"More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear."
There was a memory of happiness about the wood. It was
"the wood, where often you and I
Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie,
Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet."
In this wood, where Theseus goes a-hunting, Shakespeare, in his fantasy, allows the fairies to vex the life of mortals. For a little while he fancied, or tried to fancy, that those who are made mad and blind by the obsessions of passion are made so at the whim of powers outside life, and that the accidents of life, bad seasons, personal deformities, etc., are due to something unhappy in a capricious immortal world, careless of this world, but easily offended and appeased by mortal action.
All the earth of England is consecrated by the intense memories of the English. In this play Shakespeare set himself free to tell his love for the earth of England that had ministered to his mind with beauty through the years of youth. Walking in the Cotswold country, when
"russet-pated choughs, many in sort
Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,"
gives to the passenger a sense of the enduringness of the pageant upon which those seeing eyes looked more than three centuries ago.
Romeo and Juliet.
Written. 1591-96.
Published, in a mutilated form, 1597.