us blind to the fact that this beautiful and appealing play, fragrant with the breath of the young summer, bathed in the soft radiance of the Italian night, touched with the imperishable charm of youth and passion, is primarily poetic and only secondarily dramatic. The characteristics of the early work of the poet are found in it the frequent use of rhymes and the tendency to play with words; above all, the essentially lyrical quality of the play. Passages of pure and unsurpassed singing quality abound, and several verse-forms which were familiar to the medieval poets and were in use in Shakespeare's time are found in perfection. The first meeting of the lovers in Capulet's house is described in sonnet form; Juliet's prayer in her father's orchard for the coming of night is reminiscent of the Eveningsong, and has all the qualities of the Epithalamium ; while the parting of the lovers, when Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day remains the most tender and beautiful Morning-song in the language. Caught in the tragic movement of a family feud, the lovers live out their romance in five passionate days, during which the drama steadily deepens and sweeps towards its end with tumultuous current ; and at the supreme moment, with characteristic insight, death ushers in a final peace. It is this vision of reconciliation which made Shakespeare a master of human experience in its widest scope and significance. While exhibiting the fatality of individual struggle against the social order, he continually makes us aware of the deep and radical changes which spring out of tragic resistance and defiance; the searching reaction of the assertion of individuality on the social order. Shakespeare's joy in the possession of the poetic gift, and his earliest delight in life, found radiant expression in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a masterpiece of poetic fancy, and the gayest and most beautiful of poetic comedies. Rich as this drama is in humorous effects, it is so essentially lyrical in spirit that it stands alone in English poetry; an exquisite expansion of the masque or festival poem into a drama of pure fancy and daring imagination. It was probably composed for some marriage celebration, though it has not been connected as yet with any wedding among the poet's friends or in the court circle. Written about 1596, hints of the play appear to have been drawn from many sources. The modern reader finds such hints in Plutarch's "Life of Theseus," in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," in Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and in the old French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux," of which an English translation appeared in the decade between 1530 and 1540. Shakespeare's real indebtedness, however, was to the poetic imagination of the Germanic race to which he belonged, which still kept alive, in folklore and fairy tale, in every hamlet in England, the magical world of fairy folk; so near to the world of men, and so intimately associated with that world, and yet invisible to all save those who saw with the imagination. Especially were these elusive elves concerned with the mysteries of love and marriage; and in the magic mirror in which the poet shows them they not only associate Theseus and Hippolyta with the sweetest traditions of English field and fireside, but show forth, as in a parable, the magic properties of love when love touches the whole gamut of feeling and sets the whole nature vibrating from the passions to the imagination. There are evident connections in the play with the aspects of life and character which interested the poet and with which he had already dealt in "The Comedy of Errors," in "Love's Labour's Lost," and in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," while its exquisite lyrical quality affiliates it with "Romeo and Juliet"; but, both as regards older sources of incident and his own earlier work, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" stands in complete and radiant individuality. It discloses the original and spontaneous force of the poet's genius; his ability to use, fuse, and recast the most diverse materials with entire freedom and yet with unerring artistic instinct. He is equally at home with the classical tradition nobly presented in the figure of Theseus, with the most extravagant rustic humour set in the mouths of the inimitable clowns, and with the traditional lore of childhood—the buoyant play of the popular imagination in Titania and Oberon and Puck. His mastery of the verse-form which English tragedy has adopted is equally clear and striking. The iambic pentameter, with which his genius has almost identified English blank verse, finds in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" the full development of its melodic power. The line of five feet, each accented following an unaccented syllable, without rhyme, is freed, in Shakespeare's hands, from the stiffness and rigidity which characterized it before Marlowe's time, and becomes soft as a flute in its lighter notes and resonant and fulltoned as a bell in great passages: My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, Each unto each. A cry more tuneable Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn, In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly. One hears in these lines that clear "chime of the vowels" which gives English verse its most penetrating and magical melody. The fairies and the clowns made an irresistible appeal to the crowds in the theatre, and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" enjoyed almost a century of popularity; it was imitated and pilfered from; when it lost its hold upon the generation of the Restoration, it reappeared as opera and operetta. In Germany its fortunes touched their highest prosperity; Wieland recalled its elves in his "Oberon," Goethe drew upon it in a striking scene in "Faust," and Mendelssohn, in song and overture, interpreted it with delicate insight and sympathy. It is the supreme masterpiece in the world of fairy lore. CHAPTER IX THE SONNETS THE poetic period in Shakespeare's development coincided with a devotion to sonnet-writing which rose to the height of a passion from which few English poets escaped during the closing decade of the sixteenth century. The sonnet was the favourite verse-form for the expression of friendship, love, personal devotion, admiration of beauty; it engaged the interest of the greatest poets and of the most mechanical and commonplace verse-makers; it was the chosen instrument for the most delicate and poetic worship of individual women or of abstract virtues, and for the grossest and most obvious flattery. At a time when an author had practically no ownership in his own work and when the business of publishing was carried on largely in defiance of or complete indifference to his wishes, and generally to his harm, a great mass of literary work was circulated in manuscript, and a goodly number of people found occupation in multiplying copies of these unpublished pieces for private circulation among the friends and admirers of authors. During the decade between 1590 and 1600 thousands of sonnets of every degree of merit passed from hand to hand, and were read, known, and talked |