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. Dr. Johnson, it is true, could examine and graciously approve Master William Shakespeare's 'composition' in this pedagoguish style:

"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."

But Johnson lived, as Mr. Knight well remarks, and as the reader of this volume will be convinced before he finishes it, "in a prosaic age, and fostered in this particular the real ignorance by which he was surrounded. It is perfectly useless to dissect such criticism: let it be a beacon to warn us, and not a 'load-star' to guide us.”

*

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. Some have even gone so far as to say that it shows a failure of the author's constructive ability. The following remarks by Hazlitt are part of a criticism which has been often quoted:

"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 foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality."

This is well said; but 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 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. Lear, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth would go with the Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ariel and the Fairies, in the last two, are not more impossible than the ghosts and the witches in Hamlet and Macbeth, or more ideal than the characters of Lear and Othello.

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, all those which have thrilled the souls and quickened the pulses of men for centuries, as well in the theatre as in the closet, are unfit for the stage; an absurdity which Mr. Hazlitt could not have intended to assert. But if he meant, as it would seem he must have 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. We should not forget that when it was brought out, Oberon and Titania

*It has been. The general public will not soon forget the charm, or the critical, the true Shakesperian flavor of the performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream under the direction of Mr. Burton at his own theatre.

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.

It is undeniable, however, that A Midsummer Night's Dream is peculiarly exacting in its requisitions for proper representation. It unites, nay more,-it blends, with an all-controlling hand, the mythology and the manners of classic Greece, with the superstitions and the habits which sprung from the romantic and the grotesque spirit of the Middle Ages. In it, we have demi-gods and Amazons, with fairies and elves; the two incongruous elements being bound together by two links,-one of human love, the other of human folly. But it is remarkable that, though they are connected, they are not brought together. The kinsman of Hercules and the Queen of the Amazons are brought into contact or relation with the lovers and the clowns; and the fairies are even more intimately connected with their fortunes; but the latter and the former never come together,—have no influence upon each other. Theseus and Oberon, Hippolyta and Titania, Puck and Philostrate never meet; and though working to a common end, have no common purpose. The merely human elements of the play, also, which are essentially incongruous, do not come into contact except nominally, in the last Scene: the Athenian lovers and the amateur Athenian players, who are in fact but representations of the amateur players of the early half of the sixteenth century, are kept as much apart as if they were in different plays. How wonderful is the genius which has bound all these antagonistic powers together without destroying their

individual strength, which has blent all these opposite traits without depriving them of their individual character!

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 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" of an humble-bee ? What mortal voices can sing, "You spotted snakes, with double tongue ?" These are all practical impossibilities; but they were even less possible in Shakespeare's day