Twenty-one facts (and opinions) about A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I recorded the latest Shakespeare book club, so those of you who cannot make it to the session can watch afterwards. I pressed the wrong button, so it shows the whole screen, rather than just the speaker. I’ll make sure not to do that next time! If you want to watch the video, or join the live session, you can become a paid subscriber for $4 a month. For this piece, I relied on the Arden Introduction, but the Cambridge Introduction is also well-worth your time. As you will see, unlike some of the other “facts” pieces, I have worked in some of my own thoughts too.

For more about this stage in Shakespeare’s career, read this piece.

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1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream marks the arrival of magic in Shakespeare’s work. The fairies presage witches, ghosts, spirits, monsters, vasty deeps, and all manner of the weird. Few things have become so fixedly part of the cultural unconscious than Shakespeare’s vision of fairies who combine inexplicably the joy of innocence and the dangers of evil.

2. This is also the beginning of another truly Shakespearean place: the forest. From here on, pastoral retreat is reshaped from Arden to the island of The Tempest. Deep England, Northrop Frye’s “green world”, animates the Shakespearean imagination very deeply, from the Gloucestershire scenes in Henry IV (so sharp a rendering they are nigh unperformable) to the walking woods of Macbeth.

3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays. There are songs in the play itself, two of which were lost, gone, as Johnson said, after many other things of great value. Music is essential to Shakespeare, not only as a part of the performance, but in the lyricism of his language, both poetry and prose.

4. When giving a lecture about Othello, W.H. Auden once shuffled on the stage in his slippers, put on a recording of Verdi’s Otello, and sat and listened to it. One could do the same with this play and Mendelssohn.

5. But many great musicians have been compelled by this play: Duke Ellington named an album after one of its line; progressive rocker Steve Hackett made a Dream suite; Dream has been a musical comedy (Swinging the Dream, 1939), as well as some thirty-nine operas, including one by Britten (1960); there are also several ballets.

6. Scenes of the Dream have been painted by Reynolds, Fuseli, Blake, and Landseer, among many others. Lewis Carroll counted one-hundred-and-sixty-five fairies in Joseph Paton’s The Quarrel (1849).

   

   Sir Joseph Noel Paton, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, National Galleries of Scotland

7. What all of this shows is that Dream has become perhaps Shakespeare’s most loved play because it is his most exuberant.

8. Exuberance is the power of the dream: innocence, revelry, festivity, gaiety. Sir Toby in Twelfth Night scorns Malvolio: “dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” In the Dream, the scorn becomes manic action. There is no greater power against authority than merry laughter.

9. This is why Dream has been popular in totalitarian countries: a Nazi prison, Hungary, Lebanon. The Arden editor (whose introduction is splendid throughout), says of Peter Brook’s production in Hungary: “It was a moment’s draught of liberty, smuggled in under the aesthetic cover of theatre.”

10. C.L. Barber has a strong conclusion about the nature of dream and reality.

    Theseus, moreover, does not quite have the last word, even in this play: his position is only one stage in a dialectic. Hippolyta will not be reasoned out of her wonder, and answers her new Lord with

    But all the story of the night told over,

    And all their minds transfigur’d so together,

    More witnesseth than fancy’s images

    And grows to something of great constancy;

    But howsoever, strange and admirable.

    (V.i.23-27)

    Did it happen, or didn’t it happen? The doubt is justified by what Shakespeare has shown us. We are not asked to think that fairies exist. But imagination, by presenting these figments, has reached to something, a creative tendency and process. What is this process? Where is it? What shall we call it? It is what happens in the play. It is what happens in marriage. To name it requires many words, words in motion—the words of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

11. That last phrase is apt. Dream is a play of constant motion, not only the back-and-forth emotionality of the lover, but literally, on stage, someone should always be moving. Lovers chasing each other or fighting each other; Fairies darting, hiding, sneaking, pranking.

12. Dream is more than two-thirds verse, about half-and-half rhymed and blank. Ordinary speech, which voices plain statements and simple plot points, rises to some of the loveliest sounding poetry. Lysander, protesting his right against Demetrius is given mellifluous lines. Read these out loud.

    I am, my lord, as well derived as he,
    As well possess'd; my love is more than his;
    My fortunes every way as fairly rank'd,
    If not with vantage, as Demetrius';
    And, which is more than all these boasts can be,
    I am beloved of beauteous Hermia:
    Why should not I then prosecute my right?
    Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
    Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
    And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
    Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
    Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

    See how the rhetorical tropes are used: the anaphora of “as well… as well” gives way to “my love… my fortunes”. The first line, “I am, my lord” is echoed in the sixth: “I am beloved of beauteous Hermia.” There’s a beautiful simplicity in the alliteration of beloved and beauteous. The short vowel sounds of beloved (eh, uh), become the long sounds of beauteous (ooh, ee). The phrase “beauteous Hermia” is a double dactyl (so it is pronounced beau-te-ous Her-mi-a, dum-dee-dee, dum-dee-dee), a lovely lilting sound. The earlier part of the line is iambic (“I am be-loved) which we expect to carry on (the previous lines are all iambic). So the double dactyl catches the ear with a lover’s swoon. Beautiful irregularity builds to a great crescendo in the closing lines, which can be marked, thus,

    Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
    Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
    And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
    Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
    Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

    See the scornful spondee, “his head”, the prosecutorial firmness of the sudden iambs of “and won her soul”, and the way the plangent alliteration of “dotes,
    Devoutly dotes” stops shy of overkill by picking up the “d” sound within “idolatry”. This phrase shows, too, the musicality of the Dream; there is something of sonata formation in the vowels that go from “O”, develop through “eh”, “owe”, “ee”, and back to “O”, “O”. The marvellous caesura of “Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry” maintains the buoyancy of these plangent lines, which is brought to a pitch as the vowel sequence of “owe”, “O”, “O”, leads to the “oh” of idolatry.

    And then in the final line the word “Upon” echoes in “spot” and “inconstant” and “man”. Lysander has double-unstressed syllables, too, in “Hel-en-a” and “i-dol-at-ry”, which he uses to good effect at the ends of his lines to give a dropping, hollow, sense of sadness. He is an effective public speaker, like Othello.

13. But even the prose is poetic. There is a glory to Bottom’s cadences. We begin to see hints of Falstaff in his Mainwaring-esque pomposity.

    I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke: peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

14. Here is Samuel Johnson’s note to the lines:

    Flute. Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.

    Quince. That's all one, you shall play it in a masque; and you may speak as small as you will.

    This passage shews how the want of women on the old stage was supplied. If they had not a young man who could perform the part with a face that might pass for feminine, the character was acted in a mask, which was at that time part of a lady's dress so much in use that it did not give any unusual appearance to the scene: and he that could modulate his voice in a female tone might play the women very successfully. It is observed in Downes's Memoirs of the Playhouse, that one of these counterfeit heroines moved the passions more strongly than the women that have since been brought upon the stage. Some of the catastrophes of the old comedies, which make lovers marry the wrong women, are, by recollection of the common use of masks, brought nearer to probability.

15. Dream is about a play within a play, and that play is about another Shakespeare play: Romeo and Juliet. Pyramus and Thisbe is clearly an echo of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Dream were both written at a similar time, probably 1595. The mechanicals are a mockery of a troupe of actors trying to perform a tragedy very like Romeo and Juliet. What goes wrong in Romeo goes right in Dream. Both are about daughters defying fathers, the weak hand of stern authority, and the temporary madness of young love. Mercutio is obsessed with fairies. A.D. Nuttall says these lines of Lysander are a good summary of Romeo,

    Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
    That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
    And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
    The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
    So quick bright things come to confusion.

    They explicitly echo Juliet:

    I have no joy of this contract to-night:
    It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
    Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
    Ere one can say 'It lightens.'

    For more about Romeo and Juliet, read this.

16. Although we love it, and it has been hugely popular for many years now, Dream seems to have been little performed after the Restoration. And when it was performed, it was as a comic opera, with very little of Shakespeare’s words.

17. It started to be performed with more of the original words in 1840. But later productions still cut many lines.

18. It was common in the nineteenth century for women to play Oberon and Puck.

19. It was in Liverpool in 1880 that the popular practice of children playing fairies began, although it seems quite possible that this happened in the original productions. The fairies’ lines are so simple, so fool-proof, they seemed designed for children.

20. In 1900, the luscious tradition had a moment of glory in the Beerbohm-Tree production, which put a splendid forest on the stage with mechanical song-birds and live rabbits.

21. Peter Brook’s production in 1970 is now famous and inescapable. Its innovation was the set, a large white box. The production was full of gymnastics and circus tricks. Brooks knew that Dream is about theatre, and so his production enabled everything the theatre could do to flourish. He was surely more right than his dismal successors that this is not a play about submerged violence, but theatrical unity. Shakespeare establishes another great theme in this early masterpiece: redemption.