A Midsummer Night's Dream
For a plot synopsis, see the Folger edition's opening page. For a real understanding of the play, you'll need to read Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream using the assigned edition for your course, a specific edition required by your professor (strongly recommended). If your professor has not required a hard-copy edition, you may choose your own from your favorite library or read the text of the play in a Digital Edition produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Avoid relying on internet summaries or modern-language re-tellings.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy. The play's thematic interests include:
Love and Marriage
Although disproven, the theory that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed at a wedding celebration underscores the common view of the play as celebrating the triumph of true love, even if its course “never did run smooth” (1.1.z). Readings and performances typically offer a light-hearted comedy in which hapless lovers encounter numerous mishaps only to be united in the happy triple-wedding (and one reconciliation) at the conclusion of the play.
The plays opening lines, however, complicate this optimistic interpretation. Theseus’ reminder to his fiancé, Hippolyta, that he “wooed thee with my sword” (1.1.16) signals to the audience that their marriage is based on violence and dominance. Those familiar with classical mythology will recognize that the “wooing” to which the Duke of Athens refers was his conquest of the Amazons and that he took the vanquished queen of the Amazons as his prize.
Upon close inspection, the potential for violence is visible in all of the heterosexual relationships. Demetrius threatens Helena that he will “do thee mischief” if she doesn’t stop chasing him, Oberon wins his quarrel with Titania by forcing her into a tryst with Bottom, and Titania takes Bottom by force as well, instructing her faeries to “tie up my love’s tongue / let him come silently.” Even Hermia and Lysander, whose love seems the most genuine, may not be the perfect couple. Lysander pressures Hermia into sleeping with him and she must protect her “virgin modesty,” and once under the spell of the love-in-idleness, Lysander’s cruelty to his former beloved is fierce and disturbing. The love potion also provokes the question about whose love is true in the first place, since Demetrius remains under its spell at the conclusion of the play and we never hear what happened in “Bottom’s dream.”
Theater and Imagination
Shakespeare loves to explore the concept of metatheatricality, in which a dramatic work questions the the potential and limitations of plays themselves. The mechanicals’ performance of The Most Lamentable Comedy Pyramus and Thisbe may be his most hilarious example. The mechanicals clearly have no idea about what theater is supposed to be or how it is supposed to be, and their beliefs are remarkably contradictory. On the one hand, they don’t think the audience can imagine the setting, so they painstakingly explain that the wall is a wall and a man with a lamp is moonshine. On the other hand, they worry that the audience’s imagination will be too great and thus they assure their viewers (especially the ladies) that the fierce lion is none other than Snug the Joiner and that Bottom did not really die when Pyramus took his own life.
Theseus and Hippolyta offer more complex but still contradictory views on imagination after coming upon the young lovers asleep in the woods. While Hippolyta is willing to accept their story as leading “to something of great constancy; / But howsoever, strange and admirable” (5.1.26-27), Theseus uses the occasion to decry the powers of imagination, which he associates with “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” (5.1.7) and blames for tricking the mind such that we mistake a bush for a bear, “and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.15-16). While the playwright might not agree with the dismissive duke, he gives him the final say when Theseus chooses a dance over Bottom’s epilogue.
The performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” is often the highlight of a Dream production. In Michael Hoffman’s 199X film version, he has Flute’s Thisbe turn a malapropism-laden speech about Pyramus’ death into a powerful evocation of grief by having the actor stop “acting” a rely on something greater than a wig and a high-pitched voice. This Thisbe moves his internal audience to tears and perhaps realizes the potential of theater that Shakespeare celebrates.
Magic
The appeal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream resides largely in its enchanting depiction of the fairy realm. While productions often treat the faeries as benevolent spirits to match a modern sensibility, Shakespeare’s audience would expect malevolent tricksters whose interference in the mortal world should be feared. Oberon and Titania’s initial encounter demonstrates the potential harm wrought by the supernatural world. Telling her estranged husband that “the ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, the plowman lost his seat, and the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard” (2.1. 93-95), Titania details the famine that has resulted from their quarrel. Her concern would have resonated with contemporary audience members for whom the crop failures of the 1590s were a recent, painful memory. Furthermore, Titania’s claim to be raising the changeling, who is the object of her argument with Oberon, on behalf of the boy’s deceased mother, still taps into the longstanding belief that fairies stole human babies and left behind their own demonic spawn in their place.
Puck relishes every opportunity to create havoc, as we learn from his first appearance in which Titania’s fairy describes his as a spirit who frightens maidens, steals milk, and prevents successful churning of milk into cream. Although his mix-up with Demetrius and Lysander may have been an honest mistake, he clearly enjoys the confusion that ensues. Even more, he extends Oberon’s command to force Titania to fall in love with a beast by transforming the bumbling Bottom and steering him towards her bower.
Mythology
Although not drawn from a single source, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is steeped in mythology and draws inspiration from multiple classical and contemporary sources. Bottom’s transformation alone echoes themes and stores from Shakespeare’s favorite text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though it is more directly linked to another work concerned with transformation, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, a second-century Latin text, which tells of the disastrous love affair between Cupid and Psyche and features the narrator Lucius whose own desire to learn magic leads to his accidental transformation into a donkey. In that form, Lucius, like Bottom, becomes the object of desire of not one but two women. While in the shape of an ass, Bottom is placed in the position of Ovid’s Philomela, the mythological princess raped by her brother-in-law, who communicates her assault to her sister through weaving. Titania’s fairies evoke Philomel when they sing their mistress to sleep and, as mentioned above, when the queen of the fairies takes Bottom the weaver to her bower, she instructs her fairies to tie up his tongue.
An allusion to another Ovidian myth of sexual violation (or potential violation) occurs when Helena describes her pursuit of Demetrius as a changed story in which “Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase” (2.1.231). In Ovid’s version, the mischievious Cupid (much like Puck), strikes the god Apollo with his golden arrow, making him fall in love with the first woman he sees. Cupid then shoots the virgin nymph Daphne with the lead arrow that makes her flee from love. As the god closes in on her, Daphne pleads to her father, a local river god, to protect her virginity, which he does by turning her into a tree. When he reaches her, Apollo breaks off her branch and crowns himself with it. Apparently Oberon does not like the gender reversed version, and as he plans to fix the situation he promises that when the two leave the woods, Helena “shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love” (2.1.246).
Though not drawn from Ovid, the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta, as discussed above, also comes from classical mythology. Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans includes the story of Theseus’ conquest of the Amazons and his subsequent marriage to the conquered queen Hippolyta. The narrative also refers to Theseus’ love interests and betrayals, including Ariadne and Antiope, both of whom Shakespeare’s Titania mentions as former lovers of her husband Oberon.
The most overt Ovidian reference is the mechanicals’ performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Although this story reminds the Athenian lovers of the potential tragedy that they might have faced, the unintended hilarity of this most “lamentable comedy” might suggest that we not take any of the play’s musings too seriously.
Assignments:
1: Myth, Gender, Sex and Power
2. Film Representations of the Faerie Realm
