This is pranks which never hurt, but which often torment. especially the property of Puck, who "jests to Oberon," who is the "lob" at this court, a coarser goblin, represented with broom or threshing-flail, in a leathern dress, and with a dark countenance-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 can now readily perceive why, in this work, the "rude mechanicals" and clowns, and the company of actors with their burlesque comedy, are placed in such rude contrast to the tender and delicate play of the fairies. Prominence is given to both by the contrast afforded between the material and the aërial, between the awkward and the beautiful, between the utterly unimaginative and that which, itself fancy, is entirely woven out of fancy. 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 aërial world, whilst in the other nothing is left to the imagination of the spectator. The homely mechanics, who compose and act merely for gain, and for the sake of so many pence a day, the ignorant players, with hard hands and thick heads, whose unskilful art consists in learning their parts by heart, these men believe themselves obliged to represent Moon and Moonshine by name in order to render them evident; they supply the lack of side-scenes by persons, and all that should take place behind the scenes they explain by digressions. These rude doings are disturbed by the fairy chiefs with their utmost raillery, and the fantastical company of lovers mock at the performance. Theseus, however, draws quiet and thoughtful contemplation from these contrasts. He shrinks incredulously from the too-strange fables of love and its witchcraft; he enjoins that imagination should amend the play of the clowns, devoid ast it is of all fancy. The real, that in this work of art has be come "nothing," and the "airy 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, namely, the stories of the lovers, the poets by nature, as art and poetry, and who receives the other, presented as art, only as a thankworthy readiness to serve and as a simple offering. [From Dowden's "Shakspere." *] In the Comedy of Errors (ii. 2. 189-201) occurs the following dialogue: "Luciana. Dromio, go bid the servants spread for dinner. Dromio of S. O, for my beads! I cross me for a sinner. They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue. Dromio of S. No, I am an ape. Luciana. If thou art chang'd to aught, 't is to an ass." When Shakspere wrote thus of fairy-land, of the pranks of Robin Goodfellow, and of the transformation of a man to an ass, can it be doubted that he had in his thoughts A Midsummer-Night's Dream? The play was perhaps so named. because it is a dream-play, the fantastic adventures of a night, and because it was first represented in midsummer— the midsummer, perhaps, of 1594. The imagined season of the action of the play is the beginning of May, for according to the magnificent piece of mediæval - classical mythology embodied here, and in the Knightes Tale of Chaucer, and * Shakspere: a Critical Study of his Mind and Art, by Edward Dowden (2d ed. London, 1876), p. 66 fol. C again in The Two Noble Kinsmen of Shakspere and Fletcher, this was the month of Theseus' marriage with his Amazonian bride.* . . . A Midsummer-Night's Dream was written on the occasion of the marriage of some noble couple-possibly for the marriage of the poet's patron Southampton with Elizabeth Vernon, as Mr. Gerald Massey supposes; possibly at an earlier date to do honour to the marriage of the Earl of Essex with Lady Sidney.† The central figure of the play is that of Theseus. There is no figure in the early drama of Shakspere 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 Shakspere'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 mor* Titania says to Oberon (ii. 1. 82), "And never, since the middle summer's spring, Perhaps a night in early May might be considered a night in the spring of midsummer. † Mr. Massey is obliged to entertain the supposition that the play was written some time before the marriage actually took place (1598), “at a period when it may have been thought the queen's consent could be obtained. . . . I have ventured the date of 1595." Professor Karl Elze's theory, maintained in a highly ingenious paper in Shakspeare Jahrbuch, vol. iii., that the play was written for the marriage of the young Earl of Essex, would throw back the date to 1590. There is much to be said in favour of this opinion. tals." The heroic men of action-Theseus, Henry V., Hector-are supremely admired by Shakspere. Yet it is observable that as the total Shakspere is superior to Romeo, the man given over to passion, and to Hamlet, the man given over to thought, so the Hamlet and the Romeo within him give Shakspere 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." It is into Theseus' mouth that Shakspere puts the words which class together "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" as of imagination all compact. That is the touch which shows. how Shakspere 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 Shakspere upon his own art are not so numerous that we can afford to overlook them. It must here be noted that Shakspere makes the "palpable gross" 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 (Shakspeare Papers, p. 119) 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' 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." 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 those 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 Shakspere'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, Shakspere 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 For the method of Bottom and his company is necessary. precisely the reverse, as Gervinus has observed, of Shakspere'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!" Shakspere 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. Shakspere as much as says, "If you do not approve of my dramatic method of presenting fairy-land and 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 |