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A Midsummer Night 's Dream_intro_essay_16.html
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A Midsummer Night 's Dream_intro_essay_16.html
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<p style="text-align: left; "><u>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</u> delighted me as a child, captivated me as a teenager, and intrigues me as an adult. It is one of Shakespeare’s most-performed plays, one on which budding thespians often cut their teeth. As a result, this is an easy play to underestimate as a simple romp through Fairyland. Though never straying far from its state of reverie, the play is a lucid dream, one in which the status of dreaming itself (along with its collaborators: love, theater, the imagination) is always under investigation.</p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">This play and <u>Romeo and Juliet</u> were written nearly simultaneously, and it is often remarked (by Marjorie Garber in <u>Shakespeare After All</u>, for example) that the two plays are near-inverses of one another.<span> </span>Both plays have overbearing fathers, daughters who claim the right to choose their own lovers (and plan to run away), and strong rulers who wish to impose order. Both plays use similar imagery: the lark and the nightingale, the transformative power of night, the comparison of love to lightning. Also, each play has the other contained within it in miniature: Pyramus and Thisbe are a burlesque of Romeo and Juliet, and Mercutio’s speech about the fairy Queen Mab recalls Titania and her train. </p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">But while <u>Romeo and Juliet</u> is a tragedy that could easily (but for one misdirected letter) have been a comedy, <u>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</u>, though it contains some important threats and obstacles, assures us of its comedic resolution from the beginning. “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour / Draws on apace:” Theseus begins the play with a prediction of its happy end. What is it, then, that drives the play forward?</p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">Shakespeare uses a three-part structure to organize the plot, as he does in many of his plays. The play opens in a world of apparent order and civilization, but one that has some seeds of unrest (Hermia’s desire to disobey her father and choose her own husband, for example). The second stage sees the main characters enter a kind of transformative place, often a forest, where disorder rules: people wear masks or disguises, there is sometimes magic involved, the social hierarchy can be disrupted.<span> </span>(The title of the play refers to the folk culture idea of “midsummer madness,” a period of misrule and enchantment that happens around the summer solstice: see C. L. Barber’s classic work <u>Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy</u> (1959) for further discussion of this idea.)<span> </span>After undergoing some personal transformation, the characters rejoin the “real” world, better equipped to participate in society. (This kind of structure is typical of medieval romance: think of quest literature and fairy tales.)</p><div style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"> </div><div style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b>“Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?”</b></div><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">Hermia asks this question at the height of the play’s disorder.<span> </span>Variations of this question appear throughout Shakespeare (think of Lear’s “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” or one of the twin Dromios’ “Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?” in <u>The Comedy of Errors</u> or, more malevolently, Iago’s “I am not what I am”). In this play, it is the Athenian wood that both strips the characters of who they thought they were, and (paradoxically) transforms them into something that more closely resembles their true identities. </p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">We might remark (fairly, I think) that there are very few distinguishing characteristics that set Demetrius apart from Lysander. One reason for this might be that Puck and Oberon’s manipulations would be more difficult for an audience to accept if we did know more about them: as it is, they switch places as the faithful lover and the deserter, and end as faithful lovers both. The women, however, do not need to be magically compelled in order to transform, as they both do in this play, from barely sexualized adolescents into adults. They give over their all-encompassing friendship in favor of sexual love, and though Helena quite rightly recognizes this as a loss, she finds Demetrius “like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.” That is, there is something precious about sexual love that lies in its fundamental strangeness—while Helena and Hermia were double cherries on a single stem, the lovers necessarily remain somewhat separated from one another. Demetrius is the only character who remains under the influence of the magic flower</p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">While Oberon plans the transformation of Demetrius out of pity for Helena, his goal in transforming Titania is to “make her full of hateful fantasies” and steal her changeling boy. Yet the way in which the discord between the fairies is portrayed does not set up Titania as an object of the audience’s sympathy (and one of the challenges of playing this role is to <i>avoid</i><span style="font-style:normal"> sympathy). Titania, in forswearing Oberon’s bed and company, has brought this unnatural abstinence and barrenness into the natural world as well, as we see from her long speech in Act II Scene 1. The problem is that the Fairy Queen makes the changeling “all her joy”—that is, she dotes on him in excess, and to the exclusion of her sexual duties to Oberon. It is only the excess with which she dotes on the transfigured Bottom that lets us see the danger of doting on an inappropriate object. The changeling boy, according to the play, belongs in a masculine environment, as knight of Oberon’s train; once he is there, Titania can be released from her artificial dotage. It is significant that she is not angry with Oberon for having taken the boy (even though he does so rather cruelly, by his own report): by substituting one inappropriate object of desire for another, Oberon can eventually reassert his own proper place in Titania’s love.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">Bottom’s metamorphosis comes from Puck, rather than Oberon, and instead of being instigated in order to right some wrong, it is done purely for Puck’s own sport (and, dramatically, to provide an appropriate “monster” for Titania to love). One of the highest comedic moments in the play is when Bottom volunteers to play virtually every role in the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play—Thisbe and the Lion as well as Pyramus. Bottom’s insistence on his own transformative capabilities (“let me play Thisbe too. I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice”) is what makes Puck’s later transformation of him so funny. What makes it even funnier is that the transmogrification literalizes what Bottom has already shown himself to be: an ass.</p><div style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"> </div><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b>“A fair vestal, throned by the West”</b></p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">These transformations are set against the one figure in this play that cannot be transformed: the imperial virgin, or “fair vestal,” who is immune to Cupid’s arrow. To set this play into historical perspective, it is important to remember that Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, was ruling England when this play was written. Besides the vestal, Elizabeth is also reflected through the figures of Titania, Hippolyta, and Theseus.</p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">In 1590, Edmund Spenser published the first three books of “The Faerie Queene,” an epic poem written partly in homage to Elizabeth. The Fairy’s line “And I do serve the Fairy Queen” would have recalled this very famous poem to the audience. More explicitly, however, Hippolyta, the Amazon Queen, reminds us of Elizabeth, who was often compared to an Amazon.<span> </span>In Renaissance England, the world of the Amazons, in which women ruled over men, was a topsy-turvy emblem of disorder. Interestingly, Elizabeth is also present in the characterization of Theseus. She often referred to herself publicly as a “prince,” for she was an anomaly in a world where most power inhered in men.<span> </span>Theseus, like Elizabeth, is a benevolent monarch who rules, at least nominally, according to constitutional law (he cannot by any means extenuate the law of Athens that yields the disobedient Hermia up to her father’s whim, he says—the monarch is thus subject to the law). </p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">But what do we make, then, of Theseus’s description of what must happen to Hermia should she refuse to marry Demetrius: “To live a barren sister all your life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.”?<span> </span>Elizabeth remained a virgin, after all. Yet while virginity would disempower Hermia, leaving her subject to her father, it reinforced Elizabeth’s power. If she had married, she would have been (as all wives were) subject to her husband, and therefore something less than the absolute ruler of England.<span> </span>Furthermore, her marriageable state did quite a bit to help her foreign policy, at least during the earlier years of her reign. The marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, I think, works to minimize the implicit criticism of virginity—Elizabeth often claimed that she was married to the state (she wore a wedding ring), and if we read Theseus as an embodiment of the state, then Hippolyta is also so married.</p><div style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"> </div><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b>“The best in this kind are but shadows”</b></p><p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt">One of the most interesting facets of this play is how it deals with drama and performance. At several moments we find ourselves watching people watching other people: framed audiences are one of Shakespeare’s favorite devices, and in this play he uses them to great effect. Some things to think about while reading this: What, if anything, does this play tell us about how audiences should respond to the theater?<span> </span>What’s the difference between the real world, the “dream” world, and the “play” world? How dangerous are our eyes—and how likely are they to mislead us into illusion? How does role-playing work? And to what extent are the fairies like actors (they do, after all, create this ‘dream’ of an alternative reality)?</p>