They were out of
his range or sphere. Poetry and romance, unless liberally compounded
with prosaic ingredients, bored him on the stage and elsewhere.
In the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Massinger and Ben Jonson,
poetry and romance were for the most part kept in the background. Such
elements lay there behind a substantial barrier of conventional stage
machinery and elocutionary scaffolding. In Shakespeare, poetry and
romance usually eluded the mechanical restrictions of the theatre.
The gold had a tendency to separate itself from the alloy, and Pepys
only found poetry and romance endurable when they were pretty thickly
veiled behind the commonplaces of rhetoric or broad fun or the
realistic ingenuity of the stage carpenter and upholsterer.
There is, consequently, no cause for surprise that Pepys should write
thus of Shakespeare's ethereal comedy of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_:
"Then to the King's Theatre, where we saw _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the
most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I
confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my
pleasure.
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