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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
By 1755 English dramatic audiences as well as English dramatic critics were less concerned with faults in the construction of Shakespeare's plays then they had been twenty years earlier. Largely because of Garrick's excellent acting, the focal point of Shakespearian criticism was shifting from consideration of plot structure to consideration of character delineation. But even though advance was being made in the new criticism as well as in the growth of Shakespeare idolatry, such a varied mixture of realistic material, classical mythology, and fairy lore as Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night's Dream was bound to fail in presentation. Pepys, nearly one hundred years earlier (September 29, 1662), had seen the play and had remarked that it was the most insipid and ridiculous one he had ever witnessed in his life. In 1716 Richard Leveridge presented his Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where it had nine performances (from April 11 of that year until September 9, 1723). As the title suggests, it was a brief handling of Bottom's playing artisans—a mere fragment of Shakespeare's play. On January 21, 1745 an anonymous Mock Opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, appeared at Covent Garden and enjoyed some twenty-two performances until April 13, 1748. The music was composed by John Frederick Lampe, and the play was slightly longer than Leveridge's. No other performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in any of its parts is recorded until 1755 when Garrick made his first attempt to give his audiences some more of the material of the play. He was wise, as subsequent events proved, not to try to present it at that time in its entirety. Yet he was vitally interested in the whole of the play and joined eight years later with his friend George Colman in an attempt to produce it in its Shakespearian form.
1 See Hazelton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved, p. 42. No other record of a performance of Shakespeare's play during the Restoration period is extant. In 1692 it had been supplanted by the opera The Fairy Queen. The droll by Robert Cox entitled The Merrie Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver had, apparently, some popularity before the opening of the theatres, and was privately presented in 1661. My colleague, Dr. W. B. Van Lennep, has given me a reference in 1690 from The Folly of Priestcraft, A Comedy, which reads, “... To see you hugging him in your Bosom for a converted Saint, it seem'd to me as preposterous as to see ... the woman in Shakespeare, kissing the fellow with the asses head.” This reference may be to a revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but is more probably to a revival of the droll.
2 G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, i, 232; also Allardyce Nicoll, Eighteenth Century Drama, 1700–1750, p. 341.
3 Odell, op. cit., i, 347; Nicoli, op. cit., p. 381.
4 Some of the Pyramus and Thisbe material was included by Charles Johnson in his Love in a Forest, 1722–23; cf. Odell, op. cit., i, 244.
5 For a fuller treatment of this and substantiating footnotes see my article, “Garrick's Presentation of Antony and Cleopatra,” RES (1937).
6 Doran, Annals of the English Stage (1890), ii, 44.
7 Cross, it will be noticed, makes no mention of the alterer. Garrick, writing to James Murphy French [Dec. 7, 1756], says: “Sir, I receiv'd your letter, which indeed is more facetious than just—for if you mean that I was the person who altered the Midsummer's Night Dream, and the Tempest, into Operas, you are much mistaken ...” Jesse Foot, Life of Arthur Murphy, p. 100. Notwithstanding the denial, however, both of these alterations have been persistently fathered upon Garrick.
8 Spelled thus in the Diary. In the score of the opera published by I. Walsh it is spelled Guadagni.
9 Statistics and comments are to be found in the Cross-Hopkins Diaries in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C.
10 iv, 407.
11 Saving always the reaction of Theophilus Cibber, whose pen was usually dipped in the gall of personal animosity against Garrick. See his Two Dissertations Upon the Theatre, London [1756], p. 36, where he refers to the production as “A Midsummer Night's Dream, minc'd and fricaseed into an indigested and unconnected thing call'd The Fairies ...”
12 It is in this that Garrick writes:
13 The Actor's Tablet, in Memoirs, iv, 202.
14 Life of Garrick, ii, 269.
15 Op. cit., i, 358. The statement is essentially true, yet study of the text reveals certain glaring exceptions, for one can hardly see, at the distance of one hundred and eighty-seven years, why Garrick's Egeus should say to Theseus, “Therefore do I claim the Athenian law,” instead of, “I beg the ancient privilege of Athens”; or what improvement is made by having Hermia end her promise to Lysander,
instead of,
However, no great poetic sacrifice is made by the rewording in these particular cases.
16 David Garrick and his French Friends, pp. 62–64.
17 Note 7 above.
18 He was, of course, John Christopher Smith, 1712–95. See Anecdotes of George Frederick Sandel and John Christopher Smith, by the Rev. William Coxe (London, 1799), especially pages 46–47.
19 Possibly Garrick should be commended for keeping this song in its Shakespearean purity instead of substituting for it such a regularized form as appeared in the Museum, August 16, 1746:
20 i. i. 184 ff.
21 i. i. 234 ff.
22 i. i. 204 ff.
23 This reading had, of course, been saddled upon the century by Theobald, and accepted by Hanmer.
24 Lines 72 ff.
25 Act ii, the song of a shepherdess with the following two lines missing:
26 Edition of 1768, Elegy ix, stanzas two and three.
27 Mentioned on the title page of the 1755 edition, “The songs from Shakespeare, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Lansdown, Hammond, &c.” As yet I have been unable to identify the song from Dryden.
28 David Garrick and his French Friends, p. 63, where he appears to assume that it is Garrick's composition.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p. 62.
31 v, 40.
32 For its provenance see my article “Garrick's Long Lost Alteration of Hamlet,” PMLA, xlix (1934), 894–895.
33 Life of Garrick, ii, 113.
34 Op. cit., i, 376.
35 Colman's Posthumous Letters (1820), pp. 240 ff.
36 Richard Cross died in 1760. The Diary is carried on for a brief space in an unknown hand that merely notes the plays, afterpieces, and benefits. From 1763 on it is in the hand of the prompter William Hopkins.
37 The Italics are mine.
38 Pp. 43, 44.
39 And the language is more typical of the eighteenth century than of Theseus' Athens or of Shakespeare's England: “Bottom: But hold ye, hold ye neighbors; are your voices in order, and your tunes ready? For if we miss our musical pitch, we shall all be sham'd and abandon'd. Quince: Ay! ay! Nothing goes down so well as a little of your sol, fa, and a long quaver; therefore let us be in our airs—and for better assurance I have got the pitch pipe ...” I have checked the additions with the MS. in the Larpent Collection of the Huntington Library, by means of the photostat procured by the Folger Library. On the first page of the Larpent MS. (6S [1763]) is the notation “New Additions to the Midsummer Night's Dream,” above which in a different hand is “Garrick's 1763.” The ten pages of MS. which follow are not Garrick's. He was in France at the time they were turned over to the Lord Chamberlain. They give Colman's additional lines for Bottom and his crew at the end of Act i, fifteen songs, and several other lines not indicated in Garrick's acting copy but printed in the 1763 edition.
40 Colman preserves these two lines by including them in a song in his fifth act, a duet by two fairies: “Welcome, welcome to this place, ...” etc.
41 This line is altered by both.
42 With mean disguise let others nature hide ...
43 Such as song no. 9:
44 Colman also suggested: “P. 27. I'll follow you &c . .. [Puck] I think all this speech shd be set to Musick, and after Puck has spoken it he shd Sing it—If well set, it must have a good effect, and the words are of a kind that does half the composer's business to his hand.”
45 The article is unsigned.
46 Colman, Posthumous Letters, pp. 245 ff.
47 See E. R. Page, George Colman the Elder, 87–88, for a very brief discussion of this. He rather damns Garrick, and praises Colman's “good sense” in rescuing something of the play by his farce. (Each of us must champion his own man.) He declares that Colman's Fairy Tale was never printed. But A Fairy Tale, in Two Acts taken from Shakespeare, as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane, London, for J. & R. Tonson, 1763, 6d, squares in every particular with accounts of Colman's play, and even includes his pet “glee club” scene (see note 39 above) from his 1763 Midsummer Night's Dream. It is upon this printed version that I base my résumé of the play. There also appeared a slightly abridged edition of the same at the Haymarket, 1777.
48 At the end of Act i:
49 November 26, 1763.
50 Hedgcock, op. cit., pp. 175 ff.
