or less-more, certainly, in Richard the Third-under the influence of Marlowe; and that in the Midsummer-Night's Dream we have the earliest, purest, and most original effort of his own genius, finding its own high level, and unswayed by the influence of any dramatic predecessor. It is the dramatic complement of the poetic efforts of 1593, 1594. Aldis Wright has, therefore, in my opinion, mistaken his " gap." The interval from 1594 to 1596 has, if we consider such evidence as has been previously adduced, every single argument of weight in its favour.

Further, the evidence of style and composition is unmistakeable, and goes to show that the place of the play must be amongst the early comedies, in all probability after Love's Labour's Lost, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Errors. We have its blank verse of a somewhat regular and monotonous kind. We have the symmetrical grouping of the characters, characteristic of all the early plays. We have the usual strained conceits, the antitheses, and other rhetorical devices of Shakespeare's early manner, not to speak of certain artificial devices of construction, indicating immature stage-craft, such as the device in the first Act of leaving Lysander and Hermia alone on the stage to arrange their flight from Athens. The play abounds with rhyme, even when this is not necessary for lyrical expression. The characters, too, with the notable exception of Bottom, are more or less sketches, and are far indeed from being living exponents of Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature. The Cowden-Clarkes hereon well remark: "The internal evidence of the composition itself gives unmistakeable token of its having been written when the poet

was in his flush of youthful manhood.

The classicality

of the principal personages, Theseus and Hippolyta; the Grecian-named characters; the prevalence of rhyme; the grace and whimsicality of the fairy-folk; the rich warmth of colouring that pervades the poetic diction; the abundance of description, rather than of plot, action, and characterdevelopment, all mark the young dramatist." With regard to the date of composition, therefore, I think a fairly strong case has been made out for the autumn or winter of 1594-95; and in this date most prominent Shakespearean scholars agree: e.g. Malone, Knight, Collier, Dyce, Keightley, Halliwell, Marshall, Dowden, and Craig. We may be satisfied to leave it at that, until the unlikely event of some tangible piece of evidence arising which will tend to correct this assumption.

It cannot be said that Shakespeare is indebted to any single source for the plot of his Midsummer-Night's Dream. Hints from many quarters of his reading, knowledge, and experience seem to have been taken and welded into one beautiful and harmonious poetic mass by the force of his fancy and imagination. Some hints he took from (a) Plutarch's Lives, and from (b) Chaucer's Knightes Tale; something from (c) the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in his favourite book, Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses; perhaps a hint, perhaps not, from (d) Greene's History of James IV.; mayhap a thought or two from (e) Spenser's Faerie Queene; something from (ƒ) ballad, tale, and tradition regarding the fairy beings of English superstition and folk-lore; and possibly the hint of the "love-juice' from (g) Montemayor's Diana (1579).

(a) The essential passages in Plutarch's Lives which

supplied Shakespeare with the allusions in II. i. 68-80 will be found in the notes, p. 40.

(b) The Knightes Tale was probably the most famous of Chaucer's works, and the subject had been already dramatised, namely, by Richard Edwards in his Palamon and Arcyte, 1566. A Palamon and Arcite had also been acted at the Rose Theatre in September 1594. (See Fleay, Life and Work of Shakespeare, 1886.) But these plays are not extant. A Midsummer-Night's Dream resembles The Knightes Tale in little more than that the scene in both is laid at the court of Theseus. The characters are entirely different. "There is little," says Staunton, " at all in common between the two stories except the name of Theseus, the representative of which appears in Shakespeare simply as a prince who lived in times when the introduction of ethereal beings, such as Oberon, Titania, and Puck was in accordance with tradition and romance." In fact, Shakespeare, the dramatist, even at this early stage of his career, saw fit to reject as unsuitable for his play material which Chaucer, the poet, found entirely suitable for his tale. Such glimpses as Shakespeare may have obtained of Chaucer's characters or facts may be seen from the passages printed in Appendix III. His Palamon and Arcite, in their rivalry for the love of Emilie, may have suggested the pairs of Athenian lovers and their complicated rivalry in the play. It will not be forgotten, also, that the name of Philostrate, Theseus's "Master of the Revels," is the name Arcite assumes in Chaucer's Tale, when he goes to Athens after his escape.

(c) The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is "as old as the hills and a great deal older"; but I think that for Shake

speare's special authority we need look no further than Golding's Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book IV. p. 43, ed. 1567). The story as Golding has versified it will be found in Appendix IV.; together with A New Sonet of Pyramus and Thisbe, by I. Thomson, in Clement Robinson's Handefull of Pleasant Delites; and no doubt Shakespeare had read this ballad as well.

(d) To Greene's Historie of James Iv., written about 1590, Shakespeare is certainly not indebted in any particular that I can discover, hardly even for the name of Oberon. Its full title runs: The Scottish Historie of James IV., slaine at Flodden-Intermixed with a pleasant Comedie, presented by Oboram (sic) King of Fayeries. This "Historie" was printed in 1598. The story of Flodden Field apparently has nothing to do with the drama, the plot of which has no historical foundation; and, so far as I can discover, the " intermixture with the pleasant Comedie " consists only of a prelude or chorus in which Oberon and the angry Scot" Bohan introduce the body of the play, and of dances by certain " antics," "jigs devised for the nonst or "rounds of fairies," or "some pretty dances" between the Acts. What all this has to do with A Midsummer-Night's Dream one is at a loss to discover. Professor A. W. Ward, however, thinks that "the general idea of the machinery of Oberon and his fairy court was in all probability taken by Shakspere from Greene's Scottish History of James Iv." (See his English Dramatic Literature, vol. ii. p. 85, new ed.) The reader may be left to form his own opinion.

(e) Shakespeare, I think it will be agreed, took nothing from Spenser. Reference hereon may be made to the Faerie Queene, Book II. c. x. 631 sqq.

(f) "Shakespeare," says Keightley, in a well-known passage (Fairy Mythology, ii. 127, ed. 1833), "seems to have attempted a blending of the Elves of the village with the Fays of romance. His fairies agree with the former in their diminutive stature,-diminished, indeed, to dimensions inappreciable by village gossips, in their fondness for dancing, their love of cleanliness and in their childabstracting propensities. Like the Fays, they form a community, ruled over by the princely Oberon and the fair Titania. There is a court and chivalry; Oberon . . . like earthly monarchs, has his jester, 'the shrewd and knavish sprite, called Robin Goodfellow'" (II. i. 33).

"

Shakespeare may have gained some hints for his character of the fairy king for the purposes of this play from the old French courtly romance of Huon of Burdeaux, translated by Lord Berners, circ. 1540, on which a play, now lost, was founded, according to the record of that thrifty but illiterate" manager, Henslowe, in his Diary, where the play appears as "hewen of burdokes," and as having been performed in "desembr" and " Janewary 1593. The date of this is at any rate significant, as it must have preceded the composition of A MidsummerNight's Dream. Keightley (Fairy Mythology, ii. 6 note) shows clearly that the name is identical with that of the dwarf Elberich (.e. elf-king) in Wolfram von Eschenbach's ballad of Otnit in the Heldenbuch. It cannot be said, however, that there is more than an indirect resemblance between the Oberon of the old courtly romance and Shakespeare's fairy king. If Shakespeare took the name he took little else, save perhaps the references to Oberon's connection with the East. Mr. S. Lee, in his Introduction to