ACT V

SCENE i

All lovers are together, all is sorted out; conventionally Act IV should have been the end, since Titania is reconciled, not just humiliated. Sentimentalism is avoided, though -- the unspoken tensions in the love triangles are not entirely reconciled because they are not remembered well. Nevertheless, what we get from here on out is "extra."

Now the couples are married and Theseus and Hippolyta discuss the odd stories told by the youths. Theseus claims that

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. . . . And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name. (V.i.7-17). Thus, "After Theseus has heard the lovers' story he ascribes it all to mere imagination: not the creative imagination but imagination that plays tricks on us" (Wells 68). Hippolyta is not so sure that covers it, and she "breaks away from Theseus's dogmatism" (Bloom 169): But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur'd so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23-27)

"Theseus allows himself to be governed by reason, whereas Hippolyta knows that illusion and the imagination have an even more important part to play in human affars" (Wells 68).

Hippolyta tends to supplement Theseus' perspective well. Now we have "To wear away this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time" (V.i.33-34). "Theseus, like the historical Elizabeth I, is a benevolent monarch who goes on progresses among his people, generously responding to their sometimes amateur theatrical performances" (Garber 216). Philostrate lists the possible entertainments, including "The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to a harp" (V.i.44-45) "We'll none of that," says Theseus. Instead of the other dismal selections, he chooses the "A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth" (V.i.56-57). "Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? / That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow. / How shall we find the concord of this discord?" (V.i.58-60).

The play-within-the-play is indeed a delightful agony, not just filling time while tensions are suspended and unresolved. Instead, it constitutes a spilling over of joy:

the tone of the piece is that of love-in-idleness, an activity for the sheer fun of it and for its own sake.... A Midsummer Night's Dream is permeated with this spirit of doing things just for the love of doing them or for the love of the one for whom they are done.... (Goddard, I 78)

make valiant efforts to projects themselves into the minds, bodies, and even the building materials of the characters of classical legend that they are to represent in the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. Like the lovers under the influence of the love-juice, they cannot distinguish between illusion and reality; and they fear that their intended audience will share their inability. (Wells 66)

Quince messes up his pauses in the introduction and the dialogue is doggerel. This is a textual joke usually left out of productions since it almost requires that we see the text. Hippolyta is quickly exasperated by the production. The would-be lovers in the play, Pyramus and Thisby, in a sort of parody of Romeo and Juliet, whisper through a chink in the wall separating their families. Theseus has announced tolerant generosity and kindness towards the production, but he is first to criticize the play and heckle the actors. Demetrius joins in regarding the character, Wall: "It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord" (V.i.167-168). Unintentional bawdy puns follow in the play, with Pyramus cursing the Wall's "stones" (V.i.181; cf. 190-191) and Thisby telling Pyramus, "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all" (V.i.201). They agree to meet at "Ninny's tomb."

"Can we be blamed for looking over our shoulders, and wondering who is watching the play in which we are acting, while we watch, onstage, actors watching actors who play actors performing a part? An actor playing Theseus watches an actor playing Bottom play the part of Pyramus, and feels secure in his own comparative reality" (Garber 237).

His reference to Ninus' tomb must have given pause to the Queen in the midst of all the drollery. She would have known that Ninus was the second husband of Semiramis, Queen of Babylon, who, although she had made that city the most magnificent metropolis in the world, had coupled cruelty with lust by habitually putting her lovers to death, lest they should reveal her licentiousness. So that "Ninny's tomb" was the grave of one who had been foolish, fatuous enough to love the Queen! (Ogburn and Ogburn 586)

Art: the dream become conscious of itself, play grown to an adult state, love freed of its illusion and transferred to wider and higher than personal ends. Dream, play, love, art.... (Goddard, I 79)

FINAL PERSPECTIVE

Love

We seem to catch glimpses of numerous kinds of relationships in the love spectrum. So what is Shakespeare's point?

• Theseus / Hippolyta: there's a supposed element of passion here, but they represent the mature, staid, sensible, and adult relationship, given to smalltalk and a decided lack of "drama."
• Hermia / Lysander: from the start, forbidden and desperate, so "star-crossed"; dramatic because of threatened consequences. Egeus' preference for Demetrius is as idiosyncratic as are passions among lovers; just willful obstinence. Oberon's drops do not make Lysander rude to Hermia.
• Demetrius / Hermia: contrived and forced, so supposedly wrong from the start; a one-sided deal, but it has daddy's vote.
• Helena / Demetrius: begun before our play and sick and unhealthy now, with Helena asking to be treated like a dog; she's a stalker, and whither The Rules?
• Lysander / Helena: the ugly duckling syndrome -- Helena couldn't get anyone interested before, now she's in an "Everybody Wants to Be My Baby" period.
• Titania / Oberon: a frequently bickering couple with underlying stability perhaps, whose quarrel does not annul their rapport, in which they seem more human than Theseus and Hippolyta; but chaos follows from this decentering.
• Titania / Bottom: a perverse false delusion; an infatuation quickly cured, so "a phase"; for Bottom a once-in-a-lifetime ideal. Titania has more interest than Bottom. Bawdy but not prurient.
• Pyramus / Thisbe: tragical, but perverted ideally into good-natured humor.
• Puck not matched up: effect? prankster, loner, observer, commentator; can be fun because unattached, unmotivated; can't be called the "center" -- if he is meant to be, then all is arbitrary -- Robin Goodfellow once a name for the devil.

Final Vision

So what does the play say about love? That it's just an arbitrary mess? We get numerous permutations and variations of love relationships: some ring true, some are worrisome, some are clearly silly. The least idiotic is the Theseus/Hippolyta relationship, but it's a drag. Is there a final word on the subject? Who is most believable -- Theseus? What does he say? That can't be right about "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet": would Shakespeare agree that poets are lunatics? And Theseus is talking about fantasy, not imagination. Imagination is the mental power to shape reality, a mode of perception. Hippolyta catches this distinction and supplements his perspective. Then Theseus agrees with her obliquely in calling for the play. Theseus' hyperrationalism is then paralleled and parodied by the literalism of the artisans. The last word belongs to the fairies, whom Theseus assures us don't exist.

What is the final perspective in A Midsummer Night's Dream!?

Option 1) Love is the butt of a colossal joke here, made to look absurd, grotesque, and foolish. The poet, lover, and madman are akin. Imagination can make an ass desirable. As with Bottom and Titania, love makes an ass out of you. The transformation of Bottom is symbolic, applying also to Titania, and who else? All love is ironical here: Theseus and Hippolyta are deadened, rotely and tiredly playing out a supposed love but too old and settled to put any energy into it; Hippolyta, although apparently resigned, is a captive bride; Oberon and Titania are so used to mutual betrayal that their rift has nothing to do with passions but with the protocol of control over the changeling. Other young lovers seem silly, falling in and out of love arbitrarily, and having insufficient character for it to matter. The lovers are amenable to chemical therapy, just stick figures manipulated for fairy amusement. Thus romantic love is ridiculed by the circular madness of these four young mortals. "Pyramus and Thisby" is the most outrageous trivializing of tragic intense classical love, parodying supposedly timeless love as absurd. So all love is parodied.

Option 2) The irrationality of love is shown -- this doesn't mean Shakespeare stands for moderation and sobriety. He seems to encourage setting limits not just to passion, but also to the roles of common sense and reason in life.

Love is okay. Stand back (one is forced to here because of so many variations and perspectives) and look at characters or people as a whole. The point of view is vast from above. Panoramic imagery creates perspective and distance. Groups act in seeming isolation but always are really within a larger context whether they know it or not. Humans are being watched by fairies. "If the last act is in part a testing, it is also a celebration of the successful outcome of love and, more generally, of good fellowship, tolerance, and understanding" (Wells 69).

See the Act IV metaphor of sweet thunder, the music of hounds, musical discord, and single musical effect. All is reduced to a harmony when you have perspective. They are dogs of the hunt and death, but far off.

Variety is colorful but we get a larger total vision of unity at the end. Everyone gets along beyond the pairing up. More than final "good fellowship," we end not just with a couple or even several couples, but with a community of lovers. So the play's not so well done; even the tragic love ends up entertaining and okay. And no one is excluded. Instead of secretive private courtly love, here we end with an open honest and healthy colleciton of loves, possibly even love of humanity, of people. No matter what, for a person, it's particularized in a single individual, but this play taps into a larger universal love. The end synthesizes the previous mess and alchemically transforms it.

Indeed, A Midsummer Night's Dream as a whole is prophetic, in one respect at least, as is no other of the earlier plays, of the course the poet's genius was to take. There are few more fruitful ways or regarding his works than to think of them as an account of the warfare between Imagination and Chaos -- or, if you will, between Imagination and the World -- the story of the multifarious attempts of the divine faculty in man to ignore, to escape, to outwit, to surmount, to combat, to subdue, to forgive, to convert, to redeem, to transmute into its own substance, as the case may be, the powers of disorder that possess the world. (Goddard, I 80)