"Midsummer Night" is traditionally June 23/24, a festival of partying and dancing and superstitions regarding enchantment and witchcraft, when midsummer madness, probably associated with the heat, brings about an alternate state of mind "when people are most apt to imagine fantastic experiences" (Asimov 17; cf. Garber 218). There's a casual throwaway quality in the title -- this could be any night in midsummer, and anyone's dream. A reference to the rites of May suggests Mayday, so (as with Twelfth Night) who knows when this is taking place? Suffice it to say that the state of mind suggested is in line with the unrealistic dreamlike action of a play that tells us "that this world of sense in which we live is but the surface of a vaster unseen world by which the actions of men are affected or overruled" (Goddard, I 74). The moon is mentioned often, appropriate to madness also. The set-up is that we are waiting four days for the noble wedding, so diversion is called for.
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The play contains Shakespeare's most direct tribute to Queen Elizabeth. Ending in three weddings and a reconciliation, it also may have been an Epithalamium presented for a particular wedding. It is more appropriate for a marriage celebration than the other comedies. And the traditional mid-1590s dating of the work matches well with the wedding of Oxford's daughter Elizabeth with the Earl of Derby, one of the few aristocratic weddings during those middle years of the decade (Clark 613; Ogburn and Ogburn 576, 595, 981; Farina 54). Indeed, their course of true love had not run smoothly. Others have recently insisted on the relevance of the 1594 wedding of Sir Thomas Heneage and Mary Browne Wriothesley when these "rites of May" united two rival families (Anderson 276). A hidden moral application may have been then for young Southampton to consider marrying into the Cecil clan (Anderson 276-277), and maybe the thing was tinkered with for the Derby/Vere wedding, with the Earl now inhabiting Egeus (Anderson 287). Thus, Lysander/Hermia = Derby and Elizabeth Vere; Demetrius = Southampton (Anderson 287-88); Egeus supporting Demetrius is the poet praising the Fair Youth in the Sonnets (Anderson 288); and Helena is Elizabeth Vernon, with Demetrius still under a love spell at the end of the play that perhaps might still be broken (Anderson 298). Or maybe such occasionality is too quirky and risky: consider the touchy aspects for such a setting. Clark thinks an original version of the play was written in the early 1580s concerning the courtship between Queen Elizabeth and Alençon (Clark 613-626). Like Clark, the elder Ogburns acknowledge a hypothetical December 1584 performance under the name A Pastorall of Phillyda and Choryn (Ogburn and Ogburn 409, 575) but also detect evidence of a "sketchy version" from the mid-70s (Ogburn and Ogburn 66), partly since May Day and a new moon coincided in 1573 (Ogburn and Ogburn 577). For Prince Tudor material, see the elder Ogburns (esp. 595, 826).
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The Four Levels of Action
"A Midsummer Night's Dream is a kind of fugue with four voices" (Goddard, I 77).1) Theseus and Hippolyta serve as a frame with a realistic, seemingly stable relationship, enveloping the action of court. A dream sense is mentioned but Theseus distrusts tricks of imagination, favoring a commonsense realist attitude. "The Theseus of the Dream appears to have retired from his womanizings into rational respectability, with its attendant moral obtuseness" (Bloom 154).
2) The wooing lovers are weak characters who easily blur together in their sameness: "they are apparently indistinguishable from one another" (Garber 225). They show the transitory inconstancy of love, and physically move us from court to country -- a phenomenon that also has a psychological dimension: "wood" = mad. Here irrationality is associated with love. "Hermia has considerable more personality than Helena, while Lysander and Demetrius are interchangeable, a Shakespearean irony that suggests the arbitrariness of young love, from the perspective of everyone except the lover" (Bloom 153). Clark sees the Earl of Oxford and his Countess Anne in Demetrius and Helena (Clark 620) and Thomas Knyvet and Anne Vavasour in Lysander and Hermia (Clark 621), though I'm not sure they have that much particularity. The elder Ogburns pose an Oxford/Anne Cecil to Lysander/Hermia parallel (Ogurn and Ogburn 625). Farina thinks the couples represent William Stanley, Lord Derby and Elizabeth Vere, with Henry Percy, Earl of Nothumberland (whom Egeus/Burghley tried to match with his granddaughter Elizabeth) as Demetrius, and his eventual wife Dorothy Devereux as Helena (Farina 58-59).
3) The fairies influence love with their irrationality. Oberon and Titania's relationship is in trouble, so everything else goes out of whack. The tragedies agree "that this world of sense in which we live is but the surface of a vaster unseen world by which the actions of men are affected or overruled" (Goddard 74), not just an apology for the amount of coincidence in plots (see The Tempest finally). There's a sinister side to the fairies. Usually in production, the other fairies played by children. So you see how horrible that world could be. In the early 1580s at least, "it was the fashion for pots to refer to Elizabeth and her maids as 'nymphs and fairies'" (Ogburn and Ogburn 580).
4) The "mechanicals" are Athenian laborers -- Bottom and company: "'mechanical' has the same meaning as the modern 'mechanic'" (Garber 224). They provide the unintentional burlesque of a classical legend, not in blank verse.Illusion and reality are blurry here too as they fear that their audience will be confused. Artisans fear audience will not be able to distinguish illusion from reality, which is touching but funny. The concern for the audience's susceptibilities is funny and touching. Theseus' ultrarationalism may be parodied in the literalism of these blokes. And they give us truly delightful bad theatre.
The Romance Genre
The play can be classified as a romance, a genre involving much more than
love. Medieval stories of knights and later novels such as The Bride
of Lammermoor, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, and
Lolita usually include the following features:
- Love serves as much of the motivation (the initial set-up and conflict).
- Characters are often idealized (as types; blurry, weak, young lovers).
- Action takes place as ritualistic quest (Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light), often obliquely having an erotic intensity. Idyllic wish-fulfilment seems involved.
- Plot transitions are somewhat irrational.
- Nostalgia for a golden age may be felt.
- Setting is usually a fantastic marvellous world, having a childlike quality. (The move from court to country in the play is one of mind too -- as shown in the "wood" pun).
- Atmosphere involves confusion, akin to sleep, madness, a dreamworld.
ACT I
SCENE i
Theseus, ruler of Athens -- called, anachronistically, Duke (Asimov 18) as Shakespeare does not seem to know Greece like he knows Italy (Anderson 88) -- is anxious for the days to pass so that he can marry Hippolyta, conquered queen of the Amazons. There is a degree of passion indicated, however stately this couple seems. Theseus opens the play:
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hourIn other words, waiting around is like when an old lady won't die so you can finally inherit! Master of Revels Philostrate needs to drum up some entertainment, some merriment to whittle away the time.
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon; but O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame, or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man's revenue.
(I.i.1-6)
With this "more or less stable relationship" (Wells 65) grounding and framing the play, old Egeus interrupts with a problem: both Lysander and Demetrius are wooing his daughter Hermia and he votes for Demetrius even though she wants Lysander. Like Desdemona's father in Othello, Egeus claims that Lysander "bewitch'd" his daughter (I.i.27). Fortunately, under progressive Athenian law, the woman has choices: Theseus explains that she must either obey, or become a nun, or die. Lysander says Demetrius belongs with Helena. But the law is the law.
Lysander and Hermia, left alone to bemoan that fact that "The course of true love never did run smooth" (I.i.134), plan to elope. "It is almost as if Lysander has been watching, or reading, Romeo and Juliet" (Garber 214). "It is odd, though, that Lysander should refer to the moon lighting up the night [I.i.209-210], for at the very beginning of the play, Theseus has specifically stated that it is only four nights to the next new moon" (Asimov 21). Hermia tells Helena, who is herself lamenting that Demetrius has spurned her for Hermia's "fairness," despite the insistence that "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind" (I.i.234). Thinking Demetrius may come back to her if he knows Hermia is gone, Helena decides to tell him of their plans.
SCENE ii
"Of whatever nationality and historical period the main characters are represented as being, the lower classes are always portrayed as Englishmen of Shakespeare's own time" (Asimov 22). Peter Quince, the carpenter, plans an amateur theatrical; "quines" are blocks of wood used for building (Asimov 22). But Nick Bottom, the weaver, wants all the parts in the play, which will be Pyramus and Thisby (from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book IV). Since the story resembles Romeo and Juliet, "Did Shakespeare's satirical treatment of the Pyramus-Thisbe story get him interested in doing a serious treatment of it? Was the serious treatment already written and was he now poking a little good-natured fun at it?" (Asimov 23).
A "bottom," among other things, is a skein of thread (Asimov 22). Bottom will be Pyramus, and, like many comic figures in Shakespeare, he bungles terms: "much of the humor in Shakespeare's plays rests with the mangling of the English language by the uneducated -- something sure to raise patronizing chuckles from the better classes in the audience" (Asimov 24). Other local tradesmen will play the other parts, including a lion. Flute is a bellows-maker, appropriate since the sides of a bellows are fluted; Snout is a tinker, and so associated with fixing kettles characterized by their snout or spout; Snug is a joiner (of pieces of wood for furniture); Starveling is a tailor, associated with weakness and unmanliness (Asimov 22). There is serious concern that the lion may scare the ladies in the audience out of their wits and all the players would be hanged.
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Bottom is praised as a character. Like Dogberry later, he is given to malapropism, using words when he doesn't know what they mean and messing them up. Bottom is earthly, ponderous, slow, whereas Puck is quick, light, aerial. Bottom is substance, literally the bottom, the ballast. The "bottom" for a weaver is the center of the skein upon which the weaver's wool is wound. So Bottom is sound at the core. His name can also mean "the last, fundamental, basic" (Garber 233). His good nature is the emotional ballast of the plot. He is the best of all weavers -- equally at home anywhere with no discord for him in any of the overlapping realms of the play. Even transformed, his inner self is unfazed. Metamorphosis a mere externality for him and he is comfortable in all realms shown in this play (Goddard 79). "It is another interesting fact that the Veres had long owned the manor-house at Lavenham, which was the center of the weaving industry. Thus Oxford took the part of a weaver. But pre-eminently he was a weaver of dreams" (Ogburn and Ogburn 595). |