A Midsummer Night's Dream Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editor: Heloise Senechal

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares, Jan Sewell

  A Midsummer Night's Dream

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and "Shakespeare's Career in the Theater": Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Eleanor Lowe and Heloise Senechal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview), Jonathan Bate (captions)

  The Director's Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran, Tim Supple

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Artistic Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theater Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

  Maria Evans, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Fellow and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2008 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2008 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division

  of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  "Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836829-4

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Magical Thinking

  Metamorphosis

  The Festive World

  "The Poet's Eye ... The Poet's Pen"

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  A Midsummer Night's Dream

  List of Parts

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  A Midsummer Night's Dream in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of the Dream: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director's Cut: Interviews with Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran, and Tim Supple

  Shakespeare's Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King's Man

  Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  Shakespeare is the poet of double vision. The father of twins, he was a mingler of comedy and tragedy, low life and high, prose and verse. He was a countryman who worked in the city, a teller of English folktales who was equally versed in the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome. His mind and world were poised between Catholicism and Protestantism, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions, rational thinking and visceral instinct. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of his truly essential works because nowhere else is his double vision more apparent than in this play's movement between the city and the wood, day and night, reason and imagination, waking life and dream.

  MAGICAL THINKING

  Wood, night, imagination, dream. These are the coordinates of the second form of sight, which is best described as magical thinking. It is the mode of being that belongs to visionaries, astrologers, "wise women," and poets. It conjures up a world animated with energies and spirit forces; it finds correspondences between earthly things and divine. The eye that sees in this way rolls "in a fine frenzy," as Theseus says, glancing "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." It "bodies forth The forms of things unknown," "Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."

  Magical thinking answers a deep human need. It is a way of making sense of things that would otherwise seem painfully arbitrary--things like love and beauty. An ugly birthmark on a baby would be explained away by the suggestion that the infant might be a "changeling child," swapped in the cradle by some night-tripping fairy. The sheer chance involved in the process of what we now call sexual chemistry may be rationalized in the story of the magic properties of the juice of the flower called love-in-idleness. And in a world dependent on an agricultural economy, bad harvests were somehow more palatable if explained by the intervention of malicious sprites upon the vicissitudes of the weather.

  In the age of candle and rushlight, nights were seriously dark. The night was accordingly imagined to be seriously different from the day. The very fact of long hours of light itself conferred a kind of magic upon midsummer night. This is the night of the year when magical thinking is given full rein. For centuries, the summer solstice had been a festive occasion celebrated with bonfires, feasting, and merrymaking.

  Theseus and Hippolyta never meet Oberon and Titania. In the original performance, the respective roles were likely to have been doubled. The contentious king and queen of fairies thus become the dark psychological doubles of the betrothed courtly couple. The correspondence inevitably calls into question the joy of the match between Athenian and Amazon. Oberon actually accuses Titania of having led Theseus "through the glimmering night" when he deserted "Perigenia whom he ravished," of having made the day duke break faith with a succession of paramours. Shakespeare loves to set up an antithesis, then knock it down. Here he implies that there is ultimately no sharp distinction between day and night: the sexual ethics of Theseus are perhaps as dubious as those of the adulterous child-possessor Titania.

  Authority figures, representatives of the day world of political power, win little sympathy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the lovers, the forest may be a place of confused identity, but at least it is an escape from the patriarchal matchmaking of Egeus. In the audience, the characters with whom we engage most warmly are neither monarchs nor lords, but the mischief-making Robin Goodfellow and the ineffable weaver, Bottom. Each in his way is an embodiment of the theatrical spirit that animates everything that is most gloriously Shakespearean. Always a man of the theater, Shakespeare lives in a world of illusion and make-believe that hits at deepest truths; he knows that his world is fundamentally sympathetic to those other counter-worlds which we call dream and magic.

  Robin the Puck compares the mortals to fools in a fond pageant: he has a right to think of himself as author of the play, since it is his dispensing of the love juice that fuels the plot. As for Bottom, at one level he is a bad actor. In both rehearsal and performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe," it becomes clear that he does not really understand the rules of the theatrical game. But at a deeper level, he is a true dramatic genius: he is gifted with the child's grace to suspend his disbelief. As Pyramus, he puts up a pretty poor performance; as Ass, it is another matte
r. The comic deficiency of "Pyramus and Thisbe" is that the actors keep telling us that they haven't become their characters. The Assification of Bottom is, by contrast, akin to those brilliant assumptions of disguise--Rosalind becoming Ganymede in As You Like It, Viola as Cesario in Twelfth Night--through which Shakespeare simultaneously reminds us that we are in the theater (an actor is always in disguise) and helps us to forget where we are (we willingly suspend our disbelief). In that forgetting, we participate in the mystery of magical thinking. With Bottom himself, we in the audience may say "I have had a most rare vision."

  Many members of Shakespeare's original audience, steeped as they were in the New Testament, would have recognized Bottom's account of his dream as an allusion--with the attributes of the different senses comically garbled--to a famous passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which St. Paul says that the eye of man has not seen and the ear of man has not heard the glories that will await us when we enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Geneva translation of the Bible, which Shakespeare knew well, the passage speaks of how the human spirit searches "the bottom of God's secrets." Jesus said that in order to enter his kingdom, one had to make oneself as a child. The same may be said of the kingdom of theater. It is because Bottom has the uncynical, believing spirit of a child that he is vouchsafed his vision. At the same time, Shakespeare himself offers a dangerously grown-up image of what heaven might be like: the weaver may be innocent but the fairy queen is an embodiment of sexual experience. The "virgin queen" Elizabeth was also known as England's "fairy queen" and the wood in which the action takes place, with its "nine men's morris" and English wildflowers, is more domestic than Athenian, so there must have been an inherent political risk in the representation of a sexually voracious Titania. Shakespeare perhaps introduced Oberon's apparent allusion to a chaste Elizabeth--the "fair vestal throned by the west"--in order to dismiss any identification of Titania with the real-life fairy queen who he knew would at some point be a spectator of the play.

  METAMORPHOSIS

  The comedy and the charm of the Dream depend on a certain fragility. Good comedy is tragedy narrowly averted, while fairy charm is only safe from sentimentality if attached to some potential for the grotesque. Fairies only deserve to be believed in when they have the capacity to be seriously unpleasant. Of course we laugh when Bottom wears the head of an ass and makes love to a queen, but the image deliberately courts the suggestion of bestiality.

  In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's favorite book and the source for the tale of "Pyramus and Thisbe," people are driven by bestial desires and are rewarded by being transformed into animals. In Shakespeare, the ass's head is worn in play, but it remains the closest thing in the drama of his age to an actual animal metamorphosis onstage.

  Ovid was rational Rome's great counter-visionary, its magical thinker. His theme is transformation, the inevitability of change. Book fifteen of the Metamorphoses offers a philosophical discourse on the subject, mediated via the philosophy of Pythagoras. From here Shakespeare got many of those images of transience that roll through his Sonnets, but in the Dream he celebrates the transfiguring and enduring power of night vision, of second sight.

  Night is the time for fantasy and for love, the time in which your wildest hopes may be indulged but your worst nightmares may have to be confronted. The action in the forest fills the space between the betrothal and the wedding celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta. For the young lovers it is also a time-between, the time, that is to say, of maturation, of discovering who they really are and whom they really love. When Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius emerge after a midsummer night's madness in the wood, they don't quite know what's happened: "Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double." And they're not all quite sure if they've finally gained the person they want: "And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own and not mine own." But on reflection in the cold light of morning, the strangeness of the night has effected a material transformation, leading the lovers to a truer place than the one where they were at court the day before. Perhaps because she is herself a "stranger," an outsider in the "civilized" world of Athens, it is the Amazon queen Hippolyta who understands this best:

  But all the story of the night told over,

  And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images

  And grows to something of great constancy;

  But howsoever, strange and admirable.

  THE FESTIVE WORLD

  Shortly after the Second World War, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published a short essay that inaugurated the modern understanding that Shakespeare's comedies, for all their lightness and play, are serious works of art, every bit as worthy of close attention as his tragedies. Entitled "The Argument of Comedy," it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the "new comedy" of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The "new comedy" pattern, described by Frye as "a comic Oedipus situation," turned on "the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice."*

  The girl's father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match, but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood's golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: "The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace."

  The union of the lovers brings "a renewed sense of social integration," expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play--a marriage, a dance, or a feast. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others "who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness." Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado about Nothing, Jaques in As You Like It, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony. A Midsummer Night's Dream is his most joyous ending because there is no such figure here. At the outset, the fairies have been associated with chaos and disruption (mischief, rough weather, marital discord), but at the end they bring "blessing" and the restoring of "amends."

  Even here, though, one might wonder in retrospect whether all has quite ended well. The closing song expresses the hope that the children of all three united couples will not suffer "the blots of Nature's hand," that they will not be marked by "hare-lip, nor scar" nor any other ill-boding deformation. The very act of warding off such portents brings their possibility into play, and the mythologically literate audience member might recall that the child of Theseus and Hippolyta would be Hippolytus. Some disturbing associations then become apparent: the Theseus of ancient Greek myth would desert Hippolyta and marry Phaedra, sister of Ariadne (whom, as the play reminds us, he had earlier seduced and deserted, after she had assisted him with the thread that led him out of the labyrinth after he had slain the Minotaur). Phaedra would fall in love with her stepson Hippolytus, a young man more interested in hunting than women. She would falsely accuse him of raping her and then commit suicide. Blaming his son, Theseus would exile Hippolytus, who would promptly be thrown to his death when his horse ran wild with fear as a bull-like monster rose from the sea. That monster is a reminder of the Minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth with the head of a bull and the body of a man, who was the fruit of the perverted sexual union between a white bull sent by the sea god and Queen Pasiphae, the mother of Ariadne and Phaedra.

  Neither Hippolytus nor Phaedra is mentioned in the play. Yet the wish in the final fairy song for the issue of Theseus and Hippolyta to be "fortunate," coupled with the play's earlier enactment of the lovemaking between a queen and a beast
(not to mention the reference to Theseus' history as a serial seducer and deserter of women), means that the tragic history surrounding the mythological prototypes of the characters is not entirely absent. Seneca's Hippolytus was one of the best-known classical tragedies in the sixteenth century and its hunting imagery seems to inform the play. As so often with Shakespeare, the context may be understood in diametrically opposed ways. Perhaps he is taking dark subject matter--violence, illicit desire, monstrous births--and transforming it into something life-affirming, emptying it of all sinister content, just as the play performed by Peter Quince and friends takes another tragic tale from classical mythology, that of Pyramus and Thisbe, and fills it with "mirth." Or perhaps he is suggesting that, however joyous comedy's climactic festivity may be, it offers only a momentary suspension of life's complications. Midsummer night, May Day, Twelfth Night, the feast of fools in which for an evening the master becomes the servant and vice versa: these festive occasions are celebrations of life and social harmony, but they end in the knowledge that tomorrow we will have to go back to work, to the hierarchies and compromises of everyday normality. "How shall we find the concord of this discord?" asks Theseus of the paradox whereby the play of Pyramus and Thisbe is both "merry and tragical." Every production and every reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream has to make a choice as to the extent to which the "discord" is still apparent behind the "concord" woven by the resolution of the plot.

  Northrop Frye's "The Argument of Comedy" pinpoints a pervasive structure: "the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world." But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly:

  This world of fairies, dreams, disembodied souls, and pastoral lovers may not be a "real" world, but, if not, there is something equally illusory in the stumbling and blinded follies of the "normal" world, of Theseus' Athens with its idiotic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny [in As You Like It], of Leontes and his mad jealousy [in The Winter's Tale], of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues. The famous speech of Prospero about the dream nature of reality applies equally to Milan and the enchanted island. We spend our lives partly in a waking world we call normal and partly in a dream world which we create out of our own desires. Shakespeare endows both worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other.