while watching the other evening a very well-managed reproduction of a midsummer night’s dream, i had the sudden conviction that the play would be much better if it were acted in modern costume, or, at any rate, in english costume. we all remember hearing in our boyhood about the absurd conventionality of garrick and mrs. siddons, when he acted macbeth in a tie-wig and a tail-coat, and she acted lady macbeth in a crinoline as big and stiff as a cartwheel. this has always been talked of as a piece of comic ignorance or impudent modernity; as if rosalind appeared in rational dress with a bicycle; as if portia appeared with a horsehair wig and side-whiskers. but i am not so sure that the great men and women who founded the english stage in the eighteenth century were quite such fools as they looked; especially as they looked to the romantic historians and eager arch?ologists of the nineteenth century. i have a queer suspicion that garrick and siddons knew nearly as much about dressing as they did about acting.

one distinction can at least be called obvious. garrick did not care much for the historical costume of macbeth; but he cared as much as shakespeare did. he did not know much about that prehistoric and partly mythical celtic chief; but he knew more than shakespeare; and he could not conceivably have cared less. now the victorian age was honestly interested in the dark and epic origins of europe; was honestly interested in picts and scots, in celts and saxons; in the blind drift of the races and the blind drive of the religions. ossian and the arthurian revival had interested people in distant dark-headed men who probably never existed. freeman, carlyle, and the other teutonists had interested them in distant fair-headed men who almost certainly never existed. pusey and pugin and the first high churchmen had interested them in shaven-headed men, dark or fair, men who did undoubtedly exist, but whose real merits and defects would have startled their modern admirers very considerably. under these circumstances it is not strange that our age should have felt a curiosity about the solid but mysterious macbeth of the dark ages. but all this does not alter the ultimate fact: that the only macbeth that mankind will ever care about is the macbeth of shakespeare, and not the macbeth of history. when england was romantic it was interested in macbeth’s kilt and claymore. in the same way, if england becomes a republic, it will be specially interested in the republicans in julius c?sar. if england becomes roman catholic, it will be specially interested in the theory of chastity in measure for measure. but being interested in these things will never be the same as being interested in shakespeare. and for a man interested in shakespeare, a man merely concerned about what shakespeare meant, a macbeth in powdered hair and knee-breeches is perfectly satisfactory. for macbeth, as shakespeare shows him, is much more like a man in knee-breeches than a man in a kilt. his subtle hesitations and his suicidal impenitence belong to the bottomless speculations of a highly civilized society. the “out, out, brief candle” is far more appropriate to the last wax taper after a ball of powder and patches than to the smoky but sustained fires in iron baskets which probably flared and smouldered over the swift crimes of the eleventh century. the real macbeth probably killed duncan with the nearest weapon, and then confessed it to the nearest priest. certainly, he may never have had any such doubts about the normal satisfaction of being alive. however regrettably negligent of the importance of duncan’s life, he had, i fancy, few philosophical troubles about the importance of his own. the men of the dark ages were all optimists, as all children and all animals are. the madness of shakespeare’s macbeth goes along with candles and silk stockings. that madness only appears in the age of reason.

so far, then, from garrick’s anachronism being despised, i should like to see it imitated. shakespeare got the tale of theseus from athens, as he got the tale of macbeth from scotland; and having reluctantly seen the names of those two countries in the record, i am convinced that he never gave them another thought. macbeth is not a scotchman; he is a man. but theseus is not only not an athenian; he is actually and unmistakably an englishman. he is the super-squire; the best version of the english country gentleman; better than wardle in pickwick. the duke of athens is a duke (that is, a dook), but not of athens. that free city is thousands of miles away.

if theseus came on the stage in gaiters or a shooting-jacket, if bottom the weaver wore a smock-frock, if hermia and helena were dressed as two modern english schoolgirls, we should not be departing from shakespeare, but rather returning to him. the cold, classical draperies (of which he probably never dreamed, but with which we drape ?gisthus or hippolyta) are not only a nuisance, but a falsehood. they misrepresent the whole meaning of the play. for the meaning of the play is that the little things of life as well as the great things stray on the borderland of the unknown. that as a man may fall among devils for a morbid crime, or fall among angels for a small piece of piety or pity, so also he may fall among fairies through an amiable flirtation or a fanciful jealousy. the fact that a back door opens into elfland is all the more reason for keeping the foreground familiar, and even prosaic. for even the fairies are very neighbourly and firelight fairies; therefore the human beings ought to be very human in order to effect the fantastic contrast. and in shakespeare they are very human. hermia the vixen and helena the maypole are obviously only two excitable and quite modern girls. hippolyta has never been an amazon; she may perhaps have once been a suffragette. theseus is a gentleman, a thing entirely different from a greek oligarch. that golden good-nature which employs culture itself to excuse the clumsiness of the uncultured is a thing quite peculiar to those lazier christian countries where the christian gentleman has been evolved:

for nothing in this world can be amiss

when simpleness and duty tender it.

or, again, in that noble scrap of sceptical magnanimity which was unaccountably cut out in the last performance:

the best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.

these are obviously the easy and reconciling comments of some kindly but cultivated squire, who will not pretend to his guests that the play is good, but who will not let the actors see that he thinks it bad. but this is certainly not the way in which an athenian tory like aristophanes would have talked about a bad play.

but as the play is dressed and acted at present, the whole idea is inverted. we do not seem to creep out of a human house into a natural wood and there find the superhuman and supernatural. the mortals, in their tunics and togas, seem more distant from us than the fairies in their hoods and peaked caps. it is an anticlimax to meet the english elves when we have already encountered the greek gods. the same mistake, oddly enough, was made in the only modern play worth mentioning in the same street with a midsummer night’s dream, peter pan. sir james barrie ought to have left out the fairy dog who puts the children to bed. if children had such dogs as that they would never wish to go to fairyland.

this fault or falsity in peter pan is, of course, repeated in the strange and ungainly incident of the father being chained up in the dog’s kennel. here, indeed, it is much worse: for the manlike dog was pretty and touching: the doglike man was ignominious and repulsive. but the fallacy is the same; it is the fallacy that weakens the otherwise triumphant poetry and wit of sir james barrie’s play; and weakens all our treatment of fairy plays at present. fairyland is a place of positive realities, plain laws, and a decisive story. the actors of a midsummer night’s dream seemed to think that the play was meant to be chaotic. the clowns thought they must be always clowning. but in reality it is the solemnity—nay, the conscientiousness—of the yokels that is akin to the mystery of the landscape and the tale.