SHAKESPEARE EDITED BY HENRY MORLEY, LL.D. A MIDSUMMER- NIGHT'S DREAM NEW YORK: INTRODUCTION. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is one of the welve plays by Shakespeare which were named by Francis Meres in his "Palladis Tamia," and were, therefore, written before the publication of that book in 1598. The play was first printed, and twice printed, in quarto, in the year 1600, having been entered at Stationers' Hall on the 8th of October in that year, to Thomas Fisher, a young stationer who had only taken his freedom out four months before. But besides the quarto printed for him, and to be sold at his shop at the sign of the White Hart in Fleet Street, there was another and more faulty copy, printed without licence by James Roberts, a much older man than Fisher, and it was from Roberts's copy, the worse of the two, that the play was next printed, with some emendations of the text, in the first folio of 1623. Internal evidence does not suffice to fix the time when A Midsummer Night's Dream was written. Damp and chill spoiling the summer C. D. TRANSER JAN 2 6 1942 because there is dissension between the Fairy King and Queen, is a poet's fancy that may or may not have drawn colour from the fact that the months of June and July, 1594, were, according to the diary of Simon Forman, the astrologer, "very wet and wonderful cold, like winter, that the 10 day of July many did sit by the fire, it was so cold, and scant two fair days together all that time, but it rained every day more or less: if it did not rain then it was cold and cloudy." John Stowe said of the same year in his Chronicle, "In the month of May fell many great showers of rain, but in the months of June and July much more; for it commonly rained every day or night till St. James's day, and two days after most extremely; all which notwithstanding, in the month of August there followed a fair harvest, but .n the month of September fell great rains, wh ch raised high waters, such as stayed the car ages, and broke down bridges at Cambridge, W re, and elsewhere in many places." In Lectures on Jonas divered in the same year, 1594, Dr. King aske. his hearers to "Remember that the spring was very unkind by means of the abundance of rains that fell; our July hath been like to February; our June even as an April, so that the air must needs be corrupted; God amend it in His mercy, and stay this plague of waters!" As this might very well be about the time when A Midsummer-Night's Dream was written, it is quite possible that in Titania's picture of a summer spoilt by jealousy of Oberon, when "the fold stands empty in the drowned field," and "hoary-headed frosts. Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose," Shakespeare drew some suggestions from a near experience. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps calls attention to the flight of Serena in the eighth canto of the sixth book of the "Faerie Queene" (stanza 32), “Thro' hills and dales, thro' bushes and thro' breres," and finds more than accidental resemblance with the Fairy's answer to Puck at the beginning of the Second Act of the Midsummer-Night's Dream. "Puck. How now, spirit, whither wander you? Fairy. Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier. Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander every where." But there is so obvious an association between hills and dales, bushes and briars, they come so naturally |