The comedy of A midsummer-night's dream Author: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: so ill set visibly before the spectators of an Elizabethan theater. In ' Pyramus and Thisbe' an actual man with a lantern stands for the moon ; another represent... more »s wall with plaster on his fingers. Bottom and his crew assume that the spectators have no imaginations : Shakespeare in his fairy ' Dream ' assumes that they can imagine as poetically real anything beautiful or grotesque which the poet suggests to them. " The action of the play is comprised within three days, ending at twelve o'clock on the night of May Day. The notes of time given in the opening lines are inconsistent with this statement, but the inconsistency is Shakespeare's own." Dr Nathan Drake ("Shakespeare and His Times") has this notice of the fairies of this play: " The fairies of Shakespeare have been truly denominated the favorite children of his romantic fancy, and perhaps in no part of his works has he exhibited a more creative and visionary pencil or a finer tone of enthusiasm than in bodying forth these ' airy nothings,' and giving them in brighter and ever-durable tints once more ' a local habitation and a name.' Of his unlimited sway over this delightful world of ideal forms no stronger proof can be given than that he has imparted an entire new cast of character to the beings he has evoked from its bosom, purposely omitting the darker shades of their character, and whilst throwing around them a flood of light, playful yet exquisitely soft and tender, endowing them with the moral attributes of purity and benevolence. In fact, he not only dismisses altogether the fairies of malignant nature, but clothes the milder yet mixed tribe of his predecessors with a more fascinating spontaneousness and with a much larger share of unalloyed goodness. . . . chapter{Section 4" Such, in fact, has been the succes...« less