“Who do you love?” Bo Diddley and I are wondering.
Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: who gets to say who you can love
I’m reading through Shakespeare’s plays in an attempt to make sense of the world today. Today I’m writing about one of his most beloved comedies, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” For a quick reference to posts on previous plays, click here. Next week: “Romeo and Juliet.”
Shakespeare left behind his wife Anne and children in Stratford when he went to pursue a career in London theater. People being curious about others’ sexuality, there’s been much gossiping and speculation through the centuries of the affairs with women and men that Shakespeare might have had.
Looking in on others’ love lives has always been a favored pastime, but we shouldn’t condone it when it turns from idle wondering to active imposition. And that’s the subject of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Summary
The play opens with an Athenian duke, Theseus, preparing to marry an Amazonian queen, Hippolyta, in four days when the ‘new’ moon (that is, the waxing crescent moon) appears. The play is therefore set in what we would call a ‘new moon’ phase, when the moon is dark.
Egeus is at court to request that his daughter, Hermia, be ordered to marry a man named Demetrius. Hermia wants to marry Lysander instead, but Egeus wants Theseus to force Hermia into marriage on Egeus’ terms. Theseus agrees, declaring that if Hermia declines to marry Demetrius, she will either be put to death or placed in a convent for the rest of her life.
Demetrius had previously wooed Helena, Hermia’s best friend, and now Helena is pursuing Demetrius to fulfill the promises of love he made to her. All four of the young people are thwarted in their love as the play begins. Hermia and Lysander make plans to elope to another city, where they can be married. They decide to leave the next night.
Helena tells Demetrius of Hermia’s plans, sure that Demetrius will follow Hermia into the woods, so that she can follow him. On the night of the elopement, all four go into the dark woods, where they’re beset by the fairies and sprites that populate the forest.
We’re introduced to Oberon, King of the fairies, and Titania, the fairy Queen, who are in the midst of a spat. Titania had been in India, where her best friend died, leaving a young son (a ‘changeling’) behind. Titania’s been taking care of the young boy and hasn’t been attentive to Oberon, who is jealous.
He’s intent to get the boy away from Titania so that she returns her attention to him. To this end, Oberon sends Robin Goodfellow, a ‘puck’ or sprite, off on a journey around the world (where they once saw a mermaid riding the back of a dolphin) to obtain a flower whose nectar has magic properties. When the nectar is placed on the eye of someone sleeping, that person will fall in love with the first creature they see upon awakening.
Robin Goodfellow has been introduced as the sprite responsible for all of the vile, stupid things that happen in daily life, like upsetting a milk pail after a cow has been milked. He’s devious and delights in minor chaos. Robin sets off on his circuit of the globe to find the magic flower.
We also meet a troupe of actors called the ‘mechanicals’: amateur players who have other occupations in the city (carpenter, weaver, etc). They’re preparing a play to perform for the upcoming royal wedding. Bottom the weaver is the primary actor, and he’s depicted as an ass: pompous, ignorant, demanding. The rest of the troupe are simple folk who try to manage Bottom as best they can, in as nice a way as possible.
While Robin seeks the magic flowers, Oberon sees Demetrius and Helena (she imploring, him evading), and he decides to dispel their conflict with love. Once Robin delivers the magic flowers, Oberon orders him to place the love drops in Demetrius’ eyes, so that he’ll see Helena when he wakens. Oberon tells Robin he’ll know the couple by the Athenian garb they wear. Naturally, the male Athenian that Robin first encounters is Lysander, not Demetrius. Lysander awakens, his eyes bathed in magic potion, to see Helena. He’s now in love with Helena, and he pursues her through the wood.
Oberon drops the magic nectar in Titania’s eyes as she sleeps in her bower. Robin has happened upon the mechanicals in rehearsal, and he conjures a plan: he places a donkey’s head on an unwitting Bottom. The rest of the troupe, frightened by his appearance, run off. Bottom wanders near Titania’s bower, so that he, a literal ass, is the first creature she sees when she awakens. Oberon is delighted with the prank.
After the plot has gone sideways for every lover, Oberon directs Robin to sort out the mess with the Athenian couples (applying a counter-potion to Lysander’s eyes so that he again loves Hermia), and to remove the donkey head from Bottom. Oberon goes to Titania to negotiate the changeling boy and give her the antidote. The royal fairy couple reunite, and go off to attend the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta.
The sorting-out is accomplished by daybreak, when the two couples are discovered sleeping in the field by Theseus and his court. Theseus drops his judgement against Hermia, since Demetrius no longer wants to marry her, leaving Egeus with no more recourse against his daughter. The royal court settles down for the evening’s entertainment after the three weddings.
Amused by the preposterous billing of the mechanicals’ play (“A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth”), Theseus selects this play for their night’s entertainment. The mechanicals perform the play, which has a plot similar to Romeo and Juliet. The performance is whimsical, comic, and tender. Afterwards, the couples all retire to bed. Oberon castes a spell to ensure the fruitfulness of their marriage beds, and Robin Goodfellow sweeps the actors off the stage.
Thoughts
The play presents itself as a dreamscape, filled with references to the exotic and mysterious: an Amazonian Queen, an Indian changeling, a mermaid riding a dolphin. The night during which most of the action takes place is under a full moon, which is to say, there is no moonlight to guide the actors through the dark. The fairies and sprites, who comprise about half the characters, are creatures who come awake when people sleep. These elements reinforce the idea that the plot of the play is but a dream itself. As he sings out the play, Robin speaks to this directly:
ROBIN
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.
[….]
-Act 5 Scene 1
The title of the play sets the expectation that what is to be performed is but a dream. Is this simply a ‘weak and idle theme’, or is there more to it than a gossamer fantasy?
Since the subject of the play is love, placing it within the context of a dream implies that love is ephemeral, and indeed affections change at whim during the play. However, concluding the play with marriages argues against a theme based on the fickleness of love.
Agency in love is the point
The play begins with Theseus being excited about his upcoming wedding to Hippolyta, and her more somber response.
THESEUS
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon—but O, methinks how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires
Like to a stepdame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
HIPPOLYTA
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night,
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.
-Act 1 Scene 1
Hippolyta seems to have war or hunting on her mind (“silver bow”), and Theseus responds with an acknowledgement that she wasn’t a willing bride:
Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword,
And won thy love doing thee injuries.
But I will wed thee in another key—
With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling.
-Act 1 Scene 1
After adjudicating for Egeus that his daughter Hermia must wed Egeus’ choice of husband, not her own, upon pain of death or servitude in a convent, Theseus leaves the stage with Hippolyta, jollying her along (“Come, my Hippolyta; what cheer, my love?—“). Hippolyta, forced to marry a man who won her in war, must endure watching him force another young woman to marry against her will. Little wonder she isn’t happy.
Egeus’ argument to Theseus on why his daughter should be forced to marry continues the theme. Lysander, Hermia’s choice in love, isn’t in himself objectionable since his status and prospects are much the same as Demetrius. But Lysander has wooed Hermia, causing her to turn her affections from her father to Lysander. Egeus’ actual problem is that he’s jealous of Lysander.
Demetrius had been wooing Helena, and Helena fell in love with him. But seeing an opportunity to gain Egeus’ approval, Demetrius agreed to marry Hermia, without trying to win her love.
Similarly, Oberon’s tiff with his wife Titania is based on his jealousy of the young boy in her retinue, whom she is raising out of devotion to her friend, the boy’s mother.
All of the women in the play are denied the power to choose whom they can love. Is this a feature of the times in which the play was written, or is this intentional? I think the intention is to dramatize an aspect of the culture that’s arguably destructive.
The first scene always frames the themes of Shakespeare’s plays, and this play starts with conflict between a warrior who can’t wait for his wedding night and his bride (whom he injured and took by force), who’s dreading the wedding. Preventing the marriage of Hermia and Lysander causes them to leave Athens. Helena’s unhappiness with being discarded by a man who wooed her leads her to encourage Demetrius to leave, and she to follow him. Oberon’s jealousy causes him to unleash Robin Goodfellow, whose very nature is to disrupt the natural order of things. Titania’s anger with Oberon causes her to splinter the fairy group. In short, civic and family order has been damaged by preventing women their agency in love.
In the end, external tampering brings together the two couples (Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius), albeit in partnerships of their choosing before Egeus’s jealousy upended their vows. While dreaming, your agency is at the mercy of your imagination. In waking life, you’d never show up for a class final without your pants. But for some reason, you find your dreamlife self pantless in a room of fully clothed people, opening a blue book to take a test in a subject you know nothing about. Your imagination drives your dream’s outcomes, as the fairies direct the couplings of the youths.
The play-within-a-play, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” is about two characters who fall in love despite their families’ displeasure. They each die, in despair that they cannot have the love they long for. Although the subject matter is tragic, it’s played for laughs. These are the funniest set pieces in the play, and they rank as some of the best comedy that Shakespeare wrote.
Shakespeare typically uses the play within a play device (think of “Hamlet”, in which the play mimes the real-life murder of Hamlet’s father) to comment on or parallel the plot of the play in which it’s embedded. Here, the device highlights the usurpation of agency that the embedded play takes to tragic ends. If Theseus’ court manifests the misuse of authority to meddle in other’s lives, “Pyramus and Thisbe” depicts poignantly two characters who stand up to authority with their lives.
I think that’s why the performing troupe’s scenes are the heart of the play, and also the most affecting. Bottom is a buffoon, and many of the troupe are dim-witted. But they are, to a man, earnest. They make do with the limited resources they have to put on a play for the court and give it all they’ve got. They’re mocked by their audience, but they fail to take offense. Although affected by the emotions of their play, they simply lack the skill to convey what they feel.
You may find yourself, like Robin Goodfellow, mistaking one pair of Athenians for another: Demetrius and Lysander seem entirely interchangeable even though the female characters are studies in contrast (Hermia is dark and small; Helena is tall and fair; Hermia is a spitfire and Helena plays a victim). And like Theseus, you may question what difference it makes to Hermia, whether she’s married to one or another? If everyone ends up happy, does it matter who is paired with whom?
It matters to the women. Why shouldn’t their choices be honored?
We shouldn’t care who loves whom, in the play and real life. We should allow people to make choices about their loves, even if we think the choice is poorly made. Authorities in civic life shouldn’t have a say in others’ private lives. Maybe Pyramus and Thisbe would have tired of each other, if their families hadn’t waded in; they certainly would have grown older. They weren’t given that chance.
Love always looks different to those inside a relationship than it does outside looking in. We see the affairs of others through a natural obscurity. Almost as if you were in a dark forest under a new moon, with fairies tickling your toes.
Ellie’s Corner
Ellie only has eyes for Dave (when he’s holding treats).
Thanks for reading,
