SOURCE: Stone, George Winchester, Jr. “A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Hands of Garrick and Colman.” PMLA 54, no. 5 (June 1939): 467-82.

In the following excerpt, Stone claims that Colman was responsible for many of the alterations in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream that caused the play he produced with David Garrick in 1763 to fail with audiences and critics.

By 1755 English dramatic audiences as well as English dramatic critics were less concerned with faults in the construction of Shakespeare's plays then they had been twenty years earlier. Largely because of Garrick's excellent acting, the focal point of Shakespearian criticism was shifting from consideration of plot structure to consideration of character delineation. But even though advance was being made in the new criticism as well as in the growth of Shakespeare idolatry, such a varied mixture of realistic material, classical mythology, and fairy lore as Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night's Dream...