as it were to the merry interludes of old. In the form in which Cox at this time produced the farce of Bottom, it was subsequently transplanted to Germany by our own Andreas Gryphius, the schoolmaster and pedant Squenz being the chief character. How expressive these burlesque parts of the piece must have been in Shakespeare's time to the public, who were acquainted with original drolleries of this kind, we now can scarcely imagine. Nor do we any longer understand how to perform them; the public at that time, on the contrary, had the types of the caricatured pageants in this play and in Love's Labour's Lost still existing among thein.

On the other hand Shakespeare's fairy world became the source of a complete fairy literature. The kingdom of the fairies had indeed appeared, in the chivalric epics, many centuries before Shakespeare. The oldest Welsh tales and romances relate of the contact of mortals with this invisible world. The English of Shakespeare's time possessed a romance of this style written by Launfall, in a translation from the French. The romance of Huon of Bordeaux' had been earlier (in 1570) translated by Lord Berners into English. From it, or from the popular book of Robin Goodfellow,' Shakespeare may have borrowed the name of Oberon. From the reading of Ovid he probably gave to the fairy queen the name of Titania, while among his contemporaries, and even by Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, she is called 'Queen Mab.' In those old chivalric romances, in Chaucer, in Spenser's allegorical Faerie Queen,' the fairies are utterly different beings, without distinct character or office; they concur with the whole world of chivalry in the same monotonous description and want of character. But the Saxon fairy legends afforded Shakespeare a hold for renouncing the romantic art of the pastoral poets and for passing over to the rude popular taste of his fellow-countrymen. He could learn melodious language, descriptive art, the brilliancy of romantic pictures, and the sweetness of visionary images from Spenser's 'Faerie Queen; but he rejected his portrayal of this fairy world and grasped at the little pranks of Robin Goodfellow, where the simple faith of the people was preserved in pure and unassuming form. In a similar way in Germany, at the restoration of popular life at the time of the Reformation, the chivalric and romantic notions of the world of spirits were cast aside; men returned to popular belief, and we read nothing which reminds

us so much of Shakespeare's fairy world as the theory of elementary spirits by our own Paracelsus. From the time that Shakespeare adopted the mysterious ideas of this mythology, and the homely expression of them in prose and verse, we may assert that the popular Saxon taste became more and more predominant in him. In Romeo and Juliet and in the Merchant of Venice there is an evident leaning towards both sides, and necessarily so, as the poet is here still occupied upon subjects completely Italian. Working, moreover, at the same time upon historical subjects, settled the poet, as it were, fully in his native soil, and the delineation of the lower orders of the people in Henry IV. and V. shows that he felt at home there. From the period of these pieces we find no longer the conceit-style, the love of rhyme, the insertion of sonnets, and similar forms of the artificial lyric; and that characteristic delight in simple popular songs, which shows itself even here in the fairy choruses, takes the place of the discarded taste. The example given in Shakespeare's formation of the fairy world had, however, little effect. Lilly, Drayton, Ben Jonson, and other contemporaries and successors, took full possession of the fairy world for their poems, in part evidently influenced by Shakespeare, but none of them has understood how to follow him even upon the path already cleared. Among the many productions of this kind Drayton's 'Nymphidia' is the most distinguished. The poem turns upon Oberon's jealousy of the fairy knight Pigwiggen; it paints the fury of the king with quixotic colouring, and treats of the combat between the two in the style of the chivalric romances, seeking, like them, its main charm in the descriptions of the little dwellings, implements, and weapons of the fairies. If we compare this with Shakespeare's magic creation, which derives its charm entirely from the reverent thoughtfulness with which the poet clings with his natural earnestness to popular legends, leaving intact this childlike belief and preserving its object undesecrated; if we compare the two together, we shall perceive most clearly the immense distance at which our poet stood even from the best of his contemporaries.

We have frequently referred to the necessity of seeing Shakespeare's plays performed, in order to be able to estimate them fully, based as they are upon the joint effect of poetic and dramatic art. It will, therefore, be just to mention the representation which this most difficult of all theatrical tasks of

a modern age has met with in all the great stages of Germany. And, that we may not be misunderstood, we will premise that, however strongly we insist upon this principle, we yet, in the present state of things, warn most decidedly against all overbold attempts at Shakespearian representation. If we would perform dramas in which such an independent position is assigned to the dramatic art as it is in these, we must before everything possess a histrionic art independent and complete in itself. But this art has with us declined with poetic art, and amid the widely distracting concerns of the present time it is scarcely likely soon to revive. A rich, art-loving prince, endowed with feeling for the highest dramatic delights, and ready to make sacrifices on their behalf, could possibly effect much, were he to invite together to one place, during an annual holiday, the best artists from all theatres, and thus to re-cast the parts of a few of the Shakespearian pieces. Even then a profound judge of the poet must take the general management of the whole. If all this were done, a play like the Midsummer-Night's Dream might be at last attempted. This fairy play was produced upon the English stage when they had boys early trained for the characters; without this proviso it is ridiculous to desire the representation of the most difficult parts, with powers utterly inappropriate. When a girl's high treble utters the part of Oberon, a character justly represented by painters with abundant beard, and possessing all the dignity of the calm ruler of this hovering world; when the rude goblin Puck is performed by an affected actress, when Titania and her suite appear in ball-costume, without beauty or dignity, for ever moving about in the hopping motion of the dancing chorus, in the most offensive ballet-fashion that modern unnaturalness has created-what then becomes of the sweet charm of these scenes and figures which should appear in pure aërial drapery, which in their sport should retain a certain elevated simplicity, and which in the affair between Titania and Bottom, far from unnecessarily pushing the awkward fellow forward as the principal figure, should understand how to place the ludicrous character at a modest distance, and to give the whole scene the quiet charm of a picture? If it be impossible to act these fairy forms at the present day, it is equally so with the clowns. The common nature of the mechanics when they are themselves is perhaps intelligible to our actors; but when they perform their work of art few actors of the present day

possess the self-denial that would lead them to represent this most foolish of all follies with solemn importance, as if in thorough earnestness, instead of overdoing its exaggeration, self-complacently working by laughter and smiling at themselves. Unless this self-denial be observed, the first and greatest object of these scenes, that of exciting laughter, is inevitably lost. Lastly, the middle class of mortals introduced between the fairies and the clowns, the lovers driven about by bewildering delusions, what sensation do they excite, when we see them in the frenzy of passion wandering through the wood in kid-gloves, in knightly dress, conversing after the manner of the refined world, devoid of all warmth, and without a breath of this charming poetry? How can knightly accoutrements suit Theseus, the kinsman of Hercules, and the Amazonian Hippolyta? Certain it is that in the fantastic play of an unlimited dream, from which time and place are effaced, these characters ought not to appear in the strict costume of Greek antiquity; but still less, while one fixed attire is avoided, should we pass over to the other extreme, and transport to Athens a knightly dress, and a guard of Swiss halberdiers. We can only compare with this mistake one equally great, that of adding a disturbing musical accompaniment, inopportunely impeding the rapid course of the action, and interrupting this work of fancy, this delicate and refined action, this ethereal dream, with a march of kettledrums and trumpets, just at the point where Theseus is expressing his thoughts as to the unsubstantial nature of these visions. And amid all these modern accompaniments, the simple balcony of the Shakespearian stage was retained, as if in respect to stage apparatus we were to return to those days! This simplicity moreover was combined with all the magnificence customary at the present day. Elements thus contradictory and thus injudiciously united, tasks thus beautiful and thus imperfectly discharged, must always make the friend of Shakespearian performances desire that, under existing circumstances, they were rather utterly renounced.

ROMEO AND JULIET.

WE have pointed out our idea that Shakespeare designed the two comedies of Love's Labour's Lost and Won in an intentional contrast to each other. We shall subsequently perceive that his thoughtful Muse delighted, still more repeatedly, in placing even other dramas in a similar inner relation to each other; and it is possible that even the Midsummer-Night's Dream was designed as a counterpart to Romeo and Juliet, in which the same theme is treated in the strongest and most glaring contrast possible. The comedy, as we stated, seems to us to have originated about the year 1595, the same year in which the poet may have put the finishing touch to this tragedy, which almost all editors consider to have occupied him for a series of years since 1591. There is an early unauthenticated print of the play dated 1597, which some regard as a mutilated pirated edition of the tragedy as we read it (essentially according to the improved and enlarged quarto edition of 1599), but the latest editors consider it to be the text (spoiled, indeed) of an older work of the poet while yet young.1 In comparing it with the present play we observe the improving hand of the poet, just as in Henry VI., in various instructive touches of emendation, a series of masterly strokes show the advancing mind in all important additions, which almost always affect the finest points of poetical and psychological completion; in those passages, for instance, where he purposes to give more rhetorical force to the reproving speeches of Prince Escalus, to delineate more intelligibly the depth of affection in the lovers and the fatally concealed fervour of Romeo's passionate mind, to impress more sharply the explanatory lessons of the monk, and to work out connectedly and completely the natural succession of the emotions of the soul in the violent catastrophe

1 Both copies are to be found in Mommsen's critical edition of Romeo and Juliet. Oldenburg, 1859.