Emily Akins

11.12.98

Shakespeare 4113

Bibliographic Essay

In Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream one finds the typical use of love and nature that is evidence of Shakespeare’s youth and experimentation. He creates in this play another world, a fairy world where Puck is the ringleader and love is everywhere. Called "fancy’s child" by Milton, Shakespeare brings out his cheerful happiness in its most light-hearted manner in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A frequent observation by most critics is Shakespeare’s use of nature imagery. It is most obvious in this play because of the setting: it is hard to escape nature and its effects when the majority of the play occurs in the wood. Shakespeare uses birds to create an audible atmosphere ("more tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear" I.i.184), to tell the time, and to measure movement ("hop as light as bird from brier" V.i.391). He also puts great stock in the weather, its effects on the earthly world and the effects of the fairy world on the weather. Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the fairies believe that because they are immortal, their arguments will have some manifestation on earth, either in the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta or in the weather (Bevington, xxii).

The most prominent piece of imagery in this work is the moon. Shakespeare credits it for many events in the story. Noted by most critics and discussed in most introductions, the moon is a prime part of the play and what happens in it. The word is found 28 times just in this play, three and a half times more than any other play. Six of the eight times that the word moonlight occurs in his works are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Spurgeon 260). Shakespeare even named one of the characters of the play within the play ‘Moonshine.’ The moon tells time for many of the characters: for the lovers at the beginning of the play, Hippolyta and Theseus, the moon counts down the days until they get married. For Puck, at the end of the play, the moon serves as his cue to come out and cause mischief (259). Besides presiding as a constant clock over all that goes on in the play, the moon also has an effect on the people, the lovers in the play. For it is when the moon comes out that night takes over and that lunacy prevails and creates havoc in the lives of the lovers. Because the moon was full, the midsummer lunacy was excusable and explainable (Fleissner 2).

According to John Arthos, "Love and the moon are always discovering the precious, and in the dark … sight and love become one" (Arthos 87). He gives the moon and love some of the same qualities and characteristics: everything happens in the moonlight, its beauty can relieve strife, and it changes everything beautiful into something exquisite, reflections into images of goddesses (86). The same thing can be said for the effects of love. He also personifies the moon saying that only it knows and sees the lovers (85). By doing this he adds to the moon’s already powerful figure. In Horne’s book, Shakespeare’s Philosophy of Love, he insists that love has good judgement because it sees that which no one else can see (Horne 47), thus giving it the same omniscient qualities attributed to the moon by Arthos.

Love in this play is both a means of causing trouble and of reconciling that trouble. The lovers get mixed up and fall for someone else, thus causing trouble in the order of things. But in the end when all is reconciled and when each "Jack gets his Jill" (III.ii.461) it is because of love. It is a "force making for proper happiness and reconciliation over a wide area of human exper-ience and as a spectrum which shows sanity and eccentricity in their social setting" (Hunter 7).

There is a sense of external control: everything in the play is being controlled by something outside of the play, or at least outside the realm of reality. The mortals’ lives seem to be out of their hands: they do not act on account of their own self-awareness. Instead, things happen to them, or make them act. Their change of heart comes about because of a potion administered by Puck, not by their own hearts. The potion, just like love, ties and unties the plot (Doran 18). Stylistically, Shakespeare does not construct the characters with the ability to change on their own will, but rather to be changed by someone else’s will. Even then, whatever changes occur in the play, do not occur because of the hearts and emotions of the characters, but because of the pattern of the play; the timing of the play indicates that change should occur, and so it does (Hunter 9). Some of the events controlled by outside forces could be attributed to fate. For example, even though the potion was given to the wrong person, it still turned out for the best because of fate (Arthos 90).

Just as the moon declares the time of day, it also declares the time of year, which gives way to the lunacy and the name of the play. Because it is supposed to occur in the middle of the summer (hence the name), the play has a sense of "madness" that occurs only in that part of the year. So, the name of the play is a sort of euphemism for "mad summer" thus making all the lunacy acceptable (Fleissner 1). Another excuse for the strange behavior is that of love’s irrationality. Love is irrational and this allows for the madness and enchantment. The idea that the whole story is a dream is contributed to by the constant presence of the moon. This also accounts for the improbable events: all of these ridiculous ideas are happening simply because it is a dream (Doran 14). Puck even excuses all odd behaviors at the end when he speaks to the audience, reminding them all that it was just a dream. And as Fleissner writes, "what could be more deranged than a man turning into a donkey and having an amorous relationship with a fairy queen?" (Fleissner 2)

Though this play has the potential of being very busy and confusing with four plots circulating, Shakespeare keeps them close enough that they are still clear. Some of the plots even represent and serve as a reiteration of the original plot. For example, the "rude-mechanicals," the actors in the Pyramus and Thisbe play, are just a reflection of the actors and the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All plots are connected in that they each have one or more pairs of lovers whose happiness has been "frustrated by misunderstanding or parental opposition" (Bevington xviii). Neither plot is predominant because they play on each other so equally. Though the reader might be prone to consider the plot of the mortal lovers to be the greater, more important and primary plot, it becomes evident that not only are the two plots equal and interrelated, but that the fairies aren’t so inferior after all. In fact, it is possible that the fairies are the smarter group of the whole play because they have more power and are more aware of what’s going on. The mortals become mere puppets of the fairies, doing whatever it is the fanciful potion forces them to do.

The head of these powerful and mischievous fairies is Robin Goodfellow, or Puck. He considers himself the agent of love, like Cupid, and he is the one who gives the potion to the mortals, who starts the whole process of confusion (Bevington xxi). He gives off an air of condescension in his ever-popular line, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (III.ii.115) But he also disapproves of his own behavior saying "Cupid is a knavish lad, / thus to make poor females mad" (Brooke 8). It is possible to see Puck as the jester of this play, although the characters all have some aspect of the ridiculous in them and it would be hard to distinguish one jester from another. But Puck could be considered the jester to Oberon, like Touchstone and Feste, because of his "detachment from the problems of those around him and attachment to his own offbeat conception of wit" (Hunter 16).

As in some other of Shakespeare’s plays, there is the device of traveling between two worlds in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The mortals must flee the city and go to another place, in this case into a fairy world (Doran 17). There is a connection between the two worlds in the romance between Bottom and Titania because it is a love affair between a mortal and a god. Their romance brings up the illusion vs. reality question which is then emphasized by the play within a play, Pyramus and Thisbe which reinforces Shakespeare’s idea that all the world is a stage and that art is illusion (Bevington xxii).

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare creates two worlds similarly full of magic, mischief, and a little lunacy. Fate plays a part in both the mortals and the fairies love; madness spills over from the world of Puck into Bottom’s mortal realm causing mischeif and mayham. Puck’s fairy potion, while misleading the mortals, also seems to blur the line between illusion and reality for the viewers and readers of the play. Once his potion comes out, he opens a door between the two worlds through which Bottom and the Queen of Fairies may pass. He administers the potion to the mortals like a child opening his toy box to play: his only intention is to cause mischeif. This mischief passes from one realm to the next tying together the flighty world of the fairies and the similarly light-hearted world of the mortals where love dictates all actions … with a little help from Puck.