Midsummer Nights Dream play The characters in this play derive from three very distinct social and cultural spheres: 1. the Athenian aristocracy, 2. the "rude mechanicals"; or Athenian artisan class

Midsummer: Structures, Symbols, and Stories

• In this document I would like to explore some of the rich backstory that informs the play. Read this as a supplement to both the supporting materials in the text of the play and my other supporting materials

• Athens: Shakespeare creates an interesting dynamic by setting the human world of the play in Ancient Athens, the traditional starting point of Western, European civilization; however, he complicates this by placing it in the pre-Classical, mythical Athens that was part of the Homeric world of The Odyssey, The Iliad, and the stories of Greek Mythology. He is saying that even in the very heart of the Western tradition of rational thought, philosophy, and science, symbolized by Athens, is an older, wilder, more subconscious version of humanity that existed before history and which we characterize through art, religion, and mythology. Shakespeare also creates an Athens which has recognizably contemporary London associations! The “rude mechanicals” (or “hempen homespuns” as Robin calls them) are more like English tradesmen than they are like Athenian citizens of Bronze-Age Greece! Shakespeare very often likes to do this; he evokes ancient or foreign times and places in his plays and then imbues them with contemporary ideas and characters. His audience would have instantly recognized the ironies and ambiguities (and opportunities for laughs in the comedies) of this technique.

• Theseus: See also the Wikipedia entry…as the founder-king of Athens and the slayer of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, Theseus was one of the most important characters in Greek mythology. In the play, he occupies a strange position for such a storied figure. Theseus seems to be settling down and leaving his wild days behind him. He invokes (at Egeus’ request) the Laws of Athens (which, as the Founder, he would have established himself!) concerning Hermia’s position in the arranged marriage to Demetrius; thus, he is a symbol in the comedy of rationality and Law. Yet, at the same time, he is anxiously awaiting his nuptials with Hippolyta like a schoolboy! His character as portrayed in the play would have created a great ambiguity (and amusement) for the more educated members of Shakespeare’s audience who would have been well-aware of the mythology of Theseus.

• Hippolyta: Another figure of legend and myth, the actual stories about her and the other daughters of Ares (the god of war) and the Amazon women are quite varied. In one version, she indeed becomes the consort of Theseus after he conquers the Amazons in battle. Her presence and spoken lines in the play are quite limited, but Shakespeare uses her character for very complex symbolic purposes. The females of Greek legend who are invoked in the play, including Diana, the huntress –goddess, all evoke aspects of the feminine that he and his contemporaries considered important in the larger problem of how men and women become attracted to each other, fall in love, stay together, and perpetuate the species. The Amazons represented a darker aspect of all of this. They lived apart from men and were warlike, engaging in masculine rather than traditionally feminine activities. They thus represented the uncertain reality of gender roles in a society which insisted that the two genders were completely distinct and endowed with unwavering and natural characteristics.

• The Rites of May (May Day): There are several references to the rites of May in the play, which open up some interesting historical and political fissures for us. As the accompanying Wikipedia entry will inform you, the first of May was a very ancient pagan holiday (Beltane for the Celts, Walpurgis for the Germanic tribes, etc.) which we would probably think of as more of a Spring celebration (the ancients knew that the actual Vernal equinox was in March), but May 1st was the traditional first day of summer, which then marks the summer solstice in June as Midsummer! In Shakespeare’s day, May Day was still celebrated as a rural, agricultural holiday (especially in rural areas, which was basically everywhere that wasn’t London!) but the English Church and the Tudor Government both worked hard to ban it and stamp it out as it was associated with paganism and with Catholicism (see entry on Religion below). May Day was a fertility holiday, which is not surprising at all, since all agriculturally and pastorally based societies were very concerned with the growth and health of their fields and flocks. Naturally, fertility holidays were connected with human sexuality and a carnival atmosphere. Sexual license was said to run rampant on May Day (which is why the Church hated it) and also the normal structures of society were temporarily upended. People got drunk, wore masks, and so on. This is a perfect atmosphere for the Comic mode to take over.

• Midsummer: in Shakespeare’s time was traditionally June 24th but was celebrated the night before (the 23rd) on Midsummer Eve. This was the summer solstice celebration and was probably even more ancient than May Day. From Roman times, the Catholic Church had always tried to “convert” the old pagan holidays into Christian ones (in this case the Feast Day of St. John). Like all the older pagan holidays, Midsummer allowed that the partition between the human world and the other, “spirit” realms became tenuous or even non-existent. (think of All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween, when the dead walk, etc.) It was thus the perfect time to set a comedy where the Fairie world intersects with the human!

• The Puck, or The Goblin: The Folger edition employs the proper name of Robin Goodfellow for the character who is traditionally called Puck, and they explain that Puck is better thought of as a general term, like Goblin, for a type of Fairie. Pucks are Tricksters, a class of supernatural beings who appear in almost every mythological system in the world. Robin, in the scene where he first appears, actually gives a catalog of some of the works of mischief he engages in. Shakespeare’s Robin is relatively benign and indeed seems to bear some affection towards those he tricks and pranks, but some images of the Puck legends are much darker (stealing children, etc., which is hinted at in the plot of the Indian Boy that Titania and Oberon are fighting over). As a psychological symbol, goblins and pucks serve to remind us of the illusion of control we have about the events of our own lives and especially about nature and our place in the natural chain of being.

• The Fairie Kingdom: Shakespeare actually takes quite a risk in newly Protestant England by invoking the pagan world of the magical, supernatural fairies. English mythology (don’t you love the way Shakespeare doubles everything by juxtaposing Greek mythology with homegrown English myth?!) was rife with legends of supernatural sprites, fairies, brownies, elves, etc., who were always elusive creatures of the forests, mountains, and other wild places. It is a mistake to think of them as fairly harmless amusing Disney-esque creatures…perhaps the Tolkien version of the Elves, who are ethereal and otherworldly but also can be deadly dangerous is more appropriate. The Fairies have control of many of the natural forces of the world and are not bound by the laws of physics. The Church was not amused and tried to teach that IF such beings existed, they were surely Demonic in nature. However, by Shakespeare’s time, the combination of the general de-mystification of religion (see entry below) and the beginnings of modern scientific thinking simply relegated them to a superstitious, antiquated past. Part of the risk he took with them in this play was that they were already (especially in sophisticated London) quaint images of rural, ignorant provincial England that many of his fellow playwrights would have found faintly ridiculous and old-fashioned. He has his reasons for using them though; they symbolize all kinds of things about the natural world, they mirror the human world and the human court of Theseus, and represent the world of dreams – the human subconscious as well.

• Titania: As Queen of the Fairies, Titania affords Shakespeare with a unique opportunity to build on and play with an image of Queen Elizabeth herself that had been building steadily during her reign. The contemporary poet, Edmund Spenser had written an important and very popular epic poem (it is massively long) called The Fairie Queene, which invoked the symbolic association of Queen Elizabeth herself with the Queen of the Fairie realm. Shakespeare taps into this vein in Act II, Scene 1, Lines 158 ff.:
  That very time I saw, but thou couldst not
  Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
  Cupid all armed; a certain aim he took
  At a fair Vestal throned by the west,
  And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow,
  As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
  But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
  Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon;
  And the imperial votress passed on.
  In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
  This passage makes explicit reference to the actual historical circumstances in which, early in her reign, Elizabeth considered marriage to a number of Royal and Noble suitors but ultimately decided to stay unmarried, realizing that if she had married she would have lost her authority to whichever man became her husband, and thus the new king of England.

• The English Forest (The Green World): Many people are unaware that England used to be, after the last Ice Age, a peninsula of the European mainland and not an island! In fact, England did not become an island until sometime between 6000 and 5000 BC. This was a result of the much lower sea levels that existed when much of the world’s water was locked up in the massive Ice Age glaciers. As they melted, the sea levels rose and England was gradually separated from the French mainland by the new English Channel. In these ancient times, great, dense forests covered most of northern Europe and England was no exception. There were many Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic , Bronze Age, and Iron Age cultures in England before the Romans arrived in 54 BC (under Julius Caesar). Those cultures, the Romans, and the Post-Roman Early and Late Medieval cultures all cut down forests for building materials and fuel and to clear land for crops and grazing; so, by Shakespeare’s day only small pockets of these primeval forests remained (think Sherwood Forest). Shakespeare grew up on the outskirts of one them, the Forest of Arden, which would figure in the later play As You Like It, and his boyhood memories of Arden may have invoked the images of a deep, dark, somewhat dangerous forest, that the local farmers and shepherds were convinced were full of spirits and elves and fairies. I have already written in a previous document about the usage of The Green World symbol in Shakespeare’s comedies.

• Classical Sources – Ovid and Apuleius: Scholars have determined, based on the number and depth of references in his works, knowledge of the grammar school curriculum of the time, and so forth that Ovid was Shakespeare’s favorite classical writer. Although a poet of love, Ovid is perhaps best remembered for his Metamorphoses, which invoke a series of mythological tales of transformation and transfiguration, where men and women are changed into non-human animals and plant shapes. This image, of course invokes Robin’s translation of Bottom into an Ass. The joke was a rich one, with all kinds of folk images of the personality of certain animals where the donkey, the mule, the ass was associated with Fools and foolishness in general. However, it is a complex imagery because the ass also had interesting biblical associations such as the ass that carried Balaam in the Old Testament, the ass that carried the baby Jesus into Egypt to escape King Herod, and even the ass that carried Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It is typical of Shakespeare to choose such a richly ambiguous animal symbol and it also allowed him to tap a related classical source in the comic “novel” of Apuleius called The Golden Ass. He also delighted in playing with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which in the original Ovid is a very tragic tale. In Midsummer it is turned into a hysterical farce by the incompetent actors and their ludicrous “adaptation” of the original story. But Shakespeare uses this paradox to invoke some very interesting thoughts about actors and acting and plays…consider what Theseus says during the play within a play, “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (Act V, Scene 1, Lines 213-14). Shakespeare seems to be arguing that the audience (with their imagination) is part of the magic of creating meaning and beauty out of a play, even if the actors are bad!

• Religious Changes: There is an undercurrent of sadness and nostalgia that runs just below the sparkling and happy surface of this comedy, most evident when it invokes the strange and unreadable world of the Fairies in the enchanted forest. Shakespeare is invoking an image of England that had already largely faded by his time, but of which echoes and whispers still remained (especially in the rural Warwickshire of his childhood). Many forces were creating massive change throughout England, many of which we discussed back in Week One. The play seems to, through its many references to the old festivals, rites of May, Midsummer, fairies, and so forth, recollect the older Medieval (or even more ancient) image of England which the authorities (both of the newly organized “Anglican” Church and of Elizabeth’s secular government) were trying very hard to eradicate. The new Protestant branches of Christianity were closely entwined with other movements in social and political change in Europe, such as the rise of the Middle Class, the beginnings of Capitalism, and the disappearance of transnational church authority. One of the ways this was being implemented was to (kind of ironically for a religion based on Supernatural events) expunge a lot of the “mystical,” the “miraculous,” and the “supernatural” out of Christianity. For example, the Protestant doctrines eliminated the possibility of miracles (they had only happened during Christ’s life and during the ministry of his apostles), the mystical nature of transubstantiation during the communion disappeared, as did transitional states (limbo, purgatory) between earth and heaven/hell. The possibility of ghosts and other spirits was thus removed. One way that the authorities did all this was associate, in sermons, tracts, and so on, various Catholic doctrines with paganism (ironic when one considers how the Catholic Church spent centuries stamping out every vestige of paganism they could find!)

• Replacing The “Queen of Heaven” with Queen Elizabeth: Nowhere was this Protestant project more evident than in their attempts to eradicate the veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is incorrect to state that Catholics worshiped Mary (and the Saints) because veneration of her (and them) was more along the lines of seeing them as intermediaries of sorts between humans and God (priests were another layer of middle men). However, it was very easy for Protestant propaganda to paint it as worship and from there to quickly accuse Catholics of being pagans, that is, people who worshiped multiple gods and goddesses! There was even a grain of historical truth in these accusations because most historians think that the veneration of Mary entered the church gradually during the early centuries of the growth of Christianity in the Roman world as a way of accommodating the fact that most people (most pagans) worshiped female as well as male deities (goddesses), so Mary took on many of the aspects of the Greek and Roman goddesses like Athena, Diana, Artemis, etc. Ironically, the Church authorities in Elizabethan England actually began a similar project wherein Queen Elizabeth (as a secular political authority) was given many of the characteristics that had heretofore been ascribed to Mary! For example, as the Protestants outlawed May Day and other pagan festivals and also eliminated almost all of the Saints’ Days and Feast Days of the Catholic Church, they recognized the need for the people to still have holidays, so they created secular holidays around both Elizabeth’s Birthday and her Accession Day (the Day she had become the Queen), thus replacing religious holidays with secular ones. In paintings, in poems, and in many other art forms, Elizabeth was granted a whole host of symbolic associations with the Classical goddesses (which must have distressed many of the new religious leaders mightily [the Puritans really hated it]); she was especially associated with images of Maiden and Virgin goddesses like Diana the Huntress (which also emphasized that Elizabeth’s virginity was political, to keep England pure and in English rather than foreign control). She was also associated with the Vestal Virgins, an important symbol of Roman imperial authority (see Wikipedia entry). Spenser’s poetry made the ingenious leap of associating her with English symbols of the female divine, which connected her with the entire gamut of the Medieval Romance tradition (King Arthur and all that) as well. Shakespeare uses only whispers of associations of these symbols when he creates the suggestion that Titania is a mirror of Elizabeth and with his images of Hippolyta and the Amazons.