lsewhere a battle-ground for
critics of all sorts, but do not really assist us to an answer. More
trustworthy testimony, however, is afforded by the general character of the
play, and by Shakespeare's handling of his material; these considerations,
combined with whatever other evidence is available, have caused the play to
be assigned to the winter of 1594-5. So placed, it is the latest of the
early comedies of Shakespeare, who makes an advance on _The Two Gentlemen
of Verona,_ but has not yet attained the firmness of hand which fills the
canvas of _The Merchant of Venice_ with so many well-delineated figures.
Once arrived at this conclusion, we need not let ourselves again be led
away into vagueness or critical polemics by an attempt to find any
aristocratic wedding which this masque-like play seems designed to
celebrate; such theorising, however interesting in other ways, does not
concern and will not avail us now.

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.
Probability is thrown to the winds; anachronism is rampant; classical
figures are mixed with fairies and sixteenth-century Warwickshire
peasants. The main plot is sentimental, the secondary plot is sheer
buffoonery; while the story; of Titania's jealousy and Oberon's method of
curing it can scarcely be dignified by the title of plot at all. The
threads which bind together these three tales, however ingeniously
fastened, are fragile. The Spirit of Mischief puts a happy end to the
differences of the four lovers, and by his transformation of Bottom
reconciles the fairy King and Queen, while he incidentally goes near to
spoiling the performance of the "crew of patches" at the nuptials of
Theseus by preventing due rehearsal of their interlude. It is perhaps a
permissible fancy to convert Theseus' words "the lunatic, the lover, and
the poet," to illustrate the triple appeal made by the three ingredients
the grotesque, the sentimental, and the fantastic. Each part, of course, is
coloured by the poet's genius, and the whole is devoted to the comic aspect
of love, its eternal youth and endless caprice, laughing at laws, and
laughed at by the secure. "What fools these mortals be!" is the comment of
the immortal; the corollary, left unspoken by