A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Language and Writing 9781350103887, 9781350103917, 9781350103900

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s Time
From stage to page: reading Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s own language
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s writing career
Sources and borrowings as Shakespeare’s word- trove
Making an Elizabethan play: metatheatre
CHAPTER TWO A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time
The rise of professional literary criticism and Shakespeare in education
CHAPTER THREE Unfolding the Play Through Language
Narrative and plotting
Speech acts
Time and illusions
The audience experience
CHAPTER FOUR Hearing Shakespeare’s Language
Shakespeare for the blind
The music of poetry: rhythm, rhyme, blank verse, alliteration
‘Speaking pictures’: metaphor and imagery
Responsive listening in dialogues
CHAPTER FIVE Languages of Love
The nuptial hour
Young love
Jealousy and adultery
Love-hate
Parodying love
Monstrous love: beauty and the beast
‘And all things shall be peace’
CHAPTER SIX Language of Dreaming
Dreams and visions
Waking dreams
Dreams and imagination
Dream logic, dramatic logic and time
CHAPTER SEVEN Languages of Nature ‘Purple Passages’ in the Green World
‘Purple passages’: redundant and surplus language?
‘Dilation’
CHAPTER EIGHT Language of Change Myth, Race and Gender
Myth and change
Changelings and racial difference
Bottom as changeling: art and myth
Actors and gender
CHAPTER NINE From Page to Screen A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cinematic Language
Movie language: Shakespeare for the deaf
Movies in history
A Midsummer Night’s Dream on fi lm
Offshoots and oddities
CHAPTER TEN Writing Matters
Read
Reflect
Explore
Plan
Revise, annotate, check, proofread, bibliography
A few more tips
Appendix Shakespeare’s Works in Approximate Chronological Order
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Citation preview

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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ARDEN STUDENT SKILLS: LANGUAGE AND WRITING Series Editor Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University

Published Titles Antony and Cleopatra, Virginia Mason Vaughn Hamlet, Dympna Callaghan King Richard III , Rebecca Lemon Macbeth, Emma Smith Much Ado about Nothing, Indira Ghose The Merchant of Venice, Douglas M. Lanier Othello, Laurie Maguire Romeo and Juliet, Catherine Belsey The Tempest, Brinda Charry Twelfth Night, Frances E. Dolan

Forthcoming Titles King Lear, Jean Howard

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream Language and Writing R. S. WHITE

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THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This edition published in 2022 Copyright © R. S. White, 2021 R.S. White has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Cover image © The British Library Board (G.11631, 3:2:135–43) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3501-0388-7 978-1-3501-0387-0 978-1-3501-0390-0 978-1-3501-0389-4

Series: Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface ix

Introduction

1

1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s Time 13 From stage to page: reading Shakespeare 13 Shakespeare’s own language 17 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s writing career 23 Sources and borrowings as Shakespeare’s word-trove 29 Making an Elizabethan play: metatheatre 38

2 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time

47

The rise of professional literary criticism and Shakespeare in education 47

3 Unfolding the Play Through Language

59

Narrative and plotting 59 Speech acts 62 Time and illusions 67 The audience experience 72

4 Hearing Shakespeare’s Language

81

Shakespeare for the blind 81 v

CONTENTS

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The music of poetry: rhythm, rhyme, blank verse, alliteration 91 ‘Speaking pictures’: metaphor and images 96 Responsive listening in dialogues 99

5 Languages of Love

105

The nuptial hour 105 Young love 108 Jealousy and adultery 115 Love-hate 117 Parodying love 119 Monstrous love: beauty and the beast 121 ‘And all things shall be peace’ 124

6 Language of Dreaming

129

Dreams and visions 129 Waking dreams 133 Dreams and imagination 136 Dream logic, dramatic logic and time 141

7 Languages of Nature: ‘Purple Passages’ in the Green World 145 ‘Purple passages’: redundant and surplus language? 148 ‘Dilation’ 158

8 Language of Change: Myth, Race and Gender 171 Myth and change 171 Changelings and racial difference 176 Bottom as changeling: art and myth 180 Actors and gender 182

CONTENTS

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9 From Page to Screen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cinematic Language 187 Movie language: Shakespeare for the deaf 187 Movies in history 189 A Midsummer Night’s Dream on film 193 Offshoots and oddities 200

10 Writing Matters

203

Read 205 Reflect 205 Explore 205 Plan 206 Revise, annotate, check, proofread, bibliography 207 A few more tips 208

Appendix: Shakespeare’s Works in Approximate Chronological Order 211 Bibliography 215

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

This series puts the pedagogical expertise of distinguished literary critics at the disposal of students embarking upon Shakespeare Studies at university. While they demonstrate a variety of approaches to the plays, all the contributors to the series share a deep commitment to teaching and a wealth of knowledge about the culture and history of Shakespeare’s England. The approach of each of the volumes is direct yet intellectually sophisticated and tackles the challenges Shakespeare presents. These volumes do not provide a shortcut to Shakespeare’s works but instead offer a careful explication of them directed towards students’ own processing and interpretation of the plays and poems. Students’ needs in relation to Shakespeare revolve overwhelmingly around language, and Shakespeare’s language is what most distinguishes him from his rivals and collaborators – as well as what most embeds him in his own historical moment. The Language and Writing series understands language as the very heart of Shakespeare’s literary achievement rather than as an obstacle to be circumvented. This series addresses the difficulties often encountered in reading Shakespeare alongside the necessity of writing papers for university examinations and course assessment. The primary objective here is to foster rigorous critical engagement with the texts by helping students develop their own critical writing skills. Language and Writing titles demonstrate how to develop students’ own capacity to articulate and enlarge upon their experience of encountering the text, far beyond summarizing, paraphrasing or ‘translating’ Shakespeare’s language into a more palatable, contemporary form. Each of the volumes in the series introduces the text as an act of specifically literary language and shows that the ix

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

multifarious issues of life and history that Shakespeare’s work addresses cannot be separated from their expression in language. In addition, each book takes students through a series of guidelines about how to develop viable undergraduate critical essays on the text in question, not by delivering interpretations but rather by taking readers step by step through the process of discovering and developing their own critical ideas. All the books include chapters examining the text from the point of view of its composition, that is, from the perspective of Shakespeare’s own process of composition as a reader, thinker and writer. The opening chapters consider when and how the play was written, addressing, for example, the extant literary and cultural acts of language, from which Shakespeare constructed his work – including his sources – as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal. Subsequent sections demonstrate how to engage in detailed examination and analysis of the text and focus on the literary, technical and historical intricacies of Shakespeare’s verse and prose. Each volume also includes some discussion of performance. Other chapters cover textual issues as well as the interpretation of the extant texts for any given play on stage and screen, treating, for example, the use of stage directions or parts of the play that are typically cut in performance. Authors also address issues of stage/film history as they relate to the cultural evolution of Shakespeare’s words. In addition, these chapters deal with the critical reception of the work, particularly the newer theoretical and historicist approaches that have revolutionized our understanding of Shakespeare’s language over the past forty years. Crucially, every chapter contains a section on ‘Writing matters’, which links the analysis of Shakespeare’s language with students’ own critical writing. The series empowers students to read and write about Shakespeare with scholarly confidence, and hopes to inspire their enthusiasm for doing so. The authors in this series have been selected because they combine scholarly distinction with outstanding teaching skills. Each book exposes the reader to an eminent scholar’s teaching in action and expresses a vocational commitment to making Shakespeare accessible to a new generation of student readers. Professor Dympna Callaghan Series Editor Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing

Introduction This is a book about a play by Shakespeare which uses language to awaken and inspire your imagination. My first piece of advice on reading it is . . . don’t . . . until, that is, you have read A Midsummer Night’s Dream for yourself. Read the play quickly, trying to resist the temptation to look up footnotes for every line. Follow the narrative, pick up general meanings without worrying about what is not clear. Give yourself up to the rhythm of the lines, but focus primarily on following the story itself. And I do mean read. Opinions differ about whether to watch a video or movie before reading the play in total. There are some benefits, such as offering you an overall first impression of the play as a whole, which can especially help in understanding the plot and how the different character-groups interact with each other. A movie, especially one that offers a fresh, modern interpretation, allows you at least partially to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its intended function as performance, and helps to show some of the reasons why the play is still popular, even 400 years after it was written, and how it intersects with modern issues. However, there are some important reasons why a movie version is not an ideal introduction to a play, and these take us straight to the heart of this book’s subject: language – or rather, languages, in the plural. The argument which I will pursue in later chapters is that the mode of communicating meaning is different in each medium. Film does indeed have a language but it is different in nature from the text’s. Literature, including drama which begins as a written script, exists first in words, while movies historically originated in ‘moving images’ providing linkages through 1

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT ’S DREAM: LANGUAGE AND WRITING

the sense of sight. As a consequence, the two media are fundamentally different in how language operates, the one existing in a verbal or aural code, the other as primarily a visual code. Nonetheless, however, we ‘read’ films just as we ‘read’ books, but the language conventions are different from those required by reading processes, and from ‘live’ staging practices. It is one of the many unique qualities of Shakespeare’s plays that they are ‘amphibian’ or hybrid, and able to be realized successfully in different media, but this should not disguise the fact that they began as words and ‘writing’, whereas movies operate more as ‘spectacles’. It may not be an overstatement to suggest that written language gives free play to our imaginations, while the literalizing tendency of film can close off imaginative possibilities. This is especially important in the context of a play which to a large extent is about the power of the imagination to create new realities ‘in heaven and earth’. This point will be amplified in other chapters, and especially Chapter 9, which looks specifically at cinema. Moreover, movies rarely, if ever, present the text as a whole, partly because that would take longer than the average length audiences expect to spend in watching a commercial film. As a result, movie versions of plays generally contain little more than half the written text. Admittedly, Shakespeare’s own playing company almost certainly cut their plays in performance as well, for the same reason of reducing audience time in order to maintain attention, but they would have excised different things. For example, film is a hyper-realistic mode in which we can actually be shown things like flowers and trees in front of our eyes, whereas on the bare Elizabethan stage (like the original Globe Playhouse built four years after the Dream was first performed, but typical of the period), the poetic descriptions would have been essential as the only means to locate the audience in a specific setting, as we shall see in later chapters. The words are enough for us to ‘see’ the play in ‘the mind’s eye’, a phrase used by Hamlet. This is a central point in Chapter 4 on ‘hearing’ the play in audio books or on radio, when visual cues do not distract us from the words and verbal description. For example, generally speaking, scenery and stage directions are embedded in the text, giving all the essential information we need to follow the plot, situations and emotional tone of each scene, so that we can imaginatively visualize the settings and action. This is presumably why Shakespeare did not supply many overt stage directions in his plays. We are located first in the Athenian court

INTRODUCTION

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where, despite preparations for a ducal wedding, all is not well; then in the forest around Athens populated by the fairy kingdom at night, in which emotional chaos reigns and magical things happen; and finally we are transported back to the court where, by now, problems have been resolved, couples are married and the atmosphere is relaxed and ready for entertainment. A movie simply does not need verbal descriptions of these changes of locales, which slow up the action and are redundant because the scenery is visually apparent. But if the descriptive passages are cut, a lot of the most beautiful and atmospheric poetic descriptions – one of the trademarks of Shakespeare’s style and language – will be lost, as we shall explore in Chapter 6. Another reason I advise not watching a filmed version before reading the text is because it will certainly colour and cement your interpretation and ‘reading’ of the play before you have encountered it in its full openness and richness. In this first reading you are beginning to construct your own imaginative version of the play through its language alone. For readers, the text is a body of potential, which can be imagined and reconstructed in many and varied ways, and will be different at each reading. On the other hand, a movie represents only one interpretation, endlessly replayable on DVDs and never varying. Films are also tightly controlled by an artistic director with a definite theme in mind, supported by a fleet of screen editors determining exactly what we see and don’t see (known as the mise-en-scène, everything that appears in each frame ideally contributing to a dominant visual theme). Musical and soundtrack controllers decide what we hear, often without us consciously registering the effects yet finding our emotional responses tugged this way and that, reinforced by musical scores. Movies, however appealing they may be as entertainment, belong to a coercive and manipulative medium holding audiences at their mercy. We sit passively in darkness, disconnected from the other members of the audience, an experience which is very different from being in the more communal experience in an audience at a live performance. We are all well aware, for example, that even audience applause at the end of a movie is completely meaningless, inappropriate and even foolish, since there are no live actors there to congratulate or thank. In short, if you watch one of the films before knowing the text, it may stick in your mind as a benchmark of how the play should be presented, making it more difficult to come up with your own independent ideas based on what ‘might have been’.

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On the other hand, watching a live production on stage is a different experience again since it is inherently uncontrollable, and can be beneficial in stimulating ideas. If at any time you can see a performance on stage, however bad or good it may be, before or after you have read the play, then you may be perversely lucky. This is because Shakespeare wrote his plays for the stage, and despite superficial impressions, attending live drama is a different experience from watching a movie, with the presence of an audience making a lot of difference. It reverses almost all the factors mentioned above. The stage is an actor-centric and audience-determining environment, where a director’s power to control the audience’s responses is more limited than in films (in Shakespeare’s day there was no director at all). We become aware that comedy in particular is an ensemble event, not dominated by the modern ‘star presence’ of a couple of well-known actors, as it may be in tragedies, but a team effort. An analogy might be a football coach who, despite all the training and instructions, cannot control what happens on the field of play, and certainly not the onlookers’ collective emotions. What happens is up to the stage ‘players’ (actors), whose performances will invariably be at least slightly and sometimes markedly different each time, depending on the spontaneous reception feedback they receive. How the audience responds will depend on a host of factors beyond even the actors’ control. Theatre audiences are always actively critical, reflecting reactions and feelings back to the actors, whether through laughter or stunned attentiveness. At one extreme they can simply walk out in disgust, knowing that the actors personally will be made aware that they are probably losing attention or arousing prejudices, or they can applaud enthusiastically at the end so the actors will know they have succeeded. At another extreme, even audience silence can be active, indicating to actors either a state of entrancement or one of boredom, just as the conspicuous silence of a character, for example Hippolyta in much of the first scene, can be meaningful or provocative (McGuire, ch. 1). In all these circumstances, for better or worse, audiences are collectively participating in making the play real and new before our eyes, as a one-off, interactive experience which can never be exactly duplicated. This is especially true these days, when theatre companies positively invite a collaborative approach to plays, describing themselves as offering an ‘immersive (or embodied, interactive) experience’, and highlighting audience participation, sometimes admittedly with variable results.

INTRODUCTION

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Shakespeare was well aware of the power of the audience to make or break a play. The stage audience in the last scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream continually interjects and threatens to derail the staging of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, which is saved only by the indomitable persistence of Peter Quince’s group of actors. No doubt this kind of struggle to keep going against raucous odds was a genuine risk in mounting plays on the Elizabethan outdoor stage, in daylight and at the mercy of the elements, with a heterogeneous audience unnervingly close, surrounding the players on all sides, some standing and some seated. A running theme of this book is that, in the Dream especially, the dramatist continually invites and provokes onlookers to use their imaginations in a mutual act of creating the illusion. He sometimes signals this by even using his titles as direct addresses to the audience, naming one play ‘As You Like It’ and subtitling another (Twelfth Night) ‘or, What You Will’. These two and A Midsummer Night’s Dream all end with an epilogue spoken directly to the audience, pledging that the actors will ‘Strive to please you every day’ (Twelfth Night). In those plays in which he supplies an epilogue (including the one spoken by Puck at the end of the Dream), Shakespeare acknowledges that the performance may have failed or need ‘amending’ in some way, if it is to leave the audience in a satisfied frame of mind. In such epilogues an actor steps forward to address the audience and engage them as if the writer is directly speaking to them, breaking the illusion of the play itself: If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! . . . (As You Like It, Rosalind, Epilogue) Epilogues are an invitation to the audience to make their appreciation (or otherwise) clear, and break the barrier of difference between actors and audiences, as we see in the epilogue to Shakespeare’s last, single-authored play: . . . now, ’tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT ’S DREAM: LANGUAGE AND WRITING

Since I have my dukedom got And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. (The Tempest, Epilogue) ‘Please applaud, and let us actors go,’ the actor playing the magician Prospero is pleading, the magical words of the dramatist’s book now relinquished, and power placed in the hands (literally) of the onlookers who are invited to clap. For these reasons and others, I believe it is no great disadvantage to have seen the play on stage before reading it, since, however memorable the performance may be (whether bad or good), the medium of live theatre will enhance and expand rather than limit your own imagined recreation. Much the same can be said about radio and audio versions, as I shall argue in Chapter  4, since that medium allows us imaginative space to visualize the action as we please, with only the language as stimulus. Another feature of the live stage compared with the medium of film is that we can see that any onstage scenery, props and musical interventions are all obviously constructed and artificial. No matter how ‘realistic’ they seem as effects, we are aware that painted backdrops and props are ‘placed’ on stage and are artificial in the context. Furthermore, especially in amateur theatre but equally in professional, accidents can happen. Actors can forget their lines, speak too soon or too late or become tongue-tied, all of which will contribute to the unique atmosphere of each new ‘live’ and unrepeatable performance. I have seen stage scenery collapse or sag alarmingly, rain dropping on a heroine’s head from a leaking roof, or Macbeth slipping over at an intensely serious moment. Once I recall seeing in an intimate ‘theatre-in-the-round’ 1982 production of Antony and Cleopatra by the Royal Shakespeare Company, a famous actor, Michael Gambon, playing Antony, when, poor man, he had laryngitis. Without intending it, his obvious straining to be heard contributed to the sense of a formerly great general now facing the constraints of age and circumstances. Somehow making matters worse for him, Cleopatra was an extremely vivacious and young(ish) Helen Mirren, who continually teased and taunted her ailing lover. On Shakespeare’s stage the actors had to battle against ever-changing elemental forces of cold winds and rain, while

INTRODUCTION

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creating the illusion of a sunny day, as well as calming volatile and fickle audiences. On stage, unforeseen mischances will inevitably create unexpected and uncontrollable audience responses, changing the stage dynamics and atmosphere of the play. For these reasons, although not to the same extent as on the outdoor stages in Shakespeare’s time, the words themselves are the most reliable means of providing crucial information, usually in atmospheric poetry charged with emotions, about what we are supposed to be seeing from the dramatist’s point of view, sometimes in spite of what we actually do see on stage. Language is prioritized over visual effects and we are more swayed by what we hear than what we see. It is a truism that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy. The first editors of Shakespeare’s plays, the compilers of the famous ‘First Folio’ (1623), show us that genre is important by dividing the plays on the table of contents page into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. But comedy, especially in Shakespeare’s practice, is not a single, fixed kind of drama. Each one of his plays, including the histories and tragedies, is to some extent a mingled tragi-comedy, in which one kind of ending (happy or sad, marriage or death) might indicate a primary genre, but one that is invariably modified by internal details. Even the ‘happy ending’ is not universal in comedy, since Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example, ends with separation of the lovers instead of the expected marriage, and in each of the comedies, including the Dream, there are some doubts over whether the betrothed will live ‘happily ever after’. Many of the plays do not unequivocally end with the ‘poetic justice’ of seeing good characters rewarded and evil ones punished. Nor is romantic love central to all the comedies, since in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure (and perhaps The Taming of the Shrew) singularly unloving characters are forced together. These plays also illustrate the fact that even laughter is not essential to Shakespearean comedy, since they are lined with dark psychological shadows and offer few belly laughs. Comedies are not uniformly comic, and if a production tries to make them so, it loses more complex effects. At the end of the sarcastically titled All’s Well That Ends Well, a character sums up the events by saying, ‘life is . . . a mingled yarn, good and ill together’. Certainly A Midsummer Night’s Dream does deal with love, it has a happy ending and provides audiences with ample occasions for laughter, but these things are a matter of relative and contingent perspectives rather than intrinsic. As Horace Walpole expressed it,

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‘life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel’, and our impression of the experiences depicted will vary depending on which attitude we adopt, whether detached or empathetic. Which brings us to another central point: that the play can be a very mixed event in terms of emotions depicted, allowing not only performers but also we as readers and critics to construct many different versions of the play’s atmosphere, ranging from darkness to light, as both criticism and historical performances confirm. Shakespearean drama is multidimensional and multi-vocal, as I hope will be amply revealed in this book. This is at the very heart of its strange power, and a reason we are still drawn to the plays. As a corollary, we can be confident that in Shakespearean criticism (as in performance) and in your own interpretations, there are no universally ‘right’ answers, and very few wrong ones, apart from those that can be positively disproved by reference to the text. So long as you can find evidence to back up an idea, then it can be as valid as any other, no matter how eccentric or naïve it might initially appear. Sometimes the best ideas come from asking a very simple question about something that puzzles you (what does this phrase actually mean? how does this episode fit into the play?), or following up an unusual train of thought to see where it might lead. To some it may be dismaying to think that there are no single, correct interpretations, especially if you have a deadline to complete an essay, and want to give the marker what you think s/he may have in mind. But nonetheless, it can be a liberating experience to work out what you think, irrespective of what others, however learned, say. Intellectual plurality and imaginative fertility can reign. Note that even critics disagree with each other and can change their minds, as you will see in Chapter 3. Approach criticism in this spirit, seeing each critic and editor as advancing what is essentially no more and no less than an opinion offered in a particular period and backed up with textual evidence, about what strikes that reader as important at the time of writing. Commentators are like teachers and lecturers, able to stimulate ideas which in turn can help you formulate your own, but they can never claim to present exclusively the only correct view available, which cannot be changed, developed, improved upon or rejected in favour of another. Like us all, thankfully critics can change with their times, as we shall see in the last section of Chapter 2. If, for example, I should be asked to write this book again in ten years’ time, I am sure it would be different, as

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it would also have been ten years ago. The text is new on each reading. Language is the overarching theme of this book in its series, and I am interpreting this in the widest sense, covering different aspects of meaning-making, both within Shakespeare’s text and as it relates to different modes of transmission, whether we are reading, hearing or watching the play, on stage or in the cinema. It is the medium with which we make ourselves understood and through which we understand others. I am not presenting anything like a comprehensive or technical account of linguistic or rhetorical niceties – for these you can consult other, more specialized studies. One especially useful source is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED ), based on historical principles and showing through quotations some early usages and changing meanings of words through the centuries. Most university libraries will have access to an online version and it is worth getting to know and routinely consulting. If you want to explore aspects of Shakespeare’s language more generally, you may find useful the many specialist studies, such as G. R. Hibbard’s The Making of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Poetry (1981); Russell McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (2001); N. F. Blake, A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language (2002); Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (2004); and various contributions by David Crystal. This list alone (only a tip of an iceberg) indicates that it is a large field allowing many different approaches. To undertake a study of language in isolation would involve looking in detail at such things as rhetoric, figures of speech, versification (prosody), neologisms (words introduced by Shakespeare into the English language), wordplay (puns and ‘conceits’), grammar, semantics, polysemy (words bearing more than one meaning) and the history of language. While not entirely ignoring these concerns, instead I maintain a focus on how such considerations contribute to the unity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole. Language will be seen as an instrument, a writer’s toolkit, a means to an end and not the end itself. For a brief history of the play in performance (not specifically focused on language), you will find useful Jay Halio’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare in Performance (2003), and each of the scholarly editions of the play has a section on the performance history in its Introduction. The chapters in this book can probably be read in any order you wish, and I freely admit that the organization of the material is not

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especially methodical and may appear somewhat arbitrary. If anything, I have tried to open up thematic areas for analysis, as though each chapter is an essay on a chosen aspect of the play. Ideas and quotations in one chapter could well have appeared in another, since the play itself is a unity, making a topic or quotation relevant in more than one context and leading to recapitulatory and forecasting kinds of statements like ‘as we have noticed’ and ‘as we shall see’. I make no apology for such apparent repetitions, since this is a result of my intention to present A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself as an interconnected and constantly overlapping pattern, so that details illuminate the whole and the whole explains details, in realizations that change as the play develops. The Dream is very tightly constructed and unified, so that everything subtly overlaps and reflects the rest. Likewise, some quotations recur in different contexts since they seem so important to important themes. For example, Theseus’s broadside against lunatics, lovers and poets, the transformation of Bottom, and Puck’s epilogue all seem to come close to the playwright’s guiding vision in the play, telling us much about his attitude to the metamorphic role of the imagination in poetic drama, and operating in different ways on other parts of the play. The first couple of chapters in this book seek to provide contextual information about Shakespeare’s own language and playwriting career, the sources of the play, some observations on performance history of Elizabethan staging, and a very brief summary of how critical approaches to the comedies have changed over time, from Shakespeare’s time up to ours. We then look at how Shakespeare structured the play so as to be easily followed but with increasingly complex interweaving of the various plots. After that, chapters are more thematic, each looking at language in the play with a particular issue in mind, such as love, nature, dreams, in more or less independent essays. Chapter  8 on ‘metamorphoses’, is more speculative and attempts to bring together the various themes in this book and the play, the closeness of myth, metaphor and dreams as central to human imagination and creativity. The concentration on change provokes ideas about the play in terms of some modern preoccupations with race and gender, and how these issues have been viewed differently in different ages and cultures. Finally, a chapter is offered on some famous movie versions that have been made, emphasizing the point that the modern medium of ‘the moving image’ uses its own, largely visual language, which differs

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from the play as written text and as live performance. Overall, the book as a whole is intended not to offer ‘the final word’ on anything, but to stimulate your own ideas and provide information that may enhance understanding and enjoyment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the page, on stage and later on screen. My hope is that you will discover and pursue your own interpretations, so that the play will continue to grow in your mind ‘to something of great constancy, / But howsoever strange and admirable’ (5.1.26–7).

Exercises rcises and writing matt matters

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hese are included at the end of sections and chapters to stimulate your thinking about the play, as part of the mission of this Arden series. I offer them in part to illustrate my belief that both reading and writing are interrelated, creative activities, though differing from each other in important ways. This philosophy is amplified in the final chapter of the book. In essence, reading depends on surrendering yourself to the words of the play, not in a passive spirit but in one of active listening and not imposing your own judgements. Writing self-evidently requires your own ideas to come to the fore and be recorded as a personal response to the play. But the two are not antithetical opposites but activities lying at the beginning and end of a spectrum, and both are creative. Accordingly, the suggested exercises are offered as ways of coaxing you to think laterally, breaking away from critical commonplaces or orthodoxies and instead finding different ways to understand the play. They are also intended to encourage you to review the main themes of the chapter and to rethink them from your own point of view. Shakespeare’s plays are nothing if not multidimensional and multivalent and can be interpreted in many different ways, so there is room for you to construct your own reading, backed up with reference to the text. The medium of drama itself makes this possible, by placing different emotions and subject positions in the mouths of different characters, so that inevitably a variety of points of view are articulated, creating the possibility of a range of interpretations.

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CHAPTER ONE

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s Time

From stage to page: reading Shakespeare Shakespeare’s plays were originally written for transient occasions, namely performances on stage. His role as playwright, at least early in his career, was known only to the company which kept tight control of the written script. There was no cult of the author, except in rare cases such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, who were more notorious for their lives than famous for their works. Shakespeare’s public, bread-and-butter jobs were as an actor and shareholder in the theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Only later were the plays adapted into a reading-culture based on the existence of the works published in written form with the author’s name attached. This raises an apparently simple question, though the answers are not so obvious or self-evident as they may seem. How did language, written initially anonymously and created primarily to be performed and heard on stage, at most in a season of live performances with occasional later revivals, come to be recorded in written form and made available forever under the now internationally revered name William Shakespeare? There is some evidence that increasingly during his lifetime it was primarily the uniqueness of the language of Shakespeare’s plays that made them memorable and ‘worth’ publishing, rather than necessarily their theatrical qualities and appositeness for staging 13

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which had attracted initial attention. In a pre-copyright age, the posthumously published ‘complete works’, known as the First Folio (1623), was no doubt an attempt to give Shakespeare’s words some authorial protection now that he was dead, to preclude unauthorized and unacknowledged plagiarism. His friends Heminge and Condell, as compilers of the First Folio collection of the (almost) complete works, claimed that their aim was ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare’ and to attribute to the plays their rightful paternity: ‘We have but collected [his plays] and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans, guardian’. They are here using the kind of metaphor which Shakespeare himself would have appreciated – now that the author is dead his works, like offspring, are orphans, and need legal guardians. It does seem that the publication of the First Folio in 1623, seven years after his death, was considered a literary rather than theatrical event. Among other things, the sheer size and weight of this volume (950 pages) made it completely impracticable as a text to be used in the theatre, and it looks and feels more like the kind of giant Bibles used by preachers in church, which in itself conferred symbolic prestige on the volume. It was also priced beyond the reach of most, probably about 15 shillings for an unbound copy and £1 bound (twenty days’ wages for a skilled tradesman). It was made to sit in libraries of readers who were used to reading lengthy works of poetry, such as Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene and courtly prose romances such as Sidney’s Arcadia. This purpose is clearly signalled at the beginning of the Folio where we see an address, ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, and is emphasized by the first editors: ‘Read him therefore; and againe, and againe.’ It marks a decisive historical shift towards Shakespeare’s plays as existing in print culture, and away from their prior purpose as performance on stage. Referring to the engraved image of Shakespeare’s face on the facing page, the short poem regrets that the artist could not have drawn the ‘wit’ as accurately as the face, so that the ‘print’ will have to suffice: ‘But, since he cannot, Reader, looke / Not on his picture, but his Booke.’ This emphasis on ‘print’, ‘book’ and ‘reader’ in turn led to the eighteenth-century fashion for editing and even ‘revising’ plays to conform with ancient literary rules derived from Aristotle, and also to the vast, ever-increasing industry of books and articles on Shakespeare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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However, the movement towards Shakespeare’s fame as a writer, whose works were destined to be read in books, began before the First Folio appeared. While he was alive, some of his plays were published as ‘Quartos’ (one play per volume in small format, comparable in some ways to the modern paperback), offered to the public as performance scripts. These may not have been personally authorized for publication by Shakespeare, since the ‘prompt copies’ (the ‘master’ written playscripts used by the prompter in preparing for performance) belonged to the theatre companies he worked for rather than the writer. The company could sell rights to publication to a publisher who could gain some legal protection by paying a fee and recording the transaction in the Stationer’s Register (Smith, 2015, 140). Words were precious commodities with commercial value, and no doubt the companies did not want their words to be stolen by other companies before their stage popularity was waning. We do not know much about whether plays in Quartos were printed from the author’s manuscripts, from prompt books used in the theatres, or from individual ‘parts’ used by the actors. All sorts of theories have been advanced, and answers may have been different in each case, but the area remains largely a matter for speculation. Some plays, such as King Lear and Hamlet, were published in different textual versions, deepening the mystery further. The most likely explanation is that the ‘first’ version of a play, which was lodged for licensing by the Master of the Revels, was in some cases too lengthy for performance, and shorter versions had been cut down for the stage. It had not been until 1598 that Shakespeare was first named on quarto title pages of plays (Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost), and by 1600 he was becoming known by name as one whose works could be read with profit. He had been named in 1593 on the title page of his long poem Venus and Adonis, a work which became a bestseller (of which more anon, when we come to look at where the Dream fits in his ouevre). At the end of this book, ‘Appendix 1’ lists Shakespeare’s works in a (possible) chronological order of first performance. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime as a Quarto in 1600 (and reprinted in 1619 after his death), some five years after it had been first performed in about 1595. It has only minor differences from the Folio version, and most editors these days base their texts on the Quarto, since it seems to have been printed from an author’s manuscript. The title page provides some theatrical information confirming the play’s popularity, and

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was perhaps intended as an acknowledgement to the Company, whether or not it had given permission to publish: A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. Imprinted at London, for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe, at the Signe of the White Hart, in Fleetestreete. 1600. This gives some valuable information, telling us that the play was evidently popular on stage (‘sundry times publickely acted’), that the playing group had a patron and was known after him as ‘the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants’, and most importantly, we have the announcement on a play text of the writer’s name, ‘William Shakespeare’. This alone is significant, since many plays – possibly most – were written collaboratively by various hands, and authors’ names were not always given on the title pages. Writers were considered mere journeymen, necessary in the process of making plays but requiring no special acknowledgement. The fact that the Quarto was printed some years after the play had first been performed on stage suggests that the ‘sundry times’ it had been acted included revivals, proof of its continuing popularity on stage. But in terms of Shakespeare’s playwriting career, the appearance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on bookstalls is evidence that by 1600 he was becoming known also as a writer whose plays repay reading.

Exercise rcis 1 ist as many differences as you can think of between texts intended to be read (e.g. novels) and works intended to be performed (scripts, play texts). Consider why Shakespeare’s works can be successful either way.

L

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Exercise rcis 2

Y

ou will find images of the quarto texts with Shakespeare’s name on the following website. See what information they might offer us about Shakespeare’s fame during his lifetime, and what they tell us about Elizabethan printing practices: https:// shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/highlights/shakespearesname-printed-title-page-or-dedicatory-leaf-his-work-his-lifetime.

Shakespeare’s own language The transcription above of the Quarto’s title page throws us into some of the differences between language in Shakespeare’s day and ours, with spellings like ‘Midsommer’, ‘dreame’, ‘hath’ and so on. If you are studying or reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or preparing to watch a performance of the play, you will certainly be using a ‘modern spelling’ edition. However, this version is by no means what Shakespeare wrote. We have texts of his plays from his own era which are in ‘old spelling’ and in what often strikes us as ‘old language’, which looks like this: NOw faire Hippolita, our nuptiall hower Draws on apase: fower happy daies bring in An other Moone: but oh, me thinks, how slow This old Moone waues! She lingers my desires, Like to a Stepdame, or a dowager, Long withering out a yong mans reuenewe. Hip. Fower daies will quickly steepe themselues in night: Fower nights will quickly dreame away the time: And then the Moone, like to a siluer bowe, Now bent in heauen, shall beholde the night Of our solemnities. The spelling differences are easily assimilated, such as ‘daies’ for ‘days’, ‘yong’ for ‘young’, ‘reuenewe’ for ‘revenue’, and ‘Moone’ for ‘moon’. There is an obvious misprint, ‘waues’ for ‘wanes’, reminding us that compositors in printing shops were fallible, and without the benefits of spellchecks. Others may reveal something about

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Elizabethan pronunciation – the respective spellings of ‘hower’ and ‘fower’ might suggest that ‘hour’ and ‘four’ may have rhymed in those days (more likely with ‘hower’ dominant since if ‘four’ were pronounced ‘for’ then there would be an unfortunate and surely unlikely pun on ‘hour’ and ‘whore’). This gains some credibility when we reflect that the word was derived from the Old English fior, and from Middle English where it was variously spelt feouwer, fowuer and fower (Oxford English Dictionary). Shakespeare’s spoken language is generally believed to have sounded more like West Country English than modern ‘received pronunciation’, and even today ‘hour’ and ‘four’ could in dialect both be pronounced with two syllables and nearly rhyme. Such details might seem pedantic and not matter much to our appreciation of the meaning, but the more accustomed we become to details of Shakespeare’s language, the more fascinating a study it becomes. Other differences, or difficulties, arise when Shakespeare is using language to express ideas which have little currency today, especially in figurative language such as metaphor and simile, as in Theseus’s ‘She lingers my desires, / Like to a Stepdame, or a dowager, / Long withering out a yong mans reuenewe’, and in such cases there is probably no alternative to checking the footnote in a modern, annotated edition to make quite sure of the meaning. What it will show in this case, unexpectedly, is that Shakespeare’s words are expressing in a very economical way a set of complex ideas – the Arden edition needs a full seventeen lines in the footnotes to explain! (Chaudhuri, 2018, 2). Together with the literal meaning, that Theseus feels his desires to be thwarted just as a young man is impatient for his widow guardian to die and leave him her money (since widows could own property whereas wives could not), there are also commercial associations in the metaphor which might cast some doubt on Theseus’s own motives. But rest assured, such figurative language is usually secondary (the ‘vehicle’) to the primary content (‘tenor’), and you can pick up the overall feeling of Theseus’s impatience with slow time without struggling over those lines. Trust the sentiment (ideas and emotions) of the passage as a whole, without worrying over details. We might incidentally glance at the way the very first four lines pack in references to many of the themes to follow. Like the overture to an opera, the opening passages by Theseus and Hippolyta set up leitmotifs which will run through the play, defining its emotional, metaphorical and conceptual ambit:

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the ‘nuptial hour’ of a wedding as its destination by the end of the play, desire, night, dream, and then back to the ‘solemnities’ of marriage, this time with three couples; followed by the ‘mirth’ of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ and a kind of ‘melancholy’ in Puck’s epilogue. The moon is immediately established as a dominant image, and by specifying the phase as approaching a new moon the words open up the mystery of the ‘double time scheme’ based on the precision of consulting an almanac to ‘find out moonshine’, to be explored later in this book. Pedantic as it may seem, the exercise of reading the play in its Elizabethan spelling has some benefits. It usefully ‘alienates’ or defamiliarizes the language so we can inspect it afresh, without presupposing its modernity. As we become accustomed to the differences, we can feel we are coming closer to Shakespeare’s own writing practices and the way his mind works in the act of composing. Instead of seeing his language as an irritating impediment, as though it is a confusing or archaic variant on our own language, we can regard it as his personal, creative instrument. Sometimes the ‘old spelling’ reveals puns and wordplay which are obscured or even lost in modern English. We can also observe at close hand the problems editors face in ‘translating’ a play into modern language, and understand why every edition is different in ‘incidentals’, especially punctuation. We can appreciate at first hand why a particular passage might be a crux or knotty problem which could be a printer’s error needing ‘emending’ or an unusual or puzzling expression that requires explanation. Quite often problematical language will explain what exactly is happening on stage or who is speaking to whom, given that Shakespeare does not often provide stage directions. Furthermore, since it is often said about novels in another language like French or Russian that ‘something is lost in translation’, then why not Shakespeare too? As a bonus, you will also pick up the linguistic continuities linking ‘then and now’, as well as the differences. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English was in a state of rapid change and the period is called ‘early modern’ because it is on the way to ‘modern’. Without the regularizing tyranny of dictionaries, writers felt free to create new words (‘neologisms’), building upon linguistic roots found in Latin, Greek, French and Anglo-Saxon, and Shakespeare delighted in the opportunities. One small but interesting example of the rapid linguistic changes, partly driven by Shakespeare’s

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example, is that in this period the word ‘very’ used as an intensifier before an adjective (‘very happy’) was being used for the first time (Crystal, 2003, 162), and by chance A Midsummer Night’s Dream uses this device several times, as though parodying a fashion: ‘bottom A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry’ (1.2.13); ‘puck And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl / In very likeness of a roasted crab’ (2.1.47–8); ‘oberon That very time I saw’ (2.1.155); ‘hermia Lysander riddles very prettily’ (2.2.57); ‘Very tragical mirth’ (5.1.57); ‘Did whisper often, very secretly’ (5.1.159); ‘and very notably discharged’ (351); and multiple times in theseus A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience. demetrius The very best at a beast, my lord, that e’er I saw. lysander This Lion is a very fox for his valour. (5.1.225–7) It is illuminating at least to glance at the Elizabethan texts and now and then make some comparisons with the modern equivalents (see the Exercise). This will focus attention closely on the distinctiveness of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan, written language and how it ‘translates’ into modern English – and even non-English languages, since the works have been translated into virtually every language on earth. Let us now see what can be gleaned about, and from, Shakespeare’s own language, coming as close as is possible to his writing in the absence of a manuscript, by looking at the Quarto printing of Egeus’s complaint about his daughter’s perceived obstinacy in her choice of marriage partner: And my gratious Duke, This man hath bewitcht the bosome of my childe. Thou, thou Lysander, thou hast giuen her rimes, And interchang’d loue tokens with my childe: Thou hast, by moone-light, at her windowe sung, With faining voice, verses of faining loue, And stolne the impression of her phantasie: With bracelets of thy haire, rings, gawdes, conceites,

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Knackes, trifles, nosegaies, sweete meates (messengers Of strong preuailement in vnhardened youth) With cunning hast thou filcht my daughters heart, To stubborne harshnesse. Here Shakespeare’s use of language once again anticipates themes to be developed later in the Dream, for example repeating yet again the association of ‘moone-light’. Egeus alternates between addressing Lysander with anger and contempt, linking up love with poetry (‘rimes’) as a seduction ploy, and in parenthesis the respectfully addressed ‘gratious Duke’ to whom Egeus adopts a ‘grown up’ voice and vocabulary: ‘(messengers / Of strong preuailement in vnhardened youth)’, meaning ‘very persuasive to young people’. His repeated and emphatic ‘thou’ is meaningful since it was sometimes associated with speaking insultingly to a social inferior, while ‘you’ was more used with formal respect. (This needs to be qualified, since ‘thou’ was also used between equals such as lovers, while ‘you’ could be employed in a cold and distant way.) The language also connects up with other plays by Shakespeare. For example, Egeus’s vehemently expressed complaint that Lysander has ‘bewitcht the bosome of my childe’ is one that Shakespeare returns to later in a tragic context in Othello, which also begins with a father, Brabantio, making a very similar accusation: that Othello has stolen his daughter Desdemona’s heart. She is abused, stol’n from me, and corrupted By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks [charlatans]; For nature so preposterously to err, Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense, Sans witchcraft could not. The similar language used by disgruntled fathers suggests that Shakespeare may have had his own earlier play in mind. The word ‘stolen’ is repeated, and the idea in his word ‘filcht’ [filched]. Both fathers reveal their unrepentantly patriarchal attitudes, treating their daughters as property, a sentiment shared by the legalistic Theseus as he reproves Hermia, ‘To thee thy father should be as a god’. ‘Bewitcht’ is repeated in ‘Witchcraft’, as though the fathers regard their daughters’ love as an evil ‘hex’. Brabantio’s phrase, ‘spells and medicines’, reminds us not only of Egeus’s fear but also

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anticipates the magic flowers in the Dream, able to make or break love. However, the real ‘spell’ in both cases is poetry, which is implicit in words like ‘faining’ (‘feigning’), a word which Shakespeare often equates with fictions and acting, and ‘phantasie’. Theseus is later to condemn ‘such shaping fantasies’ linking lunatics, lovers and poets, who he believes ‘Are of imagination all compact’. For Egeus, the spell has been cast by Lysander’s poetic utterances, songs and gifts, and Othello too proves he has the gift of the gab, confessing he has wooed Desdemona in eloquent poetry, of which he says, ‘This only is the witchcraft I have used.’ In both cases it is the beguiling and seductive power of poetic language which can win emotions and create love – a claim the dramatist is making for his own lines in his plays about love. As an implicit expression of the writer’s art of generating emotions through language, the poet is both telling and showing his power over feelings aroused by the imagination. Shakespeare does tend to repeat situations from play to play (why waste a good scene?), often signalling the echoes in language, but also with profound variations from play to play. In this case, the comparison with Othello shows that the same kind of plot can be played out as either comedy or tragedy, just as ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is a comically presented version of Romeo and Juliet. Furthermore, the parental and masculine suspicion of love expressed through poetry opens up a key ambivalence in both plays. In the light of what will happen in the forest, is love a form of malevolent, transformative ‘bewitchment’ or a legitimate and overwhelming, if surprising, feeling? Brabantio’s use of ‘Sans’ provides another kind of gloss on the ambivalence. It is a direct borrowing from French for ‘without’, showing not only Shakespeare’s delight in words themselves, but also invoking the cultural roots of love poetry in medieval French troubadours and courtly romance, which could be dismissed as mere fiction and feigning associated with a country which Elizabethan politicians regarded as suspicious. The ambiguities are immediately reinforced, as we hear spirited and emotionally convincing rejoinders, especially from Hermia. She replies to the Duke’s threat of enforcing the law that, if she will not marry her father’s choice then she must die or face a life as a nun, expressing herself with the same assertiveness (a mood which she describes as ‘boulde’) that Desdemona employs in Othello. In both cases the father’s attempt to coerce his daughter with legal threats is

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rebuffed with the same resilient and courageous female resistance, though the respective fates are very different.

Exercise erci

F

ind the Elizabethan texts on the internet, e.g. the Internet Shakespeare Editions’ site, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca, or the Folger Library site, https://www.folger.edu/shakespearesworks Choose a passage and act as an editor would, turning it into modern English, without otherwise changing anything (not ‘translating’ but ‘modernizing’). Pay attention not only to spelling but punctuation, and consider how you would change it to look more modern. Then choose some different modern editions and see what choices their editors have made: you will realize that no two modern editions are exactly the same in all details!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s writing career Even if you are concerned only with the one play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is useful to know where it fits into Shakespeare’s overall literary and dramatic output. Because fewer personal records were kept in Elizabethan times than today, we have virtually no hard facts about Shakespeare’s childhood and youth, from his birth at Stratford upon Avon in 1564 until at least 1592 when he was in his late twenties and acting on the London stage. Significantly for his future career, however, we do know that during his boyhood at least thirteen professional acting companies from London visited Stratford. We know also that his grammar school education would have included rhetoric and about as much Latin learning as would today distinguish a university graduate in Classics. His name pops up in records at last in 1592, when he was referred to scathingly by a rival writer (probably Robert Greene) as an actor and playwright working in London. The word ‘Shake-scene’ and a telltale phrase from one of Shakespeare’s own early plays are used in the jealous warning to fellow players (those wearing ‘our feathers’) that there is

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a new tyro in town who both acts and writes (‘bombasts out a blank verse . . .’): . . . an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tigers heart wrapped in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum [do-all], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. (Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte, 1592) The quotation refers to a line spoken by Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 3: ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!’ (1.4.138). A more generous mention comes also in 1592 from Henry Chettle, who praises Shakespeare’s ‘uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his fa[ce]tious grace in writing, which approves his Art’ (Holland, DNB entry). He was evidently not an especially distinguished actor since we hear of his roles only from occasional anecdotes, such as the minimal part of old Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet. But acting was almost certainly how he came to be associated first with (possibly) the Queen’s Men, then Lord Strange’s Men and from 1594 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. His first theatre was the Rose Playhouse, then The Theatre, which in 1599 was disassembled and rebuilt under the famous name of The Globe, south of the Thames. By 1593 he had written, possibly in collaboration, some plays based on historical sources, namely the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III ; also a classical, Senecan revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and some comedies, The Comedy or Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, though these are rather hard to date with precision and could have been written any time between 1588 and 1593. The ‘History’ plays, based on the chronicle history of England collected by Raphael Holinshed and highlighting problems of monarchical succession, were a new kind of drama, and their ‘sequelization’ suggests they were popular on the stage. But Shakespeare was far from famous. An unexpected turning point, which could have been disastrous for Shakespeare’s fortunes, came in 1593–4, when the theatres in London were closed by the Privy Council because of the prevalence of plague in the city. Since playhouses were crowded with up to 3,000 people at a single performance, they were deemed obvious

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risks in spreading the epidemic. (Such things recur. As I write this, the world is facing a pandemic, and one of the first public measures taken has been to cancel theatres and international sporting events.) The London acting companies were able to tour the English provinces, but this would not generate a consistent enough longterm, year-round income to live on. Shakespeare, for all he could know at the time, had effectively lost his job as a writer for the theatre and faced an insecure and bleak future. He and his colleagues faced the stark likelihood that they might never work again in this profession, since there was no knowing when the plague would abate. Even apart from this ‘health and safety’ issue, there were vociferous Puritan critics of the theatre who constantly advocated banning stage performances altogether. They were eventually to get their way in 1642, when all public playhouses were closed on moral and political grounds at the beginning of the Civil War period, not reopening until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Given the situation, Shakespeare had a lot to lose, since by now he was not only an actor and writer for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but also a shareholder in the theatre company, so his whole livelihood was threatened. He had to ‘shift’ and almost overnight develop an alternative career in order to support his family in Stratford. This he managed to do with astounding success by rebranding himself as a non-dramatic poet. He published two narrative poems (known as epyllia), a comedy called Venus and Adonis and a tragedy called The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to a patron (we would now say ‘financial sponsor’), Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. For an author, such publications had at least one great advantage over writing for the theatre, since the writer’s name was prominently on the title page of each book, generating publicity for the individual. Venus and Adonis was an overnight bestseller, particularly amongst lawyers and young men about town, and it rapidly became one of the most famous and commercially successful publications in the whole period, reprinted over a dozen times in a very short space of time. Depicting Venus, the goddess of love, as a sweaty and lustful pursuer of the young mortal Adonis, who enjoys only hunting, it became a cause célèbre among educated readers for its wit, its poetry and its frank eroticism. It was this poem, not the plays, that initially established Shakespeare’s name as a writer in the public domain. It shows that at the time he was reading Ovid from the classics, and prose and poetic romance, and

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the influence of each is to become evident in the romantic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tellingly, on the title page of Venus and Adonis Shakespeare refers to it as ‘the first heir of my invention’, as if accepting that his previous dramatic writing was ephemeral and would not be known under his name as writer. He was staking a claim to a different kind of authorship and a literary career targeting readers, in case the playhouses would never reopen. It was also at this time that he was writing sonnets which, although evidently circulated among friends, were not published until 1609. After almost two long years, in 1594 the plague conditions did clear, and acting companies could get back to work in London. When the playhouses reopened, among the first group of plays Shakespeare wrote in about 1595 were two which show a remarkable transition into new forms of drama: a romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, based on an English translation of an Italian romance novella, and the romantic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which contains a kind of parody of Romeo and Juliet’s plot, in the playlet ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. Theories have been advanced that the Dream was written for a special occasion like an aristocratic wedding, but there is no evidence for this and no compelling reason for it. The most astonishing development, however, lies in the kind of language Shakespeare is now using, which is inestimably more lyrical than anything he had written earlier when he had been influenced by Marlowe’s declamatory style, and more closely aligned with the poetry and sentiments in Venus and Adonis. These two plays are generally regarded as evidence of Shakespeare entering his maturity as a stage writer in the mid-1590s and his increasing use of romance as a genre popular in both prose and poetry at the time. Shakespeare had only once drawn on romance in an earlier play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but from this time until 1603 when Queen Elizabeth died, it became a favourite quarry as he perfected his own mode of staged romantic comedy. Even a history play which he wrote at the same time, Richard II , shows a development from the earlier Henry VI plays and Richard III , and it differs from his earlier history plays in being full of the kind of poetry we find in the Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost, all written at about the same time, from 1594 to 1596. Richard II is presented as an ineffectual politician but an eloquent poet. In the next five years or so Shakespeare followed up the Dream with his other, now-famous romantic comedies: The Merchant of

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Venice (1596–7), Much Ado About Nothing (1598–9), As You Like It (1599–1600) and Twelfth Night (1601). We find ourselves pitched into the signature styles of an author, now well known by name through Venus and Adonis, who was praised by Francis Meres in 1598 especially in terms of his language: the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, &c. (Meres, 1598, 281–2) Describing the plays, Meres also writes that ‘Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds [i.e. both Comedy and Tragedy] for the stage’, and he mentions by name six plays, giving us valuable evidence in dating them. He also mentions one play, Love’s Labour’s Won, which (if it had ever existed) is either a nowlost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost or a subtitle for another of the comedies. Some independent evidence exists that it was indeed a different play since it was mentioned in a bookseller’s list of printed books in 1603. It is sobering to reflect that if the First Folio had not been published with its thirty-six plays then there would be eighteen that would simply have been ‘lost’, some without mention that they ever existed (Smith, 2015, 1). The new language and genres heralded an evolution in the work of a dramatist who had previously written an eclectic variety of plays based on classical comedy (The Comedy of Errors), classical tragedy (Titus Andronicus), English history plays, a violent, knockabout and non-lyrical play about marriage (The Taming of the Shrew) and now romantic love. Writing Venus and Adonis was obviously not only a career life-saver for the budding writer, but also a learning curve for him as a dramatist. External political considerations almost certainly influenced Shakespeare’s choice to write mainly history plays and comedies in the 1590s. Elizabeth I was on the throne, and since she was single, without issue and refrained from naming a successor until her deathbed, there was considerable anxious debate about who would be the next monarch. The so-called ‘succession issue’ was raised time and again in Shakespeare’s history plays, as a way of diplomatically commenting ‘at arm’s length’, through dramatized historical fictions, on the burning contemporary topic of regal succession (Lake, 2016, passim). These plays, drawn from

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Holinshed’s prose Chronicles, also fed into Tudor propaganda concerning Elizabeth’s Tudor ancestors and were designed to build a sense of national identity in England. Even Julius Caesar, based instead on Greco-Roman history, dealt with this theme. Meanwhile, gender as a political issue likely played a part in the choice to write romantic comedies, with the female monarch in mind. Since a woman who liked and supported the theatre was on the throne, having patronized a group called the Queen’s Men from 1583 to the mid-1590s, it could be a form of ingratiating flattery to write plays that place women’s consciousness centrally, and that present a series of powerful female characters (even though they were played on stage by boys). It is generally agreed that Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is alluding to Elizabeth, the ‘Virgin Queen’, as the ‘fair vestal throned by the west . . . the imperial votaress’ who escapes falling in love, in Oberon’s description to Puck of how the flower love-in-idleness came to exist: oberon That very time I saw (but thou couldst not) Flying between the cold moon and the earth Cupid, all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden meditation, fancy free. (2.1.155–64) Cupid misses his target of the ‘fair vestal, throned by west’, so that she does not fall in love, but it alights upon the flower which can be used to ‘infect’ other more ordinary mortals. Circumstances changed radically when Elizabeth died and James Stuart took the throne in 1603/4. (In Elizabethan dating the new year fell on 25 March, and since James succeeded on 24 March it is 1604 in modern dating.) The theatre company was renamed ‘The Kings’ Men’ and had to please a new patron. Public performers who did not have an aristocratic patron could be prosecuted as ‘vagabonds’. Shakespeare’s choice of genres changed accordingly,

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plumbing darker depths in ‘problem plays’ and tragedies, such as Macbeth, which dealt with the new Scottish king’s special interests: witchcraft and the unification of his kingdoms. King Lear cautioned against breaking this union. At the end of Shakespeare’s writing career he moved into a new genre again, sometimes called romance, sometimes tragicomedy and sometimes simply and non-committally ‘last plays’. This was a revival of an earlier dramatic form dealing with families rather than primarily young love. It became fashionable on the stage with the emergence of Beaumont and Fletcher as popular dramatic dramatists after about 1607, which may explain Shakespeare’s new departure. His four romances were Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, his last single-authored play bar one – and Henry VIII, or All is True.

Exercise erci

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earch the internet for timelines of Shakespeare’s plays. You will notice that the dates and orderings differ from each other, in small or large ways. How might we explain these differences in the earlier periods, when today books and performances are unambiguously dated and there is no doubt on the matter?

Sources and borrowings as Shakespeare’s word-trove Shakespeare’s schooling was within the sixteenth-century, grammarschool educational programme called humanism, dating back to writers in the early 1500s, Erasmus on the European continent and John Colet and Sir Thomas More in England. This system was based on the recovery (‘re-birth’, the French ‘Re-naissance’) of preChristian, classical literature, which had been largely lost in the Middle Ages except for Islamic translations. At the heart of humanism was a concentration on ‘this-world’ problems rather than seeing life as a preparation for a Christian afterlife. It emphasized the study of rhetoric as ‘the art of persuasion’, which was considered essential for both lawyers and writers. The almost universal mode of composition was derived from theories of the

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classical writers Cicero and Aristotle, emphasizing ‘Imitation’, that is, choosing a source (usually classical) and ‘making it new’ through the writer’s exercise of ‘Invention’. Originality for its own sake was not really valued as a priority until the Romantic period, two centuries later. It is often asserted that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of four plays by Shakespeare which do not ‘imitate’ single, primary sources, the others being Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest. There is possibly one more, The Taming of the Shrew, but over the last century scholars have been evenly divided on whether this was preceded by, or followed, an anonymous play called The Taming of A Shrew. But this generalization presupposes assumptions about sources that are questionable – that Shakespeare would invariably use printed works on which to base his plays, and ‘serious’ printed works at that, like Holinshed’s history of England and Plutarch’s history of ancient Rome and Greece, rather than popular romances and Ovid who had written The Art of Love as well as Metamorphoses. But not to have a source at all would go against everything we know of Shakespeare’s writing practices, or indeed that of his contemporary dramatists. The Dream is not based on one single printed source, but instead it shows Shakespeare borrowing eclectically from a range of different cultural sources, which the ‘quick forge and working house of thought’ (Henry V, Prologue) of his imagination assimilated and transmuted into dramatic unity. The plot-strand about Theseus and the courtly lovers is partly based on Chaucer’s native English poem, ‘The Knight’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales. In turn borrowing from the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch, his story depicts two Athenian knights in love with a lady. Chaucer also has Theseus presiding over Athenian events, marked by ‘muchel glorie and greet solempnytee’. He had also borrowed from love conventions in French-derived courtly romance which entered England after the Norman invasion in 1066. Shakespeare was to return to ‘The Knight’s Tale’ at the end of his career, collaborating with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, which is based even more closely on the same story. Information about Hippolyta and Theseus (who was legendary but may or may not have existed historically) derives again from Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and also Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Romans and Greeks, translated by Sir Thomas North (1579), a favourite text from which Shakespeare adapted other plays like

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Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. In one of many anachronisms in the play, ancient Greece had no equivalent of English ‘dukes’ and ‘duchesses’. In his depiction of Theseus, Shakespeare retains details which at first sight may seem superfluous to this play, such as his serial conquests, betrayals and even rapes of women, but by retaining these he casts a shadow over the character if we choose to notice the details (Doran, 1960, 121). Shakespeare emphasizes first that, in Athenian governance, nobody is above the law, not even the law enforcer, since Theseus initially warns Hermia: For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself To fit your fancies to your father’s will; Or else, the law of Athens yields you up (Which by no means we may extenuate) To death, or to a vow of single life. Come, my Hippolyta. What cheer, my love? (1.1.117–22) The last line suggests that Hippolyta may not agree with him about Hermia’s fate. By the end of the play, however, Theseus has discovered a prerogative power to ‘extenuate’ and to overrule the father: ‘Egeus, I will overbear your will’ (4.1.178). The gesture may not be a flat contradiction but an acknowledgement that the play itself has established a new kind of law, siding with youth, women’s choices in love, and emotional values, overturning patriarchal legalism and a manifestly inhumane law. This conclusion is anticipated throughout the play, despite the turmoil in the middle demonstrating that ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ (1.1.134). It is the higher, moral law of comedy, where forgiveness is a ruling principle (Hunter, 1965, passim) in which people are allowed fulfilment in love, contrasting with the unrelenting and unforgiving holding-to-account of individuals in tragedy. The more farcical tale of Bottom’s transformation comes from a book called The Golden Ass by the Ovidian writer Apuleius, which Shakespeare seems to have read in the original Latin since it was not translated into English until 1598. In this frankly obscene story of bestiality, a man is wholly changed into an ass and used sexually by his mistress. Those in the audience who knew this source would have projected an equally bawdy interpretation on what transpires offstage between the fairy queen and Bottom, when they retire to

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her leafy boudoir, implications sometimes gleefully picked up in modern performances. Knowing the context of the source thus provides another layer of potential meaning. Meanwhile, Peter Quince’s play-within-a-play, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, is taken from the Metamorphoses by Ovid, a Latin text translated into English by Arthur Golding in 1567. Shakespeare would have studied Metamorphoses at school in the original Latin, and he quotes from it frequently and draws upon it in other works, such as Venus and Adonis and Titus Andronicus. It is a kind of Shakespearean joke that the apparently least ‘learned’ group in the play are in fact the ones who follow the orthodox rule of humanist writing, in imitating a chosen classical source. However, Quince, unlike Shakespeare, has not gone back to Ovid’s Latin, but instead has read Arthur Golding’s translation into English, from which he freely borrows words, images, versification and phrases. In terms of verse form, Quince employs iambic pentameters in his play, but his reference to the prologue being written in ‘eight and six’ (3.1.23) alludes to the verse form adopted by Golding with a dogtrot, metronomic effect. This form, known as ‘poulter’s measure’ or ‘fourteeners’, meant fourteen syllables to each line, with four stresses followed by three stresses: The name of him was Pyramus, and Thisbe call’d was she. So fair a man in all the East was none alive as he, Nor ne’re a woman, maid nor wife in beauty like to her. ... The wall that parted house from house had riven therein a cranny Which shrunk at making of the wall. ... They did agree at Ninus’ tomb to meet without the town. In this version the lovers, like Quince’s, address the ‘envious’ wall as though it is a character: Now as at one side Thisbe on the t’other Stood often drawing one of them the pleasant breath from other: ‘O thou envious wall’ (they said) ‘why let’st [obstruct] thou lovers thus?’

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And Golding’s story itself is faithfully imitated in Quince’s version: Love made her bold. But see the chance, there comes besmeared with blood About the chaps a Lioness all foaming from the wood From slaughter lately made of kine [cows] to staunch her bloody thirst With water of the foresaid spring. Whom Thisbe spying first, Afar by moonlight, thereupon with fearful steps ’gan fly, And in a dark and irksome cave did hide herself thereby. And as she fled away for hast she let her mantle fall The which for fear she left behind not looking back at all. Now when the cruel Lioness her thirst had staunched well, In going to the Wood she found the slender weed that fell From Thisbe, which with bloody teeth in pieces she did tear. The night was somewhat further spent ere Pyramus came there Who seeing in the subtle sand the print of Lion’s paw, Waxed pale for fear. But when also the bloody cloak he saw All rent and torn: ‘One night’ (he said) ‘shall lovers two confound, Of which long life deserved she of all that live on ground’. (Golding, 123–4) By reading the account in Quince’s source, we find unexpectedly enhanced an appreciation of his closely observed ‘Imitation’ and his skill in adapting the poem into dramatic form. The language of Quince’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is probably not so much a parody of Golding, who seems to parody himself even without Shakespeare’s help, but rather its placement alongside the various other styles of the courtiers and fairies in the Dream is a deliberate attempt to make ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ seem old-fashioned. In Bottom’s ‘deathscene’ as Pyramus, Shakespeare may also be recalling the kind of outmoded dramatic style of a play by Thomas Preston called Cambises, first performed in 1560, which was apparently very popular and had some claims to be the first Elizabethan tragedy (Hill, 1992): I feele myself a-dying now, of life bereft am I, And Death hath caught me with his dart, for want of blood, I spy.

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Thus gasping heer on ground I lye, for nothing I doo care. A just reward for my misdeeds my death douth plain declare. Although first performed before he was even born, we know Shakespeare had either read this play (it was published in 1569) or seen a revival performance, or else heard about it since in another play Falstaff parodically mentions it: ‘Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I have wept; for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses’ vein’ (King Henry IV, Part 1, 2.4.366–9). A little more will be said in the next section about the mechanicals themselves, and what their production tells us about Elizabethan staging. Another similar in-joke for regular Elizabethan playgoers is a fleeting but clear allusion, which would have been picked up by contemporary audiences, to the most famous play of the 1590s, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd’s line, ‘What outcries pluck me from my naked bed?’ (2.5.1), voiced in a tragic situation, is echoed comically in Titania’s line when she awakes and sees Bottom: ‘What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?’ (Hibbard, 1981, 148). Recognition of the source may even have raised a knowing cheer from the audience. Such echoes are examples of the collaborative intertextuality and professional rivalries marking Elizabethan writing for the stage. The third plot-strand, the supernatural story played out in the fairy world, must surely have come at least partly from the nontextual, orally transmitted body of fairy and folk tales, which Shakespeare would have listened to as a child at his mother’s knee (Belsey, 2007; Rawnsley, 2013). Such a conclusion seems supported by the fact that ever since Charles and Mary Lamb rewrote Shakespeare’s plays for children in 1807, it is this play above all that has been considered the one most suitable for children, since it deals with their cultural heritage of fairies and magic. This, despite the fact that in some ways, as we shall see, it is not in fact very suitable for children (Smith, 2019, 83–97), or at least need not be. The play in its entirety definitely targeted adult audiences, but ones who, like the author, were ‘in touch with their inner child’. The traditional catchment of orally transmitted stories about fairies, however obvious it seems as potential source material for Shakespeare, is often overlooked because of the priority scholars give to printed texts over such material, and learned works over popular. In printed,

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literary form, Edmund Spenser had made ‘faery’ lore respectable in his epic poem in English, The Faerie Queene. Books 1–3 were published in 1590 and republished with Books 4–6 (and a fragment of 7) in 1596, but the projected volume of twelve books remained unfinished. Oberon is mentioned in this work (2.10.75–6) and there are many forests where magical things happen. But on the other hand, Spenser’s ‘fairies’ are in general very different in kind from Shakespeare’s forest-dwellers, for they are intended to allegorize humanist virtues embodied in knights and ladies and to expose the political machinations of Elizabethan courtiers. Shakespeare’s fairies derive from three different traditions. Oberon and Titania are related to Spenser’s figures, in both their political roles and their courtly language. As king and queen of the Elfin race, they are grand enchanters in their own right, who can use their power for good, or more often ill. ‘I am no spirit of a common rate, / The summer still doth tend upon my state’ (3.1.148–9) declares Titania, while Oberon can cast spells and change people’s minds and bodies like Spenser’s magician deceivers, Acrasia and Archimago. This literary association may have suggested a note of vengeful malevolence to literate Elizabethans. Secondly, Puck or Robin Goodfellow is the mischievous and anarchic hobgoblin from traditional English folklore, able to change shape in order to play gleeful and malicious tricks on humans. fairy Either I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Called Robin Goodfellow. Are not you he That frights the maidens of the villagery, Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, And bootless [in vain] make the breathless housewife churn, And sometime make the drink to bear no barm [brewer’s yeast], Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm? Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck. Are not you he? robin Thou speak’st aright: I am that merry wanderer of the night. I jest to Oberon, and make him smile

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When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile, Neighing in likeness of a filly foal. And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl In very likeness of a roasted crab [crabapple], And when she drinks, against her lips I bob, And on her withered dewlap pour the ale. The wisest aunt telling the saddest tale Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And ‘Tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole choir hold their hips and laugh, And waxen in their mirth, and [s]neeze, and swear A merrier hour was never wasted there. (2.1.32–57) In contrast with other characters, Puck’s vocabulary and imagery is stockily Anglo-Saxon – ‘fat’, ‘bob’, ‘ale’, ‘bum’ – and his favoured habitat is English agricultural village society where he wreaks havoc on ordinary mortals going about their daily routines. As his catalogue of subversive tricks indicate, he has a cruel and even sadistic streak, representing the more frightening side of fairy stories. Like so much in A Midsummer Night’s Dream there is both a light and a dark side to Puck, and both should be given close attention in order to see the play in all its paradoxes. By contrast, the third supernatural group, the diminutive fairies as attendants on Titania, are more innocent ‘wood spirits’, obeying orders and remaining harmlessly ‘fairy tale’ and generally cooperative in their amiable nature. They sing songs reminiscent of childhood lullabies and characteristically speak in nursery rhyme cadences and chants. Other myths and traditional stories are also echoed: the liaison between Titania and Bottom, as well as deriving from the literary source by Apuleius, has links with the myth of Cupid and Psyche and the fairy tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Yet more folkloric and popular culture is tapped in the play’s evocation of rural festivals, perhaps dating back again to memories of Shakespeare’s childhood in rustic Warwickshire. The play elides two celebrations, Mayday, as the first day of the month, and the ‘midsummer’ rites of the solstice on 22 June (Paster and Howard, 1999, 90–1). The former is referred to when Theseus speculates on why the four young lovers

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are found early in the morning on the forest edge: ‘No doubt they rose up early, to observe / The rite of May’ (4.1.131–2), and earlier Lysander had recalled to Hermia an earlier occasion: And in the wood a league without the town, Where I did meet thee once with Helena To do observance to a morn of May, There will I stay for thee. (1.1.165–8) Since such rituals celebrate spring and summer, they were essentially fertility holidays, appropriately enacted in a natural setting like a forest and closely associated with love, desire and female fertility. By Shakespeare’s time these customs were regarded unsympathetically by the state as dangerously pagan in nature and therefore were discouraged in favour of making the days part of the Christian calendar, so the play should not be seen as observing current Elizabethan occasions but instead drawing on collective memories from ‘time immemorial’. Certainly they account for the current of awakened sexuality running throughout the play. Far from having no source, then, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has multiple antecedents, both written and unwritten, learned and popular. Drawing on several strands of culture, Shakespeare fuses into unity an eclectic mix of sources, while providing emotional associations with each in a richly inclusive synthesis. The other group of characters who deserve special attention next, since they are the playmakers who mirror the activities and ethos of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, are the artisans.

Exercise Exe E e r ciise e

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mention above that making Theseus a ‘duke’ in ancient Athens is an anachronism (not belonging in the Greek period); it might make an interesting essay topic to find other anachronisms in the play (there are many) and to consider whether this matters or not in the theatre (and why not?). One critic, after pointing out that ‘After all the trade unions of Athens were probably not choked with men named Nick, Peter and Snug’, sums up in this way:

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The play’s ostentatious heterogeneity reaches an absurd peak in Act V, where a group of early English craftsmen present the classical tale of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ for a duke and duchess at their Athenian palace, after which a rural English fairy named ‘Robin Goodfellow’ sweeps up before craving the audience’s forbearance.

(Menzer, 2010, 95)

Making an Elizabethan play: metatheatre The group of artisan-actors, led by Peter Quince and including Nick Bottom the weaver, springs from no literary source but no doubt from Shakespeare’s direct experiences of professional practices of rehearsing and performing a play. He is poking gentle fun at the players in his own company, and even at himself as writer in the position of Quince. Explicit referencing of the stage and actors in a play is described as ‘metatheatre’ (or its near-synonym, ‘metadrama’), a device to comment upon and draw attention to the process of constructing a play (Nelson, 1971, passim; Calderwood, 1991, 117–45). A neat example comes in Twelfth Night when Fabian exclaims in disbelief, ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (3.4.127–8). Much the same could be said of the Dream as a whole – if the events were not badged as theatrical, they would be considered absurd, and by recontextualizing them into ‘fiction’ the dramatist challenges us to accept them as in some sense ‘true’ since they are happening before our own eyes. In the artisan scenes, metatheatrical allusions are used repeatedly, since we observe a group of would-be players in the process of making a play, from rehearsal to performance. The scenes tell us as much as the player scenes in Hamlet about contemporary facts relating to how theatrical companies operated. For example, we note the ‘secrecy’ of rehearsal required by Quince for fear of industrial sabotage: . . . meet me in the palace wood a mile without the town by moonlight. There will we rehearse; for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogged with company, and our devices known. (1.2.93–5)

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In the cut-throat profession of Elizabethan theatre, where surprise and novelty in dramaturgical repertoires were all-important, the same prudent seclusion was essential. The performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in the long last scene becomes a sustained example of metatheatre in action, as we observe not only the finished product of a play in performance before an audience, but also something about how audiences react and interact with the onstage spectacle. In this sense we, positioned as audience and readers, are lured into the action. The lovers ridicule the play-within-a-play, not realizing that the joke is on them, since their own story of the night has been just as unbelievable and ridiculous as the events in Quince’s play, inviting incredulous dismissal. In our turn, as spectators of the spectators, we laugh at them, not appreciating that our own ‘real-life’ affairs of the heart may also be viewed as amusing and surprising to some higher, unsympathetic audience overlooking us, such as a Puck, observing drily, ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’ (3.2.115). The final joke is on us for taking the Dream seriously as impossible events which somehow compel belief. To recognize this inclusivity requires a certain humility, and in this spirit my account of the ‘rude mechanicals’ seeks to see them as they see themselves in all seriousness, instead of depicting them as risibly rustic and plebeian figures, as do many critics, performers and the onstage audience. The theatrical effect may (must) be comic, of course, but their sincere motives can be respected. They must be seen as solemnly believing in what they are doing. The portrayal of the characters perhaps draws upon the idiosyncrasies of specific actors in The Chamberlain’s Men as Shakespeare’s colleagues. Starveling no doubt was played by the very skinny actor John Sincklo (tailors were proverbially considered thin, for some reason, and still are in movies). He probably also personated Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night and Simon Shadow in King Henry IV, Part 2, a man who, by standing side-on, ‘presents no mark to the enemy’ (3.2.260). A sequence of boy actors would have had ‘Flute’-like voices but would need to be replaced as they aged and were seen to ‘have a beard coming’, while Snout, judging from his name, may have been played by the actor who represented Bardolph in Henry V, with his bulbous, red nose. The individual body speaks with its own language and is exploited by the dramatist in such cases, as is the difference in height between the

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tall boy actor playing Helena and shorter, ‘dwarfish’ Hermia. The character of Bottom in the Dream was almost certainly played by Will Kempe, the troupe’s specialist fool or clown. This was a stage role deeply suspected by Hamlet, who thought the professional fool was an intrusive threat to plays, since the actor playing it was notorious for taking over scenes with indecorous ad-libbing and upstaging other more prominent characters. He was a plague to the writer, who expected the lines he wrote to be spoken verbatim. Intriguingly, Kempe had most likely played in the lost play The Forces [Labours?] of Hercules many years before in 1586 at Utrecht (Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, ‘Kempe’; McInnes and Hutson, n.d.), and it is the role of Hercules which Bottom would prefer to play, using a decidedly archaic poetic language as if he were recalling an earlier play: I could play Ercles [Hercules] rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split. The raging rocks And shivering shocks Shall break the locks Of prison gates, And Phibbus’ [Phoebus’] car [carriage] Shall shine from far, And make and mar The foolish Fates. This was lofty. Now name the rest of the players. This is Ercles’ vein, a tyrant’s vein. A lover is more condoling. (1.2. 25–37) As we see throughout the Dream, Shakespeare is alluding to the historical past of his profession as well as initiating new dramatic directions of his own. Peter Quince is a long-suffering author like Shakespeare, striving to keep under control his allotted casting, insisting they memorize their parts and instructing on practical matters such as not eating onions or garlic before the performance. It is tempting to imagine that Shakespeare, as a writer steeped in classical literature and one who appears at times pedantic in the way he deals with sources, acted the role of Quince himself (Chaudhuri, 2018, 280). If so, he may have doubled as Egeus, which would explain the non-

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appearance of that character in the final scene and would be consistent with anecdotes that he played older characters. It is to Quince that Bottom hopes to entrust his dream-vision that ‘hath no bottom’, to write it up as a ballad to be sung. In a sense the result, although no ballad, is the actual play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And it is a fact that in most if not all productions, it is Bottom who receives most applause, as if he has stolen the show. These artisans also have a further contemporary significance that seems not to have been fully acknowledged by critics. They show the dramatist’s awareness of the ordinary professions from which his actors’ families came, showing they were no bumpkins but a class of working men who were respected for their manual skills, and literate (‘snug Have you the Lion’s part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study’ [1.2.61, my italics]). The trade crafts had traditionally been involved in theatrical events: the father and brother of Shakespeare’s main actor, Richard Burbage, who probably played Duke Theseus (and possibly doubled with King Oberon though this would be difficult at the very end of the play), were both carpenters, like Snug the joiner (his profession taught him to make his joints ‘snug’), as was Peter Street, the master builder who designed the Globe and certainly knew Shakespeare. Judging from Peter Quince’s name, he also seems to be a carpenter by trade (‘qoines’ were wooden wedges used in carpentry), and he constructs his play as carefully as Street erected buildings. There were plenty of weavers like Bottom in London, and tinkers like Tom Snout, who were expert at mending pots and pans. Flute’s praise of Bottom places him squarely in the craft guild tradition: ‘he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens’ (4.2.10). Shakespeare’s own father was a glove-maker, and there were obviously families of tailors (Robin Starveling) and bellows menders (Francis Flute) who serviced church organs. Shakespeare subtly challenges the common assumption at the time (and afterwards) that actors were a dissolute and common lot, by drawing these men from reputable trades, just as his own actors would have come from equally respectable families. In each case the character is connected with a particular trade (Foakes, 2003) and reflects the professional tools of his trade. The very word ‘playwright’, along the lines of wheelwright (‘wright’ means builder or maker) links the writer with this group of craftsmen (Menzer, 2010, 94). Bottom, for example, is very precise about the possible colour of his stage beard, perhaps

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because as a weaver this would have especially interested him as a technical matter to be discussed with his customers, much to the amusement of Quince, though his bawdy pun is lost on modern audiences: bottom Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I best to play it in? quince Why, what you will. bottom I will discharge it in either your straw-colour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfit yellow. quince Some of your French crowns have no hair at all, and then you will play bare-faced. (1.2.86–90) The group goes about planning their play as pragmatic ‘handicraftsmen’ would, identifying practical problems like how to bring moonlight into the chamber and how to represent a wall with a ‘chink’ through which the lovers communicate. Shakespeare would have known well how problem-solvers practising these expert professions conversed, drawing on his gift for mimicking dialects and individual speech habits, while at the same time giving them dignity and insight even in their comic roles. He places his acting ensemble firmly in the tradition of craft guilds which had presented the plays he would have seen as a child in Warwickshire. These were in turn derived from medieval dramatic practice, when trade and craft guilds organized and performed plays in times before there were productions in front of wealthy patrons in London. Weavers, coopers, glovers, joiners and other tradesmen had participated in the annual Corpus Christi plays (so-called for Corpus Christ day) from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, which Shakespeare would have seen in his boyhood at Stratford. These were presented as a procession of wheeled vehicles as stages, presenting several ‘pageants’ and ‘interludes’ at different places during the afternoon, each guild having its own biblical playsubject. This was also the custom at other festivals, marriages and royal visits (Anderson, 1982, passim). The artisans’ presentation

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partly operates as Shakespeare’s fond tribute to the very source of drama in rural England which may well have inspired him to become an actor himself. The background industrial, personnel and physical circumstances of the group of players who present ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ are so similar to those facing The Chamberlain’s Men who presented the Dream that it is possible to see their scenes as a comic yet realistic depiction rather than a complete parody. Just as Shakespeare’s company needed their play to be approved by the Queen’s Master of the Revels, so the mechanicals’ play is scrutinized by Philostrate, and although not impressing this official, it is welcomed by Theseus. In order to distinguish between them, each man is given a distinctive type of language, most notably Bottom who regularly gets his words wrong, a reminder that misuse of language can be as revealing of character through speech acts as elegantly turned rhetoric. Quince and Shakespeare as writers were the only ones to see the script as a whole, while the other actors are given their ‘parts’ on ‘scrolls’, with cues recording when to enter and exit (1.2.4). (I don’t think anybody has suggested that the proverbial phrase ‘mind your Ps and Qs’ might derive from ‘mind your pees and cues’ since early English ‘pees’ meant clothes, which would have had to be swiftly changed when doubling characters.) Given that Elizabethan actors would not have been able to read the script as a whole but only their own individual part, and that their rehearsal time was very short (probably a single full rehearsal), they would have had only a rudimentary knowledge of how their part fitted into the overall story. They had to learn their lines very quickly (for several plays at a time) and simply trust in the writer’s skill in designing the play as a whole to make sense and come together in performance. ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, with so few characters, does not require ‘doubling’, but Bottom, who is apparently the most experienced actor, recognizes the possibility. It certainly faced Shakespeare’s company as a necessity, since they had only a dozen actors available at any one time to play well over twenty speaking parts and more ‘lords and attendants’ and sundry fairies. The mini-play also mocks Shakespeare himself, since he was criticized in his own time, and more roundly in the eighteenth century, for mixing genres in the fashion reproved by his contemporary Sir Philip Sidney as ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’, ‘gross absurdities . . . neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling

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kings and clowns’ (Sidney, 1973, 114). Philostrate is as contemptuous as Sidney of the hybrid genre, mingling tragedy with unintended humour: philostrate A play there is, my lord, some ten words long, Which is as brief as I have known a play. But by ten words, my lord, it is too long, Which makes it tedious; for in all the play There is not one word apt, one player fitted. And tragical, my noble lord, it is, For Pyramus therein doth kill himself; Which when I saw rehearsed, I must confess, Made mine eyes water, but more merry tears The passion of loud laughter never shed. (5.1.61–70) Similarly in Hamlet, Shakespeare, through Polonius, is satirizing his own practice in writing such plays, and his own company in acting them: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men. (2.2.397–403) Theatrical companies also had to make choices about how to establish the material scene without many props or any scenery – for example, how to show it is night-time when a play would normally be in daylight, or even how to show characters talking through a chink in a wall. The artisans’ solutions to such problems are naively literal-minded and ‘mechanical’, like having an actor portray a wall. They would also have considered how to surprise audiences without frightening them (with a lion ‘roaring’ too loudly). Shakespeare’s own practice shows more faith in descriptive language, the representational and expressive qualities of his poetry, and awakening the audience’s imagination, as at least Hippolyta understands:

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hippolyta This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard. theseus The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. hippolyta It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs. (5.1.209–12) By attending to the metatheatrical aspects of the ‘play-within-aplay’, we understand more of Elizabethan staging, as well as enriching our responses to the intrinsic involvement of these men in the variety of emotional worlds depicted within a unified and inclusive community. In terms of language, the three main, non-literary areas of sources – popular romance, fairy and folk tales, and something like ‘real life’ – are seamlessly integrated into Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, a genre which was largely his own invention, influenced by John Lyly’s plays and prose romances of the time, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. The Dream daringly hypothesizes how these radically different, hypothetical groups would interact if they should encounter each other, such as fairies having the power to alter ‘human’ affections, and most outlandishly in the erotic liaison not only of different classes but races, between a grotesquely halfanimal ‘rude mechanical’ with ‘mortal grossness’ and the fairy queen. In terms of this book and its series, the choice of eclectic and popular sources dictates the language used by the character-clusters, in ways which will be amplified in later chapters.

Writing ng ttopic

I

t is doubtful if any literature or drama, however original it may appear, lacks sources. Think of literary works that you know and ask, ‘Where did they come from? How have sources, precursors and influences been adapted to make a different work?’ Then imagine you are planning to write a play (or novel) and consider what kinds of sources you might draw on as familiar or appealing in our own times (television comedy? certain kinds of movies? favourite novels? . . .).

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Exercise erci

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xamine the scenes in which the artisans rehearse and enact ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, looking for clues about the profession in Shakespeare’s day: notice especially words like ‘scroll’, ‘script’, ‘cues’, ‘part’, etc.

CHAPTER TWO

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time The rise of professional literary criticism and Shakespeare in education We cannot help but see Shakespeare’s plays through mists of time separating us from the Elizabethans, first because of the initially unfamiliar language and poetry, and secondly because the multiple perspectives we ourselves bring to the play have been bequeathed to us by centuries of critics and commentators. They have provided us with a variety of critical vocabularies and sets of dominant viewpoints which change with each generation and have been reflected in educational programmes. The study of ‘English’ as a subject in schools and universities, comprising literary history and style, is a relatively recent discipline, and its establishment is closely bound up with changing attitudes to language. In the century before and including Shakespeare’s time, education was conducted in, and about, the classics, especially Latin. Emphasis was on studying language in terms of grammar and rhetorical composition useful in writing and legal advocacy, rather than primarily as a vehicle for imaginative literature, and for this purpose the classics offered a model. It was not until shortly before Shakespeare’s time that poets and writers of fiction began routinely to use vernacular English as the medium of expression for their own works, rather than Latin or Norman French. There had been 47

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exceptional predecessors, such as Chaucer in the fourteenth century (medieval period), who wrote The Canterbury Tales in English. But Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (the first six books published between 1590 and 1596) and Sidney’s prose romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1570–90) marked a watershed moment, showing that imaginative writers, especially courtiers to Queen Elizabeth, had gained enough confidence to write lengthy and ambitious works in their own language. This was a development of the humanist revolution in educational practice, which itself emphasized clarity of expression and everyday concerns, rather than religious preoccupations expounded pedantically for learned, scholastic audiences. Public, professional theatre in the 1590s helped develop this confidence, since English language was required to entertain mass audiences. ‘Academic’ drama in schools and universities tended to be confined to boy actors speaking Latin, intended as an educational aid to help them learn the language, acquire the arts of persuasive rhetoric and in lawyer-like fashion present opposite cases of an argument. In a charming scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare shows a grammar schoolboy, perhaps significantly named William, going through his Latin grammar exercises with his schoolmaster. Even though English in the seventeenth century became the dominant language of literature and drama, it was a considerable time before literature became an object of systematic enquiry or teaching in its own right. Students were encouraged not so much to study literature as to read, again primarily as a tool for learning how to write eloquently themselves. Some scholars in the later eighteenth century began to edit and republish older literature, especially the works of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The first of these to have a wide circulation was Samuel Johnson, who edited Shakespeare’s plays and provided a ‘Preface’ which advanced statements on the works (1765) in terms of literary criticism. Following his lead, but heading in different directions, Romantic writers in the early nineteenth century, such as Coleridge and Hazlitt, laid the groundwork for modern theoretical approaches, the former in his analysis of imagery and psychology in the written texts, the latter in ‘character study’ in theatre reviews and essays, usually praising the brilliant, contemporary actor Edmund Kean. In the nineteenth century there began to appear lectures and pamphlets intended for an educational readership, presenting historical and

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literary studies of literature and stylistics. Professorships of ‘Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ came to be appointed in universities, first in Scotland (Rhodes, 2004, 199) and then Oxford and Cambridge. The incumbents of such professorships were not chosen for their own creative writing skills, but for their knowledge of literary history as a field. Throughout the nineteenth century, anthologies of extracts from Shakespeare’s plays and other works, intended to show literary excellence, came to be published, as forerunners of our ‘literary criticism’, while theatre reviewers were regularly reporting and judging staged presentations. By the 1850s or thereabouts, we find the rise of ‘English studies’ in our modern sense becoming consolidated as a tertiary study (Palmer, 1965, ch. 7). This gradually filtered down to schools, although the ‘hidden agenda’ was in essence based on class: to teach educated men (mainly) in acquiring nationalistic and aristocratic habits of thought gleaned from ‘great writers’. The poet Matthew Arnold in 1880 published an essay called ‘The Study of Poetry’ in which he argued that ‘great’ literary works are ennobling, timeless and a source of consolation. He based his method on finding ‘touchstone’ passages from poets like Shakespeare, Milton and the classics, nuggets of stylistic excellence which were taken to demonstrate ‘high seriousness’ and deep feeling through distilled wisdom in memorable quotations. It was not until the mid-to-late-twentieth century that Arnold’s universalist assumptions about a literary canon regarded as a morally civilizing force began to be challenged for its questionable classist, sexist, racist and cultural assumptions. Shakespeare’s plays were performed on the Victorian stage with star actors and lavish scenery, but these productions were too expensive for all but the upper and middle classes to afford. He was well on the way to losing the populist roots of his own theatre, epitomized in Peter Quince’s presentation of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, and becoming instead a figure of cultural elitism, not for the masses. Cinema, invented in 1895 and seen primarily as working-class entertainment, was to change that, as we shall see in the final chapter of this book. As a cultural icon, Shakespeare’s works were appropriated more narrowly to support, underpin and propagate the English values of the British Empire in the educational system. A government document now regarded as notorious, the ‘Newbolt Board of Education Report’ in 1921, advocated the systematic study of Shakespeare and other writers as central to this Arnoldian,

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imperial mission. In some ways it was an enlightened approach (for its time), moving the emphasis of teaching English away from cramming facts and dates into school children’s heads and exploring ideas, but in other ways it propagated the values of privilege and empire-building aims, spreading its gospel to far-flung colonies in India, Africa, Asia, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as becoming entrenched in English schools. Fortunately, Shakespeare from 1800 onwards did have admirers in other countries which had nothing to do with the British Empire and had very different literary and political traditions, especially Russia, Germany and Japan. These showed that Shakespeare’s plays could survive translation into other languages and cultural transitions. As a result of all these influences, a variety of different approaches to his works have steadily emerged since the Romantic era and have left their influences even as each generation reinterpreted the plays in their own likenesses. The first work of pioneering, modern literary criticism of Shakespeare was Shakespearean Tragedy, published in 1905 by A. C. Bradley, who held professorships variously named ‘of Literature’, ‘of Languages’ and ‘of Poetry’ at universities in Liverpool, Glasgow and Oxford. Although a powerful and inspiring account which remains worth reading for its insights, Bradley’s book presented Shakespeare’s works not as theatrical presences but as meant for closeted reading and studying for their literary and philosophical qualities. He was not a man of the theatre but a profound reader. Bradley’s main concentration is on character analysis, and his approach was through an impressionism which gave weight to recurrent imagery as a prime determinant of each play’s atmosphere. Furthermore, the pre-eminence with which tragedy was held meant that for some fifty or so more years comedy continued to be sidelined as a serious subject for study, though it remained popular on stage. The genre was considered too lightweight and evanescent for serious analysis, as though its charm would be damaged by critical scrutiny. Comedy also suffered because of the priority Bradley accorded to complex characterization, which is often a secondary issue in the more ensemble-centred productions in the theatre, where comedy’s true values as drama emerge. However monumental in terms of the history of Shakespeare criticism, Bradley’s influence, running alongside the rise of Sigmund Freud’s psychiatry which significantly influenced Shakespeare studies,

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inhibited serious analysis of comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by regarding them as entertaining but secondary to tragedy in moral importance. For fifty years after its publication, there was no equivalent on comedy to Bradley’s book on tragedy. Comedy finally had its day in the critical sun from the 1950s onwards, with the emergence of some critics who were open to ideas from disciplines other than literature. The Canadian Northrop Frye, writing from outside the narrow Oxbridge academia, took as his starting-point ideas from the emerging study of cultural anthropology, particularly as it dealt with mythic structure, rituals, archetypes and symbolism. His brief but concentrated book, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, published in 1965, drew on his earlier more general works of the 1950s on literature and applied the findings to specific examples from Shakespeare’s plays. His book is as important to understanding comedy as Bradley’s book is to tragedy. Frye’s main insight was that comedy and romance are not, like tragedy, written to explore the soul and psyche of individual characters facing death, but to enact age-old social and natural processes of community reintegration and fertility. These processes, he argued, follow a repeated, tripartite pattern. First, youth resists or rejects the ‘anti-comic’ patriarchal law regulating desire, asserted by figures like Egeus and Theseus; then there is a period of topsy-turvy chaos and confusion in a natural environment such as the forest around Athens, where lovers may ‘lose themselves’ in a process of transition; leading to a final affirmation that ‘Love conquers all, in general’ (Frye, 1965, 86), as a force capable of decisively defeating its anti-comic enemies. In an earlier work, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye had named the middle section ‘the green world’, denoting a place where people were faced with natural forces and nature itself, and motivated by instinctual desire rather than logic, in a process of painful adaptation enforcing emotional change and growth. At least on the surface, the pattern works well for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it is this play which seems to provide Frye with his paradigm. The forest specifically represents non-rational, supernatural forces, making cultural anthropology a useful tool in exploring processes of emotional change. However, as we shall see throughout this book, Shakespeare is invariably ambivalent, and the scheme is not so providential and benign as it would seem. Certainly it begins with the father’s invocation of a law condemning his daughter to death or

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‘To live a barren sister all [her] life / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon’ (1.1.72–3); and the middle section in the forest shows a disordered phase of transition, full of images of burgeoning and ‘fruitful’ nature which allows desire and love to be the central subject. But this particular version of a ‘green world’ is not altogether benign since so many traumatic events happen to the tricked, confused lovers, involving considerable violence and emotions of jealousy, hatred and humiliation. As one critic puts it: [A]t one level Dream is a classic comedy of the green world triumphing over the wintry as young lovers push aside the blocking parental figures of authority and establish their own hegemony; at another, it is a dark vision of disorder and chaos with nature gone awry and the rule of reason threatened by unchained forces. (Rothwell, 1999, 34) Even the ending is not so comfortable as Frye’s pattern would suggest, since despite the various marriages there are lurking misgivings and glimpses of an open-ended future raising nagging questions. Will Theseus and Hippolyta live in peace and amity, or will they resume the state of belligerence that marked their wooing? Will Hermia be haunted by the memory of her husband chasing another woman and physically and mentally abusing her? Will Helena remember her humiliating abjection and her husband’s violent antipathy? Will Demetrius find the effect of the love juice wearing off in time, antidoting his enchanted love? Will Titania realize that it has been through a cruel trick played by her husband, a ‘king of shadows’ (3.2.347), that she has lost custody of the Indian changeling boy, has been ridiculed by an externally imposed desire for a monster and manipulated without free choice back into her husband’s favours – and will she seek revenge? And indeed, will Bottom be able to readjust to mundane life as a weaver, after his extraordinary moment of celebrity in fairyland and then as a star in a public performance at court? Answers lie outside the play’s world, of course, and in this sense may be inappropriate, but it is a central part of Shakespeare’s vision to muddy clear waters with troubling thoughts, to raise awkward questions and qualifications rather than offering simple answers. The doubts are capable of being realized on stage through gestures and tone of voice, as

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performances sometimes demonstrate. This said, however, it was Northrop Frye’s radical reassessment of comedy as a genre which opened up these serious critical doubts. His approach provided an intellectually challenging and philosophical basis for exploring why the comedies hold a more substantial weight than their general reputation for being little more than ‘happy’ theatrical experiences had suggested (Dover Wilson’s title was Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies). The American critic, C. L. Barber, taking his lead from the idea of the ‘green world’, placed the comedies in the context of ‘social customs’ of liberation through ‘festive holiday’, such as ‘May Games’ where misrule governed by magic was the driving comic principle. The subject of the carnivalesque in literature was also being explored by a Russian philosopher and critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose  Rabelais and His World appeared in the West in translation in 1968. For Barber’s purposes, once again it is A Midsummer Night’s Dream which most clearly justifies the approach, given the existence of traditional ‘midsummer’ rituals, myths of fertility and metamorphosis, and superstitions hovering about moonlight and dreaming. Jay Halio sums up the significance of the season itself from a ‘festive’ point of view: What about midsummer night? Traditionally a time of magic, when through dreams and divinations maids might discover the identity of their true loves (Barber, 123), it was also associated with festivals and even with madness (compare ‘midsummer madness’, Twelfth Night, III.iv.61, and see Young, 24). Shakespeare underscores the festive aspect of the season by twice associating it with May Day (1.i.165–8, IV.i.129–30). Marriage celebrations are also a significant part of the play. (Halio, 2003, 1–2) D. P. Young, whose work Halio cites and who is also heavily influenced by Barber’s approach, puts it this way: [Midsummer’s] customary features included the building of bonfires and the carrying of torches, the gathering of plants with magical and medicinal virtues, rituals intended for lovedivinations, and all-night watches. More generally it was thought to be a time when spirits were abroad and strange events

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occurred. All of these aspects were absorbed into Shakespeare’s comedy. (Young, 1966, 24) Another who paid attention to Frye’s breakthroughs, in pointing to comic structures aligned to folk ritual and natural cycles, was the theatre director Peter Brook, who showed in a stunning series of productions, influenced also by Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and Bertolt Brecht’s theories, that serious concepts could inform performance, giving them more critical credibility and inconclusive ambiguity. Brook’s post-war production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1947–50) gave theatrical presence to dark moods generated at the end of the play, when the announcement of death intrudes to interrupt and terminate the apparently inevitable drive toward marriage. No doubt playing on audience awareness of how the recently ended Second World War had disrupted so many relationships through prolonged absence or death, the production had profound social implications, touched upon in Kenneth Branagh’s film version (2000). In a similarly serious way, Brook’s stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1970s gave free rein to the more frightening experiences encountered in the forest, and invited the audience to share rather than judge the spirit of chaos. At this time he was certainly influenced by another radical critic who had his heyday in the 1960s, the Polish critic Jan Kott. In Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott advanced political readings of the plays which reflected conflicts and anxieties of the post-war, so-called Cold War, which had divided Europe into two power blocs. In his chapter entitled ‘Titania and the Ass’s Head’, Kott explores ‘the dark sphere of bestiality’ in unashamedly sexual terms, and he detects ‘the devilish origins of Puck’ (Kott, 1965, 171) at work behind the play (Kott, 1965, 184): The love scenes between Titania and the ass must seem at the same time real and unreal, fascinating and repulsive. They are to rouse rapture and disgust, terror and abhorrence. They should seem at once strange and fearful. (Kott, 1965, 183–4) The combined influence of Brook’s stage production and Kott’s very dark reading have become unavoidable critical reference points

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in understanding the Dream in all its complexities. One critic argues that ‘the arbitrariness and ambiguity are embodied in the play’s persistent representation of magic as an utterly erratic but nevertheless indispensable element in the process of getting society’s erotic arrangements right’, the principal agent being Puck as a figure who is ‘not only mischievous but overtly sexual, a priapic satyr’ (Orgel, 2003, 87–8). Among other things, such approaches remind us that Shakespeare’s play was written for adults, not children. Nonetheless, amiably trouble-free productions suitable for all ages still abound in schools, village halls and theatres around the world, showing that the play itself contains the potential for light and dark readings, equal and opposite interpretations. That mid-century generation of critics and directors fundamentally reoriented Shakespeare studies, especially in dealing with the comedies. By acknowledging philosophical, anthropological and social significances of the plays as worthy of serious exploration, they opened a Pandora’s box of mainly theoretical approaches, driven by an increasing professionalization and social engagement in literary studies in universities from the 1970s on. The earlier beliefs in literary unity and ‘universal’ values were dislodged and replaced with an interest in indeterminacy (uncertainty, openendedness), intertextuality (interconnections between literary works rather than seeing the work as independent and autonomous) and ‘resistant readings’ or reading against the grain of conventional approaches (for example, by challenging the normativeness of heterosexuality and marriage with alternative conceptions of sexual identity). Underlying these we can find even language itself regarded suspiciously as always ideologically loaded, never neutral. In recent theory-driven criticism, three approaches in particular have proved enduring, each having some origins in Marxist theory: feminism, new historicism and cultural materialism. Feminism and gender studies found in the comedies especially fertile ground in analysing power relations between women and men in society. Some have argued that Shakespeare anticipated feminist arguments. In the Dream, for example, we might cite the uncompromising assertiveness of Hermia’s attitudes in defying her father and standing up to the authoritarian Duke, vowing to ‘prosecute [her] right’ not to marry Demetrius, and then taking the dangerous course of eloping with Lysander. Helena is arguably even more courageous in being willing to brave the forest at night alone in pursuit of a hostile

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and vindictive man, and she responds to the bizarre turns of events with understandable anguish but also responsive dignity. Proponents of ‘New Historicism’ typically read texts with contextual reference to the prevailing political culture of the Elizabethan state, arguing equally for ‘the historicity of texts and the textuality of history’ (Hopkins, 2005, 70). The approach has arguably led most usefully towards insights into the History plays (where political issues are clearly foregrounded, as in the studies by Stephen Greenblatt) and also to more historically informed studies of the tragedies, rather than being applied to the comedies. However, one exponent, for example, has argued that the Dream through its metadramatic element deals centrally with political power and analogizes the powers of parents, princes, and playwrights; the fashioning of children, subjects, and plays. Shakespeare’s text is a cultural production in which the processes of cultural production are themselves represented; it is a representation of fantasies about the shaping of the family, the polity, and the theatre. (Montrose, 1983, 86) The play, it is said, ‘dramatizes – or, rather, meta-dramatizes – the relations of power between prince and playwright’. To explain or paraphrase this argument would take some time, but it makes clear that the new historicist’s main preoccupation is with power in the Elizabethan state, and its presumed reflection in literary and dramatic productions. Cultural Materialism is a kind of corollary to New Historicism, in a sense reversing the procedure and analysing the status of the text in the political situation prevalent in the critic’s own time rather than Elizabethan England. An example might be to consider how Shakespeare is represented in modern popular cultural forms such as advertising and comic books, seeking to use Shakespeare’s plays to illuminate topical contemporary issues such as race, gender, class and – once again – power, in our own time. In this sense, ‘materialism’ is presented as the opposite of ‘idealism’, looking at the way people actually live and think in their own social moments, rather than how they wish to live in an ideal world. The current philosophy behind literary criticism is something like ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. I don’t intend here to itemize more examples, but some sparing references will be given in chapters below (for example post-colonialism in Chapter 8), with references

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in the Bibliography section to follow-up ideas. In this encouraging and eclectic intellectual climate, your own reading – so long as it can be backed up by reference to the text – is invaluable, and the one that matters. The brief survey offered here as a kind of road map tracing changes and developments in the study of Shakespeare is (to mix metaphors) only the tip of a very large iceberg. Nowadays, when you walk into the libraries of even small to medium universities and look at the Shakespeare shelves, you will find rows and rows of books on Shakespeare in a bewildering profusion. Not for nothing do we hear of ‘the Shakespeare industry’. Do browse to familiarize yourself with the sections, but don’t be intimidated by their diversity or sheer quantity. Use the library to explore its resources through titles and gradually create your own bibliography. Book review sections in the major periodical journals such as Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Quarterly can lead you to titles of books that sound interesting enough to follow up. Then browse in some books and articles since they can stimulate and challenge, but try to hang onto your own ideas based on your readings of the play itself, since life is too short to read even a small proportion of the ever-increasing ‘Shakespeare industry’. Your own reading of the play is what matters, and it can be developed, informed and tested by wider reading. Become aware of the different ways the plays have been approached, but try not to be too swayed by one approach or another, since, as we have seen, critical fashions change from generation to generation. Introductions and footnotes to the different scholarly editions of the play contain a wealth of explanatory and critical material, so long as you don’t let them bog you down in reading the play. I do not intend to detail these apparently unending resources, but to turn attention next to the topic in hand: language in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Exercise erci

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ow ‘open-ended’ do you think is A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Are the doubts about the unqualified happiness of the ending projected on to the play by adopting a particular theoretical model chosen by a critic, or can they be supported by reference to the text?

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CHAPTER THREE

Unfolding the Play Through Language

Narrative and plotting In writing a play, which comes first, the story or the language? When Shakespeare follows a primary source, such as Holinshed’s version of English and Scottish history in the Chronicles to create history plays, or the Greco-Roman equivalent, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans in an English translation, the answer is fairly clear. The ‘story’ in these cases pre-exists the staged adaptation. In order to shorten a lengthy prose account to make it into a unified play, among the dramatist’s preliminary tasks are selecting significant events which can be presented in sequential scenes to form a coherent story presented in dialogue between characters. It seems probable that even when there is no single, primary source as in the History plays, or several different ones as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, careful initial planning must go into designing the order of events. Sometimes the functions – narrating the story and draping it with language – can be kept separate. For example, in the later Romantic age, John Keats collaborated with his friend Charles Armitage Brown to write a play, Otho the Great, during which Brown fed the narrative design scene-by-scene to Keats, who then fleshed it out with poetic dialogue. Although Shakespeare did sometimes collaborate with other playwrights, there is no firm evidence of this kind of 59

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arrangement, and certainly not in the case of the Dream, but it does seem logical for even a dramatist working alone to think in stages, first planning the storyline, secondly organizing the narrative into dramatic units (scenes) and then supplying the detailed language to create distinctive characters and make the scenes come alive on the stage for an audience. The narrative function is the ‘plot’, a word deriving from ‘plat’, a patch of ground for growing vegetables, which in Elizabethan times could be arranged in a ‘garden knot’ with an aesthetic patterning. In literary terms, ‘plot’ was used in the sixteenth century to denote ‘a plan of the actual or proposed arrangement of something; a sketch, an outline, esp. a synopsis of a literary work’ (according to the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary). When Quince says, ‘Pat, pat; and here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage . . .’ (3.1.2–4), the word can suggest both senses. Next in the process of composition, and still before we have elaborated words of dialogue, comes the detailed planning of a sequence of scenes which forward the plot, and it is here that Shakespeare’s genius is at its most evident. His basic unit of organizing a play, and keeping it moving along at an even tempo, is the scene, the ‘primary dramatic unit, the unit in which he will work out his plan’ (Jones, 1971, 1). A poem by Hugh Holland in the First Folio addresses ‘the Famous Scenicke Poet, Master william shakespeare ’. The playwright had to consider and decide exactly how much to reveal at any one moment to maintain clarity and continuity, and how much to leave until later to build suspense and create surprises. (Act divisions, marking decisive breaks in the action, seem not to have had much significance for stage performance and may have been added later if the play was to be published for learned readers, in order to imply a likeness to classical drama as analysed by Aristotle.) He had to decide what could be presented as spectacle and what needed to be spoken. Even though the arrangement of scenes comes before language, it will be language that carries the scenes into execution, as characters speak to each other and the audience in furthering the narrative. Words will establish who is speaking to whom, what they are doing at the time, and where the story is headed. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare has very few stage directions in his plays apart from entrances and exits, and the main reason for this is that he provides enough in the dialogue itself to give us as much information as

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we need to visualize the setting and know what is going on. This is one aspect where language becomes important, conveying not just feelings and information but staging a kind of built-in choreography. So seamlessly and rapidly does A Midsummer Night’s Dream proceed that it is easy to overlook the dazzling, intricate complexity of the play’s complex design. Shakespeare set himself an audacious task, perhaps without parallel in his plays. He presents, one by one, three distinct and contrasting little societies with separate plots, initially facing completely unrelated circumstances but gradually becoming intertwined and intertangled. The tragedy King Lear is arguably the only play as complicated as this, with its two families, seven major characters and several settings, including contrasts between the monarchical palace, two other households, a heath in a storm, open fields after the storm, Dover Cliff and a battle scene. In the Dream, first we meet the courtly figures in Duke Theseus’s retinue, preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta, a group which includes the young lovers and Hermia’s father Egeus, engaged in a family disagreement. Next, we meet the artisans rehearsing their play which they hope to perform on the Duke’s wedding night. Then we enter the forest where the fairy kingdom rules and strange things happen. Having defined the three character-groups – courtly, artisans and fairies – Shakespeare then proceeds to allow them to interact, with resulting states of confusion. Each group is associated with a distinctive setting, and in the absence of elaborate scenery on the Elizabethan stage, two contrasting locations need to be established clearly enough through the words alone to make them different in the audience’s mind. These are respectively the court in the urban city of Athens, and the forest surrounding the city, a place defined by magical, nocturnal happenings, into which the lovers and the artisans stray, well outside their comfort zone of the ‘civilized’ habitat for mortals in Athens, and into the ‘green world’ of nature and the unknown. Language is the tool used to create and clearly distinguish between the three character-groups and the two environments. To make matters even more difficult for the dramatist, given the need for ‘doubling’ parts, it is crucial that audiences be convinced that all the roles played by a particular actor are differentiated from each other clearly enough so as not to confuse the audience. In solving these problems the actors can obviously use superficial

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means like a change of clothing, demeanour and physical appearance, but the dramatist again must skilfully deploy variations in language and speaking style, calculated to establish all the differences quickly at the outset, and then to maintain some consistency so that we can follow the complications in the action with ease, knowing who is who.

Speech acts Speech at the court of the Duke and Duchess-in-waiting is marked initially by the measured, public rhetoric used by Theseus and the courtiers, conveyed through unrhyming lines of iambic pentameters (for further discussion of this term see section in the next chapter on ‘The music of poetry’): theseus Go, Philostrate, Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments; Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth, Turn melancholy forth to funerals. (1.1.11–14) Immediately, a tone is struck which allows the audience to expect an eventual comic ending. However, the anticipated spirit of celebration and ‘mirth’ that Theseus wishes to establish is immediately threatened by a subsidiary conflict, as the courtier Egeus, Hermia’s father, intervenes with a grievance. He also adopts Theseus’s formal language in his plea that his daughter must obey his wishes for an arranged marriage between Hermia and Demetrius, or face the dire legal consequences of either execution or confinement to a nunnery. At this stage the young characters who will take their places in the love plot also use this unrhyming verse form pitched as public formality in the company of the Duke. However, when Hermia and Lysander are alone, at a certain point they adopt a different poetic style in speaking to each other, using rhyming couplets, and when Helena as a friend enters, she adopts this too (fair . . . air and then the rhyming ‘ear . . . appear’): hermia God speed, fair Helena. Whither away?

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helena Call you me fair? That fair again unsay. Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair! Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue’s sweet air More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. (1.1.180–5) It is arguable that in Elizabethan poetry, rhyme is commonly the characteristic language of lovers, carrying an air of artifice, conformity and complicity. In this case Shakespeare links young beauty with signs of spring and new growth in the natural world, ‘When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear’. Shakespeare makes subtle modifications in spoken, poetic language to distinguish the public court dominated by older figures, the Duke representing the law and Egeus as father, from the young lovers driven by their fluctuating feelings, whether of desire and love or conflict and jealousy. A sense of location is established as well, with ‘Athens’ a place of rigorous legalism, patriarchal control and public ceremonies like the impending marriage between Theseus and Hippolyta. We are then prepared for a change of setting, as Hermia agrees to elope to Lysander’s aunt’s house seven leagues away, where the ‘sharp Athenian law’ does not apply. Their way lies through ‘the wood a league without the town’ (1.1.165). ‘Place-making’ (Palfrey, 2011, 139) is another important function of language in keeping the audience aware of where the action is situated. In most of his plays, Shakespeare presents a setting more or less as another character, defined in the language of description. He also often, especially in comedies, uses contrast to juxtapose two different places or settings, each having its own ethos and sense of place largely built up through language, such as Belmont and Venice in The Merchant of Venice and the French court and the Forest of Arden (in fact, the Ardennes in the border regions of France, Belgium and Germany) in As You Like It. In the Dream we have the court presided over by the ultrarational Duke Theseus, contrasted with the wood of Athens, marked by the wrangling of Oberon and Titania, together with the playful, fairy music of their miniature retinue and bewildering magical transformations of emotions, body and mind. Incongruous links between the places are implied by ‘changeling’ figures (mortals

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abducted into the fairy world), not only the Indian boy, but also the grotesque monster Bottom with his ass’s head abducted by the fairy queen. Even the mischievous Puck is a kind of amphibian being, able to move between both worlds as though a changeling. In this play the Athenian forest will embody magic, nature, emotional disruptions, grotesque transgressions, songs, poetry and strange transformations – all that the law-bound, ceremonial court of Athens is not. A stark and unmistakable switch of language opens the next scene, as the artisans enter, speaking in a totally different way – not poetry at all, but prose: quince Is all our company here? bottom You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip. quince Here is the scroll of every man’s name, which is thought fit through all Athens to play in our interlude before the duke and the duchess on his wedding day at night. bottom First, good Peter Quince, say what the play treats on; then read the names of the actors; and so grow to a point. quince Marry, our play is ‘The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe’. (1.2.1–10) The content of the scene is as ‘prosaic’ as the language suggests, strongly distinguished from the preceding courtiers and lovers and followed by the fairies. Actors playing these roles often mimic a yokel or ‘mummerset’ accent to establish their less than courtly class, though this is not strictly speaking necessary and can become rather irritating. Better to give the artisans the dignity of speaking in their natural voices, and let the humour emerge without forcing it. However, the apparent oxymoron in Quince’s ‘lamentable comedy’ tells us also that these personages are not completely in command of their language and muddle up words and meanings. This occurs most often in Quince’s utterances, but is also exemplified in Bottom’s

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linguistic confusions. These are sometimes the kind of malapropism (using a mistaken word that sounds the same as the one intended) as we hear from Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. But more often they are inspired coinages, running together sounds from several words with an uncertain meaning. On hearing ‘we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously’ (1.2.100), we do not know what exactly Bottom means by ‘obscenely’ – some editors suggest ‘off-scene’ for ‘in secret’, or running together ‘obscurely’ and ‘seemly’ (Hibbard, 1981, 149) – but certainly not what ‘obscenely’ usually means. In Bottom’s ‘You were best to call them generally, man by man’, he says the opposite from what he means (‘severally’ or ‘separately’ rather than ‘generally’). His later ‘I have an exposition of sleep coming upon me’ (4.1.38) is either a mistake for ‘disposition’ or ‘imposition’, or else he may indeed mean ‘exposition’ in an obliquely and almost weirdly apt sense which is difficult to explain, as in the rhetorical phrase from literary criticism, ‘expository [narrative] writing’. Such examples present Quince and Bottom attempting to show off their impressive literacy and dignified command of words and yet revealing a kind of dyslexia. Their verbal habits can create more subtle, linking effects, as in ‘Pyramus’s’ ‘Lion vile hath here deflowered my dear’ (5.1.285), where he means ‘devoured’ but unknowingly evokes the idea of violent rape, which is both symbolically appropriate and also hinted at several times in the play when dealing with love. Their verbal mistakes continue through to the final performance before the court, much to the courtiers’ amusement. This preliminary meeting of the ‘rude mechanicals’ is in Athens, but again we are alerted to an imminent change of locale as they also plan to meet by moonlight in the forest outside Athens, to rehearse: . . . meet me in the palace wood a mile without the town by moonlight. There will we rehearse; for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogged with company, and our devices known. (1.2.93–5) The next scene takes us into the anticipated wood of Athens itself. The group of native denizens here are defined by another strong transition in language, away from prose and back to poetry but of a different kind again, and in the first line we are informed it is a society of ethereal ‘spirits’:

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robin How now, spirit, whither wander you? fairy Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough wood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere Swifter than the moon’s sphere, And I serve the Fairy Queen To dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be. In their gold coats, spots you see: Those be rubies, fairy favours; In those freckles live their savours. (2.1.1–13) These are the skimming rhythms of songs (the speech may even have been sung on stage) and of children’s games, and the images establish the fairy speaker as tiny, associated with nature and having uncanny powers of flight. The playful jauntiness of the shorter, rhyming lines sets the new tone, establishing that we are now greeting the third group in the play. Their fairy environment is one full of music, magic, delight in mischief, and lush natural vegetation observed with a Lilliputian concentration on images of nature miniaturized, such as the ‘freckled’ colouring on petals of cowslips. Having established a new ambience through the extreme change of poetic idiom in short, emphatic lines, the Fairy then adopts the more conversational longer lines, which are the default mode of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘I must go seek some dew drops here, / And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear’ (2.1.14–15). However, this change to iambic pentameters, reciprocated in Robin Goodfellow’s (Puck’s) answer, makes another important point about the fairy kingdom: that it is governed by a similar hierarchy to the mortal world and is also afflicted with emotional problems, in this case marital disharmony. Puck briefly sketches the nature of the estrangement between Titania and Oberon, respectively Queen and King of the fairies, centring on their power struggle over an Indian changeling (a human child taken by the fairies), a conflict which has had unpredictable and disastrous ‘climate change’ consequences for

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the human world in terms of changeable weather, topsy-turvy seasons and disrupted crop cultivation. The fairies might be able to control the environment and at times the feelings of others, but they are just as much at the mercy of their own confused emotions as the young, mortal lovers. With deft economy then, using no visible (or minimal) scenic props on the Elizabethan stage, and with a limited number of actors at his disposal, the dramatist has introduced three clearly defined societies with their different modes of speaking and has firmly established that the forest will now be the site of action as they are all thrown together, with the promise of supernatural interventions to come. From here on, events take their unexpected course until problems are resolved and the action can return to the Athenian court, but auditors and readers (as well as theatre audiences) have a firm grounding in knowing who is who, where is where and what is happening. It is a remarkable feat of dramaturgy, substantially effected through subtle control of differing characterizations conveyed in language, equally effective for readers of the text and audiences at a staged performance. Words alone have done most of the work, and they, not the juice of flowers, are the play’s true magical elixir.

Exercise erci

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magine you are writing a scene in a play which brings together different social and emotional communities from your own experiences (school? family? friendships?) – consider how you can make the speeches by different people in these groups reflect their social and emotional differences, for example through colloquial or formal language, spontaneous or considered, warm or cool, emotional or logical, etc.

Time and illusions Another aspect of the play’s construction relates to the time scheme, which raises some odd questions. Although it may not occur to most in the audience, A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents two

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different time schemes which, when closely examined, are mutually incompatible. We are told in the first lines of the play that the wedding between Theseus and Hippolyta will occur on a night with a new moon, meaning the sky will be dark with only a ‘silver bow’ showing of the moon. Theseus repeats this when warning Hermia that she must make up her mind about her fate ‘by the next new moon, / The sealing day betwixt my love and me’ (1.1.83–4). However, when Quince’s acting company prepares for their play to be performed on the Duke’s wedding night, they consult the official ‘almanac’ or calendar, which tells them the nuptial will definitely occur on a night of ‘moonshine’: snout Doth the moon shine that night we play our play? bottom A calendar, a calendar: look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine. quince [consulting an almanac] Yes, it doth shine that night. Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open; and the moon may shine in at the casement. (3.1.46–53) The calendar says that it will be a night when the moon will be bright enough to light their play, which sounds less like a ‘silver bow’ and more like a full moon, which is a month away from a new moon. However, to make sure their audience gets the message, the artisans decide not to rely on this, but instead to have an actor ‘come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine’. New moon or full moon? No explanation for the discrepancy is offered, but they cannot both be right. And since it is clear that Shakespeare has plotted the complicated action with meticulous care, he is unlikely simply to have made a mistake on such an obvious point. In fact, he seems to do all he can to draw attention to it, by opening the play so unambiguously and later calling for an ‘almanac’ which produces the opposite result. There is another temporal distortion, since Theseus and Hippolyta insist initially that the events to follow will take four

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days and nights, yet in fact at most only two nights pass, and the wedding takes place on the afternoon of the third. Here is how the action seems to progress. Hermia and Lysander plan to elope on ‘the morrow deep midnight’ (1.1.223) – a somewhat ambiguous phrase but clarified by Lysander’s repeated ‘tomorrow night’ (1.1.164). We next hear Peter Quince’s troupe of players agree also to meet in the forest to rehearse ‘tomorrow night’ (1.2.93), meaning that all these characters will then be in the forest together. All the events in the forest are enacted over the night of the elopement. On the morning after that night (in other words, the third day), the fairies have left the scene, while the lovers are awakened by the loud sounds of Theseus’s hunting dogs, ‘such gallant chiding . . . So musical a discord, such sweet thunder’ (4.1.114, 117). Once again, Shakespeare draws attention to the time of early morning, in lines which usually draw a laugh in performance: But soft: what nymphs are these? egeus My lord, this my daughter here asleep, And this Lysander, this Demetrius is, This Helena, old Nedar’s Helena. I wonder of their being here together. theseus No doubt they rose up early, to observe The rite of May; and hearing our intent, Came here in grace of our solemnity. (4.1.126–33) Theseus’s innocent interpretation may signal his naivety but it is also in character, since his habit is to interpret every occasion as designed to honour him alone. His phrase ‘in grace of our solemnity’ means ‘in honour of our marriage ceremony’. The triple wedding takes place on the afternoon and early evening of that day, after which ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is performed to fill in ‘this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time’ (5.1.33–4). Oberon and Puck pronounce the events concluded after Theseus has given his benediction: The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.

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I fear we shall outsleep the coming morn, As much as we this night have overwatched. This palpable gross play hath well beguiled The heavy gait of night. Sweet friends, to bed. A fortnight hold we this solemnity, In nightly revels and new jollity. (5.1.353–60) At the very least questions are raised as to whether the action lasts four days and four nights as predicted, or three days and three nights, and whether the wedding night holds a new moon or its opposite. We seem to have a ‘double time scheme’. And as if it is not puzzling enough in this play, Shakespeare was to create exactly the same problem in the contemporary play, Romeo and Juliet! Before we examine the apparent contradictions, we might notice that there is one other, minor discrepancy of time, but it is more easily explained. When Bottom returns from the forest in the morning, he informs his friends that their play is ‘preferred’ to be performed before the Duke after his wedding, on that very night. But when the final Act begins, it is made clear that the decision about which play is ‘preferred’ has not yet been made, since Philostrate tries to persuade Theseus against ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. We might logically surmise that Bottom has heard their play is on a ‘short list’, but the explanation here is likely to rest simply on dramatic compression to keep the action flowing without awkwardness, rather than raising the more mysterious structural puzzles over the ‘double-time’ scheme described above. The standard modern editions such as the Arden Third Series (Chaudhuri), the Arden Second Series (Brooks), the New Cambridge (Foakes) and the New Oxford (Holland) all suggest that these apparent discrepancies in time can safely be ignored, since neither audiences nor readers actually notice them consciously (which may be the very point Shakespeare is making). Besides, by seeing this pedantically as a ‘problem’, are we not practising the same kind of pedantic literal-mindedness which we ridicule in the artisans’ approach? However, the moon is so omnipresent in the play’s references that it may not be so easy to overlook its role in the time scheme. The moon has a ubiquitous imaginative presence in imagery and metaphors quite separate from its physical presence, and it is

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drawn attention to frequently. Moonlight becomes the catalyst for change as an agent of imagination. So, if we can completely ignore the apparent discrepancies in the time scheme, then we might ask, why does Shakespeare seem to go out of his way to highlight them, to make the moon the central preoccupation in the play, and pointedly to raise the question ‘Doth the moon shine that night’? Some critics have presented ingenious explanations for the anomalies (Paolucci, 1977, 317–26), but without compelling general assent. Maybe the very point Shakespeare is making, by overtly drawing attention to anomalies that audiences apparently do not notice in the theatre, is to demonstrate that effects of a play can be, and often are, largely unconsciously registered, making us switch off our logical brains and overlook such problems. Or alternatively, that what we hear in poetic language overrides what we see on a stage: ‘Such tricks hath strong imagination’ (5.1.18). Or even more likely, he is drawing attention to the dominant metaphor, that the play itself is to be experienced as a dream and that dreaming runs on its own alternative, dream-time logic that defies the ticking of a clock and the precision of an almanac. In this play of magic and dreams the dramatist is flaunting his mastery over language to make us believe in whatever he wishes us to believe, even if it does not make logical or chronological sense. Dramatic poetry in his hands can be so emotionally powerful that it subverts our rational faculties and defies the tyranny even of time. Poetic drama can convince us, through language alone, of things which are contradictory, irrational or impossible, and so skilfully is it done that we do not even notice the anachronisms and anomalies in the theatre. Willy-nilly, we are ‘spellbound’ by the language of emotions emanating from ‘strong imagination’. We are lured into believing many ‘tricks’ and implausibilities, such as the existence of fairies and magic herbs that control human emotions, and the transformation of a human head into an animal’s. Analysis of the discrepancies of time thus leads into consideration of the dominant themes of the play, the transformative power of love, dream logic, the supernatural and magical metamorphosis. Above all, our attention is drawn to the medium of metaphorical language in the magical space of a stage which can be imagined to be anywhere, at any time, according to the poet’s whim. Seen in this way, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a dazzling celebration of the imagination which can change reality.

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Exercise erci

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race for yourself the different references to time in the play; make a chart of them, and see if you can think of possible explanations for apparent discrepancies. Do you agree that it raises questions that are significant ‘problems’ for interpretation, or should we just ignore the issue?

The audience experience It is not the writer’s language alone which conjures us, since the ‘tricks’ require some effort from the audience in suspending disbelief. In order for the transformative magic of Shakespeare’s language to operate, the dramatist must rely on a collaboration, requiring some imaginative cooperation from his audience. The exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta, as part of the onstage audience witnessing ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, makes this explicit: hippolyta This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard. theseus The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. hippolyta It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs. (5.1.217–20) When we think about it, the same could be said of the play we ourselves are witnessing (or reading). Shakespeare shows that he is well aware that his own plays, and especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, could also be dismissed as ‘the silliest stuff’ unless we are prepared to exercise imagination. In fact a later spectator, Samuel Pepys in 1662, described it as ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’. Hippolyta’s words are a nudge from the dramatist that for a play to be successful is a two-way transaction in which the audience must be prepared to trust the language of imagination rather than of rational thought. Employing as its medium the metaphorical language of poetry, the play itself is a

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sustained metaphor positing an alternative world, to which we must either surrender, or dismiss as ‘ridiculous’. This, the dramatist admits, is our choice. A relatively recent development in theatre history is the study of ‘audience contagion’, the way that audiences collectively ‘catch’ moods and emotional states from the play and from each other. The ancient theorist Aristotle had implied this phenomenon, and the concept used as a critical tool is amplified in Tolstoy’s book What is Art? (1898), which presents imaginative ‘infection’ as a defining quality of all art: And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer. (Tolstoy, 1995, ch. 4) The metaphor of infection is perhaps unfortunate, given its negative connotations of illness and the prevalence of plague in theatres as its incubator (Chalk, 2019), but no better term seems to have presented itself yet. It is clear, however, that in Tolstoy’s sense it is not physical but emotional contagion, and its application in drama is through projected sympathy with the feelings of others, prompted by the mesmeric artistry of the work constructed from language. The final scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides a uniquely rich and detailed cameo for exploration of audience contagion, since there are two audiences: first, those on the stage watching ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’; and second, we as either solitary readers or collective observers in the theatre watching the Dream. The Arden editor explains: The theatre audience would be involved at two levels: as real-life viewers outside the play’s fiction, but also akin to the viewers within that fiction. Quince’s audience mingled with Shakespeare’s, each authenticating the other’s role. By their very function as

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spectators, Shakespeare’s audience would become part of the play. (Chaudhuri, 2018, 6) On one hand we have Quince’s actors, performing in the middle of the stage and surrounded by the audience of Theseus’s court, seated either on the stage around the players or perhaps on the upper back gallery looking down on the players (both physically and attitudinally). On the other hand, we ourselves are positioned as offstage audience watching the onstage audience which is witnessing ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. There are plenty of internal clues about how the dramatist is emotionally manipulating both audience tiers. To appreciate the effects in Shakespeare’s theatre, we need to know something of the physical context of Elizabethan playhouses. Since we recall that the Quarto title-page says it was ‘publickely acted’, this seems to suggest it was staged at The Theatre, which was the earliest Elizabethan playhouse, and it may have been later revived at the Globe, which was built in 1599. In each case, the venue was theatre-in-the-round, without the separation between actors and audiences created in post-Renaissance theatres by the proscenium arch and curtain. Something a little like a boxing ring (both in shape and sometimes in atmosphere), the stage was in the middle surrounded on all four sides by the audience at very close range. There were four levels of spectators: the ‘groundlings’ on the floor lower than the stage, their heads at about the level of the actors’ legs, and three upper levels, with the richest patrons at the top. Performances were in the afternoon daylight, meaning that the audience could see and overlook each other at all levels in this ‘vertical theatre’. Soliloquies (like Hamlet’s) had to be delivered in the actor’s knowledge that he was delivering his words in broad daylight, to an audience which could well have decided to shout the actor down or to jovially answer back to questions addressed directly to them, such as ‘To be, or not to be?’ By visualizing this kind of theatrical experience, we realize that the spectators were extremely close to the actors, and that there were a lot of them (estimates of up to 3,000 have been made). It would have been impossible to keep them quiet, except by the compelling force of the play itself and the acting. Records indicate that audiences were frequently rowdy, interjecting and even hurling things like pears at the actors if they were not pleased (Gurr, 1970, ch. 6). The effects

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achieved by audience proximity and vocality could be by turns intimate, electric and pugnaciously hostile, the fact of which Shakespeare was acutely aware. This is the kind of potentially anarchic playhouse ambience in Elizabethan times that we must imagine when watching the final scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The onstage audience are intrusive, commenting openly and critically on the action and acting of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, but there are some subtle differences between the responses. In terms of audience contagion, despite variations in individual stances, both on- and offstage spectators are given licence to laugh by Philostrate, acting as master of the revels: . . . I have heard it over, And it is nothing, nothing in the world, Unless you can find sport in their intents, Extremely stretched and conned with cruel pain To do you service. (5.1.78–81) Picking up the idea of ‘service’ done to him, Theseus in lordly fashion judges the playlet mainly as a homage to himself, forgiving any lapses in quality by appreciating the ‘service’ it offers to his office. He is very self-referential in choosing which interlude to choose: hippolyta He says they can do nothing in this kind. theseus The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. Our sport shall be to take what they mistake. And what poor duty cannot do, Noble respect takes it in might, not merit. Where I have come, great clerks have purposed To greet me with premeditated welcomes Where I have seen them shiver and look pale, Make periods in the midst of sentences, Throttle their practised accent in their fears, And in conclusion dumbly have broke off, Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,

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Out of this silence, yet I picked a welcome; And in the modesty of fearful duty, I read as much as from the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity In least speak most, to my capacity. (5.1.81–105) In some ways this is a generous attitude from Theseus, in forgiving the all-too-obvious faults of ‘tongue-tied simplicity’, but it can be interpreted also as patronizing and condescending, though he cloaks mildly judgmental criticism in pedantic, even kindly, wit. Quince begins his prologue with full-stops (‘points’) in all the wrong places, upon which Theseus comments, ‘This fellow doth not stand upon points . . . His speech was like a tangled chain: nothing impaired, but all disordered. Who is next?’ (5.1.118, 125). The paradox is that the faltering language of the ‘mechanicals’ in their play is just as meaningful and communicative as the courtiers’ more literate but complacently insulting taunting. It is assumed by the onstage audience that the Duke must be given the first chance to comment, and so he does, usually addressing his amusement to his retinue rather than the players directly: ‘I wonder if the lion be to speak’ (5.1.151); ‘Would you desire lime and hair to speak better?’ (5.1.165); ‘Pyramus draws near the wall; silence’ (5.1.166); ‘The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again’ (5.1.181). The male courtiers are more openly critical, trying to impress the Duke with their preening cleverness by addressing their comments to him as ‘my lord’, but with more rudeness and without his lenience of judgement: lysander He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt: he knows not the stop. A good moral, my lord. It is not enough to speak, but to speak true. ... demetrius No wonder, my lord. One lion may, when many asses do. ... demetrius It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord. (5.1.120, 152, 165)

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Hippolyta, although invariably overruled and sometimes gently reproved by the Duke, is consistently critical and dismissive of the quality of the play itself – ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (5.1.209); ‘I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change’ (5.1.245) – though she eventually joins in a more generous spirit: ‘Well shone Moon. Truly, the moon shines with a good grace’ (5.1.260). Hermia and Helena, perhaps accepting their subservient status as newly married women (in Elizabethan terms now legally the property of their husbands not their fathers – out of the frying pan and into the fire for Hermia?), remain silent. The interventions become increasingly raucous and disruptive, threatening to overturn the occasion. The lines spoken by these critics become even longer than those by the actors, but at least the artisans are allowed to finish their play with a moral worthy of Romeo and Juliet delivered by Bottom, but without its epilogue: bottom No, I assure you, the wall is down that parted their fathers. Will it please you to see the epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company? theseus No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed. Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus and hanged himself in Thisbe’s garter, it would have been a fine tragedy; and so it is truly, and very notably discharged. But come, your Bergomask; let your epilogue alone. [Dance, and exeunt actors.] (5.1.343–53) It seems socially significant that here Theseus stoops from his customary idiom of poetry, and instead addresses the artisans in prose. Although generally condemnatory, the courtiers mingle their critiques with self-regarding amusement, oblivious of the fact that they themselves have been subjected to our laughter and ridicule in the events in the forest. Such ‘eavesdropping’ humour applies to us too, since we are drawn in to reflect upon our own follies and susceptibilities in love, which could be viewed with equal ‘derision’. The slyness of

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Shakespeare is to turn the tables in multiple ways – the courtly lovers in the stage audience laugh at ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, yet they themselves in the forest were laughed at by us in the audience, leading on to the uncomfortable recognition that it is we, as mere mortals and prone to ridiculous behaviour in love, who are being laughed at by the allseeing dramatist, whose representative in the play is Puck. Shakespeare repeated the device of an incompetently performed play-within-a-play in the roughly contemporary Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is full of ruptured ceremonies and broken promises, and which is his only romantic comedy that does not end in betrothals. ‘The Nine Worthies’, written by the local schoolmaster, is thoroughly disrupted and laughed off the stage by the courtly onlookers. The stage condemnation there is far more cruel and destructive than in the Dream, and the malice acts as a transparent reproof to the young male lovers in that play who have behaved badly themselves. In both plays, this is dramatic irony at work and a sly act of revenge taken by the master dramatist orchestrating it all. Meanwhile, Quince’s actors have done what Shakespeare must occasionally have longed to do with uncooperative audiences who do not appreciate performers’ sincere efforts to entertain. They break the illusion of theatre by stepping out of role and addressing directly the onstage audience in misguided but concerted attempts to justify their theatrical decisions. Bottom breaks ranks with his explanation: theseus The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again. bottom No, in truth, sir, he should not. ‘Deceiving me’ is Thisbe’s cue. She is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see it will fall. (Enter Thisbe.) Pat as I told you: yonder she comes. (5.1.181–6) But the rowdy amusement directed to ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is not the final effect left on audience’s emotional involvement. Mirroring the lovers’ dazed experiences of awakening after the night of violent disruptions, and Bottom’s soliloquy about his own ‘dream’, the dramatist recaptures the dream-like atmosphere for the audience. Bottom, reporting back to his comrades, exclaims, ‘Masters, I am to discourse wonders’ (4.2.28); Quince in the first

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line of his play says, ‘Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show; But wonder on, till truth make all things plain’ (5.1.127–8); while Hippolyta describes ‘the story of the night’ as ‘strange and admirable’ (5.1.27, my italics), which is the Latin word for ‘wonder’. Shakespeare often uses this word towards the end of his comedies, as if prompting the emotional response he has sought to raise. Much Ado About Nothing almost repeats Quince’s words in the phrase ‘let wonder seem familiar’, spoken by the Friar who has acted as a kind of playwright within the play, orchestrating events towards a happy ending. The last scene in As You Like It includes the phrase ‘reason wonder may diminish’, while Twelfth Night’s denouement has Olivia exclaiming, ‘Most wonderful’, and Fabian describing the events as ones to be ‘wondered at’. All in their different ways show Shakespeare reminding us that the intended emotional state or ‘audience contagion’ by the end of a play should be Aristotle’s admiratio, translated into English as ‘wonder’. At the very end of the play, as the various couples retire to bed, we are reminded that there has been yet another audience tacitly watching all, the master manipulators Oberon and Puck, joined by Titania, whose words clinch the all-forgiving and generous world of comedy which joins all the audiences ‘hand in hand’ in atmospheric unity: ‘Hand in hand, with fairy grace, / Will we sing, and bless this place’ (5.1.389– 90). ‘This place’ is not only the ducal palace but the theatre itself, the grander palace of the imagination.

Exercise erci

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hink about how you speak to people in different groups – say close friends, distant friends, your teachers, your family – and make yourself aware of the different kinds of verbal interactions being used in each. For example, things like vocabulary, changing tones of voice, informal or formal address and so on, all might be subtly or broadly different depending on circumstances. If you feel ambitious you might reproduce bits of conversation in the form of dramatic dialogue, in order to become conscious of how language is constantly being adapted to situations. Then look at some passages in the play to see how this operates in Shakespeare’s ‘conversations’.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Hearing Shakespeare’s Language

Shakespeare for the blind If the two main modes of transmission of Shakespeare’s plays have been staged performance (and latterly movies) and printed texts for readers, there is a third which has special and nostalgic significance for me – as spoken words for listeners. If I have reservations about watching movies before reading the play, I have no such qualms about audio versions which are, in essence, readings in their own right. At the time of writing, audiobooks and aural transmission of literary works on radio are undergoing a huge revival. The BBC in Britain is broadcasting on radio, to apparently significant audience reception, huge books like Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdus in ten hours, whole novels by the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley and George Eliot and the complete ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories by Conan Doyle (Iqbal, 2019). Online, audiobooks.com offers over half a million titles purely for listening, without any visual distractions. Alongside classics, many of them are original contemporary works which may never actually be published in print form, and the statistics show that ‘bestsellers’ in the medium can even reach the millions. It is a very new phenomenon but also a return to the vintage, offering power to the creative imagination of the listener. The reason for its popularity is obvious: the development of ever more compact and portable audio players, as tiny as an earbud. 81

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These days we are not anchored to a radio fixed in a room or even a material book, but can listen to readings wherever we are, while jogging or walking, outdoors or in, working or just lying on our backs with our eyes closed. As an ‘audible reading’ experience, A Midsummer Night’s Dream holds a special place in my affections, since it was the first of Shakespeare’s plays that I read and studied at school, when I was fifteen. At that stage I had seen no movie version or staged performance, so it was simply words, no more nor less than language itself. In class we went slowly and laboriously through the text, making sense of each line and speech in turn. This sounds quite dull and I don’t especially recommend it, but the discipline shaped my literary knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare’s expressive language in close detail, so it was not wasted. Through it came something like an enchanted reverence for the play and its language, which invaded my imagination and still does. I found a strange appeal in the idea of being able to make anybody love us by using a magical herbal eyewash (so long as it is applied to the right person), and it struck me also as offering an intriguingly plausible explanation for changes of weather, to posit a realm where they mirror the fluctuating moods of fairies in the throes of marital disharmony. Titania describes the disastrous phenomena of ‘contagious fogs’ causing ‘rheumatic diseases’ in humans, rain causing rivers to overflow their banks, rotting vegetables, cattle starving and mud everywhere, as the anger of the fairy queen and her estranged husband is transferred to the natural human world: And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension: We are their parents and original. (2.1.81–117) At first this kind of language creates a barrier to understanding – why not use prose, after all, and why use unfamiliar words like ‘progeny’ and ‘dissension’? Part of the problem, obviously, is that Shakespeare spoke and wrote in early modern English, which is different from our language in various ways, as we have seen. David Crystal, a specialist in the history of language puts it this way: ‘Reading a text is a meeting of minds; and when the minds are

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separated by 400 years of linguistic change, we must expect some difficulties’ (Crystal, 2003, 67). It is like reading an arcane, remote script, but one whose sounds are evocative. As I surrendered myself to the rhythms and music, I gradually discovered that the medium of poetry was, on closer inspection, being used to express complicated ideas with great economy. It was creating vivid pictures in the mind, and expressing and generating emotional states such as the rising anger of Titania and Oberon in dialogue. With a little help from footnotes and my teacher, I came to appreciate that even the ‘long words’ were designed to ‘keep time’ by placing stresses within the line to maintain the metre, the vehicle of forward rhythm (hence in the quotation above, ‘original’ in four syllables standing for ‘originator’ with five). In addition, the language was being used with such precision and aptness that it had the effect of often economically saving more words: ‘this same progeny of evils’ is more compact and colourful than ‘all these bad things resulting from our moods’. The repetition in ‘From our debate, from our dissension’ (my italics) added strong emphasis when spoken, like a speech-maker rhetorically building up to an indignant conclusion. The phrase ‘We are their parents’ refers back to the word ‘progeny’ (children), completing the idea of causation through an image. By thinking of the language as being spoken, I came to realize that language itself was doing a huge amount of work on many levels at once, economically giving information and raising emotions at the same time. Since drama and film were not on offer at my school, the closest we came to performance at that time was radio, and in the context of this language-centred book for readers, this too turned out to be no drawback, and in some ways an advantage. Heard in ‘real time’, without poring over every word, the sheer sounds became an exhilarating part of the meaning itself as it flowed, and even if individual words were puzzling or unknown, yet the momentum of poetic melody swept me along like a current. Changing tones of voice (anxious? haughty? fearful? astonished? lyrical? comical?) became clearer by hearing actors voice the dialogue on radio. Occasional sound effects made me realize how much ‘scenepainting’ is included in Shakespeare’s text, without any need for seeing what was happening. Hearing the words spoken provided my ‘inward eye’ with sequences of images, whether I followed with text in hand or not, showing me how richly pictorial Shakespeare’s

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language is. As we shall see in a later chapter, he seemed to think and generate ideas through images and metaphors, devices which depend on imaginative visualization. Our critical terminology has several words derived from the Latin for ‘listener’, such as ‘audience’, ‘auditor’ and ‘audition’, and Shakespeare draws our attention to this in many places with phrases like Mark Antony’s ‘lend me your ears’ in Julius Caesar. Puck says, ‘I’ll be an auditor’ (2.4.74), not an ‘observer’ or ‘watcher’. Yet critics do not always consider the particular opportunities for insights given through the medium of ‘auditory Shakespeare’ offered by radio drama and audiobooks, a medium which creates a unique relationship between invisible speakers and creative listeners. A host of questions are raised. What do we ‘see’ in our ‘mind’s eye’ when we only ‘hear’ words and sound effects? By eliminating all senses except sound, how much do we apprehend of a play? It may be that sound recording is less coercive, less restrictive of understandings than theatre itself, given the literalness of sensory information in what we see in front of us in the latter. It leaves more scope for the listener to create an individual impression and interpretation of a play, and raises such questions as, how are emotions conveyed in the sightless intimacy and interaction between speakers and attentive listener in this medium? It also gives full value to passages which describe imagined sights, as in flashbacks to the past such as Titania’s recollection of the pregnant mother carrying the changeling child: And in the spiced Indian air by night, Full often hath she gossiped by my side, And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands Marking th’embarked traders on the flood, When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind, Which she with pretty and with swimming gait Following (her womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles and return again As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. (2.1.124–34) This passage offers a kind of ‘thought travel’ through time and space, taking us away from the here and now, using language alone.

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Nothing is actually seen on stage, and what we have is an imagined moment from Titania’s past. The word ‘conceive’ is worth lingering over, since it illustrates Shakespeare’s gift for packing multiple meanings into a single word. It incorporates not only a double meaning playing on ‘make pregnant’ – first metaphorically (the sails) and secondly the woman’s womb – and also includes the meaning of ‘imagine’ as an act of following an idea or conception, which is exactly what the poetry is encouraging us to do in our minds. For an extraordinary example of this scene-painting, you might look at the ‘Dover Cliff’ scene in King Lear, in which Edgar, standing on a flat stage, describes looking down from the top of a cliff to the sea, and then looking up from the beach at the cliff-top. It is a purely imaginative description, created through nothing but words. There are other, less obvious advantages to my having been reared on radio Shakespeare. John Keats suggested in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law, then living in America, that if they agreed to read a nominated passage of Shakespeare at a prearranged time, they would be ‘as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. In his whimsical image, Keats is not only opening up large questions about breaking down boundaries of time and space, but also initiating a debate on ‘Shakespeare for the blind’ as a way of creating a sense of intimate relationship. He is also, incidentally, anticipating the invention of radio, officially dated over sixty years after his death in the 1890s, since it was then to become literally possible for people in different places and time zones to hear exactly the same passage of Shakespeare simultaneously. Taken to this level of contemplation, Keats’s playful suggestion implies something which is easily forgotten: that radio, especially in earlier times before television (which started in the late 1950s), and before the medium simply became regarded as ‘background noise’ or a medium for conveying news, could be either a solitary pleasure or a sociable one, as the product of a shared experience across time and place, focused on intense listening, and for the time being suppressing, disregarding or at least limiting the sense of sight to images created through heard language. Given the austerity of Shakespeare’s stage, there are some similarities, in the primacy of the spoken word and music. In 1923, BBC Radio broadcast its first full-length Shakespeare play, and since then it has presented over 300 productions of the plays and poems. Continuity was maintained throughout the

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century, riding through critical turbulence from time to time, even throughout the Second World War when the Armed Services radio broadcast productions of Shakespeare designed to raise patriotic morale. These were repeated for the home front on light radio and Home radio. Much the same story applied in America. In the United States in 1937–8 two radio networks, NBC with ‘Streamlined Shakespeare’ readings, and CBS, vied for supremacy in broadcasting Shakespeare plays (Jensen, 1918, passim). They were intended to bring cultural capital provided by the classic writer to the medium of radio, using some famous actors like John Barrymore, Rosalind Russell and Leslie Howard. Orson Welles, a great champion of radio and even more so of Shakespeare, persuaded the Columbia Broadcasting System to produce hour-long, condensed adaptations of some of Shakespeare’s plays. These are still in existence and can be heard on internet recordings (Welles), though unfortunately the surviving ones do not include A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The productions are in fact quite ambitious, since there were a lot of well-known professional actors involved, with no apparent doubling, and original music was commissioned. Welles clearly took care to consider the needs of the particular sound medium, for example introducing Twelfth Night with both a brief synopsis of the action and then allowing each of the major characters to speak some initial lines so the audience would know which voice was which. The need to reduce the text’s length to fit programming schedules was addressed by using occasional voice-over narrations, more or less an equivalent of intertitles on silent movies, to provide essential bridging information. The recordings were sold by Columbia Recordings with printed texts of the plays, mainly for schools. To contextualize the power of radio at the time, in the same year, 1938, Welles produced a radio version of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel  The War of the Worlds. The realistic reportage, including news bulletins and ‘live’ interviews between soothing musical interludes, convinced at least some of its listeners that the country was under attack by Martians, reputedly causing panic in New York.  The Australian Broadcasting Commission, following the BBC lead, also dramatized the complete works of Shakespeare on every second Sunday afternoon in 1937 and 1938, alternately at 4.30 in the afternoon and 9.00 at night (Lane, 1994, 89, 143). Unfortunately no records were kept, but given the technical constraints of the

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time, these presumably were transmitted live. This must inevitably have involved a small number of professionally contracted actors, the same ones each week, who would have needed double or even treble character parts, changing their voices accordingly. They would also have had to read the scripts without time for rehearsals and lengthy discussions, and no opportunity for second takes. The only ‘extra’ offered by the medium would have been some fairly minimal, pre-recorded sound effects like the sea, horses’ hooves or birdsong. Perhaps without realizing it, listeners were participating in something analogous to Elizabethan staging conditions, visually minimal, barely rehearsed and mounted without time for thorough workshopping or determining an overall, directorial vision. Susanne Greenhalgh is one of the very few critics who has taken an interest in radio as a medium for Shakespearean adaptations and citations (Greenhalgh 2008 and 2011). She provocatively reflects that radio is a more ‘hospitable and fertile environment for Shakespeare-related drama than that of film and television’, and redefines an apparent problem – that meaning in radio plays cannot be ‘fixed’ but tends by its nature to be open and provisional. This can be a significant strength, since the reactions of listening audiences cannot be controlled, corrected or even known: [D]espite the BBC’s self-association with Shakespeare, criticism of radio drama has always been haunted by the idea that it can give only potential meanings and simultaneously making those meanings unstable; since place ‘may be real or imaginary, present or past’ and atmosphere ‘may stimulate a different kind of affective response from what is being said.’ (Greenhalgh, 2008, 184–5) Another critic suggests that this inherent dependence on ‘potential meanings’ helps to explain . . . the ‘present-tenseness’ of the radio medium, the sense it gives of an experience still moving towards the future, even when its auditory codes remind us of its historicity, as in the ‘dated’ delivery of a Shakespeare speech recorded in the 1930s, paradoxically convinces us that its utterances are living and dynamic. (Stanton, 103)

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It is at least arguable that the immediacy of the spoken voice can enhance our ability to use imagination to flesh out the language in an ‘ever-present’ impression, gradually opening up unexpected events for the listener as the play unfolds through time. The experience of hearing Shakespeare can also make us aware of the sheer amount of stage directions and metaphorical language that are in the language itself, allowing the imagination of the listener to create the scene. Much to Bernard Shaw’s annoyance, Shakespeare’s texts provide few stage directions concerning locations of the action, but given the verbal descriptions and cues built into the dialogue, he does not need to give more, as in Bottom’s cryptic ‘Masters, spread yourselves’ (1.2.15), and exchanges like this one: hermia Be it so, Lysander. Find you out a bed, For I upon this bank will rest my head. lysander One turf shall serve as pillow for us both, One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth. hermia Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear, Lie further off, yet. Do not lie so near. (2.2.43–8) The language informs us of both what is seen and what is felt. Lysander proposes to sleep beside Hermia for protection, but she insists modestly on lying on ‘this bank’ while he must sleep further off, thus creating the situation in which Demetrius can later stumble over her without seeing Lysander. Appearances and gestures of characters are likewise embedded in the text: hermia Never so weary, never so in woe, Bedabbled with the dew, and torn with briers, I can no further crawl, no further go; My legs can keep no pace with my desires. (3.2.442–5) Her dishevelled state and exhausted feelings are presented with specific pictorial detail in this soliloquy. Shakespeare realizes

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audiences will not need ‘ocular proof’ (a phrase from Othello), because the language gives all the information required to understand her appearance and state of mind. Indeed, on the Elizabethan stage Hermia’s appearance would probably not have changed at all. By contrast with his own economy, the well-meaning but incompetent artisans’ performance is ridiculed through parody, with its over-explicit explanations about how to make things visible on stage with outlandish props instead of trusting the audience’s imagination: This loam, this roughcast and this stone doth show That I am that same Wall: the truth is so. And this the cranny is, right and sinister, Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper. (5.1.173) The comedy lies in the fact that they do not realize, as Shakespeare always does, that the language itself can awaken the imagination, without the need for literally seeing props and scenery. Even offstage places and spaces not seen at all, such as ‘a bank where wild thyme grows’, are evoked through the poetry. The listener creates a personal meaning from the language. As a related point, it is noticeable, when listening to the plays rather than seeing them, that ‘sound effects’ also are often indicated in the language itself, without needing to be reproduced in the production: Now the hungry lion roars And the wolf behowls the moon, Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, All with weary task fordone. Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe In remembrance of a shroud. (5.1.361–9) Shakespeare disdains as unnecessary the mechanicals’ earnest efforts to bring on stage a roaring lion, knowing that a mere phrase (‘Now the hungry lion roars’) can achieve the required effect. Quince and his actors would have surely made heavy weather of

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this passage and denuded it of its haunting atmosphere, by thinking it obligatory to bring onstage a wolf baying at the character representing ‘Moonshine’, a snoring ploughman, a lighted branch to be extinguished (without creating a fire), a screeching owl and a dying man. As I hope to have shown in earlier chapters, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare’s diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal poetry spoken by courtiers and the rhyming couplets of lovers, to ‘warbling’ notes and nursery rhythms of fairies, and stocky prose used by the artisan players punctuated with their comic verbal slip-ups. In this chapter, I hope to have established how crucial words are in creating the varied textures of the play, if we think of an audio medium where everything exists only in language. These days, it is often said, our culture is dominated by visual media, through advertisements, movies and the internet. As a consequence, language can seem impoverished, designed often for ‘impact’ by using crude, three-word slogans to persuade people to buy a product or accept a political message. Or words can be done away with altogether by using no more than a literal ‘product placement’ or emoji. But in the days before television (let alone computers), radio was the dominant medium in every home, language was the only tool available to ‘paint pictures’, and awakening the listener’s imagination was crucial in creating illusions. The true source of enchantment in the play lies not in the supernatural beings depicted, nor in flowers with magical properties, but in its language, as an instrument for creating meaning, activating through listening the exercise of ‘strong imagination’.

Exercise erci

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ind an audio recording of the play in a library or online; choose a scene at random and, while listening with a text in hand, highlight examples of the language itself giving information about the setting, ‘sound effects’, implicit ‘stage directions’, characters’ movements, their emotional states and atmospheric touches.

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The music of poetry: rhythm, rhyme, blank verse, alliteration But now comes the next teasing question: why poetry in particular? Why did Elizabethan dramatists choose verse as the medium to ignite the imagination, especially in the light of the fact that few if any dramatists have used poetry successfully in drama in later periods? Theories abound, none of them conclusive. One answer might be the most practical, that dialogue in a strong, regular rhythm, sometimes rhymed, may have simply been easier for actors to remember than prose. Given that they had to learn lines very quickly, and for several plays at once, the memorable regularity of verse could have provided a kind of mnemonic (memory aid). Even if an actor on the spur of the moment forgot the exact words, by maintaining the same rhythm he could ‘bluff’, surreptitiously substituting different words without disrupting the flow, in a way the audience would not consciously have noticed. We still do this sometimes, since if we forget a phrase from a poem when trying to quote, we might substitute a meaningless but ‘regular’ one, like ‘titum, ti-tum’ in the middle of a line. An accidental and amusing rather than deliberate example came when a Royal Shakespeare Company actor was reputed to have spoken the famous line on the death of Julius Caesar, ‘Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods’ as ‘Let’s carve him as a fish dish for the gods’. Another answer is that it is in the nature of poetry to achieve heightened emotional effects more effectively than prose, an important consideration in drama since it is a medium which seeks to convey emotional states to an audience. It would be hard to think of a more powerful way than these very words of expressing the haughty feeling behind Oberon’s opening line, ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania’ (2.1.60), arranged as they are in an iambic pentameter but with added stress on all the words for extra emphasis. Yet another explanation sometimes offered is that the rhythm is a kind of verbal analogue for the rhythm of the heartbeat, diastole (relaxation) followed by systole (pressure). A literally pedestrian suggestion is that it is the rhythm of walking and maintaining an even pace. Wordsworth, a later master of poetry in iambic pentameters, found it easier to compose his lines while on long walks rather than sitting at a desk. More technically, scholars point out that Elizabethans were imitating classical metres such as

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Virgil’s, though the two language systems were not quite comparable in how they ‘count’ the ‘accents’, based on the length of the vowel rather than stress (it is a rather technical subject and not for the faint-hearted since it depends on proficiency in Latin). ‘Blank verse’ is the basis of Elizabethan poetic drama. Put simply, this is the opposite of ‘rhymed verse’ exemplified in the ‘rhyming couplet’ where, as the name suggests, two successive lines end on the same rhyming syllable. Blank verse was described by another contemporary, Ben Jonson, as ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’, because it was mastered first by Christopher Marlowe. It became standard Elizabethan dramatic practice, and in poetry through to John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Romantic poet Wordsworth. Marlowe, who was born in the same year (1564) but died young (1593) may have been a mentor to the young Shakespeare, since early on they were in the same acting company and may even have collaborated on at least one of the Henry VI plays. Marlowe’s unfinished narrative poem, Hero and Leander, provided Shakespeare with a model for Venus and Adonis, and Shakespeare places admiring references to his fellow writer in later plays. Certainly he was a strong influence on dramatists right through the 1590s. Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream has plenty of rhyming couplets, especially placed in the mouths of the young lovers to denote their character similarities and callow conventionalism, and of the smaller fairies to convey a lightly tripping, song-like effect, blank verse comes to the fore in Shakespearean drama when emotionally charged feelings are expressed. This is especially true in the language placed in the mouths of Oberon and Titania, in whose verse the end-stopped quality of the rhyming couplet is replaced by a surging forward momentum, mirroring a build-up of emotional effect and its release in a sustained lyricism: titania Come, now a roundel and a fairy song; Then for the third part of a minute, hence: Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds; Some war with rearmice for their leathern wings To make my small elves coats; and some keep back The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep; Then to your offices, and let me rest. (2.2.1–8)

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Here, as elsewhere, Titania demonstrates some of the most spellbinding poetic effects and fertile imagery. There is also a marked development in Shakespeare’s deployment of blank verse over his career, ‘from regular to irregular, from smooth to rough, from rhythmically simple to rhythmically various’ (McDonald, 89), and here it is at its most regular. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a virtuoso demonstration of his evolving skill in varying his poetic voice to suit sound to sense, harking back to the more simple mastery of verse in his early play The Comedy of Errors and looking forward to the dense richness and poetic complexity of Hamlet and King Lear. By contrast, in the Dream Shakespeare also perfects in the dialogue of the ‘rude mechanicals’ mastery over comic prose, which was soon to mark the creation of one of his most famous characters, Sir John Falstaff, and later Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. The basis in each line, for both rhyming couplets and blank verse, was the iambic pentameter. In its most regular form this refers to a line consisting of five ‘feet’, a foot being an unstressed syllable (u) followed by a stressed (S) – u-S, u-S, u-S, u-S, u-S – as in ‘And LOOK / thou MEET / me ERE / the FIRST / cock CROW’ (2.1.268). To maintain the regular rhythm sometimes requires a degree of verbal abbreviation or grammatical ingenuity – ‘look thou’ instead of ‘make sure that you look’, and ‘ere’ (one syllable) for ‘before’ (two syllables), which accounts for the air of artifice and conscious ‘poeticism’. However, one thing we notice is that in practice the unstressed / stressed pattern is not actually how actors in any era would likely speak every line if they wish to bring out the meaning in a conversationally convincing way. They might use different emphases: ‘And look thou MEET me ere the FIRST COCK CROW’. Similarly, the following line can no doubt be spoken as a strict iambic – ‘This IS the WOman, BUT not THIS the MAN’ (3.2.42) – but spoken rhythm would sound more like this: ‘THIS is the WOMAN, but NOT THIS the MAN’. Scholars disagree among themselves about whether the Elizabethan spoken style was to maintain the strict iambic pentameter rhythm in a singsong fashion, or follow the spoken accents, but in either case it is clear that there are two different rhythms going on in the same line: the regular, imposed pattern of verse and the natural speaking voice of conversation. Interplay between the two, regular and irregular, prevents monotony and adds complexity to the word-music and

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was most likely the practice to maintain variety. It is clear that in many cases the ‘ti-TUM’ could not be sustained because a syllable has dropped out (as in ‘lulled [lull’d] in these flowers with dances and delight’ (2.1.254), which is not quite regular whether we say ‘lull’d’ or ‘lull-ED’. In Shakespeare’s hands such variations can create constant changes of sound, tone and feeling which prevent the poetry falling into a tedious inexpressiveness of sameness. Another flexible variation occurs when a line ends not with a stressed syllable but an unstressed, technically (and with the unfortunate gender stereotyping of ‘weak’) known as a ‘feminine ending’ – ‘His mother was a votaress of my order’ (2.1.123) – though this is rare in the Dream and used by Shakespeare more often in his later plays, suggesting a much freer and less constrained versification as his career progressed. In other cases we find the iambic pentameter distributed over two lines by different characters, the carry-over suggesting a conversational exchange in a verbal equivalent of linking arms: robin Ay, there it is. oberon I pray thee give it me. (2.1.248) And comically here, as the indistinguishable fairies line up to await instructions: titania Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed! peaseblossom Ready. cobweb And I. mote And I. mustardseed And I. all Where shall we go? (3.1.157) Such ‘run-on’ lines are sometimes used to convey the idea of two minds meeting and meshing in close emotional communication with each other. Overall, it is fair to say that Shakespeare, although

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his poetry might generally ‘scan’ in an underlying, regular way, is constantly varying the rhythms to capture the spoken voice, depending on what effect he wishes to create at any one time. When he employs a different kind of rhythm from the iambic pentameter, the change is purposeful, for example here, where two stressed, rhyming short lines are appropriate to the incantatory chant of a magical spell: On the ground Sleep sound. I’ll apply To your eye, Gentle lover, remedy. When thou wak’st, Thou tak’st True delight In the sight Of thy former lady’s eye. (3.2.448–57) Shakespeare does very little without artistic purpose, and the main thing when analysing such aspects of Shakespearean verse is to ask what dramatic effect you think is achieved by a particular verse form employed in its context. It is useless simply to point out that a particular versification is used without offering some suggestion as to its function and how it operates. Think of Shakespeare’s language like the instruments in an orchestra. His variations might be likened to those of a composer, whose music maintains a basic key, melody and harmonic line, but plays variations to achieve some effect within a specific composition. It is not especially profitable to get bogged down in yet more technicalities of Elizabethan versification, but the other ‘term of art’ worth commenting on is alliteration (using the same consonant to start two or more words in a line). This can have diverse functions according to who is speaking and how it functions, and again the golden rule is not just to tabulate its occurrence but to suggest how it works in conveying meaning. In the lines given to Peter Quince, ‘Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade, / He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast’ (5.1.145–6), Shakespeare is clearly mocking the overt regularity of the ‘b’ sound by drawing

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attention to it, though Quince no doubt feels it enhances the forcefulness of the statement. On the other hand, alliteration can be deployed much more subtly and unobtrusively to achieve more lyrical effects, such as ‘With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers’ (4.1.51); or emotions, ‘Never so weary, never so in woe’ (3.2.442), where repetition and alliteration convey Hermia’s dragging exhaustion and despair. Any one device, whether it be rhyme, repetition or alliteration, is rarely used for achieving exactly the same effect in different dramatic situations, and analysis must always be alert to the local expressiveness in its unique context.

Exercise erci hoose a short passage of ‘regular’ poetry in the play and recite it out loud, keeping the iambic pentameter rhythm (tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum); then recite it with ‘speech rhythms’, trying primarily to make the meaning clear, without regard to the artificial verse form. Notice some differences? How would you speak the lines as an actor in the theatre? Would you put the emphasis on sound or meaning?

C

Exercise erci

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hoose a short passage of poetry and a short passage of prose and take some time to memorize both. Then reflect on the experiences involved in memorizing each. Which was more difficult to get word-perfect? Why? How do you think you might go about memorizing several whole parts for two or three plays, as professional actors did in Shakespeare’s time (and now)?

‘Speaking pictures’: metaphor and imagery Many lines in the Dream (and in fact in all Shakespeare’s plays) express thoughts through visual or figurative images. Sir Philip

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Sidney in A Defence of Poetry (c. 1580) spoke of ‘speaking pictures’, a phrase which is a metaphor itself, as being at the very heart of poetry (‘poesy’): Poesy therefore is an art of imitation . . . that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture – with this end, to teach and delight. (Sidney, 1973, 79–80) Later in the same work he repeats the phrase, saying that poetry adds a dimension to philosophy’s abstractions which ‘lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy’ (Sidney, 1973, 86). Poetry can make us ‘see’ ideas through the verbal picturemaking of images and metaphors. Whether or not he had read Sidney’s Defence, Shakespeare is certainly on the same wavelength, for his use of the ‘speaking pictures’ of imagery and metaphor are among his signature writing tools. Demetrius is not just ‘inconstant’ but ‘spotted [stained]’ (1.1.110); Hermia’s pale cheeks elicit Lysander’s concern expressed as ‘How chance the roses there do fade so fast?’ (1.1.129), and she picks up and develops his image of plants which need water by speaking of her tears as a ‘tempest’: ‘Belike for want of rain, which I could well / Beteem them from the tempest of my eyes’ (1.1.130– 1). To Lysander, love is not just rapidly developing but ‘Brief as the lightning in the collied [blackened] night’ which is ‘devoured’ by ‘the jaws of darkness’ (1.1.141–9 passim). It tells us something about the stolid, common-sense practicality of the artisans that they do not use much poetic imagery except of an incongruous kind: ‘I will roar you and ’twere any nightingale’ (1.2.78). It is both their strength and weakness that in their matter-of-fact way they lack the imagination needed to envisage more complex poetic imagery and metaphor. On the other hand, it tells us much about the predominance of imagination that language which is figurative (Sidney’s ‘figuring forth’) is the main trope running through the scenes in the forest, which is itself an extended metaphor for unexpected and chaotic experiences. Puck shows himself master of word-painting in describing his jokes practised on hapless mortals by changing his shape into material objects:

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I jest to Oberon, and make him smile When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile, Neighing in likeness of a filly foal. And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks, against her lips I bob, And on her withered dewlap pour the ale. The wisest aunt telling the saddest tale Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And ‘Tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole choir hold their hips and laugh, ... (2.1.44–55) (‘Tailor’ is a puzzle, and editors have not satisfactorily explained it, though it seems to have something to do with buttocks.) Puck is the prime agent for physical metamorphosis, changing his own ‘likeness’, the affections of the humans and the appearance of Bottom, and he seems to embody also the related workings of metaphor as a figure of speech with the capacity to change thoughts into vivid images. It is part of the brilliance of the scene in which Titania woos Bottom that it portrays a collision of the two kinds of language, the poetic-figurative idioms of the forest at night voiced by Titania, and the practical lack of imagination of the daytime world in the commands of Bottom to the fairies, whom he addresses as though they are industrious workers like himself, literalizing names like Cobweb and Mustardseed (3.1.170–87) into useful commodities. Unaware that he himself has been turned into a walking metaphor as an asinine man (or into a simile, as a man ‘like an ass’), he objectifies the meanings of the fairies’ names, turning their metaphorical significance into materialities with practical uses. Titania follows in poetry, silencing Bottom’s literalism and reasserting the primacy of imagination and metaphorical transformations in the moonlit forest: titania Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,

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Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently. [Exeunt.] (3.1.188–92) The moon is envisaged through its reflection in water, and dew is its ‘tears’ making flowers moist as though they are crying to witness a sexual assault. ‘Tie up my lover’s tongue’ reverberates with a metaphorical layer, suggesting that Bottom’s braying voice and pedestrian language are at odds with his situation, and must be edited out to make him a true denizen of the imagined forest world. It is impossible to underestimate the frequency and expressive power of Shakespeare’s ‘speaking pictures’, which add layers of meaning to every statement. Although all characters in the play employ images and metaphors, the fairies in their forest-world are in this play the main exponents, as though they are catalytic agents of language.

Exercise erci

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hoose a favourite, heavily ‘pictorial’ passage from the play and see how many images (‘speaking pictures’) you can find in it. How do the words convey images, and what is the cumulative effect of their use?

Responsive listening in dialogues Hearing and listening are as important within the play for readers and ‘audiences’ as for auditors. It seems odd that not much critical attention has been paid to one of Shakespeare’s greatest gifts: his ability to construct dialogue which convinces us that his characters are engaged in believable conversations in which each listens keenly and responds plausibly. Whereas Marlowe’s characters do not often engage in the give and take of conversation because he generally worked through monologues and speeches as set pieces, Shakespeare developed a unique skill in showing his personages engaging with each other in sustained, mutual, verbal interactions based on active, acute responses. He himself had clearly listened analytically to those around him and was so interested in the process of how people

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converse that he tried to replicate it in his dialogues. The clue to this, I suggest, is that he places emphasis on the way characters listen to each other, and respond animatedly to what they hear, rather than simply speaking, however eloquently they can do this too. It is not surprising that a dramatist should be fascinated by an activity which, after all, is a remarkable and underestimated miracle underpinning human communication through language. A linguist puts it this way: Ours is a speaker’s civilization and our linguistics has accordingly concerned itself almost solely with the speaker’s problems . . . The skilful speaker wins praise; the skilful listener, despite the mystery of his achievement, is ignored. (Parker-Rhodes, 1978, xiii) So it is in much Shakespearean criticism. Attention is paid to Shakespeare’s ‘skilful speakers’ but not much to the underlying mechanics of conversation which involve ‘skilful listeners’. Sometimes the point emerges in small and apparently insignificant examples such as this: quince Have you sent to Bottom’s house? Is he come home yet? starveling He cannot be heard of. Out of doubt he is transported. flute If he come not, then the play is marred. It goes not forward. Doth it? quince It is not possible. You have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he. flute No, he hath simply the best wit of any handicraftman in Athens. quince Yea, and the best person too, and he is a very paramour for a sweet voice. flute You must say paragon. A paramour is (God bless us) a thing of naught. (4.2.1–12)

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These are not eloquent speakers but they are surprisingly efficient listeners. They respond closely to each other’s statements: Quince’s concerned question is answered in the negative and he asks another (‘Doth it?’), which is directly answered by Flute (‘It is not possible’). The grammatical connectives, ‘No’ . . . ‘Yea . . .’, show the characters continuing to listen and respond to each other in their concern over Bottom’s non-appearance. Flute is even an acutely critical listener as lexicographer, correcting Quince’s misuse of the word ‘paramour’ – ‘You must say paragon. A paramour is (God bless us) a thing of naught’ – realizing that a paramour in Elizabethan English is a mistress in an adulterous relationship and therefore ‘naught’ (the root of ‘naughty’), provoking his distaste. The exchange is somehow intriguing since Shakespeare need not have given Quince the wrong word, or it could have been left uncorrected as are Bottom’s malapropisms like ‘obscenely’ and ‘disfigure’. The result, however, gives the audience the intimate impression of overhearing an ‘authentic’, responsive conversation in which the interlocutors are seeking genuine understanding in responsive conversations which often take unexpected, digressive turns as they do in our own lives. Nor is it essential to creating this effect that they speak in prose, since poetry can achieve similar effects when characters are listening so closely to each other that they can finish each other’s thoughts, especially if they are in love: hermia O cross, too high to be enthralled to low! lysander Or else misgrafted in respect of years – hermia O spite, too old to be engaged to young! lysander Or else it stood upon the choice of friends – hermia O hell, to choose love by another’s eyes! (1.1.136–40) Each is listening to the other’s content and responding earnestly in kind, thinking along the same lines. Or as a similar device used by Shakespeare, he sometimes provides exchanges which involve rhyming couplets and show lovers responding in mutual ‘sympathy’,

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their listening becoming akin to locking minds and feelings through picking up each other’s rhymes as though reading each other’s thoughts. The rhetorical device in this exchange between Hermia and Lysander is called stichomythia and is especially noteworthy in the early scenes between Romeo and Juliet in their play. We might contrast the lengthy, initial exchange between Titania and Oberon (2.1.60–145) where they are not listening but vehemently stating mutually incompatible points of view. Both are undoubtedly eloquent and poetic speakers, but they are delivering separate monologues in mutually excluding and hostile fashion. In short, they are ostensibly speaking to each other, but not listening, and this presents a refusal to communicate as the key to disharmony in love. Or to put it another way, they are not listening to each other in a negotiating spirit, but listening for trigger words calculated to continue their bickering. It seems that when Shakespeare wants to show conflict and differences of opinion, he can do so in language showing characters not listening and responding to each other in conversational manner, but instead ‘speaking over’ the other. Similarly, Theseus and Hippolyta open 5.1 with separate statements displaying disagreement, especially evident in Theseus’s disdainful dismissal of the lovers’ stories as simply untrue and even mad: hippolyta ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. theseus More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. (5.1.1–3) Theseus seems to like the sound of his own voice as he intones what seems to be a rehearsed hobbyhorse, and he does not even hear Hippolyta’s more tentative comments in disagreement. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:

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That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (5.1.4–17) Shakespeare is having some fun here, at his own expense as well as Theseus’s. Condemning himself as a ‘lunatic’ poet, it is his ‘shaping fantasies’ and ‘imagination’ which are changing the reality as seen by ‘cool reason’, and giving to ‘airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ in his regular use of metaphorical language. He is, ironically, turning a humble actor into the Duke of Athens, as surely as a lover sees ‘Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’. However, the poet encourages the audience to consider an alternative to his scepticism, by giving Hippolyta a voice of credulous wonderment in the face of a story which holds ‘something of great constancy’: hippolyta But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images And grows to something of great constancy, But howsoever strange and admirable. (5.1.123–7) Theseus seems to ignore her statement, allowing the two contrasting attitudes to love and poetry to stand side by side, unreconciled, raising questions to be pondered in the next chapter. When we pause to consider such detailed examples of how the different characters maintain their conversations in varying degrees of understanding, we begin to see the play as a whole demonstrating Shakespeare’s subtle discriminations about human interactions through sometimes fallible language. By responding to tone and feelings, people at times fully understand each other even when they get individual words wrong, or refuse to listen even when the words are right. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare demonstrates

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a skill replicated in all of his plays – his extraordinarily acute understanding of the ‘mystery’ of responsive listeners engaged in social and emotional interactions, the fruit no doubt of his own astute capacity to listen to how conversation works.

Exercise erci

C

hoose a scene and analyse how successfully (or not) each speaker responds to, and links up with, the sense of the previous speaker’s words (unless one speaker is not ‘cooperating’ in the process of mutual meaning-making). Think of them having a conversation responding to each other, rather than each delivering a ‘speech’ or independent monologue. This might lead you on to consider how important the act of listening is in everyday conversational exchanges in ‘our’ world.

CHAPTER FIVE

Languages of Love The nuptial hour To Elizabethans, Theseus’s word ‘lunatic’ carried a more specific meaning than ours, indicating feelings under ‘lunar’ influence, governed by the changing moon. Obviously throughout the play there are references to moonlight, and it is even brought on stage as a man with ‘lantern, dog, and bush of thorn’ (5.1.134), so its spell palpably hangs over the action as a whole. But still, Theseus leaves no doubt that he believes love lies in the realm of fantasy and is the kind of insubstantial ‘airy nothing’ that might be dreamed up in the overheated brain of a poet. Shakespeare’s subtle joke here, evident to an acute listener, is that Theseus himself is the product of poetry, an ‘antique fable’, since the figure was fictional, or at most having only a tenuous historical basis, and this character’s anti-poetic polemic is given to him by a poet named Shakespeare. Moreover, Theseus includes himself amongst the lovers who will ‘outsleep the coming morn’ (5.1.355) after the celebration of his own marriage. The dramatic contradictions between words and actions may lead us into a discussion about the kinds of love represented in the play, and how they are the product of language. Suppose someone asks you, ‘Am I right, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a happy rom-com, full of laughs and all about carefree love?’ How do you respond? Well, maybe it can be seen in this unproblematical way, if we maintain a stance of observational distance from the emotional storms depicted, and if it is performed in a consistently light-hearted way, playing for laughs. But if the 105

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actors are directed to highlight the suffering of the characters they play, then other less harmonious perspectives emerge. In particular, the Dream can be said to ask as many questions as it answers about what that mysterious, overused word ‘love’ actually means. The answers forthcoming are neither entirely reassuring nor unambiguously comic. Whatever other issues it deals with (imagination, metamorphosis, illusion), the dominant subject is undeniably love. However, when we inspect the various ways in which lovers express their feelings in the heat of the moment, we find that love is not a single, easily definable or consistent emotion. It operates differently from person to person, couple to couple, and is lined with dark shadows, cruelty and pain. Accounts which confidently assert that the play moves towards, and celebrates, the heterosexual institution of marriage, providing ‘an exorcism of the fears attendant on marriage’ (Carroll, 1985, 154), downplay the very real doubts about the tenuousness and arbitrary foundations on which is built each of the amatory couples. These include Theseus and Hippolyta as both mature and with histories of former lovers; the married, quarrelling Titania and Oberon; and the emotionally oscillating adolescents Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius. All these are collectively parodied in the bizarre, adulterous coupling of a ‘monster’ with the fairy queen. In looking at each relationship in turn, we should pay attention to the language in which feelings are communicated, not simply in terms of what lovers say, but also how they speak. Language is matched to constantly varying psychological content, leading to an ever-shifting and highly ambiguous evaluation of love. If Theseus and Hippolyta look forward to their ‘nuptial hour’, then we may presume their relationship is one based on love of a kind. But if love it is that holds them together affectively, it seems to be of a very qualified kind. Theseus, referring to the fact that his betrothed was a spoil of war, addresses her in these disturbing terms: ‘Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’ (1.1.16–17). At the very least it hints more at an arranged, politically and diplomatically motivated liaison between previously warring nations, the Athenians and Amazons, rather than sincere feelings of ‘love’ between individuals. The Arden editor darkly hints at ‘a suggestion of violence, even rape, emphasized by the phallic connotations of sword’, and adds, ‘Theseus’ defeat of Hippolyta in war lurks behind their new relationship’ (Chaudhuri,

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2018, 122). We later find out that Hippolyta is far from Theseus’s first conquest, since he had in the past abducted and ‘ravished’ Perigenia, and has had affairs with Aegle, Ariadne and Antiopa, each of whom he abandoned, seduced, we learn, by Titania, the fairy queen (2.1.76–80). His record of promiscuity and violence towards women is perhaps not a good prognosis for marriage. Oberon also is accused by Titania of ‘versing love / To amorous Phillida’ and having a fling with Hippolyta: Why art thou here Come from the farthest steep of India, But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon, Your buskined mistress and your warrior love, To Theseus must be wedded; and you come To give their bed joy and prosperity. (2.1.68–73) All the potential models for marital bliss turn out to have histories of fickle philandering. Some productions these days, such as the one mounted at Shakespeare’s Globe in London in 2016, indicate through her body language and near-silence, active resistance and resentment on Hippolyta’s part. This very overt stage trope signalling the hostility and humiliation of Hippolyta seems to date back to a series of 1960s productions, in one of which she was brought on stage in a cage (Chaudhuri, 2018, 80). It may be significant that she speaks only the four lines in the opening exchange and then remains silent for the rest of the scene, as though holding herself aloof (McGuire, 1985, ch. 1). Since nowadays the same actors often double Oberon and Titania, their portrayal of Theseus and Hippolyta also suggests a latent mirroring of the blatant conflict between the fairy monarchs. There may be another clue to differences in the opening dialogue, insofar as the man measures time by clock-time, reason and wakeful daylight (‘four happy days’), the woman by night and dreaming. To make hostility so graphically obvious may be too exaggerated and literal for some critics, coming as the scene does at the beginning of what is clearly signalled as a comic plot. The scene is just as often and effectively played as a ceremonial statement confirming a marriage of equals, and in this sense a stately declaration of love in a public setting without deeper emotional currents. It is up to you

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to decide how much you want to emphasize such hints, if at all, and whether to prioritize the ‘martial’ at the expense of the ‘marital’. What comes later, however, adds weight to the suggestion that it is not quite love that lies behind this marriage, or at least not love of the same kind that is driving the younger characters. They seem to disagree with each other in ways that might be uncomfortable. Most significantly, Theseus’ famous statement after the events of the night seems a sceptical and unqualified dismissal of love as an emotion unworthy of adults with ‘cool reason’, and more typical of ‘madmen’ (5.1.3). If he is entering the marriage as a lover himself, the attitude towards love expressed by the character is undercut by his own logic, which turns himself into an ‘airy nothing’, as an admission of non-existence except as a poetic illusion and just as deluded by his ‘desire’ as the young lovers he is judging. Theseus might be a good subject for a psychoanalyst, since his reluctance to countenance fantasy and love seems based more on repression and even fear than ‘reason’, given his lack of sympathy towards Hermia in the first scene, and the reports of his history of serial seductions and violence towards women. Hippolyta is more hesitant and non-committal, admitting that there is too much of a ‘strange and admirable’ consistency shared between the different accounts given by the lovers of the nocturnal events simply to disbelieve or dismiss. Whatever we conclude about how to view the attitudes of Theseus and Hippolyta, we may acknowledge it is their language that has already raised a diversity of possibilities in a play dealing so insistently with the truth of imaginative thinking and the power of love.

Young love We are given a new range of possibilities in defining love with the entrance of Egeus and the younger characters, as though Shakespeare is systematically setting up a kind of anatomy of the word’s distinctions as it applies in different kinds of human relationships. The feelings of the waspish, sternly patriarchal Egeus towards his daughter are overwhelmingly ones of ownership rather than filial affection. To him, Hermia’s love for Lysander is at most peripheral and even irrelevant in the matter of a prospective marriage partner. His sole conviction is that it is a father’s right and duty to dictate

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who will marry his daughter Hermia, and he decrees that it should be Demetrius. Demanding the rigorous application of Athenian law, he is prepared inhumanely to consign his daughter either to a permanent state of celibacy in a nunnery or to death rather than give way, and in this he is supported by the legalistic Duke. As if anticipating Theseus’s equation of love and madness, Egeus suspects love as ‘bewitchment’, practised by a deceitful and silver-tongued Lysander (1.1.24–38). Shakespeare in his comedies, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onwards (in that play evidenced by a character significantly named Proteus for his changeableness), frequently links love with eloquent poetic blandishments. The lovers in Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example, ‘woo in rhyme’, with ‘taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical . . .’ (5.2.405–8). The description of the lover in Much Ado About Nothing suggests a similar link between love and poetry: ‘He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and now he is turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes’ (2.3.18–20). In Shakespearean romantic comedy, sexual attraction is intimately linked with and expressed through extravagant poetic language. The negative emphasis in Egeus’s attitude is upon love as no more than a spurious creation of one who adopts the tricks and linguistic ingenuity of a poet to seduce his daughter. Blandishments and ‘bewitching’ persuasions, delivering with ‘feigning voice, verses of feigning love’, describe the lyrical lines written by the poet who is the author of this scene. As in the case of Theseus, whose very existence is little more than a theatrical illusion, the joke is also on Egeus, who has been created by the very same tricksy, feigning poetdramatist: Shakespeare himself. But more than this, when the play is done and we look back at the events which have created (or fabricated) Demetrius’s love for Helena, we might even conclude that Egeus in a sense was right all along. Demetrius’s new-found love for Helena has been created by processes of ‘bewitchment’ practised by fairy agents using the juice of a flower and its antidote, which are claimed to have magical powers respectively to bring about love and take it away. At the end, Shakespeare gives no right of reply to Egeus when he is overruled by the Duke (uncharacteristically, we might think), but there does seem enough evidence to sustain a core veracity in the old man’s opinion of love. However, after the events in the ‘green world’, love itself is now at

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least valued if not fully understood. The consistent love between Hermia and Lysander, despite its dislodgement by Puck’s mistake, still seems mutual and sincere enough to represent a positive model. Helena’s love also survives the severe challenges posed by the bewildering behavioural changes of Demetrius and Lysander. Her love may be too masochistic for our full endorsement, but at least it is consistent and is finally rewarded. She is a prototype for Shakespeare’s later character, named Helen, in All’s Well That Ends Well, who finally gets her man even though he seems as callous and cruel as Demetrius. In historical terms, Shakespeare was writing at a time when attitudes to love were changing away from the absolute patriarchal authority espoused by Egeus and Theseus and towards a concept of ‘companionate marriage’ in which mutual affection and a degree of free choice are valued, which is the version espoused by Hermia and Lysander. This was a development from the Protestant Reformation, differing from older attitudes when the Roman Catholic insistence on hierarchy and male privilege prevailed. Hermia’s ‘bold’ resistance to her father aligns the play in favour of the new pitted against the old, but in this it plays upon no doubt conflicting attitudes in its audience, between the old and young, conservative and radical. One critic has described the historical moment of profound social change as one where a ‘faultline’ in the culture was being played out. Hermia is a victim caught between the expectation of filial obedience and her own love (Sinfield, 2006, 69–70), choosing to disobey and elope. In the final analysis, it might be difficult to decide whether the play celebrates marriage or emotional dissidence, since in a sense both are vindicated at the end. Egeus is not presented sympathetically and he speaks more from dogma than emotional understanding, just as Hermia speaks good sense in favour of her choice of lover. But given pre-modern norms, there would still have been parents in a 1595 audience, like Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, who would have supported prudent, arranged marriage as a decision based on their own love for a daughter whose future happiness was their prime concern. This position has spokesmen within the play in Egeus and Theseus, who both regard love as an irrationally compulsive state, and romantic love in particular as a dangerous myth based on little more than adolescent infatuation. Even Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is cautiously wary of a love that seems to her ‘too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; / Too like the

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lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say “It lightens” ’ (2.2.18–20). Another Shakespearean young woman in love, Rosalind in As You Like It, can mock the state in others as ‘merely a madness’ (3.2.389) and built upon cliches: ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’, but she cannot resist it when she is herself ‘fathom deep’ in love (4.1.197). To Shakespearean lovers, even the sceptical Rosalind, they see their driving feelings of desire as offering no alternative to action. Lysander and Hermia try to put into language an overwhelming emotional experience which is ‘Brief as the lightning in the collied night’ (1.1.145) and instantaneously devoured by ‘the jaws of darkness’: ‘So quick bright things come to confusion’ (1.1.148–9). Lysander’s imagery, identical to Juliet’s, indicates that the language of love is as metaphorical and lyrical as the imaginative language of poetry itself, and Hermia makes the connection with ‘fancy’ as the agent that allows lovers to maintain belief in their destiny, even in adversity: If then true lovers have been ever crossed, It stands as an edict in destiny. Then let us teach our trial patience Because it is a customary cross, As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs, Wishes and tears, poor fancy’s followers. (1.1.150–4) In a stumbling way, groping for some understanding of an apparently irrational force, Helena poignantly expresses a different conceptual model of love, based this time on classical myth: Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. (1.1.232–5) Multiple ironies play around the speech, showing the imaginative interconnectedness and ambivalences at work in the play. It links back to Hermia’s retort to Theseus and his reply: ‘hermia I would my father looked but with my eyes. / theseus Rather your eyes

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must with his judgement look’ (1.1.56–7); and her exclamation, ‘O hell, to choose love by another’s eyes!’ (1.1.140). It points forward to the events in the forest, when an elixir applied to the eyes of Lysander and Demetrius seems to indicate that the mind has little to do with love. The same thing happens to Titania, and her astonished perception on ‘awakening’ suggests that the eyes can cause strong repulsion as much as love: ‘O how mine eyes do loathe his visage now’ (4.1.78). However, nor is the mind any more reliable than feelings. Despite Lysander’s declaration in the forest that he has grown up into ‘reason’ and ‘ripe’ maturity, we know that when he speaks the words his mind is deranged: Not Hermia, but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove? The will of man is by his reason swayed, And reason says you are the worthier maid. Things growing are not ripe until their season; So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason. And touching now the point of human skill, Reason becomes the marshal to my will And leads me to your eyes, where I o’erlook Love’s stories, written in love’s richest book. (2.2.117–26) Not coincidentally, the thought of love as transforming the mind’s perceptions anticipates Theseus’s bundling up of lovers and poets in the same company, for both share this habit of ‘value-adding’ to appearances, transposing ‘things base and vile’ into ‘form and dignity’. Somewhat disturbingly, Shakespeare was later to use a similar formulation by Desdemona in Othello, ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’, not foreseeing how his own ‘mind’ can be altered from love to hate, this time not caused by a magic flower called love-in-idleness, but by a manipulative and undermining third party, Iago. Lysander and Hermia are beginning to realize that young love is dangerous and alluring in its capacity to illuminate the love object in a possibly falsifying way, but equally a state which cannot be suppressed or denied by divisions of class and age (1.1.132–40). Demetrius may be a little more experienced in love in his earlier couirtship of Helena, but with an unpromisingly inconsistent track record:

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Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head, Made love to Nedar’s daughter Helena And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes, Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry Upon this spotted and inconstant man. (1.1.107–10) The sad fact is that later both men, when under the influence of the magic potion, will be induced to ‘choose love by another’s eyes’ and as a consequence prove themselves ‘spotted and inconstant’. The word ‘dotes’, although used by Lysander to describe Helena’s almost devoutly religious sincerity, provides a related gloss on love elsewhere in the play. It is used later with the derogatory implication of superficiality, an obsessional passion, when Oberon commands Puck: Fetch me that flower: the herb I showed thee once. The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid, Will make or man or woman madly dote Upon the next live creature that it sees. (2.1.169–72) His plan is to make Titania ‘dote on in extremity’ (3.2.3) some unsightly creature, and her own repeated use of the word later to Bottom shows that the plan works: ‘O how I love thee! How I dote on thee’ (4.1.44). The word is used frequently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, invariably to describe the kind of love which is based on uncritical and often foolish adoration, to be suspected rather than acted upon. It is significant that the result of applying love-inidleness to the eyes is close to an addiction, a drugged and infatuated state, which, even without administering the flower, is the condition of ‘doting’ in an automaton-like way. One effect of love as random ‘doting’ is to make the four lovers at times seem interchangeable, as though they have melded into one personality without differentiation of character, personifying shallow infatuation. Another kind of love is at least hinted at when Hermia and Helena speak to each other in the absence of the men. In a beautiful image, Helena nostalgically recalls their ‘schooldays’ friendship, childhood innocence’, likening the state to a growing together, ‘Like to a double cherry, seeming parted / But yet an union in partition, / Two lovely

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berries moulded on one stem’ (3.2. 208–11). This could be seen as a contrasting glimpse of same-sex, platonic attachment, which is felt as steady and dependable companionship, and threatened by the inexplicably mercurial new feelings that are assailing them and pulling them apart. In the early stage of dawning love there remains a strong, nostalgic bond forged in childhood, as another kind of love again, even as the fault lines are emerging and turning friendship into rivalry and envy: hermia I frown upon him, yet he loves me still. helena O that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill! hermia I give him curses, yet he gives me love. helena O that my prayers could such affection move! hermia The more I hate, the more he follows me. helena The more I love, the more he hateth me. hermia His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine. helena None but your beauty. Would that fault were mine! (1.1.194–201) When sexual rivalry and jealousy intervene, the idyll is shattered, providing a small cameo of leaving innocence for a state of turbulence, division and anger: helena O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd. She was a vixen when she went to school; And though she be but little, she is fierce. hermia Little again? Nothing but low and little? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her. (3.2.323–8)

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Now caught up in the maelstrom of inexplicably confusing feelings and placed in strange situations, Helena’s plight, as one loving Demetrius but unloved by him, provides another permutation of love, the kind that is unrequited in a very unequal power distribution. Significantly, however, it is only the men, Demetrius and Lysander, who change their loves while Hermia and Helena remain consistent in their affections.

Exercise erci Does love look with the eyes or the mind in the play?

Jealousy and adultery We next witness another kind of amatory experience linking the only couple who are actually married, and this may be an ominous foreshadowing of future conflict for Theseus and Hippolyta and the young couples. The relationship between Titania and Oberon is sardonically observed at a moment of extreme conflict, but placed incongruously in the context of a fairy kingdom. The psychological situation is deftly summarized in the conversation between the Fairy and Puck. We learn that part of the problem lies in Oberon’s jealous wish to have as his own attendant ‘A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king’ (2.1.22) who is in Titania’s retinue, and that trouble has been brewing for some time: And now, they never meet in grove or green, By fountain clear or spangled starlight sheen, But they do square [quarrel], that all their elves, for fear, Creep into acorn cups and hide them there. (2.1.28–31) With the unfortunately coincidental entrance of both Oberon and Titania, we witness at first hand their angry exchange, and the language is ratcheted up in intensity as ‘troubles of the bed’ are revealed:

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oberon Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania. titania What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence. I have forsworn his bed and company. (2.1.60–2) We find the acrimonious wrangling over the changeling child involves complex issues stemming from deeper, mutual suspicion in gender relations, and Titania significantly joins Hermia and Hippolyta (possibly) in defying male domination. Oberon ineffectually challenges his wife as a ‘rash wanton’ who denies her husband’s status. She attacks him as promiscuous, accusing him of having courted the human Hippolyta who is now returning for her marriage to Theseus, while Oberon ripostes by noting Titania’s love for Theseus, which was so strong she had seduced him away from his other lovers. The jealousy runs deeper than simply the issue of the Indian boy. It also has wider consequences, as Titania describes how, given the close relationship between the fairy world and natural processes, their violent bickering has caused extreme weather events for the human world, disrupting the seasons and destroying crops. They trade accusations of adultery, Oberon with ‘amorous Phillida’ and the ‘bouncing amazon’ Hippolyta, Titania with Theseus (2.1.65–73). They then focus on the specific struggle over the changeling child, the king suggesting that Titania’s capitulation to his demands could reconcile their differences, which the queen adamantly refuses. In the lyrical and erotic passage quoted in the previous chapter, she describes her beach-side friendship with the boy’s mother, ‘a votaress of my order’, when she was pregnant in the ‘spiced Indian air’, concluding, But she, being mortal, of that boy did die, And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake, I will not part with him. (2.1.135–7) It is another glimpse of a touching, exclusively female friendship, recaptured as a lost time from the remembered past, paralleling Hermia’s and Helena’s recollected pre-pubertal relationship, and standing in contrast to the prevailing male dominance and inter-sex

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conflicts depicted in the play’s action. Titania’s lyrical language itself grows ‘big-bellied’ with its exotic imagery opening expansively like a sail in the wind. Feeling is carried by the sound of the poetry and the exotic, oceanic imagery, as well as being inherent in the sentiment expressed, opening up a rare window of imagined peace. The touching aspect is that immortals like Titania will always outlast the mortal, so such love cannot last, a central point explored by Shakespeare in his poem Venus and Adonis. The estranged monarchs part in anger, and Oberon vows revenge by charging Puck to obtain the juice of Cupid’s flower ‘love-inidleness’ (conjectured to be the wild pansy or heartsease) to use as a mind-altering drug which will make Titania fall in love with whatever creature, however loathsome, she sets eyes upon when she awakes from sleep. This stratagem seems to be a self-prophesying acting-out of Oberon’s suspicious fear of his wife’s promiscuousness. In the range of lexicons of love offered in the play, we observe in this scene anger and jealousy within marriage as a disruptive and destructive set of emotions which might be categorized, putting it mildly, as suspicious and possessive love, alongside the example of what might be described as platonic admiration and attachment between Titania and her remembered votaress.

Exercise erci

T

o what extent does the conflict depicted in the quarrel between Titania and Oberon mirror potential problems in other relationships in the play?

Love-hate Attention now turns back, through the eyes of the ‘invisible’ onlooker Oberon, to the young lovers, their respective feelings marked initially not by love-hate but by love and hate as mutually exclusive states. Demetrius is unequivocal that he ‘hates’ Helena, that the very sight of her makes him ‘sick’, and he threatens to rape her. She is equally adamant in her obsessive love which drives her to humiliating and rather shocking self-abasement close to ‘fawning’ self-flagellation:

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I am your spaniel, and Demetrius, The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, loose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you. What worser place can I beg in your love (And yet a place of high respect with me) Than to be used as you use your dog? (2.1.203–10) By using the dehumanizing image of a spurned dog or ‘spaniel’ against herself, Helena is dangerously close to admitting collusion in her situation. Hermia, by contrast, turns it against the transformed Demetrius: ‘Out, dog, out, cur!’ (3.2.65). Helena’s feelings may be termed love, but of a degrading and compulsive kind, in the light of the man’s violent rejection and threats. Her behaviour in love is comparable to Titania’s ‘dotage’ on Bottom, suggesting that the kind of love Helena feels is close to the drugged state of Titania. However, Helena does show an understanding that the situation is especially common for women. In this case, love may be helplessly subservient, downtrodden and self-abasing, but the fault lies partly in a gender imbalance: Fie, Demetrius! Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex. We cannot fight for love as men may do; We should be wooed, and were not made to woo. I’ll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the hand I love so well. (2.1.239–44) Although not assaulted, as she seems to invite, she is abandoned by Demetrius and left to ‘the mercy of the wild beasts’. For Helena in particular, the nocturnal events in the forest are a nightmare rather than a dream, compounding her low self-esteem by comparing herself in envy to Hermia, again using bestial imagery, as ‘ugly as a bear’ and a ‘monster’ (2.1.98, 101). Things get even worse for her when Lysander awakes under the influence of the love juice and declares her his new love, teaching him ‘Love’s stories, written in

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love’s richest books’ (2.1.126). His unexpected protestations of love are greeted by Helena with horror as ‘keen mockery’ and ‘scorn’, to be intensified when Demetrius also pursues her later under his equally surprising switch from hate to protestations of love. However, it is clear that in the forest any of the four young lovers could be plunged into such predicaments, as though individuality is suppressed and their identities rendered interchangeable in the bewildering sequence of events. They are playthings of forces literally beyond their control or understanding, as Shakespeare’s mordant comment on the kind of apparently arbitrary love they are experiencing.

Parodying love Even the first scene presenting the artisans under Peter Quince’s direction, discussing the play they are hoping to perform after the marriage, tells us something about love, or at least how it was presented on the Elizabethan stage. In all the laughter, it is easy to overlook the intention of the ‘mechanicals’ to present a tragic story of love which will bring tears to the eyes. The classical story of Pyramus and Thisbe, from one of Shakespeare’s favourite books, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was a love story with a tragic ending. Despite the unintentionally comic execution by the amateur actors, Quince’s version follows the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which lovers living in adjacent houses are forbidden by their quarrelling families to speak to each other, and must converse through a hole in the common wall. They arrange to meet secretly at Ninus’ tomb but Pyramus, seeing Thisbe’s veil stained with her blood, assumes she has been killed by a lioness and in grief kills himself. But Thisbe, having escaped her close encounter with the lioness, now arrives, and finding Pyramus dead kills herself with his sword. With his penchant for oxymorons, Quince leaves open the genre, describing it as ‘The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ (1.2.11–12), which in the event does, with strange accuracy, describe the paradoxical tone of the artisans’ performance. Bottom asks, ‘What is Pyramus? A Lover or a tyrant?’ (1.2.19), specifying two Elizabethan genres: tyrant tragedy (such as Richard III and Macbeth) and tragedy of love (such as Romeo and

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Juliet and Othello). Stating the former as his preference, Bottom gives a sample snippet of verse language used in older, preShakespearean plays in showing how he would play Hercules, as quoted in an earlier chapter and beginning ‘The raging rocks / And shivering shocks . . .’ (1.2.27–34). Shakespeare is mocking the dogtrot rhythms of the short lines, the forced rhymes and exaggerated alliteration of his predecessors. But Bottom himself concedes that playing a lover in a love tragedy ‘will ask some tears in the true performing’ (1.2.21). ‘If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes. I will move storms; I will condole, in some measure’ (1.2.22–3). As usual in Bottom’s language, ‘condole’ seems subtly wrong since it usually means to express sympathy with somebody who is grief-stricken. He may mean something like ‘move the audience in a more gentle or subdued way’, or mollify (soften the distressing effect). Who knows? In the scene in which the artisans rehearse their scripted lines, Shakespeare uses another rather antiquated verse metre, six-stress iambics: ‘Most radiant Pyramus, most lily-white of hue, / Of colour like the red rose on triumphant brier’ (3.1.88–9). Technically called Alexandrines, these lines had been adapted from medieval French poetry, and by Shakespeare’s day were reminiscent of earlier English poetry in the mid-sixteenth century, again showing Shakespeare imitating his predecessors’ style of love poetry. It is not quite the equally old-fashioned ‘eight and six’ (a line of eight stressed syllables followed by one of six) promised by Quince for his epilogue (never delivered as it is curtailed by Theseus), though it is comparable. The effect of using something close to a poetic style much derided as ‘poulter’s measure’ by the 1590s is to ridicule an outdated way of expressing love in dramatic poetry. Instead of arousing sympathy for lovers, its effect is parody, heightening the comedy and preempting any serious identification with Pyramus and Thisbe as lovers in this ‘homespun’ and ‘swaggering’ (3.1.72) presentation. In the comic play-within-a-play ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, so close in plot if not in effect to Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare provides a parody of his own tragedy. Even within the Dream, the fate of Hermia and Lysander is initially analogous to those of Romeo and Juliet and of Pyramus and Thisbe. The set of parallels demonstrates, if nothing else, that love in drama could be presented as comedy, tragedy or tragicomedy, or simply laughed to scorn, in whatever way the playwright should choose. It is an enigma, full of contradictions.

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Monstrous love: beauty and the beast Puck’s ‘translation’ of Bottom into an ass-headed monster paves the way for the greatest aberration of love in all literature, Titania’s induced amorousness for the grotesque figure. The seed for this situation may have derived primarily from Shakespeare’s childhood acquaintance with the folk tale of ‘beauty and the beast’, even if here the effect is purely comic, rather than (as in the tale) proposing an alternative capacity of love to allow the lover to construct the beloved as generously as she wishes. However, the kind of adulterous love expressed by the fairy queen for the ‘deformed’ mortal, however incongruous and illusionary, turns out to be arguably the only complex and fully felt desire voiced in the play. It is overwhelmingly marked by bodily attraction with all Titania’s senses awakened: ‘Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note. / So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape’ (3.1.134–5). Although she is aware of Bottom’s ‘mortal grossness’ (154), she is determined to treat him as another ‘changeling’ to remain with her in fairyland. There are curious touches in her imagery that suggest love may be a force that can be cruel in building upon others’ misery (as Helena is victimized by Demetrius’ love for Hermia): honey-bags are stolen from bees to feed the love object and provide light for him (162–4), and the wings of butterflies are plucked to make fans to keep him cool (166–7). Her emphasis on getting him to bed as quickly (and silently) as possible enhances the sexuality and eroticism driving her feelings and language alike, invoking as she does a weeping moon and weeping flowers, and examples of ‘enforced chastity’ (a double-edged phrase which could mean either ‘forced to remain chaste’ as Hermia advises Lysander, or something close to rape). ‘Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently’ (3.1.192) is the oddest touch, in its expression of apparent violence in tying up Bottom’s tongue simply to shut him up. At every level the scene represents a more dangerous, carnal version of physical love than is represented elsewhere in the play. Some avant-garde productions leave little to the imagination in visually making exclusively physical attraction the prime point of the liaison, as a love that looks not with the mind but with the eyes, infected as they are. Coming soon after Helena has been threatened with rape by Demetrius, the invasively violent images seem to suggest a dark, possessive greediness underlining love in the wild forest environment.

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Meanwhile, Bottom himself is phlegmatically impervious to any mutual feelings of attraction, instead simply wallowing in the attention of the fairies and their mistress, satisfying his creature comforts and sagely explaining the situation: ‘And yet to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends’ (3.1.139–41). Ironically the author of the play may have used this figure as his spokesman, since ‘reason and love keep little company’ in relation to the young, human quartet of lovers, and Theseus as the voice of ‘cool reason’ does not show understanding of love in any of its guises. Anarchy ensues following Puck’s intervention, which sets both Lysander and Demetrius pursuing Helena while this time Hermia is sidelined and derided. For the four lovers it is an emotionally disastrous roller coaster that further disorientates them, turning the wild aspect of the forest into an externalization of their chaotic feelings. Helena’s unrequited love for Demetrius and Hermia’s increasing confusion can no longer be contained and begin to boil over in mutual recriminations. Their ‘tit-for-tat’, spiteful exchanges, depending on verbal repetition, are amongst Shakespeare’s most frequent rhetorical devices for underscoring heightened emotions (Palfrey, 2011, 58). In the apparently violent circumstances, Hermia is driven to accusing Demetrius of murdering Lysander, which he denies: demetrius You spend your passion on a misprised mood. I am not guilty of Lysander’s blood, Nor is he dead, for aught that I can tell. (3.2.74–6) ‘Misprision’ (used by Oberon to Puck), the root of ‘misprised’, is something of a favourite word for Shakespeare in his comedies, meaning more than simply ‘mistake’ or ‘miss-seeing’, but instead evaluating wrongly (mis-prizing) and implying a misguided emotional state in which minds do not meet and confusion reigns. It is a common state in all the comedies – The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night – and in some ways it is the basic principle of Shakespearean comedy itself. Misprision rules in the Forest of Athens, its most

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spectacular manifestation as false valuing being Titania’s love for the ass-headed Bottom. For Puck, who has from the start confessed to a taste for playing sadistic tricks on mortals, it is all high comic entertainment or ‘sport’: ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (3.2.115): Then will two at once woo one: That must needs be sport alone. And those things do best please me That befall preposterously. (3.2.118–21) Audiences and readers may take their pick as to whether love has become an amusing ‘sport’ or a ‘hell’ (3.2.145), depending on how we distribute our sympathies. What is regarded as ‘sport’ for a detached observer is cruelty for involved lovers, a fact which sums up the comic presentation of love in which the audience laughs at the distresses of lovers – classic schadenfreude to be sure. In the ensuing action the words ‘sport’ and ‘hate’ alternate, and the language violently tends to the latter, once again expressed through negative animal imagery: lysander Hang off, thou cat, thou burr, vile thing let loose, Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent. hermia Why are you grown so rude? What change is this, Sweet love? lysander Thy love? Out, tawny Tartar, out! Out, loathed medicine; O hated potion, hence. hermia Do you not jest? (3.2.260–4) ‘Tawny Tartar’ has a racial overtone, referring to Hermia’s dark hair and likening her in a similar fashion to the hostile Western view of Turks in the Crusades. Vituperation and threats of physical harm are rampant, and despite Puck’s promise to make amends, the misery will not yet end for them in an episode where love turns to hate and hate to love in the blink of an eye.

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‘And all things shall be peace’ However, a change in imagery and perspective signals that the disruptions and supernatural events of the night are drawing to a close, that dawn will restore harmony, ‘and all things shall be peace’ (3.2.377). Apart from Oberon, who has special dispensation, the supernatural agents have only night-time in which to operate. Dawn will end their wanderings and they must resolve the confusions before then: robin My fairy lord, this must be done with haste, For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger, At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all, That in cross-ways and woods have burial, Already to their wormy beds are gone. For fear lest day should look their shames upon, They wilfully themselves exile from light, And must for ay consort with black-browed night. (3.2.378–87) Yet again there is an obvious, dark underside to Puck’s language, at odds with what we might expect in the genre of comedy. The ‘damned spirits’ who are buried outside consecrated ground are suicides, while ‘wormy beds’ invoke recently dead bodies, and ‘black-browed night’ conjures the doom-laden atmosphere of Macbeth rather than sitting comfortably in a romantic comedy of love. Oberon as a ‘spirit of another sort’ can ‘sport’ in the sunrise, but he knows the problems must be resolved before all the sleepers wake. He expresses the hope that the ‘night’s accidents’ will in daylight seem to the victims ‘But as the fierce vexation of a dream’ (4.1.67–8). His phrase encapsulates a set of paradoxes running through the play. It is a kind of ‘dream’ representing a spectrum of different versions of love, which seems to indicate a harmonious state of being, but here plumbs depths of primitive (‘fierce’) and troubling (‘vexatious’) emotional states. Oberon’s prophecy is realized and the sleeping characters do awake from the ‘night’s accidents’ (4.1.67) in new-found peace, as

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‘pairs of faithful lovers’ (4.1.90) looking back on the ‘night’s accidents’. Titania’s drugged state is antidoted and harmony is restored to the fairy kingdom. Bottom, after his once-in-a-lifetime ego trip of pampered contentment in spending a night with the fairy queen, has his ass’s head removed, and he can return to his fellow thespians and proceed to a different kind of self-aggrandizing moment in the limelight of the stage before the Duke. His memories of the night are as hazy and confused as those of the young, mortal lovers. For them, love’s conundrums are sorted out with externally applied love juice, not really depending on changes of heart but an application of crude mathematics (‘Yet but three? Come one more. / Two of both kinds make up four’ (3.2.437–8)), and by Theseus’s unexpected clemency towards Hermia in overruling Egeus. The young lovers drop their sing-song speeches of rhyming couplets and adopt the apparently ‘grown-up’ unrhymed iambic pentameters, as they reflect on their bewildering experiences: demetrius These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds. hermia Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double. helena So methinks; And I have found Demetrius, like a jewel Mine own, and not mine own. demetrius Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. (4.1.186–94) No wonder Demetrius in particular is baffled, as in a sense he is not really ‘awake’, since he is the one left under the influence of love-inidleness, though there seems no reason to doubt it will not be a permanent state. It might be pointed out, however, that none of the lovers at this stage express anything like uninhibited joy as we might expect, but merely bewilderment, seeing things ‘with parted eye’. Of course their situation may not have sunk in yet, but even so, might we not have expected some kind of rejoicing? It is easy to argue that

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this play, more than most, concludes on a note of conflict-resolution, fulfilment and complete peace (Garrison and Pivetti, 2019, ch. 3), and yet some doubts may lurk in the general spirit of amity. In a play riddled with linguistic, emotional and tonal contradictions, what more apt way to conclude than with a playwithin-a-play, another ‘sport’ or ‘entertainment’ reflecting or refracting in its distortions the bizarrely ambiguous events of the night? A playlet which is paradoxically billed as ‘tedious brief’ and ‘very tragical mirth’, presenting a classical love tragedy in a manner that is pure – if unintended – farce: Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? That is hot ice and wondrous swarthy snow. How shall we find the concord of this discord? (5.1.56–60 passim) Finding ‘concord of this discord’ sums up the conclusion of Shakespeare’s play, which can itself be seen as ‘merry and tragical’. But there are still problematical aspects of love left over. Theseus and Hippolyta, even on the day and night of their marriage, express disquietingly strong disagreement over the play. The Duke, having earlier dismissed the story of the lovers as at best poetic licence and at worst madness, is now indulgently forgiving of the flaws in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, choosing instead to value the good-hearted spirit behind the performance which, he reminds us, is put on to celebrate his own exalted status as Duke: ‘Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity / In least speak most, to my capacity’ (5.1.104–5). Hippolyta, however, after feeling able to respect the lovers’ story, is entirely critical of an occasion where painful incompetence is treated as fodder for superior laughter – ‘I love not to see wretchedness o’ercharged, / And duty in his service perishing’ (5.1.85–6) – and hostility – ‘I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change’ (5.1.245). Neither will give way in the argument: hippolyta This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard. theseus The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

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hippolyta It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs. (5.1.209–12) Could marital disharmony be already raising its head in this couple, just at the moment when the differences between Oberon and Titania have been resolved? After ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is concluded in a spirit of general ribaldry, the three couples, now married, are waved to bed by Theseus, but as a conclusion to a comedy of love the ending is surprisingly muted. There is no celebration of its central subject, amorousness, though it is announced that the following fortnight will be a public holiday marked by ‘solemnity / In nightly revels and new jollity’ (5.1.359–60) to celebrate the main event of the aristocratic wedding between the Duke and Duchess. Robin Goodfellow, Titania and Oberon take over, in a spirit which is far from celebratory and does not mention love at all. Rather, they dwell again on the more sombre aspects of night, the wolf behowling the moon, the screech-owl frightening the dying ‘wretch that lies in woe’ thinking ghoulishly of shrouds in the grave: Now it is the time of night That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite In the churchway paths to glide. (5.1.369–72) Admittedly, Oberon routinely blesses the wedding beds, though the emphasis is somewhat negative, in voicing hopes that the partners will be ‘ever true in loving’ (avoiding the fates of adultery and dissension which we have seen played out), and that their children will be without defects, free from ‘blots of nature’s hand’ (5.1.399) which are itemized in ugly detail: Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be. (5.1.401–4)

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It is a curiously understated set of hopes to bestow on lovers on their wedding night. In retrospect, given the many-tongued languages expressing and describing love in the play, it is difficult to recall any single reference to it as an appealing or fulfilling state. Instead, we may be left primarily with notions of a compulsive, disruptive, enigmatic, degrading and liminal emotion, a product not so much of wish-fulfilling dreams as frightening nightmares. Dark linings run through the play beneath the comic and romantic surface, emerging from time to time: references to paternal legalism in the threat of death or banishment of a young woman to a nunnery; to rape and violation, jealousy, conflict, cruelty, drugged states, changelings and even a death (the Indian child’s mother who had died in childbirth). To return to the question which opened this chapter, we might now answer that, yes, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a rom-com, though we need to redefine that genre. Romantic comedies might end happily, but always against the odds of relationship conflicts, misunderstandings and ruptures which threaten to destroy relationships – ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’. In some ways the opposing needs and feelings are more central than the jovial moments of comedy and the formulaic, often perfunctory promised end of marriage. In this sense, A Midsummer Night’s Dream might even have claims to be the great prototype, the first and still among the best of rom-coms, because it builds into its vision both darkness and light. Ironically, the last words belong to the two characters who are apparently impervious to love: Bottom’s ‘reason and love keep little company together nowadays’ and Puck’s ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’.

Exercise erci

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ind an online copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and search for the word ‘love’. You will find there are more than 160 occurrences! (Romeo and Juliett is the only play with more, though As You Like Itt comes very close with 158.) Copy and paste a selection of the passages and consider what light each one sheds on the presentation of love in the play as a whole.

CHAPTER SIX

Language of Dreaming Dreams and visions John Keats, perhaps with this very play in his conscious or unconscious mind, concluded his poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ with a series of questions after the entrancing song of the nightbird fades: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?’ Shakespeare’s lovers express the same response of dazed wonderment after the events of the night: ‘demetrius Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream . . .’ (4.1.191–3). At the end of the play, Puck’s epilogue challenges the audience to think they have ‘but slumbered here’ and what they have witnessed is ‘but a dream’ (5.1.415–18). Lysander says love itself is ‘Swift as a shadow, short as any dream’ (1.1.144), and the nocturnal fairies see themselves as ‘following darkness like a dream’ (5.1.376). There are several references also to visions, even when these have been so palpably visible that any visionary element is not so much a miracle as an inherent property of theatre: ‘My Oberon, what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamoured of an ass’ (4.1.75–6), and Bottom thinks he has had either a dream or a vision of his night with the fairy queen. Reference to dreams and visions pervade A Midsummer Night’s Dream, providing a dominant metaphor and structural element. Predictive or prophetic dreams, from ancient classical times and throughout history, have been interpreted in a similar way, as though the dream has caused what happens later. Dreams can (some argue) show us what is ‘really going on’ in our waking lives, in 129

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allegorical terms. We speak of anxiety dreams which enact sourcefeelings equivalent to the problems that are worrying us, sometimes even clarifying them and providing unconsidered solutions. Many scientists and artists have documented times of fruitless research wrestling with a problem, eventually to find a solution popping up in a dream, as if the unconscious mind in sleep has sorted through and assembled all the conflicting evidence into a neat resolution (Vernon, 1970, passim). Meanwhile, at times of stress, we may have unexpectedly peaceful, happy dreams, reminding us that we are neglecting potentially more harmonious feelings available or recalled from the past, that might lighten the psychic load if we choose to listen to them, and allow us to escape our prevailing mood. Dreams, in short, are important and meaningful, even if the meanings can be mystifying and ambiguous. However, there is only a single actual ‘waking dream’ in the play, the one recounted by Hermia when she wakes to find Lysander gone: Help me, Lysander, help me: do thy best To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast. Ay me, for pity! What a dream was here! Lysander, look how I do quake with fear. Methought a serpent ate my heart away, And you sat smiling at his cruel prey. Lysander – what, removed? Lysander, lord – What, out of hearing, gone? No sound, no word? Alack, where are you? Speak, and if you hear; Speak, of all loves! I swoon almost with fear. No, then I well perceive you are not nigh. Either death or you I’ll find immediately. (2.2.149–60) Although Sigmund Freud surprisingly never commented on this passage (nor on the play itself) in his psychological analysis of dreams, yet some critics find the meaning and significance of Hermia’s dream to be ‘Freudian’ in the terms of his theory that dreams can be ‘read’ as having a language and logic of their own. More generally, the events in the Forest of Athens seem tailor-made to construct a theory of the operations of the subconscious mind (the Freudian ‘id’) liberated from the controlling conscious mind (the ‘ego’), bringing to the surface repressed, taboo subjects,

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especially of a sexual nature, which is at the heart of many of Freud’s theories. Hermia’s own dream does not have a completely neat, one-to-one application to her actual situation, though it does have symbolic aptness. A serpent recalls the disguised Satan in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve when Adam is absent, an obvious pre-modern association with loss of innocence. But the more contemporary reading is that, in Freud’s ‘dream language’, snakes are usually understood to indicate the male phallus and fear of sex in general. Hermia’s dream would thus signify that she is – understandably – fearful of violation in her vulnerable situation, an issue which she and Lysander had talked about just before they sleep. Her demure instruction to Lysander to ‘Lie further off, in human modesty’ is couched in sexual terms: ‘Such separation as may well be said / Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid’ (2.2.62– 4). She has accused Lysander of ‘riddl[ing] very prettily’ (57) when he offers a sanitized explanation for suggesting they lie together — ‘Love takes the meaning in love’s conference’ (50). Hermia’s doubts and reticence would explain why in her dream Lysander himself does not pose a direct sexual threat, but on the other hand he is seen vicariously colluding in the snake’s advance by smiling cruelly. There are more meanings and resemblances to the plot that we could extract from Hermia’s ‘waking dream’, since unbeknown to her at this moment Lysander himself is being unfaithful while under the influence of love-in-idleness, having abandoned Hermia for Helena. When he next sees her he repels her in terms that recall but reverse her cry for help after the dream: ‘Hang off, thou cat, thou burr, vile thing let loose, / Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent’ (3.2.260–1). Furthermore, in terms of the play as a whole, Hermia has also been betrayed by Helena who informed Demetrius of the plan to elope, and in the distortions and transferences of dream logic, Helena may be equated with the serpent eating Hermia’s heart away. In spite of its apparent innocence, the play can be analysed as one that deals with repressed desires, and probes disturbing psychic material more associated with dreams than rational, waking consciousness. Hermia’s is a richly revealing dream on both the conscious and unconscious levels, but it is the only literal example in the play. All the other references to dreams are in some way used as metaphors or similes (like a dream). Other characters are persuaded or tricked to believe they have had a dream, or at least an experience very much like a dream. In

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order to undo the confusion of the lovers, Oberon instructs Puck to lead the men astray until they fall asleep and can then have the antidote to love-in-idleness applied to the eyes of Lysander: And from each other look thou lead them thus Till o’er their brows, death-counterfeiting, sleep With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep. Then crush this herb into Lysander’s eye, Whose liquor hath this virtuous property To take from thence all error with his might, And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight. When they next wake, all this derision Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision, And back to Athens shall the lovers wend. (3.2.363–72) ‘This herb’ is ‘Dian’s bud’, another name for wormwood (later the basis for the alcoholic drink absinthe), which, as the authority on herbal lore Nicholas Culpeper wrote in his book The English Physician (1780), helps control or reverse ‘the evils Venus and the wanton boy [Cupid] produce’. Diana was the classical goddess of chastity. It was reputed also to be a narcotic, a cure for plague (Lanier, 1995, 6) and, perhaps more relevantly, an antidote to the effects of toxic toadstools (Quealy, 2017, 205), forerunners of our ‘magic mushrooms’. Given these associations, the two mind-altering plants, the first of which causes the ‘dream and fruitless vision’ of the lovers and the second acting as an antidote to the effects, involve a heady combination of symptoms, provoking and then reversing sexual desire. They are also associated with warding off a ‘real-life’ disease only too prevalent and feared in Shakespeare’s London in the mid-1590s. In this case, the state resembling dreaming is connected with a whole web of medicinal lore in Shakespeare’s time.

Exercise erci

H

ow do you interpret Hermia’s dream, in light of the play as a whole?

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Waking dreams Another character who at least claims to have had a dream is Bottom, who also refers to the experience as a ‘rare vision’: Bottom wakes. bottom . . . I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was – and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (4.1.199–217) His tone is exalted and reverential but undercut by Bottom’s garbled misquotation from the Bible. What Saint Paul actually wrote in 1 Corinthians (2.9) is more logical than Bottom’s words: ‘The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.’ In an impressively distorted way, Bottom creates a kind of synaesthesia (combining two or more different sense impressions, a common poetic device): ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’. Admittedly, Bottom is waking up, so there is an element of doubt as to whether he has just had his own private dream whose content is not disclosed, but the passage has universally and more naturally been understood to refer to the episode in the play dealing with Titania’s love for him. We have all witnessed this, up to the point when Titania takes him to bed (leaving the rest to the audience’s imagination). In this he has definitely not had a dream but an experience in which he was fully awake, since we can vouch for the events we too have witnessed. Or have we been dreaming? If it is like a dream to be ‘expounded’, there

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may be another covert Freudian message to be coaxed from ‘Bottom’s dream’, since its thinly veiled element of sexual wishfulfilment and erotic content freed from repression has been undeniable and is sometimes played up in performance. There is equally something like the opposite of carnal associations, signalled by the biblical reference, since Bottom, ironically an embodiment of Theseus’s ideal of the rational man in his stolid, commonsensical reasoning, interprets his ‘dream’ not in sexual terms but primarily as a religious experience, an epiphany conferring some kind of divine knowledge on him. Paradoxically, it is Bottom, the only one who has actually interacted fully with the fairy world, who captures, despite muddling up the senses, a feeling of awe in the face of the ‘rare vision’, and he promises to ‘discourse wonders’ to his fellow actors (4.2.28). For just a moment, ‘bully Bottom’ takes on the mantle of the holy fool or seer, like Coleridge’s bard in ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise’ (especially since we know the bees have been robbed of their honey-bags to feed Bottom). There may be another of Shakespeare’s self-referential, authorial jokes here, since ‘Bottom’s Dream’ (though, again, not in fact a dream) has been written up, not as a ‘ballad’ but as an episode in a play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed not by Peter Quince but William Shakespeare. Bottom also comes closest to defining the senses of ‘dream’ and ‘vision’ operating most insistently in the play whose title includes the word Dream. The play is a metaphor or analogue for a dream or vision, in the sense of being a completely imaginative experience but one so lifelike that it compels believability. It provides an alternative reality to the world we live in, a reality with its own internal, narrative coherence (its fictional plot), its own surreal logic which can throw into proximity a supernatural fairy realm, a pair from Greek mythology anachronistically presented as English duke and duchess, four confused adolescent lovers and a very English group of Elizabethan workmen engaged as amateur actors. Strange and inexplicable things happen in our own dreams, sometimes having rational causes and explanations in our waking experience, while at other times explicable by coincidence or even supernatural causation. If they are not disregarded as merely random, then they can be seen to have their own internal language, and can be ‘read’ like a story with some inner significance. And so it is with works of

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art such as plays or literary works of fiction. The process of waking up after a dream is analogous to the play ending, leaving one temporary state of apparent reality for another, more mundane ‘real world’ outside the theatre. In this play, Oberon predicts that after the events of the night, ‘When they next wake, all this derision [division?] / Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision’ (3.2.370), and they will ‘think no more of this night’s accidents / But as the fierce vexation [distress] of a dream’ (4.1.68). But these apparent dreams are not so easily shaken off, since their lasting import is closer to a ‘waking dream’ for the lovers: demetrius Why, then, we are awake. Let’s follow him And by the way let us recount our dreams. (4.1.197–8) But they are not, in fact, dreams that they will recount, but events that have, in the relative truth of art, happened to them, which have led to consequences (marriage) and leave palpable traces on their own, fictional lives, especially that of Demetrius who now seems firmly to love Helena. His changed mental state is the only relic left of the experiences in fairyland, but it is one that reassembles the foursome into settled symmetry and changes their lives. Once again, the Romantic poet Coleridge provides an analogy, asking a musing ‘what if’ question: If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Ay! and what then? (Coleridge, ‘Anima Poetae’) Readers and audiences surely have a similar feeling of a ‘waking dream’ which has somehow left traces on our lives. Mysteriously, dreams – like plays – may have consequences and change the ways in which we look at the world, leaving vestiges afterwards in our imaginations. Puck’s epilogue voices this sense. He invites us to dismiss the play as ‘no more yielding but a dream’ or yielding nothing more to us than does a dream, which the Arden editor glosses as ‘no more

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productive or beneficial than a dream’ (Chaudhuri, 2018, 277). However, we do so at our own peril, since we have been fully awake and watching events enacted by real people (albeit actors or ‘shadows’ impersonating characters with scripted parts) in front of us. Tanya Pollard, who has discussed how Elizabethan dramatists sometimes likened their plays to mind-altering drugs like the potions in the play, asks questions raised by the end of the play when we in the audience ‘wake up’ from our apparent dream: [H]as the play drugged us, or undrugged us, or both? Are we, like Lysander, recipients of an antidote that will return us to what we were? Alternatively, have we, like Demetrius, been permanently changed? Or perhaps have we, like Titania, been both returned and altered? The play leaves these questions in doubt. (Pollard, 2005, 146) However, the crucial difference between, on the one hand, the characters and, on the other hand, readers and theatre audiences is that we have been subjected not to magic potions but to something just as potent – poetic language and fictional spectacle.

Exercise erci

U

sing an online text of the play, search for occurrences of the word ‘dream’ and use the list to inspect how many different meanings and associations the word generates in each context.

Dreams and imagination Not only Freud but popular psychology as a field has explored the possibility that dreams have a language of their own that can be decoded, interpreted and ‘read’. This habit dates right back through Renaissance and medieval times to antiquity (Holland, 1994, 3–12), in particular to a Greco-Roman text by Artemidorus of Daldis named Oneirocritica (‘Interpretation of Dreams’), which was translated in Shakespeare’s times through to the eighteenth century. The ideas were amplified by the later Roman writer Macrobius, who

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was equally influential. Their central distinction, between predictive/ prophetic dreams and non-predictive dreams, is not especially relevant to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but a more general Renaissance extrapolation is of great importance to Shakespeare. This is the underpinning assertion that dreams are fictions which are the product of pure imagination, rather than derived from ‘real’ physical experiences acquired through the senses, though we may be persuaded we have experienced a real event. A question is thus raised which is of fundamental importance to the writer, who also presents fictions created solely by the imagination, hoping to convince readers of their verity. Whether dreams and creative works can be ‘true’, or are by definition ‘untrue’, is a crucial question to which Shakespeare returns again and again. In his play Antony and Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt eulogizes the larger-than-life Roman general as both real and super-real, using the metaphor of dreaming: cleopatra Think you there was, or might be such a man As this I dreamt of? dolabella Gentle madam, no. cleopatra You lie, up to the hearing of the gods! But, if there be nor ever were one such, It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff [material] To vie [compete] strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy, Condemning shadows quite. (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.92–9) ‘Fancy’ is an Elizabethan equivalent of imagination. Shakespeare is here echoing The Defence of Poetry by his earlier contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney, who claimed for literature allegorical or figurative truth even if it is the product of the imagination. He argues, as does Shakespeare, that fictional creations can be truer than true, better than nature can ever supply: Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [of historical events], lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature; in making things either

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better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew; forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, Cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. (Sidney, 1973, 78) Works of the imagination are more idealized and in this sense can be more ‘true’ than reality itself with its haphazard accidents. Shakespeare repeatedly asserted the linkages between dreams, imagination, art and truth, from his early plays such as The Comedy of Errors in which a character muses, ‘If this be not a dream I see and hear’, to Hamlet’s ‘Aye, but to dream . . .’, and right through to the final single-author play he wrote, The Tempest, another work like the Dream incorporating magic. Here the arch-magician Prospero, after using his magic to mount a short masque with spirits as actors, reflects on the nature of theatre as akin to ‘waking dreams’ created by the imagination: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And – like the baseless fabric of this vision – The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest, 4.1.148–58) The preoccupation with the truth-telling or otherwise of the imagination and dreams runs through Shakespeare’s writing career, and especially in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where it surfaces as one of the play’s leading themes.

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It was considered a medical fact by some Elizabethan theorists that, with some exceptions which had been mentioned by Plato and Aristotle as ‘divine’ dreams giving religious revelations, ‘incorporeal’ dreams created by imagination were subversive of the faculty of reason and therefore inherently false, untrustworthy or distorted, and sometimes created by disease or fear in waking life (Gowland, 2011, 67–8ff.). If one believes such chimeras then it could be a symptom of madness. Shakespeare, then, was playing with potentially dangerous and non-rational ideas, in not only presenting the imagination and dreaming in a positive light, but even explicitly drawing emphatic attention to the lurking problems by providing the more sensible alternative posed by Theseus (5.1.122). His words alone are damning: ‘antique [grotesque, bizarre]’, ‘toys’, ‘seething brains’, ‘fantasies’, ‘lunatic’, ‘frantic [delirious]’, ‘frenzy’, ‘airy nothing’, ‘tricks’. Despite Theseus’s complacently dismissive tone, this is quite a tirade against virtually everything we have witnessed and ‘believed’ in the previous two or three hours, which have been created through words and actions as products of ‘the poet’s eye’ and imagination, and spoken by real people on the stage. If the faculty of reason is taken to be the Elizabethan norm, then in Theseus’s terms, madness has prevailed here. The narrative itself provides ‘fairy toys’ and lovers with ‘seething [boiling, simmering] brains’ who keep unexpectedly switching affections. The explanation offered for these volatile emotional changes has come from ‘shaping [creative] fantasies’, which comprehensively subvert ‘cool reason’. The most dangerous amongst lunatics, lovers and poets seem to be the poets, who employ ‘imagination’ to give a substantial ‘body’ to ‘forms of things unknown’, claiming material substance for ‘airy nothing[s]’. Among ‘Such tricks hath strong imagination’ we find magical flowers like ‘love-in-idleness’, said to bring ‘joy’, or nonsensical impossibilities like a man being turned into a monster, all by imagining the dubious existence of fairies. The attack on the lovers and the poetic creator of the play spreads to the actors who collude with the playwright to present these impossible fictions, and then to the audience who are deluded into thinking they have witnessed actual events with their eyes and ears. All the same challenges apply even if, as Puck suggests, the events are regarded simply as dreams, since a dream is just as much an ‘airy nothing’ created by the imagination as the play. In the face of Theseus’s courteously worded but ferociously disdainful onslaught, even the

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playwright seems at a loss how to defend his creation, offering only Hippolyta’s somewhat baffled response that it ‘More witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of great constancy, / But howsoever strange and admirable’ (5.1.23–7). It is at least selfconsistent and plausible. This seems similar to the legal concept of ‘circumstantial evidence’, reinforced by the courtroom word used by Hippolyta, ‘witnesseth’. Even if there are no hard facts or ‘proofs’ to be offered to refute the charge of being deluded by ‘fancy’s images’, yet enough people have provided agreement on what has happened (including the evidence we in the audience have observed) that we are all either universally ‘transfigured’ in our perceptions or there is a chain of causation, ‘something of great constancy’, which has indeed happened. It is not, however, to be judged by the limited capacities of ‘cool reason’ but simply taken on trust as ‘strange and admirable’, the latter word meaning ‘to be wondered at’. The apparent fairy story has become a challenge to reason, raising the fundamental question, ‘What is truth?’ As Sidney once again claims, the peculiar strength of imaginative poetry is that it cannot be disproved, since it depends on the figurative language of metaphor rather than literal statements from history: Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth . . . If then a man can arrive to the child’s age, to know that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written; and therefore, as in history, looking for truth, they may go away full fraught with falsehood, so in poesy, looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention. (Sidney, 1973, 102) Since the poet has not claimed to be offering historical facts but ‘fiction’ presented ‘allegorically and figuratively’, he cannot be accused of ‘falsehood’ or lying. One extra undermining of Theseus’s general approach is doubleedged. As mentioned above, his version of ‘cool reason’ equates to the pragmatism of Bottom and his fellow thespians. Their literalminded attitude to drama eliminates the imagination altogether. They resist the temptation to ‘suppose’ a bush to be a bear, and

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reduce staging problems to practical solutions of how to represent unambiguously things like a lion, or the moon shining. In other words, ‘man is but an ass’ to be Theseus’s ideal, if these prosespeaking and thoroughly rational characters are the alternative to the fairies and lovers created by the poet’s imagination. By linking up the problematical, conflicting aspects shared by ‘airy nothings’, such as imaginative creations and dreams, Shakespeare has turned A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a demonstration and interrogation of the nature of art, which can be simultaneously truthful and untruthful.

Exercise erci he ‘alternative reality’ encountered in dreams has intrigued thinkers through the ages, and has stimulated diverse philosophical, phenomenological and psychological theories, beyond Freud’s ‘Dreamology’ is a huge but fascinating area of investigation. Using the internet, do some research for yourself, noting as many different theories of dreaming that you can find. Can you employ any of these as a tool for exploring and interpreting what happens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to your own satisfaction?

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Dream logic, dramatic logic and time To return to our starting-point in this chapter, although there is only one psychologically interesting but otherwise fairly insignificant dream, the word itself is used many times. Above all it occurs in the play’s title, and several characters believe they have been dreaming, suggesting that it pervades the whole play as a philosophical reference point. By the end, the audience is invited to dismiss as a mere dream the play itself, and the actions which we have undoubtedly witnessed. Dream logic runs not along rational lines but emotional. The same can be said of dramatic logic and the poetic deployment of metaphor, which can ‘transfigure’ and ‘translate’ (or Quince’s weirdly apt ‘disfigure’) meaning as the dramatist wishes. As Rosalind

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explained, poetic drama, like dreams, can be ‘truer’ to emotional and psychological experience than everyday reality (Garber, 1974, 87). Once again, As You Like It gives a clue, when in the Epilogue the actor playing Rosalind speaks for the company and its playwright, saying ‘My way is to conjure you’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play turning on magic, extreme transformations, changes of perspective from human to supernatural, emotional volatility and episodic switches and alternations, the playwright has needed to demonstrate the skills of a conjurer even more effectively than in his many other plays. The tricks are triumphantly accomplished by crafty dramaturgy which is amenable to critical analysis, but they operate most effectively by immersing us, from the very first lines to the last, in moonlit dreams fuelled by imagination, fears and desires, rather than empirical probability. Both dreams and poetic drama are imagined environments in which we are given no choice but passively to accept whatever events happen, however absurd, nonsensical, temporally discontinuous or impossible they may seem, without questioning their likelihood. It is the slumberland and alternative language of dreams, whose sequences are ‘like a tangled chain: nothing impaired but all disordered’ (5.1.125), a place in the mind where desire may flourish and change, and where imagination plays tricks – ‘how easy is a bush supposed a bear’ (5.1.22) – all elements shared with the ‘visions’ and ‘waking dreams’ offered by drama itself. Similar paradoxes apply when we examine the time scheme of the play, raised in Chapter 3, the apparent capacity of dreams to distort time, or to bend, stretch or shrink it to psychological rather than strictly temporal purposes. Science is divided over the empirical question whether we dream in ‘real time’ (that is, a dream that takes ten minutes will contain ten minutes’ worth of events), or if dreams speed up or slow down our perception of time, irrespective of how long the dream actually lasts. The difficulty of proving something either way stems from the impossibility of actually getting ‘inside’ a person’s dream, allowing us to share the individual’s subjective perception. However, it is almost universally agreed that in different dreams, time does at least seem to dilate, constrict or be ‘bent’ in some way. This impression may also be linked with the experience in dreams of sudden shifts of ‘narrative’, jumping from one episode to another without apparent causal link. Where else do we have this experience but in drama (and in a different sense, in novels)? If we

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do not know the story before a play starts, then we are at the mercy of the playwright as to how we encounter and accumulate information, and therefore we are subjected to the same switches between plots and subplots. Each scene presents an episode which then shifts to another scenic episode, and between the scenes there may be an assumed pause, or an assumption that events are happening simultaneously, or else that one leads directly to the next. Here again we may hypothesize that live drama may be the closest experience to our dream states, that the logic and time patterns we find in the one medium correspond to the other state. Drama is like a dream and a dream is like a play, and both are beyond our rational control. We must simply submit to illusions created by language in both cases. Questions of time as a relative and psychological quantity clearly interested Shakespeare. In As You Like It, another romantic comedy set in a forest where imagination can be given free rein, the heroine Rosalind describes at some length how time is measured not only by clocks and duration, but by psychological needs and individual circumstances. The passage should be quoted at some length for the full effect of its logic to become clear: rosalind I pray you, what is’t o’clock? orlando You should ask me what time o’ day: there’s no clock in the forest. rosalind Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time, as well as a clock. orlando And why not the swift foot of Time? Had not that been as proper? rosalind By no means, sir. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. orlando I prithee, who doth he trot withal?

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rosalind Marry he trots hard with a young maid, between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized. If the interim be but a se’nnight [week], Time’s pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year. orlando Who ambles Time withal? rosalind With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that hath not the gout, for the one sleeps easily because he cannot study, and the other lives merrily because he feels no pain; the one lacking the burden of lean and wasteful learning; the other knowing no burden of heavy tedious penury. These Time ambles withal. orlando Who doth he gallop withal? rosalind With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there. orlando Who stays it still withal? rosalind With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves. (3.2.295–327) Even the super-rational Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a man who measures time by days and no doubt carefully watches the clock, understands this point in his impatience to bring on the wedding. To him, Time ‘trots’ as it does to Rosalind’s ‘young maid, between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized’. To Theseus, agonizingly slow time ‘lingers my desires, / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue’ (1.1.4–6). The more imaginative Hippolyta, however, prefers to think that Time can be measured also in nights which can ‘quickly dream away the time’ (1.1.8), providing the first of several analogies for the play which we are now watching. Her version of Time, that ‘gallops’ in Rosalind’s sense, is more or less what transpires, since in the play several days’ and nights’ events are truncated into two or three hours on stage as we ‘dream away the time’.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Languages of Nature ‘Purple Passages’ in the Green World

Unlike Shakespeare’s minimal stage resources, later Victorian and modern companies could utilize expensive scenery with stunning painted backdrops and artificial lighting, creating elaborate and realistic effects. They could bring on to the stage bulky props like sculptured tree trunks and room settings complete with real bookcases and sofas. The detailed decisions about setting and visual style would colour and determine the audience’s impression of the play, from the moment the curtain went up and before a word was spoken, limiting other possibilities. The next scene could change by dropping down a different, also painted, backdrop. With the introduction of revolving stages in the twentieth century, completely different settings could be constructed in advance, so that shadowy figures would not need to dart about onstage changing furniture between scenes. The later changes were especially important in determining how the Forest of Athens is envisaged and naturalistically differentiated from the court scenes. It must have led to variations in the way the forest is interpreted thematically, perhaps downplaying its more dangerous aspects and turning it instead into a predominantly picturesque backdrop, peopled by charming and harmless fairies. The ‘green world’ could literally be coloured 145

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spectacularly green. Needless to say, Shakespeare had no such choices available, in afternoon productions under the open sky and at the mercy of the elements. It was language which provided the only scene-painting, and the audience’s imagination was required to ‘make real’ the setting. A similar trend towards realism happened in movies, which started in late Victorian years and employed stage conventions of the day depicting nature. Some silent Shakespeare reels were filmed in the theatre. A difference was that in silent movies, painted scenery could be replaced with the real thing, outdoor nature itself, and more naturalistic alfresco settings became both possible and expected when the camera could be taken outdoors. The effect replicated the Victorian stage’s tendency to give the scenery an immediate visual language in its own right, carrying a strong component of the play’s meaning as intended by the company, in this sense reducing the imagination’s complex possibilities to something recognizably naturalistic. Filming outdoors also made it possible to change the scene, simply by moving the camera at different times of the day, so that the forest could be alternately threatening or welcoming depending on context and lighting. Even the limitation that filming had to be done in daylight was gradually overcome with more innovatory lighting. Both media – theatre and film – require firm decisions to be made about how the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to be represented, based on the realization that the audience will be ‘reading’ the visual language as part of the play’s projected meaning. But as more sophisticated visual effects were developed there came a danger. Sometimes both painted scenery on stage and outdoor filming could tempt producers to fall into the trap of the artisans’ literal-mindedness, because of the ease with which artificial but convincing stage ‘props’ could simply be shown in reality. As a consequence, language could be downplayed. Sometimes we see productions claiming to be based on historically determined ‘original practices’, but more often in mainstream, modern productions the tendency is to build upon conventions of naturalistic representation. It is sometimes amusing to notice the emergence of particular a film or stage convention, such as covering the dishevelled lovers in mud. This happens in most movies, in the BBC television adaptation by Elijah Moshinsky and even in some staged performances, such as the so-called ‘Mudsummer’ production of

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Robert le Page in the Olivier Theatre, London (1992). The textual justification is provided by such lines as ‘On the dank and dirty ground’ (2.2.79), ‘For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch’ (3.2.29), ‘Bedabbled with the dew, and torn with briers, / I can no further crawl, no further go’ (3.2.443–4) and ‘The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud’ (2.1.83). It is the equivalent of deciding that ‘Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him, to signify Wall’ (3.1.54–64 passim). Quince’s use of ‘signify’ here anticipates the modern acceptance of the visual elements as a potent ‘signifying system’ which immediately carries meaning to an audience, in this case, ‘Wall’. Shakespeare himself knew how unnecessary this was, since the audience would pick up the information from the words. In his tirade against lunatics, lovers and poets, Theseus gets one thing right, which Shakespeare demonstrates in his practice (5.1.12– 17). ‘The poet’s pen’ provides words which give substance and ‘shapes’ to ‘the forms of things unknown’ which the ‘imagination bodies forth’, thus creating images through the ‘airy nothing’ of spoken language, providing illusions with their own ‘local habitation and a name’. This is especially evident in the many descriptions of nature in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Readers, unlike theatre practitioners, can continue to trust the words alone, ignoring inconvenient illogicalities of magic, and exercising the imaginative freedom enjoyed by Elizabethan audiences. We can maintain a completely open mind without the distraction of visible stimuli, allowing us to create as we wish from the descriptive and evocatively atmospheric language offered. We need not be troubled by other problems, for example, how to represent Bottom and Titania together, an anomaly since not only are we told that the fairies are supposed to be invisible to mortals, but also that the Queen’s race is small enough to ‘creep into acorn cups and hide’ (2.1.31), while Bottom is decidedly lifesize in his ‘mortal grossness’. We can take Oberon at his word, ‘I am invisible’ (2.1.186), and Titiania’s ‘I am a spirit of no common rate’ (3.1.156) and imagine them either changing shape and size at will, or as they are playthings of the plot’s requirements at any one time. (William Hazlitt drily observed, ‘Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so.’) Place and space, the play suggests and readers readily accept, are as subjectively constructed as time, reflecting the fluctuating consciousnesses and emotional states of

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the characters and the twists and turns of the plot. In the world of the imagination, as in moonlight, ‘how easy is a bush supposed a bear!’ (5.1.22). We readers and audiences enter the mental space created by the play as a changing verbal construct, exercising such stretches of the mind to accept fantastic claims, and gradually disclosing that this forest will enforce life-changing transformations of consciousness. For this to happen, we readers need to have available all the language of the play, in its variousness and multiple possibilities. This chapter will consider how we are led to conceive of the Wood of Athens and the significance of the natural world, if we lack visual stimuli and have only the words of the play to go by. A little more will be said about the mythic significance of the forest in the next chapter on ‘metamorphosis’, a central trope of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Exercise erci

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o some research on ‘open stages’ such as the Globe playhouse in Elizabethan times, and consider how much more important language was to creating effects, as opposed to props and visible scenery, which became possible on stage in later times, and in movies.

‘Purple passages’: redundant and surplus language? To illustrate the distinction between visual cues and verbal language, let us consider a different scenario. Imagine that you are approached by a film-making company who ask for your expert advice on the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They explain that they need to cut down the play to make it a two-hour movie (the ‘two hour’s traffic of the stage’ mentioned in Romeo and Juliet), with foreshortened word-length but in a language still accessible to modern audiences. They ask what parts of the text they can delete without missing crucial narrative information that might make audiences ‘lose the plot’. We cannot in purist spirit object to the practice of trimming plays, since there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare’s own company did cut down their plays to suit special

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occasions or staging circumstances, and they probably only rarely used the whole text. It was an assumption that they could be shortened, so long as the audience could understand what was happening. There was a legal reason for this. The company needed to gain a licence of approval for the entire script from the Master of the Revels, who checked for seditious and defamatory material or blasphemy. Once licensed, they were not allowed to add more text in performance, but they could shorten it. For example, the Folio text of Hamlet, and modern editions which augment it with passages from Quartos, would have been far too long for Elizabethan productions, and passages would need to be cut each time the play was performed. It probably was never performed in full, until along came Kenneth Branagh in 1996, boasting that his four-hour movie was the first ‘complete’ version of Hamlet. However, the kinds of deletions the Elizabethan company exercised would have been different from those of a modern film-maker. My strategy in looking at what might be cut in the Dream is not to suggest how it was in fact revised at the time by Shakespeare’s company, but to see what is lost by excising passages which seem redundant in a movie. Helpfully, our movie-makers offer a preliminary suggestion: how about dropping passages like this one since, apart from the first three lines and the last two, it doesn’t add anything to the story and slows down the tempo of the action. Besides, they suggest, in using the visual medium of film, we can show lots of the named flowers, without needing to give the otiose, poetic descriptions? Surely nothing will be lost, they argue, and the essential information will come through, if we just delete the lines in italics and have a closeup of a few flowers? Enter [robin goodfellow ]. [Oberon advances.] oberon . Hast thou the flower there? Welcome, wanderer. robin Ay, there it is. oberon I pray thee give it me. I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

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Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws [sheds] her enamelled skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in. And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes, And make her full of hateful fantasies. (2.1.247–57) This reduces a passage of fourteen lines to five, apparently losing none of the essential meaning. Before we indignantly retort that we can’t just cut lines which are invariably anthologized as among the most memorable poetry Shakespeare wrote, we should consider exactly how we can justify keeping them. What would be lost if they are deleted? It is an important question which has consequences for the rest of the play, since over sixty specific plants and flowers are mentioned in this play alone. On top of these there are sundry other references to the natural world, many of which might be regarded as gratuitous embellishment if the sole consideration should be the story itself with its intertwined narratives of love between five couples (if we include Titania and Bottom). And our film-makers are quite right that their medium is one that can show details if they choose, rather than spending so much time telling us about them. For a start, this particular passage, even in context, is not meant to be seen at all, except in the ‘mind’s eye’ (Hamlet’s phrase), so that even to present a visible collage of the exact flowers would subtly distort the playwright’s intention in inserting Oberon’s memory of the ‘bank’, which lies beyond sight. In other words, we must presume the language-based mode of reporting is a conscious choice made by Shakespeare, not simply covering a limitation of his stage but having positive functions of its own. Like so much else in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the description is designed to awaken and stimulate the imagination of listeners even if nothing is seen by spectators. It creates atmosphere as much as a picture, and helps make the forest come alive as a landscape of the mind, with its own distinctive floral ambience and experienced with all the senses awakened. The musical beauty of the word-painting enhances incomparably the play’s verbal texture, evocative atmosphere and richness of imagery in ways that mere action and visual appearances cannot. It is crucial to the sense of imagined place in the play as a whole, which is one that depends so much on a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (Coleridge’s phrase) and trusting words ‘if imagination

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amend them’ (5.1.211). Without giving room for the creative imagination to operate, the whole plot would collapse into literal impossibilities in the terms Hippolyta offers for the play-within-aplay: ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (5.1.209). Moreover, the place described is very special, as the boudoir of the fairy queen, where we must later imagine Titania and Bottom sleeping. The passage also subtly characterizes the speaker himself in dramatic context, revealing Oberon’s envious state of mind as he voyeuristically imagines his estranged wife’s ‘separate bedrooms’ sleeping environment (which neither he nor we are supposed to pry into). Even the specific plants mentioned by Oberon carry other literary and symbolic meanings and associations of their own, since literate contemporaries would have connected one of Shakespeare’s frequent sources, the recently published, unfinished allegorical romance and epic poem, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in which flowers in May adorn the fictional fairy queen and recall the cult of England’s Queen Elizabeth (Strong, 1979, 49). Elizabeth’s personal emblem was the prickly but heavily scented eglantine, used horticulturally (as here) to ‘over canopy’ secret arbours (Thomas and Fairclough, 2016, 118), thus providing an unobtrusive link to the world beyond the play. This is not to suggest that Titania in the play is an allegorical equivalent of Elizabeth – far from it, since no company could dare suggest that the Queen was even married let alone involved in a sordid dispute, or capable of falling adulterously in love with an ass-headed man – but none the less the play as a whole reflects hinted aspects of the cult. For example, most critics agree that the ‘imperial votaress’, who ‘passed on / In maiden meditation fancy free’ (2.1.163–4) after Cupid’s arrow has missed her, is a reference to the virgin queen on England’s throne. Furthermore, the description evokes not only the sense of sight but also of smell. The plants mentioned by Oberon have the property of flowering at different times of the year, so they provide virtually year-long aroma in Titania’s bower. Oxlips (primroses) and violets flower in spring, woodbine (similar to honeysuckle, another heavily scented and prolific climber) in midsummer, musk roses in autumn, while the leaves of the herb thyme are scented through the year. Moreover, the lore of plants in Elizabethan times attributed medicinal uses to flowers, catalogued in herbals by Gerard and Culpeper, preparing us for love-in-idleness with its aphrodisiac effect. This ‘little western flower / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound’ (2.1.166–

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7) was the small viola tricolour, forerunner of the larger pansy which had various names (for example, heartsease and ‘tickle my fancy’), which indicate belief in it as a powerful love potion (Kerr and Dowden, 1978, 23–5). There is, then, a comprehensive and intertwined language of plants, incorporating human feelings in nature with aesthetic, symbolic, magical and therapeutic properties. If we learn to read the language of flowers as Elizabethans understood it, we find layers of extra meanings in the play which would not be so comprehensively conveyed through a static, visual tableau or bouquet. In particular, a relationship is established between Titania and a lush, burgeoning and fertile natural setting, and it is significant that it is she who points out when nature has been disturbed. There is even relevance in such apparently excrescent details as, ‘And there the snake throws her enamelled skin, / Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in’ (with ‘weed’ carrying its earlier meaning of ‘garment’). The language reinforces the association between the fairy world and nature, as fairies recycle even discarded snake skins, and implies the endlessly changing and self-generating quality of nature itself. At least the snakes no longer need their old skins, whereas elsewhere Titania orders the killing of ‘rearmice’ (bats) to use their wings for the same purpose, ‘To make [her] small elves coats’ (2.2.5). These are more examples of the play training our imagination into accepting the diminutiveness of the fairies, despite the fact that on stage the actors will all be the same size. The lines are telling us what we should see, even if we don’t, by adjusting our minds to the tiny scale of fairies, flowers and small creatures. By the way, we can see an example of the way Shakespeare habitually sees the funny side even of his own style, by undercutting the idyllic and idealized descriptions with the banality of parody: flute Asleep, my love? What, dead, my dove? O Pyramus, arise. Speak, speak. Quite dumb? Dead, dead? A tomb Must cover thy sweet eyes. These lily lips, This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks

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Are gone, are gone: Lovers make moan. His eyes were green as leeks. (5.1.317–29) Here Shakespeare may even be playfully swiping at the contemporary poet Edmund Spenser, who could write a love sonnet in a similar way: Her goodly bosom like a Strawberry bed,  her neck like to a bunch of Colombines:  her breast like lilies, ere their leaves be shed,  her nipples like young blossom’d jessamines, Such fragrant flowers do give most odorous smell,  but her sweet odour did them all excel. (Spenser, Amoretti, Sonnet 64) There may even be a sly reference to Spenser’s ‘most odorous smell’, surpassed only by the smell of his mistress, in Bottom’s verbal slip: quince Speak, Pyramus. Thisbe, stand forth. bottom Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet. quince Odours, odours. bottom . . . odours savours sweet. So hath thy breath, my dearest Thisbe dear (3.1.76–80) Spenser, like Quince, was writing in a completely metaphorical way, not aiming at giving us Shakespeare’s more naturalistic ‘speaking pictures’ but trying to convey the value of human beauty by comparing it to beauties in nature. Again like Quince’s, such rhetoric is no longer much appreciated by readers. Although our hard-headed and commercially minded cinematographers may accept the significance of ambience conveyed through the poetry, they still remain unconvinced in terms of the rest of the play. They propose another passage for the chop:

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Enter a fairy at one door, and robin goodfellow at another. robin How now, spirit, whither wander you? fairy Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough wood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere Swifter than the moon’s sphere, And I serve the Fairy Queen To dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be. In their gold coats, spots you see: Those be rubies, fairy favours; In those freckles live their savours. I must go seek some dew drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I’ll be gone. Our queen and all her elves come here anon. (2.1.1–17) Why, they ask, keep the Fairy’s first fifteen lines when it is only the last two that provide vital information, to which Puck (Robin Goodfellow) responds by explaining why the fairy queen and king are disputing? However, the Fairy’s utterance here is not just an atmospheric digression but also informational. The poetry marks an important structural transition in the sequence of scenes, and it does so, not so much in the content or message but through its mode and language. Without strongly signalling a crucial change and reorientation of the plot and characters at this point, the playwright would risk confusing the audience. The scene is preceded by Peter Quince’s company discussing their play in down-to-earth prose. It is also the last episode to be set in Athens until the final act of the play. Therefore, the entrance of the Fairy and Robin must convey a series of very decisive breaks in time, place and circumstances, and it introduces a new, totally different plot-strand. We are now pitched forward in time to ‘morrow deep midnight’ when Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, and the ‘hempen homespuns’ all plan to meet ‘in the palace wood a mile without the

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town by moonlight’ (1.2.94). We are now introduced to a new set of personages who are unexpectedly different from these mortals, and facing their own domestic emotional problems. Crucially, they speak differently. The Fairy’s language conveys all this important information, adopting a new kind of poetry, neither the prose of the artisans nor the iambic pentameters of the courtiers, but mainly short-line rhyming couplets though with internal variations. Up until ‘I must go seek’ (where pentameters take over), the passage may even be sung rather than recited, since in Shakespeare’s plays there are many implanted songs which are not marked as such in the text. An explicit example is the ‘lullaby’ sung by the fairies to Titania as she falls asleep (2.2.9–30), another section which strictly speaking could be cut, but only at the expense of losing its various functions of slowing down the pace and establishing that Titania is asleep. It is arguable that even if much of the Fairy’s passage above are cut in performance, the production would need somehow to do all this transitional work. Instead, Shakespeare achieves the effect effortlessly in the Fairy’s language, which also introduces the leitmotif to be attached to the Fairy Queen, her association with nature and minute natural processes, since the Fairy’s task is to create dew drops and place them in individual cowslip flowers to be ready for the dawn sunrise. In short, even if our screenwriters decide to drop the speech, they will need to convey all this diffuse but important information by some alternative, visual means, the effects which Shakespeare economically sketches in his language which gives ‘a local habitation and a name’ to imagined natural processes. Something similar could be said of Puck’s reply to the Fairy, as he details all the mischievous tricks he plays on mortals, emphasizing an aspect of the differences between the supernatural agencies and the agrarian human world of country folk. Puck’s ‘job description’ (quoted above in Chapter 1) emphasizes a set of strong contrasts between different kinds of fairies in the play: the apparently harmless and obedient mignons of Titania, and the more independent, irrepressible and often malevolent ‘Hobgoblin’ Puck, companion to Oberon and perhaps gendered masculine by this company and by his attitudes and actions. The two kinds are the light and dark, yin and yang, of the fairy world, whose respective creative and destructive intrusions we observe in the fates of the humans in the forest.

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In looking for another lengthy passage that might be cut, we light upon this block of almost thirty lines spoken by Titania, who explains how the feud with Oberon has caused disastrous changes for the ‘human mortals’ in the weather and the natural world: titania These are the forgeries of jealousy; And never, since the middle summer’s spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margin of the sea To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge have sucked up from the sea Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard. The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrain flock. The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable. The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest. 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 Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ [Winter’s] 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.

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And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension: We are their parents and original. (2.1. 81–117) Admittedly, even though the overall meaning is clear and summed up emphatically in the last three lines, sections of the language here need explanation nowadays, and it is one passage where poring through the footnotes is repaid with enhanced understanding. Some words are known to linguists as ‘false friends’ (faux amis) since they have changed their meanings – we think we know what they mean but in fact the meaning has changed, for example, ‘pelting’ (paltry), ‘continents’ (boundaries), ‘want’ (lack), ‘distemperature’ (disordering), ‘mazed’ (amazed, lost in a maze). Other references hark back to an earlier time in history and their meanings are now lost: ‘murrain’ (sheep which have died from plague), ‘nine men’s morris’ (the ground-plan for an Elizabethan game), ‘Hiems’ (Latin for ‘winter’ personified). But what matters more than the meanings of individual words in the passage as a whole is the expressiveness of the speaking voice. The rising crescendo mirrors Titania’s mounting rage as she berates Oberon, carried by an emotional momentum which would be lost if the speech were shortened. The general purport that their quarrel has caused profound climatic changes for humans is further emphasis of the fairy kingdom’s close affiliation to the elements, as though they are spirits and guardians of the environment, but that nature is not entirely bountiful and pleasurable – it can also be cruel and hard. In hearing and reading Shakespeare, meaning lies as much in the rhythms and cadences as in semantics, since patterns of sounds can simulate or generate states of feeling. As a final, somewhat peripheral point, it is ironic that if we did not have this passage, a small enclave in the industry of Shakespeare scholarship would not exist, as a host of commentators have suggested that it dates the writing of the play since there were seasons of perverse weather in 1594 and 1596 (Thomas, 1949) to which Shakespeare may have been referring. The theory has not gained universal acceptance because there were other years in the 1590s which had bad weather, for which the English climate has always been notorious anyway. But what is certain is that there was considerable social unrest and threats of popular revolt between the years of 1594 and 1597

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since the price of wheat had increased by a third because of the perverse weather, causing widespread poverty as a consequence (Paster and Howard, 1999, 268–9). Given this background, Titania’s words may have struck a topical chord in labouring class audiences who were themselves outraged at the practice of hoarding of the scarce natural resources by the aristocratic classes.

‘Dilation’ I have looked at only a small sample selection of passages which, on the face of it, appear to add little to a performance, but on inspection can be seen to highlight themes, emotional possibilities, ambient atmosphere and broader considerations than first meet the eye. However, no matter how strenuously we resist making any cuts in the text, we must concede that the charge of rhetorical dilatio (dilation: ‘swelling’) as defined by the ancient Roman literary theorist Quintilian (Parker, 1987, 19), or unnecessary verbal amplification, has been levelled at Shakespeare since his own time, and this needs to be addressed when thinking of his language and style. Not every word written by Shakespeare has been considered essential or sacred! He was often criticized for having written not too little but too much, and even some of his contemporaries found an element of conspicuous and unnecessary verbal superfluity in his writing, as though he is sometimes parading his own eloquence. Arguably, this applies most obviously to his poetry dealing with nature, as though this especially fired his imagination. To use his own words against him, his language sometimes grows ‘big-bellied with the wanton wind’, and might strike us at times as like thoughts running out of control, extended metaphors that can distract from the meaning they seek to clarify. We might defend Shakespeare by saying he uses style to define his characters rather than in his own authorial voice, as in the verbose language given to Polonius in Hamlet (‘more matter with less art’ reproves Queen Gertrude) and to the men in Love’s Labour’s Lost who speak in ‘Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise’, but the criticism can be seriously debated since it is voiced by fellow professional writers who otherwise praised his style. Ben Jonson, his rival and discriminating friend, wrote sharply, ‘I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) he never

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blotted out [a] line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand . . .’. Jonson goes on: He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie [fancy, imagination]; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d: ‘Sufflaminandus erat’ [‘He needed brakes’] as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too . . . But he redeemed his vices, with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised, than to be pardoned. (Jonson, 1974, 26) The later poet John Dryden criticized Shakespeare’s ‘superfluity and waste of wit’, and complained that at times his ‘whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure’ (Dryden, ‘Preface’ to Troilus and Cressida, vi, 255). In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, one of the great pioneering editors of the plays, felt this strongly enough to deliver a stern reprimand in the ‘Preface’ to his edition (1765). I quote the passages in full since they raise relevant issues in a book on ‘language and writing’, in seeking to understand and face possible criticisms of Shakespeare’s own practice, even if we may conclude, in Ben Jonson’s words, that ‘he redeemed his vices, with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.’ Samuel Johnson is specific in his criticism where Ben Jonson was general: It is incident to [Shakespeare] to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it. Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is subtle, or the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of words to things is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures. But the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain when he approaches nearest to his highest excellence,

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and seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He is not long soft and pathetic without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity. A  quibble [pun, play on words] is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. (Johnson, 1968, 73–4) In essence, Johnson is complaining of what he sees as three characteristic faults in Shakespeare: of sometimes using too many, vague words to describe things of no great importance; of inappropriate collisions of conflicting tones (tragic and comic, serious and parodic); and of undermining profundity of thought by being distracted into ‘quibbles’ or wordplay. Both Dryden and Johnson were writing in the eighteenth century, when rules of literary decorum took precedence over the picture of Shakespeare described by Milton as ‘warbling his native wood-notes wild’. Some of the ‘faults’ in Shakespeare’s language itemized by Jonson, Dryden and Johnson – facile wordiness, obscure figurative language, ‘sonorous epithets and swelling figures’ to express trivial ideas, and shallow ‘quibbles’ – might be crystallized by considering a fairly randomly chosen passage, paying attention to how the words in italics could have been more economically phrased:

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lysander Helen, to you our minds we will unfold. Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the watery glass, Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass (A time that lovers’ flights doth still conceal), Through Athens’ gates have we devised to steal. hermia And in the wood, where often you and I Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet, There my Lysander and myself shall meet, And thence from Athens turn away our eyes, To seek new friends and strange companies. Farewell, sweet playfellow. Pray thou for us, And good luck grant thee thy Demetrius. Keep word, Lysander. We must starve our sight From lovers’ food till morrow deep midnight. Exit. (1.1.214–23) Would much be lost by replacing the first of the italicized lines (based on an extended, classical ‘conceit’) with a simple ‘by moonlight’; the second with ‘where we used to meet’; the third (an unnecessary quibble on ‘starve’ and ‘food’) with ‘not see each other’? We would have to tinker with the metre to make the lines regular, but six lines out of sixteen could be shed without apparently missing much, and with the advantage of simplicity. Again, however, Shakespeare can be defended. Such excisions might be impoverishing, reducing the whole interchange to an unappealing functionality, lacking the music of poetry and breathless emotional intensity. The imagery imaginatively anticipates the next setting, the forest by moonlight, and also provides information about the idyllic childhood relationship between the two women which is about to be ruptured. Shakespeare might be ‘pardoned’ in this case for using language to develop the characterization of young lovers inclined to romantic overstatement, impetuosity and youthful idealism. It seems that more would be lost in terms of an all-inclusive definition of ‘meaning’, just to save a little playing-time. It does seem that on the one hand, dilatio is an undeniable facet of Shakespearean style

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that cannot be denied, but on the other hand, that it frequently adds compensatory layers of meaning, creating more complex effects. Another example, already quoted, of what appears initially to be a verbose digression comes when Titania reveals how she came by the Indian changeling boy who is now the source of contention: oberon Do you amend it then; it lies in you. Why should Titania cross her Oberon? I do but beg a little changeling boy To be my henchman. titania Set your heart at rest. The fairy land buys not the child of me. His mother was a votaress of my order; And in the spiced Indian air by night, Full often hath she gossiped by my side, And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands Marking th’embarked traders on the flood, When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind, Which she with pretty and with swimming gait Following (her womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles and return again As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die, And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake, I will not part with him. (2.1.118–37) It is not difficult to justify the inclusion of Titania’s explanation, since the extreme degree of conflict between the fairy queen and king is essential to the plot. But what is added to the play by retelling the flashback story of the pregnant Indian queen at such length? Several points can be made. First, Titania’s description of her relationship with the Indian woman who died in childbirth (‘she, being mortal, of that child did die’) reinforces the hierarchy between the human world and the dominant, immortal fairy realm, which will be instrumental in both the romantic plot and Bottom’s fate. Secondly, the description brings to the fore once again a strain in the play

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which articulates close friendships between women, in contrast to the masculine imposition of power through the law asserted by Theseus and Egeus, the threats of violence made by both Demetrius and Lysander in the forest, and the trick played by Oberon on his wife. Like the inset recollections of girlhood intimacy between Hermia and Helena, Titania’s poetic evocation of ‘gossiping’ with her ‘votaress’ on the beach, for all its divergence from the narrative, is inescapably beautiful in a way that creates an image of emotional freedom and female friendship as an alternative to the prevailing conflict in the rest of the play. It is as though harmony lies in the remembered past, and the present is marked by divisions and quarrelling. Part of the richly sensual expressiveness associated with Titania’s language elsewhere in the play is here unforgettably created through the metaphor linking the pregnant woman and the sails of ships which ‘conceive . . . / And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind’, ‘Which she with pretty and with swimming gait / Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)’ / Would imitate, and sail upon the land’. Further, in a play raising questions about time’s constrictions and in which events happen with lightning speed, this passage provides a kind of breathing space in the tempo, a cameo of amplification of time and space, drawing as it does on distant memory and geographical expansion. It takes us away from the nightmarish and claustrophobic Athenian forest to a different vision of nature on ‘Neptune’s yellow sands’ in ‘the spiced India air’. There is a countervailing and less romantic critical opinion available, which sees in the references to ‘embarked traders’ and ‘rich merchandise’ a hint of European imperialism’s blight in the dehumanizing trafficking of indigenous slaves, but this habit of inserting alternative options is also typical of Shakespeare’s practice, as noted by Johnson. More generally, I suggest, the passage as a whole gives a sudden glimpse of a ‘world elsewhere’, opening up a more expansive and distanced perspective than the urgent confusions in the forest. The same can be said of Oberon’s description to Puck of an imagined seascape, in his equally rhapsodic and remembered evocation of a different time and different place, free from the nocturnal turmoil of the forest: Thou rememberest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

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That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music. (2.1.148–54) Let us consider one more extended example of arguably conspicuous irrelevance, as the transformed Bottom converses with Titania’s train of fairies, which begins here and is picked up again in 4.1.1–33: titania Out of this wood do not desire to go. Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no. I am a spirit of no common rate: The summer still doth tend upon my state, And I do love thee; therefore go with me. I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee, And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep; And I will purge thy mortal grossness so, That thou shalt like an airy spirit go. Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed! Enter four Fairies: peaseblossom , cobweb , mote and mustardseed . peaseblossom Ready. cobweb And I. mote And I. mustardseed And I. all Where shall we go? titania Be kind and courteous to this gentleman. Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes. Feed him with apricots and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries. The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers, crop their waxen thighs And light them at the fiery glow-worms’ eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise;

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And pluck the wings from painted butterflies To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies. peaseblossom Hail, mortal. cobweb Hail. mote Hail mustardseed Hail bottom . I cry your worships mercy, heartily. I beseech your worship’s name. cobweb Cobweb. bottom I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb. If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you. Your name, honest gentleman? peaseblossom Peaseblossom. bottom I pray you commend me to Mistress Squash, your mother, and to Master Peascod, your father. Good Master Peaseblossom, I shall desire you of more acquaintance too. Your name, I beseech you, sir? mustardseed Mustardseed. bottom Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well. That same cowardly giantlike Ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house. I promise you, your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you more acquaintance, good Master Mustardseed. titania Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently. [Exeunt.] (3.1.146– 92)

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Initially the quibbling badinage between Bottom and the fairies seems an anticlimax after the remarkable surprises sprung in Bottom’s metamorphosis, Titania’s incongruous love for the ‘monster’ (3.2.6) and her ambitious plans to purge his ‘mortal grossness’ and make him an airy spirit. It reveals little more than the man’s rather minimal sense of humour as he puns on the names of the fairies. However, on closer inspection, the section marks an intriguing meeting of ways between the supernatural, the natural and the human worlds depicted in the play, expressed through differences of language. Bottom, we realize, is the only character who actually interacts with the fairy world on his own terms, maintaining his imperturbable self even in such strangely disorientating circumstances. For that matter, he is the only mortal even to be aware of the fairies’ existence, let alone to become a love object for the fairy queen. The ill-assorted mismatch is indicated by the stark contrast between his prosaic speech patterns, indicating a general lack of sensitivity and romantic introspection, and Titania’s liquid and mysterious poetry. Humour has often been explained by humour theorists as incongruity, and the scene is certainly comically effective in the theatre. There is a linking element in this case as well: nature itself. Bottom with his ass’s head has now crossed a borderline between human and natural, and the hybridity of the man-ass, however strange and grotesque, is a weirdly mutated phenomenon of nature. These fairies are associated through their names with plants and natural processes, their tasks including the collecting of fruit and flowers, the harvesting of bees of their honey or the bringing of jewels from the ocean, while Titania governs nature in the form of presiding over ‘summer’s state’, and she is associated with the moon’s creation of dew on flowers which then ‘weep’. Titania’s experience, however drug-induced, also recalls in intensified fashion the idea of love itself as a drug which is transformative, as the human lovers have been experiencing to their bewildered dismay. There is also a strangely quiet and friendly atmosphere about the scene which could have had ample potential for sensationalism, as though it represents a rarely mutual communication between human and natural envisaged as a ‘peaceable kingdom’, providing another contrast to the conflict and disputes. It is little wonder that this scene in particular is the one that has been chosen by many artists to illustrate an emblematically inclusive vision drawing together many

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threads in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole. Bizarrely dominated by an ‘unnatural’ freak and a hallucinating fairy, it yet embodies in general the diverse and transforming capacities of ‘the green world’ of nature. The amiable but perverse spirit of nature depicted in this scene is picked up again when the dramatist is beginning to disentangle the narrative confusions. In appreciating the dramaturgical skill and economy, we should add to the opening stage direction below the information that Hermia and Lysander, and Demetrius and Helena are also visible, soundly sleeping, so all is in readiness for sleepers to awake. [4.1] Enter [titania , bottom ] and fairies , and [oberon , puck ?] behind them. titania Come sit thee down upon this flowery bed While I thy amiable cheeks do coy [caress], And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy. bottom Where’s Peaseblossom? peaseblossom Ready. bottom Scratch my head, Peaseblossom. Where’s Monsieur Cobweb? cobweb Ready. bottom Monsieur Cobweb, good Monsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, Monsieur; and good Monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not. I would be loath to have you overflown with a honey-bag, Signor. Where’s Monsieur Mustardseed? mustardseed Ready. bottom Give me your neaf [clenched hand, to scratch], Monsieur Mustardseed. Pray you, leave your courtesy, good Monsieur.

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mustardseed What’s your will? bottom Nothing, good Monsieur, but to help Cavalery Cobweb to scratch. I must to the barber’s, Monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face; and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch. titania What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love? bottom I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and the bones. Music: tongs, rural music. titania Or say, sweet love, what thou desirest to eat. bottom Truly, a peck of provender. I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay. Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow. titania I have a venturous fairy, that shall seek The squirrel’s hoard, and fetch thee new nuts. bottom I had rather have a handful or two of dried peas. But I pray you, let none of your people stir me. I have an exposition [he means ‘disposition’] of sleep come upon me. titania Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. Fairies, be gone, and be always away. [Music stops. Exeunt Fairies.] So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. O how I love thee! How I dote on thee! [They sleep.] (4.1.1–45) The peaceful spirit uniting the contrasting personnel established in the earlier scene still prevails. Bottom continues to issue practical instructions to the fairies, as though on an equal or even superior footing to the supernatural creatures. He feels confident enough to

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parade pretentiously his cosmopolitan linguistic skills with jovial addresses to ‘Monsieur’ and ‘Cavalery’ (from the Italian ‘cavaliero’ for knight). However, simple repetition of the previous scene is avoided here by subtly changing the emphasis to a set of minor but telling contrasts, indicating the incompatible and externally coerced state of Titania’s feelings, and also exposing differences between Bottom as man and Bottom as quasi-animal. Titania’s speech continues to be horticultural, in her ‘flowery bed’, adorning Bottom’s head with musk roses and expressing metaphorically her physical possessiveness as ivy growing around the bark of the elm tree. Bottom, however, shows no interest in nature as nature, but only as donkey food such as oats, dried peas and hay. There is a further divergence in musical taste since Bottom prefers braying along to the primitive, rustic percussion of ‘tongs and bones’ to the lyrical songs which earlier sang Titania to sleep. Exploited for humour, the differences between prose and poetry also signal a love which is inappropriate, ephemeral and coercive, and which is soon to evaporate since (we now learn) Titania has given up the Indian boy and so Oberon is prepared to apply an antidote to the juice of lovein-idleness. There is also perhaps a crack of dawning realization in Bottom himself, that what he thinks is an itchy beard which needs constant scratching is not his permanent state, and that he ‘must to the barber’s’. As the fairies leave, and the personifications of beauty and beast subside into sleep, Oberon and Robin step forward to give their benedictions, and the set of reconciliations that mark the play’s conclusion come into sight. The nocturnal world of metamorphosing nature, having created wild havoc for some and emotional harmony for others, must now be disengaged, heralding a return to the daylight world of society.

Exercise erci

I

magine you are approached by a film-making company and they ask for your expert advice on the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They explain that they need to cut down the play to make it a two-hour movie with language accessible to modern audiences, and they ask what they can delete without losing crucial narrative information for audiences. How would you go about this task? What would be gained and what would be lost?

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Language of Change Myth, Race and Gender

Myth and change Dreams, myths and powerful works of art (including, but not exclusively, literature) have some important elements in common. Most are in some way explanatory, offering stories that seek to make sense of the world as we see it. These are not ‘true’ in the sense of being realistic. In fact, their whole point is that they are not realistic, at least not in the same terms used when scientific facts are employed to explain natural phenomena. But they are at least imaginatively plausible, by hypothesizing an alternative world in which paradoxical and distorted facts can reveal underlying explanations for why the world is as we perceive it, rather than as it is. For example, Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis turns a particular story into a myth of love. Written just before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it borrows from Ovidian mythology and shows the goddess of love herself thwarted in love, first by the mortal youth’s indifference to her and then by his violent death on being gored by the boar which he hunts. The poem concludes by showing that her frustrated grief explains why human love in general is so contradictory, driven by compulsive desire which feels apparently endless and immortal, and yet doomed to end prematurely because of the inescapable, mortal imperative of death. We want 171

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love to continue forever and we hope it will, but it does not, because lives end, and the fable as Shakespeare tells it explains why this is so. His Sonnets dwell insistently on the same fatal acceptance: ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate: / That time will come and take my love away’ (Sonnet 64). Some of this bittersweet realization underlies the two companion plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Change is the element lovers inhabit, for better and worse. A preoccupation with change lies at the heart of myth itself. The very title of Ovid’s collection of mythological stories, Metamorphoses, tells us this. The ending of the ‘Venus and Adonis’ episode in Ovid signifies the transformation of the dead youth into a flower with bright red petals, as though dipped in blood (still in existence and known as the ‘adonis flower’ or ‘autumn adonis’). Mythic reasoning holds that change has – or can – come about in the world by positing the imagination as a vehicle for conceiving an alternative source of knowledge, which can offer explanations for events and experiences in the ‘real world’. In literary terms, metaphors act in the same way, offering ways of seeing events transposed into similitudes, often in a symbolic fashion. Adonis as a flower which grows and dies is a metaphor for the fleeting, ever-changing destructibility of youth, beauty and love. Often in mythic narratives, magic or supernatural intervention (sometimes incompetent, like Puck’s) can be the agent for change, or change can be effected by other surprising displacements of reason and logic through divergent, dream-like modes of thinking. Even if A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a full-blown myth in the same sense as Venus and Adonis, it does bear strong resemblances to that genre, especially in its multiple references to change and its overarching, conceptual reference point of dreaming. Metamorphosis can operate in both myths and dreams in many ways. First, myths are often originary or ‘creation’ narratives, showing, for example, how conflicts between immortal gods, enacted in some ancient ‘dreamtime’ as human history was beginning, caused the future joys and tribulations in the mortal world of human beings. Such stories may, for example, teach why the moon waxes and wanes, why night follows day or why the seasons change in regular cycles as the result of a particular god gaining ascendancy at the turning point of a natural cycles – more or less as the quarrel in the alternative world of fairyland causes changes in the weather for humans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Powerful works of art, literature, drama and film also resemble myths and dreams, by

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representing heightened emotions within a connected narrative, which offers conclusions that may be hopeful or hopeless, comic or tragic – or creatively ambiguous. Shakespeare’s plays, for example – works like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear – by common consent have these explanatory capacities in abundance, since they continue to be read, performed and adapted 400 years after they were written. A Midsummer Night’s Dream partakes of all three modes of thinking – myth, dream, literature – since, besides of course being encoded in a memorable work of art, it offers also a mythic or hypothetical explanation of why young love can be so capricious and unnervingly distressing. Its central metaphor explicitly focuses on the nature of dreams, and through metaphors its concentration is on change and the importance of the imagination. Having looked at dreams in a previous chapter, in this one I propose to explore some of the interrelated links between metamorphosis, myth and metaphor, all considered as a signifying system or language explaining different kinds of change. We will then go on to look at examples of ‘changelings’ based on race and gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A central perception which Shakespeare drew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which he studied in Latin at school and to which he kept returning in his plays, was that myth and metaphor are closely related in explaining the nature of change. In Ovid’s world of gods and goddesses who are usually pursuing mortals, change is an omnipresent, ever-recurring principle in human experience, often providing a punishment for some transgression, or a solution to a problem, presented in the form of a metaphor. Apollo relentlessly stalked the reluctant nymph Daphne, and just as he was about to catch her she is transformed into a laurel tree which remains evergreen, eternally young, and associated with poets through the laurel garland. The woman is both rescued and frozen into a metaphor. Acteon, a mortal hero, accidentally spies Diana, goddess of chastity, as she bathes. She indignantly throws water on him, transforming him into a nervous deer which runs away, only to be pursued and killed by his own hunting hounds. He is punished for accidentally transgressing the boundary between mortal and immortal. A mortal woman, Arachne, challenges the goddess Athena to a weaving contest, but through her arrogance she is turned into a spider, giving us the word ‘arachnoid’. At the end of Ovid’s version of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, when the lovers die the gods make permanent the colour of Pyramus’s bloodstain as

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fruit on the mulberry tree, to symbolize their illicit love (though Quince’s play does not mention this). Such closures turn on the transformations of dynamic human beings into metaphors representing the inner essence of their behaviour – an inviolable tree, a timid deer, a spider endlessly spinning webs, bloodstained flowers or fruit. A Midsummer Night’s Dream deals centrally and apparently consciously with myth-making, fusing as it does mythological Athenian figures, metamorphosing human feelings, supernatural fairies, a changeling child and a mortal turned into a hybrid, half man and half ass, to reveal his personality in a textbook example of Ovidian metamorphosis. There is also a connection with Ovid’s Midas who grows ass’s ears because of his bad taste in music, mirrored in Bottom by his preference for crude percussive music made by bashing objects together: titania What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love? bottom I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and the bones. Music: tongs, rural music (4.1.27–9) Transformation is verbally emphasized throughout the play, explaining most of the plot transitions, with the repeated words ‘translated’ and ‘changed’ supplying the links: helena Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I’ll give to be to you translated. O teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart. (1.1.190–3) snout O Bottom, thou art changed. What do I see on thee? bottom What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you? [Exit Snout.]

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Enter quince . quince Bless thee Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated. [Exit.] (3.1.110–13) robin goodfellow I led them on in this distracted fear, And left sweet Pyramus translated there. (3.2.31–3) robin goodfellow A lovely boy stolen, from an Indian king: She never had so sweet a changeling. And jealous Oberon would have the child. (2.1.22–4) titania 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. (2.1.111–14) helena The wildest hath not such a heart as you. Run when you will, the story shall be changed. (2.1.229–30) lysander Not Hermia, but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove? (2.2.117–18) hermia Why are you grown so rude? What change is this, Sweet love? (3.2.262–3) hippolyta I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change. (5.1.245)

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At the centre of the action is Robin Goodfellow, a hobgoblin able to change his identity at will in order to trick humans, and also himself, causing changes by applying the juice to the eyes of the lovers and in transforming Bottom. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is so full of changes at every level that it seems like Shakespeare’s own version of Metamorphoses, similarly opening up questions of mortals being changed by straying accidentally into the territory of immortals. Balancing the moments of high comedy, there are ever-present elements of ‘danger and transgression’ (Lemonnier-Texier, 2006, 183–204) in the play’s imagined world, as we shall see in the curiously specific example of the changeling figure.

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hink of another work you have read involving magic or selfconsciously creating a myth through a story: perhaps the ‘Harry Potter’ books for magic, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Ringss, or a fantasy novel by Philip Pullman for a mythic scope. Compare and contrast these with A Midsummer Night’s Dream in terms of how magic and myth are used to represent change, both external and internal. Can the comparison open up a novel way of looking at the Dream?

Changelings and racial difference Notions of change always have cultural dimensions which themselves change from generation to generation. This in itself explains why readings of plays can be so different, as norms, conventions and political attitudes swing and evolve. In the Dream the idea of ‘changelings’ can be a starting-point for discussing such issues. The Indian ‘changeling child’ is a figure whose presence in the play stirs a range of emotional, racial, sexual and cultural concerns, perhaps disproportionately for one who, according to the stage directions, never actually appears onstage. In medieval times, and to a lesser degree Elizabethan, the idea of changelings stolen by fairies was the stuff of fearful superstition, to be suspected when children went missing, or to be held up as an awful cautionary tale told to

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naughty infants. This was the stuff of nightmares rather than of dreams. In the contretemps between Titania and Oberon, the existence of the Indian boy seems to provoke Oberon’s resentment that there are other, more important relationships in Titania’s life than that with himself, supplanting marital desire for her husband. His bitterness seems to resemble that of an aggrieved cuckold, excluded from his wife’s affections. Some have detected a hint of homo-eroticism in his own attachment to the ‘lovely boy’, and his desire to take the child away from the feminine world and induct him into the male hierarchy as a ‘henchman’. The latter is hinted at in the terms of their rival claims over the boy, since Oberon (in Puck’s words) sees the boy as ‘stolen, from an Indian king’ (2.1.22, my italics), whereas Titania claims she is bringing him up because of her veneration of the queen who was his mother. Productions often bring the figure on stage, costumed as a charming and demure Indian child (as in Reinhardt’s 1935 movie). More provocatively he has been depicted as a handsome, turbaned adolescent (Hendricks, 1996, 38), thus making explicit a sexual attraction felt by both Titania and Oberon (Callaghan, 1999, 152). Or productions may leave him unseen, as the text implies, leaving it up to us how we visualize him. But why is the boy specified as Indian? Postcolonial critics, and scholars influenced by Edward Said’s celebrated ideas on orientalism as constructed through Western eyes, see the insertion of this figure as raising issues of racial ‘otherness’ in an age of cultural imperialism. One critic, for example, has argued that the presence of the Indian boy invokes ‘ideological investments in, and reshaping of, the discourses of travel, trade, and colonialism’ in early modern England more generally, presenting colonial exploitation as a political equivalent of patriarchal control (Loomba, 2016, 181). In this world, women like Hermia and Hippolyta can be seen as desirable ‘merchandise’, bringing female dowries to marriage and joining wealthy families, and as spoils of war, like Hippolyta. Others dispute this reading as anomalous in Shakespeare’s world, on the grounds that English control of India did not operate until 150 years later (Eastwood, 179–80). In this sense, the Dream is in some ways pre- rather than post-colonial, and more pertinently rooted in fairy lore and superstition rather than economic realities. Another critic, linking the Indian boy with the monstrous Bottom as a kind of changeling, sees both as Western cultural constructions of

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‘foreignness’ and alien ethnic typologies indicating racial difference. The boy, it might be argued, is connected with travellers’ tales of strange creatures from the Orient and elsewhere, and in their exotic status serve to awaken Western acquisitiveness and cause proprietorial disputes like that between Oberon and Titania. The figure of the transformed Bottom, on the other hand, taps into fears concerning a hybrid ‘mulatto’ as an unnatural cross between human and equine (Hendricks, 1996, 42–3), and also equates the class marker of a ‘hard-handed man’ with a racially other species (Akhimie, 2018, ch. 3). In the erotic cameo of the ‘beauty and the beast’ liaison, we see a contrast of both different classes and also species, between a grotesquely half-animal ‘rude mechanical’ and Titania representing both an aristocratic lady and a fairy. Both the Indian boy and the transformed Bottom are the types ‘collected’ by Europeans as nineteenth-century travellers as relics of aboriginal races from farflung countries and deposited as curiosities in museums. In such a reading, the boy would be regarded as alluring while the ass-man is a barbarian figure of fear, the kind of creatures referred to by Othello as ‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (1.3.145–6). In terms of the play, the forest becomes a borderland between human habitation and fairyland, equivalent to a metaphorical ‘foreign’ place, stirring complicated feelings of both comedy and fear from colonial anxiety about mixing races. Such challenging interpretations, some textual and others extra-textual, should be considered, but the reason why the boy is Indian and seems tacitly to incite such strong feelings in Titania and Oberon remains mysterious and can be interpreted in different ways, leading in diverse, new directions. The crucial question is whether we build our interpretation on a ‘presentist’ argument about racial identity, acknowledging that the issue is topical and controversial for twentyfirst-century scholars (Thompson, 2011, ch.1), or whether we adopt a more historicized perspective taking account of ideas of colour in 1595. Once again, it’s up to you as reader! However, in either reading the changeling child can be seen as a metaphor more generally suggestive of the Dream’s central preoccupation with change. The mortal lovers in the play, or at least the two males Lysander and Demetrius, can also be considered changelings too, in several senses. Finding themselves in the forest they too become stolen playthings of the fairies, whose main power is rendering amatory transformations on the minds of their victims,

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and even changing identities. However, there is a difference between the men. In the case of Demetrius the change caused by love-inidleness is more of a clarification of his apparently pre-existing tendency to fickleness and changeability, more or less as Bottom’s change clarifies his ass-like qualities: lysander Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head, Made love to Nedar’s daughter Helena And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes, Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry Upon this spotted and inconstant man. theseus I must confess that I have heard so much, And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof; But being over-full of self-affairs, My mind did lose it. (1.1.107–14) Helena confirms his ‘spotted and inconstant’ behaviour later in the scene when she recalls Demetrius courting her (242–3). Hermia’s words gender fickleness as a male quality: ‘By all the vows that ever men have broke / (In number more than ever women spoke)’ (1.1.175–6). The play seems to support her generalization since the two women do remain consistent and unchanging in their affections and uncontaminated by the love juice. Nonetheless, Helena voices the principle to be acted out in the forest, that love itself is a metamorphic agency, though unknown to her it can be manipulated by magic and ironically it does in these cases look ‘with the eyes’ and not the mind: Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. (1.1.232–4) Lysander’s change is the more shocking to the women and even to him, since it is completely unexpected and inexplicable, and as the audience knows it is caused by Puck’s act of mistaken identity. Once again, it is deeply ironic that he attributes his change of heart to the ‘reason’ of maturity, when in fact it is irrational:

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The will of man is by his reason swayed, And reason says you are the worthier maid. Things growing are not ripe until their season; So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason. (2.2.119–21) In rejecting Hermia, Lysander uses the unpleasant language of prejudice, as though it is she who has changed. His words are charged with racial animosity, and because her hair is black, he spurns her as though she is African: ‘Away, you Ethiope’, and ‘Out, tawny Tartar, out! Out loathed medicine; O hated potion, hence’ (3.2.256, 263). Here, as in Theseus’s pejorative ‘sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’ (5.1.11), race and gender are elided in an equally unsympathetic and rejective spirit (Hall, 1995, 22–3). It is Lysander who is the true changeling here, and in every sense he has been inexplicably transformed. After the conflicts have been played out – comically to the detached audience but distressing and potentially tragic to the young lovers – and when the error has been reversed by Puck, that character can mordantly observe that, though love is certainly changeable, yet harmony in love is a kind of mathematical equation which has nothing to do with ‘reason’ and in this case is closer to the instinctive animal behaviour of pairing: Jack shall have Jill, Nought shall go ill, The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well. (3.2.461–3) It is another example in the play of humans being dehumanized, in this case turned into coupling horses. The terms in which Demetrius confirms that he has been changed turn the metaphors of change into a lesson about love itself – ‘I wot not by what power / (But by some power it is)’ (4.1.163–4) – conceding love’s perverse irrationality, in which the characters have no choice.

Bottom as changeling: art and myth Enough has been said elsewhere in this book to establish the centrality of the other ‘changeling’ in the play, Bottom, whose fate

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is in a literary sense ‘translated’ from a classical story of bestiality, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. But there is another dimension to this stroke of comic genius by Shakespeare, since in its memorable afterlife the deformed image has been in turn appropriated and ‘translated’ by later artists, as though Shakespeare has provided a true myth, the origin and creation story of an enduring cultural metamorphosis in its own right. If you search on the internet for ‘images of Bottom and Titania’, you will find dozens, perhaps hundreds of depictions, usually of the man-ass in the arms of the fairy queen. There is one painting in particular which recreates the episode, investing it with mythic strangeness and power. The Romantic-age artist Henry Fuseli was drawn to illustrate Shakespearean scenes, especially ones involving the supernatural and evil, and his painting Bottom and Titania (c. 1790) projects some disturbing ideas into Shakespeare’s comic portrayal. The Tate Gallery, which owns one of several Fuseli painted on this theme, describes their copy in this way: Titania calls on her fairies, who are wearing contemporary dress, to attend to Bottom: Pease-blossom scratches his ass’s head; Mustard-seed perches on his hand in order to assist; and Cobweb kills a bee and brings him the honey-bag. A leering young woman offers him a basket of dried peas. The young woman leading a dwarf-like creature by a string symbolises the triumph of youth over old age, of the senses over the mind and of woman over man. The hooded old woman on the right is holding a changeling newly formed out of wax. Similarly, on the left of the picture, the group of children are artificial beings created by witches. (Tate online archives) This account highlights how Fuseli has chosen some parts of Shakespeare’s text (and added others) involving cruelty (‘Cobweb kills a bee’), inflicted to give pleasure to Bottom; voyeurism (‘a leering young woman’); and the grotesque with a touch of sinister in the ‘dwarf-like creature’ led by a string, the ‘hooded old woman’ who has shaped the changeling out of wax, and ‘artificial beings created by witches’. What the description does not mention is the very obvious sexuality in the painting. Titania is completely naked, one arm raised in apparent celebration and the other fondling Bottom’s head, while the head and face of Bottom contrast with her

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light skin as he is crouched in flinching posture in semi-darkness. The representation of skin colours perhaps gestures towards the references to racial otherness found in the play. Bottom is represented as something between an apprehensive animal and an expressionless human effigy, who cowers as though he is the victim of ‘some enforced chastity’. The painted doll-like children and a foregrounded fairy with a gigantic butterfly on its head are phantasmagorical and nightmarish in their cumulative effect, as is the painting as a whole with its juxtaposed discrepancies of style. Fuseli painted a series on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including ones of Titania Awakening and of the reconciliation between Titania and Oberon, and they are all equally weird, pointing towards disconcerting hints in Shakespeare which lie just beneath the comic surface. In Fuseli’s recreations he has ‘translated’ into visual language scenes from the play, providing a highly original commentary on its world and providing his own uniquely metamorphosed myth of a myth (Shakespeare’s) of a myth (Ovid’s). It is no accident that A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been a favourite for other visionary painters like William Blake and Richard Dadd, since it shows the kind of liminal interplay between mortal and immortal worlds on which myths are based.

Actors and gender Though we don’t often think of it this way, the most comprehensive, meta-theatrical group of ‘changelings’ in plays are actors. Their profession requires them on a daily basis to be ‘transformed’ and ‘translated’ into multiple selves, their assumed identities not only designated by changing costumes and voices, but constructed by the language given to them by the playwright’s script. Commoners (‘plebeians’) become aristocrats and even monarchs (Callaghan, 1999, 152–7), and earthlings become fairies (as in the Dream itself) or gods and goddesses (as in John Lyly’s plays, performed exclusively by boy actors, and which influenced Shakespeare). Even more obviously, because of the Elizabethan practice of casting boy actors as women, males become females on stage. Such wilful and blatant changes were vehemently castigated in England by anti-theatrical, religious zealots. They repeated Plato’s attack on artists in Book 10 of The Republic, maintaining that actors told lies by pretending to

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be other than they were, as well as inflaming immoral and lustful desires in audiences. One Elizabethan anti-theatrical pamphleteer, William Prynne, described popular stage plays as ‘sinful, heathenish, lewd, ungodly spectacles and most pernicious corruptions’ (Prynne, 1632). Such hostility towards acting and actors was not restricted to the Renaissance stage, since it has in different ways existed as a prejudice in all ages and cultures (Barish, 1981, passim). Actors have often been seen as leading reprehensible double lives in their plays, for example, simulating murderers, reprobates and lechers, and in their suspected bohemian lifestyles. The Elizabethan state implicitly supported such criticism by passing ‘sumptuary laws’ restricting what people were allowed to wear in order to maintain differences between the classes, and forbidding cross-dressing. Theatre, by its very nature, flagrantly violated such norms, presenting itself as an equivalent of Shakespeare’s forest in the Dream where untrue illusions prevail, taboos are broken and identities are confused and transmuted with abandon. As Sidney had argued, poetry (and fiction in general) ‘will never give the lie to things not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written’ (Sidney, 1973, 103). Presented as a spatial metaphor rather than as a fact, a play can never be disproved and may contain its own mythic truth. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream it is the hapless Flute who would attract most opprobrium from critics hostile to playhouses, since he is a male (with ‘a beard coming’) destined with his highpitched voice to portray a woman. The charge was not only that such a publicly declared ‘changeling’ was based on an intention to deceive audiences, but more potently, reflecting a prejudice, that ‘theatre effeminized the boy actors who played women’s parts by dressing them in women’s costumes’ (Levine, 1994, 1). Dressed as women, they were deemed especially morally dangerous in stirring baser feelings in audiences, most obviously in a play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream which deals openly with sexual desire outside the law, depicting both elopement and adultery (Titania). In all this, the legal system unwittingly created a couple of its own contradictions. First, by proscribing women from playing themselves on stage for moral reasons, it implied that drama, if it was to exist at all, could portray only half the human population on the public stage to mixed audiences. Secondly, even though it disapproved of both ‘effeminization’ and forms of immorality, the

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law encouraged attitudes which effectively amounted to androgyny, or turning the boy-actor into an image of a eunuch. Even if surgical castration was not the practice in England, it was metaphorically available to keep the high-pitched voice of an actor forever young, since boys may have been discarded from the workforce when their voices broke if there was no place for them as adult actors. At the very least, a degree of child exploitation and abuse was a danger, giving some moral authority to Puritan advocates of antitheatricality (Callaghan, 1999, 67–8). In this set of dangers, and in light of the importance of ‘hearing’ discussed above in Chapter 4, the loss of the ‘woman’s part’ of the voice was more of a professional catastrophe for the boy-actor than changes to his appearance, since shaving, clothes and a wig could continue to disguise gender, potentially into maturity. Language to the rescue! Before our enjoyment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream fades away in the face of inconvenient attacks based on racial and gender stereotypes, we might return to our startingpoint, that the text of a play exists first and foremost as raw ‘writing’, and we may draw a series of consequences from this premise. I hope that this book has shown that in ‘realizing’ the play either in reading or performing, we can construct multiple possibilities of interpreting the changelings whom we find in the play. For the individual reader, freedom of the imagination is the key, while in the theatre choices can be made by a collectivity of director, actors and audience, to press one theme or another into the foreground. For example, countless all-female or all-male productions have proved decisively that no matter how it is cast, ‘something of great constancy’ can emerge as the experience of the play, if we suspend our disbelief and accept dramatic representation as myth, dream or metaphor. Manifestly racist material, such as Iago’s attitude to the Moor Othello or the Christians’ abuse of the Jew Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, can be regarded not as statements of authorial intentions but as provocations to inspect through fictions how prejudice is activated in society by unsympathetic characters. Uncomfortably, the converse holds too, that there can indeed be sexist and racist readings of these plays, underpinning patriarchal and intolerant attitudes, which in certain historical periods and cultures have lamentably prevailed as normative. But the conclusion is the same: that the text provides negotiable language which can be interpreted in terms of a diversity

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of radically differing attitudes. In Shakespearean drama in particular, as we have seen amply illustrated in this book, sentiments expressed by one character as ideals are usually parodied or debunked by another, and political views vehemently expressed in one speech are invariably undermined in another. Theseus certainly does not have the last word in his condemnation of lovers and poets as ‘lunatics’. Elizabethan training in classical rhetoric at school attuned writers, like lawyers, to give equal weight to opposite arguments, using exercises in disputatio (arguing) – ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that’. The resulting ‘countervailling’ ambiguities are a hallmark of Shakespearean drama, giving free play to the agency of the transformative imagination, expressed through language and pitted against the controlling discourse of reason. We are given wide interpretative licence by Shakespeare’s own titles of romantic comedies: As You Like It, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and a play promising no more than a ‘Dream’. Given their make-believe worlds, we may believe what we make of them.

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n what ways might A Midsummer Night’s Dream be considered to deal with issues of race and gender? Are there lines in the play dealing with related subjects, apart from the examples of the transformed Bottom, the changeling child and the male lovers?

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CHAPTER NINE

From Page to Screen A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cinematic Language Movie language: Shakespeare for the deaf We sometimes use words loosely, but even the most commonly repeated phrases can reveal a telling precision. We speak of reading a text, which is usually a solitary activity carried out by an individual. Then we listen to an audiobook or radio programme, when we might be alone or in company, but in either case attention is focused exclusively on what is heard. Next we speak of going to the theatre, implying something like going to a party expecting a communal and participative experience with all senses awakened. But we always refer to watching a movie, when the dominant sense awakened will be sight. The history of cinema provides us with an example of ‘Shakespeare for the deaf’, where substantial understanding can be achieved even without words. It is often argued that in the modern age the pendulum has swung away from language to a culture of images, cinema being both cause and symptom. The brief selection of movie representations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented here is intended to illustrate a spectrum of examples of how the play has been visually represented in some major movie versions. 187

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Academic studies of cinema usually call the medium ‘motion pictures’ or ‘the moving image’, and in earlier times it was often referred to as ‘the pictures’. The terminology is a tacit acknowledgement that historically films began without any spoken language. In the beginning, cinema was nothing but the image, and sound and spoken voices were added later. Or to be more qualified, film has always had its own visual language, which is an amalgam of image and sound and equivalent to syntax and grammar in spoken and written forms. Cinema evolved from still photography which, as Susan Sontag argues in a famous essay, teaches us ‘a new visual code’, adding that ‘photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing’ (Sontag, 1973, 1). ‘Looking at . . . observe . . . seeing’ create their own ‘grammar’ without reference to words. Both photography and movies claim to show ‘reality’, but in fact what they show is not ‘real’ but an artful and edited selection of images arranged in a certain order, no more and no less. Although cinema claims transparent naturalism and an impression of truth-telling (cinema verité) where we can trust the evidence of our eyes, in fact it is a constructed and emotionally manipulative product of selection and editing at every stage. Cinema can ‘lie’ as much as can a speaker or writer. By experience we learn to understand its conventions, in order to analyse and ‘read’ the motives and messages behind a film’s effects working on a passive audience in a darkened auditorium. Of course movies can do a service in providing a record of how a play has been performed in earlier times, at least from the Victorian age up to the present day, unlike ephemeral stage performances from the past, recoverable only at second hand through descriptions by reviewers reporting at the historical moment of staging. This book does not attempt to cover the history of staging the Dream, a subject which is amply summarized in the Introduction to the Arden (Chaudhuri, 2018, 3–38) and introductions to other edited texts, and more specific performance studies such as Halio’s. At the heart of reading film is the concept of mise-en-scene, basing analysis on how individual scenes, and even still images, can reveal the specific language of the film as a whole, its narrative direction, underlying ideologies, purposes and implied value systems. The term refers to everything that is ‘put in the scene’ at any one moment, emphasizing that every detail has been chosen by

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a director and edited to create an overall impression or ‘reading’ which can be subtle and complex. It includes everything that is made visible – actors, scenery, props, camera angles, sound, dialogue, music – since all elements are selective, highly processed and edited, so as to leave nothing to chance. Sometimes the editing prioritizes the director’s role as auteur or author who makes all decisions alone, or sometimes there is a ‘house style’ adopted and ‘target audience’ expected by a commercial studio (for example, Disney). Live theatre must leave some things to chance and can be improvisatory, spontaneous and even accident-prone, while movies are fixed in a different sense. In the respective processes of transmission, each medium exists with its own signifying code, its own language. Film is also a very recent phenomenon, not much more than a century old, compared with staged drama which dates back at least to the beginnings of recorded time. Its rapid development has been driven by evolving technology and by commercial, popularizing factors rather than primarily artistic considerations, since it is an expensive medium and needs nowadays to reach a global audience to recoup costs. This created a dependence on an international publicity machine, generating a whole industry which must be sustained without alienating potential viewers.

Movies in history First, to show just how recent was the medium, here are some dates to orientate us. The technology of reproducing ‘moving images’, and shaping them into their own grammar, evolved  during the nineteenth century, following the invention of photography in 1839. The birth of cinema itself came in the 1890s and the establishment of studios in 1897, an enterprise attributed to Georges Méliès and his brother Gaston in France. At first films were just a minute long, then reels of eight or twelve minutes, which then could be added together to make a longer work, a ‘feature film’. They were silent, though often showings were accompanied by mood music played live by a resident pianist. They were black and white, though sometimes ‘colourated’ by hand. An embryonic technology making it possible to show black-and-white films in colour by using red and green filters was known as early as 1916, but it was a cumbersome

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and expensive process requiring special projectors and prone to fail. The capacity for making feature-length movies came in 1906 (in Australia). ‘Talkies’ or non-silent movies were innovated in 1927, and full colour  was possible in the 1930s although it was not universally used until the 1950s. There are various other important facts about the history of movies, such as the monopoly of large studios and resistance to this, but these are the basic facts, and they occurred around the same time in all the countries that became major movie producers, such as Britain, the USA, Germany, Russia, Italy and India. As movies became longer and more technically elaborate, they were increasingly expensive, so only big companies could fund them. The American studios in Hollywood (for example, Warner Bros and MGM) gained immense power by also owning the cinemas and rights to show and distribute movies, until the Anti-Trust Laws in 1948 separated making from showing films. Shakespeare played a part in the movie industry from the beginning. It is among these silent movies that we find a burgeoning ‘Shakespeare for the deaf’, where words were limited to occasional ‘intertitles’ giving brief information or quotations. One of the first ever surviving snippets of film is a twelve-second extract from a version of a stage performance of King John in 1895 (‘Silent Shakespeare’). Until the 1920s there were several short, silent movies of either scenes from his plays or drastically shortened versions of a play, made in different countries. Some were filmed from a scene on stage with static camera, while others episodically presented scenes. The idea of ‘Shakespeare without words’ in silent movies, in which images alone create the narrative, raises interesting questions about where the basis of the plays lies in the new medium. As we have seen, filmed Shakespeare does not need many of the lengthy descriptive passages in the plays; and as a result all movies are shorter than the plays, often using only 50 per cent of the language. Apart from naturalistic settings, other effects which steadily became possible include ‘voice-overs’ for soliloquies, making these much more internalized and psychological rather than recited loudly for a live audience in the theatre. The first American feature-length movie made was of Shakespeare’s Richard III (again silent) in 1912, while in Germany a full-length Othello was made in 1922 with frequent intertitles  giving quotations from the play and summaries of the action – at least a

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move towards integrated language and image though still without sound itself. From the start, the short Shakespeare reels used the distinctive innovations of movie technology. Facial close-ups, impossible in the Victorian theatre, were achieved simply by moving the camera close to the face, a device which is used to the point of tedium in the silent German Othello. This device was a crucial discovery for filmic language, allowing a degree of psychological intimacy with characters, as though we can read their minds and emotions even without language. Movies could also achieve the kind of magic equivalent to Puck’s ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes’ (2.1.165), making people appear and disappear by simply turning the camera off, moving it somewhere else, and then turning it on again. These might look primitive and obvious effects now, but they were radical breakthroughs at the time in the new medium, helping to provide the elements of narrative linking and emotional insight into a distinctive visual grammar. They remain the foundational repertoire of cinematic illusions, as are flashbacks and changes of location, still supplying the basic ingredients for the ways we ‘read’ a film which depicts the passing of time. The complementary medium of television became possible in the 1950s, bringing ‘moving pictures’ into people’s living rooms, and opening up different, intimate styles of portrayal in a domestic and familyoriented watching environment. There were various paradoxes at work in adapting Shakespeare to the screen in early times, and they had far-reaching effects and still operate in modified form. At first, films were played in clubs, nickelodeons and music halls (Rothwell, 1999, ch. 1), and presented as mass, cheap, working-class entertainment, in conscious reaction against live theatre which was expensive to mount, confined to the middle classes and of necessity reaching far fewer audiences than movies. By including Shakespeare in their output, the new studios tried to give the medium respectability or ‘cultural capital’. In doing so, ironically Shakespeare was also returned to the realms of mass, popular entertainment rather than theatre elites. Attempts were made in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet (1936) to assimilate Shakespeare into the cinematic repertoire in full-length feature films, though these were at the time only partially successful, and not repeated for some time. The paradoxical process of simultaneously gentrifying

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cinema by incorporating works by a culturally hallowed bard, while at the same time repopularizing Shakespeare, was to be repeated  recurrently in some box-office successes. Examples were Laurence Olivier’s wartime Henry V (1945) and his Hamlet (1948), and later, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and the opera version of Otello (1986), alongside the musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story (1961). These were largely successful in their attempt to appeal to a range of audiences, from students of the plays through to general audiences, and they reflect popular preoccupations of the decade in which they were made. For example, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) cashed in on the patriotic spirit generated by the fiftieth anniversary of the breakout of the Second World War in 1939, and tapped into nostalgic memories of Olivier’s popular version which itself was made during the war. Branagh has become the foremost exponent of fusing the cultural and the popular, and he has in turn helped to stimulate a kind of Shakespeare renaissance on film on a global scale. Branagh’s own various adaptations including Much Ado About Nothing (1995), and Baz Luhrmann’s hugely popular Romeo + Juliet  (1996), disproved once and for all the old adage that Shakespeare was box office poison, dating back to the relative commercial failures of the 1930s versions. ‘Offshoots’ from the plays – films that use Shakespeare’s familiar plots but not his words or contexts – also became standard fare, helping to establish the Shakespeare industry on film, for example, Ten Things I Hate about You (1999) based on The Taming of the Shrew, and She’s the Man based on Twelfth Night (2006). The successful adaptations showed that Shakespeare’s plays could be commercially profitable when fully incorporated into the medium of film, while also having an educational motive. Movies were seen not just as escapist fodder for the masses, but could also deal with serious drama and stir younger audiences who were studying Shakespeare at school and university. Other structural factors always operate behind the language of cinema, such as the sheer expense of producing a film, making mainstream movies a risky investment and arguably enforcing ‘safe’ conservative interpretations of the plays rather than radical and experimental versions, though these were possible in the ‘independent’, lower budget art-house industry, and we shall note a few below. The need to make profits encouraged movie-makers also to bear in mind pre-existing, popular film genres when adapting

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Shakespeare plays (Anderegg, 2004, 19), without being limited to a subset of ‘heritage’ movies. We find Shakespeare’s plots used as the basis for musicals, westerns, science fiction and many other film genres. A Midsummer Night’s Dream could even be categorized as belonging to a ‘coming-of-age’ genre which has become a standard Hollywood type of plot. Nowadays, Shakespeare is considered a sure success in the movies, and there have been literally hundreds of examples in the 1990s and twenty-first century, with no signs of this abating. With his anniversaries in 2014 (birth) and 2016 (death), and the First Folio next in 2023, Shakespeare’s future seems assured for another century or more. Although cinema is predominantly and historically a visual medium, it has also steadily incorporated sound media. In our activity of ‘reading films’ we are aware especially of music, which is a powerful, often unobtrusive and subliminal tool in generating emotional effects in movies, and its importance cannot be underestimated. The filmed versions of the Dream provide examples of overt intertextuality drawing on all resources of image and sound.

Exercise erci

E

numerate as many differences as you can think of between film as a medium and stage performance, building up a sense of how each has a different language through which it makes meaning for an audience.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream on film Working through the major movie adaptations of the Dream provides us with a kind of miniature history of the medium sketched above, from its silent origins in the 1890s, through to the incorporation of music and then to television and more recent extravaganzas for the senses. There is a silent version of the Dream with intertitles, produced by the American Vitagraph Studio (1909). It is necessarily very much truncated to fit on one short film spool. It shows early experimentation exploiting the ‘magic’ of cinema, for

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example in filming alfresco in a suitably rural landscape, making people appear and disappear, turning Puck into an animal (a cat) and miraculously placing an ass’s head on Bottom. Oberon is renamed Penelope and is not Titania’s husband but friend, a hangover from the nineteenth century when female Oberons abounded on stage (Chaudhuri, 2018, 15), perhaps to avoid the implication of an adulterous relationship with Bottom, which would have been frowned upon by Victorians. Ironically, the effect in such productions may have raised another touchy subject at the time, same-sex relationships, since the jealousy in Shakespeare’s text can be seen to carry an inescapably erotic charge. In the silent movie, an androgynous Puck is played by a thirteen-year-old Gladys Hulette, as an especially effective and sprightly agent moving between and behind the different character groups. S/he is shown literally spanning a globe of the earth, like an aeroplane shortly after they were invented (1903). Close-ups, however, were not used in this one and the camera keeps it distance from facial expressions. In the days of black-and-white, cinema used to be called ‘the silver screen’, and the phrase aptly describes the first full-length feature film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream made in Hollywood in 1935, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. A relative flop at the box office at the time, it has come to be valued as a masterpiece of movie art, using the whole range of available of screen illusions and originating some conventions that were to be echoed in all subsequent adaptations. While drawing on a shortened version of the play’s verbal text, Reinhardt (who had directed the play on stage in Europe before moving to America, and also in the Hollywood Bowl in 1934) utilized to the full the technology of sound, which was made possible only in 1927. Mendelssohn’s incidental music, composed in 1826, contributes to (and in some cases substitutes for) the spoken language. This meant that the text itself was considerably shortened, since the meaning was conveyed through dazzling images, and emotions conveyed in music. There were also startling expressionist effects derived partly from artistic and performance experience in German film-making. Black-andwhite is used to dazzling artistic effect, and the extraordinary, slow metamorphosis of Bottom’s head into that of an ass is a classical use of a time-accelerated close-up. Industrial issues specific to the Hollywood studios system were also important in the making of this film. Warner Brothers owned

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virtually all the stages of production of movies, as they had their own contracted actors and they controlled the chains of ‘picture palaces’ where the movies played. For example, the reason for the apparently odd casting of James Cagney as Bottom and Micky Rooney as Puck was because in the studio system the company had contracts with the actors who had little choice about which roles they played. As a consequence, they came to be typecast in particular roles, and in the 1935 Dream this aspect is what lies behind the initially bizarre casting decisions. Cagney was mainly known as a tough, working-class guy, often a gangster. Rooney had become known as a child star, and here he adopts an other-worldly, screeching voice that makes the toes curl and adds a disturbing, demonic element to the character of Robin Goodfellow. Victor Jory was known for threatening malevolence in horror roles, and his Oberon has the black-caped and abrupt air of a menacing Dracula, even accompanied by bats. Dick Powell was typecast mainly as a physically attractive but somewhat dim-witted matinee idol, and as Lysander he undercuts the dashing image by revealing instead the underlying shallowness of this persona. Olivia de Havilland was lucky, insofar as this film was her debut so that she aroused no audience preconceptions. It was her role as Titania which led on to her status as a love goddess in historical romances. The fairies were child dancers, choreographed en masse, weaving ‘stairways to the stars’ in the kind of swirling rhythms which were being popularized in Hollywood musicals by Busby Berkeley. In total, the film is moulded into the genre of the musical which was the most fashionable mode in the 1930s. All in all, Reinhardt’s Dream is so haphazardly eclectic in its referencing that it could have been an artistic mess, but the director’s artistically surrealistic vision managed to translate the theme of magic in the play into the visual language of illusionist cinema, packaged as a romantic musical with a hallucinatory, gothic atmosphere. It took over thirty years – a whole generation – for the film industry to overcome its fear that another screen adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would again not make a profit. Peter Hall, as a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, had unrivalled access to some of the most distinguished British Shakespearean actors, and his film, made in 1968, is star-studded with the likes of Helen Mirren (Hermia), Diana Rigg (Helena), Judi Dench (Titania), all in their young prime, as well as Derek Godfrey

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(Theseus), David Warner (Lysander) and Ian Richardson (Oberon). However, they are not cast primarily for their individual ‘star quality’ (which is more commonly the case in movies today) but for their training and skill in speaking Shakespearean language in an accessible and lyrical way. Without Reinhardt’s pyrotechnics of spectacular sight, music and dancing, Hall’s interpretation places emphasis more centrally on Shakespeare’s words, and the text is virtually uncut, although one conspicuous omission is Titania’s ‘These are the forgeries of jealousy’ speech. It is one production which presents the mechanicals without condescension or class prejudice as serious artisans. The actors were clearly used to working as professionals in a Shakespeare-centred group of the RSC, as was Hall as director, providing an even consistency across the ensemble in inflecting the text. However, for all its virtues, at least one critic noted that the heavy concentration on text does not translate well into film, pointing out that much of the pictorial poetry is simply ‘redundant’ since it is ‘shot on location’ and we can see what is being described (Mullin, 529). Hall’s movie was made in 1968, the same year that Franco Zeffirelli’s music-saturated Romeo and Juliet appeared, to greater acclaim because Hall’s Dream was more modestly conservative in style and less effectively marketed. In the case of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet the actors cast, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, were unknown, extremely young and very much ‘faces of the sixties’, and the haunting theme tune by Nino Rota became a number one hit on the charts. Both movies show another aspect of cinematic language, in that they reflect the historical time in which they were made, even when they attempt to be ‘Elizabethan’. The women in Hall’s Dream, including Hippolyta, wear miniskirts, while the men in both films sport Beatles’ haircuts. (The Beatles themselves in Around the Beatles had made a brief spoof of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in 1964, on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday.) The aura of 1960s’ youth culture and ‘permissive society’ pervades both, with sexual explicitness respectively, leaving little to the imagination about what a near-naked Titania intends to do with Bottom, and showing Romeo and Juliet in bed. In the intertextual language of cinema, Hall also echoes visual effects from Reinhardt’s movie, with images of startled creatures like rabbits and owls and plenty of mud, which is a legacy subsequent versions follow, such as Elija Moshinsky’s thoughtful but slow-paced, made-for-television BBC version (1981).

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In the later adaptation directed by Michael Hoffman (1999), the scene in which Hermia and Helena fight has become an all-in mud wrestling match, in what looks like a swamp of melted chocolate. This film, by contrast with Hall’s, has Hollywood written all over it, using the breadth offered by a wide angle lens (Croll, 2008, 88–9), with glorious Dolby sound playing operatic arias. The cast includes established movie stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett, rather than stage actors trained in Shakespearean language. Conscious allusions to the actors’ other famous roles remind knowing audiences of their extra-diegetic personalities and personal lives known through the fashion columns. For audiences, they played themselves as much as Shakespeare’s characters. The emphasis on ‘star quality’ in the Hollywood sense is made functional to the vision of the film, operating as a publicity lure for moviegoers of the time. As a consequence, there is something of a jumble of acting styles and inadvertently clashing accents (British, American and faux Italian), which movie fans don’t seem to mind. It cost $11 million to make, and the sheer extravagance and rich colouring deploy all the technological advances of cinema up to the 1990s, adding dimensions of visual meaning to the specialized language of film, which has come to differ so much from staged drama. In terms of the conception of the play itself, there are some calculated directorial innovations and interventions. Following the lead of Branagh in the popular, recent Much Ado About Nothing (1995), Hoffman sets his film not in Athens but in the favoured tourist destination of Italy, Tuscany, though he creates a fictional village mentioned at the beginning: The village of Monte Athena in Italy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Necklines are high. Parents are rigid. Marriage is seldom a matter of love. Quirkily taking advantage of the (irrelevant?) fact that the bicycle was invented in the period, they are introduced at every turn. Mendelssohn’s music is quoted from Reinhardt, but so also, in the spirit of lavish excess, are stirring scores from Italian operas such as Verdi’s La Traviata, Bellini’s Norma and others by Donizetti, Rossini, Mascagni, ratcheting up the atmosphere of lush romanticism. As in Hall’s version, but even more explicitly, Titania openly lusts after Bottom while her fairy attendants coyly avert

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their eyes, and the young lovers are awakened naked in the morning. This may have been a marketing flaw, since it deprived the film of a General rating and thus of its potential audience of schoolchildren. In Shakespeare’s plays, sex is embedded in the language but never depicted explicitly – there are very few kisses – while nudity is virtually expected in films, creating an anomalous effect in some productions. Arguably, the unrevealed, hinted potential in the play itself can be more disturbing and ambiguous than the modern depictions can manage, and leaves more to the imagination. Perhaps the most original aspect of the film, however, is Hoffmann’s idea of turning the experience of the play into ‘Bottom’s Dream’. Far from the bombastic yokel of the character stereotype often presented on stage, this Bottom (Kevin Kline) is psychologized as a deeply insecure, dapper urban-dweller dressed in a smart white suit (he is a weaver after all) embarrassingly stained with red wine, and given to romantic fantasizing evoked by the operatic arias. Most significantly, the film turns him into a victim of an unhappy marriage. We realize gradually that the phrase in the introduction, ‘Marriage is seldom a matter of love’, refers to Bottom more than the young lovers. In this scenario, his interlude with the fairy queen (Pfeiffer) is an episode of gigantic wish-fulfilment, and he is allowed to bring back a ring given by Titania as a memento, recalling Coleridge’s idea of a flower surviving from a dream. It is hard to say whether this Bottom-centred interpretation ‘works’ in deepening the character with an implied backstory of marital problems, or whether it pulls against the play’s deliberate incongruity in showing one who seems impervious to feelings of love himself. Each viewer can hold a different opinion, but the question itself is raised because of the Hollywood conventions and expectations which dominate, and through whose lens we are encouraged to interpret the action. One critic, at least, has suggested that the medium of film positively encourages character analysis even if it is not a priority in the play: ‘Not to explore characters in depth would neglect filmic potential, for minor Shakespearean characters’ (Rothwell in Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerin, 2003, 24). Although Bottom is not a ‘minor’ character, the medium of cinema seems to require an ‘in depth’ persona. Bottom’s ‘dream’ (or rather non-dream), which ‘hath no bottom’, becomes an analogue for movies themselves, luring us into states of blissful, empathetic wishfulfilment in the magical events created on the screen, only to return

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us to a tawdry ‘real life’ afterwards, figured in the disconsolate Bottom returning to his home expecting a hostile welcome. This comes after his moment of glory on the Duke’s stage, and he is still fingering the ring which verifies his night of passion spent with the fairy queen. As the final effect, this may lead away from the conventional reading of the play as a celebration of marriage, to something like the opposite, a fear of marriage. In the very unconventional but fascinating, collaborative film made by the Spanish director Celestino Coronado and dancer Lindsay Kemp in 1984, sex and nudity are no coy or exploitative sops to Hollywood expectations, but joyously celebrated as part of the directors’ concept of the vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There was certainly no attempt in this case to aim at a General or even PG rating. In every aspect, from casting to colouring, this is an extravagantly gay, transsexual and high-camp experience, epitomized in the cross-dressed Titania played by the blind actor Jack Birkett, who was known as ‘The Incredible Orlando’. Under the influence of love-in-idleness, the young lovers fall into same-sex couples: and why not, since the love depicted in the play is so mysteriously changeable, arbitrary and magically metamorphic that any configuration and sexual preference seem possible? Bottom changes into a truly repulsive, phallic monster, shamelessly used by Titania as a living, bestial sex toy, as in Shakespeare’s own source, The Golden Ass. Puck (played by Kemp himself) is an aroused voyeur, sybaritically exulting over the salacious goings-on while guzzling on bunches of grapes by the handful. The Indian boy is an adult male with a falsetto singing voice, carried off by Oberon when Titania is asleep. ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is presented as a comic Romeo and Juliet, quoting from that play and drawing attention to the similarity in plots. The screenplay (adapted from an original stage performance), while obviously low budget, is charming and funny, and suffused once again with music. But there is barely a word of dialogue from Shakespeare’s play, apart from incidentals such as the ‘lullaby’ sung by the fairies to Titania which is set to music. Coronado’s movie takes full advantage of the artistic freedom of independent cinema (‘indies’) and has become a gender-bending, cult classic. On a more lavish scale, we can now watch filmed live performances at cinemas, featuring companies like the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre in London and

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Shakespeare’s Globe. Coincidentally, they reprise the early history of cinema when stage plays were filmed, though they are worlds apart in technological sophistication. These give us the opportunity of seeing on a global scale celebrated actors and productions with a live audience, without having to travel, but they do not always work effectively as movies. We can resist and critique them, since even when productions claim some kind of Elizabethan ‘authenticity’, like those filmed at Shakespeare’s Globe, it is impossible not to feel that they are aimed mainly at modern tourists in London. They tend to build on an image of ‘ye olde merry England’, with an emphasis on comic routines involving fabricated audience participation, and as a result soften the harsh edges of Shakespeare’s plays. Julie Taymor’s spectacular and acrobatic production was filmed at a small, intimate Brooklyn theatre in 2014, promising and delivering ‘The Magic of Love, Drugs and Midnight Madness’. This seems to work effectively as both stage play and movie version, combining elements of both media in a unified way. Perhaps less successfully integrated was the 2019 National Theatre production filmed at the Bridge Theatre, London. Heavily marketed as ‘an immersive experience’, it clearly pleased and excited the live audience who readily joined in as part of the play’s spectacle, but for this very reason film audiences may feel alienated and less involved.

Offshoots and oddities Cinematic adaptations have appeared in different languages, such as the Italian musical, Dream of a Summer Night (Sogno di una note d’estate, 1983), the French Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (1969), the Indian ‘Bollywood’ 10ml Love (2010) and others. Productions have been filmed for children, such as the half-hour shortened version in Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–4), and by children in The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (2001), as well as some made decidedly not for children. There have been several movies in which the Dream is a thematically significant inset episode where the onscreen students rehearse or study the play, as in Dead Poets Society (1989); Get Over It (2001), which is a college musical; and Were the World Mine (2008), a ‘coming out’, college version. Later videos,  DVDs and the internet, all built upon filmic language, have created and aimed at smaller, niche audiences,

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usually at a fraction of the expense of making a movie. Offshoots have also abounded, being adaptations only indirectly sourced from Shakespeare and without using his language. The significance of offshoots is that they show how Shakespearean narratives can be ‘translated’ into existing movie genres, such as so-called romcoms, teen flicks, westerns, science fiction and many others, each with its own conventions and distinctive film language. I have elsewhere argued that in fact Shakespeare through his plots created prototypes for some of these genres (White, 2016, passim), long before the medium of film was invented. The ‘art house’ genre of movies includes serious (some say pretentious), independent, auteur films, as an alternative to studio productions aiming at box-office profits. Here, the Dream is represented by Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), in which the arch-rationalist Leopold, presumably based on Theseus, says at one point, ‘There are no ghosts except in Shakespeare, and many of those are more real than many people that I know.’ A Midsummer Night’s Rave (2002) is a contribution to ‘rave culture’, usually involving a nightclub event but also reflected in some movies. The genre targets college students who will recognize the play as its basis, from the increasingly anarchic narrative where unspecified, green hallucinogenic drugs replace love-in-idleness, and as the strobe-lit night’s revels wear on, music pulses and inhibitions are unbuttoned. Shortened names indicate characters loosely based on Shakespeare’s: Elena for Helena, Mia for Hermia, Xander (Lysander), Damon (Demetrius, who is finally rejected by Elena), O. B. John (Oberon, get it?), while some names are retained, like Puck (who administers the ‘love potion’ and is given the line, ‘See the problems you run into when you limit yourself to one sex?’), Snout and Nick (Bottom), who adopts a donkey costume. I have not heard of any movie made in Scotland called A Midsummer Night’s Dram with whisky replacing love-in-idleness, but it seems only a matter of time before one must surely be made. A Midsummer’s Nightmare (2017) is a made-for-television pilot episode for a series which did not seem to continue, whose genre could be summed up as psychological horror. The connection with Shakespeare’s play is probably not essential to following the plot, though there are giveaways for those who know the text. One ambiguous character is called Micky Puck (who may or may not be behind the various horrors) and another, Nick Bottoms, who has

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his ear shot off, causing him to reflect that it feels like he is growing a donkey’s ears. And there is a forest in which very frightening events occur, surrounding a remote motel (with echoes of Hitchcock’s Psycho) where various couples stay the night. The basic premise seems to be the representation of Elena’s (Helena’s) revenge over Hannah (Hermia) as rival lovers competing over Daniel (Demetrius), which Puck meaningfully observes is an anagram for ‘Denial’. Among other useful attributes, Elena has a gun and is also an expert archer, turning her, in her own words, into a kind of diabolical Cupid. No more spoilers. The work clearly references the Dream and, at the very least, shows rather unexpectedly that the play can be stretched even into the psychological horror movie genre. Through movies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has become an indelible and ubiquitous part of popular culture, adaptable to changing social conditions and attitudes, genres and technological advances in cinema. With the advent of new forms through the internet (YouTube and Vimeo) and social media, its future afterlife in countless adaptations and intertextual manifestations seems assured.

Exercise erci

C

hoose a common scene in two film versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and analyse the differences between their ways of interpreting the play, looking at such aspects as genre, dominant themes, characterization, use of Shakespearean language, visual imagery and others that occur to you.

CHAPTER TEN

Writing Matters The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. SAMUEL JOHNSON

This chapter will sketch an idea of ‘active reading’ as a spectrum that leads towards, and includes, your own writing. It is presented as a suggested way to approach any new literary or dramatic text on which you might write an essay, not just A Midsummer Night’s Dream (it could be a poem or a novel). Reading and writing can be seen not as separate activities but two ends of a continuum, a creative process from immersion to assertion. If your reading is engaged and you are entering the spirit of the play-world, then even on first reading you will already be noticing what interests you most, and even shaping phrases in your mind, to describe your responses and discoveries. Jot down the ideas as they occur – don’t lose them! The best essays, at every level through to professional criticism, will be a rediscovering of the excitement of those early insights of your own, shaped by later rereading, rethinking and rewriting. It should be clear by now that my preference in literary interpretation is for ‘reader response theory’ supported by as much historical knowledge as possible. Although it is not so much a rigorous ‘theory’ as an inclination, reader response acknowledges that every reader is unique and also that their understanding and 203

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experience of a literary work will change at each reading. A corollary is that each generation of readers and critics brings fresh ideas and asks new questions, depending on what problems concern their society at the time, so there will be changes in approaches through time, dating back to Shakespeare’s own age – which is where some historical knowledge comes in handy. This approach also gives life to the idea that readers are always refashioning and recreating texts from the past, finding our own contemporary concerns reflected in them. One of the best modern critics, Stephen Greenblatt, expresses the interactive process of reading in this way: I began with the desire to speak with the dead. If I never believed that the dead could not speak, I was nevertheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them . . . Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead have contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. (Greenblatt, 1988, 1) This is especially true in the case of Shakespeare. What constantly fascinates me is the diversity and unexpectedness of the meanings that active readers can generate from ‘open’ texts like Shakespeare’s plays, which are amenable to many different interpretations, as if the readers are collaborating with the writer in a mutually creative activity of ‘making new’ the text. This is not the same thing as saying Shakespeare is ‘universal’, but instead that his plays are multivocal and adaptable. The process of reading can generate multiple ideas (sometimes conflicting or confusing ones) that can be held in suspension without needing yet to make choices. Unlike readers, however, directors and actors need to make decisions, which in turn will foreclose other possibilities that may be just as good or better, and at the very least different. Readers create a plurality of potential meanings, whereas performance chooses just one approach to ‘real-ize’ (make real) the text.

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Read In a preliminary, fairly rapid reading, saturate yourself in the play, trying to get an overall impression of it. As you read, keep an open mind, not looking for anything in particular, and don’t get sidetracked into detail, but try to understand the play as a whole. Don’t worry if there are words or even whole passages which you don’t understand. The editor’s notes in your text should help, but look only sparingly at them initially. You can always return later to knotty points in the text, and the footnotes will wait for you. Putting a big question mark in the margin will help you find the puzzling bits later. Often complicated language is ‘difficult’ for a reason that will become apparent later in the play. Visualize what the action might look like on the stage, and what it might sound like, especially in terms of the tone of voice behind each speech, which often expresses a responsive emotional state. This first stage is not ‘close reading’ but a yielding up of your own judgement, ‘losing yourself’ in the play itself.

Reflect Now you can begin to reassert your own thinking. After you have carried out an ‘empathetic’ first reading, start to sort out what has emerged in your mind. Jot down notes in the random order that thoughts occur to you. Which parts did you find difficult to understand and which easy? Are these to do with plot or language? Any first thoughts on what you found important or noteworthy, and worth later scrutiny as possible themes for an essay?

Explore Where you go from here can be your own choice. You might want at this stage to watch a movie version to see how it all fits together in one performance. Or you might go back and look in closer detail at some scenes which struck you as interesting or puzzling. Observe how Shakespeare builds up each scene towards some kind of climax or turning point. Pay closer attention not only to what characters say but how they say it – ask yourself, what is each character

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responding to in the other’s statements? Maybe browse in some criticism, though try not to be intimidated or overinfluenced by any single critic. Each may offer ideas, suggestions, starting-points, problems and even inspiration, but in the end it is your ideas that matter. Think laterally, not along a straight line, considering the odd and strange aspects as well as the straightforward. By this stage, you should have a pretty good idea of what you want to write on yourself, a theme for an essay. Ideally, another rapid reading will be useful, this time looking actively for the evidence you will be using from the text by way of relevant quotations. I like to put little coloured stickers beside them so I can quickly find my points of interest later and retrace my steps. Or if you don’t mind writing on the text itself, mark the passages you might wish to quote or discuss. Online texts of the play are invaluable for finding a particular word or passage quickly through the ‘search’ command, and if you are writing on a theme encapsulated in a word (for example, love, dream), it can take you straight to every occurrence in the play.

Plan It can be difficult to start writing an essay since you will have masses of ideas and quotations but find it hard to start. A plan is essential at this stage, jotting down the order of ideas that allow you to develop your overall idea in the most logical order of paragraphs. Keep this overall idea at the front of your mind, and don’t get bogged down in detail. To start writing, perhaps simply state clearly and succinctly the theme or idea which is your chosen subject in a single sentence. You can always change it later, but for now it can get you started. Don’t write in generalities, try to be specific, and use short quotations from the play to back up what you say. An essay should have an ‘argument’, not in the sense of an opinion or prejudice advanced in a heated or angry tone, but rather presentation of a set of reasons in an orderly way, adding up to a coherent statement of the theme you are advancing. You might think of the essay as a flower that steadily opens. The golden rule is that your own interpretations, however zany they might seem, are valuable, so long as you can find justification in the text itself to ‘argue’ them. If you can’t find textual evidence, you might have to be prepared to ditch that idea and try another.

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A couple of ‘bewares’. First, it is not very effective simply to keep asserting or repeating your main theme or argument. Ideally, marshal the evidence to build towards a conclusion in which you can state what you hope to have proved. How this is done depends on the material and your own approach. Secondly, even if the question set for your essay begins with a vague word like ‘Discuss . . .’, it is not an invitation just to ramble on. Every essay should have a clear structure based on an introduction which makes clear how you are interpreting the question, then an ‘explication’ of the evidence and finally a conclusion. Maintain your own personal writing style since this is the equivalent of your ‘voice’; don’t write things just because they sound impressive, but because they state clearly what you want to say. At some stage in your essay look in a little more close detail at a single scene, or even passage, to see how this exemplifies your theme, since this will add depth to your coverage. Sometimes the topic you are writing on will allow you to base your answer mainly on one very significant scene, relating it to the rest of the play where possible to give an overall reading. Above all, as you write, try to convey some excitement in sharing with a future reader the ideas which stirred your own interest. And voila! Sooner than you think you will have the number of words allowed in your word limit.

Revise, annotate, check, proofread, bibliography This final stage may not strike you as stimulating as the previous one, but it is essential, since the formalities of an essay exist to allow you to make the most of your writing. Leave time for yourself to go back carefully over your essay and revise where necessary. Nothing distracts more from a set of potentially fascinating insights as spelling errors, missing or defective references, or verbosity and meandering sentences, which should be ruthlessly pruned. There must be a consistently presented bibliography, alphabetically arranged under authors’ names, detailing the works that have contributed and helped to shape your own ideas. All this may sound like a secondary matter of presentation rather than

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content, but just as in preparing a delicious meal, the final presentation is important, to enhance the impression and make the most of the ingredients. There are various different styles for footnoting and the bibliography, and your college teacher will advise on the preferred ‘house style’: the golden rule – ‘be consistent’.

A few more tips Critics Critics can give you ideas to think about, and the best ones can give you a model for clear scholarly writing. But they usually dwell on a single question which may not interest you. You needn’t agree with them, in which case voice your disagreement and provide some textual evidence. But sometimes they can elegantly sum up what you are saying, ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ (Samuel Johnson). By quoting, with full reference given in a footnote, you are acknowledging your sources (the essential rule for all essays and critical writing, and the insurance against the dreaded sin of plagiarism).

Analysing passages and scenes As suggested above, sometimes explicating a single scene or even significant passage can give you an opportunity to provide a more in-depth analysis of how the play as a whole operates, allowing you to generalize when you come to your conclusion. When you give a reasonably long quotation (if it is essential for your argument), then provide a ‘close reading’ of it in some detail – use the quotation, don’t just plonk it in hoping your reader will do all the work of understanding, which you should be doing yourself. I am well aware that in this respect I have not always practised what I preach in this book, but sometimes I provide my own observations before quoting, using the quotation to ‘cap’ what I am saying.

Style Be clear and concise. Don’t waste words. Avoid repetitions of either words or thoughts. I know again I have sinned in this book! Don’t

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overdo adjectives and adverbs – used judiciously they can convey a richer impression of your responses, but overused they can weaken your presentation. Get used to consulting a dictionary and a thesaurus to find the exact word or phrase you are seeking (le mot juste). These days most computers have these resources built-in, just as they have a spellcheck for a final reassurance – though these can be mischievous, advising you to change a word into one which makes no sense in context. Finding exactly the right words to express your thoughts can often be a hard task, but worth the time and effort it takes. It is amazing how much words can say, and how precisely, and in the hunt for precision we have Shakespeare’s language showing us the way.

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Appendix Shakespeare’s Works in Approximate Chronological Order Dating Shakespeare’s plays with any precision is a difficult and even impossible task because records are incomplete and ambiguous. For example, there are very few Elizabethan plays where the actual ‘opening night’ (or rather, ‘opening day’!) performance can be dated, and where we do have records of specific performances we often do not know if they were first, or revivals, or special occasions. All we can do is compile a conjectural timeline based on a range of evidence including historical events and contemporary references, suggesting the possible year or years for each play. This is why in the suggested chronology below I cautiously place the plays in groups, leaving the actual dates of each somewhat open, and arranged in terms of historical and generic contexts. However, some of the later plays can be more specifically dated and I indicate these in square brackets rather than parentheses. Because of all the doubts, scholars understandably differ amongst themselves and there are many variants of such listings. The following is my own, but it can be compared with others, such as the ‘Shakespeare online’ website: http://shakespeare-online.com/keydates/playchron.html. 211

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Some scholars (including myself) would date the first eight plays on the list earlier than this website suggests, between 1588 and 1592, on the assumption that Shakespeare generally wrote no more than two or three plays in any one year, even at his prime, and this may have been even more likely when he was an ‘apprentice’. In the early plays there is also a possibility of collaboration, as is definitely so in the very last group when he was probably ‘mentoring’ other dramatists. Another slightly different, conjectural list appears on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s website: https://www.rsc.org.uk/ shakespeares-plays/timeline.

1588 to 1593 – ‘Elizabethan’ (Queen Elizabeth I on throne) The Comedy of Errors (Roman comedy) The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Romantic comedy) Taming of the Shrew (Italian comedy / ‘native’ English farce) Titus Andronicus (Roman tragedy) Henry VI, Part 2 (English history play; possibly co-written with Marlowe?) Henry VI, Part 3 (English history play; possibly co-written?) Henry VI, Part 1 (English history play; possibly co-written?) Richard III (English history play)

1593–4 – theatres closed Venus and Adonis (Poem) [published 1593] The Rape of Lucrece (Poem) [published 1593] Some Sonnets written (Poems)

1595 to 1602 – ‘late Elizabethan’ Love’s Labour’s Lost (Romantic comedy) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Romantic comedy) Romeo and Juliet (Tragedy of love) Richard II (English History play)

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King John (English History play) The Merchant of Venice (Romantic comedy) Henry IV, Part 1 (English History play) Henry IV, Part 2 (English History play) The Merry Wives of Windsor (Romantic comedy) Much Ado About Nothing (Romantic comedy) Henry V (English History play) [1599] Julius Caesar (Roman History play) [1599] As You Like It (Romantic comedy) [1599] Hamlet (Tragedy) [1600] Twelfth Night, or What You Will (Romantic comedy) [1601] Troilus and Cressida (Classical History play / ‘problem’ tragedy) Measure for Measure (Romantic comedy / ‘problem’ comedy) [1604]

1603 to 1610 – ‘Jacobean’ (King James I on throne) Othello (Tragedy of love) [1604] All’s Well That Ends Well (Romantic comedy / ‘problem’ comedy) Timon of Athens (Classical tragedy) King Lear (Tragedy / English History play) [1606] Macbeth (English History play / tragedy) [1606] Antony and Cleopatra (Classical tragedy of love) Coriolanus (Classical History play / tragedy) Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Romance, tragicomedy; begun by George Wilkins) [1608] Sonnets published (1609, poems) Cymbeline (Romance, tragicomedy) [1610] The Winter’s Tale (Romance, tragicomedy) [1611] The Tempest (Romance) [1611] Henry VIII, or All is True (English History play) [1613] The Two Noble Kinsmen (collaboration with John Fletcher) [1614]

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Editions Brooks, Harold F., ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. London: Methuen, 1979. Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018. Foakes, R. A., ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, revised edition. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Holland, Peter, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Rokison-Woodall, Abigail, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Arden Performance Editions. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Wells, Stanley, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. New Penguin Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967.

Other reading Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 2018. Anderegg, Michael. Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Anderson, J. J., ed. Newcastle Upon Tyne. Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Manchester University Press, 1982. Apuleius. The Golden Asse. Translated by William Adlington. London: n.p., 1566. Arnold, Matthew. ‘The Study of Poetry’, in T. H. Ward (ed.), The English Poets. London: n.p., 1880. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. 215

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Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Blake, N. F. A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002. Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Belsey, Catherine. ‘Peter Quince’s Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice, 94–108. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan, 1905. Buccola, Regina, ed. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: A Critical Guide. London: Continuum Renaissance Drama, 2010. Calderwood, James L. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Anamorphism and Theseus’ Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 409–30. Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London: Routledge, 1999. Carroll, William C. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Chalk, Daryl. Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage. London: Palgrave, 2019. Croll, Samuel. Shakespeare on Film: A Norton Guide. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Crystal, David. ‘The Language of Shakespeare’, in Stanley Wells (ed.), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, 67–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Doran, Madeleine. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Metamorphosis’. Rice Institute Pamphlet – Rice University Studies 46, no. 4 (1960). Dryden, John. Troilus and Cressida, or, Truth found too late a tragedy, as it is acted at the Dukes Theatre: to which is prefix’d, a preface containing the grounds of criticism in tragedy. London: Able Swallow, 1679. Dutton, Richard R., ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1996. Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1986. Eastwood, Adrienne. ‘A Survey of Resources’, in Regina Buccola (ed.), A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Critical Guide, 172–92. London: Continuum, 2010. Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

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Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Garber, Marjorie. Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Garrison, John S. and Kyle Pivetti. Shakespeare At Peace. London: Routledge, 2019. Gaw, Alison. ‘John Sincklo as One of Shakespeare’s Actors’, Anglia 37, no. 49 (1925): 289–303. Ghose, Indira. Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Gowland, Angus. ‘Melancholy, Imagination, and Dreaming in Renaissance Learning’ in Yasmin Haskell (ed.), Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, 53–102. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Greenhalgh, Susanne. ‘Shakespeare overheard: performances, adaptations, and citations on radio’, in Robert Shaugnessy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, 175–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Greenhalgh, Susanne. ‘Shakespeare and Radio’ in Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, 541–57. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Griffiths, Trevor R., ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Halio, Jay. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare in Performance, 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hatchuel, Sarah and Nathalie Vienne-Guerin. Shakespeare on Screen: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Rouen: Publications de l’Universite de Rouen, 2003. Hendricks, Margo. ‘Obscured by Dreams: Race, Empire and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1996): 37–60. Hibbard, G. R. The Making of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Hill, Eugene D. ‘The First Elizabethan Tragedy: A Contextual Reading of “Cambises” ’. Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 404–33.

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Hirschfeld, Heather. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Holland, Peter. ‘William Shakespeare’. Entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), online version, 2013. Hopkins, Lisa. Beginning Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Hunter, R. G. Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Iqbal, Nosheen. ‘Reader, I downloaded him: boom times for the literary long listen’. Guardian, 19 August 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2019/aug/18/bbc-radio-4-classic-novels-audio-amazon-audibleproust-tolstoy. Jensen, Michael P. The Battle of the Bard: Shakespeare on US Radio in 1937. York: Arc Humanities Press, 2018. Johnson, Samuel. Johnson on Shakespeare. Edited by Arthur Sherbo. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 7. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. Jones, Emrys. Scenic Form in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Jonson, Ben. ‘De Shakespeare Nostrati’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Kennedy, Judith M. and Richard F. Kennedy, eds. A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition. London: Athlone Press, 1999. Kerr, Jessica and Anne Ophelia Dowden. Shakespeare’s Flowers. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. London: Metheun & Co., 1965. Krieger, Elliot. A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies. London: Macmillan, 1979. Lake, Peter. How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Lane, R. The Golden Age of Australian Radio Drama, 1923–1960: A History Through Biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994. Lanier, Doris. Absinthe – The Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century: A History of the Hallucinogenic Drug and Its Effect on Artists and Writers in Europe and the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1995. Leggatt, Alexander. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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Lemonnier-Texier, Delphine. ‘Myth, intertext and transgression in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Pascale Renaud-Grosbras and Sophie Marret (eds), Lectures et écritures du mythe, 183–204. Rennes: Presse Universitaires Rennes, 2006. https://books.openedition.org/pur/ 37974?lang=en#authors. Levine, Laura. Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Loomba, Ania. ‘The Great Indian Vanishing Trick – Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd edition, 181–205. Chichester: Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2016. Maslen, R. W. ‘Lunacy and Littleness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Shakespeare and Comedy, 141–54. Arden Critical Companions. London: Thomson Learning, 2006. McDonald, Russ. Shakespeare and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. McGuire, Philip C. Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences. London: Macmillan, 1985. McInnes, David and Roslyn Hutson. Lost Plays Database. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/school-of-cultureand-communication/research/research-projects/lost-plays-database. Menzer, Paul. ‘The Weaver’s Dream – Mnemonic Scripts and Memorial Texts’, in Regina Buccola (ed.), ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: A Critical Guide, 93–111. London: Continuum Renaissance Drama, 2010. Meres, Francis. Paladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury. London: P. Short, 1598. Montrose, Louis. ‘ “Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’. Representations 2 (1983): 61–94. Mullin, Michael. ‘Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Film’. Educational Theatre Journal 27 (1975): 529–34. Nelson, R. J. Play-Within-a-Play. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. Nevo, Ruth. Comic Transformations in Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1980. Orgel, Stephen. Imagining Shakespeare. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ovid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Translated by Arthur Golding. Edited by Madeleine Forey. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Palfrey, Simon. Doing Shakespeare. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011. Palfrey, Simon and Tiffany Stern. Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Palmer, D. J. The Rise of English Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Paolucci, Anne. ‘The Lost Days in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 317–26.

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Thomas, Vivian and Nicki Fairclough. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Thompson, Ann. Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978, 88–93. Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art? Translated by Richard Pevear. London: Penguin Classics, 1995 (1898). Vernon, P. E. Creativity: Penguin Modern Psychology Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. White, R. S. Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Wilson, John Dover. Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. Young, David P. Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1966.

Filmography A Midsummer Night’s Dream (including offshoots) 1909 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Silent version. Silent Shakespeare DVD made by the Vitagraph Studio. 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. 1964 ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. Around the Beatles. 1968 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Peter Hall 1981 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Elija Moshinsky. BBC television. 1982 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Dir. Woody Allen. 1989 Dead Poets Society. Dir. Peter Weir. 1983 Sogno di una notte d’estate. Dir. Gabriele Salvatores. 1985 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Celestino Coronado, Lindsay Kemp. 1992–4 Shakespeare: The Animated Tales. Sundry directors. 1996 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Adrian Noble. 1999 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Michael Hoffman, Kevin Kline. 2001 The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Christine Edzard. 2001 Get Over It. Dir. Tommy O’Haver. 2002 A Midsummer Night’s Rave. Dir. Gil Cates Jr.

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2010 10ml Love 2010. Dir. Sharat Katariya. 2017 A Midsummer’s Nightmare. Dir. Gary Fleder. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=3juYVXIPtNg

Other movies cited 1912 Richard III. Silent. 1922 Othello. Silent. Germany. 1929 The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. Sam Taylor. 1936 Romeo and Juliet. Dir. George Cukor. 1945 Henry V. Dir. Laurence Olivier. 1948 Hamlet. Dir. Laurence Olivier. 1961 West Side Story. Musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Dir. Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise. 1967 The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. 1968 Romeo and Juliet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. 1986 Otello. Giuseppe Verdi’s opera version of Othello. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. 1989 Henry V. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. 1995 Much Ado About Nothing. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. 1999 Ten Things I Hate about You, based on The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing. Dir. Gil Junger. 2006 She’s the Man, based on Twelfth Night. Dir. Andy Fickman.

Internet sites ‘Internet Shakespeare’. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca. ‘Orson Welles Shakespeare Collection’. https://archive.org/details/Orson_ Welles_Shakespeare_Collection Shakespeare Complete Works. http://shakespeare.mit.edu Shakespeare Concordance. http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ concordance/. ‘Shakespeare Documented: An online exhibition documenting Shakespeare in his own time’. https://www.folger.edu/shakespearesworks.