splendid scale. In 1716 Richard Leveridge adapted from the play A Coniick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, which was performed at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and was printed in London the same year. In 1755 Garrick produced, at Drury Lane, an opera taken from A MidsummerNight's Dream, and entitled The Fairies, the parts of the clowns being entirely omitted. In 1763 he brought out the original play, with the interlude restored, but it was coldly received, and was performed only once. It was then cut down to an afterpiece by Colman, under the title of A Fairy Tale, the supernatural characters being alone retained. In that form it was somewhat more successful, and was again produced at the Haymarket Theatre in 1777, with the addition of some songs from Garrick's version.

During the present century the play has seldom been put upon the stage, and it is not likely that the experiment will be often repeated. As Hazlitt has said, "the MidsummerNight's Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. . . . 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 midday, 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."

II. THE SOURCES OF THE PLOT.

"It is probable," says Steevens, "that the hint for this play was received from Chaucer's Knight's Tale," but there is little resemblance between the tale and the play, except that Theseus and Hippolyta are characters in both, and that Philostrate is the assumed name of Arcite in the tale, while

it is the name of the Master of the Revels in the play. The poet was evidently acquainted with the Life of Theseus in North's Plutarch, and drew some little material from that source, as the extracts given in our notes will show. For the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe he was doubtless indebted to Golding's translation of Ovid and Chaucer's Legende of Goode Women. Oberon, Titania, and Robin Goodfellow were familiar personages in the popular fairy mythology of the time, but Shakespeare has made them peculiarly his own. The fairy literature of that day has almost entirely perished, and the few fragments that remain afford no evidence that the poet was under any special obligation to it for the incidents of his plot. There is a curious black-letter tract, published in London in 1628 under the title of "Robin Goodfellow; his mad prankes, and merry Jests, full of honest mirth, and is a fit medicine for melancholy" (reprinted by the Percy Society in 1841, and again by the Shakespeare Society in 1845), which, as Collier and Halliwell believe, may have originally appeared much earlier than 1628, and have been seen by Shakespeare. White, on the other hand, in his Introduction to the Play, argues from internal evidence that the "Mad Pranks" was not only written after the Midsummer-Night's Dream, but that it was in a measure founded upon this very play; and we think he makes out his case. The ballad in Percy's Reliques entitled "The Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow, once attributed to Ben Jonson, was also, as Halliwell admits, probably written after the appearance of the play. The popularity of the comedy doubtless led to the working-up of the old stories concerning Robin Goodfellow in a variety of ways. Collier mentions that in Henslowe's Diary are inserted two entries of money paid to Henry Chettle for a play he was writing in Sept., 1602, under the title of "Robin Goodfellow." Here, as in other instances, Shakespeare had his imitators and plagiarists, but there is no evidence that he imitated or plagiarized from anybody.

As White remarks, "the plot of A Midsummer-Night's Dream has no prototype in ancient or modern story."

III. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON THE PLAY.

[From Drake's "Shakespeare and his Times.” *]

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, 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 Midsummer-Night's Dream, a title 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 aërial texture, floating as it were 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."

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 moonbeams and the odoriferous atmosphere of flowers, whose sport it is "to dance in ringlets to the whistling winds," it was necessary, in order to give a *Shakespeare and his Times, by Nathan Drake, M.D. (London, 1817), vol. ii. p. 299.

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 scene where "trip the light fairies and the dapper elves," 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. . .

The fairies of Shakespeare have been truly denominated the favourite children of his romantic fancy, 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.'

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 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.

Such, in fact, has been the success of our bard in expanding and colouring the germs of Gothic fairyism; in assigning

B

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.

The canvas, it is true, which he has stretched has been since expanded, and new groups have been introduced; but the outline and the mode of colouring which he employed have been invariably followed. It is, in short, to his picture of the fairy world that we are indebted for the Nymphidia of Drayton, the Robin Goodfellow of Jonson, the miniatures of Fletcher and Browne,* the full-length portraits of Herrick,† the sly allusions of Corbet,‡ and the spirited and picturesque sketches of Milton.§

To Shakespeare, therefore, as the remodeller, and almost the inventor of our fairy system, may, with the utmost propriety, be addressed the elegant compliment which Browne has paid to Occleve, certainly inappropriate as applied to that rugged imitator of Chaucer, but admirably adapted to the peculiar powers of our bard, and delightfully expressive of what we may conceive would be the gratitude, were such testimony possible, of these children of his playful fancy:

"Many times he hath been seene
With the faeries on the greene,
And to them his pipe did sound
As they danced in a round;

* See Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess and Browne's Britannia's Pastorals.

† Herrick seems to have delighted in drawing the manners and costume of the fairy world. He has devoted several of his most elaborate poems to these sportive creatures of fancy. Under the titles of The Fairy Temple, Oberon's Palace, The Fairy Queen, and Oberon's Feast, a variety of curious and minute imagery is appositely introduced.

In his political ballad entitled The Fairies' Farewell.

§ See L'Allegro and the occasional sketches in Paradise Lost and Comus.