Shakespeare the feminist? and more on meaning

(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.