Midsummer Night/ Shakespeare After reading the document about Comedy and especially Shakespearean Comedy, reflect on your own personal theories about the comic: humor is a very complex human phenomeno
Notes: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The play was written in 1595 or 1596, shortly after Shakespeare joined, as a full shareholder, with fellow actors to form the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the early summer of 1594.
Scholars group it as one of the so-called “Lyrical” plays, along with Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Romeo and Juliet, all written in 1594-96; they are called this because of their attention to poetic language and a new level of character detail and they represent a significant “forward leap” in Shakespeare’s abilities over the earlier comedies and histories of 1588-1592.
There is no record of performance during his lifetime, but there is a tradition that it was written to be performed at an aristocratic wedding feast, perhaps with Queen Elizabeth in attendance. Most scholars today dismiss this because there is no contemporary evidence and also because it was not normal practice to do so.
The play was first published in 1600 in Quarto Form (Q1), set from Shakespeare’s own “foul papers” or an actual manuscript copy – this is a very good quarto text. A second Quarto (Q2) was published in 1619 as part of William Jaggard’s bootlegged “False Folio,” which was largely a reprint of Q1. The First Folio of 1623 has a text mostly derived from Q2 with corrections from manuscript or playbook.
The play has 2,165 lines (not a long play – only about half the length of Hamlet, the longest play. It is mostly in poetry (80%!), with a high incidence of rhyme. The characters are fairly balanced, with all the main speaking parts having a similar percentage of lines: Bottom, 12%; Theseus, 11%; Helena, 11%; Puck (Robin Goodfellow), 10%; Oberon, 10%; Lysander and Hermia 8% each; and Titania, 7%.
Sources: The play has no direct source; rather it is an amalgam of many antecedents, primarily from Classical Greek and Roman legends/history about Theseus; Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apulius’ The Golden Ass. Shakespeare conflates these myths with English folk tales and country legends about fairies and about Robin Goodfellow, the trickster Puck. The “tone” or “feel” of the play evokes the old, no longer existent English festivals of May Day and Midsummer Eve (considered pagan and Catholic by the Protestant authorities).
Shakespearean comedy revolves around themes of personal and social disruption which are ultimately resolved: social cohesion is restored, which is always symbolized by marriage(s). Shakespeare typically gives this various ironic twists: in this play, Demetrius only loves Helena because the spell has not been lifted from his eyes, and Theseus has defeated Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, in battle and thus forced her into marriage.
The comedy revels in dynamic opposites: The city of Athens (seat of Western culture, law, and Reason) and the wild forests enchanted with fairies (home of the irrational, the elemental, the bestial). Others include: the line between day and night (reason vs. emotion, conscious vs. the unconscious) and the power of Dreams.
This also allows free rein to Shakespeare’s penchant for doubling. He doubles everything in the play: there are two sets of thwarted lovers there are two royal courts (Theseus’ Dukedom and Oberon and Titania’s Fairie Kingdom), and so on.
There is also comedy about theater and playing, as in the rehearsals and the performance of the play within a play, “Pyramus & Thisby.” Question: is theater a form of collective dreaming where the audience participates in flights of the imagination? Theater is also about Transformation, or metamorphosis, which is symbolized by Bottom’s transfiguration into an Ass. Bottom is a bad actor because he cannot lose himself in the part, but when he is “translated” literally into the part of the Ass, he finally loses himself to…wait for it…ultimately find himself.
Some thoughts on social and historical issues: The rites of summer, images of Queen Elizabeth as Virgin Queen and Warrior queen, myth and the supernatural are directly related to the struggles between the old Catholic England and the emerging, rational Protestant England.
Some thoughts on Characters: Titania and Hippolyta are female leaders, Bottom is a comic vitalist (and a precursor or sketch of Falstaff), the lovers can be contrasted with Romeo and Juliet (written at the same time), Puck as the Trickster (and thus as an image of the human unconscious).
Theseus’ speech about Lovers, Madmen, and Poets at the beginning of V.1 is really the philosophical key to the play. The speech connects together the power of the imagination with the life forces of sex, desire, and love, and yet offers the Shakespearean twist – the dark point of irrationality and madness that also animates both!
As we move through the semester, we will encounter larger and larger versions of these lovers, madmen, and poets (and their dark opposites), in characters like Prince Hal, Hotspur, Falstaff, Hamlet, Ophelia, Prospero, and Caliban.
Both Bottom and Robin Goodfellow represent the disruptive comic spirit of theatre. They invite chaos and high (and low) humor into the human drama and lend full humanity even through their errors and fumbling. Robin is also just a little bit dangerous as well
The fairie kingdom and its denizens and rulers are a fascinating Shakespearean construction that has nothing to do with the staid Classical mythology of the rest of the play. They can represent the unconscious, but also reveal layers of older social strata, the tension between the modern and the medieval (and older) worlds and so on. They also have the power to disrupt and confound the human world.
Shakespeare’s comedies always contain at least a crystal of darkness and doubt about the whole joyousness of the conclusion. His audience would have been well aware, when Oberon blesses the issue of the marriage bed that the child of Theseus and Hippolyta, the boy Hippolytus, would NOT have a happy or fortunate life! Theseus would abandon Hippolyta for Phaedra, Hippolytus would fall in love with Phaedra and be banished by his father and would die being thrown from his horse as he fled
The fragility and dreamlike states induced by the play tell us that the comic mode is only an interlude in human affairs: for a short while the structures, rules, and hierarchy of society are upended, but the next morning the spell wears off, the transformation regresses, and everyone returns to work.
Theatre, however, and perhaps art in general, keeps the party going. In the dream world on stage, there is always the endless play of human imagination that suspends the pain and mundanity of quotidian life.
As one critic put it, this is a “play of simultaneous innocence and experience…it unleashes us into a world of desire that cuts to the core of our adult humanity.”
