Arcadia, but the coincidences are slight, and it may be doubted that Shakspere had here any thought of the Arcadia. 6. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a strange and beautiful web, woven delicately by a youthful poet's fancy. What is perhaps most remarkable about the play is the harmonious blending in it of widely different elements. It is as if threads of silken splendour were run together in its texture with a yarn of hempen homespun, and both these with lines of dewy gossamer and filaments drawn from the moonbeams. In North's Plutarch, or in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Shakspere may have found the figures of Theseus and his Amazonian bride; from Chaucer also (Wife of Bath's Tale), may have come the figure of the elfqueen (though not her name, Titania), and the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (see Chaucer's Legend of Good Women); this last, however, was perhaps taken from Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Oberon, the fairy-king, had recently appeared in Greene's play The Scottish History of James IV.; Puck, under his name of Robin Goodfellow, was a roguish sprite, well known in English fairy-lore. Finally, in Montemayor's Diana, which Shakspere had made acquaintance with before The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written, occur some incidents which may have suggested the magic effects of the flower-juice laid upon the sleeping lovers' lids. Taking a little from this quarter and a little from that, Shakspere created out of such slight materials his marvellous Dream. The marriage of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta-who are classical in name only, being in reality romantic mediæval figures. -surrounds the whole, as it were, with a magnificent frame. Theseus is Shakspere's early ideal of a heroic warrior and man of action. His life is one of splendid achievement and of joy; his love is a kind of happy victory, his marriage a triumph. From early morning, when his hounds-themselves heroic creatures-fill the valley with their "musical confusion," until mid night, when the Athenian clowns end their " very tragical mirth," with a Bergomask dance, Theseus displays his joyous energy and the graciousness of power. In contrast with him and his warrior bride, the figures of the young lovers look slight and graceful, and their love-perplexities and errors are seen to be among the minor and remediable afflictions of the world. Shakspere was not interested in making much distinction of character between Demetrius and Lysander, they are little more than a first lover and a second lover. Nor is Helena distinguishable from Hermia by much else than that in person she is the taller of the two and the gentler in disposition. Where there are so many contrasts, the play can admit, and perhaps needs, some uniformities. The mirth of the lovers' part of A Midsummer Night's Dream turns chiefly upon incidents, and therefore, as with the brothers Antipholus in The Comedy of Errors, differences of character are not made prominent. Here, as in the Errors, there are entanglements and crosspurposes. The one play has indeed been named "the mistakes of a day," and the other "the mistakes of a night" but the difference lies deeper than such names intimate; for in the Errors the confusion is external to the mind, here it is internal; in the Errors the feelings of the actors remain constant, but the persons towards whom they are directed take the place, unobserved, one of another; here the persons remain constant, but their feelings of love, indifference, or dislike are at the mercy of mischief-making accident. It may be noticed that in The Comedy of Errors there is a passage (Act II. Sc. ii. L. 190–204) which looks as if when Shakspere wrote it he were already thinking of his fairy-world in A Midsummer Night's Dream, of the pranks of Robin Goodfellow, and of Bottom's transformation to an ass. As the two extremes of exquisite delicacy, of dainty elegance, and, on the other hand, of thick-witted grossness and clumsiness, stand the fairy tribe and the group of Athenian handicraftsmen. The world of the poet's dream includes the two-a Titania, and a Bottom the weaver-and can bring them into grotesque conjunction. No such fairy poetry existed anywhere in English literature before Shakspere. The tiny elves, to whom a cowslip is tall, for whom the third part of a minute is an important division of time, have a miniature perfection which is charming. They delight in all beautiful and dainty things, and war with things that creep and things that fly, if they be uncomely; their lives are gay with fine frolic and delicate revelry. Puck, the jester of Fairyland, stands apart from the rest, the recognisable "lob of spirits,' a rough, "fawn-faced, shock-pated little fellow, a very Shetlander among the gossamer-winged, dainty-limbed shapes around him.” The rehearsing of their play and its performance before the Duke affords a happy occasion for grouping together the carpenter, the tinker, the bellows-mender, and their fellows who have turned actors for the nonce. Bottom, in his broad-blown self-importance, his all but impenetrable self-satisfaction, stands a head and shoulders higher in absurdity than any other comic personage in Shakspere's early plays. He is the admitted king of his company, the cock of his walk— and he has a consciousness that his gifts are more than equal to his opportunities. When the ass's head is on his shoulders it seems hardly a disguise, so naturally does the human-asinine seem to come to Bottom; he might have been for twelve months Titania's longeared love, so easily do his new honours sit upon him; nor is he more embarrassed in offering to Duke Theseus his explanations of the play. This comedy of the Athenian handicraftsmen, it should be noted, is an indirect answer to any objections which might be brought against Shakspere's attempt to represent the fairy-world, and the world of classical romance, which could be so ill set visibly before the spectators of an Elizabethan theatre. In Pyramus and Thisbe, an actual man with a lantern stands for the moon; another represents Wall with plaster on his fingers. Bottom and his crew assume that the spectators of a drama have no imaginations; Shakspere in his fairy Dream assumes that they can imagine as poetically real anything beautiful or grotesque which the poet suggests to them. It has been conjectured that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written to grace the wedding of some noble person-Southampton, who was married in 1598, or Essex, who was married in 1590. But these dates are, the one too late, the other too early. The lines (Act V. Sc. i. L. 52-53) The thrice three Muses mourning for the death have been thought to refer to Robert Greene's miser- It was probably acted before Elizabeth. The praise of "single blessedness" (Act I. Sc. i. L. 74-78) may have been designed to please the ears of the maiden queen; and Oberon's vision (Act II. Sc. i. L. 148–168) contains a splendid piece of poetical homage to her. The "fair vestal throned by the west," is certainly ! Elizabeth. It was supposed by Warburton that by "the mermaid on a dolphin's back was meant Mary Queen of Scots (the dauphin's wife), and by the "stars," the English nobles who fell in her quarrel. It has been shown, however, that a mermaid on a dolphin's back, and shooting fires, actually formed part of the Kenilworth festivities with which Leicester entertained Elizabeth, when aiming at his mistress' hand, and which Shakspere as a boy may have witnessed. Elizabeth escaped heart-whole, but Lettice, wife of the Earl of Essex, was at that time falsely loved by Leicester, and she it has been suggested— perhaps over-ingeniously-may be "the little western flower." The action of the play is comprised within three days, ending at twelve o'clock on the night of Mayday. The notes of time given in the opening lines of the play are inconsistent with this statement, but the inconsistency is Shakspere's own. Two quarto editions, of which the second was probably pirated, were issued in the year 1600. 7. King Henry VI., Parts II. and III., are recasts of two older plays--The First Part of the Contention, &c. (published 1594), and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, &c. (published 1595). About 3241 lines of these old plays reappear either in the same or in an altered form in 2 and 3 Henry VI., what remains, nearly one-half of the Henry VI. (2736 lines) being altogether new. No question in Shakspere scholarship is more perplexing and difficult than that of the authorship of these four connected historical dramas. It is impossible here to enter into this discussion, but the chief rival theories must be briefly stated: (1) Shakspere was author of the four plays: the opinion of Knight, and almost certainly erro neous. (2) Greene and Peele were the authors of the old plays; Shakspere the reviser, retaining portions |