Obe. "What thou see'st when thou dost wake,

Do it for thy true-love take;'

Midsummer-night's Dream. Act 2, Scene 2.

"

PREFACE

By ISRAEL GOLLANCZ, M.A.

THE EDITIONS

Two Quarto editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream appeared in the year 1600:

(i.) A Midsommer night's dreame. As it hath been sundry times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. Imprinted at London, for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe, at the signe of the White Hart, in Fleetestreete. 1600.

(ii.) An edition with the same title, bearing the name of "Iames Roberts" instead of "Thomas Fisher."

These editions are styled respectively the First and Second Quartos; the Second was probably a pirated reprint of Fisher's, but the differences between them are unimportant, and though the First must be considered the authoritative text, both copies are remarkably accurate, when compared with other Quartos.

The First Folio version of the play was printed from the Second Quarto, with a few slight and unimportant changes, and with some careless errors.

THE DATE OF COMPOSITION

The only positive piece of external evidence for the date of A Midsummer Night's Dream is its mention by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598. Various attempts have been made to fix the occasion for which the play was originally written. Lord Southampton's marriage with

Elizabeth Vernon has been proposed by some, but this did not take place till 1598; others maintain that the occasion was the marriage of the Earl of Essex with Lady Frances Sidney, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, in 1590; there is, however, absolutely no authority for the statement, and the probabilities are strongly opposed to the supposition.

The most valuable internal indication of the date of composition is perhaps to be found in Act v. i. 52–55:— "The thrice three Muses mourning for the death Of Learning, late deceased in beggary. This is some satire, keen and critical, Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony."

We have most likely in these lines a reference to the death of Robert Greene, "utriusque Academiæ in Artibus Magister," the novelist and dramatist, whose Groatsworth of Wit contained his well-known attack on "the onely Shake-scene in a country"; in this pamphlet Greene spoke as the very representative of "Learning," and sounded the alarm of the scholar-poets at the triumphs of the "unlearned" players in general, and of one "up-start crowe" in particular. Greene died in degraded beggary in the autumn of 1592. The phrase "the thrice three Muses" was in all likelihood suggested by Spenser's Teares of the Muses (published in 1591), in which the nine Muses severally bewail the neglect of the scholars,-one of many similar laments to be found in Elizabethan literature (cp. e.g. the lines at the end of the first sestiad of Marlowe's Hero and Leander). The words "late deceas'd" would, according to this interpretation, fix the date of composition at about 1592-3.

On the other hand, it is maintained that Titania's description of the disastrous state of the weather (II. i. 88– 117) points directly to the wretched summer of the year 1594; various contemporary accounts have come down to us of that terrible year, all of them recalling Shakespeare's words:

"A colder time in world was never seene:

The skies do loure, the sun and moone wax dim;
Summer scarce known, but that the leaves are greene.
The winter's waste drives water ore the brim;

Upon the land great flotes of wood may swim;"
-CHURCHYARD's Charitie, 1595.

[cp. Forman's Diary (1564-1602); Stowe's Chronicle, under the year 1594; Dr. King's Lectures upon Jonas delivered at Yorke in the year of our Lorde 1594.]

The general characteristics of the play lead to nothing very definite as far as its date is concerned; the rhymetest is obviously no criterion, for the comedy is intentionally lyrical; but the blank-verse, with its paucity of double-endings and general regularity, the carefully elaborated plan and symmetrical arrangement of the plot, the comparative absence of real characterization, the many reminiscences of country life, the buoyancy of its tone, all these elements manifestly connect A Midsummer Night's Dream with the group of early "love plays,"-Love's Labor's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Comedy of Errors, and it may reasonably be placed between this group and the play to which they all seem to serve as preparatory efforts, the love-tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,—i.e. about the years 1593-1595. In all probability it passed through various revisions before its appearance as we have it in the First Quarto.

THE SOURCES

(i.) Shakespeare may well have evolved A Midsummer Night's Dream from Chaucer's Knight's Tale,1 to which he is obviously indebted for many elements. The general frame-work of the play-viz., the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, must have been suggested by the Tale; but Shakespeare ingeniously opens the Dream before the marriage, so that this event may round off the whole play; Chaucer introduces us to the pair at their home-coming 1 Shakespeare's debt to Plutarch's Life of Theseus amounts to very little, a few names and allusions.