A Midsummer Night's Dream

By William Shakespeare

Themes

Theatre, Comedy and Dreams

A Midsummer Night's Dream could be described as self-reflexive, in that it openly displays that it is only a play and not presenting a picture of real life. Nevertheless, the audience is asked to suspend disbelief, to trust that the stage can be a palace in one scene and a wood in the next. Our powers of imagination are not always matched by those of the amateur actors in "Pyramus and Thisbe", the play within the play, who are hilariously over-aware of the unrealistic imitation necessary when playing - for instance - a door. The audience, however, is happy to believe that Oberon is invisible and that Cobweb is tiny enough to take on a bee in a fight. In this sense, it is apparent that we behave somewhat like the lovers do when they have had the magic juice put on their eyes. We see what we are told to see although Shakespeare refers repeatedly to the trick, like a postmodern conjurer. Quince points to the stage and says, 'This green plot shall be our stage' (III.1.3) and we find ourselves thinking of the stage alternately as a stage and then a green plot while all the time knowing it is only a stage in a playhouse.

The efforts of Peter Quince and his company of craftsmen show the audience the difficulty in putting on any play. The performance of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is hampered by talentless actors and a preoccupied audience, and yet Hippolyta admits that she is moved by Bottom's expression of tragedy: 'Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man' (V.1.282). She is seeing beyond the actual failure of the actors and the play itself to feel pathos for the man metaphorically behind the mask. A Midsummer Night's Dream precipitates a sort of waking dreaming in the audience - they accept what is literally before their eyes as well as the world of the fantastic that necessarily dwells in the imagination and is only provoked by the playwright.

The audience of A Midsummer Night's Dream is willing participants in a kind of nocturnal madness. It is a dream, as the title suggests, and not reality that Shakespeare wishes to portray. Only this acceptance of the inevitable insanity of the dream (an ass head on a man, totally inappropriate romances, the spirit world meeting the real, the potion itself) hides the subversion Shakespeare intends. Certainly we are left with the happy ending we demand but the reconciliation and marriages are no more sensible or believable than the loves inspired by the magic potion. Everything in the play is based upon conflict. The four lovers fight from the outset: first the objections of parents, then their true love in the design of the potion, then each other. The vital clue occurs in the first scene when Theseus reminds us of how he ended up with Hippolyta: "Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries;/ But I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph and with revelling". The play is in both 'keys': the violent and the celebratory and therein is the subversion that precedes the vulgar suffering of Malvolio in Twelfth Night that is neither funny nor horrific because it chooses to be both and leave us confused and uncomfortable. Shakespeare therefore enforces the confusion of the dream and its refusal to side with either good or evil.

Love

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy. It is a play that concerns lovers whose attempts to marry are blocked by older relatives. However, through various plot devices that are of great entertainment to the audience, they succeed and marry after all. It could easily be asserted that this emphasis on plot makes the portrayal of love seem false and unconvincing. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare forestalls these accusations by making the irrationality of love the centre of the play.

We are given a glimpse of the tragic love found in Romeo and Juliet, through the relationship of Hermia and Lysander. But the emphasis that should typically be on the young lovers is tempered by Helena's soliloquy at the end of Act I, Scene 1. Love is portrayed not as all encompassing, but merely as subjective and changeable. Worse for anyone attempting to see the play as a pure comedy is the sexual danger in the love portrayed by Shakespeare. Crucial to this is Hermia's dream of the snake: "Lysander, look how I do quake with fear: / Methought a serpent eat my heart away, / And you sat smiling" that introduces the theme of the fear of the phallus, Satan, and fornication. It reminds us of the darker side of romance. As ever in the play sleep is not safe but the route to a skewed and frightening truth. The intervention of the fairies in Acts II and III speeds up the process of falling in love and serves to make the emotion a source of comedy, the lovers' attempts to justify their behaviour only making their situation seem more absurd. Dreams save us from nightmares. Love is suggested to be an affliction that can exist in conflict with normal thoughts and feelings, often causing pain.

The final pairing of Titania and Bottom demonstrates more than any other couple the irrationality of love. When Titania embraces Bottom Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that sexual attraction as interpreted through dreams is not subject to any dictates, and is almost arbitrary. It can take forms incapable of lasting or those which society may reject as perverse. Shakespeare's implicit question is: do we trust love made possible between worlds by magic potions any less than that made possible by the whim of a king?

Marriage

A Midsummer Night's Dream is founded upon the concept of marriage and its inherent problems. Marriage takes two people who are seemingly opposites, with separate experiences and ambitions, and shows them to be in fact complementary to each other. The marriage creates something greater or at least different than the two were by themselves. Notably, we never get to see this side in the play: Oberon and Titania are married and in conflict while the four lovers' future is but speculation. Considering this it is apt that the play is set around the fertility rituals of Maying. May Day is when the countryside moves from spring to summer, and it marked a time when people starting to focus on the fertility of the land and themselves. The phallic symbol of the 'painted maypole' formed the centerpiece of revelry and dancing (Hermia insultingly compares the tall Helena to one at III.2.296), carrying the celebrations into the woods and hills at night. Branches and flowers were festooned as decoration: Lysander reminds Hermia at I.1.166-7 of the time when Helena was once adorned in a similar way. These rituals allowed the young to choose their life-partners without the intrusion of their elder relatives - it also gave them the opportunity to engage in pre-marital sex. The lovers leave the rational, mundane and everyday world of Athens behind and embrace the wood at night, with its incomprehensible dreamy experiences. They metamorphose from wayward children into reasonable adults, accepted by society and ready to embark upon parenthood themselves.

Location

Shakespeare's comedies often feature a shift between city and country. The play begins and ends in Athens, the city renowned for its great philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. But in the central section, spanning Acts II to IV, we are taken to a wood outside the bounds of the city where human laws and reasoning cease to apply. The rational and ordered world run by men in the day, and the non- rational, spontaneous dream world of the night both form human experience though. Both are needed to support the individual as he passes through life, and both are involved in the creation of art.

Night and Day

Apart from Scene 1 of Act IV, the whole of the play is set at night. Elizabethan plays were acted in daylight or indoors by the light of torches. There was little scenery and so the language had to build up an idea of location for the audience. Repeated references to the moon suggest a soft light falling on the players, but this lunar theme also has deeper connotations.

In Elizabethan times people believed that while the heavens were perfect and unchanging, remaining as God had first created them, the fall of man had made the area from the moon down to the earth - the "sublunary" world - imperfect and unstable. Change, death and decay are unavoidable. Earthly love, in contrast to pure divine love, is more often than not unreliable and impermanent. The moon is therefore a symbol of inconstancy and imperfection, and so linked clearly with the fickle emotions of Demetrius and Lysander. As the "governess of floods" (II.1.103) the rhythms of the changing moon are linked with the female fertility cycle as well as other cyclic and predictable changes such as the succession of generations.

Hippolyta's opening reference to "the moon - like to a silver bow" (I.1.9) would suggest to an Elizabethan audience the image of Diana, the goddess of hunting and chastity. Diana was associated with the moon goddess Phoebe (I.1.209) and Oberon later associates them when he speaks of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, being defended by "the chaste beams of the watery moon" (II.1.162). The moon's presence hangs over the play, along with its associations - madness, chastity and fertility. But no judgement is accorded. The characters are left to experience them, the audience left to decide how they might be linked.