Molly, thanks for coming. My lecture today is about Midsummer Night's Dream. So it's a nice dreams, written in about fifteen ninety five or six, so it's closest relations chronologically are probably Richard the Second and Romeo and Juliet. They're both plays, which are quite interesting to look alongside Midsummer Night's Dream and particularly in terms of linguistic and structural formality. It's first published in sixteen hundred. Quite interesting corto text.
Look at sixteen hundred and then again in sixteen twenty three. So three plot lines, as you almost certainly know, are interwoven in Midsummer Night's Dream. The human world of Athens is awaiting the marriage of Duke Theseus to his bride Hippolyta. Just as the case of Hermia, who prefers Lysander over her father's chosen suitor. Demetrius comes before Theseus for judgement Theseus Backes Aegeus Hermès father.
He backs a G.S. in saying that Demitrius is a more appropriate husband for Hermia than Lysander. And so the lovers Hermia and Lysander run away into the wood outside the city. They're followed by Demetrius, and he in turn is followed by Helena, who is in love with him. The wood is the territory of the fairy world. Its rulers, Oberon and Titania, are quarrelling over custody of an Indian boy.
Oberon's mischievous servant, Robin Goodfellow, or Park, mixes up the lovers by applying a love potion to the men's eyes. They both then turn their amorous attentions onto a bewildered Helena. Meanwhile, a group of Athenian tradesmen are practising a play to be performed at Theseus, his wedding. Robin puts an acid head onto their boisterous ringleader bottom and makes Titania fall in love with him.
In the end, all the magics are revoked. Titania Seeds Oper on the contested child bottoms as his head is removed. The play is performed and the Athenian lovers form two couples. My question for thinking about the play was remind me who marries whom. I want to use this to discuss the way this most apparently romantic of comedies is actually rather satirical about its main subject. Romantic love and turns out to be a play more about sex than about marriage.
Now, even I know that the literal answer to the question, who marries who is really quite simple while in the play. Past, Demetrius has been wooing Helena and then turns to Hermia and wild bald metres and Lysander both turned to Heleno in the wood. Things do sort themselves out. Hermia marries Lysander, Helena Murry's Demetrius.
We might set aside the possibility that Demetrius is still under the influence of the magic potion and see and said instead that whether he is or not, this is an inevitable comedy conclusion for lovers must make two couples. Hermia and Lysander get what they wanted at the beginning. Demetrius and Helena settled down as the structural foil.
So the plot of Midsummer Night's Dream has amplified a common plot type, which is hard before in these lectures and we had last week thinking about much ado about nothing. Of two men who are jealously rivalrous over a single love object. That's an absolutely common structural trope in Shakespearean comedies. We might think about two Noble Kinsman or two gentlemen of Verona as key examples of this plot type. But this plot has amplified that by doubling it. The two men are double rivals.
First for Hermia and then under the influence of Robin's potion for Helena. This shift from Hermia to Helena and then in some cases back again, plus the similarity and names of the two women. Combines, I think, with a stress throughout Midsummer Night's Dream, not on the lovers distinctiveness, but on their complete interchangeability. Demetrius is a worthy gentleman.
Theseus tells Hermia and all she can reply, which is, remember, this is her reason why she can't marry Demetrius and she's got to marry Lysander. Her own reply is, So is Lysander. These's has to agree to that. So nobody is contesting that these are completely different people. Lysander urges his own claim to marry Hermia. I am my lord as well, derived as he Demitrius as well possessed. So Lysander two sets his highest claim to marry me that he is as good as Demetrius.
So the claim is not as Ensay Cymbeline where Posthumus that sort of true suitor is set against the elfish close turn or in as you like it, where it is variously impossible that Phoebes should marry Ganymede. These plays represent the alternative suitor as clearly implausible. Clearly someone who has to be suppressed by the plot too. We have to get this woman away from it's not possible. Midsummer Night's Dream doesn't do that.
In fact, when it introduces Dimitris and Lysander in the first scene, it seems concerned to give us two lovers who are similar rather than different, who have equal social and personal claims to love Hermia, even Hermia and Lysander. That's to say, can only claim that Lysander is as worthy as Demetrius. Now that the lovers here, a double then, rather than being opposites, is part of a system of doubling and of double vision that extends throughout the play.
And we might start actually at the kind of micro level. The play has an extraordinarily heavy use of rhyme. As you know, what blank verse means is the blank means, um, rhymed. This is a play which is hardly really in blank verse at all. More than 50 percent of its lines are rhymed. Only Love's Labour's lost. Another highly formal and intricate play has a higher proportion. So it has a very high proportion of rhyming lines.
And this high proportion of rhyme goes along often with repetitive rhetorical structures, types of parallelism. So types of rhetoric which shadow or or reiterate syntactic structures by emphasising them in subsequent lines. More particularly, perhaps I saw code on that, a particular rhetorical structure which gives us syntactic units have the same length.
So here's an example from the place for a scene where we can see that rhetorical idea of syntactic doubling icicle on and rhyme, working together to emphasise the way the two female characters mirror or double each other. This is Hermia talking about Demitrius. I frown on him, yet he loves me still. Helena. Oh, that your frowns would teach my smile's such skill. I give him curses. Yet he gives me love. Oh, that my prayers.
Could such a faction move? The more I hate, the more he follows me, the more I love, the more he hates me. So it's the signals of alternate lines each. Each is a rhyming couplet, and the third couplet is where the soul parallel structures converge. I think the use of the same word me as the rhyme, the more I hate, the more he follows me, the more I love, the more he hates me. This is a collapse of rhyme because it in fact the same the same word.
We could see that that syntactic structure has been leading towards that similitude. Rhyme always brings things together at couples, things together. But here is coupling together something which is the same or in both. In both lines. Me and me. The rhyme there enacts, I think, the collapse of individual difference that the play develops elsewhere.
For all the comic emphasis later on, the physical difference between the two women is the scene, as you'll remember, where they're different sizes, they're different. Colouring seems to be the subject of kind of comic rivalry between them. The overall emphasis of the play is to stress their interchangeability. Young Kot writes, This mechanical reversal of the objects of the of desire and the interchangeability of lovers is not just the basis of the plot.
The reduction of characters to love partners seems to me the most peculiar characteristic of this cruel dream will come back to the idea of cruel treatment a minute and perhaps its most modern quality. This is the bit from court, which I think is so interesting here. The partner is now nameless and faceless. He or she just happens to be the nearest.
So one thing that does happen in this place is we're going to go into this explore is how Shakespeare repeatedly shows up the absurdity of dramatic conventions of love at first sight in the way the play target site with the magic flower and therefore shows its operations to be arbitrary. But I think something of what Kott gets there about cruelty is something that will become clearer as I go on. So linguistic and rhetorical, doubling through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme.
I think this this these formal characteristics must be one of the reasons Midsummer Night's Dream has been so, so much taken up by choreographers, by musicians, by sort of nonverbal or non-representational forms of art, ballet, opera music and so on, that it has these formal, formal linguistic quality already, which is not mostly referential, but it but it's kind of rhythmic and aesthetic.
So linguistic and rhetorical, doubling through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme shows us the way that Shakespeare's language here is a microcosm of his wider dramatic art. So what's happening at the level of a sentence or a speech is miniaturising a wider theme or debate.
So the larger scale, the kind of macrocosm of these microcosmic linguistic doublings and writings include, I think here in Midsummer Night's Dream, probably the most prominent structural use of doubling in Shakespeare's canon. So most notably, Midsummer Night's Dream seems written to allow or indeed to demand that Theseus and Hippolyta, the rulers of Athens, be doubled by that is played by the same actors as Oberon and Titania.
Now, if not elsewhere in these lectures about the interpretive possibilities of having the same actors playing different characters, I think it's a really interesting way to see in some ways non psychological connexions between the bit, between characters, between figures in Shakespeare's plays. We might think about the Winter's Tale or the Comedy of errors.
For instance, in those plays, as here, doubling is less a simple matter of the actual logistics and more part of the play's thematic construction. The doubling of the rulers of the two worlds means that the fairy world comes to stand as the night time to the courts de. Productions often also Double Theseus as master of ceremonies Phyllis Strait with Oberon's factotum Puck.
It's often suggested also that the four Athenian workmen who are practising the play Pyramus and Thisbe would have been the same actors as those playing to Tanya's fairy entourage. So that flug, flute and snugged snout would have played.
Blossom and moat and mustard seed. Seeing these heavy booted working men as the distinctly human sized faries is one of the ways we need to challenge over sentimentalised readings of this play, which derive from its reinvention as a play particularly suitable for children in the 19th century, at the 19th century, constructed an idea of fairies as diminutives or Tinkerbelle type creatures. Peter Pan is itself and add to that a sugary idea.
Do you believe in fairies? So the idea that the worst may be a dream would. A dream world in which the courts unconscious life is played out via those elements of dreams which post Freudian analysis has taught us to see a very close to literary processes, ideas like displacement or condensation or symbolisation ideas like metonymy and metaphor, or as being crucial to how dreams work. There also clearly terms with which literary criticism is very clear.
It might be helpful for us to remember that the first book, called The Interpretation of Dreams, was written not by Freud at the end of 1899, but by Thomas Hill in fifteen seventy six. Hill argued in his book, The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams, that dreams were looking glasses of the body placed it might so behold and for show matters imminent.
Hill's interpretation of dreams is quite an interesting counter to what comes later, that we're used to thinking of dreams as being a way of dealing with the past, with memory or or something. Hill tells us that actually dreams are prophetic. They look forward. What I want to do in this middle part of the lecture is to think about some of the different ways early, modern and more modern ways of thinking about dreams might help us with this play.
So preoccupied with dreaming, what might the dream have meant to Shakespeare's audiences? Perhaps one notable point to mention before we start is that while mediaeval literature is preoccupied by the dream narrative as as a as or trope for organising fictions, as as you will all know, in the early modern period, the dream narrative is a much less used literary trope.
It falls away for some reason. Between the mediaeval period and the early modern in Shakespeare's work, only perhaps The Taming of the Shrew, which I'll be talking about next week, might be thought to be a dream play. The induction with the Drunken Tinker Christopher Sligh has him fall asleep at the opening. Only to be awoken. But maybe he isn't by lords who are out hunting and decide to play a trick on him. Pretend he's a nobleman and invite him to watch a play of Catherine and Pachuco.
So apart from The Taming of the Shrew, it's Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare, most seems to explore how the dream and theatre or the dream and imagination might be connected in Midsummer Night's Dream. Almost every character falls asleep at some point in the play. Does at least opening the possibility that what happens afterwards is thus is thus their dream rather than reality.
And we understand that trope that if a person falls asleep and wakes up and then weird things happen to them in a in a film or, you know, some kind of narrative fiction of any sort, we understand that to be a dream. It was all a dream. After Lysander, who's been touched by Robin Goodfellows love in idleness potion, vows to reject Hermia until love Helena. Instead, Hermia wakes from a nightmare in which she seach, in which she says he thought a serpent.
Eat my heart away. And yet sad, smiling at his cruel prey. That's the first of the of the actual dreams in the play. Stage directions in the early text suggest that, of course, the sleeping lovers need to remain on stage all the time while the fairy world pursues its business, giving us the idea that the fairies are some kind of dream projection by the lovers. And in the sequence of a waking at the end of Act four, where to, Tanya? The Lovers and then Bottum are all serially roused from sleep.
Demetrius describes first their experiences as a dream, and the lovers depart for Athens, vowing to tell their dreams. In the immediately following scene, Bottom identifies what has happened to him as a wonderful dream. I have had a most rare vision. I had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an arse if he go about to expand this dream he thought I was. There is no man can tell what he thought I was and he thought I had.
But managed is better patched fool. If he were offered to see if he will offer to say what he thought I had. You will, he says, get Peter Quint's to make a ballad of these wonderful events and call it Bottoms Dream. Some critics have suggested that's what we should call the whole plague right at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, Robin Goodfellows epilogue performs the act of simultaneous praise for modesty about the play performed that's typical of surviving epilogues.
If we châteaux have offended think. But this and all is mended that you knew. But slumbered here while these visions did appear on this weekend Idol theme no more yielding than a dream. The whole play, Robin suggests, is our dream like modern Hollywood, then the early modern theatre is a kind of dream factory, providing theatregoers with an escapist fantasy from which they only reluctantly awake to return to their humdrum waking lives.
Adrian Noble's 1996 film of the play had the whole thing seen through the eyes of a young, pyjama clad boy. It was all his dream, drawing on tropes from Wizard of Oz and thinking about childish imagination and the doubling of waking and dreaming worlds. So that tells us that the play itself, beyond its title, has the dream as a running motif. One important source for early modern ideas about dreams comes in Thomas Nash's prose pamphlet published in 50 Ninety four as The Terrors of the Night.
Here discusses a wide range of nocturnal spooks from ghosts to dreams. We know lots of points of connexion between Shakespeare and Nas. I thought to be co-authors of Henry the Sixth Part one. There are probable allusions to Nash's texts in Henry, the fourth part one in Hamlet and in Love's Labour's Lost. It may well be, I think that Midsummer Night's Dream draws on, draws directly on the terrace of the night.
And even if it doesn't, Nash gives us some sense of what dream theory, if such existed, might have been in the early modern period. I'm just going to spend a bit of time on some of Nash's ideas about dreams. Now, like many things in the early modern period, from religious belief to the self. Dreams were being re understood and reinterpreted less as something that invaded from outside. And more as something created internally.
So that's a general movement in this period towards the kind of interior is the place where things happen or things are generated. A lot less sense of the operation of external factors, metaphysical factors or whatever on on human human behaviour. So the older view was that dreams or communication from some metaphysical realm, perhaps God, hence bottom's famous bundling of loans from St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians when he recalls his dreamlike encounter with Titania.
Or perhaps from elsewhere. Shakespeare often depicts ghosts as appearing in dreams. And there's something about the kind of double unreality of that structure, which seems useful, as in, for example, the appearance of the ghost of Julius Caesar to Brutus, or the encounters that Richard the Third and Richmond have with the play's dead, who ritually curse Richard and bless his challenger.
So the question about whether dreams come from outside or inside the human relate to broader cultural debates about human agency, that's something I talk about quite a lot in my lecture. Beth. Nash's views in the terrors of the night tend towards a sceptical idea about where dreams come from. He does not feel that dreams are the result of divine or diabolic possession. For Nash, dreams are nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fantasy which the day has left and digested.
Or an after feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations, Masada, nothing else but the bubbling scum of froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested. So Nash has a sense that it's probably quite common to us that what what dreams do is to process some elements of raw or, as he says, undigested material from from waking life. They do some work of psychic processing. That's quite a that's an idea which which many of us would would think explains are dreams.
Now, sometimes Nash's ideas seem to echo quite specifically with Midsummer Night's Dream. Nash describes the dream world as a kind of puppet stage which travesties or reaper forms the things that we have done during the day. It's a kind of performing reverse of the everyday world, a theatre that might help us think both about Midsummer Night's Dream itself and also about the play within the play.
Pyramus and Thisbe A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is not one of these things which are most known to us. Some of us that have most brains make to ourselves images of memory. On these images of memory whereon we build in the day comes some superfluous humour of ours, like a jackanapes in the night and directs a puppet stage or some such ridiculous, idle, childish invention. And he argues that when all is said, melancholy is the mother of dreams and of all terrors of the night.
Let it but affirm it has seen a spirit, though it be. But the moonshine on the wall, the best reason we have cannot infringe it. Which echoes this or dramaturge of Pyramus and Thisbe ridiculous emphasis in that play on the materiality of moonshine and wall. And most interestingly, I think for what we might want to say about Midsummer Night's Dream, Nash likens the sleeping world to that initial darkness out of which, according to biblical accounts of creation, the world was born.
No such figure as the first chaos wear out. The world was extraordinary as our dreams in the night in them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded and meet together. So that idea, that dream somehow access some primaeval time before the creation of the world in which all states, all sexes, all places are confounded and meet together, I think is quite helpful for thinking about this play.
The idea that the idea of this confounding and meeting together gives us a sense of the way in which the whole play might be imagined as a dream and that the juxtaposition of different worlds within the play. The court and the wood, the human and the animal. The upper and lower class. Fairy and mortal, male and female. This all corresponds to a kind of procreation chaos into which nasty Nash suggests our dreams, pictures.
So now sense is that dreams offer a kind of suspension of the rules of the created world. Rather like theatre. Useful, I think, for the operation of the dream motif in the play. And useful in part to show that in order to think seriously about what the dream might mean here, we don't need necessarily to turn to modern psychoanalysis. That that, too, has its advantages. But there is an early modern discourse about dreams which could enable us to think about this historically.
What more modern assessments of the implication of the dream in Midsummer Night's Dream have usefully emphasised, though post Freud, is that the dream world is entirely preoccupied with sex. That the froth or scum that comes to our minds as a result of our daytime work is almost always that of suppressed or illicit or excessive sexual desire. Freud identified dreams as wish fulfilment, a place where we do the things that we can't normally do.
And that's a useful concept, perhaps, for thinking about the play's dreamers. The prominence of sex then in the player's imagination means that the question of who marries, who registers, rather the arbitrariness of the social structure of marriage. Marriage serves, of course, in the modern comedy as the regulator of potentially anarchic sexual desire. It's very much an awake daytime form of repression in this reading. It doesn't really matter then who marries who.
It just matters that they are married because this is a necessary structure to contain the play's excessively sexual imagination. If you like. It's unconscious. Now to talk about Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most insistently sexual plays. It's very uneasily alongside the idea of it being suitable for children.
And as I've already suggested, something of this idea arises from Victorian and Edwardian ideas about fairies and childhood, like other sentimental manifestations of that in the Victorian period, like fairy paintings, which often draw Drew on Midsummer Night's Dream. The inheritance of this view of the play meant that it was established in the UK in the lower school curriculum. It was for a time, a set play for 14 year olds in UK schools.
These assumptions about the players led to the following mismatch of views, as reported by BBC News Online. A group of red faced schoolchildren walked out of the production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, upset by the sexually explicit nature of the play. Coventry teacher Steven McGraw led his class of 11 year olds from the theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
After the fairy queen Titania and Bottom, dressed as a donkey, started writhing round on a bed, Mr MacGraw said the children were all embarrassed. What we saw was not what we were expecting. It was sexually explicit. The production has driven. This is a very fine phrase. The production has driven a coach and carriage through our school's religious and sex education policies. Now, poor Mr McGraw's feeling that sexually explicit was not what we were expecting.
Shows just how far popular plays of popular perceptions of the play's wholesomeness had overlaid. What was I thinking? Instead, we should see as its insistence sexuality. Let's take that scene that the article suggests was the final straw for those Coventry schoolchildren. It lasted quite a long time. If they got to Titania and Bottom writhing on the bed, thought the maze will just go on with it by by that point. But clearly, it was just too much. So let's just let's set that scene.
The encounter between Titania and Bottom Victorian illustrated Shakespeare's. It's really well worth Googling pictures of this because you can see how this this image became completely whimsically, iconically pictured by by Victorian late Victorian culture, became the the picture that you would get in an in an edition of Midsummer Night's Dream, but an entirely kind of cleaned up version where the queen of the fairies sits decorously in a flowery bower bedecked with greenery.
And perhaps she strokes the ears of a snoozing, rather beautiful arse as headed off humanoid in her in her power. The effects of Robin Goodfellows potion must surely be intended to be more carnal than this. Not least because it's hard to imagine that spending time stroking the ears of a donkey man could quite humiliate Titania enough to make her relinquish the Indian boy. That is, after all, the point of this whole scene. According to O'Brien, that's what O'Brien is aiming at.
So we have a magically infatuated fairy queen, a man with a donkey head and a grassy bower doesn't seem to me rocket science. Do we think we find bottom asleep because he's been working so hard, learning his lines? I think not. I think the bouncin we can get twice in the play.
The plays really is really interested in what's happening in that bar. That's a sequence which toys with unshockable scenes of bestiality that invites us to speculate in decorously about Bottum hung like a donkey and stresses the sexual encounter from the pages of of its metamorphosis that transcends the social and category differences between the two people involved. Now to time is word for desire is, of course, love.
Sleep, though, and I will wind the in my arms faries be gone and be always away. So does the Woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle, gently in twist, the female ivy. So it rings the baqi fingers of the elm. Oh, how I love thee. How I dote on the Midsummer Night's Dream reveals here is that love can, of course. Then as now be it mean both sex and romance.
And that we tend to assume in Shakespeare that it means the latter romance when more often it means the former sex, just as Victorian ideas about fairies have shaped the play's reception. So, as the often repeated assertion that this play was written for performance at some aristocratic Elizabethan marriage, there is absolutely no evidence for this, and no specific wedding has ever been CCMS convincingly identified.
It's part, in fact, of a kind of critical attempt to clean this up, to make this a play, which is about marriage, to make it more decorous, more regular, a celebration of of kind of nuptial regulation rather than of sexual desire and transgression. But into Tanya's speech, I think love here means sex, not romance. The wood is the space of desire. In fact, perhaps it does just represent desire itself, since it has almost no other characteristics.
If you think back to the lecturer's giving on as you like it, talking about how the how the wood, how the forest of Ardern is depicted, the natural world of the forest of Avadon, we get none of that in the wood of Midsummer Night's Dream. There's no interest in making it into anything like a real place or an alternative place. It seems as if it is just in some sense the aid or the space of desire.
There is very little in the language of Midsummer Night's Dream that characterises the wood outside Athens as anything other than a metaphor or a metaphor or a metaphor for desire, which is not always comfortable or nice. Thus, the question of who marries who is a bourgeois fiction. This is not a play about marriage. It begins and ends with marriage, but it used them. It uses the majority of the plot to explore tantalising alternatives. Threesomes, partners, swapping bestiality, sadomasochism.
When somebody told me the bishop of subduct sometimes listen to the podcast, my first thought was, that's brilliant. My second thought was there's gonna be a point where that will pop into my mind. That was the point. Just shut your ears, Bishop. So this this the idea that the plot tries to explore sexual alternatives to marriage has been cued from the very start. Theseus marriage to Hippolyta, with which the play opens, is explicitly established as the result of conquest rather than courtship.
And the opening scene is structured so that Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, is given no opportunity to reply to Theseus. This is this is Theseus Ippolita. I wooed thee with my sword and one that I love doing the injuries, but I will weddady in another key with pomp, with triumph and with revelling. What happens immediately after that is Aegeus comes in with Hermia, Dimitrius and Lysander.
So Hippolyta never replies. Isn't is one of those silences that Shakespeare is so good at because we don't know what Hippolytus response is. This is a gap into which directors and actors can and do move. Many Hippolytus seem quite happy with this arrangement. But there are also productions and a large number of production histories which can read about Trevor Griffith's production history.
There are productions in which the captive queen is brought in in chains or depicted as a disdainful, unwilling or enforced partner in the anticipated marriage. Hints of coercive or sadomasochistic sex are often present in the staging of that opening scene. We get a sense of this later when Helena wishes herself to be Demetrius dog. The more you beat me, I will fawn on you use me. But as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me elsewhere.
Recent productions have been concerned to excavate the play's sexual unconscious. Elizabethan fairies and pucks seem to have had more obviously sexual mischief in mind as they slipped in and out of the human world. And an early modern illustration of Robin Goodfellow depicts him not as the kind of sexless figure who moves or jumps around the stage, but rather as a hairy legged satyr supporting an impressive phallus.
The issue of the Indian boy, so beloved of both Titania and Oberon and the source of the passionate discord between them, has also tended to be understood recently sexually. The Indian boy becomes less a tiny child, a more a pretty adolescent. The boy, who never appears in the play text but is often incorporated into stage productions, seems to crystallise the violent impossibility of desire in the play and its challenge as here to marriage. The Indian boy is very definitely not their own child.
It's a token between them which threatens to break up rather than confirm the relationship between Oberon and Titania. So the play seems to trace the relationships or disconnections between sexual desire as a transgressive and disturbing emotion on the one hand, and the social pragmatics of marriage on the other. Perhaps the plot suggests to us that the lovers desires and their trajectory towards marriage are not entirely the same.
Marriage is revealed as the inadequate social structural response to desire a kind of vanilla daytime version. So if violent and uncontrollable desire is the real dynamic that Midsummer Night's Dream lets loose, then it proceeds to try to bundle it back up within these regulatory structures of marriage. Hermès description of her dream of Lysander is faithlessness is in this light, unmistakeably Fallick. The serpent at her heart away. People in Shakespeare always dreaming about about snakes.
And it follows from that exchange about the regulation of sexual desire in the potentially unregulated world. Having run away from that, from the court of Athens, having run away from parental strictures, Hermia and Lysander have to negotiate whether how they're going to sleep in the woods. Hermia, you'll remember, tells Lysander, lie a little further off. So sexual attraction is potentially dangerous in this world.
One reading of what Hermia is saying there is that suddenly she realises she is in this unregulated space where what she actually wants could turn out to be quite frightening. Love is darkly physical and anarchic here, not decorously romantic. Midsummer Night's Dream, I think, is not a romantic comedy, but rather a comedy which looks beneath the conventions of courtship and romance and is actually rather frightened by what it sees.
Midsummer Night's Dream, writes, Young Kott is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays. But he goes on to say, in no other tragedy or comedy of his except Troilus and Cressida is the eroticism expressed so brutally. We might see a kind of parodic version of this, perhaps in the mechanicals laughable play. The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe takes up much of the play's final act.
It's often very funny in a slapstick and usually over the top way in performance splicing physical comedy with absurd innuendo. The stones of the world through which the lovers speak invariably draw on the meaning of stones as testicles, for instance.
But the central story of Paris, I don't mean to suggest that it isn't funny, or to say that we can't find it funny, or even to suggest that something being funny is somehow the opposite of the darkness that I'm talking about elsewhere in the play, I think. I think that's entirely compatible. But we could see that the playlet appearance in this bee again shows us that desire is destructive and violent.
This bee is menaced by a lion. Perhaps we could see that that's the menacing of her own desires. Lion violent, a lion vile hath here deflowered, my dear announces primness. Ridiculous phrase lion and ridiculous syntax. Lion vile here. Deflowered, my dear. But the word deflowered is it is definitely a sexual one. His own Souci promotes his own suicide, establishes desire as destructive, replaying the psychosexual dynamic of Romeo and Juliet.
Because the chronology of these places is unclear. It is not. It's not easy to know whether Pyramus and there's been Paradies, Romeo and Juliet that has already been performed or pre-emptively undermines its rather camp claims to seriousness. And Juliette, that has already been performed or pre-emptively undermines its rather camp claims to seriousness. And Juliette, that has already been performed or pre-emptively undermines its rather camp claims to seriousness.
But part of the trouble with Pyramus and Thisbe, perhaps in the modern theatre is this is sometimes just too funny, trying too hard to be hilarious, almost hysterical in its anxieties to overlay the play's anxieties, to display sexual urges into slapstick. But even as it tries to do that, as we've seen the story of Pyramus and Thisbe means that the real concerns of the play keep bobbing back to the surface.
So what I've been trying to suggest here in this lecture so far is that the confusions over who marries are not just light-hearted fun in the play. What they point up to us is the incompatibility of different varying compatibility of comic structure in the play with the kind of desire which the wood is able to mobilise.
It doesn't matter who marries who because marriage is revealed to be kind of arbitrary form of control, a way of taking back the frightening aspects of the of the wood and of submitting to the authority represented so decisively in the opening by Theseus and by Aegeus. I think we misread the place. We think that Hermia escapes her father's lore, is able to marry the person she wants to, and therefore kind of wrong foot soldiers really as well as as I was saying at the beginning.
It doesn't matter whether Hermia marries Demitrius or Lysander. What matters is that she gets married. So I've also been suggesting that the dream motif is a significant one that has possibility for both modern and early modern readings that to think about. To think that dreams are significant in this play doesn't mean turning to Freud necessarily, but could mean turning to Hill or Tinashe.