Adumbrations of The Tempest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Summary

As long ago as 1747, William Warburton, in his edition of Shakespeare, began his first note on The Tempest with the following words:

These two first plays, The Tempest and the Midsummer-night’s Dream, are the noblest Efforts of that sublime and amazing Imagination, peculiar to Shakespear, which soars above the Bounds of Nature without forsaking Sense: or, more properly, carries Nature along with him beyond her established Limits.

(Vol. I, p.3)

Yet even at the time when Warburton was writing the similarity between the two plays in this respect was already a commonplace of criticism, going back at least as far as Nicholas Rowe's 'Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear' (1709), where one reads:

But certainly the greatness of this Author's genius do's no where so much appear, as where he gives his imagination an entire loose, and raises his fancy to a flight above mankind and the limits of the visible world. Such are his attempts in The Tempest, Midsummer- Night's Dream, Machbeth, and Hamlet.

(Ibid., p. lviii)