the grotesque, the sentimental, and the fantastic. Each part, of course, is
coloured by the poet's genius, and the whole is devoted to the comic aspect
of love, its eternal youth and endless caprice, laughing at laws, and
laughed at by the secure. "What fools these mortals be!" is the comment of
the immortal; the corollary, left unspoken by those outside the pale, being
"What fools these lovers be!"

The sources from which Shakespeare drew the plots of his three dozen of
plays are for the most part easily recognisable; and although in each case
the material was altered to suit his requirements--_nihil tetigit quod non
ornavit_--there is as a rule very little doubt as to the derivation. We can
say with certainty that these nine plays were made out of stories from
Boccaccio, Masuccio, Bandello, Ser Giovanni, Straparola, Cinthio or
Belleforest; that those six were based on older plays, and another
half-dozen drawn from Holinshed; that Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Sidney,
Greene, and Lodge provided other plots; and so forth, until we are left
with _The Tempest_, founded in part on an actual contemporary event,
_Love's Labour's Lost_, apparently his only original plot--if indeed it
deserve the name--and finally our present subject _A Midsummer-Nights
Dream_.

The problem--given the play--is to discover what parts of it Shakespeare
conveyed from elsewhere, and to investigate those sources as far as is
compatible with the limits of this book. For this purpose, it is most
convenient to adopt the above-mentioned division into three component plots
or tales; and because these are rather loosely woven together, the
characters in the play may be simultaneously divided thus:--

1. Theseus. The main (sentimental) plot of the four
Hippolyta. lovers at the court of Theseus.