phere; but the disclosure is more striking when there is a finer sense of fresh discovery in it. In that age of new geography and England's adventurers taking practical possession of the globe, the inland poet added something to her domain; he found the forest of Arden, the witchhaunted Scottish heath, the magic isle of Prospero, and together with these he entered what was the most marvellous realm in this kind, the fairy world. If "A Midsummer Night's Dream" attended the celebration of some noble marriage, that was incidental; but no setting could be more appropriate to the play than such an occasion where the stately lovers should see themselves mirrored in the Athenian king and queen witnessing a play and spectators besides of the action of that fairy power, in an enchantment of midsummer night, which was also to invoke blessings on their wedded union. The bride-bed begins and ends the play; sleep, night, and dream are its world; poesy-to use the word of lyrical touch - is its element. The marriage of Theseus is the enclosing frame of all; but in the foreground and centre are the creatures, sports, and affairs of the fairy sphere. Oberon holds the sceptre and is master of the revels; the Athenian court, except for its wandering lovers, lies on the outskirts of the scene. Dream is the key-word, the master note on which the melody is built and to which through all changes it returns. It is not the old story how Life is a Dream; with greater subtlety and more philosophical truth, here life is rather a thing that dreams, and all the scene in its moments of high poetic relief has the vivid unreality which is the sphere of

dreaming power. But even a dream, for dramatic purposes, must have its own cosmos; and this is supplied by the fairy world. It is near nature, near mortals, and fills the visible and known world, but it is isolated from our world by night, and also by sleep, for it is by the intervention of sleep that the lovers come within its sway; it is concentrated, for local habitation and a name, in the enchanted wood. It is, nevertheless, a true world measured by time and space and action; it has distant territories and past history, a king and queen and court with a life of amusement, revels, love-episodes, and royal vexations, all its own; the Indian boy, whose fragrancy is only told of, gives substance to its polity and its affairs. Its function is to organise the dream-spirit of the play, to give sensuous definition and dramatic opportunity, and especially to body forth in films of reality as thin as rainbow bubbles that world of glamour in which Shakespeare will express the essence of the imagination most fantastically, most lyrically. It is the ethereal substance of the play, that in which all the rest coheres and exists, though when it vanishes it leaves "not a rack behind."

Shakespeare, however far afield he may range for poetical matter and creative atmosphere, nevertheless places the true interest in man's life. "Man is one world," in Herbert's phrase, and the other world, in Shakespeare's dramas, whether natural or demoniac or of the elemental spirits," attends him." Human life in this play is set forth doubly. The court sphere holds the first place, but so far as concerns the action of its higher figures, it is

very subordinate. Theseus is king, with the duty to administer the laws of the state unwaveringly, to do justice by the code; and he discharges this office with a noble dignity of speech. He has, morever, a paternal solicitude for the youthful lovers, and on the proper occasion an older man's resources to satisfy the father behind the scenes. His is the royal sport of hunting, and the final festivities are for his pleasure. He utters the words of most weight in the intellectual sphere, and gives them authority by his grave character. Yet both he and Hippolyta, who is only a consort, are almost lay figures, decorative with a certain antique severity of outline and pose, the restful part in the general action. To the court sphere belong also the two pair of lovers, Valentine and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena. The youths are the ordinary gentleman lovers of Shakespeare's early stage, with the behaviour and lovepsychology belonging to the part. Helena, her pursuit of the graceless Demetrius being granted and her betrayal of the rival lovers' plans being excused, is a more maidenly and attractive character than her schoolmate, Hermia, who only dotes upon Valentine and displays the shrewish temper that Shakespeare so often depicts as a feminine trait. The human plot lies in these characters; it is slight, and does not greatly interest the spectator in their fortunes; it is conducted with lively incident by the resources of a comedy of errors freshly handled in which a change of parts in the lovers is effected, with surprises for the two maidens resulting in great discomposure for Hermia, and a doubly ironical situation for Helena,

wretched in being sought by both lovers, falsely and to her flouting as she thinks. The dramatic action is conventional, yet skilfully contrived, involving the familiar matching of wits, the feminine scolding scene and awaking dream device in Hermia; but freshness arises in the treatment of the old machinery of play-acting by means of the novel environing circumstances. The story of the lovers, nevertheless, has by itself little vitality, and is principally an instance of invention.

The second phase of human life exhibited lies in the clown-sphere of the play, the crew of Athenian workingmen, who in love and duty tender their poor interlude, the first labour of their minds, for the royal pleasure. The humour that flows from their presence is blended from many sources. Bottom, in whom it is concentrated, own countryman of Dogberry, is yet singular in his power to expose himself, laying grossly bare a universal human weakness, in his confident ability to play all parts with the unconscious notion that the use of each is to unlock some talent of his own. There is comic situation in the first contact of ignorance with art, when these rude craftsmen attempt to compass it; in the clinging of their minds to the fact of wall and moonshine, and the ludicrous symbolism of their first essays at representation; in the contrast of their coarse realism with the Thisbe fable, turning it to silliness with a clayey hand. There is also, of course, an abstract humour in that a parody of the old stage is involved, still effective though the special plays and authors aimed at are no longer of importance, if indeed there was any pointed contemporary satire in the

piece. The main comedy is in the English characterisation, the low life, which is rendered in the usual way of Shakespeare in dealing with the populace. The clownsphere is, however, not dramatically in contrast with the court-sphere; its points are not worked out with that end. Its true opposition is rather with the fairy world, and comes to its dramatic height in the enamouring of Titania with the "translated" Bottom. The fairy plot, slighter even than the human plot, is worked out by this incident in the course of which Oberon obtains the Indian boy and peace is restored to the fairy kingdom. The comedy is most exquisite at this point in the play, and composed at once so grotesquely and delicately that the scene remains one of the capital memories of literature. Titania passes under enchantment through sleep, as the lovers do; but for Bottom a way more appropriate for his character is found in Puck's mischiefmaking spell who claps the ass's head on him. Titania awakes changed within by the herb's compulsion; Bottom is externally changed, yet in the change reveals himself in his proper nature, - the mask on him is really an unmasking; and his mind is unaffected, but adapts itself at once to his new fairy dignities and services as readily as to the lion's part. Enchantment is at its climax ; illusion can do no more; the scene goes on with beauty and humour in one rivalry, and only the merriment of surprised delight fills the onlooker at the masque-like spectacle. The clowns are fled to Athens, and following them there after daybreak Bottom returns to his original world and the task in hand, and they act before Theseus's