A

MIDSUMMER
NIGHT’S DREAM
- Seven years after Shakespeare's death, his
former colleagues assembled his plays in
one large volume called Master William
Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies published according to the
True Original Copies (1623).

- We refer to this book as the 'First Folio',

because it was the first collection of
Shakespeare's plays - printed in a large
(folio-sized) volume.
 Shakespeare allegedly wrote 39 plays either in sole
authorship or in collaboration.
 John Heminges and Henry Condell, his colleagues
and editors, included 36 in the First Folio, of which 18
including such plays as Macbeth and Twelfth Night
would have never reached us otherwise.
 The remaining 18 including such plays as Hamlet
and A Midsummer Night's Dream had been previously
printed in quartos (small, single-volume editions ).
Theories of Comedy. Romantic Comedies

 For Shakespeare's contemporaries, a 'comedy' could be

recognized by a relatively simple formula: comedies end in
marriage, while tragedies end in death.

 However, Shakespeare radically complicates this formula in

a variety of ways.
 10 romantic comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew,
Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing,
The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, and
Twelfth Night.
3 'problem plays' or 'late comedies' : Troilus and
Cressida, Measure for Measure and All's Well That
Ends Well
4 ‘romances' Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale,
and The Tempest.
a) Theories of comedy

 Although comedy was considered a 'lower' genre than

tragedy >>> extremely popular on the early modern
English stage.
 Shakespeare --- ignored the boundaries between the
serious and the playful, blurring the supposed lines of
genre between tragedy and comedy  either
infiltration of comic elements into tragedies ( COMIC
RELIEF) or comedies infiltrated by tragic elements.
 romantic comedies – plots >> the primary force >> erotic desire, and
the primary action is the overcoming of obstacles to the fulfilment of such
desire.

 lovers initially unable to fulfil their 'natural' desires for a particular

lover: either the destined characters are separated by some external event
(shipwreck, banishment) or one of them suffers from some internal bar
(melancholy, anxiety).

These 'blocking' conditions (a term used by the critic Northrop Frye)

must be overcome, at which point the 'right' characters can come together
happily.

 the blocking action - embodied in a harsh or rigid law (as in The

Comedy of Errors or in Love's Labour's Lost), often associated with a rigid
and arbitrary father (as Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream); this law
will be softened, or simply set aside, by the end of the play >>> obstacle
removed >>> the (promised) happy ending .
 comical elements—moments of humour, satiric voices, at times self-
directed, in figures like Jaques in As You Like It and Malvolio in Twelfth
Night.

 the mood at the very end of the comedies can be reflective, as in the
epilogues at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, or
even melancholic, as in the song at the end of Twelfth Night.

 One other aspect of the plots of romantic comedies: there is never just a
single focus on a single relationship, but multiple tracks of interest
followed in detail.
 Every set of lovers is surrounded by characters and situations that
mirror their own.
 full-fledged secondary plots or even a play-within-the-play (Love's
Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream) that reflect on the actions of
the main plot.
b) Contexts of comedy

 romantic comedies – for a long time - interpreted through the categories

of structure, character, or theme;

 20th -21st-century scholars - situate these plays in terms of their

historical and cultural contexts (new historicism, feminism).
 Thus, the romantic comedies are now seen to be in part concerned with
tyranny and the nature of patriarchal rule, particularly within the family.
 Focus on:
• anxieties about gender and theatre (crossdressing)
• the nature of the theatre in the early modern period (Love's
Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream).
• the early modern subject's relation to Queen Elizabeth I (A
Midsummer Night's Dream)
A Midsummer Night's Dream - SOURCES

 In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare used or adapted names,

ideas, images or hints for incidents from various works he certainly
knew, and echoed a number more: John Lyly's Gallathea; Chaucer's
The Knight's Tale, Ovid's Metamorphoses.

 scattered elements from legends, folklore and earlier books and

plays: i.e Puck - a generic name in Old English for mischievous, or
sometimes malicious spirits, and came to be used in the sixteenth
century as a specific name for a 'shrewd and knavish sprite'
(2.1.33) also known as Hobgoblin and Robin Goodfellow.
THE PLAY

 Sigmund Freud: a dream has something of the nature of a

wish-fulfilment (i.e. the discovery of the violence of passion
by the four lovers or Bottom’s dream of a life of luxury etc.)

“Dreams open up areas of experience repressed by the

conscious mind, but can also shade into nightmares in which
the frustrations of uncontrolled passions lead to violence and
madness.” (Foakes 31)
 Northrop Frye (archetypal literary criticism)

 The myths of the seasons and the theatrical genres

-Comedy = spring - the impossible dream of regeneration coming true

-Comedy = union, points to the future (the renewal of society by means
of children – the new generation)

-the comedies – an actual or symbolic journey to a 'green world', (by

contrast with a corrupted court or city), where a healthy confusion of
values/relationships might occur, leading to the restoration of a
community to harmony and peace.
 ATHENS vs THE WOODS

- ATHENS - the city - symbol of civilization (the court of Theseus- marriage –

celebration of peace and harmony) but it also displays the tyranny of reason
and patriarchal law.
- aspects of violent male domination in the play:
• the father’s power – the threat to Hermia
• Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, wooed with a sword – she is “the
image of the female monarch defeated and turned into a subject….the
unsuccessful opposition to the principles of male power that Theseus so
completely embodies” (Peter Holland 51)
• Titania’s punishment - to fall in love with a beast; yet she embodies the
representation of female monarchical freedom - equal powers to
Oberon).
- Queen Elizabeth I – in the play- the vestal of the West- not to be reached by
Cupid’s shafts; she proceeds in “maiden meditation”. FILM: 00:32:00
- Elizabeth I and the unruly rebellious (Amazonian) figures in the play :
Hippolyta and Titania – projections of anxieties of the time ( i.e.
uncontrolled female will, efficient self-governance, disobedience to male
dominance).
OBERON
That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league. (Act 2, scene 1, 155-174)
- The WOODS = wilderness, a place of experimentation and
regeneration as well as of loss of identity , madness, imagination;

- The woods - represent the converging point of the three worlds in

Shakespeare’s play : the Court, the Fairies and the Mechanicals.

- the characters 'see' a setting that reflects their own state of mind.

- For the lovers, the woods turn into a wild place - what they
perceive as savage reflects the increasing savagery and tyranny of
their own passions >>> love and friendship turn to anger and hatred.
 another element of discord -- the quarrel between
Oberon and Titania >>> causes transformation of the
seasons and confusion in nature >>> responsibility of rulers.

 The woods >>> Titania's bower, an image of sweetness

and beauty --- symbol of the liberated imagination.

 when she wakes from the hateful fantasy (2.1.258) it is '

to loathe “what she sees” (4.1.76).
Bottom, liberated through magic from his self-
importance enters unhesitatingly into his vision >>> his
good-humored, stupid innocence, childlike acceptance of
the most enjoyable vision.

While the dreams of the lovers turn to nightmare and

violence and Titania wakes to hate what she loved, only
Bottom has a wholly marvellous experience.
BOTTOM`S DREAM
“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream,
past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass
if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was - there is
no man can tell what. Methought I was - and methought I had - but
man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought
I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart
to report what my dream was! I will get Peter Quince to write a
ballad of this dream; it shall be called 'Bottom's Dream', because
it hath no bottom;” (4.1.200-208)

FILM:
00:50:40- Bottom, thou art translated
1:32:57- the play within a play
 the events in the woods- take the form of a play within the play, stage-
managed and watched over by Oberon and Puck .

Oberon’s and Puck’s 'magic’ ~ the dramatist's art in controlling, and

shaping the events, so that the nightmare of the lovers never turns into
tragedy.

Bottom - embodiment of earthy humanity who remains himself

whatever happens to him or around him + the limits of his power of
comprehension.
for the lovers and for Titania, the return to daylight, to reason, leads
to a joyful acceptance or renewal of the bonds of love >>> to a sense of
self-discovery.
THESEUS`S SPEECH ON IMAGINATION

Act V , scene 1 >>> Theseus’s speech describes the

workings of imagination from the viewpoint of 'cool
reason’:
HIPPOLYTA
‘Tis strange my Theseus, that these
lovers speak of.
THESEUS
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”
 Some critics have felt that the play affirms the
importance of the world of dreams or fantasy, and
shows that reason impoverishes the imagination;
(Marjorie Garber, Dream in Shakespeare, 1974, p. 84)

 Others have recognised the extent to which it also exposes

the absurdities of the imagination and gives approval to the
voice of reason.(Harriet Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth in
Elizabethan and Restoration Drama, 1972, pp.32-3, and Derek
Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 3rd edn, 1969, p. 148)
According to R.A. Foakes, A Midsummer Night's Dream
achieves a splendid balance between the two; “if the
imagination makes possible visions and experiences
otherwise inaccessible, and liberates natural energies from
the restraints of reason, those visions and experiences are
only given form and meaning through reason.” (Foakes
37)

 The return to order in Act 5 fulfils the pattern of the

play, which emphasizes not only the need for but also the
limitations of both reason and imagination.
 'Pyramus and Thisbe', a play-within-a-play, performed
for the marriage celebrations of the three couples who form
the main audience on stage

 tragedy turned to comedy by means of parody

[FILM- 1.36.27]

'Pyramus and Thisbe’ - distances through laughter the

earlier threats of death.
The play ends with a kind of coda, after Theseus and the lovers go
off to bed, as midnight sounds and 'fairy time' (5.1.342) comes round
again.

Titania and Oberon dance hand in hand and bless the three
married couples - celebration of harmony .

 the threatened tyranny of the law, and the violence unleashed in the
jealousies of love turning to hatred >> transformed in the settled
harmony of marriage.
Puck is left to deliver the epilogue :
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended :
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon we will mend. (5.1.401-8)

The tone - conventionally apologetic – Puck’s lines relate both to his role as a
spirit, and to the actor playing the role.
' Shadows” could mean both actors & a mere semblance or something
insubstantial (Puck called Oberon 'King of Shadows' (3.2.347), while Theseus had
referred to actors as 'shadows' (5.1.205). )

The epilogue amplifies our sense of the artifice of the stage, our awareness of
being in a theatre watching actors at work + our ability ( through our
imagination) --- to believe anything while knowing it is make-believe (i.e.
suspension of disbelief)
BIBLIOGRAPHY

- R.A. Foakes. “Introduction” to A Midsummer

Night’s Dream. New Cambridge Shakespeare,
CUP, 2003.
- Peter Holland. “Introduction” to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Oxford University Press, 1998.