A Midsummer Night's Dream

We have been broght up on a Shakespearean tradition-a tradition of "doing" Shakespearean play at school, and occasional visits of the elocutionary Allan Wilkie. So well steeped are we in it that any deviation, as given in this picture, seems incapable of appreciation by the public; and yet the diction was pure Shakespeare.

Untrammelled by the time and place limits of the "legitimate" stage, and commanding all the superior effects of photography and lighting, the producer, Max Reinhardt was well able to sublimate Shakespeare's idea of the madness of Midsummer-Night. The result was a picture of surpassing originality and very great beauty. A new idea of grace is presented in the movements of the fairies, a new conception of expression is shown by a single pair of hands while a deeper impression of tragedy comes from Bottom's transformation.

The mortals play a secondary part despite the splendour of their palaces and equipages. It is not given to them to float and glide through the air, to see anything so impressive as the billowing of Oberon's cloak, nor to hear such sweetness as the gnomes' orchestra and the fairies singing. The quarrels and the actions of the lost lovers, and the presentation of "Pyramus and Thisbe" by Bottom and his friends is to show just "what fools these mortals be."