weather and storms of rain among us; which if we will
observe, and compare it with what is past, we may say that the course
of nature is very much inverted. Our years are turned upside down: our
Summers are no Summers; our harvests are no harvests; our seed-times
are no seed-times. For a great space of time scant any day hath been
seen that it hath not rained." Dyce indeed scouts the supposal that
Shakespeare had any allusion to this eccentric conduct of the elements
in the Summer of 1594, pronouncing it "ridiculous"; but I do not quite
see it so; albeit I am apt enough to believe that most of the play was
written before that date. And surely, the truth of the allusion being
granted, all must admit that passing events have seldom been turned to
better account in the service of poetry.

* * * * *

I can hardly imagine this play ever to have been very successful on
the stage; and I am sure it could not be made to succeed there now.
Still we are not without contemporary evidence that it had at least a
fair amount of fame. And we have authentic information that it was
performed at the house of Dr. John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on
Sunday, the 27th of September, 1631. The actor of Bottom's part was on
that occasion sentenced by a Puritan tribunal to sit twelve hours in
the porter's room of the Bishop's palace, wearing the ass's head. This
Dr. Williams was the very able but far from faultless man who was
treated so harshly by Laud, and gave the King such crooked counsel in
the case of Strafford, and spent his last years in mute sorrow at the
death of his royal master, and had his life written by the wise,
witty, good Bishop Hacket.

* * * * *

Some hints towards the part of Theseus and Hippolyta appear to have
been taken from _The Knight's Tale_ of Chaucer. The same poet's
_Legend of Thisbe of Babylon_, and Golding's translation of the same
story from Ovid, probably furnished the matter of the Interlude. So
much as relates to Bottom and his fellows evidently came fresh from
Nature as she had passed under the Poet's eye. The linking of these
clowns with the ancient tragic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, so as to
draw the latter within the region of modern farce, is not less
original than droll. How far it may have expressed the Poet's judgment
touching the theatrical doings of the time, were perhaps a question
more curious than profitable. The names of Oberon, T