A Mid Summer Night Dream Tragedy in Comic Disguise

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A Midsummer Night's Dream: Tragedy in Comic Disguise Author(s): Virgil Hutton Reviewed work(s): Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 25, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1985), pp. 289-305 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450724 . Accessed: 23/11/2012 02:27
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SEL 25(1985) ISSN 0039-3657
A Midsummer Night's Dream: Tragedy in Comic Disguise

VIRGIL HUTTON Even though the seriousness of A Midsummer NightksDream has long been getting its due, T. Walter Herbert is the only critic to treat at length the metaphysical implications as the dominant concern of the play. A rapid survey of the criticism of the play reveals an early concentration on the theme of love, which, with Barber's rejection of love as the play's major motif, gradually yields to a stress on the theme of art (perhaps climaxing with Young's view of the play as Shakespeare's Ars Poetica), which in turn may, under the provocation of Herberts study, shift to a probing of the play's metaphysical dimensions.' Herbert opens an inviting prospect for critics by claiming to make statements not about Shakespeare's intentions but only about a contemporary spectator's reactions to the play. Through linking the theme of art with the metaphysical issues raised by Herbert, I will argue that Shakespeare did deliberately raise the philosophical and religious issues so perceptively pondered by Herbert's spectator. Herbert's spectator sees two contrasting worlds in the play: the comic animist world of Athens, under the guidance of the fairies, and the tragic nonanimist "Babylonian" world in the playwithin-a-play of "Pyramus and Thisby," where there is no guidVirgil Hutton is an Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Joyce, and Hemingway. 1938). 'Henry B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London: Methuen, Charlton's chapter on the play represents an influential interpretation focusing on the love theme. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare'sFestive Comedy: A Study of LDramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959); David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Mazed Dream"(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966); T. Walter Herbert, Oberon's World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977). Quotations from the play are from the text in Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge, eds., The Complete Worksof Shakespeare(Waltham: Xerox, 1971).
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ance of any gods or spirits whatsoever. Because "Pyramus and Thisby" is produced by citizen mechanicals, the spectator, with the aid of Herbert's centuries of hindsight, links their soulless play world with the future soulless world of commerce, industry, and technology that they are to construct in real life. Thus, for him, the play provides not merely a representation of contemporary currents of thought and belief but also a prophetic glimpse and warning of the "brave new world" to come. Though accepting some of the premises of this new naturalistic world himself, and though not being able to reconcile his religiously oriented beliefs in a beneficent animist world with the actualities of life around him, Herbert's spectator in the end rejects the Babylonian vision of the mechanicals' play and rests in the more comfortable world of the fairy King. If one could choose which world to live in, one might certainly, along with Herbert's spectator, prefer the world of benevolent fairies to the fairyless world of"Pyramus and Thisby." But of course we have no such choice. If our world is a world with fairies or gods, none of our beliefs or actions can make it otherwise, any more than Lysander's or Theseus's lack of belief in the fairies prevents them from existing and operating. And if our world is a world without fairies or gods, no beliefs or actions of ours can make it otherwise, just as the godless world of "Pyramus and Thisby" would not be changed by any appeals for godly aid Pyramus or Thisby might have made. The only choice we have is one of belief, and through A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare does seem to offer us this choice, after hinting at his own belief concerning the reality. For many critics, the choice offered by the play is either between the rational and the irrational or between reason and the imagination. For those stressing the theme of love, rational love is said to triumph over irrational love as the young lovers, after their night of irrationality, return to the bonds of rational love and marriage exemplified by Theseus and Hippolyta. When linked to the theme of art, however, "cool reason" usually loses out to the presumably warmer imagination.2 Though both views suffer from the absence of a clear example of
Dream," 2George A. Bonnard, "Shakespeare's Purpose in Midsummer-Night's Paul A. Olson, "A Midsummer Night's Shakespeare Jahrbuch 92 (1956):268-79; Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage," ELH 24, 2 (1957):95- 119; Marjorie B. Garber, Dream in Shakespeare:From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), ch. 2.
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dramatized "reason" in the play, the rational-irrational love dichotomy is particularly vulnerable. First, the designation of Theseus as the standard of rational love is unconvincing because Shakespeare does not develop the quality of Theseus's love sufficiently for us to apply any special label to it. Second, at the beginning of the play the young lovers are endeavoring not to avoid marriage but to avoid marriage to parties not of their choice, which seems quite rational. Third, at the end of the play no difference in the quality of the young peoples' love is portrayed. Those who claim that the juice of "Dian's bud" represents rational love as opposed to the irrational love induced by the flower "love-in-idleness" must, like Frank Kermode, pass over with embarrassing silence the fact that Demetrius's charmed eyes are never washed with the antidote.3 The dichotomy of reason and imagination also relies heavily on linking Theseus to reason (often tagged "skeptical reason") in opposition to the fairy realm of imagination. But, as some critics have recently pointed out, Theseus represents reason in general no better than he represents reason in love. Huston, for example, likens Theseus's behavior in the first scene of the play to that of an irrational tyrant,4 and certainly one might easily view Oberon's behavior toward the lovers as more reasonable than Theseus's blustering threats. Even in the opening exchange of Act V, where Theseus is usually labeled the defender of reason and Hippolyta of the imagination, Hippolyta's openmindedness, as Herbert's spectator observes (pp. 160-61), is more reasonable than Theseus's dogmatic dismissal of the evidence. Here we pause to note that Theseus's unreasonableness lies particularly in his refusal to grant any more reason to the poet's imaginings than to the lunatic's ravings. Hippolyta grants some credibility to the lovers' stories because she discerns an order or pattern in their account-that is, she finds some "reason" in them-that differentiates them from "fancy's images." Shakespeare's point seems to be that the poet's imaginings, unlike the lunatic's, also contain an order or pattern as a result of being under
3Frank Kermode, "The Mature Comedies," in Early Shakespeare, ed. John R. Studies 3 (New York: St. Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Martin's Press, 1961), p. 218. An attack on Kermode's interpretation is offered by R. W. Dent's "Imagination in A Midsummer Nightns Dream," SQ 15, 2 (Spring 1964): 115-29. 4J. Dennis Huston, "Bottom Waking: Shakespeare's 'Most Rare Vision,"' SEL 13, 2 (1973):217.
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the guidance of reason, and therefore deserve some consideration as purveyors of truth. After Hippolyta's superior reasonableness here, however, Theseus, during the mechanicals' play, becomes the more reasonable in his gracious tolerance and willingness to mend the mechanicals' efforts with his imagination. No characters consistently embody reason, just as no scenes illustrate a world of reason as opposed to a world of imagination. And this deficiency is to be expected, since Shakespeare's comedies, as well as his tragedies, are devoted to showing that reason and people, like reason and love, in the words of Bottom, "keep little company together now-a-days" (III.i. 129-30). Only the play as a whole remains to exemplify that necessary fusion of reason and imagination in art that Hippolyta's speech and Shakespeare's ars poetica call for. But though the reconciliation of reason and imagination remains an important theme, it is not the major concern of the play. In order to be a complete embodiment of Shakespeare's ars poetica as well as his defense of poetry, the play would have to go beyond a presentation of mere method. It would have to contain a discernible pattern or order that would produce a meaning beyond "fancy's images.'7 That such a meaning arises from the worlds perceived by Herbert's spectator appears likely not only because the worlds are concretely dramatized within the play but because other interpretations centering on love or the imagination have not been able satisfactorily to account for the carefully constructed parallels, antitheses, and paradoxes generated by the mechanicals' play. Through the mechanicals' rehearsal scenes, Shakespeare confronts many of the problems and paradoxes arising from the art of drama; I will concentrate on one problem slighted by critics. Once in the first rehearsal scene and twice in the second the mechanicals worry over how to keep their play from frightening the ladies. In considering this worry, critics have largely concentrated on how Shakespeare satirizes the mechanicals' overly literal-minded solution to the problem;5 but little attention has been devoted to the problem itself, which, though raised so lightly and comically by the mechanicals, is of fundamental importance to any artist. Behind the mechanicals' concern for "the ladies," which is comparable in some respects to our modern expressions of concern for "the children," lies the general concern over how much should be
'Barber, pp. 148-51.
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shown to anyone. And the problem for artists, as with the mechanicals, becomes particularly pressing when their material is perceived as being frightening or offensive. The mechanicals' worry is twofold: first, they fear the effect on the audience (that they will be too frightened to continue watching the play); and second, they fear the repercussions on themselves (that the ladies will have them hanged). In relation to the first fear, a consideration of Hamlet's "Mousetrap" may prove instructive. There we see a clear example of the audience (Claudius) being so upset by a performance that he cannot see it through. When we ask why, we find that Hamlet's theory of art is to blame. The mirror image he holds up to Claudius is too exact, too close to Claudius's secret reality for him to bear. The theory suits Hamlet's purposes, but it is not appropriate as a general theory of art; for if it succeeds splendidly in art's one traditional aim of instructing Claudius as to his faults, it fails miserably in art's other aim of providing him with delightful entertainment. The mirror must be sufficiently distorted to keep the audience's shoe from pinching so tightly that they cannot enjoy the performance. And even Hamlet's mirror is sufficiently distorted to allow the more innocent spectators to enjoy the performance by preventing them from realizing its sinister purposes. Hamlet's "Mousetrap" may also illustrate the mechanicals' fear of repercussions. By making Claudius perceive that his crimes are discovered, Hamlet rouses not only Claudius's conscience, but also his determination to kill the one who has revealed knowledge of his guilt. The real death Hamlet faces and the imagined death the mechanicals predict are extreme but realistic manifestations of the resentment aroused toward anyone who exposes the follies and crimes of another too openly. Through censorship, society both reveals where it is most vulnerably fearful and warns artists to avoid portraying these subjects too openly. But of course artists are most attracted to these forbidden subjects because it is obviously just in these areas that society is most in need of enlightenment and instruction. Thus, as many have pointed out, the artist must distort his mirror to penetrate the censorship shield of society just as Freud's dreamwork distorts the dream content in order to deceive the individual's internal censor. Since they are to provide entertainment for a marriage celebration, the mechanicals fear that the threat of violence, posed by the lion, as well as the actual violence of the onstage suicides of Pyra-
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mus and Thisby will be too much for their audience's sensibilities. Shakespeare must share this concern because, if scholarly conjecture is correct, he too is preparing an entertainment to celebrate a marriage, and he would not wish to bathe both the stage and the audience in a bloody tragedy. Yet the seemingly inept decision of the mechanicals to entertain with a tragedy that they must then sweat to divest of its tragic content is also Shakespeare's. And we must ask what he had in mind. Simply to entertain is the goal of the mechanicals, and, judging from Theseus's assertion that "This palpable gross play hath well beguil'd / The heavy gait of night" (V.i.356-57), they achieve this aim brilliantly. But if we include instruction as a goal of art, their play utterly fails, for, as many critics have observed, the audience of newlyweds gives no indication of receiving any instruction whatsoever. They fail to perceive the parallels between themselves and the story of Pyramus and Thisby. By a clumsy performance and by striving to palliate everything unpleasing to their audience, the mechanicals have so distorted their artistic mirror that the newlyweds do not recognize their own features in it. Shakespeare's deliberate rather than unwitting decision to include a tragic story within his comedy surely reflects his desire to instruct as well as to entertain; for if a wedding celebration demands entertainment, the newlyweds also need instruction as preparation for sustaining their new commitments. As Hugh Richmond notes, having our obtuse stage audience witness a playwithin-a-play is a device, used earlier in Love'sLabor'sLost, to incite the theater audience to grasp meanings lost to the stage audience.+ In A MidsummerNight's Dream, the theater audience, including perhaps a pair of newlyweds, should be able to observe the pertinent parallels overlooked by the stage couples and to apply to themselves the clear warning of the tragic consequences that may result from rash actions induced by passionate love. From their superior viewpoint the theater audience can then smile at the stage audience, and Shakespeare's instruction neatly gives rise to comic pleasure. But since such instruction does not seem frightful enough either to drive away the audience or to attract the wrath of society's censorship - if we are to apply the mechanicals' fears over the effect of their play to A Midsummer Night's Dream itself, as I believe we
Sexual Comedy:A Mirrorfor Lovers (IndianapbRugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare's olis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. 121.
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should-we must gaze more deeply into Shakespeare's distorted mirror. Here we must return to the speculations of Herbert's spectator over the "Babylonian," godless world of the mechanicals' play, for these speculations uncover strong reasons for Shakespeare's having fears similar to those of the mechanicals concerning the reaction to his play. After perceiving the parallels between the story of Pyramus and Thisby and the adventures of the young lovers watching the skit, Herbert's spectator, through induction, concludes that the tragic outcome of the mechanicals' play can be explained by the one major lack of parallelism: the absence of any benevolent fairies or gods to protect Pyramus and Thisby from the fatal consequences of their misguided assumptions.7 But Herbert's spectator makes no attempt to decide where Shakespeare stands in relation to the contrasting worlds in the play. We must still ask what it is that Shakespeare tried so cunningly both to present and to conceal. Pursuing the reasoning of Herbert's spectator a bit further may help. Though the absence of benevolent gods in the mechanicals' play may account for the tragic deaths of the lovers, we need not conclude that such a world of accident must always produce tragic results, for there may be happy as well as unhappy accidents. The crucial point being made is that tragedy can occur only in a world not under the guidance of benevolent gods. Both the world of Lysander and Hermia and the world of Pyramus and Thisby are full of accidents, but the one pair of lovers is saved from their unlucky accidents by the benevolent fairies, whereas the other pair is not. And neither pair is more deserving of help than the other. Which of these worlds does the play present as an image of reality? If my reasoning in the preceding paragraph is correct, the answer immediately becomes apparent. Our world of daily tragedies is more faithfully mirrored in the godless world of Pyramus and Thisby than in the fairy world of the Athenian woods. C. L. Barber, for instance, stresses the play's skeptical attitude toward the existence of the fairies,8 and certainly the fanciful representation of the fairies is not calculated to instill belief in their literal existence. Indeed, it is the presence of the fairies that creates the dreamlike atmosphere of unreality in the play once we move into the woods, and it is this air of fantasy that makes the contrasting
7Herbert, pp. 53, 143-44. 8Barber, pp. 123, 140-43.
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tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby appear all the more shocking and
realistic.
Shakespeare also, I believe, uses the play's moon symbolism to reinforce the realism of the Pyramus and Thisby tragedy. The opening speeches ofA MidsummerNights Dream reveal a moonless or virtually moonless world as Theseus and Hippolyta await the new moon's appearance in four days. This moonlessness emphasizes the realism of the first scene, where the motifs of love and sex are treated by government and parent with the heavy-handed obtuseness so familiar in our society. When, upon the scene's shifting to the woods, the moon, with comic inconsistency, shines brightly overhead, it becomes apparent that Shakespeare is using the moon to signal, among other things, a fantasy world of wish-fulfilling dreams. In the mechanicals' play the moon also plays a singularly important role, though it has not been overly commented on by
critics.
As in the main play, the moon makes its entrance when the scene shifts to the night meeting place of the lovers fleeing their parents' cruelty. Ominous signs, however, accompany this moon. It enters not with fairies but with a lion, and it shines not on palace woods but on a tomb. Furthermore, this moon, instead of being associated with the magical moonlight of Act II, is linked to the waning moon of Act I by two speeches of Theseus: Theseus: but, 0, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! (I.i.3-4) Theseus: It appears, by his small light of discretion, that he is in the wane. (V.i.242-43) Still, the moon's dim presence preserves a faint atmosphere of romance as it ironically provides just enough light for Pyramus to spy the bloodstained mantle of Thisby. But even this faint glimmer disappears when Pyramus, in the throes of death, orders the moon to depart: "Pyramus:Moon, take thy flight. / Now die, die, die, die, die!" (V.i.293-94). And in case the audience has overlooked the moon's obedient departure, Shakespeare has Hippolyta ask "How chance Moonshine is gone before Thisby comes back and finds her lover?" We must supply the answer to Hippolyta's unanswered
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query. The moon's exit at the crucial moment of Pyramus's death marks the turn to tragedy just as Mercutio's death performs the same function in Romeo and Juliet. Here, of course, the multiple distancing of the action enables the comic tone to continue, but the symbolic message is clear. The moonless conclusion of "Pyramus and Thisby" represents the intrusion of dark reality into the midst of comic romance, and Pyramus's "now die, die, die, die, die!" becomes the comic equivalent of Lear's "Never, never, never, never, never." But Shakespeare is not yet through with this moon. At the close of the mechanicals' play we are again reminded that their moon is no longer creating a world of benevolent magic; Theseus pairs the moon with the lion to perform a ritual symbolizing not the joy of restoration but the finality of death: "Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead" (V.i.334). And following this symbolic return from fantasy to reality brought about by the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby, Shakespeare is ready to present the play's final image of the moon-the cold, naturalistic moon that chilled Herbert's spectator:9 Puck: Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf beholds the moon. (V.i. 354-55) Our shock should double when we recall the play's opening promise of a forthcoming new moon, a symbol of renewal suitable for the traditional comic ending. The reversal is so extreme and unexpected that I don't believe it can be satisfactorily explained as merely a foil to heighten our sense of joy. A consideration of Shakespeare's technical strategy here may help. By abruptly transferring the lion and moon from the playwithin-a-play to the main action, Shakespeare heightens the realism of Puck's images through the seeming change from fiction to "fact," from Snug's and Starveling's make-believe back to reality. The use of Puck and then Oberon as spokesmen here further strengthens our acceptance of the realities they describe; the fairies, in contrast with the mechanicals and even with Theseus, give the effect of a godlike chorus. Comic distancing, however, continues to create the ambivalent
9Herbert, pp. 61-62. Here I follow, with Herbert, the Folio's "beholds."
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tone oftragicomedy. If the fairies as spokesmen add a godlike credibility to their images of disaster, their godlike status also adds credibility to their more happy promises of protection from these disasters, so that we can cheerfully leave our characters to the comic fate of being happy ever after. But still our emotions at the end must remain mixed. For though we can accept the happy prophecies for the characters within the framework of the play, we cannot convincingly apply those prophecies to ourselves within the framework of reality, just as the newly married spectators could not be certain that none of their children would ever suffer any "blots of Nature's hand" (V.i.392). The images of surrounding threats and potential disasters ultimately derive their powerful authority not from the credibility of the speakers but from the everyday evidence of experience, which, paradoxically, refutes the existence of the godlike spokesmen. For the theater spectators, then, the final effect should be the mingling of comic delight with tragic instruction. Specifically to the newlyweds Shakespeare's message, which of course applies to all, seems clear: in order to have any chance of preserving your marriage and some degree of happiness you must recognize and be ready to meet and endure all sorts of possible calamities that may occur in a world where one cannot count on the continual guidance and aid of benevolent fairies or gods. The stage spectators experience the delight but fail, for various reasons, to receive the instruction. Distracted by the bungling performance of the mechanicals and blinded by the desire to reinforce their egos after their own recent follies, the stage lovers do not recognize even the most obvious instructive parallels with themselves. But they cannot be faulted for snobbish obtuseness in missing the even bleaker philosophical implications of the wedding entertainment, since they are not in a position to be able to draw the inferences open to Herbert's spectator and to us concerning the presence and absence of the fairy gods in the two stories. Being unaware of the presence of the fairies, the stage spectators cannot perceive that their good fortune resulted from the aid of the fairies, whereas the bad fortune of Pyramus and Thisby resulted from the absence of any such aid. Why then shouldn't the stage lovers be proud of their own sagacity in comparison both with the hapless Pyramus and Thisby and with the clumsy actors portraying them? Seeing the young lovers, even at the end of the play, so full of ignorance, can we be at all hopeful that their present happiness will
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outlast even the short night left after the "iron tongue of midnight" has spoken? We can, because, in lieu of the instruction they missed, they have the fairies to protect them from the disasters so common among less fortunate married couples. The prognostication for the newlyweds in the theater audience may be favorable to the extent that they grasp and assimilate the play's instruction, which has been generally neglected, perhaps, because it seems less appropriate to comedy than to tragedy. In 1957 Frank Kermode was applauding the new seriousness with which critics were approaching Shakespeare's comedies in general and A MidsummerNight's Dream in particular, '0 and succeeding critics have continued to call attention to the dark, nightmarish, and potentially tragic undercurrents of the play. But to my knowledge, Herbert, through his spectator, was the first to apply the term "cosmic comedy" to the play." The term is apt because it recognizes the play's treatment of themes conventionally reserved for tragedy: the nature of the universe; man's relation to the universe; the existence of the gods; man's relation to the gods if they exist; human suffering; and death. Whether or not one wishes to establish a separate genre for such plays, the label, as a working hypothesis for the "intrinsic genre" of the play, to use the term of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. ,12 allows one to see and to take seriously many things in the play that have been overlooked or dismissed because the play is supposed to be merely a comedy. Critics have seldom expressed difficulty over labeling A MidsummerNightksDreambecause they have apparently not been sufficiently aware of the play's tragic content. It is time to observe that the esthetic theory stated and exemplified in A MidsummerNight/s Dream is also operating in a "dark"comedy or "problem" play such as Measurefor Measure;only in the latter play there is not so great a disparity between the comic surface and the serious undercurrents-the tragic content is not so cautiously disguised. Herbert's spectator begins to suspect that A MidsummerNight's Dream may be a cosmic comedy when he hears Titania "bemoan the misplaced seasons and the excessive rain.""3By creating his fairies in the image of the
')Kermode, pp. 214, 220. "Herbert, p. 153. '2E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation(New Haven: Yale Univ. 1967), pp. 78-89. "Herbert, p. 153.
Press,
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Homeric gods, Shakespeare provides a broad clue that his play will be cosmic in scope, just as the mechanicals' "Lamentable Comedy" (I.ii.9) and "tragical mirth" (V. i.57)- labels that also fit A Midsummer Night's Dream-point to the intrusion of tragic content. Let us consider how the play's fairy world, which represents, I believe, an approach to an ideal world for Shakespeare, contributes to a mingled effect of comic delight and tragic pathos. Some have seen the workings of Providence in the fairies,14 but the fairies contrast rather than compare with the gods of conventional Christianity. Most obviously, the fairies are sexual lovers, who, like any man and wife, are in the midst of a domestic quarrel, unlike Christian deities who are not susceptible to such mortal antics. The fairies' susceptibility to sexual involvement with humans is also, of course, Homeric rather than Christian, though the New Testament stories of the virgin birth retain the motif in spiritualized form. Of even greater importance is a difference seldom if ever commented on: the fairies, unlike Christianity's God, do not hesitate to accept responsibility for some of the evils in the world. After enumerating the recent disturbances in the order of nature, Titania, instead of trying to blame "sinful" man, emphatically places the responsibility on herself and Oberon: Titania: And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. (II.i.115-17)
"Parents" is a key term here because it links the fairies to Egeus, the parent of Hermia, and to the unseen parents of Pyramus and Thisby. Through implication, Shakespeare places the burden of responsibility for the potential tragedy of Hermia and the real tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby on the parents, those who, like the gods, have the most authority and power. In taking responsibility, the fairies further parallel the Homeric gods, who, as symbols of forces beyond human control, are regularly assigned responsibility for the behavior of nature and of humans. As for lending aid to humans, the fairies, again unlike Christian'4John A. Allen, "Bottom and Titania," SQ 18 (1967):111; Stephen Fender, Shakespeare: A Midsummer Nights Dream (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), pp. 48-49, 54-55.
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ity's God, are not deterred from preventing a fall into disaster by the excuse that they would thereby be interfering with human "free will." Shakespeare's fairy world humbly concedes that humans are masters neither of their fate nor of their wills, although the characters retain the illusion that they are acting freely. And this situation, though an anathema to some peoples' notions of human dignity and pride, seems to be presented as preferable to one in which the gods, if they exist, sit idly by, for whatever excuses, while Pyramus and Thisby, like Romeo and Juliet, blunder into death. The Homeric gods too are not deterred from giving aid to humans by any concerns over free will, but the fairies surpass both Christianity's God and the Homeric gods in one important respect: selfless benevolence. The fairies are willing to go out of their way to help hapless humans without first demanding belief or worship or sacrifices. The lovers in A MidsummerNight's Dream, far from calling upon the fairies for help, are wholly unaware of the fairies' existence. And the fairies, instead of showing any eagerness to be recognized and worshiped, provide their aid invisibly throughout, except for their appearance to Bottom, who provides no threat to their secrecy. Such altruism sets an ideal standard for gods, who surely should be kind enough to help suffering mortals without prescribing any preconditions or demanding any succeeding
gratuities.
Kind as they are, however, the fairies, because they are not omnipotent, cannot totally alleviate the sufferings of mortals, nor can they be held responsible for all of the world's evils. Their sphere of operation is limited both in space (wherever they happen to be) and in time (largely the night). Similarly, the Homeric gods, besides having to contend with each other's interference, suffer at crucial times the limitations of Fate-as when Zeus cannot save his therefore cannot son Sarpedon from being killed in battle-and bear total responsibility for human suffering. Paradoxically, the omnipotent, omniscient God of conventional Christianity, who is most eligible to bear total responsibility for human suffering, is the God who totally declines to accept such responsibility. Curiously enough, the fairies' lack of omnipotence enhances rather than diminishes the ideal status of their world. For one thing, their world is not subject to the irreconcilable moral and logical dilemmas that automatically arise whenever omnipotence is assigned to any being. For another, the fairies exercise upon our imagination a gentle charm that could not be attached to an omnip-
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otent figure, who must remain as unlovable as an unclimbable cliff. But most importantly, the fairy world represents an ideal because, as many have noted, it symbolizes, like the Homeric world, a union between man and nature. Since nature may be too restrictively understood, however, we must add that the union is between man and the gods, between man and the universe. In Shakespeare's play, the parallels between the fairies and the mortals, like the anthropomorphism of the Homeric gods, establishes this perception of unity, which is perhaps most unforgettably symbolized in the brief twining of Titania around Bottom. Add omnipotence to any of the characters, however, and the attractive vision of unity is irrevocably contorted into absurdity. Herbert's spectator speculates on how the coming age of science, business, industry, and technology was creating the godless Babylonian world of the mechanicals' play. But in a more fundamental sense the gods had already been stripped away from man by Christianity, which, as it strove to distinguish itself from paganism and as it became more and more rationalized and intellectualized, disparaged the anthropomorphism of previous religions through stressing the differences rather than the parallels between man and God. The persistent belief in fairies, which Shakespeare lovingly exploits, manifests the effort to bring the gods back to earth in an understandable and meaningful relationship with humans, who cannot psychologically sustain a position of isolation from the rest of the universe. As the increasing remoteness of orthodox gods induces a feeling of being unimportantly lost in an indifferent abyss, people seek, by reverting to earlier beliefs or turning to new ones, to re-establish their place in the universe, to re-establish their union with the universe, to become part of things once more. Shakespeare's ideal world of Homeric fairies fits almost any meaning of "dream" one might think of. It is certainly, to use Freud's terminology, a wish-fulfillment dream that provides at least temporary psychological solace to our waking frustrations. To serve as meaningful wish fulfillment, however, the play must also contain the nightmare world of Pyramus and Thisby, from which we are psychologically protected by the play's equivalent of Freud's dreamwork - the artistic triple distancing of the play-within-aplay. The play's ideal world is also a dream in the sense of something that in reality does not exist. At the play's end we are allowed to wake up to the fact that the fairy world was but an artistic dream,
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and it is only then that the play's suppressed content of extreme tragic pathos has a chance to surface. As in the opening of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale and in Wordsworth's sonnet, "The world is too much with us," the displacement of the fairies and of the Homeric gods by later beliefs is not seen as an improvement. Rather, all three works, through a recreation of past worlds, stress how much has been lost. Shakespeare's vision, however, may be the bleakest, since it suggests that even these mourned lost worlds never existed except in the mind of dreaming man. The classical story of Pyramus and Thisby seems deliberately chosen to illustrate that the ancient gods were no more benevolent and protective in reality than the more recent gods who presided over the destiny of Romeo andJuliet. And the supposed newly-married couples in the audience will, like the couple in Arnold's "Dover Beach," have to rely on their own resources of love and mutual support to maintain their happiness in an unpromising world. The final sense of dream I will treat is the one raised in the epilogue - that a dream is something of such little value and significance that one need not pay it serious attention: Robin: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mendedThat you have but slumb'red here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream Gentles do not reprehend.
The irony behind Shakespeare's belittling of his play has regularly been noted, but its relation to the play's theory of art, which demands the employment of sufficient distancing devices to allow the presentation of unsettling views without destroying the purveyance of pleasure, has been overlooked. Under the conventional concern that the performance has not been sufficiently pleasing lies a more serious concern. For, if my reading of the play has any validity, there would be ample reason to fear that some of the audience might be offended by its instruction, and we can recognize how the word dream, from the title to the end of the play, serves as the last layer of defense to ward off any who might be both perceptive enough to grasp the play's serious implications and orthodox enough to protest against them.
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A MIDSUM
M E R NIGHT'S
DREAM
Frequently A MidsummerNight's Dream has been interpreted as a defense of the irrational and of the imagination against the attacks of reason. Marjorie Garber, for instance, concludes: "But if illusion and the imagination are not without their dangers, they are nonetheless, in the terms of this play, preferable to their radical opposite, 'cool reason,' in Theseus's phrase." She sees Bottom's efforts to avoid frightening the ladies as resulting from his being "aware of the dangers of imagination and illusion" and wanting to protect the court audience from them just as dreamwork, she claims, warns us "against the dangers of the irrational."15Certainly both illusion and the irrational may be dangerous if mistaken for reality and reason, but Garber's analysis seems slightly awry. Dreamwork does not warn against the irrational; it protects the mind from too direct a confrontation with unpleasant reality. Similarly, Bottom and the mechanicals strive to protect their audience not from illusion but from too clear a confrontation with the terrifying realities of their story; and their imagination must be exercised to discover means to avoid frightening their audience, just as Shakespeare exercised his imagination to present unpleasant messages without frightening away his audience. Here again, reason and the imagination should be seen not as opposing duellists in a game of one-upmanship but as necessary partners in any artistic enterprise. Without "cool reason" the efforts of the imagination are apt to be wasted, for the careful calculations of reason are needed not only to produce artistic order and meaning out of chaos, but also to determine how much unpleasantness or strangeness an audience can tolerate. In A MidsummerNightksDream, Shakespeare demonstrates his understanding of the fragile human psyche by not only using but also by having the distancing device of a play-within-a-play the players of this internal drama use distancing devices. But somewhat like the magician who pretends to reveal his secret while continuing to deceive his audience, Shakespeare has so artfully exposed his secrets under the guise of farcical parody that few have grasped what he was up to. In another way, however, Shakespeare's employment of artistic illusion in A MidsummerNight's Dream is the opposite of the magician's: the magician creates the illusion that bodies are being cut in half and heads are being chopped off while in reality no such things are happening at all; Shakespeare creates
'5Garber,pp. 82, 84.
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the illusion that all is well while in reality heads are rolling all over the place. The magician presents comedy under the guise of tragedy; Shakespeare presents tragedy under the guise of comedy.

A Mid Summer Night Dream Tragedy in Comic Disguise

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A Mid Summer Night Dream Tragedy in Comic Disguise

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Rice University

SEL 25(1985) ISSN 0039-3657

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Tragedy in Comic Disguise

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