(WARNING: If you're looking for a quick read, I would suggest hitting the back button.)
It's over. I have officially finished A Midsummer Night's Dream. And now that I'm done, I have to say that it was well worth reading: lively, entertaining, and amusing. In school, we tend to focus on Shakespeare's tragedies, and as good as those are, it's nice to read something where things work out well at the end. A Midsummer Night's Dream has all the wordplay, clever plot twists, and compelling characters that you would expect from Shakespeare, and it's not any less serious--in terms of universal messages and statements about human nature--than his tragedies. It just arrives at those statements in a slightly different way. Over the course of this post, I'm going to try to tease out one possible meaning of the play.
In my first post, I speculated about a possible feminist message to the play. Shakespeare sets up a clear conflict between the men's desires and the women's desires, and I wondered what it would mean if the women's desires won out in the end. At the same time, I was aware that I had to be careful. It was possible that Shakespeare was questioning or criticizing the customs and gender roles of his time, but if I decided that he was, I had to make sure to find that meaning in the text rather than overlaying my own modern sensibilities on a play that was written over 400 years ago. That was a common message in almost all the books and articles I've read about reading and analyzing literature. Vladimir Nabokov said, "Minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise." Thomas Foster claimed that readers--not writers--are in charge of the reading and don't have to make the interpretations the author intended, but also cautioned that interpretations must be grounded in the text. I was especially mindful of Francine Prose, who criticized the "warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading 'texts' in which ideas and policies trumped what the writer had actually written." I knew that I would become exactly what Prose told me not to become if I didn't guard against it.
I was also aware that Shakespeare, on other occasions, wrote plays that seemed to have rather un-feminist messages. It seemed unlikely that the same guy who wrote The Taming of the Shrew would also write a play that argued for women's rights. And yet, as I kept reading, I thought there might be something to my initial hypothesis. The story centers around four hapless lovers: Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena. Hermia's father, Egeus, wants her to marry Demetrius, but she prefers Lysander. Egeus is so hell-bent on getting his way that he asks Theseus to execute his daughter if she refuses to marry Demetrius. And he describes her like a piece of garbage that he's all too eager to throw away: "As she is mine, I may dispose of her/Which shall be either to this gentleman/Or to her death, according to our law." Theseus doesn't discourage this kind of thinking. He tells Hermia, "Your father should be as a god/.../your eyes must with his judgment look."
What would happen to Demetrius if Helena married Lysander? Conveniently, there's someone else who loves Demetrius: Helena. She has tried everything to woo him, but he refuses to return her affection. "The more I love," she says, "the more he hateth me." If he would only change his mind and open his heart to her, everyone would walk away happy. And if that happened, it could be construed as a victory for the two bold women over the ironclad rules of the time.
That's where the fairies come in. Oberon, king of the fairies, decides to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena, and he tells one of his underlings, Robin Goodfellow, to find Demetrius while he's sleeping and anoint his eyes with a special nectar that will make him fall in love with the first person he sees when he wakes up. (In a bit of illogic that is never explained, Oberon is somehow certain that the first person Demetrius sees when he wakes up will be Helena.)
Naturally, things don't go according to Oberon's plan. Robin messes up and puts the nectar in Lysander's eyes instead. Helena comes upon him and wakes him up, and he jumps right up and declares his love for her. What I find most impressive about the whole thing is that, even though he was just sound asleep, his first line contains exactly the right number of syllables and even rhymes with Helena's line preceding it. After that, we get to laugh as Lysander chases Helena around the woods. He insists that he's serious, while she is certain that he's mocking her. Robin, looking on, says, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" This can be read as a statement about literature and storytelling in general: When you get down to it, aren't all stories, whether they're tragedies or comedies, about human failures and follies?
But Robin's line can also be read as a statement about the foolishness and irrationality of human love, which is a theme that Shakespeare develops throughout the story. In addition to the part about Lysander and Helena, we have the absurdity of Titania, the queen of the fairies, falling in love with Nick Bottom, a weaver with the head of an ass, as a result of Oberon's and Robin's trickery. When the dramatic focus returns to our original four lovers, Oberon anoints Demetrius' eyes with the same nectar. This doesn't quite solve the problem because there are now two people chasing Helena. The tables have turned: Hermia, the object of both men's affection at the beginning of the play, is now ignored. It's all quite ridiculous.
Oberon and Robin eventually get things straightened out. They put a new spell on Lysander so that he loves Hermia again, and they put a different nectar in Titania's eyes to undo her love for Bottom. Titania and Oberon are reunited; their feud is over. Demetrius, Lysander, Helena, and Hermia return to Athens from the woods and tell Theseus that things have changed: Now Demetrius loves Helena. Theseus decides, despite Egeus' protests, to allow Lysander to wed Hermia and Demetrius to wed Helena, and there we have it: a victory for feminism and true love. But it can't be that simple, because we have to reconcile the happy ending with the arbitrary and ridiculous mechanism used to bring it about. I mean, the outcome is determined by fairies going around and sprinkling stuff in people's eyes! Demetrius' love for Helena would not exist if it weren't for the fairies' mischief. And yet it is treated as if it were equal to the affections of Lysander and Hermia and Titania and Oberon. It's incongruous.
I think there's a feminist message in there somewhere, but we have to consider a few other things in order to figure out the finer points of that message. A good interpretation, according to Laurence Perrine, must account for all the details on the page. He was writing about poetry, but I think his ideas can be applied to plays as well.
So here we go: The people who are touched by the fairies' spells call on the language of dreams and visions to describe their experiences. When he speaks to Theseus in the morning, Lysander says he is "half sleep, half waking." Demetrius says to his three companions, "Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream." Titania says, "What visions have I seen!/Methought I was enamored of an ass." Bottom says, "I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was." Love is like a dream, Shakespeare is saying. It's confusing, illogical, illusory, indescribable. Someone is pulling the strings, but whoever it is, we are only dimly aware of him or her. So if Shakespeare is saying something about gender equality, what he really seems to be saying is that male and female love are equally irrational, which falls short of a ringing endorsement of women's rights.
There's also the pesky matter of Hippolyta, whom I have somehow neglected to mention thus far. She is the soon-to-be-wife of Theseus, the duke of Athens. Not that she has much choice in the matter--Theseus kidnapped her so he could marry her. Shakespeare doesn't particularly care how Hippolyta feels about the whole thing: She speaks once in the first four acts. She does get a few more lines in the last act, mostly to make fun of the play that she and Theseus are watching, and Theseus responds respectfully enough to her. At that point, it seems almost like a conversation among equals, rather than a conversation between master and slave, which is how I imagined the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta up until that point. Still, I find it hard to ignore how Hippolyta got there in the first place. It certainly clouds the picture.
And yet I also can't ignore the stinging rebuke that the story's outcome gives to Egeus. It's one thing to say that a woman's love and a man's love are equally foolish; it's another to actually give equal consideration (and perhaps even preference) to the woman's love rather than the man's, and that's exactly what Shakespeare does. The fairies control the ending of the story; they're kind of like the Fates in Greek mythology. And clearly, based on the fairies' actions, fate has at least some concern for a women's desires. What they want actually matters, at least in some cases. There might be a contradictory message related to Hippolyta's status, but the feminist meaning definitely exists. In Shakespeare's time, this meaning would have generated controversy. But Shakespeare uses a narrative framing device--a play, performed by Bottom and his friends, within the actual play--in order to dance around any potential trouble.
Bottom and his friends are quite afraid that their show will offend the audience because it includes two suicides and a roaring lion. Accordingly, they add a prologue explaining that none of the actors actually dies and the lion is actually a guy in a costume. At the conclusion of the play, Bottom offers to read an epilogue in which, it appears, he will apologize for any offense the actors may have caused. But Theseus rebuffs him: "Your play needs no excuse."
Interestingly, Shakespeare does the same thing as Bottom. He has already covered himself pretty well by hiding the feminist message in a farcical comedy--if anyone complains, he can just say that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. But just in case any people are still offended, he has Robin deliver an apology to the audience: "If we shadows have offended,/Think but this and all is mended:/That you have but slumbered here/While those visions did appear." If you didn't like it, he's saying, just think of it as a dream. But careful readers know, because of what Theseus said just a few moments earlier, that Shakespeare doesn't really want them to pretend it was all a dream. His play needs no excuse. He's apologizing, but he's not sorry at all. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, and he's acting like it's all a joke, but he's actually quite serious. The narrative sleight-of-hand simultaneously drives away the people who are too closed-minded to accept Shakespeare's message and draws in the readers he actually cares about.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
The Bottom line
So far in my posts about Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, I haven't mentioned the Athenian tradesmen: Nick Bottom, Peter Quince, Francis Flute, Tom Snout, Snug, and Robin Starveling. That's a shame, because they're quite entertaining. It's probably not necessary to have comic relief in this play, as the hapless lovers and the fairies' shenanigans are funny enough already, but comic relief is exactly what the tradesmen are. The tradesmen do interact with the other characters, but based on what I've seen through the first four acts, none of these interactions are vital to the main conflict over Hermia's and Helena's love. Structurally, the play would work just fine without them. That, as well as my own recollections from seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream a few years ago, leads me to believe that the tradesmen are there mainly to make us laugh.
From the first scene in which they appear, the bumbling tradesmen, who are planning to put on a play at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, bring oddball and offbeat humor to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom wants to play every part in the play; he accepts the role of Pyramus, the male lead, then asks to be Thisbe, Pyramus' star-crossed lover, then begs to be the lion as well. Bottom is also notable for his odd uses of language: "generally" to mean "individually," for example. A funny moment comes when Snug the joiner, the idiot of the group (though they're all portrayed as idiots with the possible exception of Quince), is given the lion part. "Have you the lion's part written?" he asks Quince, who is directing the play. "Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study." His admission of his own dimwittedness is unnecessary: Quince already knew he wasn't the brightest bulb and gave him a part to match his intelligence. "You may do it extempore," Quince says, "for it is nothing but roaring."
The tradesmen reappear at the beginning of Act III. During the course of rehearsals, the group dynamic comes into greater focus. Quince is the smart, practical one--he wrote the play, and he has an almanac handy when the others ask if the moon will shine the night of the performance. But Quince and the others defer to Bottom, the extroverted center of attention. When Bottom mentions his concerns about the violence in the play (Pyramus kills himself) and the scariness of the roaring lion ("to bring in a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing"), they all agree to add a prologue to clarify that the lion isn't actually a lion and no one is actually harmed when Pyramus dies. (This clarification is probably unnecessary for the audience, but the tradesmen don't quite seem to understand the concept of fiction.) When the other tradesmen are unsure about some practical aspect of the production, such as how to make a wall for Pyramus and Thisbe to talk through, they ask for Bottom's opinion and carry out whatever he suggests. He gets the final word.
More funny things happen once they actually begin rehearsing. Bottom reads his very first line wrong: "Thisbe, the flowers of odious savors sweet..." Quince corrects him, saying the word "odious" should be replaced with "odors." Now, I'm not an expert on 16th-century English, but I don't think the revised version of that sentence makes a lot of sense either: "The flowers of odors savors sweet..."?
Meanwhile, Flute (a man playing a woman, which I imagine would already make the audience laugh) reads all his lines at once rather than stopping and waiting for the other actors to speak and cue him. Also humorous are the lame attempts at rhyming ("hue" and "Jew", "brier" and "tire") and inventions of words ("brisky") to get the number of syllables right.
Right about this time, the fairy Robin Goodfellow, who has been invisibly watching the rehearsal, casts a spell on Bottom, giving him the head of an ass. The humor of this is heightened when Bottom, oblivious to his appearance, walks back onto the rehearsal stage. "O Bottom, thou art changed!" Snout says. "What do I see on thee?" Bottom replies, "What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you?" I'm not sure what he means by this--and knowing Bottom, he might not know either--but he certainly has no idea how true his words are. A few lines later, he responds to his friends' confusion at his appearance by saying, "I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could." This is the height of dramatic irony, and quite funny for the audience. It's also an apt transformation for Bottom to make, both because of his name (bottom and ass) and because of the slightly upside-down nature of his thinking.
Moments later, Titania, the queen of the fairies--who is under a spell that will make her fall in love with the next person she sees--is awakened by Bottom's singing and promptly declares that she loves him. So we now have a character with the head of an ass, and we have another character who is madly enamored of him. It doesn't get more absurd than that.
In Act IV, when Bottom wakes up on the ground, he can't believe what has happened to him. In keeping with his inept, blundering character, he misquotes St Paul's letter to the Corinthians in the Bible: "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 continues: "I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream' because it hath no bottom." This doesn't make any sense, just like most of everything else about Bottom. He's just a little bit off, in a way that makes him unintentionally funny. Maybe he has a higher purpose in the story, one that will be illuminated in the final act. Or maybe he's just there to be the butt of our jokes. But if the latter is true, I'm still impressed by Shakespeare's sophistication in making him look like an idiot. The name, the double entendres, the reference to the Bible--it's all very clever and well thought-out. That kind of craft is, I guess, why there's so much fuss about Shakespeare.
From the first scene in which they appear, the bumbling tradesmen, who are planning to put on a play at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, bring oddball and offbeat humor to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom wants to play every part in the play; he accepts the role of Pyramus, the male lead, then asks to be Thisbe, Pyramus' star-crossed lover, then begs to be the lion as well. Bottom is also notable for his odd uses of language: "generally" to mean "individually," for example. A funny moment comes when Snug the joiner, the idiot of the group (though they're all portrayed as idiots with the possible exception of Quince), is given the lion part. "Have you the lion's part written?" he asks Quince, who is directing the play. "Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study." His admission of his own dimwittedness is unnecessary: Quince already knew he wasn't the brightest bulb and gave him a part to match his intelligence. "You may do it extempore," Quince says, "for it is nothing but roaring."
The tradesmen reappear at the beginning of Act III. During the course of rehearsals, the group dynamic comes into greater focus. Quince is the smart, practical one--he wrote the play, and he has an almanac handy when the others ask if the moon will shine the night of the performance. But Quince and the others defer to Bottom, the extroverted center of attention. When Bottom mentions his concerns about the violence in the play (Pyramus kills himself) and the scariness of the roaring lion ("to bring in a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing"), they all agree to add a prologue to clarify that the lion isn't actually a lion and no one is actually harmed when Pyramus dies. (This clarification is probably unnecessary for the audience, but the tradesmen don't quite seem to understand the concept of fiction.) When the other tradesmen are unsure about some practical aspect of the production, such as how to make a wall for Pyramus and Thisbe to talk through, they ask for Bottom's opinion and carry out whatever he suggests. He gets the final word.
More funny things happen once they actually begin rehearsing. Bottom reads his very first line wrong: "Thisbe, the flowers of odious savors sweet..." Quince corrects him, saying the word "odious" should be replaced with "odors." Now, I'm not an expert on 16th-century English, but I don't think the revised version of that sentence makes a lot of sense either: "The flowers of odors savors sweet..."?
Meanwhile, Flute (a man playing a woman, which I imagine would already make the audience laugh) reads all his lines at once rather than stopping and waiting for the other actors to speak and cue him. Also humorous are the lame attempts at rhyming ("hue" and "Jew", "brier" and "tire") and inventions of words ("brisky") to get the number of syllables right.
Right about this time, the fairy Robin Goodfellow, who has been invisibly watching the rehearsal, casts a spell on Bottom, giving him the head of an ass. The humor of this is heightened when Bottom, oblivious to his appearance, walks back onto the rehearsal stage. "O Bottom, thou art changed!" Snout says. "What do I see on thee?" Bottom replies, "What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you?" I'm not sure what he means by this--and knowing Bottom, he might not know either--but he certainly has no idea how true his words are. A few lines later, he responds to his friends' confusion at his appearance by saying, "I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could." This is the height of dramatic irony, and quite funny for the audience. It's also an apt transformation for Bottom to make, both because of his name (bottom and ass) and because of the slightly upside-down nature of his thinking.
Moments later, Titania, the queen of the fairies--who is under a spell that will make her fall in love with the next person she sees--is awakened by Bottom's singing and promptly declares that she loves him. So we now have a character with the head of an ass, and we have another character who is madly enamored of him. It doesn't get more absurd than that.
In Act IV, when Bottom wakes up on the ground, he can't believe what has happened to him. In keeping with his inept, blundering character, he misquotes St Paul's letter to the Corinthians in the Bible: "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 continues: "I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream' because it hath no bottom." This doesn't make any sense, just like most of everything else about Bottom. He's just a little bit off, in a way that makes him unintentionally funny. Maybe he has a higher purpose in the story, one that will be illuminated in the final act. Or maybe he's just there to be the butt of our jokes. But if the latter is true, I'm still impressed by Shakespeare's sophistication in making him look like an idiot. The name, the double entendres, the reference to the Bible--it's all very clever and well thought-out. That kind of craft is, I guess, why there's so much fuss about Shakespeare.
Intertextuality: A case study
The first two characters we meet in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta, are themselves based on Greek myths. Theseus was, according to legend, the founder and first ruler of Athens. He had two fathers (myths don't need to follow the laws of biology): Aegeus (a mortal) and Poseidon (the god of the sea). This dual parentage gave him both mortal and divine characteristics. Hippolyta was the daughter of Ares, the god of war. She was the queen of the Amazons, a legendary race of female warriors. Depending on which version of the story you read, Theseus either kidnapped Hippolyta or captured her in battle (which, I admit, is not a huge distinction). Theseus makes direct reference to this within the first 20 lines: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword/And won thy love doing thee injuries."
Shakespeare has chosen to set his play inside a Greek myth. But he takes liberties with it by placing completely mortal characters of his own invention in the same space as legendary, quasi-divine mythological figures. He builds the story around his own characters and shoves Theseus and Hippolyta to the periphery; after the first scene, we don't see them again until Act IV. This is not an illogical thing to do. After all, Theseus couldn't have ruled Athens unless he had some people to rule over. Those people weren't mentioned a whole lot in the myths about Theseus, but they must have existed within the universe of the Athenian founding story. Shakespeare fills in the gap by inventing a few of them.
What Shakespeare does here with Greek mythology is actually quite similar to what other authors have done with Shakespeare's works. For example, Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I haven't read, but which is mentioned in Thomas Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor) revolves around two minor characters from Hamlet. The play makes reference to Shakespeare's original work, just as Shakespeare makes reference to the myths about Theseus, but dares to imagine what the lives of the peripheral people were like. They weren't important enough to be characterized in depth in the original work, but they were people, so they must have had their own problems and conflicts. All that was needed to bring those problems and conflicts to life was an author's imagination--Shakespeare's in the case of Theseus, Stoppard's in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
A few other things about mythological allusions in this play: First of all, they're everywhere! I count eight references to mythological figures in just the first scene of dialogue. Sometimes, they seem almost gratuitous, as when Lysander says, "Tomorrow night when Phoebe doth behold/Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass..." According to the notes, Phoebe is an uncommonly used name for the goddess of the moon. There's a reason that Shakespeare is Shakespeare and I'm not. Still, was it really necessary to make a somewhat obscure mythological allusion in order to say, "Tomorrow night when the moon comes out and reflects in the water..."
At first, I thought that all the references to gods mythological characters might contribute to the setting of the story, functioning as a kind of regional dialect. A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in Athens, after all. But with my limited knowledge of Greek mythology and a little Googling, I realized that Shakespeare actually uses the Roman names for a lot of these gods. There are lots of mentions of Diana, the goddess of chastity and the moon; the Greeks, however, would have referred to her as Artemis. I don't know why Shakespeare mixed things up in this way, but it's kind of weird.
Shakespeare also plays with the original Greek myth by inserting a character from a different branch of stories. Oberon, the king of fairies, is a figure in medieval literature; he had nothing to do with the ancient Greeks until Shakespeare put him in this play.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is an excellent case study for intertextuality. Literature builds on itself over time. With a little creativity, old things can be twisted into entirely new things; old characters, stories, and meanings can be entirely reinvented. A story lasts far beyond its author's lifetime.
Shakespeare has chosen to set his play inside a Greek myth. But he takes liberties with it by placing completely mortal characters of his own invention in the same space as legendary, quasi-divine mythological figures. He builds the story around his own characters and shoves Theseus and Hippolyta to the periphery; after the first scene, we don't see them again until Act IV. This is not an illogical thing to do. After all, Theseus couldn't have ruled Athens unless he had some people to rule over. Those people weren't mentioned a whole lot in the myths about Theseus, but they must have existed within the universe of the Athenian founding story. Shakespeare fills in the gap by inventing a few of them.
What Shakespeare does here with Greek mythology is actually quite similar to what other authors have done with Shakespeare's works. For example, Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I haven't read, but which is mentioned in Thomas Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor) revolves around two minor characters from Hamlet. The play makes reference to Shakespeare's original work, just as Shakespeare makes reference to the myths about Theseus, but dares to imagine what the lives of the peripheral people were like. They weren't important enough to be characterized in depth in the original work, but they were people, so they must have had their own problems and conflicts. All that was needed to bring those problems and conflicts to life was an author's imagination--Shakespeare's in the case of Theseus, Stoppard's in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
A few other things about mythological allusions in this play: First of all, they're everywhere! I count eight references to mythological figures in just the first scene of dialogue. Sometimes, they seem almost gratuitous, as when Lysander says, "Tomorrow night when Phoebe doth behold/Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass..." According to the notes, Phoebe is an uncommonly used name for the goddess of the moon. There's a reason that Shakespeare is Shakespeare and I'm not. Still, was it really necessary to make a somewhat obscure mythological allusion in order to say, "Tomorrow night when the moon comes out and reflects in the water..."
At first, I thought that all the references to gods mythological characters might contribute to the setting of the story, functioning as a kind of regional dialect. A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in Athens, after all. But with my limited knowledge of Greek mythology and a little Googling, I realized that Shakespeare actually uses the Roman names for a lot of these gods. There are lots of mentions of Diana, the goddess of chastity and the moon; the Greeks, however, would have referred to her as Artemis. I don't know why Shakespeare mixed things up in this way, but it's kind of weird.
Shakespeare also plays with the original Greek myth by inserting a character from a different branch of stories. Oberon, the king of fairies, is a figure in medieval literature; he had nothing to do with the ancient Greeks until Shakespeare put him in this play.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is an excellent case study for intertextuality. Literature builds on itself over time. With a little creativity, old things can be twisted into entirely new things; old characters, stories, and meanings can be entirely reinvented. A story lasts far beyond its author's lifetime.
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