But as a whole the play is disappointing. The plot is too fantastic; Proteus too much of a cad; Julia, though brave and modest, is yet too faithful; Valentine {149} too easy a friend. The illusion of romance throws a transitory glamour over the scene, but, save in the development of character, the play seems immature, when compared with the greater comedies that followed it. +Date+.--The first mention of the play is by Meres (1598); the first print that in the First Folio (1623). The presence of alternate riming sonnets and doggerel rime on the one hand, and of a number of double endings on the other, render 1592 a reasonable date. In its development of character it marks a great advance over the other two comedies of this period. +Source+.--The chief source was a story of a shepherdess, an episode in the Spanish novel, _Diana Enamorada_, by Jorge de Montemayor (1592). Shakespeare probably read it in an English translation by B. Yonge, which had been in Ms. about ten years. This story gives Julia's part of the play, but contains no Valentine. The Silvia of the story, Celia, falls in love instead with the disguised Felismena, and when rejected kills herself. Whether it was Shakespeare who felt the need of a Valentine to support the tale, or whether this was done in the lost play of _Felix and Philiomena_, acted in 1584, cannot be told. The Valentine element may have been borrowed from another play, of which a German version exists (1620). +Midsummer Night's Dream+ is Shakespeare's experiment in the fairy play. Four lovers, two young Athenians of high birth and their sweethearts, are almost inextricably tangled by careless Robin Goodfellow, who has dropped the juice of love-in-idleness upon the eyes of the wrong lovers. King Oberon tricks his capricious and resentful little queen, by the aid of the same juice, into the absurdest infatuation for a clownish weaver, who has come out with his mates to rehearse a play to celebrate Theseus's wedding, but has fallen asleep and {150} wakened to find an ass's head planted upon him. All comes right, as it ever must in fairyland; the true lovers are reunited; the faithful unloved lady gets her faithless lover; Titania repents and is forgiven; and Theseus's wedding is graced by the "mirthfullest tragedy that ever was seen."