Shakespeare in performance works were plundered for these scenes. Among the drolls taken from Shakespeare were "Bottom the Weaver" (Bottom's scenes from "A Midsummer Night's Dream") and "The Grave-makers" (the gravedigger's scene from "Hamlet"). At the Restoration in 1660, Shakespeare's plays were divided between the two newly licensed companies: the King's Company of Thomas Killigrew and the Duke's Men of William Davenant. The licensing system prevailed for two centuries; from 1660 to 1843, only two main companies regularly presented Shakespeare in London. Davenant, who had known early-Stuart actors such as John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, was the main figure establishing some continuity with
A Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon is a "horrid brute". Towards the end of the 19th century, Georg Brandes (1895–6) and Frederick S. Boas (1896) were the last major additions to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" criticism. Brandes' approach to anticipates later psychological readings, seeing Oberon's magic as symbolic and "typifying the sorcery of the erotic imagination". Brandes felt that in the play, Shakespeare looks inward at the "domain of the unconscious". Boas eschews the play as ethical treatise or psychological study and instead takes a more historicist and literal approach. To Boas the play is, despite its fantastical and exotic trappings, "essentially English and Elizabethan".