A Midsummer Night's Dream: A User's Guide

Michael Pennington

A MIDSUMMER

NIGHT’S DREAM

A User’s Guide

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Interval Music

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Conclusion

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, probably the most popular of Shakespeare’s comedies, a girl is threatened with state execution if she does not abandon the man she loves and marry her father’s choice. In no other Shakespeare play is state coercion applied in quite this way to a matter of the heart. The unexpected savagery of the Elizabethan court anticipates an image of modern brutality: the kneeling figure on television of a teenage Saudi princess waiting for decapitation in the 1980 documentary Death of a Princess. She was accused of sleeping with a commoner, Hermia only of being wooed by an unelected admirer, but the punishment is the same. Nobody in A Midsummer Night’s Dream will question the law (though the silence of Hippolyta, the outsider, is interesting): we have to deduce that it’s the norm, and be grateful that before the end of the scene Theseus has the wisdom to moderate it.

The plays of Shakespeare are of course full of irate male parents thundering at their unruly young, with more or less potency. In Othello, Desdemona’s father Brabantio asks for state punishment for her but is overruled. In Romeo and Juliet, Capulet mercilessly bullies his daughter Juliet but is soon manipulated into order. Cordelia faces no more than banishment for refusing to flatter Lear. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes orders Perdita, his baby daughter, to be abandoned on a mountainside, but by then he has convinced himself that she is not his. Titus Andronicus does kill one of his sons, off-the-cuff rather, in the heat of the moment; but he is operating in a story in which you might in any case end up cut to pieces and baked in a pie. In truth, none of these children encounters Hermia’s extremity, so carefully considered by Egeus, or, by changing the prevailing tone to comedy, survives it more rapturously.

It seems that Shakespeare may have written A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors within a year or so of each other, around 1595. In The Comedy of Errors it is the father who is the victim of the gallows humour: Aegeon, fallen into enemy hands in a bitter trade war, is given twenty-four hours either to find his twin sons or face death, and this triggers uproarious farce. As with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the initial extremity is, like the crack of the starter’s gun, more or less forgotten once the action gets going. While Romeo looks in its early stages as if it might be a romantic comedy but ends with the piteous overthrow of its star-crossed lovers, the Dream and The Comedy of Errors present themselves as possible tragedies but develop into wild delight.

Nevertheless the Dream’s premise of paternal violence is unnerving, as is much of the play, which threatens its characters with the loss at any moment of identity or hope. At one point, a man famously appears to grow the head of an ass, so convincingly that a supernatural being – the Fairy Queen, no less – thinks that it is real and becomes wildly attracted to him. He is so flattered that he almost comes to think he is indeed a beast; she is deceived even though she knows perfectly well what a human is from her other dealings with the mortal world. Modishly, it might be argued that this adventure of hers represents her subconscious anxiety; but the fact is that she is the victim of a precisely targeted drug slipped to her by her husband, who is – initially, at least – delighted to see her sexually degrade herself with an animal.

Recently arrived from India, she and her vengeful consort preside over a community of fairies, whatever we imagine such things to be. For us their associations have become quite lightweight and prettified, the sentimental end of the older, deeper conceit of ‘faerie’ which interested and bothered the Elizabethans, for whom it included witches and hags, elves and goblins, incubi, succubi and shamans. But fairy magic still appeals to both the children and the adults within us, as a nostalgically shared memory whose oddity we cannot quite forget. A good ghost story brings its adult listeners together in scary relish: but alone, they dread private visitants, endure bad dreams, and make fascinated guesses at what kind of fantastic life might lie just beyond their vision. In a more mundane way, we become deeply intrigued when infra-red cameras shoot wildlife at night, peering through a veil at a mysterious, shaded world; we watch with a mixture of curiosity and squeamishness, knowing we are not really intended to be witnesses.

Through the medium of King Oberon and Queen Titania, Shakespeare leads us into this unknown, ensuring that we are touched by its discomforts as well as its charms. We are never allowed to see it as something so exotic that it doesn’t affect us, and our guides often seem oddly like us. We gather that they have always had direct relationships with men, women and children while also being able to wield unnatural power over them, and their own behaviour suggests there is no real border between supernatural magic and intimate pettiness. Oberon may be able to circle the globe ‘swifter than the wandering moon’, but much of his career is a matter of correcting simple mistakes he has initiated; he is little more effective as a herbalist than Friar Laurence, more tragically, was in Romeo and Juliet. Unable, because of his human dimension, to ignore his morals, we are awed by the cruelty of his trick on Titania; on the other hand his promise of protection for his human clients at the end of the play has a godlike benevolence.

At the threshold of his ambiguous kingdom stands a ‘puck’, Robin Goodfellow, a figure with long folkloric associations and thought of by many in his original audience as a large, rough hairy devil with a delight in disorder. In an anonymous contemporary play called Grim the Collier of Croydon he is described as wearing ‘a suit of leather close to his body; his face and hands russet-coloured, with a flail.’ Brought to our stage at adult human size, and sometimes smaller, Puck’s main pleasure in life seems to be discomforting the vulnerable, booby-trapping old ladies and confusing weary travellers. He watches all the groups that come into Oberon’s wood to see what additional trouble he can cause them. The inspirational ass’s head is his initiative, not Oberon’s, and he would regard it as the best service he does his difficult master. He is a faithful and dependent servant, compensating for his mistakes with exaggerated claims of what he can achieve in forty minutes. Having boasted, he is often next seen dragging around the forest much like the lovers he has been sent to reorganise. At such times he seems more human than not, his self-confidence undone and his relations with the audience frankly confidential. For all that, he remains a slightly unsettling figure from the superstitious recesses of the English memory, and, like his masters, not quite of us.

Into this puzzling world tumbles a group of amateur actors intent on rehearsing a play for a royal wedding. They are nominally led by a carpenter, and comprise a tailor, a bellows-mender, a joiner, a tinker and a weaver called, of all things, Bottom. Bottom especially loves acting, and occasionally becomes vainglorious in his enthusiasm; his fault may be the one defined three hundred years later by the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who observed critically that some actors are more in love with what they think they can bring to their art than what art can bring to them.

Puck, in a moment of condescension, calls these actors rude mechanicals, and the name has stuck; the same noun is applied adjectivally by the Tribunes to the Citizens in Julius Caesar, and there is no question but that it is contemptuous. But for all their clumsiness, these are decent working men who have discovered a common interest. They speak very much as we might, and bring into the play the easy pleasure of recognition: in the surrounding confusion, their anxieties are agreeably small and familiar.

Although the preparations for their play weave only intermittently through the action, apparently as comic relief, they are doing something their author surely believed in: in fact he is taking us directly into the actors’ engine-room in a way that he never did to the same extent again. It is, I suppose, impossible to use the image of theatre in a play without making an audience reflect on why they are sitting there, feeling the cleansing effect of simulated emotions and an eagerness to believe against all odds. Bottom and his friends are afflicted by bad luck rather than incompetence. It may have been a mistake to let Peter Quince the carpenter, who is better at writing and directing than acting, introduce their play, since in his nervousness he nearly reduces it to nonsense; but in any case the production is disabled by the fact of Bottom having been arbitrarily called away by Puck to be part of the fairy world, so that they never managed a complete rehearsal. Even though their work is not so ridiculous, and there is no moment in the text that suggests the author wants the performance to collapse, they are shown no mercy on the night. They are not the last theatre company to find that an upper-class audience can be more vicious than a pub one because it uses such obscure language.

The real mechanicals are four young people who are reduced to the action of puppets by Puck – mostly by mistake. The drug that Oberon uses on Titania is the source of their troubles too – or perhaps, as with Titania, it forces them to enact their suppressed desires. Two of them start the play as consensual lovers and all four seem to be friends, and even seem to be from Friends. They might be university contemporaries, not so long graduated, the girls I would hazard in English Literature, one of the men in Drama and Music, and the other perhaps in Business Studies. No sooner has one of the Eng-Lits escaped the threat of execution and run away with Drama-and-Music than he lets her wander round the forest half the night, and on meeting her again turns blankly on her as if she were a loathsome stranger. Her friend, whom Business-Studies has abandoned and who now feels she must be as ugly as a bear, has to endure both men turning on her with an adoration that she knows cannot be real – in the case of one because he is the man who deserted her, and of the other because he really loves her friend. The two women, who have been fond of each other since school, are driven to the edge of violence by these men, and the men prevented from killing each other partly by a supernatural intervention and partly by their own fatigue and cowardice.

This barely comic tale is made possible, and nominally tied up at the end, by two figures from myth re-imagined as the Duke and Duchess of a Renaissance court. As the architects of the play’s action, Theseus and Hippolyta might seem to represent the virtues of considered wisdom and humanity. However, apart from Theseus’s tolerance of a cruelly anachronistic law, that picture is complicated by the fact that the Elizabethan audience would have recognised them as something less than perfectly matched. Astonishingly, otherwise alert critics have called the pair mature, self-commanding, idealised; still more misleadingly, it has been said that their detachment forms a stable background for the play’s madnesses. But the fact is that this royal couple may be as dysfunctional by nature as the lovers are by intoxication. Theseus was known to be a violent military hero with an extremely dubious reputation with women; he emerges from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, one of Shakespeare’s sources, as a serial rapist, seducer and abandoner, the embodiment of renegade male machismo. The Amazon Hippolyta meanwhile belonged to what he might have feared most, a self-sufficient female community – in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, she was the ‘Queen of Femenye’.

The general consensus of legend is that together with his friend Hercules, Theseus led the Athenians in a campaign against these Amazons, and that before leaving, he kidnapped Hippolyta’s sister Antiope. Depending on which account you read, either Antiope or Hippolyta eventually married Theseus (and gave birth to Hippolytus, whereby hangs another tale); in yet other versions of the story, it was the Amazons who conquered, whereupon Hippolyta forcibly took Theseus as her husband. The Elizabethans in general were conditioned to see Amazons as barbaric and their female self-government as a bellicose thing, to be subjected at length to male structures. However, this position was necessarily modified by respect for the Virgin Queen Elizabeth under whom they lived: hence the mutedly respectful treatment of Hippolyta in the play, and her implicit link with the equally independent Titania. By the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta seem to have come to terms, as improbably as if Mike Tyson and Emmeline Pankhurst decided to marry, but the echoes of the past persist: lurking behind their new genial identities are legendary images of opposition and violence.

*

Needless to say, there is another point of view: that such an account takes matters far too seriously, and that it is faintly ridiculous to allow scruples to play so freely around such a ravishing entertainment. Normally severe commentators roll over on their backs at the blandishments of the comedy, or inquire only half-heartedly into it, as if fearful to compromise the fact that this lovely thing is, after all, only a play. In their more relaxed version of events, not only are Theseus and Hippolyta grown-ups whose union will calm all frenzies, but the lovers’ upheavals are impossible to take seriously, first because their characters are barely differentiated, and then because the preponderance of their story is told in rhyming verse, which in English from Chaucer to Hilaire Belloc is a ready instrument of comedy. So all their troubles are like the banana-skins of pantomime when nobody gets hurt, rather than those of life, which lead to fractures.

Undeniably, generations of new theatregoers have jumped with delight at the sight of Bottom in his ass’s head, for many people the most enduring Shakespearian image of their lives. The undisturbing and delightful nature of this transformation is, it is said, underlined by the fact that Puck takes the head off as a mere piece of machinery when the joke is over. So Bottom’s adventure with Titania should be seen as no more than a merriment, and no erotic deductions made. Puck himself is a jolly figure, imp rather than ogre, and the Mechanicals’ play a wonderful example of working-class ineptitude and hubris; never mind the sensibilities of the performers, Pyramus and Thisbe must go wrong in a number of hilarious ways, since few things are more enjoyable for audiences than a play within a play that misfires. And as far as a moral register for Oberon and Titania is concerned, there just isn’t time to consider it, since the way they speak is so rapturous, so astoundingly beautiful, that that must be more or less their sole purpose. Much else of the play is a superb faunal and floral miscellany that you can almost hear and smell; the magic effects are unthreatening, tongue in cheek. And beyond all this, look at the way the thing has always worked in the theatre: a superb machine that we do well not to tamper with, a supreme imagination on a magnificent riff. Oppression, nightmare and bestiality have nothing to do with it.

In many ways it is difficult to argue with this. Moment to moment, the play gleams like a fish in the water, its intricate and delicate design shimmering with light; it both creates and satisfies desire. The poetry is some of the most brilliant Shakespeare ever wrote, and the most self-generating: it seems often to have no purpose beyond the continuation of delight. The reckless invention upon invention, the breathtaking cadences, the limitless fantastication of an idea which owes virtually nothing to any source, are all executed with a bravado that dares you to suspect it will all fall apart, its various elements impossible to corral. We say it’s miraculous that Tom Stoppard can introduce Chaos Theory into a play about landscape gardening (Arcadia) or construct another about philosophers and acrobats (Jumpers). But at least these are real things; so far he hasn’t done fairies, whereas Shakespeare throws them too into a pot that already contains young lovers, amateur actors and their rulers. The play’s slight edge of virtuosity, its sense that Shakespeare is celebrating his own gifts, gives it its chutzpah, its arrogant star quality. Like Hamlet, a performance of the Dream has a tangible effect for good, as if we were all gathered round the same watering hole for a moment. During Oberon’s lyric flights audiences often hold their breaths, alert and inspired; then they become helpless with laughter, yelping with it in fact, at the Mechanicals’ play. The only bit that tends not to interest people is Theseus and Hippolyta, but we’ll see about that. The play has stimulated music as perhaps no other work by Shakespeare; ever since it was reintroduced to the stage in something like its right form in the 1840s, it has been unassailable. Every year a batch of revivals fight it out for our attention; the programming of whole theatres sometimes seems to depend on it; nervous at the thought of The Tempest, or even of Twelfth Night, they fall on the Dream as a dead certainty. Its sheer otherworldliness has led some critics to conclude that it is unstageable and best enjoyed by the fireside, with, so to speak, the eyes closed; yet every year several hundred thousand eyes are trained on it.

But to let the argument rest here – that this play allows you simply to forget your troubles in a world both enchanted and safe – would mean that Shakespeare sometimes wrote great and complex works but at others took the day off. In fact this was a writer who could play bassoon notes on a penny whistle and a line of lyric melody on a tuba. There is no difficulty for him in starting a drama with a matter of life and death and ending it with fairies singing a ditty: he can complicate without strain, execute any number of hairpin turns and articulate whatever you already have deep in your mind. Looking from a distance like a superb fireworks show, at close quarters the Dream sometimes has a more acrid smell. Its foray into the unconscious has attracted artists as troubled as William Blake, who used to see angels on Peckham Rye, Richard Dadd, who spent half his life in bedlam after murdering his father, and Henry Fuseli, who swore in seven languages and wept when he read the Bible. The Polish critic Jan Kott, particularly fashionable in the late 1960s, proclaimed the dear old Dream to be the most darkly erotic of Shakespeare’s plays, as brutal as Troilus and Cressida, and saw Titania’s fairies as toothless and sniggering ancients; in his view everyone wakes from the dream of the title with a sense of sexual shame, especially Bottom, who has been raped by Titania. Subsequent productions have sometimes concentrated so hard on his lively ideas that managements have had to post warnings to parents in the foyer.

None of this would have surprised the author, mixing and matching with unparalleled virtuosity. At the same time, he was, over twenty years of playwriting, remarkably constant to certain preoccupations. He was always interested in describing a journey for his characters which leaves none of them quite the same at its end. Typically, this involves sending them to an unknown location to re-order their thinking. King Ferdinand’s ‘little academe’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the outlaws’ forest in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the labyrinth of Ephesus streets in The Comedy of Errors have already been tentative gestures in this direction. The forest that lies at the centre of A Midsummer Night’s Dream arises from the same instinct for a spiritual journey into darkness and back into a wider light.

It must be said that in this play the outing is circumstantially successful rather than educative. Later, in As You Like It, Orlando and Rosalind and even the wicked Duke and Oliver will emerge from the Forest of Arden with an increased understanding of themselves; ahead of them stands Lear on his stormy heath, the deserted seashore of Timon of Athens, and Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Compared with these, it is hard to see what Helena and Demetrius, Lysander and Hermia, quite learn in the wood near Athens. Demetrius receives a sort of shock therapy to remind him that Helena was the girl for him after all; his and Lysander’s behaviour plays profoundly on the insecurities of Helena and Hermia but is never explained to them or understood by the men. When all four wake up, their shared dream dispelled by the wave of a wand, they have a beautiful brief exchange to re-cement their friendship, then disappear into virtual silence. Perhaps what they have been through together will temper them, as if they had survived a brush with death; perhaps recognising their frail hold on events will make them into careful parents. But this isn’t expressed: we infer it. Actually, their experience has been alarming and cautionary, but hardly instructive.

However, this is almost the first time that Shakespeare has tried such a thing, and soon he will see how much more can be done with it. Oddly enough, curative development is mainly expressed in this play in characters who never leave their natural domain; it is perceptible in Oberon in the forest, and in the seemingly inert Theseus and Hippolyta in the Court. Bottom’s group, meanwhile, doesn’t need to change, since a secret of their charm is their impermeable stability: whatever happens they will remain their commonsense selves. Bottom does have a great moment of sensibility when he wakens from his dream of being someone else; but then he obliterates it completely and marches back into his old life.

Rather than the commoners, it is the rulers who learn something; especially the males. King Oberon, for all the beauty and rareness of his speech, starts as one of Shakespeare’s small men as much in need of change as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale or Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor: a jealous lover who will sacrifice everything for revenge on a woman for being, simply, what she is. In Shakespeare’s early writing he also belongs in the sequence of Richard II, Mercutio, and Berowne: wonderfully over-equipped men whose articulacy creates mute awe, but who are limited by a disastrous inability to use their talents for any creative purpose. Oberon’s fine talk of promontories, dolphin’s backs and little western flowers is challenged by the maturity and conscience of Titania, who reminds him of the catastrophic effect of their quarrel on the wider world. His lamentable response is to dream up a sorcerer’s revenge; then, no sooner has he seen Titania making an ass of herself with Bottom than he repents and dances with her. As he confronts the limits of his revenge and longs for things to be at peace in all worlds, he seems to be completing an odyssey as Shakespearian as that of Prospero.

Oberon’s parallel in the human world is, clearly enough, Theseus. Theseus’s presence in a play like this is at first sight surprising, he who moved mountains and was so firmly stuck to his seat in the underworld by Hades that when Hercules pulled him free he lost part of his thigh (giving rise to the belief that Athenians had thin legs). But perhaps he is not so badly chosen for his purpose. His mythic side relates him to the strangely fanciful, intemperate and childish behaviour of classical deities, with its odd mix of embarrassing physical detail and grandiloquence. But he is also the first of such heroes to emerge from the shadows into something like recorded history. Theseus unified Attica and built a fortress on the Acropolis, thus in a way founding the Athenian city state; and in the play, his statesmanlike sonorities give him sporadic authority. Often he is vain, with a disconcerting habit of boasting about his past, especially to his prisoner-of-war bride Hippolyta. But the better side of him understands (with a sympathy that stops short of enthusiasm) the imagination of poet, lover and lunatic, and he has a marvellous final word, if I understand it rightly, on the craft of acting:

The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

Judge of Hermia but patron of the arts, Shakespeare allows Theseus to be by turns rational and boastful, judicious and self-aggrandising. His contradictions begin to settle at the end of the play, a new relationship with Hippolyta brought about by the simple act of marrying her. Their contentious past seems forgotten, and they speak on equal terms.

Most powerful figures in Shakespeare undergo re-training of this kind, assuming