While He was 'chucking them out,' an archangel asked
Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in the air
still, and have power to wreck ships, and to work evil in the
world."[92]
* * * *
OBERON'S VISION.
_A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, like too many other plays of Shakespeare, has
been unable to escape the inquisition of "deuteroscopists"--those who are
always on the look-out for historical and other allusions. The dainty
passage (II. i. 148-174), in which Oberon gives Puck directions how and
where to find the magic herb that works the transformations of love in the
rest of the play, appears to contain a reference to Elizabeth as "a fair
vestal throned by the west" and "the imperial votaress." So much may be
reasonably granted; but Warburton in his edition proceeded to identify "the
mermaid on a dolphin's back" with Mary Queen of Scots, the dolphin of
course being the Dauphin, and so forth. This interpretation of the alleged
secret allegory was displaced in 1843 by one rather more plausible--though
still needlessly fantastic.
_Oberon's Vision_, by the Rev. N.J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society, 1843)
attempts to prove that in composing this passage Shakespeare was referring
to the Earl of Leicester's attempt to win Elizabeth's hand, when she
visited him at Kenilworth in 1575; the mermaid, uttering dulcet and
harmonious breath, so that the rude sea grows civil, and the stars that
shot from their spheres, are explained, by parallel passages from
contemporary accounts, as parts of the pageant or "Princely Pleasures"
which formed the Queen's entertainment.
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