Works of Shakespeare Author:William Shakespeare, John Gregory 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: INTRODUCTION A Midsummer-night's Dream is first mentioned Literary in 1598 by Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia. History' Two years later it appeared for t... more »he first time in print, in two nearly simultaneous quarto editions. Whether the second was issued by the publisher of the first— T. Fisher—or surreptitiously by some one else, only the printer, J. Roberts, being named, cannot be decided. It corrects several blunders, is in general far superior to the texts known to have been pirated, and was afterwards used as the basis of the first Folio. But it commits more blunders than it corrects, conventionalises without insight, and is on the whole decidedly the less authentic and original. The play had already, as the title-pages of both editions attest, been ' sundry times publicly acted,' by Shakespeare's company. It continued throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century to be one of the most popular of his early comedies. The attraction lay chiefly in two features,—the fairies and the clowns,—and the subtle threads by which they are inwoven did not prevent their being detached, adapted, and imitated for the benefit of the distinct audiences to which each feature specially appealed. Thus in 1602 the clowns' burlesque was imitated in the Oxford play of Narcissus ; and after the suppression of the theatres furtive performances were ventured of a droll, afterwards (1661) printed as The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver. The fairy-scenes had a more illustrious after-history. Shakespeare's fairydom, composed, as we shall see, of many elements, took hold of the contemporary imagination, and has coloured all subsequent fairy literature. Even the splendid attempt of Spenser, a few years before, to found a new spiritualised Faerie in the minds of men, succumbed bef...« less