‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
But, all the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron
[How] to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,
his dramatic work was steadily advancing. To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ [161] The comedy may well have been written to celebrate a marriage—perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’ (II. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon’s fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western flower called ‘Love-in-idleness’ that he bids Puck fetch for him, has been interpreted as a reminiscence of one of the scenic pageants with
which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575. [162] The whole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy. Hints for the story can be traced to a variety of sources—to Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale,’ to Plutarch’s ‘Life of Theseus,’ to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (bk. iv.), and to the story of Oberon, the fairy-king, in the French mediæval romance of ‘Huon of Bordeaux,’ of which an English translation by Lord Berners was first printed in 1534. The influence of John Lyly is perceptible in the raillery in which both mortals and immortals indulge. In the humorous presentation of the play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ by the ‘rude mechanicals’ of Athens, Shakespeare improved upon a theme which he had already employed in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ But the final scheme of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is of the author’s freshest invention, and by endowing—practically for the first time in literature—the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, Shakespeare may be said to have conquered a new realm for art.