a coherent and symmetrical plot and a definite purpose; but, while it moves toward a final result of absolute order, it presupposes intermediary progress through a realm of motley shapes and fantastic vision. Its persons are creatures of the fancy, and all effort to make them solidly actual, to set them firmly upon the earth, and to accept them as realitics of common life, is labor ill-bestowed. The German Shaksperean commentator Ulrici-who commonly has an excess of theory and errs by explaining too much-has made certain. observations upon this comedy which are exceptionally helpful toward a clear view of Shaksperc's drift. "It is the comic view of things,” says this writer, "that forms the basis of the whole piece. Not merely in particular cases do the maddest tricks of accident, as well as of human caprice, perversity, and folly, destroy each other in turn, but, generally, the principal pursuits and provinces of life are made to parody and paralyze each other. The particular modification of the general comic view, which results from this ironical parodying of all the domains of life, at once determines and gives expression to the special ground-idea which first reduces the whole into organic unity. Life is throughout regarded in the light of a midsummer night's dream. Life appears in travesty. Oscuro. To body forth the form of things is, in this case, manifestly, a difficult task and yet the true course is obvious. Actors who yield themselves to the spirit of whim, and drift along with it, using a delicate method and avoiding insistence upon prosy realism, will succeed with this picce -provided, also, that their audience can be fanciful, and can accept the performance, not as a comedy of ordinary life, but as a vision seen in a dream. The play is full of intimations that this was Shaksperc's mood. Even Bottom, the consummate flower of unconscious humor, is at his height of significance in his moment of supreme illusion: "I have had a dream,-past the wit of man to say what dream it was:-Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was-there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I hadBut man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the car of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was." The whole philosophy of the subject, comically stated, Г is here. A serious statement of it is in the words of the poet Campbell: "Well may sleep present us fictions, Since our waking moments teem As make life itself a dream." Various actors in the past-although "A Midsummer Night's Dream" has not had great currency upon the stage, at any period, whether in England or America-have laid a marked stress upon the character of Bottom. Samuel Phelps, upon the London stage, was esteemed excellent in it. He acted the part in his own production of the Dream, at Sadler's Wells, and he again acted it in 1870 at the Queen's Theatre, in Long Acrc-now demolished. On the American stage, William E. Burton was accounted wonderfully good in it. "As Mr. Burton renders the character," says Richard Grant White, "its traits are brought out with a delicate and masterly hand; its humor is exquisite." And Mr. William L. Keese, in his careful and very serviceable biography of Burton, makes equally cordial reference to this achievement of the great comedian: "How striking it was in sustained individuality, and how finely exemplified was the potential vanity of Bottom! What pleased us greatly was the vein of engaging raillery which ran through the delivery of his speeches to the fairies." Burton produced the Dream at his own theatre, in 1854, with such wealth of fine scenery as in those days was accounted prodigious. The most notable impersonation of Bottom that has been given here since Burton's time was, probably, that of the late George L. Fox-already mentioned in this preface. Self-conceit, as the essence of the character, was thoroughly well understood and expressed by him. He wore the ass's head, but he did not know that he was wearing it; and when, afterward, the vague sense of it came upon him for an instant, he put it by as something inconceivable and intolerable. His "Not a word of me !!"-spoken to the other hard-handed men of Athens, after his return to them out of the enchanted "palace wood "-was, perhaps, his finest single point. Certainly it expressed to the utmost the colossal self-love and swelling pomposity of this miracle of bland and opaque sapience. But Fox was stronger in pantomime than in a consistent character of sustained comedy. The essential need of acting, in a portrayal of this play, is whimsicalitybut it must be whimsicality exalted by poetry. 16 WILLIAM Winter, |