A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
“Man is an ass if he go about to
expound my dream”
Bottom, IV, i, 207
Is this the most popular, most performed of
Shakespeare’s plays?
• Straightforward characters – few psychological
complexities
• Lyrical – “poetic” – language
• “Classic” comic structure.
• Upbeat ending: “Jack shall have Jill/ Nought
shall go ill.”
• The “rude mechanicals”
But what’s the real reason???
The “tick” of Shakespeare’s imagination: self
reflexiveness.
The roots of the imagination, the sources of
theater.
No narrative source for the play -he made it up “all by himself, with nobody
helping him.”
Playing roles, making theater
Meg O’C, skeptical five-year-old drama critic at
production of MND in Regent’s Park, 1978:
“Daddy, are they who they say they are, or are
they just actors?”
Act III, scene i: Bottom’s concerns:
“And for the more better assurance, tell them that I
am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This
will put them out of fear.”
The imaginative materials of MND
• “Athens” – how real?
• The lovers: what sort of lovers, how
imagined?
• The fairies: what are they?
• The “mechanicals”: where from?
Theseus and Athens
• Law ‘n order.
• Plotlessness of Theseus/Hippolyta – just
hanging out, waiting for nuptial day.
• The wonderfully rational “law of Athens.”
• Gender order in Athens.
• “What cheer, my love”
His rationality on “The lover, the lunatic, and the
poet”: Act V, scene 1.
But Theseus’ view of drama
• “I will hear that play.” -- V, 1, 81ff
• What the audience must supply: “The
kinder we, to give them thanks for
nothing.”
• Hippolyta: “This is the silliest stuff that ever
I heard.”
Theseus: “The best in this kind are but
shadows, and the worst no worse if
imagination amend them.”
The fairies
• Reversal of world of Athens? – “What
cheer, my love?”
• Gendering of rule
• What are fairies? Their role in natural
phenomena, etc.
• Puck as mad, possibly malevolent
playwright?
• Oberon’s role.
The lovers – “quick bright things”
coming to confusion
•
•
•
•
1)
2)
3)
I, 1, 130 to 149: the generic possibilities
What other play was Shakespeare writing – or had just
written – in 1595?
How are the lovers imagined?
Their “geometry”:
Lysander> Hermia,and Hermia> Lysander. But
Demetrius > Hermia and Hermia < Demetrius. Helena
> Demetrius, but Demetrius < Helena.
Lysander > Helena, < Hermia; Hermia> Lysander.
Demetrius > Hermia. Helena > Demetrius.
Lysander > Hermia, Hermia > Lysander. Demetrius >
Helena, Helena > Demetrius. “Jack shall have Jill,
Nought shall go ill.”
The Mechanicals
Philostrate describes them as
“Hard-handed men, that work in Athens here
Which never labored in their minds till now;
And now have toiled their unbreathed memories
With this same play, against your nuptial. “
• Their names suggest their trades: Peter Quince is a
carpenter (quines are blocks used in building); Bottom
the weaver: bottom is a sort of bobbin for winding yarn;
Snug the joiner; Flute for fluted bellows in an organ;
Snout suggests the spout of a kettle, which a tinker
would mend; and tailors were notoriously skinny, so
Starveling.
Obviously a group of English workingmen, not real
of course but comically imagined.
Inexperienced but enthusiastic amateur actors.
Are they in fact inventing theater for themselves,
the way children would?
They may be as unsophisticated about theater as
Theseus is sophisticated.
But are their concerns in fact the basic problems of
putting on a play, funny mainly because we have
already solved them?