PREFACE

'I 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 entertainment 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 common 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.

Their native

Not thus, however, is it with our German brothers. 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

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 German 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, Ein St. Johannis Nachts-Traum. But then we must remember that WIELAND was anxious to propitiate a public wedded to French dramatic laws and unprepared to accept the barbarisms of Gilles SHAKESPEARE. Indeed, so alert was poor WIELAND not to offend the purest taste that he scented, in some incomprehensible way, a flagrant impropriety 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 Walpurgisnachtstraum, and stood bravely by it in spite of the criticisms of KURZ in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch (iv, 304). SIMROCK's main difficulty 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 Conversations-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 drew.

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 superstitious observances, such as seeking for the future husband or sweetheart, &c. This assertion SIMROCK (p. 436, ed. Hildburghausen, 1868) uncompromisingly pronounces false; because the only custom mentioned by GRIMM in his Mythologie, p. 555, as taking place on Midsummer Eve is that of wending to neighboring springs,

there to find healing and strength in the waters. Night there were only the Midsummer fires.

On Midsummer

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 Walpurgis night,-Theseus makes several allusions to the May-day observances; 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 Geirröd 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, Walpurgisnachtstraum, 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 'in 'deference to SHAKESPEARE, just as SHAKESPEARE himself would have 'named his own play, knowing that the mad revelry of spirits, for

'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 intimate 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; as the cross purposes of the lovers were to be made straight with fairy charms during slumber, 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.

The 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 dated 1600. 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:†

* How many, how various, how wild, and occasionally how identical these festivities 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.

† In Malone's reprint of this entry, the title reads a 'Mydsomer Nyghte Dreame.' It 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 nights Dreame.'