the short dialogue of the chase, all in the best style of the author’s second period.  Perhaps, however, what seem the defects of the former, the fanciful quirks and far-fetched conceits, were wisely designed, in order to invest the part with such an air of dreaminess and unreality as would better sort with the scope and spirit of the piece, and preclude a disproportionate resentment of some naughty acts into which those love-bewildered frailties are betrayed.

There is at least a rather curious coincidence, which used to be regarded as proving that the play was not written till after the Summer of 1594.  I refer to Titania’s superb description, in ii. 1, of the strange misbehaviour of the weather, which she ascribes to the fairy bickerings.  I can quote but a part of it: 

    “The seasons alter:  hoary-headed frosts
    Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
    And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
    An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
    Is, as in mockery, set:  the Spring, the Summer,
    The childing Autumn, angry Winter, change
    Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
    By their increase, now knows not which is which: 
    And this same progeny of evils comes
    From our debate, from our dissension.”

For the other part of the coincidence, Strype in his Annals gives the following passage from a discourse by the Rev. Dr. King:  “And see whether the Lord doth not threaten us much more, by sending such unseasonable weather and storms of rain among us; which if we will observe, and compare it with what is past, we may say that the course of nature is very much inverted.  Our years are turned upside down:  our Summers are no Summers; our harvests are no harvests; our seed-times are no seed-times.  For a great space of time scant any day hath been seen that it hath not rained.”  Dyce indeed scouts the supposal that Shakespeare had any allusion to this eccentric conduct of the elements in the Summer of 1594, pronouncing it “ridiculous”; but I do not quite see it so; albeit I am apt enough to believe that most of the play was written before that date.  And surely, the truth of the allusion being granted, all must admit that passing events have seldom been turned to better account in the service of poetry.

* * * * *

I can hardly imagine this play ever to have been very successful on the stage; and I am sure it could not be made to succeed there now.  Still we are not without contemporary evidence that it had at least a fair amount of fame.  And we have authentic information that it was performed at the house of Dr. John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on Sunday, the 27th of September, 1631.  The actor of Bottom’s part was on that occasion sentenced by a Puritan tribunal to sit twelve hours in the porter’s room of the Bishop’s palace, wearing the ass’s head.  This Dr. Williams was the very able but far from faultless man who was treated so harshly by Laud, and gave the King such crooked counsel in the case of Strafford, and spent his last years in mute sorrow at the death of his royal master, and had his life written by the wise, witty, good Bishop Hacket.