Hello, litterbugs, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, a ramble through the wide, beautiful meadow of British lit. This is where rhyme gets its reason, and today’s episode features Shakespeare’s rhymiest play, and one of his most popular – almost certainly his most popular comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How much reason we get from this phantasmagoric nocturnal hallucination remains to be seen.
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So, I’m going to start this episode with a confession. I’d never really liked A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In fact, until maybe a month ago I didn’t even think that I was going to do an episode on it. She Who Must Be Obeyed was quite surprised when she saw the film versions in our streaming queue: “I didn’t think you liked that play.” Incidentally, it is one of She’s favorites.
You see, I thought I knew the play: oh, it’s that one with the fairies and the bumbling mechanicals and that scamp Robin Goodfellow. Of course I’ve read it several times and seen performances, but not for quite a while and all I really recalled was a kind of gauzy, childish, rom-com. These apprehensions were reinforced by my recollection of Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society, in which a stern father, who sees education only as an instrument for accumulating status and wealth, forbids his sensitive young son from performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at his school. The boy defies his father, plays Puck triumphantly, and then ends his own life. It was all too melodramatic, a feebly inspiring dilution urging us to “follow our hearts, “be true to ourselves,” and all the other anodyne bromides that decorate the walls of guidance counselors’ offices. Instead of blaming the film, I blamed the play.
But I am here before you a new man, with new eyes and a contrite soul. Since the Dream really is one of Billy the Bard’s greatest hits, I felt that I could not dodge it here on the poddie. So, with some reluctance, I returned to Elizabethan Athens and the magical forest and was struck with how distorted my memories of the play had been. Yes, there are fairies and mechanicals, but the play is so much richer, so much more complex and ambiguous than the mere twee rom-com cum motivational speech I had misremembered.
In case you too have faulty memories or indeed have no familiarity at all with the play, here’s a quick summary.
Duke Theseus of Athens prepares to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and is interrupted by Egeus, one of his courtiers, begging the Duke to resolve a family dispute. Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, does not wish to marry Demetrius, the young man father prefers, because she loves another young man, Lysander. The Duke offers Hermia three options: obey her father, become a celibate nun, or die.
Striking upon their own option 4, Lysander and Hermia decide to run away and, bewilderingly, tell Helena, Hermia's friend, who, bewilderingly, is desperately in love with Demetrius. That night, Lysander and Hermia flee Athens, but don’t know where they’re heading and get lost in the deep forest. Demetrius decides to follow the lovers into the woods. Why would he know to do that? Because Helena opened her mouth. Why? Because Hermia trusted her with a secret. There’s a lesson there, kids. Of course, Helena follows Demetrius, expecting that he will abandon Hermia and fall in love with her instead. Because of course he would, you know, after running after Hermia into the woods.
Anyway, back in town, a group of working men (whom we call the Mechanicals) prepare a play for Duke Theseus on his wedding day. Nick Bottom, the weaver, is to play the tragic lover Pyramus, while Flute, the bellows-mender, begrudgingly agrees to play Thisbe.
Back in the forest, Oberon – the Fairy King—has recently quarreled with his queen, Titania. She has acquired a magical Indian child, and refuses to hand him over to Oberon, who wants the boy as a page. The reasonable solution here is to send your fairy servant, Puck, on a mission to gather a special flower whose nectar makes people fall in love with the next creature they see. It is the only way to deal with recalcitrant female disobedience.
Then Oberon hears Demetrius and Helena arguing nearby. Demetrius abuses Helena, verbally and emotionally (with room for some physical should the director feel like it). Oberon orders Puck to give 'the Athenian' a dose of the flower juice, too, so Demetrius will fall in love with the first person that he sees. It is the only way to deal with recalcitrant male privilege.
Get this: Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, puts the nectar on his eyes while he sleeps, and when he is woken by Helena, falls immediately in love with her, Hermia becoming an unpleasant memory. Demetrius gets some juice too and falls in love with Helena as well.
Now, while all this is going on, the Mechanicals decide to rehearse their play in the woods in the middle of the night – an age-old and entirely sensible theatrical practice. Puck overhears them and, for a jolly jape, turns Bottom into an ass, a donkey. Bottom is then lured to Titania who, while sleeping, has been given the flower juice, too. How much of that stuff is there? When she wakes up, the beautiful fairy queen falls in love with the ugly ass. They party.
Meanwhile, Demetrius and Lysander, still in thrall to love potion #9, woo Helena. Hermia grumps like the rejected pretty rich girl in a teen comedy. Oberon orders Puck to rectify the chaos as the lovers' bickering and chasing has exhausted them. Puck gets the lads lost in the woods with a bit of expert ventriloquism, and puts an antidote on Lysander's eyes.
Bottom, meanwhile, has been getting a spa treatment from Titania's fairies, then falls asleep beside her. Oberon restores Titania's sight; she wakes, understandably dismayed at the donkey in her bed. Having learned her lesson, she surrenders the little boy to Oberon for his page. Bottom gets de-assed, and rejoins his friends in Athens during dress rehearsal. Theseus and Hippolyta’s pre-nuptial hunting party disturbs the slumber of the quarreling lovers. Lysander sees Hermia and once again falls in love with her.
The four lovers become two happy couples: Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena. Hey, let’s have a triple wedding! Great idea! The mechanicals present 'Pyramus and Thisbe' before the wedding guests and as the three couples retire to bedtime frolics, Puck and the fairies return to bless the palace and its people.
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The basic dynamic of drama, at least as classically conceived, is the restoration of order. After the hurly-burly of the plot’s conflicts, the denouement reestablishes stability. Tragedies do this by killing off the main characters and comedies do this by marrying off the main characters. I exaggerate of course for effect, but the principle is broadly sound. As Theseus himself says regarding Pyramus and Thisbe’s “tedious brief” scene of “tragical mirth”: “How shall we find the concord of this discord?”
Note the opposites here: tedious and brief, tragic and mirthful, concord and discord. The play revels in crossing boundaries and transgressing categories. How are these things resolved? I think the play, for all its magic and enchantment, offers a pretty hard-headed response to this conundrum.
Only the most casual of readers or observers can fail to notice the multiplying parallels Shakespeare establishes in the play. Theseus and Hippolyta have their complements in Oberon and Titania. Some productions emphasize this doubling by actually having the same actors play Theseus and Oberon, Hippolyta and Titania. We have the, well, not love-triangle – perhaps the love-rhombus of Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius. There are parallels between Hippolyta, the captured Amazonian queen and Titania’s captured Indian boy. We’ve the gender-power parallels: Theseus over Hippolyta, Oberon over Titania, Egeus over Hermia. Peter Quince, in marshalling his little band of players, is a rather rustic version of Theseus and Oberon. And, of course, there’s the play within a play.
These parallelisms play out in a world of pitched opposites: there is Athens, the urban, cosmopolitan metonym for reason and rationality set against the forest: wild, irrational, impulsive, magical. On the more abstract level, certain elements of play body forth the polarities of reason and imagination, consciousness and subconsciousness, cosmos and chaos, order and liberty, love and power. Shakespeare employs various poetic meters to indicate these contrasts: there is the stately blank verse of the Athenian court. In the forest, Puck speaks in the four-beat tetrameter line, more folksy and chant-like, a nod to indigenous English folklore.. The Mechanicals, of course, speak in prose, their attempts at poesy only underscoring their uncouthness. Lack of couth?
And of course, the great dichotomy of the play: that between waking and dreaming. We’ve mentioned dreams a few times in this podcast, going all the way back to episode 3 and the idea that literature is the dream of a culture or civilization. Episodes 10 and 11 looked at medieval dream vision poems like “The Owl and the Nightingale” and “The Vision of Piers Plowman.” In the Middle Ages, dreams were generally seen as something exterior to the person dreaming. They came from outside – a vision from God, perhaps. Or perhaps the Devil. Drawing from classical writers like Artemidorus, early modern dream theorists began looking at a variety of origins and definitions for dreams. Some, like Marc de Vulson, a bit more traditional, thought that dreams foretold future events. Remember Richard III and Richmond’s dreams of ghosts before Bosworth field? That kind of thing.
Others, like Richard Saunders, thought that dreams came from the dreamer herself. He believed dreams were affected by a person’s humor, health, and by the time of year. A dream could be produced by something you ate, rather like Charles Dickens’ Scrooge charging Marley’s ghost with being “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” A fella named Thomas Hill wrote the first book called The Interpretation of Dreams, offering an encyclopedic catalog of symbolism and interpretation while admitting that most people dismissed such study as contemptible. Nonetheless, dreams produced a great deal of anxiety in the Elizabethan mind. Thomas Nashe, known better as a playwright, wrote a text called The Terrors of the Night, in which he argued that “A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations.” Here, I think, is the source of the anxiety: what if dreams are interior? What if they do reveal impulses, desires, drives over which we have no control?
That’s the idea that Shakespeare’s exploring in this play. Because governing all of the parallels and doubles and opposites is a single dominant symbol: the moon. Some form of the word “moon” appears 38 times in a Midsummer Night’s dream, over 3.5 times as many occurrences as in Love’s Labors Lost, with the second highest frequency. It’s mentioned three times in the play’s first ten lines as a metaphor for time’s passage, especially the ending of one era and the beginning of another. Oberon and Theseus both refer to it as cold and virginal, being of a “watery” humor, associated with femaleness (phlegm and black bile, dull and melancholy, according to humoral theory, the dominant approach to what we would now call psychology of the time).
Starveling, one of the Mechanicals, plays the embodiment of Moonshine in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and provides the occasion for several references to the moon’s omnividence. The hard-handed working men of Athens also give us a few mentions of the “man in the moon,” who, at the time, was the legendary patron deity of drunkards. We are also treated to an instance of the “horned moon,” perhaps a reference to illicit sexual activity and infidelity, fickleness, horns being the sign of the cuckold
Now, the moon is one of those archetypal symbols. If that seems vaguely familiar, you’re probably remembering our discussion in episode 5 on the Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wanderer and the Seafarer, where I spoke of the ocean as an archetype of chaos. An archetype is a symbol that is recognized by many different cultures at many different times. So, almost all cultures see the ocean or the water as a symbol for chaos or formlessness, but with the potential for order (see baptismal symbols in Christianity). Most cultures see the directions east and west as cognate with birth and death, respectively, because of the sun’s rising and setting. The forest, mentioned above, is an archetype for chaos, too, but usually with an element of confusion or bewilderment. Think of all those fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. Or places like Fangorn and Mirkwood in the Lord of the Rings – the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter or the Haunted Forest in the Wizard of Oz. Anyway, that’s archetypes, and the moon is a big one.
The most noteworthy characteristic of the moon in these terms is its changeability, its mutability. The moon waxes and wanes, changes shape. It moves closer to us and further away, it brightens and darkens. It is inconstant.
Couple that with the fact that the moon does not generate its own light, but rather reflects that of the sun, and we get the feminization of the moon, such as the Greek goddess Selene, the Roman Diana, the Mesopotamian Nanna, the Egyptian Khonsu, and the Hindu Chandra. In the Christian tradition, Mary is associated with the moon. Now, certainly we can see a somewhat misogynistic slant to such associations of inconstancy and dependency, but the moon has also powerful association with fertility, gestation, renewal, especially as the female menstrual cycle loosely follows a lunar schedule and the waxing moon approximates the pregnant belly. We should also note the moon’s effect on the ebb and flow of ocean tides.
There are also, of course, some less pleasant associations. The inconstancy mentioned a second ago also connotes a wildness, an irrationality, a madness, hence our terms lunacy and lunatic. And we all know what happens to the lycanthrope in the full moon – the man who shapeshifts into a wolf. So the moon is very bound up in ideas of carnality, the cycle of creation and destruction, mutability, and the divine feminine.
How does all this come to bear on A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Why is Shakespeare so insistent on emphasizing the moon’s presence in the play?
OK, yes, one reason is simply a matter of setting. Shakespeare’s theater had minimal apparatus for scenery and since plays were performed during the day, one had to emphasize in the play’s language the time of the play’s action. Keep saying moon and eventually even the groundlings will get that it’s nighttime.
But we’d only need it once per scene, maybe twice, to establish setting. What I think is interesting here is that Shakespeare uses the femininity and changeability of the moon as a way of paradoxically restoring the order (which has been traditionally masculinized) so necessary to the comedic structure, only to imply its disruption again.
Let’s look at a speech by Titania in the second act. She has been arguing with Oberon, accusing him of loving Hippolyta: he claps back by saying she loves Theseus. Then they bicker over custody of the Indian boy. Before storming off, Titania offers this:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
Titania posits that their arguing is the cause of all the chaos observable in the natural and civil worlds. Her notion that chaotic change comes “from our debate, from our dissension” paradoxically points to a symmetry, a “great chain of being” – one thing is affected by another thing – a jenga puzzle or butterfly effect, if you will. Interestingly, she also notes that they are the parents, the originals, of all – this spiritual, magical, irrational realm is primordial.
Compared to that, the conventions of human civilization seem trivial, even feeble. I mentioned at the top of the show that the play has a dark edge that many often overlook. The play opens with two examples of sexual tyranny and cruelty. Theseus has captured Hippolyta and will now marry her though he laments “how slow This old moon wanes!” – that is, he is rather impatient, shall we say. She replies that the moon, like to a silver bow / New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities.” I suppose she could be referring to something romantic like Cupid’s bow, but the fact that she is an Amazon queen – a race of women known for their skill at archery – seems to modulate any enthusiasm one may be tempted to impute to her. But it is ambiguous, and I suppose she could be overwhelmed by Theseus’ power and charm, like Xenocrate with Tamburlaine. Shakespeare’s audience would have seen her as a dense character allusion. Not only a warrior queen, but one of a society that abjures males. In the ancient myths, she is daughter of Ares, the god of war, and she features in the labors of Hercules. In Plutarch’s Lives, a prime source for Shakespeare, Hippolyta brokers the peace with Theseus and offers marriage to seal the treaty – she restores and ensures order. So Shakespeare’s portrayal of her here calls up powerful associations and then thwarts them.
Theseus then tells her (or us, really, because she’d already know this): “Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, And won thy love, doing thee injuries.” To this, Hippolyta gives no reply. In fact, she remains silent throughout the rest of the scene, in which their conversation is interrupted by Egeus demanding that the duke support his patriarchal right over Hermia. Remember that she wishes to marry Lysander, of whom Egeus disapproves, charging the young man: “thou hast by moonlight at her window sung!” He wants her to marry Demetrius. He then declares to Theseus:
I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,
As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman
Or to her death, according to our law
Immediately provided in that case.
How this gets forgotten in the many descriptions of the play as a child-like romp eludes me. The language of possession is blunt, that his daughter is an object to be disposed of as his right. He would prefer her immediate death to her disobedience. The duke does offer the third option of forced chastity as a nun, but in a play swollen with references to sexuality, fertility, and carnality, this seems nearly a living death.
Oh, and here’s another instance of the doubling I mentioned earlier. There seems to be no concrete reason for Hermia or Egeus to prefer either of the young suitors. When the duke says that Demetrius is a worthy gentleman, all Hermia can muster in reply is “so is Lysander.” So the duke says, if they’re both worthy, why not choose the one that Daddy wants? Wouldn’t that be easier? I guess not. But Lysander and Demetrius are ciphers, really. They’re interchangeable. The fact that Puck confuses the one for the other in the forest only drives the point home. Come to think of it, not much daylight between Helena and Hermia, either. Though Helena is a more pathetic character I think – desperate for Demetrius, who only abuses her. But Hermia is the target of Lysander’s racist and sexist invective when he is drugged, so call it a draw.
But the events in the night forest, to some extent, thwart the orderly procession of rights and privileges that the men in Athens presume to hold. The juice of a simple flower confounds the dull senses of men whose superficial passions may be easily stirred by equally superficial appearances: the adjective “fair” precedes a female character’s name almost two dozen times, and it seems rather a pale word for beauty. Titania twice applies the word to Bottom the Weaver after he has been transformed into an ass, once describing his virtue and once his large ears.
The play’s resolution, with its restoration of order, seems a rather peculiar one. Right, everybody gets married: Theseus to Hippolyta, Lysander to Hermia, and Helena to Demetrius. The Mechanicals put on their play for the celebrations to great regard. Titania gives up her Indian child to Oberon to advance marital bliss. But these are not unmixed results. Hippolyta is forever captive. Demetrius is forever under the love spell, and thus a captive in his own way. Hermis does get Lysander, but Titania capitulates to Oberon, so the Indian boy loses his liberty, too. As drama demands, order is restored, but it’s a very precarious one, one that contains the seeds of its own disruption. The moon continues to wax and wane.
Which is all very contrary to our ideas of romantic comedy, which many people assert has its roots in Shakespeare’s play. In rom-coms – all those Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock movies from the 1990s are the epitome of the genre now, though their debt to the films of Hepburn, Tracy, and Grant from the 1940s is immeasurable – anyway, in those stories, stability is, well, stable. The world before the lovers meet, misunderstand, quarrel, and reconcile is very much like the world after all the confusion gets sorted out. As people, the lovers alter very little, if at all. The modern rom-com assumes that the human self is fixed, immutable. What the characters undergo is not growth or change or refinement. Rather, at best, they only realize who they always really were, what they always really wanted. They didn’t change, only what they knew about themselves changed. But Shakespeare’s play only provides the appearance of order, a smoothing over that resolves, in fact, very little. The characters are not stable – they are often the mere shadows that Puck, in his famous epilogue, calls them, subject to irrational powers and drives and whims and dreams. The putative rationality of Athens and maleness is revealed to be as erratic and groundless as a fairy dream, and no match for the elemental forces of chaos that surround it.