A Midsummer Night's Dream

“ But read it and compare it with the nature-poetry of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and you will feel how far the great Englishman surpasses the greatest Frenchmen in pure unrhetorical lyrism and irrepressibly playful, absolutely poetical poetry, with its scent of clover, its taste of wild honey, and its airy and shifting dream-pageantry.
We have here no pathos. The hurricane of passion does not as yet sweep through Shakespeare's work. ”

“ Notes descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers....
The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.—Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective: everything there is in the fore-ground. ”

“ The play chosen for representation that night was A Midsummer Night's Dream; and Filina, in the character of "Titania," won golden opinions from one and all. In her dainty fairy garments she bewitched the hearts of her audience by her charming acting and fascinating coquetry, and the old castle walls rang with the loud bursts of applause that were constantly accorded to the lovely actress. ”

“ Love's Labour's Lost. Act v. Sc. 2.
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn [57:1]
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 1.
For aught that I could ever read, [57:2]
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 1.
O, hell! to choose love by another's eyes.
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 1.
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ”

“ In The Midsummer Night's Dream, on the other hand, there flows a luxuriant vein of the boldest and most fantastical invention; the most extraordinary combination of the most dissimilar ingredients seems to have been brought about without effort by some ingenious and lucky accident, and the colours are of such clear transparency that we think the whole of the variegated fabric may be blown away with a breath. ”

“ It is none the less of value to recognise at the outset that A Midsummer-Night's Dream is more of a masque than a drama—an entertainment rather than a play. The characters are mostly puppets, and scarcely any except Bottom has the least psychological interest for the reader. ”

“ Obviously, by actors of the first order and with costumes and scenery the most splendid. This goes without saying, for the play is intended quite as much to be seen as to be heard. To do it justice, the performance must bring out some of the splendor and the fantasy with which it was conceived. As we read A Midsummer Night's Dream it is easy to imagine the glorious succession of splendid scenes, but on the stage the characters become flesh and blood with fixed limitations, and the illusion is easily lost unless every agency is used to carry it out. ”

“ And now, if any are offended with this story of fairies and their pranks, as judging it incredible and strange, they have only to think that they have been asleep and dreaming, and that all these adventures were visions which they saw in their sleep: and I hope none of my readers will be so unreasonable as to be offended with a pretty harmless Midsummer Night's Dream. ”

“ There are some points that naturally suggest a comparison between The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night's Dream. In both the Poet has with equal or nearly equal success carried Nature, as it were, beyond herself, and peopled a purely ideal region with the attributes of life and reality ”

“ Thus he gradually returns to those brighter moods of his youth from which the fairy dances of the Midsummer Night's Dream had evolved, or that unknown Forest of Arden in which cypresses grew and lions prowled, and happy youth and mirthful maidenhood carelessly roamed. Only the spirit of frolic has departed, while free play is given to a fancy unhampered by the laws of reality, and much earnest discernment lies behind the untrammelled sport of imagination. He waves the magician's wand and reality vanishes, now, as formerly. ”

“ His delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the Midsummer Night's Dream alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together. ”

“ The fairy of folk-lore in Shakespeare's day is nearly everything that the fairies of A Midsummer-Night's Dream are; we may possibly except their exiguity, their relations in love with mortals, and their hymeneal functions. His conception of their size as infinitesimal at least differs from that of the popular stories, where (as far as can be ascertained) they are shown to be about the size of mortal children. ”

“ To talk with her in unrestrained frivolity, glancing from theme to theme, but always with a grain of sentiment or philosophy in their talk; to walk beside her in those stately alleys at Discombe, or to linger in the marble temple; to follow the peacocks along the grass walks; to look for the nests of the thrushes and blackbirds in the thick walls of laurel; to plan garden-plays—Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream—in that grassy amphitheatre, which reminded Allan of the Boboli Gardens—these things made a happiness that filled mind and heart to the exclusion of all thought of the future. ”

“ Romeo and Juliet, which was published in 1597 as played by Lord Hunsdon’s men, was probably produced somewhat before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as its incidents seem to have suggested the parody of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude. ”

“ The only action of 'As You Like It' is pedestrian; if the characters had been placed in the forest in the first scene, the drama would have been then as ripe for its catastrophe as it is in the last. Midsummer Night's Dream has no plot.'The Midsummer Night's Dream' relates a midnight stroll in a wood ”

“ When we come out from a performance of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' we feel as near to the stars as when we come out from 'King Lear.' For the joy of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than wisdom, their love is stronger than death. ”

“ In A Midsummer Night's Dream the heroic couple (Theseus and Hippolyta) have as a counterpart the fairy couple (Oberon and Titania) ; and, further, there is a complex symmetry in the fortunes of the Athenian lovers, Hermia being at first wooed by two men, while Helena stands alone and deserted, whereas afterwards it is Hermia who is left without a lover, while the two men centre their suit upon Helena. Finally, there is a fifth couple in Pyramus and Thisbe, represented by the artisans, who in burlesque and sportive fashion complete the symmetrical design. ”

“ Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the poet's irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an expression of human reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is only by way of exception that he makes reason the determining factor in human conduct. He early felt and divined how much wider is the domain of the unconscious than of the conscious life, and saw that our moods and passions have their root in the unconscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are latent in the wayward love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream. ”

“ Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?
HIPPOLYTA.
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur’d so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
Enter lovers: Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia and Helena.
THESEUS.
Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth. ”

“ The ether itself flamed, and the colour of that flame was blue. It was the light of vision, the very light of a Midsummer’s Dream. The cloud that had shed the rain brooded apart with wings of folded gloom. Two or three drifting feathers of dark grey vapour barred the burning blue. Perishably fine, they dissolved against the glow, and one amazing star showed translucent at the vapour’s edge, now veiled, now blazing out as the mist wavered and withdrew from so much brightness. A night for love, a night for lovers’ dreams.
Yearning came upon Elizabeth like a flood. ”

“ In Shakespeare’s time it was a belief that no one could see the fairies and live, for he makes Falstaff exclaim, “They are fairies, he who looks on them shall die;” but any one who desires to see them through the eye of a poet should read most carefully the altogether delightful “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” ”

“ Songs in Shakspeare are introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beautifully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for them, as Desdemona's 'Willow,' and Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You Like It. But the whole of the Midsummer Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical. ”

“ His liberal eye doth give to every one—
Thawing cold fear.
The singular language and thought in Midsummer Night's Dream, reflects on our subject. The poet, from his vast treasury of imagery, speaks of the fiery light of the glowworm's eyes. ”