are so closely like those in Nash's Summer's Last Will, where Summer says—
"Died I had indeed unto the earth,
But that Eliza, England's beauteous Queen,
On whom all seasons prosperously attend,
Forbad the execution of my fate
Until her joyful progress was expired"—
that I think they are alluded to by Shakespeare. The singularly fine summer of 1592 is attributed to the influence of Elizabeth, the Fairy Queen. Nash's play was performed at the Archbishop's palace at Croydon in Michaelmas term of the same year by a "number of hammer-handed clowns (for so it pleaseth them in modesty to name themselves);" but I believe the company originally satirised in Shakespeare's play was the Earl of Sussex', Bottom, the chief clown, being intended for Robert Greene. Thus much for date of production. For the title of the play, compare the conclusion of The Taming of a Shrew and Peele's Old Wife's Tale, the latter of which is performed in a dream, and the former is supposed by Sly to be so; the interpretation that it means a play performed at midsummer is quite inconsistent with iv. 1. 190, &c., and other passages. The names of the personages are interesting, because they show us what books Shakespeare was reading at this time: from North's Plutarch, Life of Theseus, the first in the book, he got Periginia (Perigouna), Aegles, Ariadne, Antiope, and Hippolita; from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, also the first in the printed editions, which he afterwards dramatised, Philostrate; from Greene's James IV. Oberon. This last name, with Titania's, also occurs in the Queen's Entertainment at Lord Hertford's, 1591. The time-analysis of this play has probably been disturbed by omissions in producing the Court version. I. 1. 128-251 ought to form, and probably did, in the original play, a separate scene; it certainly does not take place in the palace. To the same cause must be attributed the confusion as to the moon's age; cf. i. 1. 209 with the opening lines: the new moon was an afterthought, and evidently derived from a form of the story in which the first day of the month and the new moon were coincident after the Greek time-reckoning. It is worth notice that not only is the title of Preston's Cambyses parodied in the Pyramus interlude, but his pension of sixpence a day is ridiculed in iv. 2. Nor must we quite pass over the fact, which confirms the 1595 date, that on 30th August 1594, at the baptism of Prince Henry (of Scotland), the tame lion which was to have been brought in in the triumph was replaced by a Moor, "because his presence might have brought some fear." The play is nearly as much an error play (iii. 2. 368) as the Errors itself, and, like it, has no known immediate source for the plot. The Pyramus interlude is clearly based on C. Robinson's Handfull of Pleasant Delights (1584); and some of the fairy story may have been suggested by Montemayor's Diana. The line ii. 2. 104, is from Peele's Edward I. (near end), "how nature strove in them to show her art," and I think the man who dares not come in the moon because it is in snuff may allude to the offence given at Court by Lyly's Endymion in 1588. An absolute downward limit of date is given by a line imitated in Doctor Doddypol, a play alluded to in 1596 by Nash, and spoiled in the imitation—
"Hanging on every leaf an orient pearl,
Which shook together by the silken wind