“The poet’s eye, in a 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.“

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of only three plays in William Shakespeare’s corpus that was written without a primary source of inspiration (the other two being Love’s Labours Lost and The Tempest). Of course for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare did borrow from various classical works, like Aristophanes, Plutarch, Ovid, Seneca, Chaucer and so on, but the play was not directly inspired by, say, a particular biographical portrait in Plutarch’s Lives. Still, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is energized by the spirit of classical antiquity, it is saturated with imagery from ancient Greek and Roman mythology like “Cupid’s fiery shaft quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon” and a “mermaid on a dolphin’s back” and “Venus in her glimmering sphere” and “high Taurus’s snow” and the “drooping fog as black as Acheron.” Both the setting and the imagery of the play hearken back to the beauty of classical Athens, a time period which weighs heavily over much of Shakespeare’s writings, yet which is curiously only featured as the setting in two chief plays —A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Timon of Athens. And since A Midsummer Night’s Dream springs forth almost entirely from the imagination of William Shakespeare, it might rightly be said that the play, therefore, contains something important, perhaps even proximal, to Shakespeare’s own views. Disguised as nothing more than a silly sojourn into a sylvan dreamland, Shakespeare offers a layer of hidden wisdom in this subversive comedy concerning the tension between love and politics (or perhaps eros and nomos), an explicit tension in the play which ultimately sheds light on the need for moderation in matters of both love and politics. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also one of the most heavily rhymed and metered of Shakespeare’s plays (it was written during a period of heightened lyricism in his works), and the play was likely penned around the same time as Romeo and Juliet. Thus, the two plays share a certain natural kinship —Romeo and Juliet a tragedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream a comedy. As with other plays throughout his corpus, Shakespeare explores similar parallel stories in both his tragedies as well as his comedies, but he never actually presents an argument in favor of one or the other –comedy or tragedy– instead, he simply offers up both perspectives as a mirror of the human condition. Both comedy and tragedy have something important to teach us about what it means to be human. And even though A Midsummer Night’s Dream is exoterically a ridiculous satire, the humor it elicits serves as a kind of truth-telling (i.e. it shows us the nature of things we consider to be either high or low) and reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers a nice opportunity to examine the distinctions between tragedy and comedy courtesy of William Shakespeare, a poet who successfully fulfilled Socrates’s famous challenge to tragic poets at the end of Plato’s Symposium.

Unlike in Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet or King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a light comedy about several lovers who escape the oppressive rule of their city (Athens) and flee into a nearby lush forest where they encounter a chaotic pagan dreamworld filled with playful fairies who tamper with human desires. In contrast to the storm-drenched barren heath in King Lear, or the blackened nightfall which engulfs high-walled Verona in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in a flourishing natural environment, a wondrous wooded world teeming with life. This contrast between settings serves to illuminate a chief difference between comedy and tragedy –in tragedy, we find barrenness and desolation; in comedy, we find abundance and fertility. Likewise, within the characters themselves, tragic characters are often principled figures who prefer to sacrifice themselves and leave behind an uncompromising legacy (think here of Achilles’s famous choice in The Iliad, as foretold by his mother, Thetis, between a long and uneventful life, or a short but glorious death. Had The Iliad been a comedic epic, Achilles would have likely chosen the former path). At any rate, in comedic characters, we tend to find flexible characters who are adaptable to their surroundings, in being open to transformation or metamorphosis, and who ultimately compromise their values in order to achieve peace and joy in the end. Happiness is the goal at which comedy aims. In addition, comedy is geared toward a healthy and orderly civic life; its characters are often reflections of that goal. Therefore, the end of a play is a critical indicator of whether that play is a tragedy or comedy. At the end of a tragedy, there is a sense of diminishment, sacrifice, or death, whereas the end of a comedy is almost always inclusive, pleasant, or triumphant –it typically depicts a reintegration of the political community, or a harmonious reunion of all characters in question. The final tableaux of a comedy typically features a whole group of people in celebration of life, marriage, victory, or procreation. The characters in a comedy tend not to live rigidly principled lives which are tested by the prospect of death. Instead, they are often fairly commonplace folks who are easy to look down upon (as Aristotle notes in his Poetics). In tragedies, we look upward at the downfall of characters greater than ourselves; in comedies, we look downward upon the antics of characters inferior to ourselves. Put simply, tragic heroes are extraordinary, while comedic heroes are ordinary.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare sets the play in ancient Athens during the mythical reign of the Duke Theseus. It is deliberately set far away in the distant past, drawing audiences’ attention away from the religious and political troubles plaguing Elizabethan England. In this way, Shakespeare subtly frees himself from the cultural prejudices of his day in order to playfully explore ideas that would otherwise be considered taboo. In this world of ancient Athens, Theseus rules with near impunity (or so he thinks). We first meet him impatiently awaiting his impending nuptials in four days to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Theseus is eager to consummate their marriage, but Hippolyta is not. It should be noted that, while not explicitly stated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in many classical accounts, Hippolyta was taken home as a prize for Theseus after conquering Amazonia (a victorious moment which was celebrated in ancient Athens, and later featured prominently on the façade of the Parthenon). In most accounts, such as Euripides’s Phaedra, Theseus, in fact, raped and abducted Hippolyta. This brutal act of savagery is only briefly alluded to in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wherein Theseus acknowledges that he “wooed her with his sword,” and Hippolyta later confesses her own admiration for Heracles (her belt was the subject of his ninth labor), instead of her soon-to-be husband. But while Theseus claims to stand for reason and order in the play, he is in fact a violator of the natural order, having taken a wife without first courting her. As was well-known in classical antiquity, Theseus’s violation of Hippolyta is what led to a son named Hippolytus, and when Hippolyta died, Theseus was remarried to Phaedra, a woman who scorned Aphrodite in becoming a follower of Artemis, leading Aphrodite to curse her with an erotic desire for her own stepson, Hippolytus (son of Theseus and Hippolyta). In response, Theseus prayed to Neptune, and Neptune effectively killed Hippolytus before Phaedra tragically killed herself. This fateful tale was staged by Euripides and later adapted by Seneca (in fact, Shakespeare seems to quote from Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) before the story was also adapted into a French neoclassical tragedy by Racine. We later learn that Theseus has been goaded into various other sexual conquests in the past with “Perigouna” and “fair Aegles” and “Ariadne.” At any rate, the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, which serves as the subtle backdrop to the comedy, casts a shadow over the play. It serves to highlight the megalomaniacal grandeur which Theseus evidently sees in himself –he is a conqueror, an undisputed ruler, an old man with a young heart, and a leader who no longer believes in the dominion of nature (i.e. he has convinced himself that he can orchestrate and control the erotic desires of all the young lovers in Athens). He seems to know no limits to his rule. Consider the moment Theseus commands his “Master of Revels” Philostrate (whose name means “lover of war”) to awaken the passions of the Athenian youth:

“Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments;
Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth,
Turn melancholy forth to funerals” (1.1.12-14).  

In prior Shakespearean plays, it has come to light that when young men –full of vigor and passion– have no foreign wars to fight, they instead turn to fighting each another, which allows irrational impulses to subsume them. This is not to lament or bemoan the nature of young men, but rather to warn the political community against a particular danger that arises when wild, youthful energy is not harnessed toward a productive political outlet. This political threat was most starkly evident in Romeo and Juliet, where sword fights frequently break out in broad daylight on the streets of Verona between young men, some of whom are ensconced in an absolutist vision of the erotic and are forced to gratify their desires in some manner which is counter to law or convention (Romeo is the most blatant example). Similarly, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream young lovers, Hermia and Lysander, are determined to be with one another, but Hermia’s father, Egeus, disapproves of Lysander because he has already promised her hand in marriage to different young man, Demetrius. Egeus brings his case before Theseus, claiming that Hermia’s heart has been “bewitched” by Lysander with mere “love-tokens” (why hasn’t Demetrius also attempted to “bewitch” Hermia with “love-tokens” if he truly wants her hand in marriage?) In turn, Egeus invokes the “ancient privilege” in Athens: an old rule that a father may choose his daughter’s future husband or else face death –a most cruel but traditionally conservative custom. Rather than seeking a compromise with Egeus, Theseus speaks directly to Hermia and he offers her the choice: either marry Demetrius as her father wishes or else die. Strangely, however, he adds a third option: that she may also become a chaste nun by metaphorically sacrificing herself on the altar of Diana (i.e. commit to a life of virginity), wherein she will “abjure the society of men” and live as “a barren sister” while “chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.” In both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, fathers attempt to choose the lovers of their daughters, and in both plays, the disobedient daughters are threatened with the punishment of living the life of a nun (in Shakespeare, nunnery is an undesirable lifestyle).

“Thrice blessed they that master so their blood
To undergo such a maiden pilgrimage;
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lies, and dies in single blessedness” (1.1.74-78).

Hermia is given four days to make her decision, ending on the day of Theseus’s wedding. Of course, a more capable ruler might have had more foresight in seeing that young lovers are not likely to simply relent to customs and laws. Eros is wayward and unpredictable; it seeks to transcend the established order (i.e. love knows no bounds, or Amor Vincit Omnia). Thus, Hermia and Lysander hatch a plan to flee into the forest en route to the home of Lysander’s wealthy, childless aunt –a dowager– who loves Lysander as her own, but who lives “seven remote leagues” from Athens. There, they can be married. In echoing the absoluteness of Romeo’s love for Juliet, Lysander also claims his love for Hermia is true, and he laments “the course of true love never did run smooth.” Previously, Athens was a “paradise” to Hermia, but now that she cannot consummate her love, Athens has become a “hell.” Before setting out, the lovers run into a familiar young woman named Helena and decide to share their escape plans before fleeing. Secretly, Helena is actually enamored with Egeus’s preferred suitor for Hermia, Demetrius. Desperate for Demetrius’s attention, Helena then informs Demetrius of Lysander and Hermia’s plan to flee into the forest the next morning. Here, we see the enmity and envy (perhaps even mimetic desire in the Girardian sense) beginning to emerge between the characters –Helena envies Hermia for gaining Demetrius’s affections, and Demetrius envies Lysander for gaining Hermia’s affections. Mutual resentments among the characters foreshadow trouble ahead as Helena and Demetrius decide to chase after Hermia and Lysander for their own separate reasons (notably, Demetrius’s plan to marry Hermia echoes Theseus’s impending marriage to Hippolyta –he wants to possess her, but he has not yet won her heart).

To complicate matters, this four-way romantic conundrum is hardly the only plot thread in the play. In fact, A Midsummer Night’s Dream features the juxtaposition of no less than four distinct plotlines, each of which shares certain commonalities with all the others, while operating independently until all are interwoven together by the end. The central plot concerns the aforementioned lovers: Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena; along with the impending marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. But there is also an underplot concerning a group of Athenian artisans (or “rude mechanicals”) practicing a play they plan to perform at Theseus’s wedding. Perhaps they are similar to Shakespeare’s own Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The Artisans are: Peter Quince (a carpenter), Snug (a joiner), Nick Bottom (a weaver), Francis Flute (a bellows-mender), Tom Snout (a tinker), and Robin Starveling (a tailor). They are all lower-class Athenians (i.e. “Bottom” is at the bottom of the social hierarchy), in contrast to the high-born figures in Theseus’s court, and they are set to perform “The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe” –a most striking choice for a performance on a presumed day of merriment, the day of the king’s wedding. This famous tragedy tells the story of two lovers in ancient Babylon who are separated by their family’s feud. They whisper to each other through a “chink” in the wall. In secret, they make plans to meet beneath a mulberry tree at the tomb of Ninus (legendary founder of Nineveh), but when Thisbe escapes, she is confronted by a wild lion who steals her mantle (or veil). While she flees into a cave, Pyramus arrives and spots her torn mantle. Assuming the lion has killed his beloved Thisbe, he tragically slays himself. And when Thisbe emerges from the cave to find her dead lover, she, too, commits suicide. Why would the mechanicals (and likewise Shakespeare) draw our attention to this grave tragedy in a comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Is there something edifying about this play? Has Theseus forgotten something about the nature of love? The “rude mechanicals” are given the following roles in the play:

• Nick Bottom: Pyramus (though he believes himself capable of performing other roles in the play).
• Francis Flute: Thisbe (in those days, men performed all the female roles).
• Robin Starveling: Thisbe’s mother
• Snout: Pyramus’s father.
• Peter Quince: Thisbe’s father.
• Snug: The Lion.

Along with the other characters, the “rude mechanicals” also retire into the forest where they can practice their performance, but all the characters soon become lost and disoriented in this enchanted wonderland. The setting is nightfall –it is the realm of eros, where desires reign supreme. Having departed from reason and order as provided by the city of Athens, the characters all encounter a confusing state of being, the kind where man is either ‘a beast or a god’ (as Aristotle mentions in Politics, Book I). Here, we discover the surprising domain of the fairies who are ruled by King Oberon and Queen Titania (i.e. the “Fairy Queen,” which is likely a nod to Queen Elizabeth I). The fairies in the play are gentle purveyors of mayhem, particularly Robin Goodfellow (or “Puck,” a well-known devilish sprite or fairy in English folklore) who “frights the maidens of the village.” The fairies are misleading night-wanderers who are slightly mischievous and animated by games and other cheeky hijinks. The word “fairy” is connected to “fay” or the three classical “Fates,” which preside over human destiny and childbirth; they are purveyors of dreams and wish fulfillment. During the night, the fairies “run by the triple Hecate’s team from the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream, now are frolic.” The late Shakespearean scholar Paul Cantor rather convincingly argues that the introduction of this fairy kingdom, ruled by Oberon and Titania, is Shakespeare’s way of reviving the richness of pagan mythology in the modern world. They stand for the forces of nature –akin to an alternative theology in contrast to the predominant Christian theology which had caused so much turmoil in Shakespeare’s day. In this wooded world outside Athens, the pagan gods are not omniscient and benevolent (and therefore they do not pose the same problem of theodicy as we find in modern monotheisms), but rather the fairies are prone to error, and are sometimes even malevolent –in other words, the ancient gods did not have the same problem of evil we have inherited from Christian theology. In the classical sense, nature is not malicious, but it is capricious.

In many respects, King Oberon and Queen Titania mirror mortals in the play, like Theseus and Hippolyta, leading us to wonder: who are the true rulers of Athens? If Theseus cannot woo the hearts and minds of his people, but Oberon can through the use of natural herbs and magic, does Oberon possess something that Theseus is lacking? Oberon is in the midst of a dispute with his wife over an Indian changeling boy she refuses to release (a changeling was a child secretly substituted for another in infancy, and this mischievous switch typically involved fairies). He hopes to employ the young man as a squire, while Titania rejects her husband’s requests because the boy’s mother was actually a worshipper of Titania but now has died (notably, neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Fairy Queen in the play are mothers of children, but the Fairy Queen intends to raise the changeling boy as her own). In response, Oberon plots revenge on his wife –he asks Robin Goodfellow/Puck to find a “a little western flower” that was struck by Cupid’s arrow (and transformed the flower from white to purple), a plant which maidens call “love-in-idleness,” the juice of which, when laid on sleeping eyelids, will make a man or woman madly dote upon the next living creature he or she lays eyes upon. The flower is akin to a love potion. In this case, Oberon of the forest possesses the power to control the object of love’s desire –the very same power Theseus seems to lack in Athens. To what extent might a natural godlike creature, like Oberon, have more power over the Athenians than Theseus himself? Does Theseus neglect the pagan gods at his own risk? Despite being the mirror image of one another, Oberon and Theseus are strikingly different in several respects. For example, Oberon wants to humiliate his wife, Titania, by forcing her to fall in love with some foul beast. With the love juice, Oberon holds the power to compel and control eros, whereas Theseus seems to have failed in this respect –he has forcibly (and therefore unnaturally) taken a wife for himself, and he wrongly believes he can control the whims of young lovers in Athens. Perhaps Oberon (as a metaphor for the Aristotelian concept of nature) succeeds where Theseus has failed. At any rate, Oberon heads to an over-canopied bank where thyme grows with oxlips and nodding violets, alongside sweet musk-roses and eglantine –here is where Titania frequently sleeps. Oberon (whom Robin Goodfellow/Puck refers to as the “king of shadows”) sprinkles the juice on Titania’s eyelids, while Puck/Robin Goodfellow is dispatched to find an Athenian man to administer the juice. Unfortunately, he mistakes Demetrius, whom Oberon had previously spotted, for Lysander and sprinkles the flower juice on the wrong man –nature is known to make mistakes from time to time. And having wandered into the woods in the moonlight, Lysander and Hermia lie down to sleep, albeit far apart from each another in protection of their Hermia’s honor, but Lysander soon awakens and the “love-in-idleness” forces him to suddenly fall in love with Helena instead of his beloved Hermia.

From here, chaos ensues. After having bid farewell to the safety and comfort of the city, the Athenians encounter the full force of nature in its wild, unpredictable ways. In these scenes we are reminded of Shakespeare’s frequent lampooning of the medieval tradition of courtly love (particularly the modern virginal notion of “love at first sight” as found in the poetry of Dante and Petrarch). In some respects, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream might well be interpreted as a satire of common notions about love, or eros. Namely satirizing the idea that love is an absolute, eternal, spiritually-infused passion in the modern sense. The great myth of Christian courtly love is that it can transform people into serious, tragic, godlike figures who are willing to die for the sake of love (since love, or agape, is greater than both faith and hope in the Christian paradigm, at least according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:13). True love, as the common view goes, yearns to supersede laws and customs –it seeks justification for its own sake. In other words, Lysander’s love for Hermia is believed to be “true” because they are both willing to abandon their families in Athens in order to consummate their love. While Lysander chases after Helena into the woods (which comes from the Old English word “wod,” meaning “mad” or “lunatic”), Hermia awakens from a terrible dream of a serpent eating her heart to find her lover is no longer nearby. And realizing his error, Puck attempts to resolve his mistake by pouring the love juice upon Demetrius’s eyelids such that he now instantly falls in love with Helena –but she grows irate, believing both men are mocking her. Helena’s envy and ire for Hermia grows, while Lysander and Demetrius agree to a duel –all four characters have grown to resent one another, or as Helena says to Hermia:

“It is not friendly, ‘tis not maidenly.
Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it,
Though I alone do feel the injury” (3.2.217-219)

Meanwhile, Robin Goodfellow/Puck happens upon the “rude mechanicals” practicing their performance in the forest. In a playfully malevolent display, he transforms Nick Bottom’s head into the head of an ass (a hilarious moment akin to Apuleius’s The Golden Ass), an which leads the other mechanicals to flee in terror, unsure of what they have seen. Shortly thereafter, Titania awakens and immediately falls in love with the first thing she sees –a lower-class mortal, Nick Bottom, who now has the head of an ass. Oberon has apaprently achieved his wish for Titania to fall in love with a beast. But immediately, Bottom is given command of a cohort of fairies (Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed) and he becomes something akin to a fairy king –in competition with Oberon. In some respects, Bottom is the one character in the play who achieves both of Aristotle’s criteria for a man divorced from a city –he becomes both a beast and a god.

“Come, wait upon him; lead to my bower.
The moon, methinks, looks like a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently” (3.1.188-192).

While all of this bedlam unfolds, Oberon steals Titania’s boy before Robin Goodfellow/Puck manages to return Lysander’s erotic desire back where it belongs, directed at Hermia. And when the four Athenians awaken in the morning, they assume the night’s events were little more than a strange dream. They seem unable to fully articulate their experiences. By happenstance during a morning hunt, Theseus and Hippolyta (and their hounds) find the four young lovers in the woods. Seeing that both Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena have now paired off into their own peaceful, loving unions (recall that Demetrius was never actually relieved of his “love-in-idleness”), Theseus declares he will override Egeus’s invocation of the ancient Athenian “privilege.” Instead, he hails a trio of wedding ceremonies for the young lovers, in part so they will not flee from Athens (by my count, two nights have now passed, and thus the forthcoming wedding ceremony actually occurs earlier than the four days’ time, which was initially lamented by Theseus at the outset of the play).    

Regarding the night’s phantasms, Theseus does not believe the young lovers’ stories from their evening in the woods:

“…I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fair 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 a 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!” (5.1.2-22).

Ever a man of reason and custom, in spite of his past adventures battling mythical creatures like the minotaur, Theseus seems to hold nature in low regard. He does not believe there are things beyond his power in the dominion of nature, so long as he retreats behind the peaceful, rational walls of Athens. At this point, Shakespeare reminds us that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy. The characters who once believed themselves to be tragic heroes, like Lysander, have learned to compromise their principles (including Theseus) and there is a reintegration of the whole political community by the end. The irrational world of dreams and eros had been far too dizzying and horrifying for the characters, thus the flight from the city into nature transforms into a return from nature to the city. The characters have shuffled around in carnivalesque dance –a la Ovidian transformations– only to find harmony by the conclusion. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the characters keep changing partners and they do not stand or fall based on principle or honor, instead they adapt to their surroundings, and as the play ends, they seem to have learned something new. Indeed, as noted by Marjorie Garber, the title A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a reference to the old European folk concept of “midsummer madness” which occurs on Midsummer Eve, June 23rd, the longest day and shortest night of the year wherein madness and witchcraft would run amok. The tradition hearkens back to ancient agrarian festivals and it points to the theme of fertility and political succession.

Interestingly enough, the play does not end here in happy matrimony (as a more conventional comedy might). Instead, we return to Bottom who awakens in the woods after Titania has been cured of her desire for him and his head has been returned to its normal visage. He returns to the city alone only to realize that he cannot explain the night’s activities to his compatriots –surely, he would be mocked for claiming his head was transformed into a donkey and that he was anointed king of the fairies. Instead, he claims the night gave him a “most rare vision… past the wit of man to say what dream it was” but that he would be no true Athenian if he described it. Once back among his fellow thespians, Bottom and the other “rude mechanicals” continue to practice their performance while the wedding ceremony takes place in the temple offstage (we never actually see the wedding in the play). But later, with three hours still until bedtime, Theseus requests a performance to “ease the anguish of a torturing hour.” First, he rejects several plays: “The battle of the Centaurs, to be sung by an Athenian eunuch to the harp” because Hippolyta is already aware of the glory of Heracles; “The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals tearing the Thracian singer in their rage” because it is an old device that was played when Theseus returned from Thebes a conquerer: “The thrice three Muses mourning for the death of learning, late deceased in beggary” because this play is a satire keen and critical, not sorting with a nuptial ceremony; but he strangely accepts “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love for Thisbe; very tragical mirth,” in spite of Philostrate’s protestations (Philostrate is the “Master of Revels” whom Theseus dubs “our usual manager of mirth”). In some editions, Philostrate and Egeus are interchangeable, and some scholars have suggested the same actor was intended to play both characters in the play. Regardless, Theseus rejects Philostrate’s protestations (that the play is poorly rehearsed), and the “rude mechanicals” performs their tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is constantly interrupted by Theseus’s skepticisms and criticisms (he distrusts his imagination), breaking the fourth wall of this little play within a play. Why is there a brief play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Presumably, the characters still have something to learn. In many ways, the tragic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is the story of Romeo and Juliet, it is what A Midsummer Night’s Dream might have been. And when the performance concludes, Theseus requests for no epilogue to the performance but agrees to see a Bergomask, a rustic dance associated with the supposedly clownish inhabitants of Bergamo, Italy (perhaps a nod to the ancient satyr play which came at the end of a tragic cycle). As A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes, we briefly return to the woodland fairies as Robin Goodfellow/Puck delivers the closing apologia for the events contained herein:

“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.
And as I am an honest puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the puck a liar call.
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends;
And Robin shall restore amends” (closing lines 5.1.413-428).

*****

The play ends with the audience (beckoned by Puck) to consider that this whole affair is “no more yielding but a dream” and to believe that we have merely “slumbered here” like Athenians in the woods. But as we have seen repeatedly throughout the play (with characters like Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, Helena, and even Puck) dreams are of great consequence. The dreamworld of eros outside the city has managed to unleash some tremendously disruptive forces on the characters. The dreamworld is where normal social rules are abandoned in a carnivalesque atmosphere. It shows us the relaxing of inhibitions, albeit temporarily at a distance. It satirizes courtly love, while carefully avoiding the religious censors at the time, while also gently exploring pagan themes against the backdrop of a silly story, making the beliefs of classical antiquity (i.e. polytheism) seem less threatening to the modern Christian world. The play begins in the sphere of Athenian law, convention, and ancient rites, but it quickly moves into lawless nature, because there is a sense among the characters that the city has lost touch with nature (in particular, the notion that kings and fathers can command the forces of love by ancient privilege), neglecting the role of women in love and their voice in the creation of families (which is necessary for the future order of the political community). The irrational wooded world provides the solution to the Athenian political problem of a loss of fertility and a failed marriage. According to this theory, under Theseus’s rule, the political community has become too detached from nature and there is a need for it to be reminded that eros freely directs people toward one another regardless of ancient rites and privileges. But this escape into the woods is not a Rousseauian return to nature –Shakespeare does not romanticize primitivism nor asceticism– it is not a pure flight from reason. But rather, the point here is that the city should be cautious lest it become too overly controlling. The suggestion is not that the city should be rejected by its citizens, but rather that it must be rejuvenated. And sometimes a renewal of the city requires a leader like Theseus to cast aside old traditional rites and privileges so that the young may consummate their love in new ways. The aim is to make the city more aligned with nature. Lysander and Hermia, for example, begin the play feeling oppressed by political rules and conventions, but by the end of the play they are ready to return to the political community in order to reinforce and reaffirm the need for the political bonds of family, marriage, and so on (many scholars have speculated about whether or not this play was actually written for a particular aristocratic wedding). In the same way that Theseus compromises his values and permits the two lovers to marry, Lysander and Hermia also compromise their erotic desires by not continuing their flight to his aunt’s home. What have they learned? Perhaps that love cannot remain in a dream-like state. Love desires the firm grounding of reality, which necessitates a return to the city. In the same way that eros longs for transcendence, eros paradoxically also yearns for substantiation, and living in a perpetual dreamworld makes eros little more than an “airy nothing.” Thus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare also offers a qualified defense of art, or more specifically, poetry (contra Plato) as a means of substantiating love, not for its own sake, but rather as a tempering force. When placed in the right hands, it discourages indulgence and serves as an antidote to madness and absurdity. As Theseus says, poetry has the capacity to transform unknown things into “shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” This defense of poetry is one which demonstrates the capacity for the poets to encourage moderation and allay the passions rather than inflame them –it is a brand of poetry which purges the passions in a moment of catharsis as Aristotle describes in the Poetics, albeit with respect to tragedy rather than comedy.    

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For this reading I used the impressive Arden edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream along with Paul Cantor’s excellent lectures and Marjorie Garber’s essential essays.