Page:Midsummer Night's Dream (1918) Yale.djvu/101



A Midsummer Night's Dream was first printed, in quarto, in 1600. A second quarto bears the same date on the title-page, but this was actually printed about 1619. The existence of the play some years before 1600 is proved by the fact that it is mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, which was published in 1598. Those who seek to determine the date of composition more definitely than this are obliged to base their opinions upon internal evidence. Some critics see in Titania's speech about the confusion of the seasons (II. i. 88–114) a reference to the unusually cold, wet summer of 1594. Others, believing that the play was written to honor some great wedding, have attempted, without conspicuous success, to determine whose that wedding was. The result of these and other conjectures and of inferences drawn from the manner in which Shakespeare here handled his verse is that there is general agreement that the play was written not earlier than 1593 and not later than 1595.

In its original and complete form the play has been, until relatively recent years, among the less popular of Shakespeare's works, although in 1631 the Bishop of Lincoln got into trouble with the Puritans by allowing it to be performed—in whole or in part—at his house on a Sunday. An abridgment of the play with the title The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver was apparently acted in private during the period when the theaters were closed (1642–1660). Whether the performance which Pepys saw in 1662 and thought 'the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life' was a representation of the play as Shakespeare wrote it is not certain, but in 1692 at any rate the original was displaced by