say, except that it happens to be poetically and dramatically precisely right for its purpose. Listen again when the brisk hunting horns break into the "still" fairy music and disperse the mists of the dream-to the heroic notes of Hippolyta's

I was with Hercules and Cadmus once

When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta; never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

And then the deeper tone of Theseus

My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee'd and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,
Each under each.

And above all—just because he is called a comic character-do not miss the simplicity and charm of Bottom's immortal

Let me play the lion too. I will roar, that it will do any man's heart good to hear me; I will roar, that I will make the duke say, "Let him roar again, let him roar again."

Having taught our ears due observance of the tunes and harmonies, the shifts of time and key between speech and speech and scene and scene (though one must not press these parallels too far), nothing stands between us and the easiest enjoyment of the play. The archaisms are few, and though the fun of the rustic interlude is (unhappily) not so immediate for us as it was to the Elizabethans, we need not miss the spirit of it if we look for no more than it offers, if we shake free from that disastrous modern town-bred habit of supposing that a country clown and a circus clown are the same.

Shakespeare wrote nothing more perfect of its kind than A Midsummer Night's Dream. One might indeed say—and defend the position-that he wrote nothing so perfect. And he wrote nothing more of its kind, for Love's Labour's Lost, its true companion, is an earlier work. The perfection of the play lies in the fact that its subject and substance and method are so suited. Its inspiration is lyrical and no touch of the main story and no character is too heavy for a lyric to bear. Theseus, the classic hero, is a figment, but he is meant to be. Hippolyta is a shadow of anything the name suggests. They are there only to heighten the romance of the lovers in the wood, and to add dignity to the wedding-which was more than the play's end in the sense that the play itself was assuredly written for the celebration of some great wedding feast. Was there ever such a party given! And the four lovers are not much more substantial or complex in character than the fairy king and queen; rightly, for it is all a fairy play.

We pass now to Romeo and Juliet. This is earlier work and, for all its beauties, cruder work. And the conventions of its emotional expression will often be strange to us; we shall need to make allowance for them.

"Romeo and Juliet"

Note the effect of the opening scene; the progression from the comic prose of the quarrelling servants to the Prince's sounding verse. In a few hundred words Shakespeare gives us the family feud at full pitch, the men, the masters and their wives, and Verona's own share in the trouble. Mark how, even before this, the very first words of the chorus strike for us the keynote of the play.

Two households, both alike in dignity,

A piece of technique that Shakespeare learned early and never lost, to put his auditors upon the right track of scene and character, without delay. But the whole story, helped by the verse, seems to move swiftly and easily, the first act culminating in the charming action of the dance and closing with the perfect passage after Romeo has been recognised-we must picture as we read it the maskers departing with their torches,' and the two figures left alone:

Nothing in this first act need strike the most "modern" of us as strange, unless it be the fantasy of the talk in the scenes between Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio, and their extreme addiction to punning. But we must remember that-apart from such talk being dramatically suited to Romeo's self-conscious humour —this was all in the literary, if not in the actual conversational fashion of the day (for people who were quick enough to indulge in it). And puns were not then in discredit. They were not thought of as poor jokes, or even as jokes at all. The English language was, to cultured Elizabethans, like a new-found and wonderful inheritance. And they revelled in it, they sported with it in every conceivable way. But it did not occur to them-until the game wore thin-that they were degrading it by doing so.

'Modern editions, with no authority from the Folio, mark their “exeunt" 10 lines or so too early, and spoil the effect. Modern producers, however, generally show

more sense.