Kurzbeschreibung von: The Works of William Shakespeare

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundiy times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Cham- berlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. Imprinted at London, for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at bis shoppe, at the Signe of the White Hart, in Fleete-streete, 1600." 32 leaves. "A Midsommer night's dreame. As it hath beene sundry times ipublikely acted, by the Right Honourable, the Lord Cham- berlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. Printed by James Roberts, 1600." 32 leaves. A Midsummer Night's Dream occupies eighteen pages in the folio of 1623, viz., from p. 145 to p. 162, inclusive, in the division of Comedies. It is there divided into Acts, but not into'Scenes, and is without a list of Dramatis Personse. chapter{Section 4 A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. INTRODUCTION. DR. JOHNSON, doling out scarce half a dozen lines of cold approval to this play, devotes two of them to saying, " Fairies in his [Shakespeare's] time were much in fashion: common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great." But, unfortunately for Shakespeare's reputation, the ignorance and misapprehension displayed in this sentence sadly impair the value of that approbation of which it forms so large a part. An editor of Shakespeare should have known that the fairies of The Faerie Queen and those of A Midsummer-Night's Dream are not the same. A reader capable of appreciating either poem, on reading both, must see, untold, that they have nothing in common. The personages of Spenser's allegory are the supernatural beings of stately romance, endowed with traits typical of the moral virtues: the freakful atomies of Shakespeare's dream are the ' good people' in whose actual existence every rustic in England had full fai...