Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream Author(s): David Marshall Reviewed work(s): Source: ELH, Vol.

49, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 543-575 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872755 . Accessed: 16/04/2012 16:01
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EXCHANGING VISIONS:
NIGHT'S DREAM
BY DAVID MARSHALL I

READING A MIDSUMMER

"Spiritsand fairies cannotbe represented, theycannoteven be painted,-they can only be believed."1 A Midsummer Night's Dream seemsdesignedtoengagetheissue atstakein thisassertion ofCharlesLamb's.Lambmakeshis claimafter the drawing conclusion that"the plays of Shakespeare less calculatedforperforare manceon a stage,thanthoseof almostany otherdramatist whatever."2Although is writing he aboutthe fitness Shakespeare's of tragedies stagerepresentation, often thesensethat is for one has he describing the problemspresentedby producingShakespeare's "dreamplay."3 spectators stagerepresentations, As to writes Lamb, "'we findto our cost thatinsteadof realizingan idea, we have materialized brought and downa fine visiontothestandard flesh of publication Lamb's essay,in 1816,WilliamHazlitt of tookLamb's position;while watching performance A Midsummer a of Night's Dream, Hazlittrealizedthatthe playcould notbe represented on thestage.His reviewfor Examiner the begins:"We hope we have notbeen accessory murder, recommendingdelightful to in a poem to be converted intoa dull pantomine.... We have foundto our cost,once for that regions fancy theboardsofCovent all, the of and Garden notthesamething. that are All was fine theplay, in was lost in the representation."5 Hazlitt'srehearsalof this review in the 543
ELH 0013-8304/82/0493-543 $01.00 Vol. 49 Pp. 543-575 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress

and blood. We have to let go a dream....""

Five years afterthe

pages of his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays shows that he was responding not to a particular performance but to what he saw as the character of the stage: "Poetry and the stage do not agree well together.... The idea can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everythingthere is in the foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality...."6 As a play of rare visions, airy shapes, and dreams, A Midsummer Night's Dream stages the dilemma of how to marrypoetry to the stage. Of course, Lamb and Hazlitt could be accused of reading Shakespeare from the standpoint of English Romanticism-of tryingto turn public plays into private poems. Both are also reacting to the conventions of the nineteenth-century stage: what Lamb calls "contemptible machinery" and "the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery."7 Clearly, these are not the conditions of dramatic illusion that the prologue to Henry V figures in its invocation of the audience's powers of imagination. Their responses, however, should not be disregarded. Lamb and Hazlitt have realized that in the theater a vision of a play is expounded and imposed upon them. Each finds to his cost that some impression of his fantasyhas been stolen. I will argue that the experiences of these spectators-these points of view-begin to represent a reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream; they reflect the play's presentation and dramatization of the conditions of theater. Hazlitt, in particular,asks us to see thatthe question of the Dream's fitnessforthe stage is posed by the play itself; he frames a double simile: "Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attemptit as to personate Wall or Moonshine."8 Hazlitt's allusion to the mistaken enterprise of the play within the play suggests that A Midsummer Night's Dream might contain a dangerous acknowledgment: a threat that the representation of the play itself might be undone. By undone I mean not only the senses of incomplete, ruined, negated, and expounded, but also the sense in which the scene that Shakespeare refused to represent before the audience of The Winter's Tale is said to be undone by its mere narration: Shakespeare withholds fromour sight an encounter which, we are told, "lames report to follow it and undoes description to do it."9 Hazlitt asserts that the attempt to present Shakespeare's Dream on the stage would be as counter-productive and literal minded as the mechanicals' attempt to figure moonshine; and he implies that the play within the play, in reflecting and figuring the problems of 544 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

representing A Midsummer Night's Dream, might undo Shakespeare's impossible enterprise. Hazlitt's perspective is an extreme manifestation of what was to become a commonplace in nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism. ("It has often been remarked wrote Maginn, "that it is impossible to play the enchanted scenes of Bottom to any effect.")10 But most critics have presumed thatA Midsummer Night's Dream is in fact fitforstage representation. Dowden, forexample, admits that the mechanicals "serve as an indirect apology for [Shakespeare's] own necessarily imperfectattemptto represent fairyland" but claims (with Gervinus) that the play's acknowledgment of the limitations of theatrical illusion really differentiates Shakespeare frominept attempts "to leave nothing to be supplied by the imagination."" This has become the predominant point of view in the twentieth century: C. L. Barber attacks Hazlitt and declares, "Shakespeare, in his play, triumphantlyaccomplishes just this hard thing, 'to bring moonlight into a chamber.' "12 David P. Young agrees: "Where the mechanicals fail at dramatic illusion ... A Midsummer Night's Dream succeeds.'3 Perhaps the conventions of the modern stage-a physical and imaginative space which has been transformed by film, stylization, Brecht, and the magic of technology-have returned us to the sensibilities suggested in the prologue to Henry V. Today, representing Shakespeare's dramatic illusions on the stage doesn't strike us as a problem. However, it may be that, enchanted with the play, we too easily assume that any comparison it makes between itself and the mechanicals' play is self-congratulatory. Lamb and Hazlitt's perhaps perverse or anachronistic points of view-their visions ofA Midsummer Night's Dream and its problems-might teach us another way to look at Shakespeare's play. The point is not to take sides in the debate about whether the play can be represented but to recognize how seriously the play addresses and is addressed by the specter of moonshine. Let us returnto the terms and the scene of Hazlitt's double simile: "Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine." Readers and spectators have agreed that this moonshine can be seen as a figure for all that is shining, magical, and dream-like in A Midsummer Night's Dream, even if they have disagreed about how it reflects upon Shakespeare's enterprise of picturing on the stage a night-world of visions and imaginary characters. The mechanicals have been seen as placing David Marshall 545

both too much and too little faithin theatrical illusions (hence their fears about the audience's belief in lions and walls). Their comedy lies partly in their literalization of what should remain figured and figurative.But we need to see that this literalization becomes a figare forthe dilemma of the play-a dilemma that Hazlitt figures in terms of figurativelanguage. To embody fancy and to personate moonshine are like tryingto paint a simile, to map out or spell out what cannot be pictured as such; and a figure cannot be figured in this sense without becoming literalized-or lost. This predicament becomes more clear if we look at the language of Shakespeare's text at the famous moment when the mechanicals arrive at the proper prop to stand for moonshine. After Bottom suggests that real moonshine be allowed to play itself,Peter Quince replies: "Ay; or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine" (III, ii, 59-61). The verb to disfigure in this line is always glossed as a characteristicmalapropism, a humorous mistake made by Quince as he means to say to figure; that is, to represent. But this verbal mistake, this moment of misspeaking, can be read as a "Freudian slip" on the part of the play's unconscious-or as a signal that the problem of the play may appear in a play of words. We must read Quince's line not just as an appropriate mistake but as something Shakespeare meant to say. What then, is the status of the or in the formulation "to disfigure, or to present"? Is Quince juxtaposing two alternate possibilities or is he using the terms synonymously? The possibility of representing the play resides in the answer to this question. For the threat of the mechanicals' literal-mindedness would be its reflection of the inevitable disfiguring inherent in presenting moonshine. Looking at Quince's terms fromHazlitt's perspective we see that to present is to disfigure. The question of the play is whether presenting and representing must mean misrepresenting; whether figure must be synonymous with disfigure; whetherfigure must mean or even mightmean literalize, or literally, de-figure. Hazlitt's and Lamb's views about the fitness of A Midsummer Night's Dream for stage representation may or may not be persuasive, but they can teach us that one way to see the play is to recognize in this comic moment a figure forthe possibility of the play's impossibility. This would allow us to realize the senses in which the play is about problems of representation and figuration: not only whether the play can be staged but also what it means to 546 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

present a vision or an image to someone else's mind, to ask another person to see with one's eyes, to become a spectator to someone else's vision. Such questions themselves raise questions about the conditions of theater: the power of one imagination over others; the power to enchant and transformvision; the possibility of autonomous minds or imaginations sharing dreams and fantasies; the difference between picturing a text in private reading and attending a public, collective spectacle. A Midsummer Night's Dream asks us to take seriously the dilemma of joining poetry and the stage. In adopting this perspective we will find ourselves considering yet another question: the possibility of what Shakespeare elsewhere called "the marriage of true minds.'4
II

In the first part ofDie Wahlverwandtschaften, the Count delivers a short lecture on comedies and marriage, as if he were a cynical Northrop Frye: are The comedies whichwe see so often misleading;theytempt the awayfrom realitiesoftheworld.In a comedy our imagination we see marriageas an ultimategoal, reached only aftersurobstacles which fill several acts; and at the moment mounting when this goal is achieved, the curtainfalls and a momentary in warmsourhearts.But it is quite different life.The satisfaction play goes on behind the scenes, and, when the curtainrises not again,we would rather see or hear any moreof it.'5 Goethe's novel is about points of view, perspectives, and spectacles. In it characters are reduced to interchangeable pairs of A, B, C, and D; lovers are substituted for one another by mysterious and altering affinities.I can imagine that Elective Affinitiesis in part a parodic translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I introduce the Count's speech here to read it as an ironic commentary on Shakespeare's play.16 The Count's remarks make Charlotte "uneasy" and eventually "determined to stop this sort of talk once and forall"; but I hope they will remind us that plays that end in marriage are not necessarily comedies. In fact,A Midsummer Night's Dream, which raises the curtain on a parody of Romeo and Juliet after its marriages have been performed, seems to invite speculation about what will go on-and what has gone on-behind its scenes. Is it asking too much of an antique fable and a fairytoy to be skeptical about the "gentle concord" created by the sudden reconciliation and rearrangement of the lovers at the end of the play? David Marshall 547

How are we to take Demetrius' recovery from the "sickness" of abandoning Helena and loving Hermia since it is just as much the product of enchantment as Lysander's abandonment of Hermia and love for Helena? Are we to be pleased by the success of Helena's subjection of herself to Demetrius or Titania's sudden and manipulated surrender to Oberon? What about Hippolyta's marriage to the soldier who vanquished her? These are questions that are not presented by the traditional view of the play as a "wedding present" and an epithalamium in which there is a "festive confidence that things will go right."'17 They raise the possibility that A Midsummer Night's Dream is not "one of Shakespeare's happiest comedies"'18 but rather a "most lamentable comedy" (I, ii, 11-12) and "very tragical mirth" (V, i, 57). We don't need to imagine another act, however, to doubt the play's status as a happy comedy. Indeed, as the curtain rises on the firstscene, despite some elegant poetry, we have no reason to believe that the conflicts unfolding before us will be resolved any more comically than those of, say, The Winter's Tale or even King Lear. Even before Hermia is threatened with death in order to force her to marry against her will, the stage is set with an exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta that could be played as tense rather than as festive. Hippolyta speaks only once in the first scene-and she doesn't speak again until the fourthact-yet critics have usually acted as if they knew what was going on in her mind. C. L. Barber describes the characters looking toward their wedding in this way: "Theseus looks forward to the hour with masculine impatience, Hippolyta with a woman's willingness to dream away the time."'19I don't know how Barber manages to assign genders to these feelings, but, more important,I fail to see any sign of either happiness or willingness in Hippolyta's response to Theseus' expression of impatience. Hippolyta speaks with dignity,reason, and diplomacy-as is appropriate for a queenly prisoner-of-war-but her words are restrained and noncommittal: Four days will quicklysteep themselvesin night, Four nightswill quicklydreamaway the time; And thenthe moon,like to a silverbow New-bentin heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities.

(I, i, 7-11)

Theseus, in his opening speech, has figured the moon "Like to a stepdame or a dowager, / Long withering out a young man's reve548 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

nue" (5-6), thereby inaugurating the play's pervasive imagery of gain and loss and prefiguringLysander's plan to "steal" Hermia by fleeing to his "widow aunt, a dowager / Of great revenue" (I, i, 156-157). Hippolyta's response pictures the moon as a "silver bow / New-bent": under this sign will an Amazon warrior marry the prince who admits to her, "I wooed thee with my sword, /And won thy love doing thee injuries" (16-17). Theseus' "nuptial hour" (1) becomes Hippolyta's "solemnities" (a term that will echo throughout the play, conveying a sense of gravityas well as ceremony). But the most telling interpretationof Hippolyta's revision of these figures comes fromTheseus himself. He replies by telling Philostrate to "Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments, Awake the pert and / nimble spirit of mirth,/ Turn melancholy forthto funerals; / The pale companion is not for our pomp" (12-15). Theseus addresses Philostrate but clearly he is responding to Hippolyta, as if she were playing Hamlet to his Claudius. He has heard and seen a mournful melancholy in his bride-to-be, not a happy willingness, and he reminds her that they are going to a wedding and not a funeral. Then he thinksto acknowledge thathe has wooed her with his sword and done her injuries-one critic calls this a "ravishment disguised in [an] oblique courtesy"20-but he assures her: "I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling" "21 (18-19). It has been argued that Theseus "prizes harmony, but fromthe key in which how will the key of this wedding be different he won Hippolyta's "love" (his word, not hers) in combat?22Pomp, revelling, and particularly triumph sound as much like a military celebration as a wedding; and we should note the possibility of a textual pun produced by the orthographywhich rendered "revelling" as "reuelling"- which on the page "sounds" like "ruling."23 Characteristically, Hippolyta does not respond to this halfapologetic assertion of will; nor does she break her silence when Theseus turns to her and says, "Come, my Hippolyta. What cheer, my love?" (122) afterhe has faced Hermia with the choices of marrying according to her father's will, "death, or .. . a vow of single life" (121). What cheer, indeed, would Hippolyta express in response to this scene of wooing with a sword? It is hard to imagine her in the firstscene as "a tamed and contented bride,"24 particularly since Theseus seems to have trouble picturingher in this way. Hippolyta stands as more than an ornament for a masque; her silence is an importantkey to the conflictsofA Midsummer Night's Dream. The problem of how to read her silence-and what it means David Marshall 549

to imagine what is going on behind the scenes, as it were, in the privacy of her mind-is one of the problems the play can teach us about. As readers who must imagine Hippolyta represented on a stage, we must firsthear her silence; we must recognize that she does not speak. Traditionally, however, critics seem to have identifiedwith Theseus at the beginning ofthe play. They have adopted his point of view, and, in imposing his sentiments upon his bride, they have read happiness in her silence, thus reenacting the telling mistake of Peter Quince in scene ii when he speaks of playing before "the Duke and Duchess on his wedding day" (I, ii, 6-7, my emphasis). David P. Young, who dedicates a chapter about order to Theseus, agrees with other critics about the limits of Theseus' vision in Act V, but sees the firstscene with Theseus' eyes: "It is appropriate that Theseus, as representative of daylight and right reason, should have subdued his bride-to-be to the rule of his masculine will. That is the natural order of things."25 This may have been the ruling ideology in the sixteenth century or in 1966-I don't see that it has ever been the natural order of things-but it is not necessarily the ideology of A Midsummer Night's Dream. We should be willing to consider Hippolyta's fortunes as the curtain rises, in the same way that she perhaps weeps Hermia's fortunesin the firstscene; to do this, we must take her eyes. Hippolyta is not silent for the reasons that Cordelia decides to "love, and be silent."26 Nor is she performingthe "perfect ceremony of love's rite" in which one must "learn to read what silent love has writ."27Hippolyta is, I believe, tongue-tied, as if she were the serious reflection of Bottom at the moment when Titania comically ravishes him with the command to her fairies: "Tie up my lover's tongue, bring him silently" (III, i, 186). Theseus (who has "heard" of Demetrius' inconsistency but "being over-full of selfaffairs"[I, i, 111-113] manages at least twice to forgetabout it) can thereforehear in Hippolyta's silence what he likes. He describes himself meeting frightened subjects who, unable to speak, dumblyhave brokeoff, Not payingme a welcome. Trustme, sweet, Out ofthis silence yet I picked a welcome, duty And in the modestyof fearful tongue the much as from rattling I read as Of saucy and audacious eloquence. simplicity and Love, therefore, tongue-tied In least speak most,to mycapacity.

(V, i, 98-105)

550

Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

These are noble sentiments; but if Hippolyta is tongue-tied (and she is silent afterthis speech as well), it does not necessarily follow that one should read love in her silence. Part of Theseus' judgment against Hermia's advocacy of her own will cites that she is "wanting [her] father'svoice" (52); that is, she lacks her father'sconsent and she wants to speak in her father'svoice, to speak with his authority. Theseus tells Hermia that her voice has no standing in his court; her appeal is overruled because her plea must fall on deaf ears. I suggest thatboth Hermia and Hippolyta are in effecttongue-tied in the same way: their fate is to have others dictate their sentiments while they are silent or silenced. The dispute over Hermia is after all the real drama of the first act-to which the brief monologues of Theseus and Hippolyta stand as a prologue. This dispute is figured as an economic one: Egeus insists that his daughter is private property ("she is mine, and all my rightof her / I do estate unto Demetrius" [97-98]) which Lysander is tryingto ""filch"(36). (We might imagine that Hermia is named afterHermes: the master thief,the god of commerce and the marketplace, and the god of dreams.)28 However, the struggle over Hermia is also pictured as a conflictover control of her imagination and vision. Egeus accuses Lysander: "'thou hast given her rhymes . . . / Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung / With feigning voice verses of feigning love, / And stol'n the impression of her fantasy . . ." (28-32). This is not the same accusation as when Hermia calls Helena a "thief of love" who has "stol'n my love's heart fromhim" (III, ii, 283-4). Egeus is complaining that Lysander with his voice and poems and fictions and trinketsof love has inscribed his own figure upon Hermia: in the paraphrase of one editor, "stealthily imprinted thine image upon her fancy."29This is a kind of theftbecause the act of imposing or imprintingupon her imagination, as Theseus figures it, belongs to Egeus. Her impression is seen as rightfullyhis, which is why Hermia's claim to think and speak forherself is also a crime against her father.Theseus pictures the situation for Hermia in this manner: should be as a god, To you yourfather One thatcomposed yourbeauties; yea, and one in To whom you are but as a form wax, him imprinted, withinhis power and By it. or To leave the figure, disfigure

(47-51) 551

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Hermia, in Theseus' eyes, firstseems her father's creation: a mixture of Eve and Galatea; but then in Theseus' revision of his figure (which makes more ominous his reference to his wedding with Hippolyta as "the sealing day betwixt my love and me" [84]), Hermia becomes a character stamped upon blank wax. It is her father's rightto impress his own image upon this wax, to imprinta figureor disfigureit, to dictate what she represents and what she represents to herself: how she looks. "I would my fatherlooked but with my eyes" (56), complains Hermia. Theseus insists: "Rather your eyes must with his judgment look" (57). Hermia is told to "choose love by another's eyes" (140), to see what others have figured for her fantasy-just as Hippolyta is asked (or assumed) to see her wedding fromTheseus' point of view. This struggle over vision and imagination also characterizes the dispute between Oberon and Titania. Oberon's response to Titania's denial of his question, "Am I not thy lord?" (II, i, 63) is to seek control over her sight, to steal the impression of her fantasy. His strategyand revenge is to "streak her eyes /And make her full of hateful fantasies" (II, i, 257-258). With his magic he dictates how she will look and love, enthralling her eyes to Bottom's deformed shape until the moment he decides to "undo / This hateful imperfectionof her eyes" (IV, i, 61-62) and let her "See as thou wast wont to see" (71). The changeling boy is ostensibly the object of contention between Oberon and Titania, an occasion forboth jealousy and disobedience. But it also represents an impression of Titania's fantasythathas been stolen fromOberon; when he says, "I'll make her render up her page to me" (II, i, 185), we can hear a play on words which resonates in the context of the images and figures we have been juxtaposing. Just as Egeus insists on imprintinghis own figures upon Hermia, Oberon wants to be the author of Titania's page. Egeus says that Hermia is his to "render" (I, i, 96); Oberon is determined to make Titania render up the blank page of her imagination, surrender the rival image impressed on her fancy. It is within his power to replace the image of her love with the disfigured head of Bottom,to command her sight and fancy,to "leave the figure, or disfigure it." As a god, by the authority of his magic, Oberon enacts literally what Egeus and Theseus can performonly figuratively(or by coercion) when they tell Hermia to "fit your fancies to your father's will" (I, i, 118).3o one's fancyto someone else's will (or vision or The cost of fitting representation) is the issue with which I began this account of A 552 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

Midsummer Night's Dream. This issue returns us to the scene of the playhouse; but in the terms of Lamb and Hazlitt, we are speaking of what was fromthe outset the price of admission to the theater. As we become spectators to a representation of the play, we must exchange our privately imagined readings for a publicly shared spectacle and allow ourselves to be silenced and impressed by someone else's vision and point of view. It is fitting, then, that the play should raise its curtain on the imposition of a point of view on tongue-tied Hippolyta, the stealing of Hermia's fantasyand the imprintingof a character on her imagination, and the transformation of Titania into a blank page to be writtenand figuredupon by someone else's fancy.A Midsummer Night's Dream presents a political question: whether these women will be authors of their own characters or representations upon which the voices and visions of others will be dictated and imprinted. The dramatization of this situation, however, simultaneously presents us with a figureforthe conditions of theater. This double vision is focused by the parallel formulationswhich we have seen as figuringwhat is at stake in each of these situations: the mechanicals' scheme "to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine" and Theseus' view of Hermia as a "fo-rmin wax" which her fatherhas "imprinted" with the "power / To leave the figure or disfigure it." We remarked that Quince's supposed malapropism raised the possibility that to present or figure moonshine (the figure of A Midsummer Night's Dream) might mean to disfigure it. We took seriously the way that Quince's formulation may mean its "or" to join synonyms rather than separate alternatives. Obviously, Theseus in his phrase doesn't mean to appose the acts of figuring and disfiguring as synonyms; but how stable is the "or" which stands between imprinting a figure and disfiguring? The parallel situations of Hermia, Hippolyta, and Titania should make us wonder how the figuring and imprinting pictured by Theseus would be differentfromdisfiguring.From Egeus' capacity to claim Hermia as his own printed character-and his reading of that character's autonomy as the imprint of another man-to Oberon's more literal (if not more real) tyranny over Titania's vision and imagination, the play shows impressing a figure and point of view upon someone else's imagination as disfiguring.These terms,then, reflect and are reflected by the dilemma of staging the play, which is also the dilemma of watching the play represented, as well as the problem of reading and writing about the play. By making these David Marshall 553

claims I do not mean to neutralize the political conflicts of A Midsummer Night's Dream (here dramatized in terms of the domination of women) by translatingthem into problems of representation. Rather, I hope to show that the realm of politics and the realm of poetry and theater here should be seen to figure each other. As spectators to these scenes we must acknowledge our roles as men and women and our roles as actors and spectators in a theater. This, too, is the price of admission.
III

Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in the lights I am proposing makes it difficultto imagine that even with its comic scenes the play would have made a very suitable wedding present. (This is assuming, of course, that the play or some version resembling the text of the First Quarto was indeed performed at a weddingsomething we do not know.)31 It often seems as appropriate as the play that Philostrate describes to Theseus as "against your nuptial" (V, i, 75); and just as the prologue to that play excuses, "If we offend, it is with our good will" (V, i, 108), Puck's epilogue acknowledges the possibility that "we shadows have offended" (V, i, 413).32 Lovers are not presented in a very sympathetic light, even if one allows them their follies. This is reflected in the question Bottom asks when, in the scene following the dispute over Hermia, he is assigned the part of Pyramus: "What is Pyramus? a lover or a tyrant?"(I, ii, 19). Bottom's pairing of these stock roles is perhaps a logical, if comic, question; but it offersyet another formulation in which the status of an "or" is ambiguous. For in Theseus, Demetrius, and Oberon (and indirectly in Egeus, who takes Demetrius' part) we see men who are lovers and tyrants.Again, we wonder if the play will show us a difference between these two choices. The tyrannyof the two kings in response to women who would control their own vision might authorize one to read a textual pun or hear the echo of a psychological association between the phrases "If he come not, then the play is marr'd. It goes forward,doth it' (IV, ii, 5-6) and the phrases ten lines later ". . . there is two or three lords and ladies more married. If our sport had gone forward. . ." (IV, ii, 16-17). Whether one imagines an association between the two lines or not, the play suggests that getting married might mean getting marr'd, especially if we hear in marr'd its sense of "disfigured." I should acknowledge again that the point of view I have been expounding goes against what seems to be the predominant as554 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

sumption thatA Midsummer Night's Dream is a play which makes "luminous a traditional understanding of marriage."'33I quote this phrase froman impressive and scholarly article that I will take to be representative of this assumption, Paul A. Olson's "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage." Professor Olson sets out to present ''a cursory survey of Renaissance thought concerning the function of festival drama and the significance of wedlock"34 and then reads A Midsummer Night's Dream in this context. He commands an array of sources to claim that marriage, forthe Elizabethans, "maintained the patterned hierarchy of society" and "fulfilled its part in the concord of things when the male ruled his mate in the same way that reason was ordained to control both will and passions."35 However, when the article imposes this ideology, and its twentieth century legacy, upon the play, I want to object on two related grounds. First, we should understand both the uses and the limits of entirely circumstantial evidence. Information about historical and intellectual context can help us to locate where the play takes place and what ideologies it must depend upon or resist as it stakes out a position. However, with such an understanding we may discover in the play a scene of struggle-either a reflection of, or an engagement in, struggle-and not necessarily a display of power: a representation of power relations which confirmsor reinforcesa particular world-view. This leads to my second point: in consideringA Midsummer Night's Dream, the recognition of traditional views or relations should not be substituted for a reading of the conflicts that are acted out in the play. To claim, for example, that "'the movement toward an orderly subordination of the female and her passions to the more reasonable male" is "epitomized" in the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta36is to turn one's eyes fromthe contrast,as the play begins, between Theseus' impatience for his wedding night and Hipas polyta's reasoned patience. It is also to be as forgetful Theseus is of Demetrius' seemingly unreasonable and (dare I say) wanton conduct.37 Simply to assume that Shakespeare adopted conventional models of Theseus as "the reasonable man and the ideal ruler" and Hippolyta as the Amazon who stood for"a false usurpation of the duties of the male reason by the lower female passions"38 is to insure that the conflicts of the firstact-Hippolyta's silence and Hermia's desire to speak with her father's (that is, her own) voice-will fall on deaf ears. Olson quotes from Celeste Turner Wright's survey of "The Amazons in English Literature" David Marshall 555

but ignores her too brief speculation on risks and possibilities involved in portraying an Amazon on the English stage while Elizabeth played the role of Virgin Queen. Furthermore, who is Theseus, thathe should overrule Kent's lessons about blind respect forthe authorityof kings? There is more to take issue with: Oberon is assumed to be justified in seeking sovereignty over Titania, who becomes a representative of "the forces of the lower passions in man" and "<princess of sensual passion."39 Oberon's behavior is ignored as male critics indulge their fantasies about Titania's supposedly "erotic games with Bottom and the changeling."40 However, my aim here is not so much to refute Olson's position as to suggest what it must ignore and, more important,to propose that the terms and context that Olson construes may indeed be present in the play, but not as a representation of the "Renaissance concept" of marriage (a concept too easily assumed to be stable, known, and even "natural"). Suppose that we opted not to see the play and its marriages through the eyes of Theseus. Critics have recognized that the famous fifth monologue in which Theseus opposes reason and the act imagination serves to mark the limits of his rationality.I think that the struggles between men and women in A Midsummer Night's Dream also place his embodiment of order, reason, and power in an ironic light. One way to picture this (in addition to the readings I have proposed) would be to imagine Theseus as a relative, as it were, of another Greek tyrant:Pentheus in the storyof the Bacchae. (Scholars tell us that Shakespeare did not read Euripides, whose works were a standard part of school curricula in Greek but were not translated.41 Shakespeare would have known the story of the Bacchae, however, at the very least from Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Imagine a play in which a tyranttakes it on himself to defend male order and hierarchy against female rebellion and sexual frenzy,in part by seeking to imprison the women of his city. Suppose this ruler stands as a symbol of rationality,that his will to reason tries to explain away the irrational,that he denies the possibility of a collective hallucination. In this world the gods are not exempt fromhuman passions; one god transformsand distorts the vision of a woman so that she takes a man's head for an animal's-or an animal's head for a man's. People wake from dreams and find everything seeming double. Is this the frenzy of Dionysus or a midsummer night's dream?42 My purpose in proposing this double vision is to suggest that A 556 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

Midsummer Night's Dream might parody and transformsome elements of the Bacchae myth. To consider that story as an almost hidden model for Shakespeare's play would be one way to allow that if one were to read A Midsummer Night's Dream as a conflict between "masculine" principles of rationality and order and "female" principles of sexuality and passion, it would not necessarily follow that one should privilege these terms according to the values of traditional Christian hierarchies. The storyof the Bacchae provides a model in which these values are reversed. It reflects an image of the limits of Theseus' imagination and vision as he (like Oberon) tries to repress "female" passion with "male" reason. At the least, we are reminded of a dialectic in which the poles are less than stable and alternative visions of the world are set in struggle. Furthermore, we should note that in Ovid's text the story of Pyramus and Thisby is told by a weaver as a storywithin the story of the Bacchae; just as, of course, the play of Pyramus and Thisby is presented by a weaver (and company) as a play within the play ofA Midsummer Night's Dream. IV My quarrel with those who would see A Midsummer Night's Dream as a traditional celebration of marriage is not simply that they refuse to read parts of the play closely; it is that they act as if it were clear what marriage means to the play. I am claiming that the play swerves away from festive comedy as it radically places in question a social institution that embodies relations of power and stages conflicts of imagination, voice, and vision. However, to say thatA Midsummer Night's Dream is "anti-marriage" also would be to stop short of understanding the differentsenses of marriage that the play is concerned with. On more than one level it meditates on the terms of marriage by considering the conditions of being sundered and being joined. From the outset we see lovers who want to be joined but who find themselves sundered: Demetrius has parted fromHelena, Hermia and Lysander are threatened with separation and then divided; in addition, Oberon and Titania are divided because Titania will not part with the changeling boy. The situations which separate, divide, part, and mismatch these various pairs provide the comedy of errors of the middle acts. Then, afterthe supposedly "gentle concord" which occasions Theseus to command that the "Ccouples shall eternally be knit" (IV, i, 184), we become spectators to the comic and tragic sundering of Pyramus and David Marshall 557

Thisby: questionable entertainment for a questionable wedding feast.43 However, even ifwe want to believe thatthese marriages end the play happily, we must admit that all that has been sundered has not been joined. In particular, there remains the problem of Helena. Helena is a problem, to begin with, because she often seems to embody the opposites of the qualities shared by the other women in the play: defiance, self-respect,independence, dignity. Could it be to emphasize by contrast the paths that Hippolyta, Titania, and Hermia have not taken that Helena is made to tell Demetrius: "I am your spaniel; ... The more you beat me, I will fawn on you ... spurn me, strike me, / Neglect me, lose me . . ." (II, i, 203-206)? One way to understand this love would be to suppose that it is not love at all, or at least not love for Demetrius, or desire forhis love. The speech I have just quoted from is a response to Demetrius' question: "do I not in the plainest truth/Tell you I do not nor cannot love you?" (II, i, 200-201). Before begging that she be treated "as you use your dog" (210), Helena answers: "And even for thatdo I love you the more" (202). Is Helena's pursuit of Demetrius founded in an expectation that he will not love her? When Demetrius suddenly appears to love her afterbeing transformedby Oberon's magic, she refuses to take his declarations seriously, to accept his claim of love. Indeed, her strategyto win "thanks" by the "dear expense" (I, i, 249) of informing on Hermia and Lysander could hardly be designed to better her position in regard to Demetrius. Whereas their flightmight have left Helena as a logical alternative for Demetrius to fall back upon-both Hermia and Lysander wish her luck with this as they say goodbye-Helena's betrayal can serve only to prevent the union (and escape) of her two friends. Suppose, however, that it is Hermia and not Demetrius that Helena hopes to catch. Recall the love poem contained in the expression ofjealousy that Helena speaks to Hermia as her firstlines in the play: Your eyes are lodestars, and yourtongue'ssweet air More tuneable to larkthanto shepherd'sear When wheat is green,when hawthorn buds appear. Sickness is catching.0, were favorso, Yours would I catch,fairHermia,ere I go; My ear should catch yourvoice, myeye youreye, My tongue should catchyourtongue's sweet melody. Helena's 558

(I, i, 183-189)

declaration, with increasingly ambiguous possessives, Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

moves away froma conceit about wanting to attractDemetrius. She would catch Hermia's favor, too; and, in another sense, she has caught this favor,like the "sickness" that Demetrius describes as his love forHermia. From Helena's point of view, stopping Hermia and Lysander would not necessarily result in the marriage of Hermia and Demetrius. By law Hermia has three choices and rather than marryDemetrius or die she may choose "a vow of single life" (I, i, 121). Theseus describes this "maiden pilgrimage" (I, i, 75) as the life of a "barren sister" (72), insisting, "But earthlier happy is the rose distilled /Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,/ Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness" (76-78). Hermia vows, "So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord, / Ere I will yield my virgin patent up / Unto his lordship whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty" (79-82). These choices and characterizations should be kept in mind because, for Helena, Hermia's "sister's vows" (III, ii, 199) are precisely what is at stake. They are what has been lost and what might be gained. When Helena rejects Lysander's "vow" (III, ii, 124) of love, she declares in response to his oath: "These vows are Hermia's" (III, ii, 130). She means they are meant forHermia, they belong to Hermia; but also, these are Hermia's vows, these are the vows that Hermia made, I recognize them. Lysander has just spoken of his "badge of faith" (127), figuringhis tears as an identifyingfamilycrest. A few moments later, Hermia appears on the scene and Helena bitterly the "sister's vows" (199) they shared, reproaches her forforgetting comparing their former union to "coats in heraldry . . crowned with one crest" (213-214). Weaving a complex fabric of images, Helena figuresthe past state of "childhood innocence" (202) which characterized their shared vows:
.

(203-211) We can see this densely poetic emblem of female sexuality as a revision of Theseus' figuringof the maiden vow of single life: his "barren," "fruitless" state, his flower "withering on the virgin David Marshall 559

gods, We, Hermia,like two artificial Have withour needles createdboth one flower, on Bothon one sampler,sitting one cushion, Bothwarblingof one song,both in one key; As ifour hands,our sides, voices and minds So Had been incorporate. we grewtogether, Like to a double cherry, seemingparted, But yetan union in partitionTwo lovelyberriesmoulded on one stem....

thorn" are transformedinto a persuasive picture of "single blessed"So will I ness" in which two "grow" as one, floweringand fruitful. grow," vows Hermia to Theseus; so did we grow, insists Helena with her vision of what is "maidenly" (217), with her picture of the "virgin patent" Hermia must exchange to 'join with men" (216).44 Hermia responds to Helena's long and intense monologue: "I am amazed at your passionate words" (220). She is amazed, I take it, both at Helena's paranoid assumption that there is a conspiracy to persecute her and at the passionate expression of her love; the latter passion formsand informsthe bulk of Helena's speech. Hermia has allowed that "Before the time I did Lysander see, /Seemed Athens as a paradise to me" (I, i, 204-205); but as she and Lysander prepare to "turn away [their] eyes" fromAthens (218) and enter exile, she barely looks back at the "playfellow" (220) with whom she acted Adam and Eve in a garden of "childhood innocence ... like two artificialgods." Helena, in contrast,surprises Hermia by describing this paradise with the pain of loss and the joy of recollection. What she describes is a kind of marriage, and we can hear her words echo as a version and inversion of the Church of England's wedding ceremony. Dwelling on the word "one," Helena declares herself to have been joined with Hermia as "one," <'incorporate." (Her "We, Hermia . . ." sounds almost like a "royal we" rather than a first-person plural and direct address-as if the one name named them both.) She reproaches: "will you rent our ancient love asunder, / To join with men in scorning your poor friend?" (III, ii, 215-216). The wedding ceremony fromthe 1549 Book of Common Prayer states "that it should never be lawful to put asunder those whome [God] by matrimonie haddeste made one"; or, to quote its better known declaration: "Those whome God hath joyned together: let no man put asunder."45 Helena's appeal reworks these terms; she "chides" (218) Hermia forhaving sundered their union by joining with men-just as formerlythey "chid the hasty-footed time / For parting us" (200-201). The sense of Helena's characterization of their vows as the vows of marriage is underlined by a speech of Lysander's which strongly prefigures Helena's language and imagery. When Hermia and Lysander meet at the prearranged place in the woods where Hermia and Helena "Upon faintprimrose beds were wont to lie, / Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet" (I, i, 215-216), Lysander declares: "One turfshall serve as pillow for us both, / One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth" (II, ii, 41-42). Already these 560 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

lines, spoken on the "beds" that Helena and Hermia used to lie on, anticipate the imagery that Helena will use when she describes the same scene. Lysander continues: 0. take the sense, sweet of myinnocence. Love takesthe meaningin love's conference. I mean thatmyheartuntoyoursis knit, So thatbut one heartcan make of it; Two bosoms interchained withan oathSo thentwo bosoms and a single troth.

(II, ii, 45-50)

We can read Lysander's oath as a double paraphrase: it takes the language of the wedding ceremony (which also speaks of God "knitting" the couple together and calls foreach of the betrothed to "plight" to the other his or her "troth") and practically constitutes an official vow of marriage, and it doubles the figures Helena will speak-from the "cushion" to the single, incorporate body that two people seem to share. Helena's recital of the scene of her vows with Hermia is thereby turned into an echo of Lysander's secret ceremony, although the spectator learns retrospectively that Lysander is echoing the sister's vows. These juxtapositions of speeches and texts further identify the sundering Helena laments with the breaking of the vows of marriage: vows which (imagined or not) she appears to take much more seriously than those which Demetrius has broken. Helena's monologue is one indication that sundering and joining appear as more than comic devices in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her speech acts like a meditation on joining: moving from an association of words which are prefixed by con ("confederacy... conjoined ... conspired ... contrived. . .") to the stunning series of figures which culminate in the "double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition" (III, ii, 209-210). We can further measure the seriousness of these images, as well as what they say about the conditions in which we find the play's characters, if we recognize in Helena's portrayal of an "ancient love" (III, ii, 215) and subsequent state of loss a picture of the emblem and story of love which Plato has Aristophanes present in The Symposium. Aristophanes' myth(which was extensively summarized in Ficino's popular commentary The Symposium)46 on proposes thatwe live in a fallen state, each of us a half of an original whole person from which we have been severed. Love, then, both heterosexual and homosexual, "restores us to our ancient state by attemptingto weld David Marshall 561

two beings into one ... this is what everybody wants, and everybody would regard it as the precise expression of this desire ... that he should melt into his beloved, and that henceforth they should be one instead of two."47 Helena's vision of her lost union with Hermia, "As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds / Had been incorporate" (III, ii, 207-208), evokes both this mythical, original condition and the restorationthat love means in its sense of mending what has been sundered. Here Christian, classical, and mythic imagery seem to come together to figure Helena's perception that what had been joined together in her ancient love has been put asunder. These terms imply that Helena will be leftapart, parted, denied the marriage in which she felt united, unless we are willing to see her enchanted reunion with Demetrius as a fitting compensation. In that case we could read Helena's last expression of sentiment in the play as the completion envisioned in the myth fromThe Symposium: "I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own and not mine own" (IV, i, 190-191). Helena has just agreed with Hermia that "everything seems double" (189) and she perhaps regards newly affectionateDemetrius with a look of dazed recognition, as if he were both familiar and strange, both a part of herself and not herself. (This might authorize the possibility proposed in the Variorum that "jewel" should read "gemell"-that is, twin.)48 However, in light of the context of this marriage-both the events leading up to it and the utter silence of Helena and Hermia throughout the last act-it is hard to imagine that such a union would adequately repair what has been sundered or restore what has been lost. v It makes sense to recall at this point that all of the mechanicals are concerned with some form or manner of joining. Carpenter, joiner, weaver, bellows mender, tinker, tailor; their occupations enact the preoccupations ofA Midsummer Night's Dream. Two constructor put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered. It is appropriate, then, that afterPeter Quince assigns the roles of his play, he instructsthe mechanicals: "But masters, here are your parts; and I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you to con them by tomorrownight" (I, ii, 88-90). The newly appointed players are told to con their parts, which we know means to learn their roles by heart; but in juxtaposition with "parts" we 562 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

might also read con as the prefix that Helena mediates on in her monologue about sundering and joining-the letters that add the sense of "something joined together" to a word. For a moment vocation and avocation appear to coincide as these men who join and mend together are called upon to "con" their parts. To be an actor, however, is to play a part,to create it, to become it on stage. To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part. The mechanicals feel compelled to acknowledge this on their stage: "tell them that I Pyramus am not Pyramus" (III, i, 19), says Bottom the weaver; and so Snout the tinker declares himself Snout and a wall, and the lion insists that he is the lion and Snug the joiner, as if Brecht and not Peter Quince had produced this play. This is the world of the theater but its conditions also characterize the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There Hermia asks, "Am I not Hermia? Are you not Lysander?" (III, ii, 273) upon finding herself divided fromher partnerand replaced by someone else who had been assigned to her role. We have remarked that in the mirrorimage of this moment Helena calls Demetrius (her twin or not) "mine own and not mine own." It is with these double visions in mind that I want to imagine that scene (in which the lovers awaken from their dream-filled slumber) as an acknowledgment of the perpetual coming together of the world of the play and the world of the theater. Picture Demetrius saying, "These things seen small and undistinguishable / Like far-off mountains turned into clouds"; Hermia, too, beholds this vision"Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double"-as does Helena: "So methinks; /And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own" (IV, i, 186191). What, however, are "these things"? The characters and events that they have woken up to, perhaps; or those that they have "dreamed." But imagine the actors speaking these lines in the direction of the audience, as if they were actors who had woken to find themselves on the playhouse stage. The effectwould be similar to the moment of unconscious self-consciousness when, in an"Then how can it other context, the audience watches Helena ask,< be said I am alone /When all the world is here to look at me?" (II, i, 225-226); or like the epilogue which Puck speaks to remind the audience that they have dreamed and slumbered in a theater. (In a sense, this exchange stands as the lovers' epilogue.) Hermia's double vision of these things, her parted eye, comes fromher parted I:

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the doubling and dividing of her "I" into two parts-Hermia and not Hermia, the part and the actor before us. This is the dedoublemernt that Diderot recognized as the actor's mode of being. Diderot also recognized that actors must see these things with parted eye because they must face the audience across an imaginary partition, an invisible wall, whether they pretend to speak across it or not. As actors they are kept apart, separated by the parts they play and the partitionsthey deliver across a distance. As spectators we must face the fact that they-and consequently we-are sundered. Against this background, this theatrical representation of a world where people appear sundered fromthemselves and each other,we see the men who join things together tryto con the parts of actors. Their play, "conned with cruel pain" (V, i, 80), is of course about sundering: the story of two lovers who are parted first by their families and last by death-but most palpably by a wall. This wall is referredto in the prologue as the "vile Wall which did these lovers sunder" (V, i, 80); and in language that also echoes and parodies key words fromthe lovers' speeches, Thisby apostrophizes:

o Wall, fulloftenhastthou heard mymoans

my For parting fairPyramusand me. My cherry lips have oftenkissed thystones, Thy stoneswithlime and hairknitup in thee.

(V, i, 186-189)

It has oftenbeen remarked that the play within the play reflectsthe comedy of errors that the lovers enacted in the woods, or the tragedy they might have produced; and that the newly married couples do not appear to notice this, although we might read their mixtureof joking, interruption,silence, and impatience as an indication if not an acknowledgment of this recognition. However, we need to recognize as well the serious echoes that these terms and images of parting should recall by the fifthact: in particular, the ridiculous image of sundering that is presented and personated by one of the mechanicals. Separating the lovers but also providing a medium of communication, binding them in a union in partition, this wall stands both as a comic, literal-minded device and as a literalization of one of the play's key figures. The wall acts as a visual metaphor, a "translation of a metaphor in its literal sense" (to borrow Schlegel's description of Bottom's transmutation).49The tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby that is told by Ovid's weaver is metamorphosed into a farce for the couples who, for better or for worse, have been "knit." However, at the center of this play within 564 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

a play is a picture of what has been sundered: a partition that should also remind us of our place. Here is what has faced us throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream, what will face us still when we wake fromthe play and find ourselves in the theater. These reflections should lead us to wonder about what we are laughing at when we find the mechanicals ridiculous. (This is where the play might be laughing at us.) What, after all, is more ridiculous: to personate the wall that stands between us, thereby insisting that we see it, or to act as if the wall is not there? We are told that the mistake of the mechanicals is to leave nothing to the spectators' imaginations, but can we be trusted to see the invisible walls that confrontus? Are we so much more observant than the spectators to the play within the play? Throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream they figure beholders who can hardly see what is before them: each other or themselves. What is more ridiculous: to have someone "signify wall" or to "let him hold his fingers thus" (III, i, 60)-as if either partitions or the people standing for them allowed us openings to see through; as if, like Lysander, we could wake froma death-like slumber and exclaim: "Transparent Helena, Nature shows art, / That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart" (II, ii, 104-105)? He is, of course, enchanted: dreaming. The theater presents itself as an imaginary "wooden 0" (Henry V, I, i, 13) through or in which we may see its spectacles. But the theater must end by teaching us how to see-not only how to see through-the invisible wall that creates its architecture. This is a wall that we have to imagine to see, yet it won't disappear if we won't see it. Theater shows us both partitions and how we personate partitions. It allows us to hear "'partitionsdiscourse," to repeat the play on words Demetrius makes as he watches a man simultaneously present a text and a wall (V, i, 165-166). This reminds us that texts, too, are walls that keep us asunder, although we might wish to deliver them, deliver ourselves fromthem, and thus present ourselves. The theater sunders us and shows us how we are sundered, turning us into spectators of its world and our own. However, A Midsummer Night's Dream ends with the promise of mending, as if its actors really would join, construct, repair, and weave together rather than just teaching us the parts they have conned. Puck's epilogue in its sixteen short lines twice offersto "mend" and twice promises "amends." We should consider the interplay of these words, how they rhyme with each other and with the ends of the play: David Marshall 565

If we shadows have offended, Thinkbut this,and all is mendedThat you have but slumberedhere While these visions did appear. And thisweak and idle theme, No moreyieldingthana dream, Gentles,do not reprehend. If you pardon,we will mend.

(V, i, 412-419)

How could the theater mend us, join us together as it shows us that we are parts and apart? Could it forma union in partition,as if what kept us separate hinged on what assembled us? In one sense it is the place of theater to transfixits spectators in one spot, to make them stand together-both literally and through its figures by joining their minds in a common vision and point of view. This collective stance is what is strange and admirable about what passes fora dream one midsummer's night. Theseus denies the "fantasies" (V, i, 5) the lovers wake up with, but Hippolyta remarks on the strange "compact" of imagination the lovers seem to share: of But all the story the nighttold over, so And all theirmindstransfigured together, thanfancy'simages More witnesseth of And growsto something greatconstancy.

(V, i, 23-26)

Hippolyta's description of a concord of minds that seem to stand together is also the dream of theater: that we could be. joined together in a collective hallucination, that figures could be carried across and visions shared. The dream of theater is that particular stories, images, and minds could "grow'> "so together" that they
would

seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition" (III, ii, 208-210). Afterthe lovers awaken into a double world that still has the air of dreaming about it, Demetrius proposes, "let us recount our dreams" (IV, i, 198). According to Hippolyta, they recount them and add them together. However, Demetrius' proposal is also Bottom's cue to awaken fromhis dream and declare his famous lines: "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of any man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream" (IV, i, 203-205). A Midsummer Night's Dream leaves open the question of whether we can recount or expound our 566 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

seem like Hermia

and Helena,

who "grew together ...

dreams; perhaps it was the threat that Bottom and not Demetrius was right that caused Freud to practically ignore this play in his writing.50But A Midsummer Night's Dream both reminds us and asks us to forget about the epistemological problem that dreams raise and stand for.We mightbe able to tell our dreams (or translate them into ballets or plays; this may mean to act them out), but we cannot know the dreams of other people. The magic of the play is that separate minds appear to be transfiguredtogether; dreams (or what seem like dreams) appear to be shared. This is the dream that will mend the spectators of the play if they think that they have slumbered and witnessed the same visions and dream. Yet Puck ends by reminding us that this is also a dream that calls for amends: "We will make amends ere long; ... Give me your hands, if we be friends. / And Robin shall restore amends" (V, i, 423-427). Why must he restore amends? The play, in part, has recounted our losses, but it has also robbed us. Recall that when Theseus prefiguresthe opening of Puck's epilogue by calling actors "shadows," he says that "the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them," to which Hippolyta rejoins, "It must be your imagination then, and not theirs" (V, i, 209-211). We have seen the willfulness of Theseus' imagination, the power of his projections. Hippolyta's revision of her husband's claim recalls that the interplay of imaginations in the play is often portrayed as a struggle. Spectators are expected to work their imaginations upon a play (this is what the prologue to Henry V requests of us), but at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream we are faced with the possibility that we have been worked upon, that we are owed amends because our imaginations have been amended: changed, altered, revised. Have we found to our cost that a vision and a dream have been reduced to an unmanageable reality? Or have we found to our cost that a vision has been imposed upon us, that impressions of our fantasies have been stolen? What does it mean that we have slumbered? When Puck causes Helena to slumber, she speaks of "sleep" as that which will "4stealme awhile frommy own company" (III, ii, 436). What does it mean that the dream we are told we have witnessed is said to have an "idle theme" (V, i, 416)? It is with the flower called "love-in-idleness" (II, i, 168) that Oberon makes Titania render up her page to him by streaking her eyes and filling her with fantasies. Have we lost ourselves or the figures we imagined for ourselves? What are we to think of this dream that fora while has reduced us to silence and filled our minds with airy shapes and fantasies? As David Marshall 567

spectators-and as readers-we must wonder what happens when we see with someone else's eyes, allow ourselves to become the blank page upon which an author imprintscharacters, a play representations. The marriage of true minds that is the dream of theater presents the double prospect that it might mar us as it mends us, steal as it restores. What does theater's figuringor disfiguring add up to? Can theater's "transfiguring"mediate between or synthesize figuringand disfiguring? What do we exchange forour visions? VI We have seen that A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes an economy of exchange, as if, like the Sonnets, its figures marked various registers with the expenses of loss and possession. The terms and imagery of theftare set down in the firstscene, which pictures the "trafficin women" (to use Emma Goldman's phrase)51 upon which men for so long have founded their societies; and throughoutthe play, characters are figured as merchandise or stolen goods. (Hermia, Lysander, Helena, Demetrius, Egeus, Oberon, and Titania each "steal" or are stolen fromor are stolen in the course of the play.) The figure for these character-commodities is the child who rivals Hermia as the most contested "property" in the play: the changeling boy that Titania is accused of having "stolen" (I, ii, 22). (According to folk tales, fairies stole lovely children and left deformed "changelings" in exchange; this boy is the changeling the fairies took, not left behind.) When Titania insists to Oberon that "the fairyland buys not the child of me" (II, i, 122), she is perpetuating rather than rejecting terms that inscribe people in a system of economic relations. Her monologue pictures the boy as "merchandise" which his mother's womb, like a trader's ship, was "rich with" (II, i, 127-134). The changeling comes to represent all of the characters in the play who are traded or foughtover as property. It also shows us that the other characters are changelings in the sense that the play's plot revolves around their exchanges: their substitutions and their interchangeability. Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena all exchange one another (are exchanged for one another) in almost every possible switch and combination. Bottom, too, is "changed" and "translated" (III, i, 103, 107). In becoming a disfigured substitute for Titania's changeling boy, he becomes both a changeling for himself (a monster left in his own place) and a changeling forthe changeling (which Titania has been tricked into exchanging). The changeling boy is mysteriously ab568 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

sent in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but in a sense he is everywhere; the play casts its characters as changelings. We also could say that the play is performed by changelings because that is what actors are. For Shakespeare's spectators, the term "changeling" would have been a synonym for someone Protean who would not stay the same fromone moment to the next. This is precisely the "ontological subversiveness" (as Jonas Barish has called it)52thatactors were condemned forin Elizabethan England. Actors take others' parts and places; they exchange themselves for others, substitute others for themselves. This is further compounded in A Midsummer Night's Dream because characters often seem to be changed into actors: as parts and partners are exchanged and mixed up, individual characters seem reduced to parts or roles. We watch changelings portraychangelings. In another sense, changelings are everywhere in the play because they fill its pages and dialogue: they are its figures of speech. The figuresthatTitania employs to tell the changeling's storyenact and figure exchange in various senses. Describing herself on the shore with the woman who is pregnant with the boy, she tropes the ships to see their "sails conceive / And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind" (II, i, 128-129). Then the metaphor doubles or reverses-it is exchanged-as Titania tropes the woman to see her "rich" with her own human cargo, just as the woman tropes herself to "imitate" the ships and "sail upon the land /To fetch me trifles, and returnagain, /As froma voyage, rich with merchandise" (II, i, 131-134). The woman and the ships stand foreach other,exchanging properties in a double sense. If we recognize the act of carryingand trading cargo performed by these literal and figurative ships to be transport (as in metapherein) then we see that these double metaphors both dramatize and figure metaphor as they transfer, transfigure, exchange, and carry across. Born of this mirror of metaphors, destined to be switched, substituted, and exchanged, the changeling is also a trope fortropes. It makes sense, then, that in The Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, Puttenham invents a rhetorical category called "Figures of Exchange" and names one of those figures "the Changeling." Puttenham refersto exactly the sort of constructions the mechanicals make-"a play with ... wordes, using a wrong construction fora right,and an absurd fora sensible, by manner of exchange"53-but we can see that in a sense all tropes act as changelings. The changeling figures figures. That Puttenham uses "changeling" to mean something ill-formed David Marshall 569

which appears in the place of something fair reminds us that in A Midsummer Night's Dream the changeling is not the disfigured child. Appropriately,the play ends with a blessing by Oberon, who has authored many of the play's exchanges and deformations in pursuit of his page, to insure forthe newly married couples that the blots of Nature'shand Shall not in theirissue stand. Never mole, harelip,nor scar, Nor markprodigious,such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon theirchildrenbe.

(V, i, 398-403) Prefacing Puck's appeal forour blessing and his promise of amends, Oberon's reprise of the figure of the changeling might remind us of the questions facing us at the end of the play. We might wonder again if we who have rendered up the pages of our imaginations in exchange forthe play leave the theater free (or freed) fromblots or disfigurement.This is what worried us as we let the play imprintits figures on us, risking change and amending. Have we been stolen and leftas changelings? I asked the question: What do we exchange for our visions? I meant to suggest that we both give up visions in this exchange and get visions in return. In this sense the exchange of visions might be seen as an alternative to the theftof visions in the play. What is at stake appears to be our visions of ourselves: we would not be forced to look with someone else's eyes, to submit to the tyrannyof someone else's view or imagination of us. Yet how do we see ourselves? In the theater, we see ourselves as changelings: capable of seeing ourselves on the stage, substituted forby actors whose parts we take in acts of sympathyor identification. We allow actors to stand as changelings forus, whether or not we recognize them as they present or disfigure us, as they act our parts. In this sense we see with "parted eye" and "everything seems double"; we both take their eyes and see for-ourselves. The theater is like the "dark night" that, in Hermia's words, "from the eye his function takes"; it may "impair the seeing sense," but it offersother senses "double recompense" (III, ii, 177-180). It keeps us in the dark, but it offersto show us ourselves-doubled. The double recompense in this play of double visions would be to learn how to see and to learn how to see others. It is this double vision that Theseus, Egeus, and Oberon in their single-mindedness cannot know. Recall that Hermia-whose eyes are "blessed and attractive" (II, i, 91) "lodestars" (I, i, 183)-is asked by Helena: "O, teach 570 Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream

me how you look" (I, i, 192). To teach one how you look might be the alternative to the tyrannythat forces someone to see with another's eyes or to assume a character that someone else figures and impresses. To learn how you look would be to learn what you look like and to learn how you see: both to take your eyes and to let you see yourself. This is the recompense if you let someone take your eyes and see the figure of yourself. If we risk seeing our visions disfigured-if we figure our visions in order to see them, despite the cost-this is only because we cannot be represented; we can only be believed. To learn this exchange of visions would be to release others fromthe roles we cast them in, to permitthem to stop being changelings. Only when these visions are double-each of us learning how to look-will we be able to recognize disfiguringand provide it in exchange another sense. A Midsummer Night's Dream figures these relations as loss, and in a sense it inscribes us in it. The play, however, might teach us how to look. If we will let one of Bottom's lines echo apart from its comic context, we can hear the admonishment, warning, and offerof vision that the play addresses to its spectators: "let the audience look to their eyes" (I, ii, 22). Yale University
FOOTNOTE S "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness forStage Representation,"in The Worksof Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 140. I would like to acknowledge having benefited from many conversations with Margaret Ferguson to the throughout various stages ofthis essay. I am also grateful Thomas Greene, who generously read and commented on the manuscript. 2 Lamb, p. 127. 3 The phrase is from Edward Dowden's Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, reprintedin part in the Signet edition ofA MidsummerNight's Dream, ed. WolfgangClemens (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 137. 4 Lamb, p. 126. 5 William Hazlitt, Hazlitt on Theater, ed. William Archerand Robert Lowe (New York: Hill and Wang, n.d.), p. 73. 6 William Hazlitt,Characters of Shakespear's Plays (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), p. 102. This essay is also reprinted in the Signet edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream. 7Lamb, pp. 136 and 140. 8 Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, p. 102. 9 All citations fromShakespeare's works referto William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). The Winter's Tale, V, ii, 55-56. 10 William Maginn, Shakespere Papers: Pictures Grave and Gay (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), p. 116. Maginn writesthatTheseus' commentsabout the play within upon the stage of some ofthe finer the play serve "as an excuse forthe want of effect
1 Charles Lamb,

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touches of such dramatistsas [Shakespeare].... His own magnificentcreation of fairylandin the Athenian wood must have been in his mind, and he asks an indulgent play of fancy . . ." (p. 120). "I Dowden, pp. 139-140. 12C. L. Barber,Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1972), p. 149. 13 David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1966), p. 105. 14 The phrase is fromSonnet 116. 15 Goethe, Elective Affinities,trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1963), pp. 82-83. 16 Compare Henry Alonzo Myer's typical discussion of the interchangeability of in the lovers of Shakespeare's play with the discussion of elective affinities chapter fourof Goethe's novel. Myers describes the various pairings of the Athenian lovers as "A becomes B. and then becomes A again ... A becomes B, and then becomes C, and then becomes D, and finallyA again." ("Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream: Tragedy and Comedy" in the Signet A Midsummer Night's Dream, "allegory": into a prefiguring p. 165.) Eduard turnsthe formulaof elective affinities "<You,Charlotte,represent the A, and I am your B; for,to be honest, I completely depend on you and follow you as B follows A. C obviously stands forthe Captain ... we should tryto find a D foryou . . ." (p. 43). 17 Barber, p. 131. Cf. W. Moelwyn Merchant: "'What a wedding present! There is the fitnessof the fable, the play's whole tone and atmosphere,the appropriate ending.' Few have found it necessary to quarrel with Granville-Barker'sestimate of the play's suitabilityas an epithalamium." ("A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Visual Re-creation" in Early Shakespeare: Stratford-Upon-Avon-Studies3 [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961], p. 165.) 18 Madeleine Doran, Introduction to A MidsummerNight's Dream in the Penguin of Complete Works,p. 146. Cf the refutation JanKott'sShakespeare Our Contemporary by Thomas McFarland: "A Midsummer Night's Dream is the happiest of Shakespeare's plays, and very probably the happiest work of literatureever conceived ... A Midsummer Night's Dream moves in dreamlike sequences as ifon the brinkof an eternal bliss." (Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy [Chapel Hill: The Universityof North Carolina Press, 1972], p. 78.) 19Barber,p. 125. Frank Kermode refersto "a rational,patient pleasure like thatof Theseus and Hippolyta," assuming thatthey share the same sentiments.("The MatureComedies" in Early Shakespeare, p. 215.) Harold F. Brooks,in his introduction to the Arden edition of the play, writes thatTheseus "is an ardent lover, and in her replyHippolyta reciprocateshis love." (A MidsummerNight's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, [London: Methuen, 1979], p. lxxxix.) 20 Merchant,p. 165. 21 Young, p. 63. 22 In discussing these lines, both G. K. Hunter and E. K. Chambers rathereasily accept Theseus' alleged conversion: Hunter describes an "image of violence transposed into revelry"(William Shakespeare: The Late Comedies [London: Longmans, Green, 1962], p. 18) and Chambers refersto "deeds of violence" replaced by a "still loving and tender husband" (Shakespeare: A Survey [London: Sidgwick and Jackson,1925], p. 85). 23 Cf. A Midsommer Night's Dreame (I, i, 23) in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, Vol. X, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895). 24 Celeste Turner Wright, "The Amazons in English Literature," Studies in Philology, 36 (1940), 437. 25 Young, p. 99. He continues, "It is equally appropriate that Oberon, as king of should have lost controlofhis wife,and thatthe corresponding darknessand fantasy,

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natural disorder described by Titania should ensue." (The second chapter of Young's book is "for Theseus" [p. 64].) George A. Bonnard offersanother Thesean reading of Theseus and Hippolyta in the firstscene: "there is no conventional lovemaking between them, they never even speak of their love. They remind us of Petruchio and Katherina in the latterpart of The Taming of the Shrew.... But one thing is certain: their deep happiness, the strongquiet joy they find in each other. Every word of Theseus bespeaks his satisfactionat having found a true mate at last, one thathe feels sure will be a good wife to him, a helpful companion throughlife, one also that will know how to keep her place, as her silence proves when he discusses Hermia's marriage with Egeus and the young lovers. Throughout that scene the Duke acts the sovereignjudge of course and Hippolyta knows she has no business to interfere, which is not only tactfulbut highly sensible of her." ("Shakespeare's Purpose in Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare Jahrbuch,92 [1956], 269-270). Thomas McFarland writes, "It is difficult imagine a comic opening to to compare with this one in the benignityof its tone and in its absolute guarantee of gladness." (Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy, p. 80.) Larry S. Champion refersto the "comic tone" which "is immediatelyestablished in the first scene throughfarcicalrepartee and action" (The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedies: A Study in Dramatic Perspective [Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1970], p. 47). Harold F. Brooks, in his introduction the Arden edition ofA Midsummer Night's Dream, sees Oberto on's enchantmentof Titania as justified because "Titania is offendingwifehood, as Hippolyta, formerly,did womanhood" (p. cvi). Cf. Freud's use of Titania to exemplify a "punishment" in neurosis: "Titania, who will not love her rightful husband Oberon, is obliged instead to bestow her love on Bottom,the phantasyass." ("Extracts from the Fliess Papers," Standard Edition, I, trans.James Strachey[London: Hogarth Press, 1906], 256.) A few recent critics have expressed discomfortat Theseus' behavior in the first scene and noted Hippolyta's apparent disquiet at the judgment of Hermia. Cf. Ralph Berry,Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1972), pp. 91-105; Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 101-102; Stephen Fender, Shakespeare: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), pp. 32 and 51; and Harold F. Brooks, p. civ. However, these critics set out to justifyTheseus' actions and to portrayhim in a sympatheticlight; and they ignore Hippolyta's view of her own situation.
26

27

Thesean point of view. 31 Cf. Alfred Harbage, "Love's Labour's Lost and the Early Shakespeare," Philological Quarterly, XLI (1962), 19-20. 32 A masque presentingan ambivalent view of its occasion may have been considered appropriatein the Renaissance. My point is thatmanycriticshave considered A MidsummerNight's Dream a fitting wedding present because theyhave discounted the play's ambivalence; it is in this contextthat I question the play's "appropriateness.

fault

28 Cf. the discussion of Hermes by Jean-ChristopheAgnew in "The Threshold of Exchange: Speculations on the Market," Radical History Review, 21 (Fall 1979), 101. An issue only hinted at in my essay-the relation of theater to the marketplace-is the subject of Agnew's "From Prayerto Performance:The Marketand the Theater in Anglo-AmericanThought, 1600-1900," Diss. Harvard 1977. 29 Doran, note forA Midsummer Night's Dream, I, i, 32. 30 Harold F. Brooks has a particularlybenign interpretation these events; he of sees Oberon as Titania's "mentor: he takes charge of her experience in order to guide her into a change in attitude.... His move against her is designed to reunite her with him; on his own terms,certainly, but it is of course she who is principallyat

KingLear, I, i, 62. Sonnet23.

. ." (p. cvi). Again, I am suggesting that the play places in question such a

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33 Paul A. Olson, "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage," ELH, 24 (1957), 96. 34 Olson, p. 96.

35
36

37 The mythological Theseus was, of course, famousforhis conquests of women. Thomas North'sversion of Plutarch'sLives includes a Life of Demetrius, in which Plutarch's Lives of the Demetrius' "wantonnesse" is recounted. See Thomas North, Noble Grecians and Romanes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928), VI, 254-255. 38 Olson, pp. 101, 102.

Olson,P. 99. Olson,p. 101.

4001son, p. 111. Donald C. Miller in "Titania and the Changeling," (English Studies, 22 [1940], 66-70), sets out to prove that Titania was a "wanton" who had made the changeling her lover. His glosses depend on Oberon's descriptions of Titania. Scholars appear to have feltsuch speculations went too faronly when Jan Kottclaimed thatall of the charactersof the play were engaged in a dark,sensuous world (Shakespeare Our Contemporary,trans. Boleslaw Taborsky [London: Methuen, 1965]). 41 See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Leese Greeke (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1964); C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the SixteenthCentury (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1944). 42 My understandingof The Bacchae was enhanced by an unpublished essay by April Alliston,"Eros and Dionysus: The Double Sun." 43 Anotherlook at Ovid suggests that Theseus' other choices of wedding entertainmentare no more "sortingwith a nuptial ceremony" (V, i, 55). "The battle with the Centaurs" (44) is the story a wedding feast(at which Theseus was present)that of ends in attemptedrapes and violent warfare;Book XII of the Metamorphoses provides a gorydescription.(Theseus also seems less than pleased at the prospectof an "Athenian eunuch" [45].) "The riotof the tipsy Bacchanals, /Tearing the Thracian of singerin theirrage" recalls the destruction Pentheus; it's no coincidence thatthis piece was played forTheseus when he "fromThebes came last a conqueror" (51). Theseus has just denigrated the "frenzy"of the poet's eye, that"Doth glance from heaven to earth,fromearthto heaven" (12-13). We are more likely,especially with this signpost pointing to Thebes, to associate him here with Pentheus than with Orpheus. 44 MargaretFerguson has suggested that Helena's monologue recalls Polixenes' "twinned lambs" speech fromThe Winter's Tale I, ii, 67-74. Polixenes describes a lost state in which two boys are seen as doubles in "innocence"-until the apparent See also Orsino's descripof corruption theirworld by women and heterosexuality. Night: "One face, one tionofthe reunionofthe twins Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth voice, one habit, and two persons " (V, i, 216). 45 Churche of England, The Book of Common Prayer and Administracionof the Sacraments,and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Churche of England (London, 1549), n.p. 46 Althoughneither The Symposium nor Ficino's Commentary was available in English to Shakespeare, Ficino's Latin translationof Plato and Italian and French translationsof the commentarywere widely reprinted in the sixteenth century. (Between 1484 and 1590, nineteen editions of the translationof Plato appeared; Ficino's complete works appeared in 1561 and 1576. An Italian translationof the was published in 1544.) See Raymond Marcel, Introductionto Sur le Commentary Banquet de Platon ou De L'Amour by Marsile Ficin (Paris: Societe d'Edition "Les Belles Lettres," 1956), p. 114. The "Oratio Quarta" recounts the speech of Aristophanes.I am assumingthatat the veryleast Shakespeare would have known ofthis myth.For a discussion of the relation of Ficino to Renaissance love treatises, see

39

Olson,p. 111.

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John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Press, 1958), pp. 67-163. Bruno's "Eroici furori" (New York: Columbia University 47 Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 62-64. Marianne L. Novy hears an echo of Aristophanes'image of lovers split "like a sorb apple which is halved forpickling" in Antonio's description of Sebastian and Viola in TwelfthNight: "An apple cleftin two is notmore twin/Than these two creatures" (V, i, 215-16). Cf. "'And You Smile Not, He's Gagged': Mutuality in Shakespearean Comedy," Philological Quarterly,55 (1976), 91. 48 Variorum,pp. 192-193. 49 Quoted in Variorum,p. 323. 50 Only fourreferencesto A MidsummerNight's Dream, all of them practically "asides," appear in the Standard Edition of Freud's complete works. 51 Goldman's title also appears in the title of a compelling essay by Gayle Rubin, scene ofA MidsummerNight's Dream mighthave served as an forwhich the first illustration:"The Trafficin Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropologyof Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210. Anti-Theatrical Prejudice," Critical Quarterly, 8 52 Jonas A. Barish, "The (1966), 331. 53 George Puttenham,The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869; rpt.English Reprints,IV, [New York: AMS Press, 1966]), p. 184.

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