Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Vol. 4 of 12: The Plays Edited From the Folio of 1623, With Various Readings From All the Editions and All the Commentators, Notes, Introductory Remarks, a Historical Sketch of the d104, an Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Drama, a Memoir of the Poet
R. Johnson, doling out scarce half a dozen lines of cold approval to this play, devotes two of them to saying, Fairies in his [shakespeare's] time were much in fashion common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser's poem had made them great. But, unfortunately for Shakespeare's reputation, the ignorance and misapprehension displayed in this sentence sadly impair the value of that approbation of which it forms so large a part. Ah editor of Shakespeare should have known that the fairies of The Faerie Queen and those of A Mad summer-niglzt's Dream are not the same. A reader capable of appreciating either poem, on reading both, must see, untold, that they have nothing in common. The personages of Spen ser's allegory are the supernatural beings of stately romance, endowed With traits typical of the moral virtues: the freakfu.' atomies of Shakespeare's dream are the good people in whose actual existence every rustic in England had full faith a faith shared by no small proportion of his superiors in rank and edu cation, until the poet's hand transplanted elf and fay from the byways of tradition and the dim retreats of superstition into the bright and Open realms of fancy and imagination.
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