Preface

[:Oc:c;c;c(r-,.c|v^.,r:^
Vav'c'cVc'c
A NEW VARIORUM EDITION
OF
Shakespeare
EDITED BY
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
HON. PH. D. (HALLE), HON. L. H. D. (COLUMB.), HON. LL D. (PENN. ET HARV.f HON. LITT. D. (CANTAB.)
A Midsommer Nights D re a me
EIGHTH EDITION
PHILADELPHIA & LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Copyright, 1895, by H. H. Furness. Copyright, 1923, by H. H. Furness Jr.
W bstcott & Thomson, Electrotypers and Stereotypers, Phila.
Press op J. B. Lippincott Company, Phila.
11 22
IN MEMORIAM
PREFACE
*1 know not,’ says Dr Johnson, ‘why Shakespeare calls this play '“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when he so carefully informs us ‘that it happened on the night preceding May day.’
‘The title of this play,’ responds Dr Farmer, ‘seems no more
* intended to denote the precise time of the action than that of The
* Winter' s Tale , which we find was at the season of sheep-shearing.’
‘In Twelfth Night,' remarks Steevens, ‘Olivia observes of Mal- ‘volio’s seeming frenzy, that ‘‘it is a very Midsummer madness.” ‘That time of the year, we may therefore suppose, was anciently ‘ thought productive of mental vagaries resembling the scheme of ‘ Shakespeare’s play. To this circumstance it might have owed its ‘ title.’
‘ I imagine, ’ replies the cautious Malone, ‘ that the title was ‘suggested by the time it was first introduced on the stage, which ‘was probably at Midsummer: “A Dream for the entertaimnent of ‘“a Midsummer night.” Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale ‘had probably their titles from a similar circumstance.’
Here the discussion of the Title of the Play among our forbears closed, and ever since there has been a general acquiescence in the reason suggested by Malone : however emphatic may be the allusions to May-day, the play was designed as one of those which were com¬ mon at Midsummer festivities. To the inheritors of the English tongue the potent sway of fairies on Midsummer Eve is familiar. The very title is in itself a charm, and frames our minds to accept without question any delusion of the night ; and this it is which shields it from criticism.
Not thus, however, is it with our German brothers. Their native air is not spungy to the dazzling spells of Shakespeare’s genius. Against his wand they are magic-proof ; they are not to be hugged into his snares ; titles of plays must be titles of plays, and indicate what they mean.
Accordingly, from the earliest days of German translation, this discrepancy in the present play between festivities, with the magic
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PREFACE
rites permissible only on Walpurgisnacht, the first of May, and a dream seven weeks later on Johannisnacht, the twenty-fourth of June, was a knot too intrinse to unloose, and to this hour, I think, no Ger¬ man editor has ventured to translate the title more closely than by A Summernight’ s Dream. In the earliest translation, that by Wieland in 1762, the play was named, without comment as far as I can discover, Etn St. Johamtis JV achts- Traum. But then v/e must remember that Wieland was anxious to propitiate a public wedded to French dra¬ matic laws and unprepared to accept the barbarisms of Gilles Shake¬ speare. Indeed, so alert was poor Wieland not to offend the purest taste that he scented, in some incomprehensible way, a flagrant impro¬ priety in ‘Hence, you long-legged spinners , hence;’ a dash in his text replaces a translation of the immodest word ‘spinner,’ which is paraphrased for us, however, in a footnote by the more decent word ‘spider,’ which we can all read without a blush.
Eschenburg, Voss, Schlegel, Tieck, Bodenstedt, Schmidt (to whom we owe much for his Lexicon), all have Ein Sommer Nachts Traum. Rapp follows Wieland, but then Rapp is a free lance ; he changes Titles, Names, Acts, and Scenes at will ; The Two Gentlemen of Verona becomes The Two Friends of Oporto, with the scene laid in Lisbon, and with every name Portuguese. But Simrock, whose Plots of Shakespeare's Plays, translated and issued by The Shakespeare Society in 1840, is helpful,— Simrock boldly changed the title to Walpurgis- nachtstraum, and stood bravely by it in spite of the criticisms of Kurz in the Shakespeare fahrbuch (iv, 304). Simrock’s main diffi¬ culty seems to me to be one which he shares in common with many German critics, who apparently assume that Shakespeare’s ways were their ways, and that he wrote with the help of the best Conver- sations-Lexicon within his reach; that at every step Shakespeare looked up historical evidence, ransacked the classics, and burrowed deeply in the lore of Teutonic popular superstitions; accordingly if we are to believe Simrock, it was from the popular superstitions of Germany that Shakespeare, in writing the present play, most largely
Tieck, in a note to Schlegel’s translation in 1830, had said that the Johannisnacht, the twenty-fourth of June, was celebrated in England and indeed almost throughout Europe, by many innocent and super¬ stitious observances, such as seeking for the future husband or sweet- heart &c. This assertion Simrock (p. 436, ed. Hildburghausen, 1868) uncompromisingly pronounces false; because the only cus- tom menaoDd by Grimm in his Mythologie, p. 555, as taking place on Midsummer Eve is that of wending to neighboring springs,
PREFACE
vii
there to find healing and strength in the waters. On Midsummer Night there were only the Midsummer fires. When, however, Tieck goes on to say that ‘ many herbs and flowers are thought to ‘attain only on this night their full strength or magical power,’ he takes Simrock wholly with him ; here at last, says the latter, in this
fact, * that the magic power of herbs is restricted to certain tides
* and times, lies the source of all the error in the title of this play,
‘a title which cannot have come from Shakespeare’s hands.’ All
the blame is to be laid on the magic herbs with which the eyes of the characters in the play were latched. Shakespeare, continues Simrock, must have been perfectly aware that he had represented this drama as played, not at the summer solstice, but on the Wal- purgis night, — Theseus makes several allusions to the May-day ob¬ servances; and inasmuch as this old symbolism was vividly present to the poet, we may assume that he placed the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta on the first of May, because the May King and May Queen were wont to be married within the first twelve days of that month. Even Oberon’s and Titania’s domestic quarrel over the little changeling * is founded on the German legends of the gods Frea and Gwodan quarrel in the same way over their devotees, and Frigga and Odin, in the Edda , over Geirrod and Agnar. ‘ The commentators, ’ complains Simrock, ‘ are profuse enough with their explanations where ' no explanations are needed, but not a hint do they give us of the ‘reason why Puck is called a “wanderer,” whereas it is an epithet ‘which originated in the wanderings of Odin.’ This Germanising of Shakespeare is, I think, pushed to its extreme when Simrock finds an indication of Puck’s high rank among the fairies in the mad sprite’s ‘ other name, Ruprecht, which is Ruodperacht , the Glory-glittering. ’ It is vain to ask where Shakespeare calls Puck ‘Ruprecht;’ it is enough for Simrock that Robin Goodfellow’s counterpart in German Folk lore is Ruprecht, and that he chooses so to translate the name Robin. As a final argument for his adopted title, Walpurgisnachts- traum, Simrock (p. 437) urges that Oberon, Titania, and Puck could not have had their sports on Midsummer’s Eve, because this is the shortest night in the year and it was made as bright as day by bonfires. In reply to Kurz’s assertion that Wieland’s Oberon suggested Goethe’s Intermezzo (that incomprehensible and ineradicable defect in Goethe’s immortal poem), Simrock replies ( Quellen des Shakespeare , 2d ed. ii, 343, 1870) that Goethe took no hint whatever from Wieland’s Oberon , but named his Intermezzo — A Walpurgisnachts Traum 1 in ‘ deference to Shakespeare, just as Shakespeare himself would have ‘ named his own play, knowing that the mad revelry of spirits, for
V1U
PREFACE
‘ which the night of the first of May is notorious, then goes rushing ‘by like a dream.’
This brief account of a discussion in Germany is not out of place here. From it we learn somewhat of the methods of dealing with Shakespeare in that land which claims an earlier and more inti¬ mate appreciation of him than is to be found in his own country — a claim which, I am sorry to say, has been acknowledged by some of Shakespeare’s countrymen who should have known better.
The discrepancy noted by Dr Johnson can be, I think, explained by recalling the distinction, always in the main preserved in England, between festivities and rites attending the May-day celebrations and those of the twenty-fourth of June : the former were allotted to the day-time and the latter to the night-time.* As the wedding sports of Theseus, with hounds and horns and Interludes, were to take place by daylight, May day was the fit time for them j as the cross purposes of the lovers were to be made straight with fairy charms during slum¬ ber, night was chosen for them, and both day and night were woven together, and one potent glamour floated over all in the shadowy realm of a midsummer night’s dream.
I he text of the First Folio, the Editio Princeps, has been again adopted in the present play, as in the last four volumes of this edition. It has been reproduced, from my own copy, with all the exactitude in my power. The reasons for adopting this text are duly set forth in the Preface to Othello , and need not be repeated. Time has but confirmed the conviction that it is the text which a student needs constantly before him. In a majority of the plays it is the freshest from Shakespeare’s own hands.
As in the case of fifteen or sixteen other plays of Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night' s Dream was issued in Quarto, during Shakespeare’s lifetime. In this Quarto form there were two issues, both of them
^t1600’ To only one of them was a license to print granted by the Master Wardens of the Stationers’ Company— the nearest approach in those days to the modern copyright. The license is thus reprinted by Arber in his Transcript of the Stationers' Registers , vol. iii, p. 174 :f
* How many, how various, how wild, and occasionally how identical these fes¬ tivities were, the curious reader may learn in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, i, 212- 247, 298-337, Bohn’s ed., or in Chambers’s Book of Days
t In Malone’s reprint of this entry, the title reads a may be worth while to mention what, I believe, has been nowhere noticed, the variation in the title as it stands in the Third and Fourth Folios: ‘A Midsummers
PREFACE
IX
s. octobris [1600]
Thomas ffyssher Entred for his copie vnder the handes of master Rodes I and the Wardens A booke called A
mydsommer nightes Dreame . vjd
The book thus licensed and entered appeared eventually with the following title page : — * A | Midfommer nights | dreame. | As it ‘ hath beene Sundry times pub- | lickely ailed, by the Right honoura- \
‘ ble, the Lord Chamberlaine his | feruants. | Written by William 1 Shakespeare. | [Publishers punning device of a king-fisher, with a reference, in the motto, to the old belief in halcyon weather : ‘ motos foleo comp oner e fluctus] *[[ Imprinted at London, for Thomas ‘ Fisher, and are to | be foulde at his Ihoppe, at the Signe of the ‘White Hart, | in Fleeteftreete. 1600.’
The Quarto thus authorised is called the First Quarto (Qt), and sometimes Fisher’s Quarto.
No entry of a license to print the other Quarto has been found in the Stationers' Registers. Its title is as follows ‘A | Midfom- ‘ mer nights | dreame. | As it hath beene fundry times pub- | likely ‘ ailed, by the Right Honoura - | ble, the Lord Chamberlaine his | feruants. | Written by William Shakefpeare. | [Heraldic device, with ‘ the motto Post Tenebras Lvx.] Printed by lames Roberts, 1600.’
This is termed the Second Quarto (Q,) or Roberts’s Quarto. The second place is properly allotted to it, because, apart from the plea that an unregistered edition ought not, in the absence of proof, to take pre¬ cedence of one that is registered, it is little likely, so it seems to me, that Fisher would have applied for a license to print when another edition was already on the market ; and he might have saved his registration fee. There are, however, two eminent critics who are inclined to give the priority to this unregistered Quarto of Roberts. ‘ Perhaps,’ says Hal- liwell,* Fisher s edition, which, on the whole, seems to be more cor¬ rect than the other, was printed from a corrected copy of that published ‘ by Roberts. It has, indeed, been usually supposed that Fisher’s edition ‘ was the earliest, but no evidence has been adduced in support of this ‘ assertion, and the probabilities are against this view being the correct one. Fisher s edition could not have been published till nearly the ‘ end of the year ; and, in the absence of direct information to the ‘contrary, it may be presumed t-hat the one printed by Roberts is ‘really the first edition.’ If the ‘probabilities,’ thus referred to, are the superiority of Fisher’s text and the lateness in the year at which it was registered, both may be, I think, lessened by urging, first, that
* Memoranda on the Midsummer Might* s Dreamy p, 34, 1879.
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PREFACE
the excellence of the text is counterbalanced by the inferiority of the typography, a defect little likely to occur in a second edition ; and, secondly, in regard to the ‘end of the year,’ Halliwell, I cannot but think, overlooked the fact that the year began on the 25th of March ; the 8th of October was therefore only a fortnight past the middle of the year.
The other critic who does not accept Fisher’s registered copy (Q,) as earlier than Roberts’s unregistered copy (Qa) is Fleay, to whom ‘ it seems far more likely ’ ( The English Drama , ii, 179) that ‘ Roberts ‘ printed the play for Fisher, who did not, for some reason unknown to ‘ us, care to put his name on the first issue ; but finding the edition ‘ quickly exhausted, and the play popular, he then appended his ‘name as publisher.’ Furthermore, Fleay makes the remarkable assertion that ‘ printer’s errors are far more likely to have been intro- ‘ duced than corrected in a second edition.’ From Fleay’s hands we have received such bountiful favours in his Chronicle History of the London Stage and in his Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama that it seems ungracious to criticise. Shall we not, like Lokman the Wise, ‘accept one bitter fruit’ ? and yet this bitter fruit is elsewhere of a growth which overruns luxuriantly all dealings with the historical Shakespeare, where surmise is assumed as fact, and structures are reared on imaginary foundations. Does it anywhere stand recorded, let me respectfully ask, that Thomas Fisher ‘ found that the edition * was quickly exhausted ’ ?
Thus, then, with these two texts and the Folio we have our critical apparatus for the discovery, amid misprints and sophistications, of Shakespeare’s own words, which is the butt and sea-mark of our utmost sail. To enter into any minute examination of the three texts is needless in an edition like the present. It is merely forestalling the work, the remunerative work, of the student; wherefor all that is needed is fully given in the Textual Notes, which therein fulfill the purpose of their existence. Results obtained by the student’s own study of these Textual Notes will be more profitable to him than results gathered by another, be they tabulated with ultra-German minuteness. It is where only one single text is before him that a student needs another’s help. This help is obtrusive when, as in this edition, there are prac¬ tically forty texts on the same page. All that is befitting here, at the threshold of the volume, is to set forth certain general conclusions.
In the Folio, the Acts are indicated. In none of the three texts is there any division into Scenes.
In Fisher’s Quarto (Q,), although the entrances of the characters are noted, the exits are often omitted, and the spelling throughout is
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archaic, for instance, shee, bedde , dogge, &c., betraying merely a com¬ positor’s peculiarity; to this same personal equation (to borrow an astronomical phrase) may be attributed such spellings as bould, I, i, 68; chaunting, I, i, 82; graunt , I, i, 234; daunce, II, i, 90; Per- chaunce, II, i, 144; ould, v, i, 273, and others elsewhere. Its typog¬ raphy when compared with that of the Second Quarto is inferior, the fonts are mixed, and the type old and battered. On the other hand, the Second Quarto, Roberts’s, has the fairer page, with type fresh and clear, and the spelling is almost that of to-day. The exits, too, are more carefully marked than in what is assumed to be its predecessor. Albeit the width of Roberts’s page is larger than Fisher’s, the two Quartos keep line for line together ; where, now and then, there hap¬ pens to be an overlapping, the gap is speedily spaced out. In both Quartos the stage directions are, as in copies used on the stage, in the imperative, such as ‘ wind horns , ’ ‘ sleep, ’ &c. Both Quartos have examples of spelling by the ear. In ‘ He watch Titania when ihe is ‘afleepe’ (II, i, 184) Roberts’s compositor, following the sound, set up ‘ lie watch Titania whence Ihe is afleepe. ’ In the same way the compositors of both Quartos set up : ‘ Dians bud, or Cupids flower,’ instead of: ‘ Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower.’ Again, it is the simi¬ larity of sound which led the compositors to set up : ‘ When the Wolf beholds the Moon,’ instead of behowls. And, indeed, I am inclined to regard all the spelling in Fisher’s Quarto, archaic and otherwise, as the result of composing by the ear from dictation, instead of by the eye from manuscript ; hence the spelling becomes the compositor’s personal equation. Moreover, many of the examples of what is called the ‘ absorption ’ of consonants are due, I think, to this cause. Take, for instance, a line from the scene where Bottom awakes. Roberts’s Quarto and the Folio read : * if he go about to expound this dream.’ Fisher’s compositor heard the sound of ‘to’ merged in the final / of ‘about,’ and so he set up, ‘if he go about expound ‘this dream.’ The same absorption occurs, I think, in a line in The Merchant of Venice, which, as it has never, I believe, been suggested, and has occurred to me since that play was issued in this edition, I may be pardoned for inserting here as an additional instance of the same kind. Shylock’s meaning has greatly puzzled editors and critics where he says to the Duke at the beginning of the trial: ‘I’ll not answer that: But say it is my humour, Is it an- ‘swered?’ Thus read, the reply is little short of self-contradiction. Shylock says that he will not answer, and yet asks the Duke if he is answered. Grant that the conjunction to was heard by the com¬ positor in the final t of ‘But,’ and we have the full phrase ‘I’D
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‘ not answer that but to say it is my humour,’ that is, ‘ I’ll answer that ‘no further than to say it is my humour. Is it answered?’
In the discussion of misprints in general, and especially of these instances of absorption — and these instances are numberless — not enough allowance has been made, I think, for this liability to com¬ pose by sound to which compositors even at the present day are exposed when with a retentive memory they carry long sentences in their minds, and to which compositors in the sixteenth and seven¬ teenth centuries were most especially exposed, when, as we have reason to believe, they did not, as a rule, compose by the eye from a copy before them, but wholly by the ear from dictation.* Furthermore, it is not impossible that many of the examples adduced to prove that the text of sundry Quartos was obtained from hearing the play on the stage may be traced to hearing the play in the printer’s office. Be this as it may, it is assuredly more likely that such blunders as ‘ Eagles ’ for sEgle, or ‘Peregenia’ for Perigouna (of North’s Plutarch), in II, i, 82, are due to the deficient hearing of a compositor, than that they were so written by a man of as accurate a memory as Shakespeare, whose ‘ less Greek ’ was ample to avoid such misnomers.
In the address ‘To the great Variety of Readers’ prefixed by Heminge and Condell to the First Folio, we are led by them to infer that the text of that edition was taken directly from Shakespeare’s own manuscript, which they had received from him with ‘scarse a blot.’ Unfortunately, in the present case, this cannot be strictly true. The proofs are only too manifest that the text of the Folio is that of Roberts’s Quarto (QQ. Let us not, however, be too hasty in imputing to Heminge and Condell a wilful untruth. It may be that in usin a printed text they were virtually using Shakespeare’s manuscript if they knew that this text was printed directly from his manuscript and had been for years used in their theatre as a stage copy, with possibly additional stage-business marked on the margin for the use of the prompter, and here and there sundry emendations, noted pos¬ sibly by the author’s own hand, who, by these changes, theoretically authenticated all the rest of the text.
• Conrad Zeltner, a learned printer of the 17th century, said _ ‘that it was
customary to employ a reader to read aloud to the compositors, who set the types rom dictation, not seeing the copy. He also says that the reader could dictate from as many different pages or copies to three or four compositors working together When the compositors were educated, the method of dictation may have been prac¬ tised with some success; when they were ignorant, it was sure to produce many errors. Zeltner said he preferred the old method, but he admits that it had to be a andoned on account of the increasing ignorance of the compositors.’— The Invtn ■ turn Qf Printing, &c. by T. L. De Vinne, New York, 1876, p. 524.
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The Folio was printed in 1623. We know that A Midsummer Night' s Dream was in existence in 1598. Is it likely that during the quarter of a century between these two dates, many leaves of legible manuscript would survive of a popular play, which had been handled over and over again by indifferent actors or by careless boys ? That many and many a play did really survive in manuscript for long years, we know, but then they had not, through lack of popularity, probably been exposed to as much wear and tear of stage use as A Midsummer Night' s Dream, wherein, too, about a third of the actors were boys.
Be this, however, as it may, in those days when an editor’s duty, hardly to this hour fully recognised, of following the ipsissima verba of his author, was almost unknown, it is an allowable sup¬ position that Heminge and Condell, unskilled editors in all re¬ gards, believed they were telling the substantial truth when they said they were giving us as the copy of Shakespeare’s own hand¬ writing, that which they knew was printed directly from it, and which might well have been used many a time and oft on the stage by Shakespeare himself.
Let us not be too hasty in condemning Shakespeare’s two friends who gathered together his plays for us. To be sure, it was on their part a business venture, but this does not lessen our gratitude. Had Heminge and Condell foreseen, what even no poet of that day, how¬ ever compact of all imagination, could foresee, ‘ the fierce light ’ which centuries after was destined ‘ to beat ’ on every syllable of every line, it is possible that not even the allurements of a successful stroke of business could have induced them to assume their heavy responsibility; they might have ‘shrunk blinded by the glare,’ the world have lacked the Folio, and the current of literature have been, for all time, turned awry.
The reasons which induced Shakespeare’s close friends and fellow - actors to adopt Roberts’s Quarto (Q2) as the Folio text, we shall never know, but adopt it they did, as the Textual Notes in the present edi¬ tion make clear, with manifold proofs. It is not, however, solely by similarity of punctuation, or even of errors, that the identity of the two texts is to be detected ; these might be due to a common origin ; but there are ways more subtle whereby we can discover the ‘ copy ’ used by the compositors of the Folio. Should a noteworthy example be desired, it may be found in III, i, 168-170, where Titania calls for Pease-blossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed, and the four little fairies enter with their ‘Ready,’ ‘And I,’ ‘And I,’ ‘And I.’ In the Folio, Titania’s call is converted into a stage-direc-
XJV
PREFACE
tion, with Enter before it, and the little fairies as they come in respond ‘Ready’ without having been summoned. Had the Folio been our only text, there would have been over this line much shedding of Christian and, I fear it must be added, unchristian ink. But by referring to the Quartos we find that it is in obedience to Titania s call that the atomies enter, and that Enter foure Fairy es is the only stage-direction there. Like all proper names in both Quartos and Folios, the names Peaseblossom and the others are in Italics, as are also all stage-directions. In Fisher’s Quarto (Q,) Titania’s sum¬ mons is correctly printed as the concluding line of her speech, thus : — ‘ Peafe-bl offome, Cobweb, Moth, and Mujiard-feede ?' In Roberts’s Quarto (Q,) the line is also printed as of Titania’s speech, but the compositor carelessly overlooked both the ‘ and ’ in Roman, which he changed to Italic, and the interrogation at the end, which he changed to a full stop, thus converting it apparently into a genuine stage-direc¬ tion, and as such it was incontinently accepted by his copyist the com¬ positor of the Folio, who prefixed Enter and changed Enter foure Fairies into and foure Fairies, thereby making the number of Fairies eight in all; and he may have thought himself quite ‘smart,’ as the Yankees say, in thus clearing up a difficulty which was made for him by Roberts’s compositor, through the printing in Italic of ‘ and ’ and through the change of punctuation. Thus it is clear, I think, that in this instance there can be little doubt that Roberts’s Quarto was the direct source of the text of the First Folio.
There are, however, certain variations here and there between the Quartos and Folio which indicate in the latter a mild editorial supervision. For instance, in II, i, 95 both Quartos read ‘euerie pelting riuer ;’ the Folio changes ‘pelting’ to ‘petty,’ an improve¬ ment which bears the trace of a hand rather more masterful than that of a compositor who elsewhere evinces small repugnance at repeating errors. In III, i, 90, after the exit of Bottom, Quince says, according to the Quartos, ‘A stranger Pyramus than e’er played ‘ here ’—a remark impossible in Quince’s mouth. The Folio corrects by giving it to Puck. In III, ii, 227, in the Quartos, Hermia utters an incurably prosaic line, ‘I am amazed at your words;’ the Folio, with a knowledge beyond that of a mere compositor, prints, ‘ I ‘am amazed at your passionate words.’
Again, there is another class of variations which reveal to us that the copy of the Quarto, from which the Folio was printed, had been a stage-copy. In the first scene of all, Theseus bids Philostrate, as the Master of the Revels, ‘ go stir up the Athenian youth to merriments.’ Philostrate retires and immediately after
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XV
Egeus enters. In no scene throughout the play, except in the very last, are Philostrate and Egeus on the stage at the same time, so that down to this last scene one actor could perform the two parts, and this practice of ‘ doubling ’ must have been frequent enough in a company as small as at The Globe. In the last scene, however, it is the duty of Philostrate to provide the entertainment, and Egeus too has to be present. There can be no ‘ doubling ’ now, and one of the two characters must be omitted. Of course it is the unimportant Philostrate who is stricken out ; Egeus remains, and becomes the Mas¬ ter of the Revels and provides the entertainment. In texts to be used only by readers any change whatever is needless, but in a text to be used by actors the prefixes to the speeches must be changed, and ‘Phil.' must be erased and ‘ Egeus ’ substituted. And this, I be¬ lieve, is exactly what was done in the copy of the Quarto from which the Folio was printed,— but in the erasing, one speech (V, i, 84) was accidentally overlooked, and the tell-tale ‘Phil.’ remained. This, of itself, is almost sufficient proof that the Folio was printed from a copy which was used on the stage.
Furthermore, cumulative proofs of this stage-usage are afforded both by the number and by the character of the stage-directions. In Fisher’s Quarto (Q,) there are about fifty-six stage-directions ; in Roberts’s (Qa)> about seventy-four ; and in the Folio, about ninety-seven, not counting the division into Acts. Such minute attention to stage-busi¬ ness in the Folio as compared with the Quartos should not be over¬ looked.
There remain in the Folio two other traces of a stage copy which, trifling though they may be, add largely, I cannot but think, to the general conclusion. In V, i, 134, before Pyramus and the others appear, we have the stage-direction ‘ Tawyer with a Trumpet before them .’ In ‘ Tawyer ’ we have the name of one of the company, be it Trumpeter or Presenter, just as in Romeo and Juliet we find * Enter Will Kempe .’ The second trace of the prompter’s hand is to be found, I think, in III, i, 1 1 6, where Pyramus, according to the stage-direction of the Folio, enters ‘ with the Asse head.' In all modern editions this is of course changed to ‘ an Ass’s head,’ but the prompter of Shakespeare’s stage, knowing well enough that there was among the scanty proper¬ ties but one Ass-head, inserted in the text ‘ with the Asse head ’ — the only one they had.
In any review of the text of the Folio one downright oversight should be noted. It is the omission of a whole line, which is giver in both Quartos. The omission occurs after III, ii, 364, where the omitted line as given by the Quartos is : —
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‘ Her. I am amaz’d, and know not what to fay. Exeunt
Had the Folio omitted Hermia’s speech while retaining the Exeunt , we might infer that the omission was intentional ; but, as there is no Exeunt in the Folio where it is needed, the conclusion is inevitable that the omission of the whole line is merely a compositor’s oversight, and not due to an erasure by the prompter or the author, who had the line before him in his Quarto.
To sum up the three texts: — Fisher’s registered Quarto, or The First Quarto, has the better text, and inferior typography. Roberts’s unregistered Quarto, or The Second Quarto, corrects some of the errors in Fisher’s, is superior to it in stage-directions; in spelling; and, occasionally, in the division of lines; but is inferior in punc¬ tuation. The First Folio was printed from a copy of Roberts’s Quarto, which had been used as a prompter’s stage copy. Thus theoretically there are three texts; virtually there is but one. The variations between the three will warrant scarcely more than the inference that possibly in the Folio we can now and then detect the revising hand of the author. In any microscopic examination of the Quartos and Folios, with their commas and their colons, we must be constantly on our guard lest we fall into the error of imagining that we are dealing with the hand of Shakespeare ; in reality it is sim¬ ply that of a mere compositor.
The stories of the texts of A Midsummer Night' s Dream and of The Merchant of Venice are much alike. In both there are two Quartos, and in both a Quarto was the ‘ copy ’ for the Folio, and in both the inferior Quarto was selected ; both plays were entered on the Stationers' Registers in the month of October, of the same year ; both were the early ventures of young stationers ( The Merchant of Venice was Thomas Heyes’s second venture, and A Midsummer Night's Dream Thomas Fisher’s first), and in both of them James Roberts figures as the almost simultaneous printer of the same play. And it is this James Roberts who is, I believe, the centre of all the entangle¬ ment over these Quartos of The Merchant of Venice and of A Mid¬ summer Night's Dream , just as I have supposed him to be in the case of As You Like It (see As You Like It, p. 296, and Merchant of Venice, p. 271 of this edition). I will here add no darker shadows to the portrait of James Roberts, which, in the Appendix to As You Like It, was painted ‘ from the depths of my consciousness.’ I will merely emphasize the outlines by supposing that young Thomas Heyes and young Thomas Fisher were the victims of the older, shrewder James Roberts, who in some unknowable way was close enough to
PREFACE
xvu
the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants to obtain, honestly or, I fear me, dishonestly, manuscript copies of Shakespeare’s plays, and, unable, through ill-repute with the Wardens, to obtain a license to print, he sold these copies to two inexperienced young stationers; and then, after his victims’ books were published, in one case actually printing the Quarto for one of them, he turned round and issued a finer and more attractive edition for his own benefit. Then, after the two rival editions were issued, the same friendship or bribery, which obtained for him a copy taken from the manuscript of Shakespeare, led the actors to use James Roberts’s clearly printed page in place of the worn and less legible stage manuscript. Hence it may be that Heminge and Condell, knowing the craft whereby the text of Roberts’s Quarto was obtained, could with truth refer to it as ‘stolne and surreptitious,’ and yet at the same time adopt a copy of it which had been long in use on the stage, worn and corrected perchance by the very hand of the Master, as the authentic text for the Folio ; and in announcing that they had used Shakespeare’s own manuscript, their assertion was a grace not greatly ‘snatched beyond the bounds of truth.’
Thus, by the aid of that pure imagination which is a constant factor in the solution of problems connected with Shakespeare as a breather of this world, we may solve the enigma of the Quartos and Folio of this play and of the others where James Roberts figures.
It is perhaps worth while to note the ingenuity, thoroughly Ger¬ man, with which Dr Alexander Schmidt converts the heraldic device on the title-page of James Roberts’s Quarto into an example of pun¬ ning arms. ‘ The crowned eagle,’ says the learned lexicographer (. Program , & c. p. 14), ‘on the left of the two compartments into ‘ which the shield is divided, probably indicates King James , Eliza- ‘ beth’s successor, and gives us the printer’s surname. The key, with ‘ intricate wards, on the right, is the tool and arms of a “ Robertsmzxv,” ‘ as a burglar was then termed. ’ If my having in Heraldry is a younger brother’s revenue, Dr Schmidt’s having in that intricate department of gentilesse is apparently that of a brother not appreciably older, most probably a twin. According to my ignorance, the shield is an achievement, where the husband’s and the wife’s arms are impaled. If this be so, leaving out of view the extreme improb¬ ability of any reference in the ‘crowned eagle to Elizabeth’s suc- ‘ cessor ’ three years before Elizabeth’s death, the key in the sinister half of the shield is Mrs Roberts’s arms; and though my estimate of her husband’s honesty is small, I am not prepared to brand the wife as a burglar. James Roberts printed several other Quartos, B
xvin
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and whether or not he was unwilling to give further publicity to his wife’s burglarious propensity, and thereby disclose the family skeleton, it is impossible to say ; but certain it is that he did not afterward adopt these armes parlantes , as they were termed, but used innocent and misleading flourishes calculated to baffle detectives.
No commentary on a play of Shakespeare’s is now-a-days complete without a discussion of the Date of its Composition. Could we be content with dry, prosaic facts, this discussion in the present play would be brief. Meres mentions A Midsummer Night' s Dream among others, in 1598. This is all we know. But in a discussion over any subject connected with Shakespeare, who ever heard of resting content with what we know ? It is what we do not know that fills our volumes. Meres’ s Wits Commonwealth was entered in the Stationers' Registers in September, 1598, when the year, which began in March, was about half through. Meres must have composed his book before it was regis¬ tered. This uncertainty as to how long before registration Meres wrote, added to the uncertainty as to how long before the writing by Meres the play of A Midsummer Night' s Dream had been acted, leaves the door ajar for speculation ; critics have not been slow to see therein their oppor¬ tunity, and, flinging the door wide open, have given to surmises and discursive learning a flight as unrestricted as when ‘ wild geese madly ‘sweep the sky.’ Of course it can be only through internal evidence in the play itself that proof is to be found for the Date of Composition before 1598. This evidence has been detected at various times by various critics in the following lines and items : —
‘ Thorough bush , thorough briar.' — II, i, 5 ;
Titania’s description of the disastrous effects on the weather and har¬ vests caused by the quarrel between her and Oberon. — II, i, 94-120;
‘ And hang a pearl in every cowslip' s ear' — II, i, 14 ;
* One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold.' — V, i, n ;
A poem of Pyramus and Thisbe ;
The date of Spenser’s Faerie Queene ,
The ancient privilege of Athens, whereby Egeus claims the dis¬ posal of his daughter, either to give her in marriage or to put her to death. — I, i, 49 ;
* The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death of learning , late dec east in beggerie.' — V, i, 59;
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xix
And finally, the whole play being intended for the celebration of some noble marriage, it is only necessary to find out for whose mar¬ riage it was written, and we have found out the Date of Composition.
If this array of evidence pointed to one and the same date, it would be fairly conclusive of that date. But the dates are as manifold as their advocates ; and there is not one of them which has not been, by some critic or other, stoutly denied, and all of them collectively by Dyce. Of some of them it may be said that they are apparently founded on two premises : First, that although Shake¬ speare’s vocation was the writing of plays, yet his resources were so restricted that his chief avocation lay in conveying lines and ideas from his more original and vigorous contemporaries. And secondly, that although Shakespeare could show us a bank whereon the wild thyme grows and fill our ears with Philomel’s sweet melody, yet he could not so depict a season of wet weather that his audience would recognise the picture unless they were still chattering with un¬ timely frosts. (It has always been a source of wonder to me that the thunderstorm in Lear is not used to fix the date.)
The last item in this list, namely that which assumes the play to have been written for performance at some noble wedding, is one of the chiefest in determining the year of composition. From our know¬ ledge of the stage in those days this assumption may well be granted. But we must be guarded lest we assume too much. To suppose that Shakespeare could not have written his play for an imaginary noble marriage is to put a limitation to his power, on which I for one will never venture. And, furthermore, knowing that Shakespeare wrote to fill the theatre and earn money for himself and his fellows, to suppose that he could not, without a basis of fact, write a play with wooing and wedding for its theme, which should charm and fas¬ cinate till wooing and wedding cease to be, is to impute to him a dis¬ trust of his own power in which I again, for one, will bear no share. How little he wrote for the passing hour, how fixedly he was grounded on the ‘ eternal verities, ’ how small a share in his plays trifling, local, and temporary allusions bear, is shown by the popularity of these plays, now at this day when every echo of those allusions has died away. If the plays were as saturated with such allusions as the critics would fain have us believe, if all his chief characters had pro¬ totypes in real life, then, with the oblivion of these allusions and of these prototypes, there would also vanish, for us, the point and meaning of his words, and Shakespeare’s plays would long ago have ceased to be the source of * tears and laughter for all time. ’ No noble marriage
XX
PREFACE
was needed as an occasion to bring out within Shakespeare’s century that witless opera The Fairy Queen, and yet almost all the allusions to a marriage to be found in A Midsummer Night' s Dream are there repeated. I have given a short account of this opera in the Appen¬ dix, page 340, partly to illustrate this very point. Moreover, this same denial of Shakespeare’s dramatic power is everywhere thrust for¬ ward. It is pushed even into his Sonnets, and for every sigh there and for every smile we must needs, forsooth, fit an occasion. Shake¬ speare cannot be permitted to bewail his outcast state, but we must straight sniff a peccadillo. We deny to Shakespeare what we grant to every other poet. Had he written The Miller' s Daughter of Tenny¬ son, the very site of the mill-dam would have been long ago fixed, the stumps of the ‘ three chestnuts ’ discovered, and probably fragments of the ‘long green box’ wherein grew the mignonette. Probably no department of literature is more beset than the Shakespearian with what Whately happily terms the * Thaumatrope fallacy.’ It is in con¬ stant use in demonstrating allusions in the plays, and pre-eminently in narrating the facts of his most meagre biography. On one side of a card is set forth theories and pure imaginings interspersed with ‘ of course, ‘it could not be otherwise,’ ‘natural sequence,’ &c., &c., and on the other side Shakespeare; and, while the card is rapidly twirled, before we know it we see Shakespeare firmly imbedded in the assumption and are triumphantly called on to accept a proven fact.
In the Appendix will be found a discussion of the items of internal evidence which bear upon The Date of Composition. In this whole subject of fixing the dates of these plays I confess I take no atom of interest, beyond that which lies in any curious speculation. But many of my superiors assert that this subject, to me so jejune, is of keen interest, and the source of what they think is, in their own case, refined pleasure. To this decision, while reserving the right of private judge¬ ment, I yield, at the same time wishing that these, my betters, would occasionally go for a while ‘into retreat,’ and calmly and soberly, in seclusion, ask themselves what is the chief end of man in reading Shakespeare. I think they would discern that not by the discovery of the dates of these plays is it that fear and com¬ passion, or the sense of humor, are awakened: the clearer vision would enable them, I trust, to separate the chaff from the wheat; and that when, before them, there pass scenes of breathing life, with the hot blood stirring, they would not seek after the date of the play nor ask Shakespeare how old he was when he wrote it.
‘ The poet,’ says Lessing, ‘ introduces us to the feasts of the gods, and
PREFACE
xxi
‘ great must be our ennui there, if we turn round and inquire after the ‘usher who admitted us.’ When, however, between every glance we try to comprehend each syllable that is uttered, or strain our ears to catch every measure of the heavenly harmony, or trace the subtle workings of consummate art, — that is a far different matter ; therein lies many a lesson for our feeble powers ; then we share with Shake¬ speare the joy of his meaning. But the dates of the plays are purely biographical, and have for me as much relevancy to the plays them¬ selves as has a chemical analysis of the paper of the Folio or of the ink of the Quartos.
Due explanations of The Textual Notes will be found in the Appendix r, page 344. It has been mentioned in a previous volume of this edition— and it is befitting that the statement should be occasion¬ ally recalled — that in these Textual Notes no record is made of the conjectural emendations or rhythmical changes proposed by Zachary Jackson, or by his copesmates Beckett, Seymour, and Lord Ched- worth. The equable atmosphere of an edition like the present must not be rendered baleful by exsufflicate and blown surmises. It is well to remember that this play is a ‘ Dream,’ but, of all loves, do not let us have it a nightmare. It is painful to announce that in succeed¬ ing volumes of this edition to these four criticasters must be added certain others, more recent, whose emendations, so called, must be left unrecorded here.
There is abroad a strange oblivion, to call it by no harsher name, among the readers of Shakespeare, of the exquisite nicety demanded, at the present day, in emending Shakespeare’s text — a nicety of judgement, a nicety of knowledge of Elizabethan literature, a nicety of ear, which alone bars all foreigners from the task, and, beyond all, a thorough mastery of Shakespeare’s style and ways of thinking, which alone should bar all the rest of us. Moreover, never for a minute should we lose sight of that star to every wandering textual bark which has been from time immemorial the scholar’s surest guide in criticism : Durior lectio preferenda est. The successive win- nowings are all forgot, to which the text has been subjected for nigh two hundred years. Never again can there be such harvests as were richly garnered by Rowe, Theobald, and Capell, and when to these we add Steevens and Malone of more recent times, we may rest assured that the gleaning for us is of the very scantiest, and reserved only for the keenest and most skilful eyesight. At the present day those who know the most venture the least. We may see an example of this in The Globe edition, where many a line, marked with an
XXII
PREFACE
obelus as incorrigible, is airily emended by those who can scarcely detect the difficulty which to the experienced editors of that edition was insurmountable. Moreover, by this time the text of Shake¬ speare has become so fixed and settled that I think it safe to predict that, unless a veritable MS of Shakespeare’s own be dis¬ covered, not a single future emendation will be generally accepted in critical editions. Indeed, I think, even a wider range may be assumed, so as to include in this list all emendations, that is, substitutions of words, which have been proposed since the days of Collier. Much ink, printer’s and other, will be spared if we deal with the text now given to us in The Globe and in the recent (second) Cambridge Edition, much in the style of Nolan’s words to Lord Lucan : ‘ There is the enemy, and there are your ‘ orders. ’ There is the text, and we must comprehend it, if we can. But if, after all, in some unfortunate patient the insanabile cacoethes emendi still lurk in the system, let him sedulously conceal its prod¬ ucts from all but his nearest friends, who are bound to bear a friend’s infirmities. Should, however, concealment prove impossible, and naught but publication avail, no feelings must be hurt if we sigh under our breath, ‘Why will you be talking, Master Benedict?
* Nobody minds ye. ’
The present play is one of the very few whereof no trace of the whole Plot has been found in any preceding play or story ; but that there was such a play — and it is more likely to have been a play than a story which Shakespeare touched with his heavenly alchemy— is, I think, more probable than improbable. I have long thought that hints (hints, be it observed) might be found in that lost play of Huon of Bur deaux which Henslowe records ( Shakespeare Society, p. 31) as having been performed in ‘desembr’ and ‘Jenewary, 1593,’ and called by that thrifty but illiterate manager ‘ hewen of burdokes.' Be this as it may, all that is now reserved for us in dealing with the Source of the Plot is to detect the origin of every line or thought which Shakespeare is supposed to have obtained from other writers.
The various hints which Shakespeare took here, there, and every¬ where in writing this play will be found set forth at full length in the Appendix, p. 268. Among them I have reprinted several which could not possibly have been used by Shakespeare, because of the discrepancy in dates ; but as they are found in modern editions, and have argu¬ ments based on them, I have preferred to err on the side of fulness.
I have not reprinted Drayton’s Nymphidia, which is in this list of publications subsequent in date to A Midsummer Night's Dream;
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xxiii
first, because of its extreme length ; and secondly, because it is access¬ ible in the popular, and deservedly popular, edition of the present play set forth by the late Professor Morley, at an insignificant cost. The temptation to reprint it, nevertheless, was strong after reading an assertion like the following: ‘Shakespeare unquestionably borrowed ‘ from Drayton’s Nymphidia to set forth his “ Queen Mab,” and enrich ‘ his fairy world of the Midsummer Night' s Dream.' * The oversight here in regard to the date of the Nymphidia is venial enough. It is not the oversight that astonishes : it is that any one can be found to assert that Shakespeare * borrowed ’ from the Nymphidia , and that the loan ‘enriched’ his fairy world. Halliwell ( Fairy Mythology , p. 195) speaks of the Nymphidia as ‘ this beautiful poem.’ To me it is dull, commonplace, and coarse. There is in it a constant straining after a light and airy touch, and the poet, as though conscious of his failure, tries to conceal it under a show of feeble jocosity, reminding one of the sickly smile which men put on after an undignified tumble. Do we not see this forced fun in the very name of the hero, ‘ Pigwiggen ’ ? When Oberon is hastening in search of Titania, who has fled to ‘ her ‘ dear Pigwiggen,’ one of the side-splitting misadventures of the Elfin King is thus described : —
* A new adventure him betides :
He met an ant, which he bestrides,
And post thereon away he rides,
Which with his haste doth stumble,
And came full over on her snout ;
Her heels so threw the dirt about,
For she by no means could get out,
But over him doth tumble.’
Moreover, is it not strange that the borrower, Shakespeare, gave to his fairies such names as Moth , Cobweb , Peaseblossom, when he might have ‘ enriched ’ his nomenclature from such a list as this ? —
4 Hop, and Mop, and Dryp so clear,
Pip, and Trip, and Skip that were To Mab, their sovereign ever dear,
Her special maids of honour ;
Fib, and Tib, and Pinck, and Pin,
Tick, and Quick, and Jil, and Jin,
Tit, and Nit, and Wap, and Win,
The train that wait upon her.’
Halliwell-Phillipps I mentions a manuscript which he had seen
* Gerald Massey: Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 573, ed. 1866; ib., ed. 1872. f Memoranda on the Midsummer Night's Dream , p. 13, 1879.
XXIV
PREFACE
of Charles Lamb, wherein Lamb ‘speaks of Shakespeare as having invented the fairies.” ’ No one was ever more competent than Lamb to pronounce such an opinion, and nothing that Lamb ever said is more true. There were no real fairies before Shakespeare’s. What were called ‘ fairies ’ have existed ever since stories were told to wide- eyed listeners round a winter’s fire. But these are not the fairies of Shakespeare, nor the fairies of today. They are the fairies of Grimm’s Mythology. Our fairies are spirits of another sort, but unless they wear Shakespeare’s livery they are counterfeit. The fairies of Folk Lore were rough and repulsive, taking their style from the hempen homespuns who invented them ; they were gnomes, cobbolds, lubber- louts, and, descendants though they may have been of the Greek
Nereids, they had lost every vestige of charm along their Northern route.
Dr Johnson’s final note on the present play is that ‘fairies in ‘[Shakespeare’s] time were much in fashion, common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser’s poem had made them great.’ If the innuendo here be that Spenser’s fairies and Shakespeare’s fairies were allied, the uncomfortable inference is inevitable that Dr John¬ son’s reading of his Faerie Queene did not extend to the Tenth Canto of the Second Book, where ‘faeryes’ are described and the descent given of the Faerie Queene, Gloriana. Along the line of ancestors we meet, it is true, with Oberon; but, like all his progenitors and descendants, he was a mortal, and with no attributes in common with Shakespeare’s Oberon except in being a king. To save the student the trouble of going to Spenser, the passages referred to are reprinted in the Appendix, p. 287. Merely a cursory glance at these extracts will show, I think, that as far as proving any real con¬ nection between the two Oberons is concerned, they might as well have. been ‘the unedifying Tenth of Nehemiah.’
Reference has just been made to Henslowe’s hewen of burdokes with the suggestion that it may have supplied Shakespeare with some hints when writing the present comedy. One of the hints which I had in mind is the name Oberon, and his dwelling in the East. No play founded on the old romance of Huon of Burdeaux could have overlooked the great Feus ex machina of that story, who is almost as important a character as Huon himself, so that Henslowe’s ‘hewen ’ must have had an Oberon, and as ‘hewen ’ was acted in 1593, we get very close to the time when Meres wrote his Wits Commonwealth and extolled Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night's Dream , in 1598 It may be interesting to note that although the character, Oberon, appears for
PREFACE
XXV
the first time in this old French romance of Huon, Keightley has shown that the model is the dwarf Elberich in Wolfram von Eschen- bach’s ballad of ‘ Otnit ’ in the Heldenbuch. Furthermore, the names Elberich and Oberon are the same. ‘ From the usual change of l into ‘ u (as al—au, col=cou, &c.) in the French language, Elberich or Albe- ‘ rich (derived from Alp, Alf ) becomes Auberich ; and ich not being ‘ a French termination, the usual one of on was substituted, and so it ‘ became Auberon, or Oberon. ’ *
There is one point, however, which certainly yields a strong pre¬ sumption that Huon’s Oberon was, directly or indirectly, the pro¬ genitor of Shakespeare’s Oberon. Attention was called to it by Mr. S. L. Lee (to whom we are indebted for the valuable excursus in The Merchant of Venice on the ‘ Jews in England ’) in his Introduction to Duke Huon of Burdeauxf ‘ The Oberon of the great poet’s fairy- ‘ comedy,’ says Mr Lee, ‘ although he is set in a butterfly environment, ‘ still possesses some features very similar to those of the romantic ‘ fairy king. . . . The mediaeval fairy dwells in the East ; his kingdom ‘ is situated somewhere to the east of Jerusalem, in the far-reaching ‘ district that was known to mediaeval writers under the generic name ‘of India. Shakespeare’s fairy is similarly a foreigner to the western ‘ world. He is totally unlike Puck, his lieutenant, “ the merry wan- ‘ “derer of the night,” who springs from purely English superstition, ‘ and it is stated in the comedy that he has come to Greece “ from the ‘“farthest steep of India.” Titania, further, tells her husband how ‘ the mother of her page-boy gossiped at her side in their home, “ in ‘ “the spiced Indian air by night-fall.” And it will be remembered ‘ that an Indian boy causes the jealousy of Oberon.’
It is, however, quite possible to account for these coincidences on the supposition that there was an Oberon on the English stage, inter¬ mediate between Huon’s and Shakespeare’s. It is difficult to believe that if Shakespeare went direct to Duke Huon no trace of the pro¬ genitor should survive in the descendant other than in the Eastern references, striking though they are, just pointed out by Mr Lee. The two Oberons do not resemble each other in person, for, although Huon’s Oberon ‘hathe an aungelyke vysage,’ yet is he ‘of heyght but ‘of .iii. fote, and crokyd shulderyd ’ (p. 63). Again, ‘the dwarfe of ‘ the fayre, kynge Oberon, came rydynge by, and had on a gowne sc * ryche that it were meruayll to recount the ryches and fayssyon thereof ‘ and it was so garnyshyd with precyous stones that the clerenes of them ‘ shone lyke the sone. Also he had a goodly bow in hys hande so
* Fairy Mythology , ii, 6, foot-note, 1833.
t Early English Text Society, Part i, p. 1.
XXVI
PREFACE
‘ ryche that it coude not be esteemyde, and hys arrous after the same
• sort and they had suche proparte that any beest in the worlde that he ‘ wolde wyshe for, the arow sholde areste hym. Also he hade about ‘ hys necke a ryche home hangyng by two lases of golde, the home ‘ was so ryche and fayre, that there was neuer sene none suche ’ (p. 65).
It may be also worth while to remark that the parentage of Huon’s Oberon was, to say the least, noteworthy. His father was Julius Caesar, and his mother by a previous marriage became the grandmother of Alexander the Great (p. 72). It was this strain of mortality derived from his father that made Oberon, although king of ye fayrey, mortal, ‘lama mortall man as ye be,’ he said once to Charlemagne (p. 265), and shortly after he added to his dear friend, the hero of the romance, ‘Huon,’ quod Oberon, ‘know for a truth I shal not abyde longe in
* this worlde, for so is the pleasure of god. it behoueth me to go in to ‘ paradyce, wher as my place is apparelled ; in ye fayrye I shal byde ‘no longer’ (p. 267).
Unquestionably, this Oberon of Huon of Burdeaux is a noble character, brave, wise, of an infinite scorn of anything untrue or unchaste, and of an aungelyke visage withal, but except in name and dwelling he is not Shakespeare’s Oberon.
When we turn to Puck the case is altered. We know very well all his forbears. About him and his specific name Robin Good- fellow has been gathered by antiquarian and archeological zeal a greater mass of comment than about any other character in the play. The larger share of it is Folk Lore, but beyond the proofs of the antiquity of the name and of his traditional mischievous character little needs either revival or perpetuation in the present edition. The sources of the knowledge of popular superstitions were as free to Shakespeare as to the authors whose gossip is cited by the anti¬ quarians, all had to go to the stories at a winter’s fire authorised by a grandam.
Sundry ballads are reprinted in the Appendix , for which the claim is urged that they have influenced, or at least preceded, Shake¬ speare. There also will be found the extracts from Chaucer’s Knight's Tale which have been cited by many editors as the story to which the present play owes much. It is difficult to under¬ stand the grounds for this belief. There is no resemblance between the tale and the drama beyond an allusion to the celebration of May day, and the names Theseus and Philostrate. For the name Hippolyta, Shakespeare must have deserted Chaucer , who gives it ‘ Ipolita,’ and
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resorted to his Plutarch. Staunton truly remarks that ‘the persist- ‘ ence [of the commentators] in assigning the groundwork of the ‘ fable to Chaucer’s Knight' s Tale is a remarkable instance of the ‘ docility with which succeeding writers will adopt, one after another, ‘an assertion that has really little or no foundation in fact.’
No little space in the Appendix is allotted to the extracts from Greene’s Scottish History of James IV. This was deemed necessary, because of the great weight of any assertion made by Mr W. A. Ward, who thinks that to this drama Shakespeare was ‘ in all probability ’ indebted for the entire machinery of Oberon and his fairy-court. With every desire to accept Mr Ward’s view, I am obliged to acknow¬ ledge that I can detect no trace of the influence of Greene’s drama on A Midsummer Night' s Dream.
In the Appendix will be found the views of various critics concern¬ ing the Duration of the Action. This Duration is apparently set forth by Shakespeare himself with emphatic clearness in the opening lines of the play. Theseus there says that ‘ four happy days bring in ‘another moon,’ and Hippolyta replies that ‘four nights will quickly ‘dream away the time.’ When, however, it is sought to compute this number of days and nights in the course of the action, difficulties have sprung up of a character so insurmountable that a majority of the critics have not hesitated to say that Shakespeare failed to fulfill this opening promise, and that he actually miscalculated, in such humble figures, moreover, as three and four, and mistook the one for the other. Nay, to such straits is one critic, Fleay, driven in his loyalty to Shake¬ speare that, rather than acknowledge an error, he very properly prefers to suppose that some of the characters sleep for twenty-four consecutive hours — an enviable slumber, it must be confessed, when induced by Shakespeare’s hand and furnished by that hand with dreams.
That Shakespeare knew ‘ small Latin and less Greek ’ is sad enough. It is indeed depressing if to these deficiencies we must add Arithmetic. Is there no evasion of this shocking charge ? Is there not a more excellent way of solving the problem?
The great event of the play, the end and aim of all its action, is the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Why did Shakespeare begin the play four days before that event ? If the incidents were to occur in a dream, one night is surely enough for the longest of dreams; the play might have opened on the last day of April, and as far as the demands of a dream were concerned the dramatis persona have all waked up, after one night’s slumber, bright and fresh on May-day morning
XXV111
PREFACE
Why then, was the wedding deferred four days ? It is not for us to ‘ha’e the presoomption ’ to say what was in Shakespeare’s mind, 01 what he thought, or what he intended. We can, in a case like this, but humbly suggest that as a most momentous issue was presented to Hermia, either of being put to death, or else to wed Demetrius, or to abjure for ever the society of men, Shakespeare may have thought that in such most grave questions the tender Athenian maid was en¬ titled to at least as much grace as is accorded to common criminals ; to give her less would have savoured of needless harshness and tyranny on the part of Theseus, and would have been unbecoming to his joyous marriage mood. Therefore to Hermia is given three full days to pause, and on the fourth, the sealing day ’twixt Theseus and Hip- poly ta, her choice must be announced. Three days are surely enough wherein a young girl can make up her mind ; our sense of justice is satisfied ; a dramatic reason intimated for opening the play so long before the main action ; and the ‘ four happy days ’ of Theseus are justified.
The problem before us, then, is to discover any semblance of probability in the structure of a drama where to four days there is only one night. Of one thing we are sure : it is a midsummer night, and therefore full of enchantment. Ah, if enchantment once ensnares us, and Shakespeare’s enchantment at that, day and night will be alike a dream after we are broad awake. To the vic¬ tims of fairies, time is nought, divisions of day and night pass unper¬ ceived. It is not those inside the magic circle, but those outside — the spectators or the audience — for whom the hours must be counted. It is we, after all, not the characters on the stage, about whom Shakespeare weaves his spells. It is our eyes that are latched with magic juice. The lovers on the stage pass but a single night in the enchanted wood, and one dawn awakens them on May day. We, the onlookers, are bound in deeper charms, and must see dawn after dawn arise until the tale is told, and, looking back, be conscious of the lapse of days as Avell as of a night.
If ‘ four happy days,’ as Theseus says, ‘ bring in another moon ’ on the evening of the first of May, the play must open on the twenty-seventh of April, and as, I think, it is never the custom when counting the days before an event to include the day that is passing, the four days are : the twenty-eighth, the twenty-ninth, the thirtieth of April, and the first of May. Hippolyta’s four nights are : the night which is approach¬ ing— namely, the twenty-seventh, the twenty-eighth, the twenty-ninth, and the thirtieth of April. The evening of the first of May she could not count ; on that evening she was married. (We must count thus
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XXIX
on our fingers, because one critic, Mr Daniel, has said that Hippolyta should have counted five nights.)
The play has begun, and Shakespeare’s two clocks are wound up ; on the face of one we count the hurrying time, and when the other strikes we hear how slowly time passes. But before we really begin to listen, Shakespeare presents to us ‘ one fair enchanted cup, ’ which we must all quaff. It is but four days before the moon like to a silver bow will be new bent in heaven, and yet when Lysander and Hermia elope on the morrow night, we find, instead of the moonless darkness which should enshroud the earth, that ‘ Phcebe ’ is actually beholding ‘her silver visage in the watery glass,’ and ‘decking with liquid pearl ‘ the bladed grass.’ It is folly to suppose that this can be our satellite — our sedate Phoebe hides her every ray before a new moon is born. On Oberon, too, is shed the light of this strange moon. He meets Titania ‘ by moonlight,’ and Titania invites him to join her ‘ moon- ‘ light revels.’ Even almanacs play us false. Bottom’s calendar assures us that the moon will shine on the ‘ night of the play. ’ Our new moon sets almost with the sun. In a world where the moon shines bright in the last nights of her last quarter, of what avail are all our Ephemerides, computed by purblind, star-gazing astronomers ? And yet in the agonising struggle to discover the year in which Shakespeare wrote this play this monstrous moon has been over¬ looked, and dusty Ephemerides have been exhumed and bade to divulge the Date of Composition, which will be unquestionably divulged can we but find a year among the nineties of the sixteenth century when a new moon falls on the first of May. But even here, I am happy to say, Puck rules the hour and again misleads night-wanderers. There is a whole week’s difference between the new moons in Germany and in England in May, 1590, and our ears are so dinned with Robin Goodfellow’s ‘Ho! ho! ho!’ over the discrepancy that we cannot determine whether Bottom’s almanac was in German or in English. (I privately think that, as befits Athens and the investigators, it was in Greek, with the Kalends red-lettered.) Into such dilemmas are we led in our vain attempts to turn a stage moon into a real one, and to discover the Date of Composition from internal evidence.
In Othello many days are compressed into thirty-six hours ; in The Merchant of Venice three hours are made equivalent to three months. In the present play four days are to have but one night, and I venture to think that, thanks to the limitations of Shakespeare’s stage, this was a task scarcely more difficult than those in the two plays just mentioned.
Grant that the play opens on Monday, Hippolyta’s four nights are
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PREFACE
then, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night. Why does Lysander propose to elope with Herraia * to-morrow ‘night,’ and Hermia agree to meet him ‘ morrow deep midnight’? One would think that not only a lover’s haste but a wise prudence would counsel flight that very night. Why need we be told with so much emphasis that the Clowns’ rehearsal was to be held ‘ to-morrow ‘ night ’ ? Is it not that both by the specified time of the elopement and by the specified time of the rehearsal we are to be made conscious that Monday night is to be eliminated ? If so, there will then remain but three nights to be accounted for before the wedding day, and these three nights are to be made to seem as only one. If while this long night is brooding over the lovers we can be made to see two separate dawns, the third dawn will be May day and the task will be done. We must see Wednesday’s dawn, Thursday’s dawn, and on Friday morning early Theseus’s horns must wake the sleepers.
It is not to be expected that these dawns and the days following them will be proclaimed in set terms. That would mar the impression of one continuous night. They will not be obtruded on us. They will be intimated by swift, fleeting allusions which induce the belief almost insensibly that a new dawn has arisen. To be thoroughly re¬ ceptive of these impressions we must look at the scene through the eyes of Shakespeare’s audience, which beholds, in the full light of an afternoon, a stage with no footlights or side-lights to be darkened to represent night, but where daylight is the rule ; night, be it remem¬ bered, is to be assumed only when we are told to assume it.
The Second Act opens in the wood where Lysander and Hermia were to meet at ‘ deep midnight ’ ; they have started on their journey to Lysander’ s aunt, and have already wandered so long and so far that Demetrius and Helena cannot find them, and they decide to ‘ tarry ‘for the comfort of the day.’ This prepares us for a dawn near at hand. They must have wandered many a weary mile and hour since midnight. Oberon sends for the magic flower, and is strict in his commands to Puck after anointing Demetrius’s eyes to meet him * ere the first cock crow. Again an allusion to dawn, which must be close at hand or the command would be superfluous. Puck wanders 1 through the forest ’ in a vain search for the lovers. This must have taken some time, and the dawn is coming closer. Puck finds the lovers at last, chants his charm as he anoints, by mistake, Lysander’s eyes, and then hurries off with ‘I must now to Oberon.’ We feel the necessity for his haste, the dawn is upon him and the cock about to crow. To say that these allusions are purposeless is to believe that Shakespeare wrote haphazard, which he may believe who lists
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xxxi
This dawn, then, whose streaks we see lacing the severing clouds, is that of Wednesday morning. We need but one more dawn, that of Thursday, before we hear the horns of Theseus. Lest, however, this impression of a new day be too emphatic, Shakespeare artfully closes the Act with the undertone of night by showing us Hermia waking up after her desertion by Lysander. Be it never forgotten that while we are looking at the fast clock we must hear the slow clock strike.
The Third Act begins with the crew of rude mechanicals at their rehearsal. If we were to stop to think while the play is going on before us, we should remember that rightfully this rehearsal is on Tuesday night ; but we have watched the events of that night which occurred long after midnight ; we have seen a new day dawn ; and this is a new Act. Our consciousness tells us that it is Wednesday. Moreover, who of us ever imagines that this rehearsal is at night? As though for the very purpose of dispelling such a thought, Snout asks if the moon shines the night of the play, which is only two or three nights off. Would such a question have occurred to him if they had then been acting by moonlight? Remember, on Shakespeare’s open-air stage we must assume daylight unless we are told that it is night. Though we assume daylight here at the rehearsal, we are again gently reminded toward the close of the scene, as though at the end of the day, that the moon looks with a watery eye upon Titania and her horrid love.
The next scene is night, Wednesday night, and all four lovers are still in the fierce vexation of the dream through which we have fol¬ lowed them continuously, and yet we are conscious, we scarcely know how, that outside in the world a day has slipped by. Did we not see Bottom and all of them in broad daylight ? Lysander and Demetrius exeunt to fight their duel ; Hermia and Helena depart, and again a dawn is so near that darkness can be prolonged, and the starry wel¬ kin covered, only by Oberon’s magic ‘fog as black as Acheron,’ and over the brows of the rivals death-counterfeiting sleep can creep only by Puck’s art. So near is day at hand that this art must be plied with haste, ‘for night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And ‘yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger.’ Here we have a second dawn, the dawn of Thursday morning. All four lovers are in the deepest slumber — a slumber ‘more dead than common sleep,’ induced by magic. And the First Folio tells us explicitly before the Fourth Act opens that ‘ They Jleepe all the A 17.’
Wednesday night has passed, and this Act, the Fourth, through which they sleep, befalls on Thursday, after the dawn announced by Aurora's harbinger has broadened into day. Surely it is only on a
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midsummer noon that we can picture Titania on a bed of flowers, coying Bottom’s amiable cheeks and kissing his fair large ears. Never could Bottom even, with or without the ass’s nowl, have thought of send¬ ing Cavalery Cobweb to kill a red-hipt humble-bee on the top of a thistle at night, when not a bee is abroad. It must be high noon. But Bot¬ tom takes his nap with Titania’s arms wound round him; the after noon wanes ; Titania is awakened and disenchanted ; she and Oberon take hands and rock the ground whereon the lovers still are lying, and then, as though to settle every doubt, and to stamp, at the close, every impression ineffaceably that we have reached Thursday night, Oberon tells his Queen that they will dance in Duke Theseus’s house * to- ‘ morrow midnight. ’ But before the Fairy King and Queen trip away, Puck hears the morning lark, the herald of Friday’s dawn, and almost mingling with the song we catch the notes of hunting horns. So the scene closes, with the mindful stage-direction that the Sleepers Lye Jiill. It was not a mere pretty conceit that led Shakespeare to lull these sleepers with fairy music and to rock the ground ; this sleep was thus charmed and made 1 more dead than common sleep ’ to recon¬ cile us to the long night of Thursday, until early on Friday morning the horns of Theseus’s foresters could be heard. The horns are heard ; the sleepers ‘ all start up ’ ; it is Friday, the first of May, and the day when Hermia is to give answer of her choice.
The wheel has come full circle. We have watched three days dawn since the lovers stole forth into the wood last night, and four days since we first saw Theseus and Hippolyta yesterday. The lovers have quarrelled, and slept not through one night, but three nights, and these three nights have been one night. Theseus’s four days are all right, we have seen them all ; Hippolyta’s four nights are all right, we have seen them all.
1 here are allusions in the Second Act, undeniably, to the near approach of a dawn, and again there are allusions in the Third Act undeniably to the near approach of a dawn ; wherefore, since divisions into Acts indicate progress in the action or they are meaningless, I think we are justified in considering these allusions, in different Acts, as referring to two separate dawns ; that of Wednesday and that of Thursday, the only ones we need before the May-day horns are heard on Friday.
For those who refuse to be spellbound it is, of course, possible to assert that these different allusions refer to one and the same dawn, and that the duration of the action is a hopeless muddle. If such an attitude toward the play imparts any pleasure, so be it ; one of the objects of all works of art is thereby attained, and the general sum of
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xxxiii
happiness of mankind is increased. For my part, I prefer to submit mysell an unresisting victim to any charms which Shakespeare may mutter ; should I catch him at his tricks, I shall lift no finger to break the spell ; and that the spell is there, no one can deny who ever saw this play performed or read it with his imagination on the wing.
Thus far we have been made by Shakespeare to condense time ; we are equally powerless when he bids us expand it. Have these days after all really passed so swiftly ? Oberon has just come from the farthest steep of India on purpose to be present at this wedding of Hippolyta. We infer that he takes Titania by surprise by the sudden¬ ness of his appearance, and yet before the first conference of these Fairies is half through we seem to have been watching them ever since the middle summer’s spring, and we are shivering at the remembrance of the effect of their quarrel on the seasons. Oberon knows, too, Titania’s haunts, the very bank of wild thyme where she sometimes sleeps at night. He cannot have just arrived from India. He must have watched Titania for days to have found out her haunts. Then, too, how long ago it seems since he sat upon a promontory and marked where the bolt of Cupid fell on a little Western flower ! — the flower has had time to change its hue, and for maidens to give it a familiar name. It is not urged that these allusions have any con¬ nection with Theseus’s four days; it is merely suggested that they help to carry our imaginations into the past, and make us forget the present, to which, when our thoughts are again recalled, we are ready to credit any intimation of a swift advance, be it by a chance allusion or by the sharp division of an Act.
These faint scattered hints are all near the beginning of the Play : it is toward the close, after we have seen the time glide swiftly past, that the deepest impressions of prolonged time must be made on us. Accordingly, although every minute of the dramatic lives of Oberon and Titania has been apparently passed in our sight since we first saw them, yet Oberon speaks of Titania’s infatuation for Bottom as a passion of so long standing that at last he began to pity her, and that, meeting her of late behind the wood where she was seeking sweet favours for the hateful fool, he obtained the little changeling child. Again, when Bottom’s fellows meet to condole over his having been transported, and have in vain sent to his house, Bottom appears with the news that their play has been placed on the list of entertainments for the Duke’s wedding. We do not stop to wonder when and where this could have been done, but at once accept a conference and a discussion with the Master of the Revels. Finally, it is in the last Act that the weightiest impression is made of time’s slow passage and that many a C
XXXIV
PREFACE
day has elapsed. When Theseus decides that he will hear the tragical mirth of ‘ Pyramus and Thisbe,’ Egeus attempts to dissuade him, and says that the play made his eyes water when he saw it rehearsed. When and where could he have seen it rehearsed? We witnessed the first and only rehearsal, and no one else was present but our- selves and Puck ; immediately after the rehearsal Bottom became the god of Titania’s idolatry, and fell asleep in her arms ; when he awoke and returned to Athens his comrades were still bewailing his fate ; he enters and tells them to prepare for an immediate performance before the Duke. Yet Egeus saw a rehearsal of the whole play with all the characters, and laughed till he cried over it.
Enthralled by Shakespeare’s art, and submissive to it, we accept without question every stroke of time’s thievish progress, be it fast or slow ; and, at the close, acknowledge that the promise of the opening lines has been redeemed. But if, in spite of all our best endeavours, our feeble wits refuse to follow him, Shakespeare smiles gently and benignantly as the curtain falls, and begging us to take no offence at shadows, bids us think it all as no more yielding than a dream.
A/arch, 1895.
H. H. F.
A Midsommer Nights Dreame
Dramatis Persona
Thefeus, Duke of Athens.
Egeus, an Athenian Lord.
Lyfander, in Love with Hermia.
Demetrius, in Love with Hermia. §
Quince, the Carpenter.
Snug, the Joiner.
Bottom, the Weaver.
Flute, the B ellows-mender.
Snout, the Tinker. IO
Starveling, the Tailor.
Hippolita, Prince fs of the Amazons, betrothed to Thefeus. Hermia, Daughter to Egeus, in love with Lyfander. Helena, in love with Demetrius.
Attendants. 15
Oberon, King of the Fairies.
Titania, Queen of the Fairies.