365, 366, 367, 372, 378, 379, 384, 388, 399n., 408n., 417n. Helen of Troy, 221, 375 Hercules, 67, 125, 212; see also Index III Hermia, xvi, xvii, 3, 10, 11, 13, 16, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 36, 38, 41n., 54n., 61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 74, 85, 92, 98, 102, 104,109,125,129,133,134,136,144, 150,151,160,165,179,185,192,193, 198,199,207,214,215,219,220,222, 233,234,235,242,253,254,260,267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 277-9, 285, 286,287,289,290,291,293,296,298, 301,314,316,317,318,319,321,322, 325,326,329,337,341,347,349,350, 351, 354-5, 365, 366, 367, 369, 379, 388, 397n., 399n., 401n., 408n., 429 Hippolyta, xvi, xvii, 2, 3, 12, 16, 17, 24, 27, 32, 38, 56n., 67, 83, 92, 97, 98, 112, 119,125,127,129,130,133,143,150, 154,156,158,164,170,178,179,185, 187,191,194,195,212,215,221,226, 227,235, 239, 242,247, 251, 257,260, 261,268, 269, 271,284,285,289,290, 293,296,298, 300,301,305, 317, 320, 322,328,329,330,332,337,339,341, 346,347,350,351,356,365,366,367, 375, 378, 387, 399n., 402n.

142, 143, 145-7, 148, 152, 155, 158, 163, 172, 174-5,185, 191, 193-5, 200, 204, 208, 216, 218, 221-2, 226, 227, 246-7, 248-9, 250-1, 256-8, 263, 266, 287,294, 295, 297, 299-300,303,304, 306, 330, 332, 335, 340, 344, 345, 351, 366, 368-9,375, 377, 384, 409n., 416n., 419, 426, 429, 430 Indian boy, see Changeling Indian mother, 215, 367, 369 Interlude, see Pyramus and Thisby Language, see Style Lion (character), 5,11, 71, 72, 73, 90, 91, 92, 103,112,125,182,195,198,201,215, 227,230,239,240,254,330,333,334, 341, 358, 379, 392n. Love (as theme), 10, 20, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 61, 114-15, 129, 155, 206, 208, 209, 233-4, 235-7, 243, 266, 303-6, 336-7, 347, 365-7, 386-8, 425, 430, 432,434 Lyricism, see Style Lysander, xvi, xvii, 2, 3, 12, 43n., 61, 64, 67, 69, 74, 85, 98, 99, 109, 125, 129, 133, 136,150,155,165,179,185,192,193, 194,198,207,208,214,215,233,235, 260,271, 272, 273,279,286, 289,290, 291, 293, 296,301, 304, 317,318,319, 322,325,326,337,341,347,349,350, 354-5, 365, 366, 369, 371, 372, 383, 388, 398n., 399-400nn.

Illusion, 16, 17, 19, 20, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 42n., 54n., 85, 91, 93, 112, 129, 142-3, 155, 201, 217-18, 279, 297, 305, 325, 333-4,341, 344, 345, 368-9, 386-7, 403n., 426, 433 Imagery, see Style Imagination, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 21, 24, 27-8, 29, 31, 32, 33-4, 37, 45n., 48n., 53n., 59, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 92, 100, 101-2, 103, 104, 107, 112-13, 118, 122, 124-5, 127, 128,

Marriage, 28, 33, 35, 37, 53n., 155,156,187, 215,219,235,241,242,249,260,266, 269,272,285,317,332,333,339,341, 365, 41 In., 431, 434; see also Date and occasion; Love Marxism, see Social criticism Masque, 2, 5, 19, 23, 28, 30, 32, 33, 50n., 52n., 77-8, 207, 241-3, 273, 312, 332, 334, 335, 338, 370, 407n., 421, 434 Metamorphosis (transformation, translation), 16, 20, 22, 34-5, 83, 111, 119, 134, 169, 172, 175, 179-80, 181, 198, 199, 200, 201, 208, 210, 211, 221, 239, 255, 265, 272, 302, 313-14, 333, 348, 368, 371, 372, 390n., 400n., 425, 426, 428, 433

438

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Moonshine (as character), 5, 93, 103, 128, 136,163,177,182,200, 227, 230, 257, 341, 377 Morality, 10, 13, 20, 22, 25, 35, 36, 37, 59, 60-1, 73, 86, 87, 91, 104, 109, 143, 169, 171, 197, 199, 200, 207, 209-11, 222-3, 227, 233, 243, 259, 261, 292, 307-12, 336, 361, 367, 386, 391n., 428 Moth, 90, 271 Muses, 61, 126, 391n., 410n. Music, 1, 5-6, 14, 17, 21, 23, 25, 30, 31, 36-7, 39, 45n., 49n., 76-8, 87-8, 92, 108-9,146, 162, 169, 186, 187-8,191, 197, 201-2, 206, 241-2, 312, 322-3, 335, 344, 349, 396n., 401n., 404nn., 414n., 415n., 420, 421, 422, 423, 426, 428, 432 Mustardseed, 90, 111, 271, 272, 340 Mythology, see Classical elements Nedar, 38, 192, 220, 290 Neoplatonism, see Platonism Oberon, xvi, 2, 3, 4, 12, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 37, 43n., 44n., 46n., 61, 67, 76, 83, 86-8, 91, 92, 98, 99, 103, 107,113, 114, 125, 129, 133, 135, 137-41, 143, 144,147,155,158,160,162,163,166, 167, 169, 175, 185, 186, 187, 191,194, 199, 201, 204, 205, 207, 208, 212, 215, 216, 220, 222, 223, 233, 236, 242, 249, 251, 254, 255, 260,267, 268, 271, 272, 275, 287, 289, 292, 293, 294, 296, 299, 301, 303-6, 308, 318, 319, 324-5, 329, 333, 337, 338, 340, 344, 347, 348, 354, 355, 356, 358, 366, 367, 369, 371, 372, 379, 381-2, 387, 389n., 391n., 393n., 394nn., 396n., 397n., 399n., 402nn., 407n., 410n., 428 Occasion, see Date and occasion Opera, see Music Painting, see Graphic art Parody, xvii, 20, 83, 153-6, 170, 266, 339, 349 Pastoral, see Genre Peaseblossom, 90, 111, 125, 200, 271, 333,

340, 360 Perigenia, 208, 337 Phillida, 114, 305 Philomel, 88, 322 Philostrate, 133, 248, 271, 285, 300, 371, 399n. Phoebe, 65, 193, 235 Platonism, 22, 28, 31, 34, 40, 223-4, 225-8, 277-80, 41 In., 426 Play-within-the-play, see Pyramus and Thisby Plot, see Structure Productions, 1604, 5; 1620, 5; 1630, 5; 1631, 5; 1662, 5; 1692, Purcell, 5, 38, 421; 1716, Leveridge, 5, 421; 1723, Johnson, 5, 421; 1745, Leveridge/ Lampe, 5, 421; 1755, Garrick, 6, 422; 1763, Garrick/Colman, 6, 103, 394n.; 1763, Colman, 6, 103, 422; 1777, Colman, 6, 390n.; 1798, Oulton, 5; 1816, Reynolds, 16, 38, 90, 92-3,103, 118, 135, 394n., 398n., 422; 1833, Bunn, 404n.; 1840, Planche/Vestris, 19, 135-6, 177, 399n., 400n., 402n., 403n., 404n., 422; 1843, Tieck (Germany), 404n.; 1853, Phelps, 19, 17783, 403-4nn., 409n.; 1854, Burton, 404nn.; 1854, Barry, 186-7, 404n.; 1865, Bj0rnson, 383-5; 1888, 1895, Daly, 295-7, 324-7, 412n., 413nn., 433; 1889, Benson, 298; 1900, 1911, Tree, 19, 343-5, 415n.; 1914, Barker, 37, 49n., 378-80, 418n., 423, 425; 1960, (Britten), 36; 1970, Brook, 36; 1996 Albery (Britten) 56n.; general comments, 38-9, 412n. Prologue (character), 136 Psychoanalytical criticism, 29, 34, 35-6, 38, 40, 54nn., 427, 429, 432 Psychology, 14,15,19, 21, 22, 31, 40, 52nn., 55n., 199, 229, 245, 292, 336, 360, 370, 430 Puck, see Robin Goodfellow Pyramus, 2, 5, 11, 54n., 71, 72, 73, 103, 122, 133, 135, 163, 180, 195-6, 198, 215, 227,240,255,265,272,293,300,301, 330, 333-4, 338, 366, 432 Pyramus and Thisby (the Interlude), xvii, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 16, 22, 24, 28, 42n., 54n., 65, 67, 71, 77, 83, 98, 112, 124, 129,

439

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

133, 155-6, 158, 164, 166, 170, 187, 195, 198, 200, 210, 211, 212, 215, 220, 225-8, 243, 248, 254, 257, 260, 264, 266, 273, 293, 294, 296, 300-1, 304, 312, 314, 319, 322, 325, 332, 333-4, 338, 339, 341, 345, 347, 351, 356, 366, 371, 372, 375, 387, 407n., 415n., 421,432 Quince, xv, 4, 65, 71, 72, 90, 91, 103, 113, 117, 129, 133, 144, 180, 194, 195-6, 201,215,220,230,239,265,268,271, 272,328,330,333,341,345,357,363, 379, 390n., 399n. Robin Goodfellow, the Puck, xv, xvi, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 17, 32, 33, 37, 48n., 57n., 63, 65, 72, 77, 86, 88, 90-2, 95, 99, 102, 103,105,107,113,114,115,119,125, 138,144,149,150,152,155,162,166, 171,175,178,179,182,185,186,187, 190,191,192,194,198,199, 200, 201, 204,208,209,210,211,212,214,215, 216,222,230,233,235,238,239,243, 249, 254-5, 260, 266, 268, 271, 273, 279, 289, 292, 293, 294, 296, 299, 304-5, 306, 312, 318, 319, 321, 324, 325, 328, 329, 333, 340, 341, 344, 354, 355, 358, 360, 361, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 372, 379, 380, 381-2, 384, 387, 388, 389nn., 390n., 394nn., 395nn., 396n., 397n., 399n., 403n., 407n., 418n., 419 Scenery, 178, 186-7, 325, 345, 374-5 Snout, 90, 97, 129, 173, 220, 230, 231, 271, 319, 357, 390n., 399n., 405n. Snug, 90, 91, 97, 103, 112, 120, 129, 165, 195, 200, 204, 215, 220, 230, 231, 239, 254, 268, 271, 328, 334, 357, 379, 392n., 399n. Social criticism, 13, 15, 17, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 40, 61-2, 70-1, 115-16, 159,165, 203-5, 211, 238, 243-4, 247, 253-5, 264-6, 290-1, 321-2, 330-1, 357-9, 364, 425, 429, 430, 433, 434 Song, see Music Sources, 12, 23, 39-40, 57nn., 77-8, 134-5,

160-1, 168, 205, 267-8, 299, 313-14, 321, 328-9, 341, 347-8, 370-2, 391n., 392-3nn., 398n., 408n., 410nn., 417n., 419, 420, 433, 434; see also Fairies Starveling, 72, 90, 91, 97, 103, 129, 165, 215, 220, 230, 231, 271, 334, 357, 399n., 405n. Structure, xvi-xviii, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 30, 36, 39, 40, 67, 82-3, 97, 119, 121-2, 125, 128-9, 130-1,143-4, 154-6, 160, 164-7, 168-70, 185-6, 214-15, 245-52, 314-15, 328, 337-8, 349-51, 353-6, 361-2, 370-1, 408-9n. Style, 8-9,10-11,13,14,15-16,17-18,20-1, 22, 24-5, 30-1, 36, 39, 40, 46-7nn., 50nn., 66-7, 76-8, 80, 82-3, 84-5, 91-2, 98-100, 101, 104, 107, 108-10, 113, 122, 124, 143-4, 146-7, 158-9, 169-70, 188-9, 197-8, 201-2, 206-7, 217-18, 223, 235-7, 243, 245-6, 2623, 266, 293, 296-7, 313, 322-3, 334, 339-40, 343, 348-9, 367, 369, 373, 379-80, 384-5, 387-8, 415n., 433; see also Music, Versification Text and textual criticism, 5, 11-12, 1415, 18, 25, 38, 47n., 49n., 66, 69, 74-5, 94-6, 123-4, 150-2, 160, 187, 326,392n., 394-5nn., 397-8n., 401nn., 405nn., 407n., 411-12n., 414nn., 429 Theseus, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 2, 3, 7, 12, 13, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 41n., 44n., 46n., 51n., 54n., 61, 64, 67, 71, 72, 73, 83, 87, 92, 97, 98, 104, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120,125,127,129,130,133,134,136, 143,150,154,156,158,160,164,166, 170,171,174,178,179,185,187,191, 192,194,195,198,201,208,211,212, 213,214,215,219,220,221,226,227, 235,239,240,242,247,248,249,250, 251, 254, 255, 256-8, 260, 261, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 277-80, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290,293,296, 297,298, 299, 300-1, 305, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321-2, 325, 328, 329, 330, 332-3, 334, 336, 337, 339, 340, 341, 346, 347, 350, 351, 356, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 371,

440

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

372, 375-6, 378, 382, 384, 387, 399n., 402n., 408nn., 410n., 432 Theseus (historical figure), 161, 174, 273, 299,301,371 Theseus's speech on imagination, 7, 27-8, 104, 221-2, 226-7, 250-1, 257, 271, 287, 297, 300, 332-3, 340, 351, 368-9, 371, 374-6 Thisbe, Thisby, 2, 5, 11, 41n., 54n., 71, 73, 103,133,144,163,227,239,293,300, 301, 338, 358, 363, 366, 432 Titania, xv, xvi, xviii, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 32, 33, 35, 37, 41n., 44n., 54n., 65, 67, 72, 76, 83, 86-8, 91, 92, 98, 99, 102, 104, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114-17, 119, 125, 126, 129,133,134,143,144,147,149,155, 158,159,160,162,167,169,170,182, 185,186,187,194,198,199, 201,202, 205,208, 210, 212,214, 215, 216, 221, 222, 223, 233, 236, 239, 242, 249,

250, 251, 254, 260, 266, 267, 271, 272, 274-6, 287, 289, 292, 293, 294, 296, 298, 301, 303-6, 308, 319, 325, 329, 330, 333, 337, 338, 340, 344, 347, 349, 356, 366, 367, 371, 372, 379, 381-2, 387, 391n., 396n., 397n., 399n., 402n., 407n., 410nn., 41 Inn., 414n., 416n. Title, 4, 69, 75, 84, 102, 109, 127, 130, 133, 148-9, 156, 166, 168, 191, 205, 207, 258, 270, 289, 336 Venus, 46n., 188, 305, 326, 412n.; Cytherea, 397n. Versification, xviii, 8, 15, 24, 25, 32, 46-7n., 50n., 66, 68-9, 81-2,95-6, 98,109-10, 113, 125, 167, 217, 281-7, 309-12, 329, 390-ln., 413nn., 429, 430, 433 Wall, 2, 5, 72, 93, 103, 127, 128, 163, 173, 182, 200, 226, 227, 230, 257, 341, 377

II SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS (EXCLUDING A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM)

Adriana (The Comedy of Errors), 267-8 ALgeon (The Comedy of Errors), 268 Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, (Twelfth Night), 230 Ajax (Troilus and Cressida), 264 All's Well That Ends Well, 153, 207, 221, 260, 279, 387 Antipholus of Syracuse (The Comedy of Errors),' 267-8 Antony and Cleopatra, 78, 183, 336, 379, 386, 413n. Ariel (The Tempest), 83, 91, 102, 143, 144, 146, 171, 236, 238, 275, 292, 312, 341 As You Like It, 5, 11, 50n., 76, 109, 153, 157, 158,235,247,260,289,301,361,387, 392n., 423 Autolycus (The Winter's Tale), 326 Banquo (Macbeth), 316 Bardolph (Henry V], 357 Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), 349 Belch, Sir Toby (Twelfth Night), 230

Berowne (Love's Labour's Lost), 262, 293, 314 Biron, see Berowne Bullcalf (2 Henry IV), 230 Caliban (The Tempest), 83, 143, 230, 237, 238, 240, 292, 435 Capulet (Romeo and Juliet), 322 Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra), 316 Comedy of Errors, The, 68, 76, 123, 124, 125, 253, 254, 262, 267-8, 270, 314, 315, 322, 387, 398n., 410n. Constance (KingJohn), 64 Coriolanus, 232, 358, 359 Costard (Love's Labour's Lost), 230, 304 Crab (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 230 Cressida (Troilus and Cressida), 289 Cymbeline, 96, 146, 265, 292, 317, 375 Desdemona (Othello), 109, 350, 375 Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing), 11,

441

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

230, 264, 265, 357, 379 Dull (Love's Labour's Lost), 230, 357

King John, 64, 115, 151, 269, 343-4 King Lear, 146, 157, 373, 375, 379, 380, 402n. King, see Navarre

Elbow (Measure for Measure), 230, 357 Falstaff, 132, 158, 188, 198, 270, 357, 360; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 188, 201, 357, 392n., 416n. Fang (2 Henry IV), 357 Feeble (2 Henry IV), 230 Friar Laurence (Romeo and Juliet), 388 Froth (Measure for Measure), 230 Gobbo, Launcelot (The Merchant of Venice), 230 Hamlet (character), 26, 160, 203, 257, 258, 282, 295, 297, 300, 312, 363, 375-6, 412n. Hamlet, 5, 6, 10, 14, 47n., 82, 99, 103, 157, 162,171,190,220,231,232,241,292, 300,301,307,308,311,312,317,330, 358, 360, 376, 387, 417n., 430 Hector (Troilus and Cressida), 256 Helena (All's Well That Ends Well), 221 Henry ZFplays, 55n., 201, 434 Henry IV, part two, 158, 416n. Henry V, 55n., 112, 195, 257, 358, 434 Henry V (character), 43, 256, 257, 337 Henry VI plays, 66, 79, 284, 292, 391n. Henry VI, part one, 398n. Henry VI, part two, 292, 398n., 417n. Henry VI, part three, 292 Henry VIII, xii, 55n., 292, 434 Henry VIII (character), 67 Holofernes (Love's Labour's Lost), 357 Horatio (Hamlet), 282

Launce (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 230 Love's Labour's Lost, 34, 51n., 68, 72, 77, 79, 95, 123, 124, 125, 159, 168, 190, 207, 262,267,268,270,284,286,303,304, 313, 315, 322, 333-4, 357, 371, 387, 390n., 392n., 398n., 402n., 410n., 420 Luciana (The Comedy of Errors), 267-8 Lucio (Measure for Measure), 230 Lucrece, see Rape ofLucrece, The Mab, Queen (Romeo and Juliet), 2, 200, 298, 340, 393n., 396n. Macbeth (character), 157, 199, 316 Macbeth, 6, 21, 31, 83, 85, 95, 103, 146,152, 157, 292, 337, 379, 381, 410n., 427 Malvolio (Twelfth Night), 75, 230, 264, 271, 414n. Maria (Twelfth Night), 264 Measure for Measure, 10, 42n., 47n., 137, 158, 168, 435 Merchant of Venice, The, 1, 10, 47nn., 51n., 123,153, 157, 201, 219, 260, 269, 370, 41 On., 420, 421 Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet), 158, 209, 298, 340 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 1, 87, 88, 123, 188, 201, 275, 357, 392n., 402n., 416n. Milan, Duke of (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 258, 314 Miranda (The Tempest), 238, 291 Moth (Love's Labour's Lost), 77, 230 Mouldy (2 Henry IV), 230 Much Ado About Nothing, 102, 153,168, 197, 230, 387

Imogen (Cymbeline), 290, 375 Jaques (As You Like It), 226, 414n. Julia (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 269, 293 Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), 137, 322, 350 Julius Caesar, 292, 340, 343 Katharine (Henry VIII), 232

Navarre, King of (Love's Labour's Lost), 314 Nym (Henry V), 357 Oliver (As You Like It), 289 Olivia (Twelfth Night), 75, 264 Ophelia (Hamlet), 109 Othello (character), 362 Othello, 157, 162, 303, 304, 373, 375, 386, 391n., 410n.

442

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Parolles (All's Well That Ends Well), 221 Passionate Pilgrim, The, 95, 410n. Perdita (The Winter's Tale), 291 Pericles, 55n., 79, 292, 39In., 398n. Petruchio (The Taming of the Shrew), 95 'Phoenix and the Turtle, The', 278 Pistol (1 Henry /Fand Henry V), 72; (Henry

Solinus, Duke (The Comedy of Errors), 268 Sonnets, 225, 303, 336, 419, 429; no. 1, 225; no. 20, 225; no. 29, 300; no. 44, 225; no. 54, 225; no. 66, 308; no. 78, 225; no. 101, 225; no. 116, 279; no. 125, 225, 227; no. 147, 225 Speed (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 230

V), 357 Polonius (Hamlet), 376 Portia (The Merchant of Venice), 219, 291 Prospero (The Tempest), 91, 149, 312, 337, 369, 410n. Proteus (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 293, 314 Rape ofLucrece,The, 41 On. Pochard II (character), 369 Richard II, 103, 292, 336, 369 Richard III, 232, 292 Romeo (Romeo and Juliet), 17, 113, 256, 257, 262, 322, 337 Romeo and Juliet, 5, 39, 57n., 68, 80, 82, 87, 88, 146, 157, 159, 160, 200, 201, 269, 298, 317, 336, 338, 339, 366, 388, 393n., 402n., 410n., 433 Rosalind (As You Like It), 235 Rosaline (Love's Labour's Lost), 293, 349 Rosaline (Romeo and Juliet), 337 Shadow (2 Henry IV), 230 Shallow (2 Henry IV), 357, 379; (The Merry Wives of Windsor), 230 Shylock (The Merchant of Venice), 219 Silence (2 Henry IV), 357, 379 Silvia (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 293 Simple (The Merry Wives of Windsor), 230 Slender (The Merry Wives of Windsor), 230 Sly (The Taming of the Shrew), 17, 49n., 116, 230, 357, 358, 397n. Smooth (2 Henry IV), 357, 416n. Snare (2 Henry IV), 357

Taming of the Shrew, The, 95, 116, 123, 125, 292, 315, 387, 397n. Tempest, The, 6,7, 16, 31, 34, 50n., 60, 78, 82, 83, 87, 91, 128, 142, 146, 149, 153, 154, 158, 169, 191, 224, 237, 268, 275, 292, 301, 303, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 337, 341, 371, 410n., 423, 430 Timon of Athens, 232, 340 Titus Andronicus, 46n., 79, 398n., 402n. Touchstone (^5 You Like It), 230, 264 Troilus and Cressida, 20, 46n., 146, 206, 264, 278, 304, 306 Twelfth Night, 53n., 69, 75, 158, 260, 264, 271,353,354,378,387,428 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 23, 68, 79, 122,123,124,125,159,232,258,269, 270,303,314,315,322,324,336,370, 387, 398n., 410n., 413nn. Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 130, 267, 268, 371, 408n. Valentine (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), 293,314 Venus and Adonis, 124, 262, 379, 410n. Verges (Much Ado About Nothing), 357 Wart (2 Henry IV), 230 What You Will, see Twelfth Night Winter's Tale, The, 69, 79, 80, 102, 260, 279, 378 Wolsey (Henry VIII), 232

III GENERAL INDEX A., T., The Massacre of Money, 4 Abbey, Edwin Austin, 328, 414n. Abbott, Edwin Abbott, xii, 50n., 419

Abraham, 60, 105 Achilles, 363, 402n. Actaeon, 35, 54n., 425

443

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Addison, Joseph, 7 Aeneas, 188, 280, 392-3n. Aineid, see Virgil Aeschylus, 224 Afienbladet, 383 Ahritnan, 304, 412n. Ainslie, Douglas, 386, 426 Akenside, Mark, 224, 406n. Alasco, Prince, 392n. Albery, Tim, 56n. Alcibiades, 326 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 264 Alencon, Francois, Duke of, 139 Alexander, Peter, 31, 32, 52n., 425 Alice (in Wonderland), 299 Allatius, Leo, 400-ln. Allen, Shirley S., 404n. Allentuck, Marcia, 48n., 425 All the Year Round, 177 Allingham, Helen, 175, 403n. AUingham, William, 403n. Altick, Richard Daniel, 39, 425 American Imago, 54nn., 428, 429 American Journal of Insanity, The, 229 American Quarterly Review, The, 49n., 425 Amherst, J.H., 397n. Anacreon, 110,369 Analectic Magazine, The, 157 Anderson, Mary, 295, 412n. Anne, Queen, 259, 434 Annual of Psychoanalysis, The, 54n., 429 Anonymous, New Exegesis of Shakespeare, xiii, 21, 203-5, 405, 425 Appleton, William Worthen, 403n. Apuleius, 33, 39; The Golden Asse, 57n., 434 Arabian Nights' Entertainment, The, 17, 116, 398n. Arber, Edward, 395n. Arbuthnot, R., 47n., 425 Archer, William, 339, 425 Arden, Mary, 187 Arion, 78 Ariosto, Lodovico, 386, 426; Orlando Furioso, 146, 418n. Aristophanes, 198 Aristotle, 10, 36 Armstrong, Edward AUworthy, 76 Armstrong, John, 389n.

Arne, see Bjernson, Bjornstjerne Arnold, Matthew, 258 Arthos,John, 54n., 425 Arris, F., 179, 403n. Athenaeum, The, 44n., 48n., 181, 219, 421, 428 Attempt, The, 381 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 409n. Austen, Jane, 406n. Babcock, Robert Witbeck, 419 Bacchus, 280 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 146 Bacon, Sir Francis, 49n., 253, 254, 277, 328, 395n., 434; authorship controversy, 253-4, 277, 328 Baconians, 253, 328, 408n. Baer, Ann, 417n. Baker, David, 7, 46n., 419 Ballad Society, The, 267 Bang, W., 42n., 424 Barber, Cesar Lombardi, 29, 34, 37, 52n., 53nn., 399n., 425 Barclay, James, 8, 46n., 425 Barkan, Leonard, 35, 54n., 425, 431 Barker, Harley Granville, 25, 27, 37, 49n., 51n., 378-80, 418, 418nn., 420, 423, 425 Barlow, Nora, 415n. Barrett, Lawrence, 295, 412n. Barry, Mrs. Ann Spranger, 64, 389n. Barry, Thomas, 404n. Bartley, George, 399n. Barton, Anne, 34 Bate, Jonathan, 35, 394n., 419, 425 Bate, Walter Jackson, 405n. Bates, Katharine Lee, xiii, 21, 23, 27, 321-3, 422 Bawcutt, N.W., 43n., 424 Bayle, Pierre, 49n., 419 Baynes, Thomas Spencer, xviii, 23, 274-6, 411,425 Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent, 343 Beattie, Dr. James, 11, 47n., 425 Beaumont, Francis, 43n., 46n., 294, 399n., 431, 432 Bednarz, James P., 41n., 425 Beerbohm, Sir Henry Maximilian, xiv, 19, 48n., 343-5, 394n., 415, 416n., 425

444

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 30 Bell, John, 9, 12, 46n., 63, 64, 389n., 390n., 393n., 422, 428 Bell, Mary, 76, 434 Bell, William, 48n., 419 Bellini, Vincenzo, 188, 404n. Bellerophon, 403n. Benson, Sir Frank Robert, 298 Bentley, Richard, 48n., I l l , 434 Bentley's Miscellany, 101, 111, 431 Berlioz, Hector, 55n. Bernhardt, Sarah, 326, 414n. Berry, Edward, 56n., 425 Betterton, Thomas, 5, 45nn., 421, 431 Bevington, David, 37, 5In., 55n., 423, 425 Bible, 221, 223, 353; 1 Corinthians, 406nn., 409n.; Deuteronomy, 405n.; John, First Epistle, 406n.; Jonas, 410n.; King James version, 406n.; Matthew, 405n.; Revelations, 406n.; Vulgate, 406n. Bickerstaffe, Isaac, 79 Birch, Thomas, 49n., 419 Bismarck, Otto von, 233 Bj0rnson, Bj0rnstjerne, xiii, xv, 20, 29, 339, 383-5, 418, 425; Arne, 385, 418n. Black, A. Bruce, 419 Black, Ebenezer Charlton, 50n., 423 Black, John, 81,432 Blackwood's [Edinburgh] Magazine, 111, 181, 288, 412n. Blair, Hugh, 11, 47n. Boaden, James, 20, 49n., 137, 419 Boas, Frederick Samuel, xii, xiv, xvii, 332-4, 415, 425 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 161 Boghurst, William, 409-1 On. Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I Bonner, George Wilmot, 101 Booth, Edwin, 295, 412n. Booth, Michael R., 48n., 419 Bosch, Hieronymus, 35 Boswell, James, the elder, 94; The Life of Johnson, 66 Boswell, James, the younger, xi, 12, 14, 25, 66, 94-6, 392n., 394, 394n., 412n., 421, 422 Botticelli, Sandro, 415n. Bourchier, Arthur, 19 Bowers, Fredson, 41n., 424

Bowie, John, 77, 392n. Boydell, John, 'Shakespeare Gallery', 14, 48n., 389n., 393n., 420 Bradbrook, Muriel Clara, 31, 52nn., 425 Bradley, Andrew Cecil, xii Bradshaw, Graham, 55n., 425 Brand, John, 40In. Brandes, Georg Morris Cohen, xiii, xvii, 28, 339-42, 415, 425 Bremond, Claude, xixn. Brennan, Elizabeth M., 42n., 425 Brennecke, Ernest, 45n., 421, 425 Briggs, Katharine Mary, 40, 48n., 57n., 419 Brindal, Mr., 399n. Brissenden, Alan, 40, 43n., 425-6 Bristol, Michael, 53n., 426 Britten, Edward Benjamin, 36, 39, 45n., 56n., 57n., 426, 428 Brook, Peter, 36, 430 Brooke, G. V., 179, 403n. Brooke, Stopford Augustus, xv, 28, 365-7, 417, 426 Brooks, Alden, 31,426 Brooks, Harold, 37, 51n., 57nn., 423 Brougham, Mrs. John, 399n. Brown, John Russell, 33, 5In., 52n., 53n., 55n., 405n., 419, 426, 431 Browne, Gordon, 292 Browning, Robert, 142, 256, 298, 346, 365 Browning Society, The (London), 267 Browning Society, The (Philadelphia), 346 Bruno, Giordano, 33 Bryant, William Cullen, 157 Bullen, Arthur Henry, xi, 370, 417n. Bullough, Geoffrey, 39, 419 Bulman, James C., 56n., 429 Bunbury, Henry William, 65, 390n. Bundy, Murray Wright, 32, 426 Bunn, Alfred, 404n. Bunnett, Fanny Elizabeth, 206, 409n., 428 Burbage, Richard, 183, 404n. Burns, Raymond S., 42n., 424 Burns, Robert, 397n. Burridge, see Burbage, Richard Burridge, Christina F., 56n., 426 Burton, William Evans, 404nn. Bury, R.G., 41 In. Bush, Douglas, 44n., 435 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 118, 142,

445

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION 145

Bysshe, Edward, 46n., 419 Cade, Jack, 358, 417n. Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 81, 153, 402n. Calderwood, James Lee, 36, 41, 53n., 56n., 57n., 426 Cambyses, see Preston, Thomas Camp, Harry F., 54n. Campbell, John, Lord, 253, 408n. Campbell, Lewis, 274 CampbeU, Thomas, xiii, xiv, 17, 97, 118-20, 398,422 Candido, Joseph, xxi Capell, Edward, xviii, xixn., 47n., 40In., 404n., 422, 426 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 219 Carlyle, Thomas, 111, 219 Carroll, D. Allen, xx, 51n., 54n., 57n., 419 CarroU, William C, 56n., 426 Carter, Angela, 56n., 423 Case, Robert Hope, xii Castle of Indolence, The, see Thomson, James Ceres, 382 Cervantes, Saavedra, Miguel de, 358,392nn., 417n. Chabrol, Claude, xixn. Chalmers, Alexander, 393n. Chambers, Sir Edmund Kerchever, xiii, xvii, 27, 28, 30, 33, 41n., 42n., 43n., 45n., 50n., 335-8, 370, 371, 372, 415, 417n., 419, 420, 423 Changeling, The, see Middleton, Thomas and Rowley, William Chapman, George, 2, 4, 42n., 44n., 262, 424, 427 Charivari (Paris), 290 Charles I, 4 Charley's Aunt, see Thomas, Brandon Charlton, Henry Buckley, 29, 32, 33, 426 Charney, Maurice, 53n., 428 Chatterton, Thomas, 66, 238 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 32, 39, 57n., 86, 106, 134,161,168,184,191,201,214,267, 268, 271, 307, 312, 346, 347-8, 371, 372, 391n., 405n., 408n., 427, 430, 434; 'The Clerk's Tale', 308; (attributed to) The Flower and the Leaf, 193, 347-8, 416nn.; 'The Knight's Tale',

191, 268, 308, 347, 371-2; The Legend of Good Women, 348; 'The Merchant's Tale', 391n., 393n.; The Pardoner's Tale', 308; 'Wife of Bath's Tale', 98, 268, 402n., 410n.; The Parliament of Fowls, 268 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, xiv, xv, 26, 27, 360-4, 417, 426 Chimaera (Chymaera), 6, 59, 91, 106, 129, 175, 193, 403n. Cipriani, Giovanni Battista, 64, 389n. Circe, 274, 275, 41 In. Clark, Cumberland, 32, 426 Clark, William George, xi Clarke, Charles Cowden, xv, xvi, xvii, 21, 29, 48n., 50n., 145, 214-16, 405, 405n., 422, 426 Clarke, George, 326, 414nn. Clarke, Helen Archibald, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 26, 28, 108, 346-52, 416, 423 Clarke, John Archibald, 346 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 26, 50n., 214, 422 Claude (i.e., Claude Lorrain), 195 Clelia, see Downing, Charles Clemen, Wolfgang H., xviii, 76 Clubb, Louise George, 57n., 426 Coburn, Kathleen, 108, 426 Cody, Richard, 34, 57n., 426 Coleridge, Hartley, 90 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 108, 426 Coleridge, Mrs. Henry Nelson, 397n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, x, xiv, xviii, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 48n., 49n., 51n., 90, 97, 108-10, 127, 133, 145,146,158,168,208,214,219,282, 288, 349, 369, 396, 396n., 397nn., 405n., 406n., 412n., 420, 426 Collier, John Payne, x, xi, 15, 160, 184, 398n. Collins, William, 400n., 406n.; Ode on the Poetical Character, 146 Colman, George, the elder, 6, 7, 43n., 45n., 46n., 79, 103, 394n., 426, 433; A Fairy Tale, 6, 390n., 422 Columbus, Christopher, 49n., 299, 435 Columbus of Literature, The, see Wigston, William Francis C. Comparative Literature, 54n., 431 Contemporary Review, The, 29, 298, 434

446

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Cook, Sir Edward Tyas, 173, 432 Cooke, Arthur L., 43n., 424 Cooper, Fanny, 179, 399n., 403n. Cooper, John, 399n. Corbould, Elvina Mary, 5In., 426 Corneille, Pierre, 340, 386, 415n., 426 Cornwall, Barry (pseudonym), see Procter, Barry Corson, Hiram, 25, 426 Cosmopolitan, The, 295, 431 Cox, Robert, 5, 421 Coxeter, Thomas, 46n., 426 Craftsman, The, 357 Craig, Hardin, 5In., 423 Craig, William J., xii, 256 Craven, Hawes, 344, 416n. Creizenach, Wilhelm, xii Critica, La, 386, 418n. Croce, Benedetto, xiii, 28, 386-8,418,418n., 426 Croker, Thomas, 105 Crosby, Ernest Howard, xiii, 26, 357-9, 416, 417n., 426 Cruikshank, Robert, 101 Cudworth, Charles, 428 Culler, A. Dwight, 47n., 419 Cumberland's British Theatre, 101, 422 Cuningham, Henry, 27, 28, 423 Cunningham, Francis, 42n., 396n., 424 Curie, Richard, 298 Curll, E., 45n. Cyclops, 163 Cypriani, see Cipriani Daily News, The, 274 Daly, Augustin, 295-7, 324-7, 412n., 413nn., 414nn., 433 Daniel, George, xiv, 17, 24, 101-4, 395, 422 d'Anois, Madame, see La Mothe, Marie Catherine Dante (Alighieri), 81, 83, 145, 146, 225, 245, 313, 393n.; The Inferno, 271, 415n. Darton, Frederick Joseph Harvey, 392n. Darwin, Charles, 330-1, 414-15n.; On the Origin of Species, 298 D'Avenant, Charles, Circe, 391n. Dawson, Anthony B., 54n., 426 Day, John, 2, 42n., 424

Dean, Basil, 49n., 427 Dean, Winton, 37, 45n., 426, 428 Dearing, Vinton A., 45n. Deighton, Kenneth, 50n., 422 Dekker, Thomas, 41 n., 276, 424; The Shoemaker's Holiday, 1-2, 4In.; The Whore of Babylon, 2, 41n., 41 In. Delius, Nicolaus, xi, 267 Dennis, John, 416n. Dent, Robert William, 33, 34, 426 Description of the Queene's Entertainment in Progress at Lord Hartford's, A, 67 De Selincourt, Ernest, see Selincourt, Ernest de Dibdin, Charles, 15, 79-80, 393, 393n., 426 Dickens, Charles, 97, 142, 177, 181, 290, 414n., 417n. Dicks, John, xi Diddear, Mr., 399n. Dido (1583), 392n. Dido, 392-3n. Digges, Leonard, 'Upon Master William Shakespeare', 4 Dobbs, Leonard George, 31, 426 Dobson, Michael, 420 Doctor Dodypoll, see The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll Dodd, William, 10, 11, 47n., 397n., 427 Dodsley, Robert, 74, 392n. Dollimore, Jonathan, 55n., 434 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 57n., 427 Donne, John, 3, 4, 43nn., 424 Donnelly, Ignatius, 277 Don Quixote, see Cervantes, Saavedra, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 112 Douglas, Lady, Countess of Sheffield, 137, 139 Dowden, Edward, xi, xii, xiv, 18, 23, 27, 256-8, 288, 350, 408, 412n., 415n., 427 Downing, Charles, 21, 22, 28, 303-6, 412, 427 Doyle, Richard, 181, 404n. Drakakisjohn, 55n., 429 Drake, Nathan, xiv, 15, 16, 18, 25, 48nn., 49n., 84-9, 97, 98, 102, 393, 393nn., 396n., 400n., 425, 427 Drayton, Michael, 223

447

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 4 Dryden, John, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 43n., 45n., 46nn., 66, 391n., 407n., 424 Dubrow, Heather, 5In. Ducrow, Andrew, 112, 397n. Duff, William, 8-9, 25, 46n., 427 Dunn, Allen, 38, 427 Duns, John, 203 Dutton, Richard, 36, 51n., 54n., 55n., 420 Dyce, Alexander, xi, 15, 410n. Dyer, Sir Edward, 31, 52n., 426 Dyer, Thomas Firminger Thiselton, 48n., 420 Eagleton, Terry, 55n., 427 Early English Text Society, 29, 267 Ebsworth, Joseph WoodfaU, 21, 49n., 427 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 190, 405n. Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, The, 48n., 428 Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, The, 5 In., 130, 162, 430, 431, 433 Edward III (Shakespeare apocrypha), 267 Edwards, Philip, 42n., 424 Edwin, John, 390n. ELH, 53n., 431 Eliot, George (i.e., Mary Ann Evans), 290 Elizabeth I, 2, 20, 28, 37, 67, 78, 95, 99, 106, 112, 114, 122, 137-41, 183, 191, 209, 243, 301, 329, 348, 357, 366, 367, 391n., 398n., 400n., 410n., 41 In.; Gloriana, 335 EUacombe, H. N., 340 Ellenberger, Henri Frederic, xixn. Elliott, Mrs. M. Leigh, see Leigh-Noel, M. Ellis, Henry Havelock, 405n. Elton, William R., 45n., 420 Elze, Karl Friedrich, xii, xiii, 21, 23, 26, 28, 42n., 241-4, 339, 407, 407n., 41 In., 427 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 406n. Empson, William, xviii, 40, 50n., 57n., 427 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 274, 373 Engell, James, 405n. England's Helicon, 95 English Association, The, 332 English Literary Renaissance, 43n., 54nn., 425, 431, 432 Erskine, Thomas, Lord, 232, 407n.

Essays in Literature, Macomb, Illinois, 57n., 429 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of, 243, 254, 258, 273, 339, 41 In. Essex, Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of, 137, 140 Evans, Gwynne Blakemore, The Riverside Shakespeare, xx, 51n., 53n., 413nn., 423 Evans, Herbert Arthur, 50n., 422 Evans, Maurice, 42n., 424 Evans, T. M., 53n., 427 Evening Mail, The (Dublin), 137 Examen of the New Comedy, Call'd The Suspicious Husband, An (Anon.), 7, 27, 46n., 51n., 425 Examiner, The, 49n., 90, 145, 177, 262, 398n., 403n. Fabian, Bernard, 46n., 428 Fabricius, Johannes, 38, 427 Faini, Paola, 45n., 420 Fairclough, Henry Rushton, 408n. Fairy Mythology, The, see Keightley, Thomas Fairy-Queen, The, see Purcell, Henry Fairy Tale, A, see Colman, George Farjeon, Herbert, 49n., 427 Farmer, John Stephen, 40In. Farmer, Richard, 69, 398n. Faucit, Helena, Lady Martin, 288, 289, 412n. Felheim, Marvin, 413n. Felton, Samuel, 13, 14, 63-5, 389, 389n., 427 Fender, Stephen Allen, 35, 427 Ferguson, Margaret W., 55n., 431 Fielding, Henry, 17, 115, 116, 398n.; Tom Thumb, 115, 397n.,418n. Figaro (London), 292 Finkenbrink, Dr. G., 50n., 427 First Folio (1623), 1, 5, 12, 56nn., 69, 75, 124, 152, 319, 346, 350, 395n., 401n., 403n., 405n., 41 In., 413nn., 421, 423, 429 First Quarto (Fisher: 1600), 1, 12, 49n., 56nn., 69, 75, 123-4, 151, 401nn., 405n., 41 In., 413nn., 421, 427, 429 Fisher, Peter, 33, 53n., 427 Fisher, Thomas, see First Quarto Fiske, Roger, 37, 45n., 55n., 421, 427, 428

448

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Fitzgerald, Francis (pseudonym), see Taylor, Charles Fleay, Frederick Card, 23, 25, 50n., 427 Fletcher, John, xii, 2, 23, 43n., 46n., 125, 128, 294, 394n., 399n., 412n., 431, 432 Flora, 149, 348 Foakes, Reginald Anthony, 5In., 56n., 108, 423, 426 Folly of Priestcraft, The (Anon.), 3, 43n., 423 Forbes, Sir William, 47n., 425 Ford, John, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, 3, 43n. Forker, Charles R., xxi, 44n., 427 Fortnightly Review, The, 53n., 262, 430, 433 Foss, George R., 32, 427 Franz, Wilhelm, xii Fraser, Hugh, 111 Fraser's Magazine, 111, 190, 274, 396n., 406n., 425, 433 Frazer, Sir James George, 33 Freear, Louie, 344 Freedman, Barbara, 55n., 427 Freud, Signiund, xv, xixn., 34 Friedman, Winifred H., 48n., 420 Fry, John, 399n. Frye, Northrop, 29, 34, 52n., 427-8 Furness, Horace Howard, xi, xiii, 12, 13, 15, 49n., Sinn., 97, 317-20, 321, 399n., 411n., 413, 422 Furness, Horace Howard, Jr., xi Furnivall, Frederick James, x, xi, xiii, 22, 23, 206, 262, 267-9, 410, 410nn., 422 Fuseli, Henry (Johann Heinrich Fiissli), 14, 16, 39, 88, 344, 393n., 394n., 416n. Garber, Marjorie B., 36, 55n., 428 Gardner, Dame Helen, 3, 43nn., 424 Garlick, Kenneth, 48n., 427 Garner, Shirley Nelson, 55n., 428 Garrick, David, 1, 6, 14, 43n., 45n., 59, 79, 103, 389n., 394n., 422, 433 Gayton, Edmund, 5 Gee, John, 4 Genette, Gerard, xviii, xixn. Gentleman, Francis, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 46nn., 47nn., 48nn., 393n., 417n., 422,428 George III, 389n. Gerard, Alexander, 9, 46n., 417n., 428

Gervase of Tilbury, 88 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, xii, xiii, xiv, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 33, 39, 48n., 108, 206-13, 222, 257, 288, 409n., 412n., 428 Gibson, Colin, 42n., 424 Gifford, WiUiam, 42n., 90, 95, 395-6n., 424 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenk, 403n. Gildon, Charles, 6, 7, 10, 12, 44n., 45nn., 46nn., 47nn., 420, 421, 428 Gillray, James, 393n. Gil Polo, Caspar, 416n. Girard, Rene, 36, 55n., 428 Gloriana, see Elizabeth I Glover, John, xi Goddard, Harold, 33, 53n., 428 Godley, Alfred Denis, 395n. Godsalve, William, 57n., 428 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 153, 190, 223, 245, 264, 339, 405n.; Wilhelm Meister, 190 Gohdes, Clarence, 307 Golden Asse, The, see Apuleius Golding, Arthur, 106; Ovid's Metamorphoses, xviii, 134, 269, 275, 371, 395n., 41 In. Goldingham, Harry, 78 Goldsmith, Oliver, 66, 414n. Goldstein, Melvin, 35, 428 Gooch, Bryan N.S., 404n., 420 Good Words, 29, 360, 426 Gordon, George Stewart, 27, 423 Gosse, Edmund, 145, 373 Goya, Francisco de, 35 Gradiva, 56n., 430 Grange's Garden, 135 Grant, Miss, 399n. Granville-Barker, Harley, see Barker, Harley Granville Graves, Robert von Ranke, 31, 428 Gray, Thomas, 392n. Green, Roger Lancelyn, 328 Greenaway, Kate, 175, 403n. Greenblatt, Stephen Jay, 5In., 55n., 423, 428 Greene, Robert, 126, 284, 391n.; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 348, 416n. Greenlaw, Edwin Almiron, 399n. Greg, Sir Walter Wilson, 42n., 394-5n., 423 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, xviii, xixn.

449

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Grey, Zachary, 13, 47n., 428 Griffith, Elizabeth, xiii, 13, 14, 26, 46n., 59-62, 389, 428 Griffith, Richard, 59 Griffiths, Trevor R., 52n., 56n., 404n., 423 Griggs, William, 49n., 427 Grillparzer, Franz, 230, 406n. Grim the Collier, see Haughton, William Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl, 396n. Grosart, Alexander Balloch, 44n., 395n., 424 Gryphius, Andreas, Hen Peter Squenz, 5, 45n., 421 Gui, Weston A., 35, 36, 428 Guizot, Francois Pierre Guillaume, 408-9n. Gulliver's Travels, see Swift, Jonathan Habicht, Werner, 48n., 431 Haffenden, John, 50n., 57n., 427 Hailes, David Dalrymple, Lord, 15, 48n., 428, 430 Hale, John K., 40, 428 Hales, John Wesley, 44n., 428 Halio, Jay L., 45nn., 56n., 420 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 121 Hallam, EUen, 121 HaUam, Henry, xvi, xviii, 17, 18, 97, 121-2, 125, 127, 128, 162, 166, 398, 398n., 428 Hallam, Henry Fitzmaurice, 162 Halliwell (afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps), James Orchard, xi, xiv, xviii, 5, 15, 18, 19, 22, 40, 42n., 43n., 44nn., 45n., 48n., 108, 132-6, 162, 219, 399, 401n., 410n., 41 In., 420, 422, 425,428 Halliwell-Phillipps, see Halliwell, James Orchard Halpin, Nicholas John, 20,137-41,208, 209, 220, 242, 340, 400, 407n., 410n., 428 Hamilton, Albert Charles, 53n., 428 Handel, George Frideric, 206 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 12, 14, 48n., 390n., 421, 425 Harari, Josue V., 54n., 428 Hardy, Thomas, 290 Harleyjohn, 399n. Harness, William, 401n. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 328, 414n., 430

Harris, Bernard, 55n., 431 Harrison, George Bagshawe, 51n., 52n., 378, 420, 423 Hartford, Lord, 67 Hartnoll, Phyllis, 45n., 55n., 426, 427, 428 Harvey, Gabriel, 68, 126 Harvey, William, 157 Haslewood, Joseph, 43n., 424 Hathaway, Anne, 321 Hathaway, Richard, 165 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 77 Haughton, William, Grim the Collier of Croydon, 151,401n. Hawkes, Terence, 38, 53n., 428 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 146 Hayman, Francis, 14, 48n., 425 Hazlitt, William, x, xiii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 49n., 56n., 90-3, 97, 128, 145, 165, 184, 185, 214, 288, 294, 297, 394, 398nn., 409n., 412n., 429 Hazlitt, William Carew, 43n., 424 Heath, Benjamin, 13, 47n., 429 Hecate, 274, 41 In. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xvii, xixn., 245 HeibergJ. L., 341 Heminges, John, 45n. Hemming, Mr., 399n. Hendricks, Margo, 56n., 429 Hendrickson, J.R., 392n. Henning, Standish, 42n., 424 Henry VIII, 2 Heraud, John Abraham, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 135, 219-24, 265, 399n., 406, 406n., 409n., 429 Hercules, 363, 403n.; see also Index I Herford, Charles Harold, xi, 42n., 393n., 408n., 424 Herpich, Charles A., 41 n. Herrick, Robert, 4, 44n., 330, 414n., 424 Hertzberg, W., 408n. Hewet, H.W., 157 HexterJackH., 417n. Heywood, Thomas, 260, 321, 407n. Hickson, Samuel, xii Hill, Donald L., 415n. Hitchcock, Ethan Allen, xiii, 21, 22, 225-8, 406, 406n., 429 Hodgdon, Barbara, 56nn., 429

450

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Hodnett, Edward, 39, 429 Hogan, Charles Beecher, 390n. Hogarth, William, 63 Hogg,James, 111 Holinshed, Ralph, 392n. Holland, Norman, 36, 429 Holland, Peter, xixn., 28, 45n., 46n., 51n., 53n., 56nn., 40In., 420, 423 Holy day, Barten, 4, 44n., 424 Homer, 4, 8, 11, 44n., 145, 160, 198, 206, 245, 298, 313, 328, 424, 427; Mad, 402n. Hooker, Edward Niles, 424 Hope, Jonathan, xii Horace, xviii, 105, 122, 408n., 415n. Household Words, 177 Howard, Skiles, 40, 429 Howe, Percival Presland, 49n., 429 Hudson, Henry Norman, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 20, 28, 50n., 97, 108, 168-72, 288, 402, 412n., 422, 423 Hurfinan, CUfford Chalmers, 51n., 420 Hughes, John, 7, 45n., 429 Hughes, Merritt Y., 44n., 424 Hulley, Karl, 41 In. Humbert, Claas Hugo, 408n. Humboldt, Alexander von, 224, 406n. Hunt, John, 145 Hunt, Leigh, 17, 48n., 142, 145-7, 214, 400, 400nn., 429 Hunt, Maurice, 21, 57n., 429 Hunter, George Kirkpatrick, 4In., 52n., 53n., 392n., 424, 429 Hunter, Joseph, 19, 20, 148-52, 400, 401nn., 429 Huntington Library Quarterly, 54n., 433 Hurd, Bishop Richard, 397n. Ibsen, Henrik, 339, 383 Iliad, see Homer Illustrated London News, The, 219 Independent, The, 307, 430 Ingleby, Clement Mansfield, The Shakespeare Allusion-Book, 41n., 42nn., 43nn., 44nn., 420 Ingram, John Kells, 50n., 429 lo, 397n. Ireland, Samuel, 66 Iris, 143

Irving, Sir Henry, xi, xiii, 45n., 292, 295, 412n., 422, 431 Irving, Washington, 157 Isaacs, J., 5In., 420 Jacobson, Gerald F., 54n., 429 Jaggard, William, 394n. Jaggard, William (1911), 47n., 420 James I, 5, 31, 149, 241, 393n. Jameson, Anna, 13, 18, 288, 289, 412n. Jerrold, Douglas William, 19, 56n., 181-3, 404, 429 Jeune, Lady, see Yonge, Charlotte Mary Johnson, Charles, Love in a Forest, 5, 421 Johnson, Samuel, xi, 1, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 46nn., 47nn., 48n., 49n.,.66, 69, 74, 90, 94, 97, 106, 127, 389nn., 390n., 391n., 393n., 396n., 399nn., 401nn., 405n., 41 On., 422, 425, 429 Jonson, Ben, 2, 6, 41n., 42nn., 55n., 66, 78, 207, 223, 241, 242, 260, 313, 390n., 393n., 394n., 395-6n., 399n., 402n., 405n., 407nn., 408n., 412n., 424, 425, 433 Jorgens, JackJ., 45n., 420 Jourdain, W.C., 42n. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 52n., 426 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 22, 245, 433 Jove, 95, 209 Jowett, Benjamin, 41 In. Joyce, James, Ulysses, 256 Juno, 95, 274 Jupiter Tonans, 186 Kant, Immanuel, 406n. Kaplan, Morton, 54n., 429 Kauffman, [Maria Anna] Angelica, 64, 38990n. Kavanagh, James H., 55n., 429 Kean, Edmund, 92 Kearsley, George, 11, 47n. Keats, John, x, 15, 48n., 49n., 145, 146, 214, 216, 374, 433, 434 Keeley, Robert, 399n. Keightley, Thomas, 16, 105-7, 149, 274, 395, 396n., 41 In., 420 Kellogg, Abner Otis, xiii, 26, 229-31, 406, 429

451

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Kelsall, Malcolm, 395n. Kemble, Charles, 118, 142 Kennedy, James Edmund, xxi Kennedy, Judith Mary, xiii, xviii, 56n., 416n., 429 Kennedy, Richard Frederick, xiii, xviii, 44n., 429 Kenny, Thomas, xv, 21, 26, 217-8, 406, 429 Kenrick, WilUam, 13, 46n., 48n., 425, 429 Kermode, John Frank, 33, 429 King, Dr. John, Lord Bishop of London, 269, 41 On. Kingsford, Charles Lethbridge, 400n. Kingsmill, Hugh, 52n., 426 Kirk, Robert, 87, 393n. Kirkman, Francis, 5, 421 Klaassen, Eh'zabeth Mary, xxi Klaassen, Michael Walter, xxi Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich, 230, 406n. Klopstock, Gottlieb Friedrich, 118 Knight, Charles, xi, xiii, xvi, 15, 18, 23, 25, 49n., 108, 123-9, 135, 164, 398, 412n., 422, 430 Knight, George Wilson, 27, 30, 31, 32, 52n., 430 Knollys, Lettice, 137, 140, 209, 243 Knowles, James Sheridan, 230, 406n. Knox, Sir Thomas Malcolm, xixn. Kolbe, Frederick Charles, 30, 430 Kottjan, 29, 35, 37, 430 Kotzebue, August von, 230, 406n. Krieger, Elliott, 32, 37, 54n., 430 Lacy, Mrs. Walter, 399n. Lake, David J., 42n. Lamb, Charles, 48n., 90, 142, 145, 214 Lamb, Mary, 48n. La Mothe, Marie Catherine, Countess d'Aulnoy, Cabinet des Fees, Le, 163, 402n. Lampe, John Frederick, 5, 45n., 421 Lane, Edward William, 398n. Laneham, Robert, 400n. Lang, Andrew, xv, xvi, 27, 29, 328-31, 414, 414nn., 430 Langbaine, Gerard, 44n., 420 Langland, William, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, 105, 395n. Lanier, Sidney Clopton, xiii, 25, 36, 307-12,

413, 430 Laroque, Fra^ois, 53n., 399n., 430 Latham, Grace, xviii, 24, 25, 281-7, 411, 41 In., 430 Latham, Minor White, 32, 40, 57n., 420 Latham, Ronald E., 413n. Latham, Robert, 45n., 400n., 432 Larimer, Eh'zabeth Wormeley, xiii, 26, 108, 288-91,412,430 Latona, 274, 41 In. Lavater, Ludwig, 88 Lavin, J.A., 416n. Lawrence, William John, 32, 41n., 430 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, see Scott, Sir Walter Leavis, Frank Raymond, xviii Lechay, Daniel, 38, 430 Lee, Margaret L., 42n., 423 Lee, Nathaniel, 3, 43n., 424 Lee, Sir Sidney, xi, 19, 345, 368, 416n., 423, 435 Leggatt, Alexander, 36, 430 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, 20, 137, 139-40, 209, 243 Leigh-Noel, M., 26, 427, 430 Leinwand, Theodore B., 55n., 430 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 329, 414n. Lerner, Laurence, 57n., 434 L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 399n. Letters of Literature, see Pinkerton, John Leveridge, Richard, The Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, 5, 421; Pyramus and Thisbe: A Mock-Opera, 5 Levin, Richard, 54n., 430 LeWinter, Oscar, 418n. Lewis, James, 326, 414n. Liddell, Henry George, 402n. Lily, John, see Lyly, John Lincoln, Lord Bishop of, see Williams, John Listen, John, 16, 92 Literary Gazette, The, 111 Literature & Psychology, 54n., 429 Lithgow, William, 151 Lloyd, Janet, 53n., 430 Lloyd, William Watkiss, xiii, xvi, xvii, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 197-202, 405, 405n., 422, 430 Lloyd's Weekly, 181 Locke, John, 15, 76

452

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Locrine, 79 Lope, see Vega Loutherbourg, Philippe Jaques de, 63, 389n. Lowes, John Livingston, 48n., 76, 430 Lucius (pseudonym), see Hailes, David Dalrymple, Lord Lucretius, 305-6, 412-13n. Lucy, Sir Thomas, 165 Luna, 275 Lyly, John, 122, 137, 141, 336, 341, 398n., 407n., 428 Maas, Jeremy, Victorian Fairy Painting, 39, 48n., 430 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 27, 5In., 430 Mackail, John William, 30, 430 Mackenzie, Agnes Mure, 30, 32, 52n., 430 Mackenzie, Dr. Shelton, 111 Maclise, Daniel, 111 Macmillan's Magazine, 298 Macready, William Charles, 178, 403n., 404n. Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius, 33 Mad World, My Masters, A, see Middleton, Thomas Maginn, William, xiv, 17, 24, 111-17, 257, 288, 397, 412n., 431 Magnusson, A. Lynne, 42n., 433 Maine, Sir Henry James Sumner, xvi, xviii, 20, 21, 23, 25, 48n., 162-7, 402, 431 Malcoknson, Cristina, 3, 43n., 431 Malone, Edmond, xi, xvi, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 41n., 43n., 669, 74, 75, 79, 85, 94-6, 121, 124, 125, 126, 133, 159, 341, 390, 390n., 391nn., 392nn., 393n., 394, 395n., 398n., 406n., 421, 422 Malone, Kemp, 307 Malone Society, The, 42n., 423 Marchant, Edgar Cardew, 403n. Marowitz, Charles, 56n., 431 Marshall, Francis Albert, xi, xiii, 25, 26, 27, 292-4, 412, 412n., 415n., 422 Marshall, Miss, 399n. Marston, John, 1, 41n., 392n., 424, 425 Martin, Leonard Cyril, 44n., 424 Martin, Lady, see Faucit, Helena Martin, Peter, 94 Martindale, Charles, 35, 54n., 431

Martindale, Michelle, 35, 431 Martineau, Jane, 48n., 430 Martz, William J., 53n., 431 Marvell, Andrew, 5, 44n., 424 Mary Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart), 20, 329 Massinger, Philip, 3, 42n., 43n., 46n., 424, 426 Mather, Cotton, 313 Mathews, Mrs. Charles, 135 Matson, M.N., 391n., 423 Matthews, Brander, 418n. Matthews, F., 399n. Matthews, William, 45n., 400n., 432 Maturin, Charles Robert, 230, 406n. Maxwell, James Coutts, 44n., 431 May, Susan Hartman, xxi, 49n., 420 Mayerson, Philip, 403n. McDonald, Antony, 56n. McGee, C. Edward, 42n., 433 McGuire, Philip C., 56n., 431 McKeithan, Daniel Morley, 2, 43nn., 431 McKerrow, Ronald Brunlees, 370 Meadows, Kenny, 142, 157 Meadows, Mr., 399n. Medea, 275, 333 Medici, Cosimo di, 363 Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 41n., 425 Melchiori, Barbara Arnett, 48n., 431 Melchiori, Giorgio, 41n., 424 Mendelssohn, Felix, 21, 37, 45n., 49n., 55n., 162, 187-8, 344, 404n., 427 Merchant, William Moelwyn, 36, 48n., 431 Meres, Francis, 1, 41n., 67, 84, 126, 159, 393n., 420 Merry Passages and Jeasts (Anon.), MS. Harleian 6395, 78, 392n. Metamorphoses, see Ovid Metastasio (originally Trapassi), Pietro, 108, 396n. Michel, Francisque, 118 Michelangelo (i.e., Michelangelo Buonarroti), 197, 224, 339, 406n. Midas, 19, 35, 132, 134 Middleton, Thomas, 2, 3, 42nn., 424; The Changeling (with William Rowley), 3, 43n., 424, 431; A Mad World, My Masters, 435; see The Revenger's Tragedy Milgate, W., 43n., 424

453

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Mills, Charles, 97 Milton, John, 4, 44n., 49n., 51n., 81, 105, 146, 365, 393n., 424, 428, 429, 430, 434, 435; Comus, 4, 19, 23, 128, 148, 294, 393n., 395nn.; 'L'Allegro', 9, 44n., 394n., 395n., 399nn., 400n., 406n.; 'Lycidas', 402n.; 'On the Death of a Fair Infant', 4; Paradise Lost, 4, 146, 389n., 394n., 395n., 399n., 400n., 401n., 433 Minerva, 46n., 274 Minotaur, 35, 273 Modem Language Association of America, xi Modem Language Quarterly, 53n., 426 Modem Philology, 41n., 52n., 53n., 432 Moliere (i.e., Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 340, 402n., 408n., 415n. Montagu, Elizabeth Robinson, 6, 8, 13, 46n., 431 Montaigne, Michel de, 256 Montemayor, Jorge de, 348, 416n. Montgomery, George Edgar, xiii, 24, 56n., 295-7, 412, 431 Monthly Magazine, The, 219, 399n. Monthly Packet of Evening Readings, The, 288 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 29, 37, 41, 57nn., 431 Moore, Edward M., 49n., 418n., 425 Moore, Thomas, Irish Melodies, 395n. Moorhead, J[ohn] Kfirkby], 405n. More, St. Thomas, Utopia, 358-9, 417n. Moreto y Cabana, Agustin, 402n. Morgan, James Appleton, xii, 408n. Morgenbladet, 383 Morison, Mary, 339 Morley, Henry, xiv, 19, 23, 56n., 177-80, 403, 403nn., 431 Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, The, 184 Morning Herald, The, 181 Morrison, Alexander James William, 81, 153,432 Mortimer, John, 27 Moulton, Richard Green, xii, xvii, 22, 3536, 416, 431 Moyse, Charles Ebenezer, xv, xvi, 22, 5In., 270-3,411,431 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 30

Mucciolo, John M., 45n., 420 Muir, Kenneth Arthur, 39, 420 Munro, John James, 41n. Napoleon I, 159, 402n. Narcissus: A Twelfe Night Merriment (Anon.), 2, 42n., 423 Nares, Robert, 150, 401n. Nashe, Thomas, 126; Gabriel Harvey's Hunt is up, 68 National Police Gazette, 253 Neely, Carol Thomas, 55n., 431 Neidig, W., 394n. Neil, Samuel, 40In. Neilson, Julia, 344 Ness, Frederic William, 53n., 431 Neue Jahrbucher fur Philologie und Pddagogik, 407n. New Academy of Complements, The, 5 New Exegesis of Shakespeare, see Anonymous New Monthly Magazine, The, 181 New Shakespeareana, xi New Shakespeare Society, The, x, xviii, 25, 29, 130, 267, 281 New Variorum Shakespeare, xi, xiii Newton, Henry Chance, 49n., 431 Nichols, John, 39In., 400n. Nicoll, Allardyce, 44n., 424 Nineteenth Century, The, 416n. Nisbett, Mrs., 399n. Nobel Prize, 324, 383 Noctes Shakspeariana, x Norgate, Edward, 5 North British Review, The, 203 North, Christopher (pseudonym), see Wilson, John North, Sir Thomas, Plutarch's Lives, 299, 371 Notes and Queries, 43n., 44nn., 425, 427, 429,431 Novak, M.E., 43n. Novello, Alfred, 214 Novello, Vincent, 214 Nutt, Alfred, 48n., 420 O'Brian, Constance, see O'Brien, Constance O'Brien, Constance, 288, 412n. O'Connell, 49n. Odell, George Clinton Densmore, 45n.,

454

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418n., 431 Oedipus, 301 Oedipus at Colonus, see Sophocles Olson, Paul, 33, 431 Oneiros, 192 Orford, Lord, see Walpole, Horace Orlando Furioso, see Ariosto, Ludovico Ormerod, David, 35, 431 Ormuzd, 304, 412n. Orsini, Napoleone, 386 Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserv'd, 395n. Oulton, Walley Chamberlain, Pyramus and Thisbe: a Pantomime, 5 Over, Alan, 76, 434 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), xviii, 23, 34, 35, 39, 54nn., 105, 106, 122, 134, 149, 160, 269, 274-6, 347, 371, 395n., 396n., 41 Inn., 425, 435; 'Pyramus and Thisby', 199, 215, 226, 432 Oxenfbrd, John, 405n. Oxford English Dictionary, The, 267, 39In., 392nn., 394n., 400n., 401n., 403nn., 404nn., 405nn., 406n., 407n., 409nn., 412n., 414n., 415n. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, The, 402n. Palmer, David John, 51n., 420 Palmer, John Leslie, 31, 432 Pan, 107, 275, 303 Panofsky, Erwin, 23, 50n., 432 Papetti, Viola, 45n., 420 Parker, Patricia, 39, 432 Parker, Theodore, 264 Parrott, Thomas Marc, 52n., 432 Parsons, William, 390n. Pater, Walter Horatio, xii, 344, 415n. Paterson, Helen, see AUingham, Helen Paton, Sir Joseph Noel, 162, 163, 402n. Patterson, Annabel, 55n., 432 Payne, W.H., 399n. Pearson, D'Orsay W., 35, 432 Peele, George, 53n., 284, 427 Pegasus, 403n. Penny Magazine, The, 123 Pepys, Samuel, 5, 45n., 149, 330, 331, 347, 400n., 416n., 432 Percy, Bishop Thomas, 65, 390n. Percy, William, 4, 43n., 424 Persius Flaccus, Aulus, 4, 44n., 424

Peters, A., 243 Pettet, Ernest Charles, 31, 432 Phelps, Samuel, 19, 177-80, 181-3, 403-4n., 409n. Phidias, 174 Philips, Edward, 76, 392n. Philological Society, The, 267 Phoebus, 61 Piercy, see Percy, Bishop Thomas Plain Englishman, The, 123 Planche, James Robinson, 19, 136, 161, 402n., 422 Plato, 31, 224, 277-80, 41 In.; Timceus, 278, 41 In. Plautus, Mencechmi, 122 Plesner, Augusta, 418n. Plutarch, 269, 347, 371; 'Life of Theseus', 299 Pluto, 86, 275, 391n., 393n. PMLA, 43n., 44n., 45n., 433, 434 Poe, Edgar Allen, 267, 410n. Poet Lore, x, 346 Pollard, Alfred William, 394n. Poole, John, 14 Poole, Josua, 5, 44n., 151, 401n., 420, 429 Pope, Alexander, 10, 11, 12, 15, 25, 46nn., 47nn., 90, 94, 404n., 421, 434; The Rape of the Lock, 146 Porter, Charlotte Endymion, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 26, 28, 108, 346-52, 416, 423 Porter, Helen Charlotte, see Porter, Charlotte Endymion Porter, Joseph A., 55n., 430, 432 Potts, Leonard James, 31, 432 Pressly, William L., 50n., 432 Preston, John F., 232 Preston, Mary, xiii, xiv, xv, 26, 29, 232-4, 407, 407nn., 432 Preston, Thomas, Cambises, xvii, 341, 415n. Price, Antony W., 5In., 420 Price, Curtis Alexander, 45nn., 421, 432 Priestley, John Boynton, 31, 432 Proceedings of the British Academy, 52n., 433 Procter, Adelaide, 'A Lost Chord', 142 Procter, Bryan Waller, xiii, xiv, 19, 97, 142-4, 400, 422 Prodicus, 174 Propertius, Sextus, 13 Proserpina, 86, 39In., 393n.

455

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Proteus, 71, 336 Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 54n., 432 Psychoanalytic Review, 54n., 428 Punch, or The London Charivari, 181, 404n., 429 Purcell, Henry, 1, 5, 45n., 432; The FairyQueen, 5, 38, 421 Purdon, Noel, 35, 432 Pyramus and Thisbe, see Ovid Pyrrha, 274, 41 In. Quarles, Francis, 4, 44n., 424 Quarterly Review, The, 90, 190, 395n., 408n. Queen Anne, see Anne, Queen Queen Elizabeth, see Elizabeth I Queen Victoria, see Victoria, Queen Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 423 Rabkin, Norman, 36, 53n., 432 Racine, Jean, 81 Rainforth, Miss, 399n. Ralli, Augustus, 97, 217, 229, 421 Randall, Dale B.J., 55n., 430, 432 Randolph, Thomas, 3, 43n., 424 Rape of the Lock, The, see Pope, Alexander Raphael (i.e., Raffaello Sanzio), 129, 188, 197, 224, 404n., 406n. Ravenscroft, Edward, 46n. Ravich, Robert A., 54n., 432 Ray,J. W., 180,403n. Raysor, Thomas Middleton, 48n., 108, 397nn., 426 Reed, Isaac, 12, 74, 393nn., 394nn., 408n., 422 Rehan, Ada, 326-7, 414nn. Representations, 55n., 431 Revenger's Tragedy, The (Anon.), attributed to Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur, 2, 42n., 424 Review of English Studies, The, xixn., 56n., 429 Reynolds, Frederick, 16, 38, 90, 103, 118, 135, 394n., 398n., 422 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 14, 39, 63, 66, 162, 224, 389n., 390n., 406n. Rhoads, Diane Akers, 34, 432 Richards, Ivor Armstrong, xviii Richmond, Hugh, 35, 432 Rickert, Edith, 31, 32, 41 n., 432

Ridley, Maurice Roy, 52nn., 432 Riverside Shakespeare, The, see Evans, Gwynne Blakemore Roberts, James, see Second Quarto Roberts, Sasha, 281, 412n., 421 Robertson, D.A., 52n., 427 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 108 Roderick, Richard, xviii, xixn. Roffe, Alfred, 27, 432 Rolfe, William James, xii Romani, Felice, 188, 404n. Ross, Lawrence J., 42n., 424 Rossi, Louise, 5In., 426 Rostand, Edmond, 414n. Round Table, The, 17 Rouse, William Henry Denham, 395n., 411n. Rowe, Nicholas, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 45nn., 46nn.,401n., 41 In., 421,428 Rowley, William, The Changeling (with Thomas Middleton), 3, 424, 431 Royal Academy, The, 224, 389n. Royal Irish Academy, The, 137 Royal Society, The, 132 Royal Society of Literature, The, 84, 381 Rudd, Niall, 35, 432 Rugeley-Powers, S., 418n. Ruskin, John, 173-6, 403, 403nn., 432 Russell, John, Lord, 409n. Ruud, Martin B., 383-5, 425, 432 Rymer, Thomas, 44n. Ryskamp, Charles, 400n. Sadie, Stanley, 45n., 421 St. George, 364 St. Luke, 188 St. Thomas University, xxi Salingar, Leo, 57n., 432 Samiel, see Zamiel Sandys, George, 275, 41 In. Sanger, E., 45n. Sarrazin, Gregor, xii Saturday Review, The, 324, 343, 414n., 425, 433 Saturn, 274 Saturnia, 274 Saxon, Arthur Hartley., 397n. Schafer, Jiirgen, xixn. Schanzer, Ernest, 33, 432

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Schiller, (Johann Christoph) Friedrich von, 223, 264, 404n. Schlegel, August Wilhekn von, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 15, 16, 27, 48n., 81-3, 90, 97, 118, 128, 172, 215, 242, 393, 402n., 403n., 432 Schmidgall, Gary, 57n., 432 Schmidt, Alexander, xii Schmitz, L. Dora, 153, 241, 427, 434 Scholl, Adolf, 155, 402n. Schwartz, Robert, 53n., 434 Science of English Verse, The, see Lanier, Sidney Clopton Scot, Reginald, 88; The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 372 Scott, Robert, 402n. Scott, Sir Walter, 48n., 118, 175, 232, 299, 300, 407n., 412nn., 421; The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 175, 403n. Scourge of Venus, The, 106, 395n. Scribe, Augustin Eugene, 402n. Second Folio (1632), 4, 69, 150, 184, 401n., 411n. Second Quarto (Roberts: 1619), 1, 5, 12, 49n., 75, 123, 184, 394n., 398n., 401nn., 411n., 413nn., 421, 427 Sedge, Douglas, x Selincourt, Ernest de, 28, 374-7, 432 SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 56n., 433 Semiramis, 397n. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the younger, 39 Sessions, Barbara F., 433 Settle, Elkanah, 5, 45n. Seward, Thomas, 7, 12, 46n., 47n., 128, 399n., 432 Sewell, EUzabeth, 34, 35, 432 Seymour, E.H., 43n., 433 Seznec, Jean, 23, 50n., 433 Shakespeare Allusion-Book, The, see Ingleby, Clement Mansfield Shakespeare Club (Stratford-upon-Avon), The, 374, 432 Shakespeare, Gilbert, 36 Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xi, 53n., 241, 408n., 427 Shakespeare Quarterly, 42n., 48n., 53nn., 56nn., 57n., 425, 426, 427, 429, 435 Shakespeare Society, The, x, 407n.

Shakespeare Society of New York, xi Shakespeare Studies, 54n., 56n., 427, 431, 435 Shakespeare Survey, 48n., 51n., 56n., 419, 421, 427, 431 Shakespeareana, x, 346 Shapiro, Michael, 42n., 433 Sharpham, Edward, The Fleire, 2, 42n., 424 Shaw, George Bernard, 25, 56n., 324-7, 343, 360, 361, 413, 414nn., 433 Shee, Sir Martin Archer, 230, 406n. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 125, 145, 256, 339, 406n. Shelley, Samuel, 64, 390n. Shelley Society, The, 267 Shelton, Thomas, Don Quixote, 77, 392n. Sherbo, Arthur, 421 Shirley, James, 3, 43n., 44n. Siddons, Mrs. Sarah, 118 Sidgwick, Arthur, 370 Sidgwick, Frank, 39,335,370-2,417,417nn., 433 Sidgwick, Henry, 370 Sidney, Lady Frances, see Walsingham, Frances Sidney, Sir Philip, 243, 402nn. Sigurd, 363 Simpson, Evelyn, 42n., 393n., 408n., 424 Simpson, Percy, 42n., 393n., 408n., 424 Simpson, Richard, xii, 4In., 433 Sinfield, Alan, 55n., 434 Singer, Samuel Weller, xiii, 197, 401nn., 422, 430 Singleton, Henry, 70, 39In. Sir Launfal, 372 Sir Orpheo, 372 Skeat, Walter William, 395n., 405n., 416n. Skottowe, Augustine, 11, 17, 18, 97-100, 119, 395, 402n., 433 Skottowe, Philip F., 97 Skretkowicz, Victor, 402n. Slights, William, 38, 433 Smart, Christopher, 12, 47n. Smibert, Thomas, 25, 433 Smirke, Robert, 70 Smirnov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 32-3, 433 Smith, Bruce R., 56n., 433 Smith, D.I.B., 44n., 424

457

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Smith, George Charles Moore, 2 Smith, Sir James E., 400n. Smith, John Christopher, 6 Smith, Nigel, 55n., 435 Smith, Robert Metcalf, 419 Smith, Sydney, 264, 409n. Snider, Denton Jacques, xvi, 21, 22, 23, 28, 245-52, 407, 407nn., 408n., 433 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, xxi Society of Antiquaries, The, 132, 148 Somnus, 405n. Sophocles, 224, 398n.; Oedipus at Colonus, 299,301,412n. Sophonisba, see Thomson, James Sorelius, Gunnar, 40, 433 Southey, Robert, 111, 219, 256 Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of, 243,258,272, 273, 41 In. Spalding, William, xiv, xvi, 18, 19, 130-1, 399, 408n., 433 Spedding, James, xii Spencer, Hazelton, 31, 433 Spenser, Edmund, 7, 12, 45n., 61, 68, 80, 106, 122, 126, 127, 145, 204, 209, 225, 339, 365, 374, 391n., 393n., 395n., 429; The Tears of the Muses, 61, 68, 126, 399n.; The Faerie Queene, 45n., 107,146,223, 271, 396n., 405n., 41 In., 417n., 429 Spevack, Marvin, xii Spinoza, Benedict de, 36, 225 Spirit of the Times, The, 253 Sprague, Homer Baxter, 44n., 422 Spurgeon, Caroline Frances Eleanor, xviii, 29, 30, 48nn., 49n., 76, 433 Stael, Madame (Germaine) de, 301 Star, The, 324 Starr, Herbert Willmarth, 392n. Staton, Walter F., Jr., 35, 433 Stauffer, Donald Alfred, 31, 52nn., 433 Staunton, Howard, xi, 41 In. Stavig, Mark, 39, 433 Stavisky, Aron Y., 421 Steevens, George, xi, 12, 14, 47n., 66, 67, 74_5, 94_6, 123, 253, 389n., 390n., 392, 392n., 398n., 399n., 401nn., 408n., 422 Stephen, Leslie, 397n.

Sterne, Laurence, 417n. Stevens, John, 428 Stevens, Paul, 44n., 433 Stevenson, Burton, Stevenson's Book of Proverbs, 389n. Stone, George Winchester, Jr., 43n., 45n., 433 Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael, 381-2, 433 Stopes, Marie Charlotte Carmichael, 381 Stothard, Thomas, 70 Stowe, John, 149, 269, 400n., 410n. Strachey, Sir Edward, xv, xvi, 20, 21, 25, 190-6, 404, 405n., 433 Strachey, Lytton, xii Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, The, 374 Stroup, Thomas B., 43n., 424 Studies (Dublin), 4In., 430 Studies in English Literature, 54n., 434 Styan, John Louis, 38, 49n., 421 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 403n. Sulloway, Frank J., xixn. Surtz, Edward, 417n. Swain, Lillian, 324, 413n. Swedenborg, Emanuel, 225 Sweeney, John Gordon III, 42n., 55n., 433 Swift, Jonathan, 389n.; Gulliver's Travels, 330, 414n. Swinburne, Algernon Charles, xiv, 23, 142, 262-3, 373, 415n., 417, 433 Swinburne, Charles, 262 Swinburne, Sir John Edward, 262 Taborski, Boleslaw, 54n., 430 Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, xiii, xiv, 28, 235-7, 433 Tarlinskaja, Marina, xixn. Tasso, Torquato, 34, 390n., 426 Tate, Nahum, 3, 43n., 424 Tave, Stuart, 40, 434 Tawyer, William, 5, 45n. Taylor, Charles, 15, 25, 70-3, 391, 434 Taylor, Edward, 47n., 434 Taylor, John, the Water-Poet, 4 Taylor, Michael, 54n., 434 Temple, Launcelot (pseudonym), see Armstrong, John Tennenhouse, Leonard, 55n., 434 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 121, 365 Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 49n.,

458

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 429

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 111, 181 Thaden, Edward C., 418n. Thaler, Alwin, 44n., 434 Thatcher, David S., 404n., 420 Theatres: Astley's Amphitheatre (London), 397n.; Bergen Theatre (Norway), 383; Broadway Theatre (New York), 404n.; Burton's Theatre (or, the Chambers Street Theatre: New York), 404n.; Christiania Theatre (Norway), 383; Covent Garden (Theatre Royal: London), 49n., 90, 93, 101, 103, 116, 118, 135, 136, 398n., 399-400nn., 403n.; Curtain Theatre (built 1577: London), 266; Daly's Theatre(s) (New York; London), 296, 297, 324, 414n.; Drury Lane (Theatre Royal: London), 93, 101, 179, 389n., 403nn.; Globe (built 1599: London), 98, 112; Globe (modern: London), 298; Haymarket (Theatre Royal), 390n.; Her Majesty's (built 1897: London), 343-4; Rose (built 1587: London), 266; Sadler's Wells (Islington), 177-83, 404n.; Theatres Royal, see Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and Haymarket Theobald, Lewis, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 41n., 47n., 109, 110, 350, 397n., 416n., 421 Theocritus, 328 Thomas, Brandon, Charley's Aunt, 326, 414n. Thomas of Erceldoune, 372 Thompson, Ann, 57n., 281, 412n., 421, 434 Thorns, William John, 48n., 421 Thomson, James, 400n.; The Castle of Indolence, 146, 400n.; The Tragedy of Sophonisba, 380, 418n. Thorndike, Ashley Horace, 418n. Thorn-Drury, George, 421 Thousand and One Nights, The, see Arabian Nights' Entertainment, The Tieck, Ludwig, 341, 404n., 41 In. Times, The (London), 19, 49n., 425 Titan, 274, 275, 363 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 92 TobinJ.J.M., 57n., 434 Today, 324

Todd, Henry John, 395n. Tolstoy, Leo, 357 Tonson, Jacob, 45n. Tourneur, Cyril, see Revenger's Tragedy, The Toynbee, Mrs. Paget, 48n., 434 Transactions (New Shakespeare Society), x, 50nn., 281, 410n., 415n., 427, 429, 430 Trapassi, see Metastasio, Pietro Tree, Mrs. (Helen Maud Holt), 344 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 19, 343-5, 415n. Tritonia, 274 Tyler, Wat, 358, 417n. Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 13, 47n., 39In., 434 Tzotzil Indians, 41 Ulrici, Hermann, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, 20, 22, 28, 33, 49n., 97, 153-6, 170, 401, 401n., 434 University of Toronto Quarterly, 53nn., 57n., 426, 432 Upton, John, 13, 47n., 434 Vandersall, Stanley T., 41 In. Van Doren, Mark, 30 Van Laun, Henri, 28, 235, 433 Vaughan, Henry, 414n. Vega, Lope de, 402n. Verity, Arthur Wilson, 44n., 50n., 371, 422, 424 Vernon, Elizabeth, 243 Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, 20, 21, 23, 24, 108, 157-61, 168, 402, 402n., 422 Verulam, Lord, see Bacon, Francis Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth, 19, 177, 399n., 402n., 403n., 404n. Vickers, Brian, x-xix, xx, xxi, 40, 44n., 45nn., 46nn., 47nn., 48n., 49n., 53n., 55n., 416n., 421, 434 Victoria, Queen, 13, 183, 191, 365 Victorian Fairy Painting, see Maas, Jeremy Vigny, Alfred de, 277 Vining, James, 399n. Virgil, 8, 105, 122, 188, 279; JEneiA, 404n. Vision of Piers Plowman, The, see Langland, William Volochova, Sonia, 433

459

SHAKESPEARE: THE CRITICAL TRADITION

Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), 339 Wagner, Adolph, 97 Wagner, Richard, 21, 31, 322 Walker, William Sidney, 41 In. Waller, Alfred Rayney, 415n. Walpole, Horace, Lord Orford, 14, 48n., 347, 416n., 434 Walsingham, Frances, Lady Sidney, 243 Warburton, William, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 46nn., 47n., 49n., 59, 110, 139, 150, 201, 389n., 398n., 401n., 421 Ward, Sir Adolphus William, 22, 259-61, 408, 409n., 434 Ware, Sir James, 68 Warrack, John, 396n., 414n. Warton, Joseph, 7, 46n., 434 Warton, Thomas, the younger, 44n., 61, 78, 106, 126, 204, 389n., 395n., 396n., 399n., 405n., 424 Warwick Shakespeare, The, see Chambers, Edmund Kerchever Watts, Cedric, 40, 434 Weber, Carl Maria von, Der Freischutz, 414n. Webster, John, 42n., 405n., 425 Weckherlin, Mr., 5 Wedderburn, Alexander, 173, 432 Wedgwood, Dame Cicely Veronica, 44n. Wedgwood, Frances Julia, xv, 27, 28, 29, 56n., 298-302, 412, 434 Wedgwood, Josiah, 298 Weimann, Robert, 37, 53n., 55n., 434 Weiss, John, xiii, 26, 264-6, 409, 434 Wells, Stanley William, 51nn., 54n., 55n., 420, 421, 423 Wells, Susan, 55n., 434 Welsford, Enid Elder Hancock, 30, 32, 53n., 434 Wendell, Barrett, xiii, xvi, 23, 313-6, 322, 413, 413n., 434 Wendorf, Richard, 400n. Wenzel, Siegfried, 55n., 425 West, David, 54n., 432 West, Ewan, 396n. WhaUey, George, 108, 426 Whalley, Peter, 2, 42n., 424 White, Diana, 339 White, Richard Grant, xi, xiii, xvi, 19, 20,

21, 24, 49nn., 184-9, 288, 351, 401n., 404, 404n., 412n., 416n., 434 White, Robert Sommerville, 48n., 51n., 421, 434 Whiter, Walter, 15, 23, 76-8, 392, 392n., 434 Whitman, Walter, 357 Whyte, Lancelot Law, xixn. Wigston, William Francis C., 21, 22, 23, 28, 277-80,411,434 Wilde, Oscar, 343 Wiles, David, 40, 49n., 434 Wilhelm, C., 368 Wilkes, George, xiii, 26, 253-5, 408, 408n., 435 Wilkinson, Lancelot Patrick, 35, 435 Williams, Gary Jay, xx, 5, 38, 45nn., 51nn., 54n., 56nn., 57n., 394n., 403n., 404nn., 413n., 414n., 415n., 419, 421 Williams, John, Lord Bishop of Lincoln, 5 Wilson, John, 288, 410n., 412n. Wilson, John Dover, 32, 423 Wilson, Richard, 55n., 435 Wilson, Sir Daniel, 26, 238-40, 407, 435 Wily Beguiled, 2, 42n., 423 Wind, Edgar, 23, 50n., 435 Winstanley, William, 44n., 421 Winter, William, 413-14nn. Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, The, 1, 67, 68, 391n., 423 Wither, George, 151, 401 n. Women's Studies, 56n., 428 Wood, Henry Harvey, 4In., 424 Wood, Stanley, 24, 50n., 423 Woodberry, George Edward, xiii, xiv, 28, 108, 368-9, 417, 417n., 423, 435 Woodberry Society, The, 368 Woodhouse, Arthur Sutherland Piggott, 44n., 435 Woodman, Tony, 54n., 432 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 374 Wordsworth, William, 90, 219, 222, 374, 395n., 416n., 417n. World, The, 324 Wright, George Thaddeus, xixn. Wright, Thomas, 396n. Wright, William Aldis, xi Xenophon, 403n.

460

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Yachnin, Paul, 2, 42n., 435 Year's Work in English Studies, The, 332 Yong, Bartholomew, 416n. Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 281, 288 Young, David Pollock, 34, 53nn., 435 Youth's Companion, The, 295 Zamiel, 324, 414n. Zimbardo, Rose Abdelnour, 54n., 435 Zukofsky, Celia, 55n. Zukofsky, Louis, 36, 435

461