A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This is a play about dreams--and
nightmares.
It is also a feel-good play:
As Bottom, who dreams of being a great
actor, says, “I will roar, that it will do any
man’s heart good to hear me (1.2.71)
Dreams
Nightmares
Dreams of wealth, sex, prestige
Resolution of waking anxieties
A replay of the day’s events by a
drunken, untalented film director
Helplessness, unprepared, naked
Moon imagery
Theseus says the “old moon wanes” slowly
but Hippolyta counters that time flies and the
new moon will arrive fast (as an arrow?), :
bent “like to a silver bow” 1.1.1-10
The moon controls tides; Titania floods
Moonshine = lunacy < luna = moon
Note the different social
classes (intro. p. 98)
martial elders: Theseus and Hippolyta,
young lovers
Robin the lone prankster spirit
King and Queen of fairies
flower fairies: Peaseblossom, Bobweb,
Moth, Mustardseed
Athenian workmen: Quince, Flute,
Snout, Snug, Starveling, Bottom (the
real hero of the play?)
Key passages
What are the elements of Egeus’s belief in
witchcraft? (1.1.27-40)? (rhymes, songs, and
verses; tokens and “impressions”;
“prevailment”)
Contrast Egeus’s reading of the law
(obedience or death, 1.1.42044) to that of
Theseus (he adds chaste confinement,
1.1.65, 73-75)
Why does Theseus feel the need to cheer up
Hippolyta (1.1.122)? (He hasn’t exactly saved
Hermia from her father’s brutality).
1.1
 What does Theseus want to talk to Demetrius and
Egeus (the idiot) about? What is the effect of his
calling them aside?
 For what reasons is it that “the course of true love
never did run smooth” (1.1.134)? (class differences,
age, friends’ opinions, etc.)
 Hermia advises patience (as will King Lear), but
Lysander suggests they elope to the forest, and
Hermia swears she will (note that all oaths in
Shakespeare are taken by a higher power: here there
are several, including Cupid’s bow).
1.1
Helena is uncomfortable in her body (she
wants Hermia’s eye, tongue, look, beauty; at
3.2.289, we learn she is tall, or at least taller
than Hermia).
Hermia by contrast is a kind of head case
(Athens seemed like paradise before she saw
Lysander, now she wants to leave)
Lysander (having gotten what he wants,
Hermia to elope) becomes very poetic, telling
Helena their plan.
Note that Hermia has been to the woods
before, with Helena when they were girls
(215)
1.1
Lysander prays that Demetrius will favor
Helena ([may] “Demetrius dote on you”
1.1.225, which eventually he does, once
properly drugged; the other doter is
Bottom, also drugged)
The power of love
Note how the iconography of Cupid
offers Helena ways to think about how
love acts, what it is--blind, wings, a
child [why?], forsworn [a liar, like
Demetrius, who had said he loved
her]?), otherwise a very difficult topic
(OK, class, take out some paper and
write an essay on what love is), since
Plato’s Symposium.
Helena’s decision
Having learned that Hermia and Lysander
plan to fly to the forest, Helena in turn plans
to tell Demetrius, knowing he will follow
Hermia, and thus give her an opportunity
merely to see him.
But a decision is not an action. What does
Helena do?
Action 1.1
Mortified by Demetrius’s desertion, jealous of
Hermia, overlooking the bleakness of
Hermia’s flight from her father, and still in
love, Helena settles for the chance merely
to see Demetrius as he leaves her “and back
again” (meaning what? come back with him?
return home alone and dream of him some
more? follow him?).
Or, if we rephrase in terms of the theme of the play:
Abandoned as if in a nightmare (compare
Hermia and Bottom later left alone and
frightened) Helena day-dreams about
Demetrius.
1.2 Action Statement
After Peter Quince orders the players to meet
at the “Duke’s oak,” Bottom gets in the last
word.
Or, in terms of the theme of the play:
Dreaming of being a great actor, Bottom gets
in the last word, reinforcing Peter Quince’s
order to the players that they meet in the
forest to rehearse, where no one can steal
their ideas.
2.1
Notice the use of short, headless lines
to suggest the supernatural:
] Over hill, over dale,
] Thorough bush, thorough briar.
Compare Macbeth:
] Double, double, toil and trouble
Puck
Robin Goodfellow (2.1.35, also called Puck,
pn. Pook, as in spook) is different from
Titania’s flower fairies. “
Goodfellow” is a euphemism for a trouble-maker
(like the movie about the Mafia).
What are the examples of Puck’s mischief?
 (lines 35-52: interferes with household chores,
misleads travelers, spooks horses, makes the ice
slip in your drink, collapses your chair)
Marital strife of Oberon and
Titania
She accuses him of affairs (with Phillida and
even Hippolyta!
He accuses her of loving Theseus and
stealing him away from many women
(Perigouna, Ariadne, Antiopa).
Their strife affects the weather (2.1.81-117):
winds, fog, floods, rot in the fields, early
frost):
He wants her “changeling” boy (120) but she
keeps him in memory of the boy’s mother
who was a devotee of the goddess in India
(136)
We have laughed to see
the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied
with the wanton wind
Which she . . . would
imitate, and sail upon
the land . . .
(2.1.130-132)
Marital strife of Oberon and
Titania
 Furious at her refusal, Oberon sends Puck for the
flower “love-in-idleness” (love is only for aristocrats
of leisure, not the working classes, who have no time
for it).
 The “fair vestal throned by the west” (158) is often taken to be
Queen Elizabeth, immune to Cupid’s arrows (she never married,
and styled herself the virgin Queen, and was flattered when Sir
Walter Ralegh named the land she gave him in America Virginia)
. Annabel Pattern says, thought, that the one immune to love
may also be Titania, who seems not so in love with Oberon
(perhaps parallel to Hippolyta, wary of Theseus).
 The herb will make Titania love the next thing she
sees (180), and Oberon will demand the child in
exchange for curing her (and he gets want he wants
by the end of the play).
Meanwhile, Helena enters in
pursuit of Demetrius
Not exactly what she planned: she is not
dreaming of him, but begging, fawning like a
spaniel.
She complains that men should pursue
women, as Apollo chased Daphne (231)
--in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, also the source of
Pyramus and Thisby, and all Shakespeare’s
classical myths. He also wrote a poem called The
Art of Love, which said idleness was necessary,
leave town on her birthday to save expenses, offer
her a soft pillow at the games, and girls, “do not
let the goats graze under your arms.”
Bernini’s
“Daphne and
Apollo”
Villa d’Este,
Rome
Plots join
Interfering Oberon sees the need for
the love juice to make Demetrius love
Helena.
Oberon gives the job to Puck, while he
heads for “a bank where the wild thyme
grows” (flowers, party “time” pun?) to
find Titania and juice her.
(note that the love potion can be use for
good or ill).
2.1 Action Statement
Perhaps blinded by his own need for
vengeance--his dream of controlling his wife
Titania--but also something of a do-gooder
and so not wholly unredeemed, Oberon
trusts Puck (mistakenly, as it turns out), the
prankster, to administer properly the potent
love potion.
2.2 Fairies
Titania, sleepy, asks the fairies to sing for her,
and their lullaby raises the horrors of insects
so deadly to tiny flower fairies
Shakespeare shrunk the fairies, who were
traditionally supernatural, lusty beings like
Oberon and Titania: Walt Disney is the
result.)
2.2 More adventures at the
bank of the wild thyme
Oberon leaves after completing his task.
Weary Hermia and Lysander sleep apart,
appalling Puck, who figures Lysander must be
the one who needs the love juice (“this lacklove,” 83).
Enter Helena and Demetrius. He leaves; she
stays.
Lysander, juiced, wakes, sees Helena,
proclaims he will run through fire for her, and
chasing Helena, deserts Hermia (the moral
action?).
Some Shakespeare Vocabulary
blows means blooms (where the wild
thyme blows)
owe means owns
fond always means foolish
More 2.2
Well, Demetrius can’t help it, so it’s not
really an action following a decision.
After Lysander leaves, Hermia wakes,
having dreamed of a serpent--obviously
that rat (rather, snake) Lysander, who
deserted her, and chases after
Lysander, afraid to stay alone.
Her action parallels Helena’s in 1.1, sort of
chasing a dream, or a man.
3.1
Puck turns Bottom into an ass (as if he
wasn’t one already)
Bottom, also afraid to be alone (like
Hermia), sings to dispel fear (117).
Titania wakes and is enchanted by his
song (recall the magic Egeus worried
about).
3.1 Bottom among the fairies
Bottom turns out to be a great guy, perfectly
at home in any company: he shakes hands
with the little fairies.
Titania proves to be a true dream for Bottom,
a despiser of chastity (190).
Action: Titania orders her fairies to keep
Bottom silent (reversing roles, since men
usually wanted women silent).
3.2 Chasing around the forest
 Oberon praises Puck for making the thing Titania must
love an ass-headed actor trying to play Pyramus (35).
 Hermia rejects Demetrius, who lies down to sleep. gets
juiced, and wakes to fall for “Helen, goddess, nymph,
perfect, divine” (137).
 Helena thinks he’s making fun of her.
 Lysander and Demetrius bicker over her and retreat for
a duel (249-255)
 Hermia thinks Helena insults her shortness (“puppet”
line 289).
 Oberon stirs up the chase (360), even telling Robin
they are spirits that don’t have to quit at dawn (388),
so on it goes..
3.2
Puck ends the pursuit by anointing
Lysander’s eyes--not a moral action,
since that’s his job.
Puck moralizes, that he is restoring
order [harmony, the theme of comedy,]
4.1 Out Hunting
 Oberon restores Titania and Bottom after he gets
what he wants, before Theseus, enters to boast
about “the music of my hounds” (105), which he
admits is a “musical confusion” (109).
 Hippolyta says she has seen better hounds (the worst
insult), those of Hercules (111), putting Theseus on
the defensive (“My hounds are bred of the Spartan
kind” 118, with big ears and dewlaps), but the
argument dwindles and is set aside (182) when they
stumble across the lovers.
 Like a comedy, where harmony emerges despite the ridiculous,
Theseus hears music in the discordant howling of the hounds,
tuned like bells, each under each. The musical baying of the
hounds is the Central image for the whole play.
Bottom’s Dream
 When the court party leaves, Bottom wakes up.
He has glimpsed the other world, but as in
Plato’s allegory of the cave, how can he
explain it to anyone? Also a vague overtone
of seeing through a glass darkly, or
Corinthians 2-9-10: “the eye hath not seen”
The actors are bewailing Bottom’s death or
translation when he enters with joy, the
theme of the play: “Where are these lads,
where are these hearts?” (24).
(Shakespeare likes to add rebirth after death to
heighten the joy of his comedies, along with lots
of harmony in the form of dance and music)
5.1
Rationale Theseus tries to explain the lovers’
story (3-22, lovers are like madmen or poets,
famous speech: read it carefully), but
Hippolyta insists on truth, since their stories
don’t contradict.
The play of Pyramus and Thisby is a comic
tragedy, showing that art less important than
mirth.
The fairies bless the house.
Note the sequencing, the varying moods of
the long fifth act: hilarious, touching, feel
good, does your heart good. No source for
this plot; Shakespeare invented it. It’s all
show biz.
Genre
Tragedy is a dramatic form that shows happens when
1) a virtue becomes a vice
2) civilization falls apart
Comedy is about the establishment of social harmony.
Both are dramatic terms of art: thus “tragedy” is not the same as
“horrible” and comedies can be bittersweet as well as funny.
Comedy
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From Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen, pp. 73-75
Impossible to define
Definite kinds, low to high
Reformation of a (ridiculous) character
Holiday spirit
Ritual element (marriage)
Comic diction
Ritual
Drama is not life, but ritual.
Thus Shakespeare ends comedies (and
romances) in weddings as a sign, not a proof,
of social stability: 3 weddings in MSND; 2 in
Much Ado
(What happens after, who knows? Cf. the marital
problems of Oberon and Titania: but you need hope.
Thus in tragedies, people tend to die (but not
necessarily).
End of Monty Python and the
Meaning of Life
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Sense of moral uplift for vile humans
“Montage” of death
Dinner party as image of social communion
Outsider/scapegoat to remove evil
Hint of heaven
Rebirth after death
Music and harmony
Message: be kind to others