Page:Midsummer Night's Dream (1918) Yale.djvu/102

90 an operatic version with music by Purcell, and from then until well on in the nineteenth century the records show only such perversions and adaptations as that produced by David Garrick in 1755, in which some very stupid songs replaced much of Shakespeare's text and in which the parts of Lysander and Hermia were given to Italian singers.

The credit for the restoration to the stage of something like the original play must be given to Tieck, a German translator of Shakespeare, who produced it at Berlin in 1827 with the incidental music by Mendelssohn which has since become famous. Some of the best performances of recent years have been given in Germany, notably the production by Max Reinhardt, which combined remarkable excellences with lapses of taste characteristically German.

In England and America productions reasonably faithful to the original text have been both frequent and popular since the performance by Mme. Vestris in 1840 at Covent Garden in London. The spectacular possibilities of the play and the popularity of Mendelssohn's music have so appealed to managers that the text has often been swamped in scenery and sound, but there must have been good acting in Augustin Daly's production (1888), when Theseus was played by Joseph Holland, Demetrius by John Drew, Lysander by Otis Skinner, and Helena by Ada Rehan. In 1903 the New Amsterdam Theater in New York was opened with a performance of the play characterized rather by lavish expenditure of money than by intelligence of acting or direction; at another revival in 1906, Miss Annie Russell attempted to play the part of Puck; and in 1915 Granville Barker offered to New York his London production, one which certainly displayed intelligence although its gilded fairies and its substitution of supposedly suggestive 'decorations' in place of realistic scenery aroused much hostile criticism.