32 L. A. Sherman 



Evidently, in Trollope's case, the chasm between a vision of 

 character and the portrayal of it was a yawning one. Ouiller- 

 Couch implies that Shakespeare did not at first see character well, 

 but had to feel for it, if haply he might sense or catch it in some 

 feature. We fear that our author is grievously wrong in this. 

 It would not be harder to show that Shakespeare from the first 

 saw character whole and drew it whole when needed than that he 

 developed these capabilities play by play. To be sure he did not 

 always exploit personality in the Comedies. But Romeo and 

 Juliet is as complete in both aspects as Othello or King Lear, and 

 might be held more vivid and telling in character distinctions than 

 Cymheline, The Tempest, or The Winter's Tale, which we re- 

 member were his latest plays. Shakespeare of course is Shake- 

 speare for nothing besides so much as for bridging the chasm 

 between seeing and saying as no man else has ever bridged it. 

 He was surely alive to character differences even in the Errors, 

 though, as Quiller-Couch has shown, he might not use them. 

 And he had his bridge-making technic with him all the while, as 

 the next drama in the series of Comedies proves. Let us follow 

 Quiller-Couch a little further : 



We come to A Midsummer-Night's Dream ; and, with the three earlier 

 comedies to guide us, shall attempt to conjecture how the young play- 

 wright would face this new piece of work. 



First we shall ask, " What had he to do ? " 



Nobody knows precisely when, or precisely where, or precisely how, A 

 Midsummer-Night's Dreafn was first produced. But it is evident to me 

 that, like Love's Labour's Lost, it was written for performance at court; 

 and that its particular occasion, like the occasion of The Tempest, was a 

 court wedding. It has all the stigmata of* a court play. Like Love's 

 Labour's Lost and The Tempest, it contains an interlude; and that inter- 

 lude — Bully Bottom's Pyramus and Thisbe — is designed, rehearsed, enacted 

 for a wedding. Can any one read the opening scene or the closing speech 

 of Theseus and doubt that the occasion was a wedding? Be it remem- 

 bered, moreover, how the fairies dominate this play ; and how constantly 

 and intimately fairies are associated with weddings in Elizabethan poetry, 

 their genial favours invoked, their malign caprices prayed against. I take 

 a stanza from Spenser's great Epithalamion : 



Let no deluding dreames, nor dreadfull sights 

 Make sudden sad affrights ; 

 Ne let house-fyres, nor lightnings helpelesse harmes, 



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