A MIDSUMMERNIGHT'S DREAM
Background and Analysis
By William Harlan @
This is an alternative version of a tape- recorded lecture done about Shakespeare's play as part of the instructional material for English 154 at Diablo Valley College. This document is not a transcription of that taped lecture but does contain the same information. You should read this material in conjunction with the revised Signet Edition of the play. All line references are to that edition. Lines referred to in boldface should be consulted before you read the analysis which follows.
A Midsummer Night's Dream was probably written about 1595 -- 96. Shakespeare had established himself as a successful playwright working with an acting company which called itself The Lord Chamberlain's Men, basically the same group of actors who, with a few exceptions, would work with Shakespeare throughout his career. Many believe the play was written right after Romeo & Juliet because of a passage in the final scene of Dream which seems to mock the death scene in the lovers' tragedy. Dream has been one of Shakespeare's most delightful, popular comedies since it was first written. Like so many of the other comedies it glorifies romantic love while at the same time holding that rarefied emotion up for gentle satire as well. More than any other play Dream shows how the nature of love can make both men and women appear foolish. It shows us that love is often arbitrary and its effects random.
Dream is also a fascinating look into theater. In his plays Shakespeare often spoke of theater and used drama as a kind of metaphor to discuss life. But this play more than any other shows us the amateur theatrical tradition Shakespeare inherited and how that primitive play-acting worked. It must have shown Shakespeare's audience how far the theater of the professional dramatists like Shakespeare had come in a relatively short time. At the same time while we watch a group of bumbling amateurs try to stage a tear-jerking tragedy of romantic love, we can see Shakespeare gently poking fun at the excesses of his own medium.
Shakespeare brings together elements from
different sources to construct his play. The amateur thespians are based
on the working class people of Shakespeare's London with craftsmen like weavers
and tailors and carpenters represented by a group called in the play the "rude
[uncultured] mechanicals [people who work with their hands]." The lovers
are based on the aristocratic elite who frequented London. Then the play is set in ancient
One of the unusual aspects of the play is that Shakespeare has four different story lines, based on the different source material for the characters, and representing four different levels of society. At the very top we have Oberon, King of the Fairies, and his wife, Titania, Queen of the Fairies, who rule the natural world and the spirits who inhabit that world. These characters are very powerful; for example, in the play we learn they control the climate. They are invisible to the human world, most of the time, but their power is such that they can make mortals fall in love or out of love whenever they wish. At the next level we have the human royalty, Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. They rule the human world and make life-and-death decisions for the people under their control even while they engage in a formal courtship. Below them we have the human lovers, young gentlemen and ladies of the upper class for whom love is everything. Finally we have the working class men, who decide to put on a little theater production of a romantic tragedy, "Pyramus and Thisby." They are rank amateurs, but what they lack in ability, they make up for in enthusiasm. These four different groups each follow their own story lines, and when the plots become intermixed, the results are both incongruous and wonderfully funny.
Each of these four stories is centered on a troubled relationship. Oberon and Titania are married but separated and engaged in a bitter custody battle. Theseus and Hippolyta are in a courtship but under strained circumstances. Lysander and Demetrius, Hermia and Helena fall in love, fall out of love; they are the ping pong balls in the great game of love. Mirroring the troubles of the others, the play the "rude mechanicals" choose to perform is about the ultimate troubled relationship where the lovers end up killing themselves through misunderstanding, a kind of parody of Romeo & Juliet.
Act I, Scene 1
The play opens with a hero of Greek mythology, Theseus, Duke of Athens, just returned from a military victory. He has defeated the Amazon warriors and captured their queen, Hippolyta. Now he proposes to marry her as a political act which will bring the Amazons under his total control. He tells his bride-to-be, "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword,/ And won thy love, doing thee injuries" [16 -- 17]. Warfare might not be the best context in which to win a woman's love. It's an unusual prisoner exchange arrangement: she lost so she has to marry him. But there's no guarantee that she will love him. As you watch the play performed see if you can spot signs of tension in this relationship. How do the problems of the lovers, Theseus' subjects, help to highlight possible anxieties in the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta?
Theseus complains that they have to wait for the marriage ceremony until there is a new moon in four days. Then an Athenian nobleman, Egeus, enters and demands that Theseus use the power of the state to force his daughter, Hermia, to marry the man that he has selected for her, Demetrius. Egeus is a stereotypical Elizabethan father, a man used to running every aspect of his family's lives, especially his daughter, whom he sees as property. We saw just such a character in the figure of "Old Capulet," Juliet's father in Romeo and Juliet. As with Capulet, Egeus is enraged because his daughter has rejected his choice of man for her to marry, and he demands that Theseus intervene. Hermia has had the audacity to fall in love with Lysander, someone her father does not approve of. In the first passage of the play, on what does Egeus blame his daughter's behavior? Secondly, why does he try so hard to control her? Finally, what are the choices Egeus offers his daughter. [Act I, scene 1, line 1 -- 57]
It's easy to see how Hippolyta might well watch to see how her future husband, Theseus, handles the issue of Hermia's love life. If Hermia is simply forced against her will to obey some man, Hippolyta may have a glimpse into her own future. Egeus is almost laughable in his approach to Hermia's resistance. First, he assumes she could not have fallen in love with someone he disapproves of, so he charges Lysander with having bewitched her. (We might say he "brainwashed" her.) He has given her rhymes, interchanged love tokens with her and even sung at her window, "With feigning voice, verses of feigning love,"[ 30] feigning here meaning phony. He has "stolen the impression of her fantasy," or warped her mind, with "bracelets of his hair." Well into the 19th Century men would give their lady loves such bracelets -- they're a great gift idea, personal and inexpensive! In addition, he's used, among other things, nosegays (flowers), sweetmeats (candies) and other trifles. You can hear some contemporary father saying, "He must have given her drugs -- that's it!" If you've read the play, you know that Hermia is the most fiercely independent character in the whole play. The idea that someone could have "brainwashed" her is ridiculous.
Hermia probably inherited her determination from her father. He is absolute in his approach to controlling his daughter. It's almost as if his control is his identity. Either she marries Demetrius or she must be executed -- that's it! This dire situation is often found in Shakespeare's comedies where the threat of violence helps set up or intensify the humor. Here we have one of Shakespeare's most delightful and ethereal comedies, and within the first 25 lines we have a death threat hanging over one of the characters!
Lysander and Demetrius are introduced by name here, and we are told they are equal in name and honor. In fact as the play progresses we will find that they are so equal, they are almost interchangeable. When the scene moves out into the forest and the boys are bewitched into falling in love first with one girl and then the other, they literally do become interchangeable.
In the next sequence notice how Theseus tries to arbitrate the dispute between Egeus and Hermia. Notice how he modifies Egeus' either/or choice of marriage or death. Why might Theseus have offered a third option to Hermia? [I, 1, lines 58 -- 127]
How does Theseus change Egeus' choices for his daughter? He adds a third option -- to become a nun for the rest of her life. As he says at line 70,
You can endure the livery of a nun,
For aye [ever] to be in shady cloister mewed [imprisoned],
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
This rather poetic passage does remind us that Diana, goddess of the moon, was also associated with chastity for the ancient Greeks. Why does Theseus offer this third choice? One explanation is that Theseus uses the possibility of becoming a nun as a humane option to help Hermia escape the dilemma of death or dishonor. He's a decent ruler, charged with upholding the law that makes daughters subject to their fathers' wills, and this lets him avoid having to order the death of a young woman. The other consideration is what Hippolyta thinks of all this. Here is her future husband using his power to force a young woman to marry against her will. How does Hippolyta react to all this? We have one possible hint in the text, near the end of the passage we just examined, where Theseus says at line 122, "Come, my Hippolyta. What cheer my love?"
One possible interpretation of this line is "Cheer up, don't be so sad," as if she were reacting to what she had just seen.
At the beginning of this passage we get an indication of how extraordinarily independent Hermia is. At line 58 she speaks for the first time with an apology:
I do entreat your grace to pardon me.
I know not by what power I am made bold,
Nor how it may concern my modesty,
In such a presence here to plead my thoughts;
Young Elizabethan ladies were supposed to be seen, not heard, especially in a public setting before someone like the ruler. But Hermia pipes right up, bold as life and with no concern for her modesty. She asks that her options to be laid out for her. Despite living in a patriarchal society, Hermia never allows herself to be stifled by a man. When Theseus lays out the three choices she has and urges her to marry Demetrius, she refuses to yield her virginity to someone "My soul consents not to give sovereignty" [line 82].
There's a rather nice zinger at line 93 where Lysander says, "You have her father's love, Demetrius;/Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him." Then we learn at line 106 from Lysander that
Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head, [I'll force him to admit]
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.
Demetrius has wooed and won the love of another young woman, Helena. ("Made love" here is not used in the physical sense but refers to courtship.) Helena has reciprocated Demetrius' love to the point that she "dotes" on him. ("Dotes" used three times to signal the power of her love, as we will see.) So Demetrius, having dumped one girl for another, does not come off well. Theseus acknowledges this when he says at line 111 -- 112 that he had meant to speak with Demetrius about his actions. Nevertheless, Demetrius is entitled to Hermia, and Theseus takes him, Egeus and Hippolyta out of the room, almost as if he were giving Lysander and Hermia a chance to say good-bye.
In the next passage Lysander and Hermia will catalogue the possible obstacles to a successful love affair. At one level we can view this as a couple of soppy kids romanticizing their forced separation. At another level the difficulties confronting lovers that they describe are all too real; when the average life expectancy was 36 years, death can play havoc with your love life. Then after they list their problems, Lysander urges Hermia to elope with him. Look at the inducements he offers to get her to run off with him. (As we saw in Romeo and Juliet the idea of a young gentlewoman running away from her extended family was a radical step.) [I, 1, lines 128 -- 179]
At the beginning of the passage Lysander observes, "Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,/ Could ever hear by tale or history,/ The course of true love never did run smooth" [133 -- 135]. The last part of that quotation is just one of the hundreds of lines from Shakespeare that have entered into the general culture, so that people who have never heard of the playwright use his description of love.
The obstacles that Lysander reminds Hermia of include some that are universal and some that are unique to the Elizabethan Age. At line 135 we have differences in blood, by which Lysander means social class; commoners falling for blue bloods. We'll see this dynamic especially in Twelfth Night. Then we have differences in age; old people falling for young or vice versa. Next Lysander mentions love frustrated because "it stood upon the choice of friends" [139]. What he is referring to here is the idea of having your loved one chosen for you, what has happened to Hermia. She responds bitterly to this situation at line 140: "O hell! To choose love by another's eyes!" Lysander then lists the other obstacles of war, death or sickness which "lay siege" to love, a particularly military passage. Finally in a very poetic passage at line 143 Lysander describes how fleeting, or as he calls it "momentany" [sic], love can be:
Making it [love] momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied [dark as in a coal mine] night,
That, in a spleen [instant of passion], unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man has power to say, "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
We've all had that experience of observing a sudden flash of lightning in the night which instantly illuminates everything and then is gone. That is how quickly love seizes us and is gone, as it is, sadly, with all "bright things." This is just one of a number of examples of very powerful poetic imagery which Shakespeare uses in this play.
Hermia says at line 150 that being in love means being frustrated and struggling against overwhelming odds. She seems destined to watching tear-jerking movies and crying for the rest of her life. Lysander agrees that this is the lot of all lovers, but he proposes they act and take charge of their own destinies by eloping. Now Lysander's proposal is very interesting. He does not begin by telling her how much he loves her or how much he longs to become a husband and a father. No, he begins by describing his financial prospects in a rather circuitous way. He has an aunt who is a "widow" (no husband to inherit the estate) and a "dowager" (well along in years) who has a large "revenue" (income). Furthermore, she has "no child" (no other heirs) and she "respects" (treats) him as a son. Plus, she lives out of the legal jurisdiction of Athens, so they can marry there. What's interesting here is that even though these two kids are completely in love with each other, Lysander feels he has to lay out the potential of his future earning power to get his girlfriend to run off with him. For the Elizabethans marriage was as much about money and social rank as it was about love.
Hermia's response to his offer reveals a certain ambivalence about trusting him enough to turn herself over to him. He has asked her to meet him the next night out in the woods to run off. At line 170 she swears by "Cupid's strongest bow" and "his best arrows." The ancient Greeks and Romans, who created the mythological figure of Cupid, and the Elizabethans, who continued to use him to describe the actions of lovers, did not see this symbol of love simply as a cuddly little baby with a bow and arrow. Cupid was portrayed as a child to emphasize the idea that love was controlled by something that was irrational. Furthermore, whom you fell in love with was completely arbitrary, like a blindfolded kid shooting arrows at random. (See Helena's description of Cupid at lines 234 -- 241.) Swearing by Cupid is a way of reminding Lysander that trusting love can be risky. At line 171 she swears by the doves of Venus. Venus was the goddess of love, but it was the kind of passionate lust that could disappear as quickly as it grabbed you. The really revealing aspect of Hermia's ambivalence is found in the reminder of the "Carthage queen," Dido, who trusted the vows of love which Aeneas, the "false Troyan," gave her before he took advantage of her and sailed off, causing her to kill herself. To make it abundantly clear that she will have her eye on Lysander, she sums up at line 175:
By all the vows that ever men have broke,
In number more than ever women spoke,
In that same place thou hast appointed me,
Tomorrow truly will I come with thee.
Men are so untrustworthy that they have broken more promises than women have ever asked them to swear! We'll see how this suspicious nature of Hermia's will come into play once they get out in the woods.
In the next passage Helena, Demetrius' spurned ex-girlfriend, comes in. In this scene where people's reaction to love is so absolute and extreme, Helena is no exception. She could take up a full hour on the "Doctor Phil" show. [I, 1, lines 180 -- 251]
Helena's reaction to losing Demetrius' love is to hate herself. She asks for an extreme makeover so that she will resemble Hermia exactly. The reason her boyfriend has dumped her must be that Hermia's eyes are magnets ("lodestones"), her voice more alluring than the lark in spring. She wishes she could catch Hermia's looks, like an illness. In her frenzy of self-loathing she says she would give all the world, except Demetrius, to be turned into Hermia. When Hermia denies trying to entice Demetrius, swears she hates him, the spurned lover concludes that such rejection must be the source of Hermia's power over him. Earlier I made the point that the two men are essentially interchangeable; the two women, despite the similarity in their names, are poles apart. Despite being best of friends, they could not be more different in personalities. To comfort her friend Hermia now tells Helena about the elopement, reassuring her that there will be no more competition for Demetrius' love. (You have to wonder how Lysander feels about having their secret plan revealed. Nevertheless, he goes along and hopes Helena can regain Demetrius' love once they have left the scene.)
How does Helena react to the news of her rival's imminent departure? Not in a way we might expect! Around line 226 she continues in her complaint about Hermia's beauty, pointing out the injustice that other people say she is as attractive as Hermia, but that doesn't matter if Demetrius doesn't agree. She bewails the power of love to affect our perceptions at line 232: "Things base and vile, holding no quantity [beauty],/ Love can transpose to form and dignity." Helena blames the irrational power of love, embodied in the form of Cupid we had discussed earlier:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste:
Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
As waggish boys in game themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjured everywhere. [234 -- 241]
Intellectually Helena understands how love warps our judgments and makes us do crazy things. And yet she goes right ahead and does an insane thing herself. At line 246 she decides to tell Demetrius about the elopement of Hermia and Lysander! What is she thinking? Her competition is leaving town, she only has to wait for her boyfriend to return to his senses, but she blows her advantage. It is a mark of Helena's lack of self-esteem that she does this simply to get on Demetrius' good side so he will let her go with him when he goes out to the woods to stop Hermia and Lysander. She is a girl badly in need of professional help.
Act I, Scene 2
We now shift from the level of royalty and the upper-class lovers to the world of the working folks, the "rude mechanicals," as they are called in the play. These six men all work with their hands, and their names are related to their trades: Quince is a carpenter who uses blocks or quinces in building; Bottom is a weaver, an important part of whose loom is called a bottom; Snug is a joiner, also in construction, whose job was to make sure woodwork was tight or snug; Flute repaired bellows such as the one on the church organ which made a fluted sound; Snout is a tinker who repaired the snouts or spouts on kettles; Starveling is a tailor, stereotypically thin, probably because their customers often skipped out on their bills. Although they are mocked in the play for their ignorance, they do have some knowledge and can read. Peter Quince has brought them together as an amateur theater group to perform a play on the occasion of Theseus marriage. They are doing this not just as a civic duty but also because such performances often earned the people involved a royal reward, just as Shakespeare had probably received from Queen Elizabeth and later King James. Quince is the brains of the outfit and has written a play based on the ancient Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisby. Bottom is the principal actor of the bunch and has done enough roles to have fallen in love with the sound of his own voice; he is the model for all the ham actors in theater history. As is often the case in theatrical productions, there is tension and conflict just under the surface. Where in this scene do you sense a struggle among the participants? [Act 1, scene 2]
This is one of my favorite scenes in all of Shakespeare, in large part because of Bottom. In his enthusiasm and bounding self-confidence that he can play all the parts, Bottom is my hero. In the 1960's the British actor Peter Sellers starred in a number of film comedies where he played multiple parts, but I'm sure on his best day he could not have equaled the eagerness of Bottom.
There are a number of conflicts among the actors just below the surface. While there is general approval of the idea of staging the play, some potential actors are not sure they're up to the task. The major conflict is the fight over who is going to run the company. Peter Quince has written the play and gathered the group together, but it is not at all clear that he will be able to keep Bottom from taking over as the boss. Let's look at the scene in detail to discover this struggle for artistic control. In most productions of this play the actors speak in a broad British working class accent, as opposed to the educated, "university" accent of the upper-class lovers. In the text we can spot this social distinction by the fact that characters often misspeak themselves, using the wrong word, such as at line 2 where Bottom tells Quince to call the names of the actors "generally," when what he means is "individually, man by man." Any word of two syllables or more may be misused at any time.
Throughout the scene Bottom tells Quince he's doing something wrong, as at line 8, when he tells the playwright to first explain what the play is about and then read the names of the actors. Of course, Bottom had told Quince back at line 2 to do a roll call of the actors first. Quince announces the title of the play at line 11: "The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe." No, that is not a misprint; Quince also has trouble with big words and apparently thinks "comedy" means anything on stage. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe was an ancient Greek story of misunderstanding and mutual suicide by lovers who sound a lot like Romeo and Juliet.
Naturally Bottom is the first actor called, and he assures everyone he knows the play, although it has never been performed, having just been written. "A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry" [14 -- 15]. Yes, it must have been a laugh riot when the two lovers kill themselves! He asks Quince what part he will play, and Quince tells him "Pyramus," which must have been a major role since it's mentioned in the title, and he has said he knows the play, and yet Bottom asks at line 23, "What is Pyramus? A lover, or a tyrant?" We all know someone like Bottom who tells us he knows everything but when it comes down to it, knows hardly anything.
Bottom's question also tells us something about the plays that were performed in the years before Shakespeare helped revolutionize the English theater: there wasn't much variety. You were either a lover and got to have really romantic scenes and suffer greatly. Or you were a tyrant and got to rant and threaten. In either case there was a good chance you got to die on stage. Since before Shakespeare's time right down to the present there is nothing actors like better than dying on stage. It gives them a chance to play on the emotions of the audience. Bottom is really turned on when he's told the part is "A lover who kills himself, most gallant, for love" [24].
Bottom sees the potential of Pyramus' role. At line 25 he anticipates the way he will play the part:
That will ask some tears in the true performing of it: if I do it, let the
audience look to their eyes. I will move storms, I will condole in some
measure. To the rest: yet my chief humor is for a tyrant. I could play
Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.
This is very exciting, but you'll notice at line 27 there's a slight wrinkle: "if I do it." He hasn't agreed to the role. As the chief actor in the company (remember, he was the first one called) he's got some leverage. He assures his fellow actors that he "will move storms" and will "condole in some measure." Does it appear to you that he understands the meaning of "condole"? No wonder there's a problem: it's got two syllables. Bottom gives Quince permission to assign the rest of the roles, but before the guy who is supposed to be in charge can say anything, Bottom goes on to tell everyone that what he's best at is playing a tyrant. He is especially good at playing Hercules, a part that had lots of ranting. Except Bottom doesn't say "Hercules" but "Ercles," a Cockney pronunciation which drops the initial "h" sound, the way a young Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins would have spoken the word. Despite setting the play supposedly in ancient Greece, Shakespeare wants his audience to see Bottom and his buddies as working class blokes from the East End of London, the traditional home of people called "Cockneys."
Now Hercules was one of the most frequent heroes of those early amateur dramas, but by far the most popular tyrant figure was Herod, the evil king in the New Testament who ordered all the babies in Bethlehem slaughtered to try and eliminate the baby Jesus. And one of the great scenes in those early tyrant dramas was the scene where Herod's soldiers kill the babies off stage. The screams of the victims and their mothers were apparently a real crowd pleaser, and to supply the special effects those early theater technicians took cats and made them howl and scream. If you really wanted to get maximum effect, you tore the cats' tails off! That's what Bottom is talking about when he mentions "a part to tear a cat in." The things people had to do before computer enhancement!
To prove his skill as a fine dramatic actor Bottom gives his friends a speech from a previous role he played. It's a wonderful sounding speech at line 32, full of rolling consonants and sonorous vowels, but is absolutely nonsense. It is devoid of meaning, plus it's got a mispronunciation:
The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates:
And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far,
And make and mar
The foolish Fates.
"Phibbus" is supposed to be "Phoebus," the Greek god whose "car" or chariot was the sun. Not only does Bottom rattle off these speeches to impress people, but he's his own best critic. At line 40 he tells us, "This was lofty," in case we missed its significance and adds, "This is Ercles' vein, a tyrant's vein. A lover is more condoling." We can only guess at what Bottom thinks "condoling" means.
Besides having trouble with words of more than one syllable, the "rude mechanicals" have trouble using words and phrases that have a sexual connotation. They will use a number of suggestive words without realizing they have a double meaning. The unawareness of the characters only adds to the humor of the situation. At line 10 Bottom urges Quince to "grow to a point." Anything in a Shakespearean comedy which refers to "point," "hard" or "erect" can be and probably was taken as a reference to a male erection. At line 45 when Quince tells Flute he must "take Thisby on you," we might think it just means Flute has to play that role, but the dirty-minded audience members in Shakespeare's day would hoot, "Oh, Thisby's going to be on top!" These cheap sexual jokes must have been very popular among theater patrons since Shakespeare uses them so often in the plays.
Flute objects to playing the part of a girl, arguing that he has the beginnings of a beard. Quince assures him it will be all right since Thisby will wear a mask. Now actors in classical Greek dramas had worn special theatrical masks, but Quince's reference here is undoubtedly to the kinds of masks that young Elizabethan women wore when they went outside to keep their complexions milky white. Remember the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet had worn a mask when she went out on her mission to Romeo and wanted to appear as the grand lady. With the news that Thisby will wear a mask, Bottom immediately wants to play Thisby's part as well and shows Quince at line 53 how he can speak "in a monstrous little voice," like a girl. It's not clear how Bottom could do both parts live on stage without the help of a split screen, but he's willing to try it. If Quince is not careful Bottom will be playing all the parts and running the whole production.
The other roles are parceled out, including Snug, the joiner, playing the part of the Lion. Snug must be new to the theater and a little slow, because he asks for the script of the lion's part so he can memorize it. There were a limited number of scripts available to the actors, and it is unlikely that someone playing the part of a lion that simply has to roar would be given his own script. Naturally Bottom wants to play that part as well, offering to roar so loudly and so well the Duke would command, "Let him roar again" [74]. Here's another insight into how plays were performed in these early days; apparently it was not unusual for some important person in the audience to interrupt the flow of the play and order an actor to do a line or a roar again because he liked the way the actor did it. Quince tells Bottom he can't play the Lion because if he roared "too terribly, you would fright the Duchess and the ladies, that they would shriek; and that were enough to hang us all" [75 -- 77]. Some years before this play was written an ambitious nobleman entertaining Queen Elizabeth had staged a masque, a kind of musical allegory popular with the nobility, which often used special effects. This particular production featured a goddess riding in a chariot drawn by a lion, and the nobleman decided to use a real lion. (There were lions kept in captivity at the Tower of London.) When the members of the court realized it was a real lion, there was panic as courtiers threw themselves in front of the queen to protect her from attack. Soon after a law was enacted forbidding the use of real lions in any production. Hence, the concern that Bottom's realistic roaring would result in all of the actors being hanged. Bottom is not deterred, while he admits that frightened ladies "would have no more discretion but to hang us" [80 -- 81]. He offers, at line 81, to "aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. I will roar you an 'twere any nightingale," undoubtedly giving them an example of his "aggravated" voice. (Obviously he means "moderated" or softened.)
Struggling to keep Bottom from taking over the whole play, Quince tells him he can only play the part of Pyramus. He offers added inducement by describing the character as "a sweet-faced man [handsome]; a proper man as you shall see in a summer's day; a most lovely gentlemanlike man." The prospect of a working-class bloke getting to play a member of the elite of that society, a "gentleman," seems to convince Bottom, and he finally agrees at line 90. What kind of an actor is Bottom? What's the first question he asks when he takes on a role? "What's my motivation? Do I have any love scenes? How many lines do I have?" No, Bottom's first question at line 90 is "What beard were I best to play it in?" Bottom loves putting on different beards, and he apparently has a number of different ones to choose from: "straw-colored," "orange-tawny," "purple-in-grain" or a bright yellow beard he describes at line 95 as "your French-crown-color beard." Now a "French crown" was a gold coin in circulation throughout England, so this is a pretty good description of the color. Peter Quince turns this information into an obscure joke that reveals some of the social tensions of the time. The number one health problem of the age was the spread of syphilis, which had appeared in Europe about 100 years earlier. The people understood that the disease spread by sexual contact, and they blamed its introduction on foreigners. The Italians blamed the Spanish, the French the Italians, and the English blamed the French and called syphilis "the French disease." Now in the later stages of the disease the victim would often lose his or her hair. So when Quince at line 97 says, "Some of your French crowns {heads] have no hair at all, and then you will play barefaced," he is evoking the idea that with the French disease there may be no hair, hence no beard and therefore Bottom would perform in bare-face. This is called going a long way for a short joke.
As the scene winds down Quince announces that they will go out into the woods outside of town to rehearse since otherwise their competitors may spy on them and figure out what they are doing and how. He will furnish the "properties" or "props" they will need. As the nominal leader of the group, he has the final lines of the scene at line 106: "I pray you, fail me not." But Bottom, as the man seeking control, is determined to get in the last word, and he gives the group a little pep talk at line 107: "We will meet; and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains: be perfit [perfect]: adieu." Once again, we can only imagine what Bottom thinks "obscenely" means; it's another of those unwitting sexual reference. Quince is not about to let Bottom seize control by getting the last word, so he adds at line 110: "At the Duke's Oak we meet" repeating his previous directions. Bottom does get the last word in with his admonition at line 111: "Enough: hold or cut bowstrings," which is about like saying, "Fish or cut bait." Who will be the leader of Peter Quince's company?
Act II, Scene 1
This scene introduces us to the fourth social level, the fairy world. In Shakespeare's time belief in fairies was widespread, so the fairies were played by regular actors wearing some costume that suggested magical qualities. Today we are much more ambivalent about supernatural creatures who live in the forest. The contemporary tradition has been that to play the fairies you get every little kid studying ballet in the immediate area and parade them on stage so that the audience says, "Ah, how cute!" and all the grandparents come to see the show. I once spoke to a group of second graders who were getting ready to perform selected scenes for their parents. They had no interest in any of what I called the major characters; they just wanted to know what I could tell them about the fairies. In fact among these kids the most popular character was Peaseblossom! The fairies are a real challenge because the tendency is to dismiss the fairies as fluff or to laugh at them for the wrong reasons. Puck is a little easier to handle; he's obviously related to the fairies, but he's a fairy with attitude. He's the number one bad boy. I'm sure someone has already done Puck on stage as a gangsta rapper. As you read this scene see if you can identify the motive for Puck's evildoing. How bad is he? The major piece of information here is the separation and estrangement between Oberon and Titania. Each has come to the woods outside Athens because of their connection with the bride or groom. Oberon has championed Hippolyta in the past; Titania has supported Theseus. This is just like a couple going through a messy divorce who run into each other at the wedding of friends and start the fight all over again. The conflict centers on a custody battle over a little human boy, a changeling which was a human kidnapped by the fairies. [Act II, scene 1]
In the opening verse we have a description of the function of a nameless fairy who serves Titania. We see the close connection between the fairy world and nature, as the fairy has been sent out to "seek some dewdrops here,/ And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear" [14 -- 15]. Shakespeare has the fairy use comparisons which would make sense to an audience of Londoners. We're told at line 10: "The cowslips tall her pensioners [attendants] be;/ In their gold coats spots you see." And in the royal processions the attendants, or people who received pensions, of Queen Elizabeth did indeed wear gold coats.
The fairy has run into Puck, and through the two of them we learn about the marital problems. The only explanation for why Oberon wants the changeling is at line 25 that he wants the kid to be part of his gang. Compare that with Titania's reasons for holding on to the child, which we'll get later in the scene. We're warned that there will be fireworks if the couple meet each other, so much so that all the fairies will, at line 31, "Creep into acorn cups and hide them there."
The idea of the fairies in general and the specific character of Puck were common among the members of Shakespeare's audience, many of whom had grown up in the country. Puck is referred to as "Robin Goodfellow" at line 34 and "Hobgoblin" at line 40, both traditional names for a mischievous spirit found in many different cultures throughout Europe. Puck is accused of frightening villages maidens (line 35), charming the milk to keep it from turning into butter in the churn (line 37) or preventing the malt from fermenting into ale (line 38). Finally he is the spirit that misleads people in the dark (line 39). These are all common confusions or frustrations of rural village life. Sometimes, seemingly without explanation, milk will not turn into butter (we know now it is because of low butterfat content) and fermentation won't take place (due to chemical factors). And we've all had the experience of becoming disoriented in the dark when we're sure we know where we're going. We can understand how simple country people trying to make sense of these apparent mysteries would come up with the idea of a spirit that takes delight in our mishaps. But the key here is that Puck is not malicious or evil. He's like a mischievous kid who doesn't care about human priorities. Certainly Puck delights in his tricks and delusions which he elaborates in his speech lines 42 -- 56. He identifies his chief job as a jester to amuse Oberon, and he describes three comic devices in detail. First, he will neigh like a young female horse in heat in order to trick an old male horse into appearing foolish. Second, he will disguise himself as a roasted crab apple in the bowl of hot mulled wine being drunk by an old lady (called a "gossip"). Puck will bob against her lips and make her spill the wine down her chin to everyone's amusement. Sometimes he will imitate a small stool and wait until an old lady is telling a serious story before slipping out from under her so she falls and cries out in exasperation. Puck's sense of humor obviously veers toward the Three Stooges.
In the following passage Oberon and Titania meet and accuse each other of infidelities. What has been the effect of their marital problems upon the weather and why? [II, 1, lines 60 -- 117]
In creating the characters of Oberon and Titania, Shakespeare has provided details about their life together. After a tense meeting the estranged couple start to trade recriminations. Titania accuses Oberon of being there because he is in love with Hippolyta, as if he were the shepherd Corin who traditionally flirted with the shepherdess Phillida. Now he wants to bless her marriage to Theseus. For his part Oberon accuses his wife of being in love with Theseus and having helped him double-cross several human women. That's why she is here outside Athens. Now it is not made clear whether either fairy has actually made physical love to the humans they lusted after.
From line 81 -- 117 Titania now describes how their problems have affected the weather in the area. The summer has been unnaturally rainy, so that agriculture has been disrupted: the oxen and farmers have been unable to plow the fields; the grain has rotted before it could sprout; the flocks of sheep have succumbed to diseases. At line 98 Shakespeare gives us a insightful poetic description of a village drenched and flooded: "The nine-men morris is filled up with mud;/ And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,/ For the lack of tread, are indistinguishable." In the center of each village was an open area called the "commons," which was used for such things as folk-dancing, the favorite being the morris dance designed for nine men. In the summer the commons were normally heavily used and hence bare. Now they are full of mud. The footpaths around the village are not in use because of the rain and are still covered with grass. Titania
explains how the seasons have been reversed and the cycles of life have been upset. At line 115 she identifies the reason: "And this same progeny of evils come/ From our debate, from our dissension;/ We are their parents and original." The fact that the domestic dispute between this couple disrupts the weather tells us how much power they wield over the natural world.
In the next passage we learn about the specific reasons for the fight. What do you make of the arguments put forward by each of them? [II, 1, lines 118 -- 187]
Theseus simply says he wants the "changeling boy" to be his "henchman" [121]. On the other hand, Titania has a lengthy and moving rationale for her determination to raise the boy, lines 121 -- 127:
Set your heart at rest.
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a vot'ress of my order,
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossiped by my side,
And sat with me by Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking th' embarked traders on the flood;
Titania makes it clear no amount of wealth will make her change her mind about keeping the boy. No wonder! The boy's mother was a "vot'ress" or priestess. So we know Titania is worshipped as a goddess and has a cult, at least in India. Titania had a close personal relationship with this human and shared intimate thoughts with her, "gossiped," at night on the beach watching the trading ships sailing away on the tide. European trade with India was a relatively new and exotic thing.
Titania now develops a powerful comparison between her human friend and the sailing ships between lines 128 -- 137:
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following -- her womb, then rich with my young squire --
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.
This extended metaphor between the mother and a sailing ship is a conceit, a detailed comparison between two very different things with several points of likeness. The woman "conceived" a child and grew big-bellied, just as the sails of the ship did. A man impregnated the woman to cause her pregnancy as the "wanton" [sexy] wind filled the sails. She moved smoothly on the land as the ship did on the water, and she brought things, "trifles," to Titania, just as the ships brought merchandise when they returned from a voyage. Just as the ships carried treasure in their holds, so she carried the wealth of her child. But she was a mortal and died in childbirth, as commonly happened in Shakespeare's time. There is this strong personal bond between Titania and the boy's mother which makes her commitment to raise him all the more powerful. However, this is a patriarchal society, even among the fairies, and she must eventually give in to her husband. Nevertheless, Shakespeare seems to have given Titania the compelling argument in the dispute and the imaginative language to express it.
Oberon is not impressed by Titania's argument or her language. All he sees is that his wife has disobeyed her lord and master. He determines that he will be revenged on her.
He asks Puck about a particular event in the past, poetically described at line 148:
Thou rememb'rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea maid's music.
We see here a reminder of the power of music, "harmonious breath," for the Elizabethans. The harmony of music evoked a sense of order and peace, even at the cosmic level of stars. Later in the play Oberon will evoke this power of music to represent harmony at the personal level when he and Titania reconcile.
On that occasion Oberon, because of his divine power, was able to witness Cupid shooting a love shaft "At a fair vestal throned by the west," which missed and hit a small white flower, making it purple now and a powerful love potion. Your notes tell you that the "fair vestal" [virgin] who escapes Cupid's arrow and goes on "In maiden meditation, fancy free" is probably a reference to Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, who had just turned down a marriage proposal from a French duke before this play was written. Much of the literature of this time contains such passing tributes to the queen. It also serves the purpose of connecting the magical events of the play with the reality of the time in which the play was written. Oberon explains that the juice of the flower, called "love-in-idleness," can cause the person who has it put in his or her eyes fall in love with the first creature, regardless of how horrible, that comes along. He sends Puck for the flower, and his fairy henchman says he will "put a girdle round about the earth/ In forty minutes." This undoubtedly struck Shakespeare's audience as evidence of the magic power Puck possessed; it's ironic that 40 minutes is about the time it takes for an orbiting spacecraft to circle the globe nowadays. What we have throughout this sequence is the spectacle of these powerful supernatural beings using the best of their magical tricks to act like a couple from a TV sitcom. Oberon is like Desi on the old "I Love Lucy" show trying to teach his wife an object lesson. Both these god-like creatures end up looking foolish and/or abusive because of love.
In the next sequence Oberon overhears the argument between Demetrius and Helena and decides to try and help her out. As we read the exchange between Demetrius and Helena,
think of yourself as a self-help therapist like Dr. Phil. What would he say to Helena about her behavior? [II, 1, line 188 -- 268]
Helena is chasing after Demetrius, dogging his footsteps. Obviously she cannot take rejection and is shown as emotionally needy, demanding that Demetrius return her love for him. I'm sure Dr. Phil, after some colorful country comparisons, would urge her to get professional help. Her groveling is almost embarrassing at line 203:
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love --
And yet a place of high respect with me --
Than to be used as you use your dog.?
It's not a healthy relationship!
Demetrius is increasingly hostile to this girl he can't shake. At line 201 he tells her in plainest terms: "I do not nor I cannot love you." When that doesn't work at line 212 he tells her he is sick when he looks at her. She responds that she is sick when she cannot look at him. At 217 following he is threatening, suggesting that she has made a mistake following him out in the woods where he might well attack her and forcibly take her virginity. A young gentlewoman's virginity was an extremely important proof of her chastity, the most valuable thing she had. Helena is undeterred and assures him that his virtue will not let him take advantage of her. At line 227 he threatens to run off and leave her to the mercy of wild beasts, and she complains that the wildest beast doesn't have as hard a heart as Demetrius. The normal pattern is that the man pursues the woman, but he is forcing her to do the pursuit, which is hardly the thing a gentleman is supposed to do. Demetrius' final threat at line 237 is that he will do her mischief in the wood, to which she responds, "Ay, in the temple, in the town, the fields,/ You do me mischief."
Oberon observing all this feels sorry for Helena and vows that he will help her win Demetrius' love. Perhaps, he realizes she, like himself, suffers from rejection. Maybe he is just being nice. When Puck returns with the magic flower he orders his henchman to find the sweet Athenian lady and anoint the eyes of the disdainful youth she is chasing so that he will fall in love with her. Out of this laudable effort to correct love's inequity all the subsequent problems of the play will flow. Notice Oberon's poetic description of Titania's bower at line 249:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
Again the fairies are associated with specific flowers and hidden nooks in the forest. We also get some idea of the actual size of the fairies, being small enough to wear the cast off skin of a snake. Titania's bower, the hidden place where the queen sleeps, will be used as a location in much of the next two acts.
Act Two, Scene 2
The next scene opens with Titania preparing for bed and having the fairies sing a song to protect her from the evil things that roam around in the dark. How is the language different here from the language used elsewhere in the play? This passage is followed by the arrival of the eloping couple Lysander and Hermia. What's the tension that arises between the lovers? [II, 2, lines 1 -- 65]
Shakespeare uses a variety of forms of language in the play up to this point. In much of the first scene he uses the blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter associated with the upper class characters. In the second scene with Bottom and the boys he uses prose, ordinary language with no poetic meter. Much of what the fairies speak, such as the opening passage of II, 1, is in rhymed couplets, the iambic pentameter of blank verse, but with every two lines linked by end rhyme. The rhyme lends a sense of magic to what the fairies say. Now at Titania's bower we have a fourth kind of language used in a song performed by the fairies to provide a charm against the evil things of night, such as owls, snakes, hedgehogs and spiders. The lyrics of the song use lines that are shorter than the usual lines and linked by intricate rhymes. Most certainly these words were set to music, and the fairies performed a dance while they sang. The music, rhyme and movement helped to lend an air of magic to the performance in those days before computer animation. The fairy scenes in the recent film release of this play starring Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer are especially good at capturing this sense of magic again using music.
Oberon sneaks in and puts the love potion in Titania's eyes. Then instead of continuing the charm, Oberon invites all the "vile things" in at line 34 so Titania will fall in love with something inappropriate.
Titania's bower was represented by the inner stage, the small area at the back of the main stage which could be closed off by a curtain. At line 35 the human lovers enter and play out their scene. Throughout this action in the stage performance we are aware that there is a sleeping time-bomb, the charmed queen, just a few feet away, waiting to wake up. It heightens the tension. The film versions of the play seldom take advantage of this aspect of the staging.
When I was coming of age at Watsonville Union High School, we were familiar with the gambit that Lysander pulls in the next sequence. We would drive up to Hecker Pass outside of town with a girl and then encounter car trouble, which would necessitate having to pull off the road into the shadows. It wouldn't be our fault -- it was the car. In this scene Lysander explains they will have to spend the night in the woods, since Hermia is exhausted and he has lost his way. As long as they are in this situation, they might as well sleep together! Nice try, Lysander. With all the passion and purity of his love, Lysander proposes at line 41 that they sleep together: "One turf shall serve as pillow for us both,/ One heart, one bed, two bosoms and one troth" [promise].
To prove his love Lysander gives a speech with six different ideas embodied in figures of speech, beginning at line 45:
O, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence!
Love takes the meaning in Love's conference.
I mean, that my heart is unto yours knit,
So that but one heart we can make of it;
Two bosoms interchained with an oath;
So then two bosoms and a single troth.
Then by your side no bed-room me deny,
For lying so, Hermia, I do not lie.
Lysander begins by protesting his innocence with a play on "innocence/sense" at line 45. Line 46 says, in effect, if you really loved me you would comprehend my meaning, which he states at lines 47-48 as the idea that they share one heart. At 49 -- 50 this idea of anatomical time-share is repeated using bosoms, so that, in effect, when he says, "Trust me," Hermia should trust him as she would herself. At 51 we have a fancy pun on "bed-room," the idea of his finding room to bed down next to her. Then the capper: By lying next to you, I am most assuredly not telling a lie. A general observation based on life experience: when someone tries that hard to prove he isn't lying, don't believe him.
Besides, Hermia, we remember from her speech back in the first scene about Dido, Venus and Cupid, already has doubts about the reliability of Lysander's promise of love. They may be alone out in the woods, but she's not going to let her guard down. She soothes his ego at 54 -- 55, and then proposes that "for love and modesty," they observe the social taboos about even the appearance of premarital sex as a "virtuous bachelor and a maid." (God forbid, someone should stumble across them out in the forest while they were lying together!) She ends at line 60 with a sweet little sentiment: "good night, sweet friend,/ Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end!" Ironically, Lysander's love is going to alter sooner that either of them realizes. Lysander, frustrated but still love besotted, echoes Hermia's sentiment and adds at line 63: "end life when I end loyalty!" Usually when characters in a Shakespearean play make such melodramatic declarations, something is about to happen to challenge them.
Sure enough, Puck enters. Remember he has been sent out to find the disdainful youth wearing Athenian clothes who is treating a young woman badly in order to dowse the boy's eyes. What he sees matches what he was told: a man wearing "weeds of Athens" [71]; the rejected woman, sleeping on the "dank and dirty ground" [75], unable to sleep next to "this lack-love, this kill-courtesy" [77] who won't let her get any closer to him. So, calling him a "churl," or base fellow, Puck puts the juice on his eyes and leaves him to awaken to fall in love with Hermia. So we see how Hermia's concern for observing the social conventions has led Puck to make a potentially tragic mistake, especially when Demetrius and Helena wander in.
She's still dogging him, and he's still trying to get rid of her. So he runs off. Helena again falls prey to self-pity and wonders at line 90 where Hermia is now, she who has "blessed and attractive eyes" [91]. (Ironically she is right there on stage, along with Titania as well.) Helena berates herself and says she is so ugly that wild animals will run away from her; it's no wonder Demetrius has dumped her out in the woods at night! At that point she stumbles over Lysander. Unsure whether he is dead or alive, she shakes him and asks at line 102, "Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake." Now both sets of lovers have been speaking in rhymed couplets throughout this scene, and to emphasize how quickly the love potion works on Lysander, Shakespeare has him wake up and immediately complete the rhymed couplet Helena started at 103: "And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake." With nary a pause to contemplate this radical change in his affections, Lysander is completely in love with Helena: "Transparent Helena! Nature shows art,/ That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart" [104 -- 105]. He claims that he can see her heart and knows she must return his love. For these lovers, love and hatred are always very close together, so that Lysander's very next response at 106 is to express his contempt for his rival, Demetrius: "Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word/ Is that vile name to perish on my sword!" We've seen this irrational hatred and emphasis on the emotional response to a name before in Romeo and Juliet.
When Helena asks Lysander what has happened to his love for Hermia, he declares that he repents "The tedious minutes that I with her have spent" [112]. Lysander acts as if this sudden change of affection were the most natural thing in the world. " Who would not change [exchange] a raven for a dove?" [114]. He now tries to prove that dumping Hermia was a logical step! At line 115 he argues "The will [sexual desire] of man is by his reason swayed, / And reason says you are the worthier maid." Lysander is simply responding to the chemicals he has ingested, and yet he proclaims that it is a considered conclusion from the process of reason. Shakespeare here is mocking the idea of love as a totally irrational force, which he emphasizes by the patent idiocy of this guy claiming he figured it out all by himself.
And how does Helena respond to this sudden change in her life? If she had a shred of self-esteem and dignity left, she might well conclude, "Well, this is an interesting development -- my best friend's boyfriend throwing himself at me." But Helena believes she is worthless, and therefore no one can really be in love with her. It must be an elaborate trick to make fun of her. At line 123 she rebukes Lysander:
Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born?
When at your hands did I deserve this scorn?
Is't not enough, is't not enough, young man,
That I did never, no, nor never can
Deserve a sweet look from Demetrius' eye,
But you must flout my insufficiency.
It's all a joke in very poor taste played upon a girl who is the butt of the joke because she isn't good enough to deserve her erstwhile boyfriend's love.
The ultimate irony of this situation is that the harder Lysander tries to convince Helena he now loves her, the angrier she becomes at this apparent ridicule. As she runs off, Lysander decides to follow her and abandon Hermia. He compares his former love for her as nausea we feel when we've eaten too many sweets or the revulsion people feel when they discover they have been led astray by a heresy. These are powerful images that emphasize once again how extreme the emotions of love are among these characters.
Hermia awakens from a bad dream: she dreamt a serpent was eating her heart and Lysander did nothing but smile at the outrage. (If Freud were to have analyzed this dream he would have made much out of the idea of a snake, a sexual symbol, attacking her.) When Hermia finds Lysander is nowhere to be found, and she remembers the last thing he said before she went to sleep about never ending his loyalty to her until he died, she concludes he must be dead. At line 156 she rushes off to find him or find her own death. Look at the difference between Helena and Hermia: one can't believe it when a man declares his love. The other can't believe it when her boyfriend dumps her and concludes he must be dead.
Act III, Scene 1
Now we move to the rehearsal by the "rude mechanicals." The same issues are present: the struggle for control of the enterprise, the challenge of the setting and the characters' motivation. The biggest challenge that confronts them, however, is the absolute failure of their imaginations. These guys are so literal in their approach to the play that they become comical. [III, 1, lines 1 -- 103]
The subtle battle over who is in charge continues, but now the pattern is that the actors find a potential problem (create one if you have to) with the production and then figure out a way to solve it. Most of the problems involved giving Bottom more lines to say. This is a trait as old as actors -- padding their parts. There are four problems raised in putting on the play. They all involve a misconception about the nature of drama. The boys all suffer from failure of the imagination. The scene opens with a brief description of how Shakespeare's stage worked. The open area of a small clearing in the forest represents the stage which had spectators on three sides. A thicket on one side stood for the "tiring house," the backstage area where the actors kept their costumes or "attire." Quince adds at line 5, "we will do it in action as we will do it before the Duke." That means they will begin blocking the play, figuring out their stage movement, right with this first rehearsal. The first problem is posed by doing a pretend suicide on stage. The audience will be terrified that the actor will really be killing himself. The ladies in particular will be frightened. Starveling is so undone by the idea of panic over the suicides that at line 14 he declares: "I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done." Leaving the suicide out of the story of "Pyramus & Thisby" is like ending Romeo and Juliet without any violence. Having raised the issue of the killing, Bottom proposes the solution: write a prologue for me in which I explain that no actors were killed in the performance, and further tell them that I am not really Pyramus but Bottom the weaver. You see how literal these guys are and how they assume the audience is unable to tell the difference between truth and make-believe.
Peter Quince can once again feel control slipping from him, but he agrees at line 23 to write the required prologue using the poetic meter often employed in ballads, lines of eight and six syllables, something like this: "dear PATrons AS you WATCH this PLAY,/ do NOT think THAT it's REAL." All Bottom hears is that every other line is going to have two fewer syllables, two fewer chances to impress the audience, and at line 25 he suggests: "No, make it two more. Let it be written in eight and eight," which makes no sense at all.
Snout, who wasn't too sure about doing the play before, worries at line 27 that the ladies will be afraid of the lion, and Starveling, who is convinced they're heading for disaster, agrees at line 28. Bottom agrees the lion poses a problem at line 29. To bring a lion among ladies "is a most dreadful thing" [31]. The boys have got this pathological fear that ladies are going to freak out at the slightest provocation. As Bottom explains at 31, "there is not a more fearful wild fowl than your lion living." We see his expertise extends from theater to zoology [smile]. . Snout suggests another prologue, like Bottom got to have. (We don't hear what Snug, who's going to play the lion, thinks of the idea, but then the prospect of roaring undid him before, so he might be daunted by a prologue.) Bottom jumps into the idea of how to sanitize the lion at line 36. His solution is for Snug to name his name in the prologue and to have some kind of strange costume that allows half his face to be seen. That way the audience will realize it's a man pretending to be a lion. Bottom even tries to micromanage the wording of the prologue, offering multiple versions. Nothing in the play will escape the imprint of Bottom!
Peter Quince now raises two problems. He must realize that Bottom is gaining control of the production by identifying problems and then offering solutions. Quince points out that the play says the lovers met by moonlight and that they are separated by a wall. How can the actors get the moon and a large wall into the room? These obstacles seem insurmountable to the literal minds of imaginatively-challenged! No surprise when Bottom comes up with the first solution at line 56: leave the window open so the moon can shine in. However, Quince is not about to accept Bottom's solution. He proposes that someone play the part of the Moon, or as Quince mangles the concept, to "disfigure" [60] the figure of Moonshine, complete with a thorn bush and dog. (Different cultures see different things when they look at the shapes on the face of the moon; the legendary account of the man-in-the-moon was much more complex in Shakespeare's time and included a man with a bush of thorns and a dog -- don't ask me how! Watch for a comic piece of business with the dog.) What is going on here is that Quince is competing with Bottom for artistic control. If Bottom can define a problem and then come up with a solution (a prologue), Quince can too, with an even more intricate solution -- someone to play the part of Moon.
That just leaves the problem of the wall. At line 66 Snout declares, "You can never bring in a wall. What say you Bottom?" Notice how Snout has turned to Bottom for direction. The battle for leadership is swinging in favor of the actor. Bottom is not at all embarrassed to steal Quince's idea for the moon and use it again. Someone will play the Wall, carrying plaster and roughcast (primitive concrete), and holding his fingers apart to signify the cranny or hole through which the lovers whisper. This last touch becomes a wonderful comic bit in performance.
So with all the problems solved, the boys start rehearsing. Puck enters, invisible, and decides to watch and possibly interfere. We see some details about how plays were performed in that time. Because the text of the play had to be painstakingly written out by hand, each actor has received an abbreviated script which had just his lines and the cues for him to speak them. (There was probably only one complete script which was kept backstage and used to prompt the actors if they forgot their lines.) Bottom has learned his lines, but he still has problems with the words. At 83 "odors" has become "odious," frustrating Quince. (It's fun to imagine Shakespeare, the playwright/actor, casting himself as Quince, the would-be dramatist.) Bottom's performance prompts Puck come up with a practical joke. When Bottom leaves the "stage" by going into a thicket, Puck follows him, promising that when he returns he will be "A stranger Pyramus than ever played here" [89].
Thisby is not any better than Pyramus as an actor. First, Flute does not understand that Bottom's final line before his leaving is the cue for him to speak. Flute/Thisby pours out all his lines at once, including the ones for his later scene. Quince's dialogue is a delightful mix of nonsense and inconsistency. For example, Pyramus is praised for being "lily-white of hue" [94] and then in the next line having a red complexion like a rose. Quince has Flute call Pyramus a youth or juvenile, but the writer errs and uses the name of the Latin writer "Juvenal" instead. Having used that word, he needs something else that starts with "J" to connect to it. (Quince loves to use alliteration, using words with the same initial sounds.) But the only "J" word he can come up with is "Jew" which in this context makes no sense at all. He then has Thisby compare her love to a hard-working horse -- hardly a romantic comparison but perhaps a foreshadowing of how he will reappear. Flute/Thisby muffs her final line at 98 by declaring she will meet her lover at "Ninny's tomb." Both Pyramus and Thisby will consistently mispronounce the name "Ninus" throughout the performance, driving Quince crazy. (One wonders if Shakespeare had actors who messed up his well-chosen language.) Furthermore, Flute has blurted out all his lines at once, including the cue lines.
When Bottom comes back on stage, having missed his cue, he has been transformed. Puck apparently thought that since he acted like an ass, he should look like one. This change comes as a real surprise to us as it does to the characters. Normally Shakespeare prepares the audience for anything like this before it happens so that we can watch the reactions of the characters to the dramatic change. Here we experience the shock along with the people on stage. Clearly Puck is thinking of something grotesque for Titania to fall in love with, but at the same time it's a wonderful practical joke, like the ones he is described as having played to amuse Oberon. This kind of transformation, turning people into animals, wholly or partially, was a device used by one of Shakespeare's favorite Latin authors, Ovid. Bottom's wearing the ass' head is always a real crowd pleaser, especially with children. Both my kids thought this was the height of comedy when they first saw it.
In this next sequence do you think Bottom has any idea that he's got an ass' head on?
[III, 1, line 104 -- 129]
Bottom makes two specific references to "asses," but does he realize how he has changed? He attributes his friends' behavior to a practical joke designed to upset him, literally to make an ass of him. For their part his friends believe they are haunted, or as Quince tells Bottom at 120, once again messing up the big word, "Thou art translated." Puck adds to their confusion as they run away by transforming himself into different animals or objects, including a hound and magical fire, to chase the actors through the forest. Bottom responds to this supposed joke by walking up and down to show he is not frightened and by singing a little song about the birds of the woodlands. Now here is a little Elizabethan "insider joke": the song he sings mentions the "woosel," or blackbird; the "throstle" and the "wren." But most of the song is devoted to the "cuckoo." The cuckoo bird was associated with cuckoldry, the betrayal of husbands by their wives, because according to folklore the cuckoo bird laid its eggs in other birds' nests, the equivalent of an unsuspecting husband raising a child as his own sired by his wife's lover. So when a man heard the cuckoo's cry, it was a reminder that he should check on what his wife was doing. Well, Bottom is about to cuckold Oberon by having a passionate, albeit short-lived affair with Oberon's wife with Oberon's connivance. Bottom will, in effect, be the cuckoo bird. He has no idea what is about to happen to him, but he behaves as if absolutely nothing is wrong. He is completely unflappable.
In the next sequence how does love make Titania appear to be foolish? What exactly is it that Titania wants? How does Bottom react to this extraordinary situation? [III, 1, line 130 -- 201]
Bottom's singing awakens Titania at line 130: "What angel wakes me from my flow'ry bed?" Just like Lysander she is immediately smitten. Now here's the great irony of the situation: throughout the play the fairies remain invisible to all the humans, including Theseus and Hippolyta. The only human privileged to see a fairy is Bottom, and he gets to see Titania, this vision of ethereal loveliness, who throws herself at him at line 138:
I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamored of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.
Now you would think the sudden appearance of this unearthly, beautiful creature declaring her love would unnerve Bottom just a little. Not a bit! The unflappable Bottom acts as if stuff like this happened to him all the time. He doesn't ask who she is or where she came from. He responds by lecturing her gently about the inappropriateness of her outburst of affection at 143:
Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say
the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays; the more
the pity that some honest neighbors will not make them friends. Nay, I can
gleek upon occasion.
"Gleek" here means talk wisely or make a clever remark, something we have not seen much evidence of up to this point from Bottom. Titania agrees at 149: "Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful." That's love, says Shakespeare, in a nutshell: it can make even Bottom appear to be a genius. Notice how throughout this sequence we have a contrast between Titania's beautiful rhymed verse and Bottom's rather bumbling prose.
Bottom may be a boob, but he does have some sense of his own limitations. At line 150 he corrects Titania's perception about him: "Not so, neither; but if I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have enough to serve my own turn." Basically he has stayed there because he doesn't know the way home. Titania is not about to lose her lover, and she shows her power over him at line 151:
Out of this wood do not desire to go.
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
The summer still doth attend upon my state;
And I do love thee. Therefore, go with me.
There is an implied threat in the second line above. He's not going anywhere. This fairy goddess has power over the summer itself. A mere mortal is not going to be able to resist her. Best just to relax and enjoy it. Now at line 158 Titania tries to bribe him to go along with her:
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing, while thou on pressed flowers doth sleep:
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so,
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.
She tempts him with promises of riches from the ocean. (In other plays Shakespeare also evokes this idea that the bottom of the sea is covered with rich jewels.) She offers him comfort with song and flowers and bed. But her greatest lure is to offer him a kind of immortality -- to cross from the human to the fairy world. Now that's a big order, to purge Bottom of his grossness. There's a whole lot of grossness involved. Bottom never questions this extraordinary offer nor requests further details. He just acts like there's nothing unusual in what is happening.
Titania at line 164 introduces her fairy attendants and orders them to "Be kind and courteous to this gentleman." (The idea of Bottom being mistaken for a gentleman is funny; he reciprocates by calling all the fairies "Master" as if they were members of the local gentry.) She lists all the fruits that they are to feed him at line 167 -- 168. The fairies are to use the waxy thighs of bumblebees to serve as candles to lead Bottom to Titania's bower and, at line 173, "To have my love to bed and to arise." This last direction is coyly ambiguous: does she want Bottom to go to bed and to get up in the morning? Or, does she want Bottom to come to bed and get sexually aroused? You be the judge. As Bottom meets each of the individual fairies he treats them with an exaggerated courtesy and tries to identify with each one, based on his name. The first fairy is called Cobweb, and Bottom, calling him "Master," offers at line 181 "if I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you," referring to the folk lore of using cobwebs to stop bleeding. The second fairy is called Peaseblossom, and Bottom suggests that his parents were "Mistress Squash" and "Master Peascod," referring to different stages in the development of pea from flower to a full pea pod. The third one, Mustardseed, has the most elaborate background at line 191:
Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well. That same cowardly
giant-like ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house. I promise
you your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you of more
acquaintance, Good Master Mustardseed.
In his attempt to find some common ground with this fairy, Bottom personifies the tiny seeds of the mustard plant. He expresses sympathy for the fact that they were often mixed in cattle feed, or, as your notes suggest, that mustard made of the seeds was often consumed by humans eating beef. Now old English mustard is nothing like the watery yellow paste that we consume in this country. Real mustard, such as you get in pubs, will make your eyes water, as Bottom's eyes did, although not in sympathy for the oppressed mustardseed.
Bottom would be content to spend the night chatting with his new friends. However, Titania wants to move things along. In an intricately rhymed five-line stanza at line 197, she says:
Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower.
The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye:
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Tie up my lover's tongue and bring him silently.
Remember that the moon was associated with Diana, the goddess of chastity. Titania envisions the moon weeping for violations of that chastity ("enforced") and her tears causing dew in the flowers. That's a lot more poetic than explaining dew as condensation of water vapor in the air. The other interpretation of these lines is to take "enforced" as meaning "required" so the flowers are weeping because they must remain chaste. In any event it is clear that Titania is not taking Bottom back to her bed to discuss the physics of weather. We also get a hint that Bottom is reacting to what is happening. As events take shape and even Bottom realizes what this creature wants from him, he begins to make noises of an excited nature. What kind of noise would a donkey make in heat? It would be difficult to achieve intimacy with one of the partners braying loudly. No wonder Titania orders to fairies to muzzle Bottom and bring him silently.
Now throughout the magical night in the woods all the supercharged horny humans and fairies are running around. The sexual tension is almost palpable. But the only characters that we know of who "get lucky," who actually have sex, are Bottom and Titania. Of course, she will not want to believe it and he will not be able to remember it.
Act III, Scene 2
In the opening sequence of the next scene, why is the audience's level of awareness superior to Oberon's? [Act III, scene 2, line 1 -- 40]
Oberon has no idea who or what his wife fell in love with, but we have been privileged to watch the encounter and to see exactly how she makes a fool of herself. So we anticipate Oberon's reaction has he learns at the very end of Puck's long speech that "Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass" [line 34]. One of the reasons Shakespeare makes Puck's speech of revelation so long (28 lines!) is to allow us to savor watching Oberon's reaction. He's glad he has tricked her, but he may feel a little ambivalent about what he has made her do. Puck assures his boss that the second job, the dousing of Lysander with the love potion, is also successfully completed. At that point, however, in come Demetrius and Hermia, and the scope of the mistake becomes clear.
In this next sequence how do we see Hermia's inability to accept the idea that Lysander abandoned her in the forest? What is Demetrius trying to do in this passage to woo Hermia? [III, 2, lines 41 -- 87]
Demetrius is still trying to convince Hermia of his love which she has refused with what he calls her "breath so bitter" [44]. For her part Hermia believes Demetrius has murdered Lysander; it's the only explanation for why he was gone when she awoke. As she says at line 50, "The sun was not so true unto the day/ As he to me." After all, the last thing he said to her before they went to sleep was "end life when I end loyalty" [II, 2, line 63]. Hermia says at 53 she would as soon believe he had run off from her as she would believe "This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon/ May through the center creep, and so displease/ Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes." It's a rather elaborate conceit she uses here to suggest something too fantastical to believe: that it is possible to drill a hole through the solid earth all the way to the other side of the globe. This would allow the moon to slip through and show up at high noon on the other side of the world and upset the sun, the moon's brother. When she accuses Demetrius of murdering Lysander, he responds by claiming he is the murder victim of Hermia beauty which treats his love with "stern cruelty" [line 59]. This is the same exaggerated love imagery of Petrarch which we saw Romeo use, and it is singularly inappropriate to use at this time. Hermia begs Demetrius to return Lysander's corpse, and he responds in hatred at line 64 "I had rather give his carcass to my hounds." This drives Hermia into an even greater rage at him. She finally becomes so angry that at line 81 she storms out without getting a satisfactory answer about what Demetrius knows of Lysander's whereabouts. Demetrius is so undone by her rage he stays behind and falls asleep.
What is Oberon's reaction when he realizes that Puck has made a terrible mistake and has destroyed the true love of Lysander? What is Puck's reaction to his mistake? [III, 2, line 88 -- 121]
To Oberon, who was operating with pure motives in trying to help Helena, this is a tragedy, and he blames Puck. But Puck's reaction is a funny piece of cynicism at line 92: "Then fate o'errules, that, one man holding troth,/ A million fail, compounding oath on oath." What he's saying is, "What's the big deal if one guy breaks his promise to his lover? Millions of other men break their oaths regularly." We are reminded of Hermia's little warning about the frailty of men's loyalty back in the first scene when she agreed to run off with Lysander. Oberon sends Puck off to find Helena while he puts the potion in Demetrius' eyes. Puck returns in a few lines with Helena and Lysander in tow. Puck's great line is at 115: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" He foresees that when Demetrius wakes up and falls back in love with Helena, "Then will two at once woo one" [118]. He anticipates the humor: "And those things do best please me/ That befall prepost'rously" [120 --121]. He's right about the fun.
In the next long sequence all the love confusion plays out with the help of the love potion. Helena will awaken the sleeping time bomb, the dosed Demetrius, and she will get what she has wanted for the whole play. How do you explain her reaction to Demetrius' declaration of love? Hermia will enter at line 177 having heard Lysander. How many lines does it take for Hermia to finally figure out that he has dumped her? Compare Hermia's reaction to her boyfriend having left her for another woman with Helena's reaction to the same situation. Finally what is Hermia's "hot button"? What is it that drives her crazy? [III, 2, line 122 -- 344]
This sequence examines a complex domestic dispute in great detail; these people all need professional help. At line 122 Lysander enters pleading with Helena for her love. He uses that same six-line rhymed verse form which Titania did earlier. This form is the sestet, the last six lines of a Shakespearean sonnet. Lysander here argues that his love must be true because he weeps as he speaks it. Helena is not impressed and reminds him once again of his oaths of love to Hermia. Lysander once again denies that he had any judgment when he thought he loved Hermia. In his desperation Lysander now does something a gentleman should not have done: he reminds Helena that Demetrius does not love her at line 136.
On cue Demetrius wakes up and is in the full flower of love. Just as Lysander was instantly in love, so Demetrius begins spouting the cliches about love from our friend Petrarch at line 137:
O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne? [eyes]
Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!
That pure congealed white, high Taurus' snow,
Fanned with the eastern wind, turns to a crow
When thou hold'st up thy hand: O, let me kiss
This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!
In the opening line here he gets all the superlatives, and then he starts on the favorite physical features that Petrarch said you had to describe: the eyes, the lips, the paleness of the skin. Check Romeo's speech at Juliet's balcony and you'll find the same comparisons. Using that archaic word form of "eyne," he says her eyes surpass crystal. Her lips are like cherries and tempting ones at that. Her skin is whiter than the snow on the highest mountain. (Remember that Elizabethans prized very pale skin as a mark of beauty as well as social superiority compared to the tan skin of lower-class women who had to work outdoors.) Even Helena's hand holds the promise of religious redemption, being both a "princess" and a "seal of bliss," which has the connotation of being the holder of God's grace.
This is what Helena has wanted throughout the play -- Demetrius pronouncing words of love to her. Is she happy? Is she fulfilled? She is not. Obviously Demetrius is part of the practical joke to mock her for being a rejected lover. Now she accuses the men of violating their code of honor as gentlemen: "None of noble sort/ Would so offend a virgin" [159 -- 160]. In their frustration both Lysander and Demetrius go after each other, thinking that it is merely the other's presence which is thwarting their courtship. They each offer Hermia to the other. At line 176 Demetrius sees Hermia entering and mocks Lysander: "yonder is thy dear."
Hermia recognizes Lysander by his voice and at line 183 asks the key question: "why unkindly didst thou leave me so?" So he tells her that he hates her and loves Helena now, ending at line 189 with "Could not this [the fact I left you] make thee know,/ The hate I bare thee made me leave thee so." Hermia is the exact opposite of Helena. She simply refuses to accept rejection: "You speak not as you think: it cannot be so" [191].
Helena jumps on this exchange and concludes that Hermia is part of the conspiracy. In a long speech (192 --219) she attacks Hermia' betrayal in very powerful and poetic images. At line 198 she asks,
Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sister's vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us -- O, is all forgot?
All school days friendship, childhood innocence?
They have been friends for a long time, long before men and romantic love complicated their lives. They have done needlework together, sung together, as if they had been a single person. In an interesting conceit Helena describes this sense of unity at line 208:
So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries molded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
And yet Hermia has destroyed their friendship "To join with men in scorning your poor friend./ It is not friendly, 'tis not maidenly./ Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it" [216 -- 218 ]. We can see here how deeply Helena feels betrayed. It is a crime against the entire female gender.
Hermia has no idea what Helena is talking about (lines 230 -- 231), but Helena gets more worked up about Hermia's duplicity and now imagines that she is the mastermind behind the whole practical joke. It is Hermia who has ordered her two lovers to mock Helena by pretending to be in love with her. At line 224 she describes Demetrius' actions:
And made your other love, Demetrius
(Who even but now did spurn me with his foot),
To call me goddess, nymph, divine and rare,
Precious, celestial?
Helena is terribly hurt, but she remembers what Demetrius said to her, almost word for word. Look back at his declaration of love at line 137. She includes most of the flattering words Demetrius had used, plus a few more. It may be a terrible joke, but she loved hearing him say these things to her.
When Hermia again professes to have no idea what Helena is talking about, the supposed butt of the joke becomes even angrier and at line 237 envisions a comic conspiracy: "Ay, do! Persever, counterfeit sad looks,/ Make mouths upon me when I turn my back;/ Wink at each other; hold the sweet jest up." When Helena threatens to end the fun by running off, perhaps to kill herself (line 239), the boys spring into action, swearing their love to Helena, even as they threaten to kill each other. At line 247 Hermia is perplexed by Lysander's declaring his love for Helena, and she assumes that it is a cruel joke and tells her erstwhile boyfriend, "Sweet, do not scorn her so." When the boys start fighting each other again, they keep talking about going off to hold a duel, because a duel was an affair of honor that you fought in private, away from the presence of women. Faced with this threat of violence, Hermia intervenes at line 256 by grabbing Lysander to keep him from going off into the bushes to fight a duel with Demetrius, and the former boyfriend calls her an "Ethiope." When you remember how Elizabethans defined beauty by the paleness of a woman's complexion, you can see how hurtful this remark is. Hermia still doesn't understand that Lysander has dumped her. Demetrius mocks Lysander for using Hermia's holding him as an excuse not to fight, and in his frustration Lysander says to her at line 260: "Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! Vile thing, let loose,/ Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent!" (It's interesting to remember the serpent that attacked Hermia in her dream.) So in two line here Lysander, who earlier in the evening wanted lots of physical contact with Hermia, now calls her four bad names. The girl still doesn't have a clue and at line 262 asks why he is suddenly so rude. So Lysander, growing impatient with her persistence, gives her another shot: "Thy love! Out, tawny Tartar, out!/ Out loathed med'cine! O hated potion, hence!" The Tartar of Central Asia was seen as a dark-skinned savage. If we count the sarcastic tone of the first two words here, once again he insults her four times in two lines. Her only response is to ask if he is joking, to which the angry Helena says yes, "And so do you" [265]. Lysander ignores her and turns his attention to Demetrius' taunts that he is allowing Hermia to stopping him from defending his honor. At line 269 he asks, "What, should I hurt her, strike her, kill her dead?/ Although I hate her, I shall not harm her so." And finally, after all this time and the multiple insults, the light begins to dawn in Hermia's hard head at line 271. See how Shakespeare has her slowly discover the truth here:
What, can you do me greater harm than hate?
Hate me! Wherefore? O me! What news, my love!
Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?
I am as fair now as I was erewhile.
Since night you loved me; yet since night you left me.
Why, then you left me -- O, the gods forbid --
In earnest, shall I say?
She finally contemplates the significance of his having left her; she's beginning to get it. Lysander hammers home the message that he hates her, never wants to see her again and loves Helena. At long last, after more than 100 lines and all those insults, Hermia understands that she's been dumped!
So who's to blame? Lysander, for being the sleazy guy she anticipated back in the opening scene when she talked about men breaking every oath? Demetrius, for trying to horn in on her affections? No, of course not, it's Helena's fault! Just as the guys suddenly discover they're in love and immediately try to kill their rival, so Hermia goes after Helena at line 282: "O me! You juggler! You canker blossom [a worm]!/ You thief of love! What, have you come by night/ And stol'n my love's heart from him?" Helena, still operating on the theory that this is all a tasteless joke, is upset and responds at line 288: "Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you."
In the course of this scene Hermia has been insulted numerous times, but only now does she react. It turns out that the absolutely self-assured, independent young lady has one sore spot -- her height! References to her being short are her hot button. And "puppet" apparently implies that she is not very tall. And off she goes at line 289:
Puppet? Why so? Ay, that way goes the game.
Now I perceive that she hath made compare
Between our statures; she hath urged her height,
And with her personage, her tall personage,
Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him.
It's amazing how people in their anger will reveal what really bothers them. Look at how many times Hermia mentions "height" and "personage" in this passage. And of course there has to be a reason why Lysander no longer loves her, so it must the same thing that she has felt inadequate about all this time. Just as the men turn their hatred into threatened violence, so too the women at line 294:
And are you grown so high in his esteem,
Because I am so dwarfish and so low?
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak!
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.
Once Hermia is wound up, she supplies the hurtful words herself, such as "dwarfish" and "low" here. And after others hear these "hot button" words, they can't help using them, even if they don't want to. Helena seeks protection from her two phony lovers to keep Hermia from scratching her eyes at line 303: "You perhaps may think,/ because she is something lower than myself,/ That I can match her." Now I don't think Helena intends to mention the issue of height again; it just slips out. However, it is also possible for the actress playing Helena is see this as a chance to get payback on the "ideal" Hermia that everybody loved earlier. Whatever the motive for the "low" reference, Hermia blows up at line 305.
Now Helena tries to placate her, telling her that she has always been her friend. She finally reveals that she did tell Demetrius about the elopement to win his approval, but the only thanks she got were his curses. (So much for the solidarity of the sisterhood Helena talked about back at line 218.) She asks to be allowed to return home with her broken heart and her folly. Before she can get away, however, the boys start competing with each other as to who can better defend her from Hermia's threatened onslaught. Helena again talks about Hermia's propensity for violence at line 123: "O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd! [That's an alternative way of describing Hermia's self-assertiveness.]/ She was a vixen when she went to school;/ And though she be but little, she is fierce." There it is again! Helena just can't help herself. Hermia responds at line 326: "'Little' again! Nothing but 'low' and 'little'!/ Why will you suffer her to flout me thus?" She tries to attack Helena. Lysander stops her. If Hermia is bothered by references to her size, Lysander will give her lots to be upset about in order to prove his love to Helena: "Get you gone, you dwarf;/ You minimus of hind'ring knotgrass made;/ You bead, you acorn!" Four insults in three lines again, but all related to height this time. Be sure to check your footnotes for the story of the knotgrass. Interesting! Demetrius is enraged that Lysander dares to attack Hermia on Helena's behalf, and since Lysander is no longer hindered by Hermia, the boys go off, "cheek by jowl," to fight their duel in the bushes. Hermia, left alone with Helena, starts after her again and she runs away. (An interesting sidelight: there are references in several of Shakespeare's plays written around this time to two female characters, one taller and with a light complexion, and the other shorter, with a dark complexion. Scholars are pretty sure that these physical details indicate that Shakespeare had two principal boy actors at this time with these characteristics. It's just one more reminder that Shakespeare wrote these plays for a very specific group of actors.)
Oberon accuses Puck of having deliberately screwed up the lives of the human lovers. Puck does not feel any guilt for the mistake, saying at line 353 "their jangling I esteem a sport." But he does point out that he's not to blame for the mix-up since he found a youth in Athenian clothes as ordered. Oberon feels personally responsible and orders Puck to raise a fog to keep the two combatants separated and to run them around in circles by imitating the voice of the other until they are exhausted. Once they have fallen asleep, he is to bring the two girls to the same place and charm them to sleep. Oberon will go and beg the changeling boy from his lust-besotted wife. Puck promises to do as ordered quickly, since the approaching dawn means the spirits must take cover from the sunlight. Oberon denies that the fairies face the same restrictions as other spirits and that he has often operated in the daytime. Puck, singing a little chant, dupes each of the boys into an exhausted stupor. Then he brings in poor Helena who only wants to slink back to Athens in shame. Puck momentarily forgets Hermia and has to remind himself at line 437: "Yet but three? Come one more./ Two of both kinds make up four." The way Puck talks about the lovers here you can see how he regards them not as suffering, sensitive human beings but as tokens in a game. Who we are or what we want is immaterial to most of the fairies. Once they are all asleep in one place, Puck applies the antidote potion to the eyes of Lysander, saying at line 461: "Jack shall have Jill./ Nought shall go ill." Their lives will be straightened out, regardless of whatever psychological trauma they may have suffered. (Years ago a famous eccentric director, Jan Kott, mounted a production of this play not as a comedy but as a Freudian nightmare where we see the psychological and psychic damage on the humans who have no idea what is happening to them.)
Act IV, Scene 1
This scene covers the end of the enchantment in the forest and falls into four distinct parts. The first sequence shows a moment of post-coital tenderness between Titania and Bottom. Ask yourself how this might have been staged to heighten the sense of incongruity. [Act IV, scene 1, lines 1 -- 48]
We've all seen couples where the partners simply don't go together physically. Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts a few years ago were a perfect example. That's Bottom and Titania. Besides the physical incongruity, Titania doesn't sound right. Here's this ethereal creature with this lyrical gift for beautiful expression using her talent to gratify Bottom's "mortal grossness." It's the sublime in service to the ridiculous, as at line 1:
Come, sit thee down upon this flow'ry bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears my gentle joy.
At the end of the sequence she has a similar poetic passage where she compares her holding the sleeping Bottom to the "female ivy" enringing the elm tree [line 46 --47].
For his part Bottom is equally out of his depth, trying to sound like the lord of the manor, ordering the fairies around. Since they got the sex part out of the way, he seems much more at ease, and he now addresses the fairies with exalted foreign titles. He uses "mounsier" nine times, all mispronounced, and calls Cobweb "Cavalery once, a corruption of "cavalier," a knight. We get a sense of what would constitute heaven for Bottom -- someone to scratch his head (lines 7 and 25), some honey (line 13), some comfort food (line 34 -- 41) and some sleep (line 42). His taste in music reminds us of Bottom's real taste: "I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let's have the tongs and the bones" [line 31 -- 32]. It would be the equivalent of Bottom asking for a country-western ballad played entirely on the spoons and musical saw.
Bottom still has no idea what happened to him, but he begins to get some vague hints. At line 26 he realizes he is "marvail's hairy." Note the customary misuse of longer words. His specific "comfort foods" might give him a clue. At lines 34 -- 41 he asks for "provender" (animal food), "good dry oats," "a bottle [corruption of "bundle"] of hay" and "a handful or two of dried peas." But that's as close as he gets to discovering his metamorphosis. At line 42 he gives in to "an exposition of sleep." I've had that feeling.
In the next sequence Oberon and Titania are reconciled. Is the question of the changeling boy equitably resolved? What action marks the return of harmony in the relationship? [IV, 1, lines 49 -- 105]
Oberon and Titania are reconciled because his use of a magic potion worked. He hoodwinked his wife into giving up the little boy on whom she had such a strong moral claim because she was besotted with love for Bottom. Now there are two ways of looking at this development. Most of the people in Shakespeare's audience, the men anyway, probably felt fine about Oberon winning through trickery because wives were supposed to obey their husbands, no matter how unreasonable the request. The women may well have felt that it was unfair, especially since Oberon never makes a convincing argument about why he should have the child. Many modern productions highlight the inequity of Oberon taking the child and suggest an unresolved issue between husband and wife. In most Shakespearean comedies we find a festering conflict at the end, a dark shadow in the levity of the comedy. We'll certainly see that at the end of Twelfth Night. Oberon does feel bad about how he took advantage of his wife around line 50. He observes that her love for Bottom made her appear foolish and even shameful. At line 56 he describes how she gathered flowers to adorn grotesque object of her love, but even the flowers were ashamed:
And that same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flouriets' eyes, [small flowers]
Like tears, that did their own disgrace bewail.
It's a lovely and imaginative description, the dew becoming the tears of the embarrassed flowers used to honor Bottom. When Oberon administers the magic antidote to Titania's eyes, she awakens and immediately remembers that "Methought I was enamored of an ass" [80]. Oberon had asked Puck to make sure neither the lovers nor Puck had any sense of what happened to them: "think no more of this night's accidents,/ but as the fierce vexation of a dream" [lines 71 -- 72]. Only Titania is granted the "privilege" of remembering exactly what she did and her feelings of loathing and disgust as she looks upon what she shared her bed with: "O, how my eyes do loathe his visage now" [82]. She realizes how foolish love has made her behave.
Oberon has set in motion the disengagement from the magic of the forest. It is only right that the most aware creature, Titania, should be the first to wake up. And that the least aware creature, Bottom, should be the last. At line 84 Oberon asks his wife to call forth music as a means of putting the humans into an even deeper trance of forgetfulness. The music also symbolizes, as it did for the Elizabethans, the return to a harmonious relationship. Oberon and Titania reinforce the unity represented by the music with a stately dance as they leave the stage.
The next sequence, in which the difficulties of the young lovers are all resolved, falls in two parts. In the first Theseus takes Hippolyta hunting in the woods the morning of their wedding. What is Theseus eager to show off? Why? What is Hippolyta's reaction? In the second part the lovers are discovered asleep on the ground. How does Theseus try to cover up any potential embarrassment? What do the lovers remember of events of the previous night? [IV, 1, lines 106 -- 202]
Theseus takes Hippolyta out on their wedding day so he can show off his hounds, just like some guy might take his girlfriend out to impress her with his Trans Am with the rebuilt engine. Hippolyta makes it difficult by telling Theseus she has heard the best hounds in the Ancient World, dogs of Sparta owned by Hercules, the hero of mythology. Not to be outdone, Theseus assures her that his dogs are bred from the same Spartan stock and, although slow, trained to bay in harmony. There continues to be this tension just below the surface in the relationship of the royal couple.
At this point the hunting party, including Hermia's father Egeus, stumble upon the two sets of sleeping lovers. What were these kids doing the night before that they would end up sleeping on the ground out in the forest? Theseus quickly invents an explanation that will hide any embarrassing implications at line 135: "No doubt they rose up early to observe/ The rite of May; and hearing our intent,/ Came here in grace of our solemnity." In other words, they came out very early to wave to the royal couple and fell asleep waiting. It's a nice way to cover the situation, although a few lines later on, at 142, he says, "Saint Valentine is past;/ Begin these wood birds but to couple now?" which is closer to what he and everyone else thinks is really going on.
They are awakened and Lysander reveals that he and Hermia had come to the woods to escape Theseus' edict about marrying. Egeus goes ballistic again and reveals at line 161 what he really seeks in marrying his daughter to Demetrius: "my consent." The old man just wants control. Demetrius no longer wants to play that game and reveals rather poetically how he has changed at line 167:
But, my good lord, I wot [know] not by what power --
But by some power it is -- my love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud [toy],
Which in my childhood I did dote upon;
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia:
But, like to a sickness, did I loathe this food;
But, now in health, come to my natural taste,
Now do I wish it, love it, long for it,
And ever will for evermore be true to it.
This must be reassuring for poor Helena who suffers most from rejection. It does make a very powerful impression about love returning to the true objection of affection, until we realize that Lysander used almost the same language and argument when he dumped Hermia and thought he was in love with Helena. Shakespeare's sly sense of humor is lurking just below the surface.
Theseus overrules Egeus, undoubtedly to the relief of Hippolyta, and decides that the lovers will marry whom they want. In fact in a gesture of magnanimity he invites them to join his wedding, since they already have the caterers and the band. Egeus should be happy; he gets out of having to pay for his daughter's wedding. The lovers are still confused about what has happened to them. Are they still dreaming? Helena has a sense at line 193 that something bad did happen: "I have found Demetrius like a jewel,/ Mine own, and not my own." For his part Demetrius isn't sure the appearance of the Duke wasn't part of the dream he can't remember now. They agree to compare their memories to try and figure out what happened.
That leaves just one person who must emerge from the charms of the night of love. Appropriately Bottom is the last to wake up. What is Bottom's reaction to his experience? [IV, 1, lines 203 -- 222]
The others all woke with a sense that something significant happened, although they couldn't remember the details. Only Bottom awakens as if nothing had taken place. Here he has been through this night of incredible love with an ethereal creature, and in his mind he is still at the play rehearsal. When he realizes that his friends have all gone and left him asleep, he finally recognizes that he has had "a most rare vision." He just doesn't know what it was, but he unwittingly reminds us when he says at line 209: "Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream." In a burst of comic profundity he explains how inexplicable his dream is by mixing up all the physical senses at line 214: "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." He decides to get Peter Quince to write a ballad about called "Bottom's Dream" since it has no bottom.
Now earlier in the lecture I talked about how actors love to pad their parts. The other thing they love to do is to upstage their fellow actors. He is fortunate that Pyramus gets to die on stage; but then so does Thisby. So when Bottom thinks about where in the play he will perform his ballad, he naturally decides to perform it during Thisby's death scene, thereby making sure all eyes are on him. With all the innocent arrogance of a ham actor he explains to himself at line 222, it will make Thisby's death scene "the more gracious."
So unflappable Bottom has come through this incredible experience, not available to any other human, and he is concentrated entirely on the play. A true professional!
Act IV, Scene 2
In the next scene takes us back to Athens with the other cast members as the reflect sadly on their missed opportunity, if only Bottom had not been transformed, if only they had been able to performed with him. Suddenly, Bottom reappears. How is the question of Bottom's change dealt with? [Act IV, Scene 2]
This is the most joyous scene of the play as Bottom is reunited with his buddies. They are dying to learn what happened, and Bottom teases them at line 29 by offering "to discourse wonders" and then refusing to explain at all. Of course, we understand that before you can "discourse" you have to understand, and he still hasn't a clue. The other actors are so happy to see him, they just accept his refusal.
As the scene opens the company is discontent because of Bottom's absence. At line 4 Starveling offers the explanation that he has been "transported." This refers to the belief that people, especially children, who just disappeared had been taken by the fairies. The play is ruined because they have no Pyramus. Peter Quince, no longer in danger of losing control to Bottom, praises his acting ability in appearance, "best person" at line 11, and best vocal ability, "a very paramour of a sweet voice" at line 12. Naturally he means "paragon" but these guys have misused language through the whole place. They will do an especially wonderful job of misusing words in the next scene. Many of their verbal bloopers had sexual overtones. But here, finally, after all these mistakes, Flute finally catches one at line 13: "You must say 'paragon.' A paramour is, God bless us, a thing of nought," which means something dirty. (Can you see the origin of the word "naughty" in a sexual sense?)
Without Bottom the play cannot be performed. When Snug says there are now three couples getting married, and if their play had been chosen for performance, they would have been "made men" [line 18], he is referring to the idea of royal reward. That's what the guys have been aiming at all along. Flute, who was reluctant at first to play Thisby, has become totally committed to the production. He is overwhelmed by the injustice of the situation:
O sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a day during his life.
He could not have scaped sixpence a day. An the Duke had not given
him sixpence a day for playing Pyramus, I'll be hanged. He would have
deserved it. Sixpence a day in Pyramus, or nothing.
This passage reveals how royal rewards apparently worked. Sixpence wasn't much, but you got it every day! Selflessly Flute is concerned about his fellow actor. They really do think he is the Russell Crowe of his time.
When Bottom comes back he brings word that their play has been chosen as one of the finalists in Star Search Athens. He now takes control completely, ordering the actors around and issuing last minute commands, including avoiding onions and the Lion letting his nails grow for claws. Now there is no struggle over who gets the last word in the scene. Bottom closes it with "No more words. Away! Go, away!"
Act V, Scene 1
The final scene will be dominated by the performance of the play-within-the-play. The first sequence, however, shows us Theseus and Hippolyta discussing what happened to the lovers in the forest. What's unusual about Theseus' attitude toward romantic love? [Act V, scene 1, lines 1 -- 27]
What this sequence shows us is that those who did not participate in the adventures in the forest cannot understand what happened. Theseus, even on his wedding day when you would think a person would be most open to the transforming power of love and imagination, dismisses the stories of the lovers by lumping the lover with the poet and the madman. On the other hand Hippolyta senses that something "strange and admirable" [27] took place, although its exact nature is hidden from human eyes. In his explanation of how we delude ourselves through love, art or madness, Theseus at line 12 gives a very powerful and persuasive explanation of the process of the imagination and, in so doing, the philosophy of Shakespeare's art:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
I don't think anyone has ever given a more exact or poetical explanation of creativity.
The wedding has already taken place, and the newlyweds are just waiting for dark when it would be polite for them to slip off and start their honeymoons. In the interim they want some entertainment, and so Theseus turns to his official purveyor of entertainment, Philostrate, and asks what's available. Why does he make the choice he does? [V, 1, lines 28 -- 107]
Philostrate goes through four choices. At line 44 they have "The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung/ By an Athenian eunuch to a harp." That doesn't sound appropriate for a wedding reception. The second option is at line 48: "The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals,/ Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage." This is apparently a sight gag, where a bunch of drunks appear to tear a poor lounge singer to pieces. It's funny the first time, but what do you do for an encore? It's like the little car at the circus that drives to the center ring and all these clowns get out of it. Once again, not exactly what you want at a marriage feast. The third choice is even less palatable at line 52: "The thrice three Muses mourning for the death/ Of Learning, late deceased in beggary." As Theseus guesses this is probably an acid-tongued satire by an intellectual complaining that he's not getting the government grant he deserves. This may be a reference to a particularly long-winded piece of pompous writing that was published right around this time. Theseus rejects it. And so by a process of elimination we come at line 56 to the winner: "A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/ And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth." After playing around with the contradictions of tedious and brief; tragical and mirth, Theseus picks this entertainment. Philostrate tries to dissuade him at line 61:
A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious. For in all the play
There is not one word apt, one player fitted.
And tragical, my noble lord, it is,
For Pyramus therein doth kill himself,
Which, when I saw rehearsed, I must confess,
Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears
The passion of loud laughter never shed.
It's not surprising that Theseus selects a play for the nuptial entertainment. Apparently noble or even royal weddings had plays performed as part of the celebration. There's some evidence that A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed on such an occasion. Even when Philostrate characterizes the actors at line 72 as "Hard-handed men, that work in Athens here,/ Which never labored in their minds till now," the Duke demands that they see it performed. When Philostrate warns that it will be terrible, Theseus assures him and the rest of the wedding party at line 82, "For never anything can be amiss,/ When simpleness and duty tender it." Hippolyta says she will not enjoy it, but Theseus insists at line 104 that "Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity/ In least speak most, to my capacity." This reveals a largeness of spirit and humane tolerance, what the French call noblesse oblige, that makes Theseus appear a superior leader. It will not, however, stop him and the others from laughing at the play and heckling the actors.
In the next sequence the Prologue (Peter Quince) comes out and gives a lengthy introduction to the play. Try reading his initial speech at line 108 -- 117 aloud to see if you can detect what the source of the humor is for the audience. [V, 1, lines 108 -- 154]
Quince, undoubtedly nervous, rushes through the prologue ignoring all the intended marks of punctuation. Look at line 114 -- 116, as it is punctuated on the page, representing how Quince delivered it: "All for your delight/ We are not here. That you should repent you,/ The actors are at hand." This gives you some sense of the verbal humor.
The reaction to the Prologue sets the pattern for the whole performance. The boys do a few lines and the audience heckles. Shakespeare seems to have discovered this formula because he uses it in a number of comedies: characters saying things in a comic way is funny, but characters doing that while others comment on how silly they are is even funnier. Look for this pattern in Twelfth Night in the scene where the comic characters play a practical joke on the pompous hypocrite, Malvolio.
Once he gets into the summary of the play's action, Quince's mutilation of the language is apparent. For one thing he uses words which were archaic when Shakespeare wrote it, such as at line 139 when he uses "hight," a word from Middle English, to mean "called." This word adds nothing to the understanding of the lines. Secondly, he uses words in strange or repetitive ways to maintain the rhyme of the speech, as the phrase "think it no scorn" at line 137 (which makes no sense at all) to rhyme with "thorn." Or line 141 where we discover the Lion "Did scare away; or rather did affright" (which means the same thing but sound like an important distinction, just so he can get a word to rhyme with "night." Finally, Quince has been praised for his use of alliteration (using words which begin with the same vowel sound), and as an amateur writer, he figures if two alliterative words are good, nine are lots better so we get lines 146 -- 147: "Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,/ He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast." Someone stop him before he alliterates again! The purpose of the narrated prologue at the beginning of these old-fashioned plays, along with a pantomime of the action, was to give the audience a clue about what the story line was because it was assumed the language was so formal and complicated, audiences wouldn't be able to understand. The play Hamlet has another play-within-the-play where the prologue is necessary to help understand the play's language. In this case the actual play is not much of an intellectual challenge. Shakespeare is making fun of the old kinds of plays which he inherited.
The next sequence is the scene with the Wall, Pyramus and Thisby. The language here is funny as the characters have to explain everything, even the most obvious stuff. One of the little comic gems in this passage is the use of the word "stones," which in Shakespeare's time, as well as ours, refer to testicles. Where does Pyramus step out of character to become Bottom again? Enjoy! [V, 1, line 155 -- 218]
Once we get into the heart of the play we see the challenge of the imaginatively-impaired trying to create an illusion of reality. The Wall at line 161 has to "prove" his identity to the audience. (By the way, the cranny or chink is formed by holding his fingers apart.) Bottom's acting style is also a challenge; you can imagine him bellowing so even the people in the last row probably had to cover their ears. Quince's writing here reveals other serious shortcomings. He is trying to write metered verse with ten syllables per line. Sometimes he just runs out of things to say, so we get things like line 172: "O night, O night! Alack, alack, alack!" which consists of three words that are repeated until he has the requisite ten syllables. The words themselves really break new ground in communications, as at line 171, where we learn "O night, which ever art when day is not!" The best humor in this sequence is the effort to treat the Wall as if he were an animate object, and once you bring in the issue of his "stones," it really does get hilarious. (In a film version done back in the 1930's, starring James Cagney as Bottom, and made at a time when the Hayes censorship office was making sure all sex was removed from the movies, the filmmaker was able to keep Thisby's line 190 intact.)
The heckling from the audience continues, and when Bottom curses Wall's "stones" at line 181, Theseus observes, "The Wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again." As long as you've got a Wall that can speak and feel, he probably doesn't appreciate having his stones cursed. At this point Bottom steps out of character and explains to the Duke, who obviously doesn't "get it," what is about to happen: that his last line was the cue for Thisby's entrance. Leaving your character on the stage is an absolute no-no for a professional actor. But it fits with Bottom's personality that he would want to make sure everyone in the audience had the benefit of his wisdom.
At line 197 Peter Quince throws in some classical references to give his writing some class, just like Shakespeare himself did. The only problem is that either Quince or his actors mess up when they try to allude to the young lovers Leander and Hero who were faithful in love even as they died. Bottom calls himself "Limander," instead of "Leander." For Thisby "Hero" becomes "Helen." Helen of Troy, the slut that caused the Trojan War, was no where close to the innocent young girl Hero. On a roll, however, Pyramus throws in references to "Shafalus and Procrus," fictitious names that have perplexed scholars for centuries. The other mispronunciation is strictly a case of actor-error. Neither Bottom nor Flute can come upon the name "Ninus," the guy whose tomb will serve as a meeting place for the lovers, without turning it into "Ninny's," an unfortunate comment on playwright and actors. We leave this sequence with the image of Thisby kissing the Wall's hole at line 202, one of my favorites.
As you review the next sequence ask yourself what it has in common with Romeo and Juliet. [V, 1, lines 204 -- 364]
In the last part of the play-within-the-play, we see the comic pay-off of some of the jokes prepared for since the first act. Poor Snug, who so worried about playing the Lion and frightening the ladies, turns out to be a tame pussycat. Moonshine, who is weighted down with all kinds of props associated with the moon, is heckled so unmercifully that he is almost reduced to tears at line 257. Part of the problem for Moonshine is the reference to his being "horned" at line 239. Men whose wives cuckolded them were said to wear "horns," which were invisible to them but which everyone else could see. Moonshine's horns of the crescent moon set off mockery of poor Starveling. In his frustration he finally tells the audience at line 257: "All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn [lantern] is the moon; I, the man i' th' moon; this thorn bush, my thorn bush; this dog, my dog."
After Lion chases Thisby off chewing her mantle with his bloody mouth, Pyramus enters and has his biggest scene. The language is screamingly inappropriate, such as when he bewails Thisby, who he presumes is dead, at line 282, with "O dainty duck! O dear!" On the other hand there are lines that are so overwritten, they are funny, as at 285:
Approach, ye Furies fell!
O Fates, come, come!
Cut thread and thrum;
Quail, crush, conclude and quell!
Try saying that last line five times without hurting yourself. Bottom really rattles around with the sounds of that alliteration here. No wonder Theseus says, his tongue in his cheek, "This passion, with the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad." Earlier we saw how Peter Quince used excessive repetition to stuff enough syllables into the meter of the line. Here we reach a new low at line 307: "Now, die, die, die, die, die." Imagine how Bottom will overact this part of the scene.
Now this whole sequence has a number of parallels with Romeo and Juliet: a young couple makes a tragic mistake and thinks the other has died; the mutual suicide; the feuding fathers; the final scene at a tomb. And we have some echoes in the language Shakespeare uses in both plays. Here's just one example: Pyramus says, "Eyes, do you see/ How can it be?" and Romeo, at V, 3, line 112, says, "Eyes, look your last!/ Arms, take your last embrace!" Thisby's farewell to Pyramus really waxes poetic, in a comic fashion, of course, at line 332:
These lily lips,
This cherry noses,
These yellow cowslip cheeks,
Are gone, are gone.
Lovers, make moan.
His eyes were green as leeks.
Thisby manages to make Pyramus sound like a float in the Rose Bowl Parade.
At the conclusion the actors think they have performed the world's most powerful tragedy, while the audience is howling with laughter. Unlike a professional acting company they have managed to leave the stage littered with bodies, so Theseus, at line 350, says, "Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead," and Demetrius adds, "Ay, and Wall too." Bottom, who wants to make sure everyone understands every nuance of the play, jumps up, resurrected, so he can explain the moral, "No, I assure you; the wall is down that parted their fathers." He then offers the audience a choice of hearing an epilogue, which like the prologue, would explain everything one more time, or watching the company perform a "Bergomask dance." This idea of the actors performing a dance after the play apparently was a custom on Shakespeare's stage as well. Instead of watching the credits roll by, you got to watch Romeo and Juliet do a break dance! Theseus says the epilogue isn't necessary at line 357: "for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse, for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed." After a couple of more shots at the actors, he praises the production and calls for the dance. The boys will get paid!
Theseus switches from prose to verse at line 365, signaling that the rough humor of the play-within-a-play is over. The bell has sounded midnight, and it is almost "fairy-time" [line 366]. Theseus gives us his true assessment of the production of "Pyramus and Thisby," in case anyone in the audience thought that it was a serious performance; he calls it "palpable gross" at line 369 but says it served to pass the time. The newly weds can now start their honeymoons!
As soon as the humans leave the stage, Puck appears with a broom, ostensibly to help clean the room by sweeping the dust from behind the door [line 392]. In his speech he evokes a sense of night with prowling animals and remembrances of death that frighten the restless humans. The graves let out their spirits that wander the graveyards. The fairies are at home in the world of the dark and they have blessed the house on the occasion of Theseus' marriage.
Oberon and Titania now enter and perform a song and dance to further the blessing of the house. Oberon then pronounces a benediction for the newly weds at line 403:
Now, until the break of day,
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be;
And the blots of Nature's hand
Shall not in their issue stand.
Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.
This speech starts out with a traditional blessing of the bridal bed and then moves to a general blessing upon the children created by these unions. But the specific blessing which follows at lines 411 -- 416 is rather poignant, reminding us how for people in that age the idea of birth defects was a constant worry. Oberon offers supernatural protection for the children who will come from these marriages.
The final speech belongs to Puck, and in it he does something rather odd: he apologizes for the shortcomings of the play and in effect begs for applause. At line 425 he offers this rationale for the play:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumb'red here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream.
Shakespeare is saying that this play about people having visions while in the forest is itself simply a dream. In a way it has no more significance than a fantasy, and yet we have been moved by the experience. Art at its most powerful has this ability to shape our vision. Throughout his career he would explore this idea that the experience of the play was in a sense like a dream, an alternative reality. He continues at 436:
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long:
Puck flatters the audience by calling them "gentles," as if they were all members of the upper class, while asking their forgiveness for the play. If Shakespeare's actors, unlike Bottom and his buddies, can escape the audience's hissing ("serpent's tongue"), they will be better in the future. Now this elaborate apology may have just been a kind of affectation on Shakespeare's part -- "Jeez, we're sorry you had to sit through one of the world's comic masterpieces." It's also a reminder to the audience Shakespeare was writing for that they and this acting company had a long history together, as if to say, "We'll be back very soon, and better than ever." There must have been an excitement in the theater as they watched Shakespeare fulfill his promise, even while mockingly apologizing for his work. Puck concludes by cleverly begging for the audience's applause by asking them to supply the final action of the play at line 439: "Give me your hands if we be friends,/ And Robin shall restore amends." Shakespeare does this kind of witty apology for several of his comedies in the closing lines. Surely he was aware of how little they needed such excuses. Thus ends this delightful comedy.