A Midsummer Night's Dream – William Shakespeare, 1595-96 ★★★★

Love as a Mental Disorder

There is a book waiting to be written about literature’s worst employees. Near the head of this list I would like to nominate one Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After botching a big assignment, he has the cajones to look at his boss, no mere mortal but the fairy king Oberon, throw up his hands, and exclaim: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Yet he doesn’t even get a reprimand, let alone a performance review. Just a mild “Stand aside” as Oberon sets about fixing Puck’s mess. Such is the ease of life as practiced in this easiest of Shakespeare’s plays.

How easy though? Yes, it is one of the shorter plays, with a smallish cast, a total of nine scenes, and nothing very involved in the way of a story. It’s a breeze to read compared to most Shakespeare plays, and a joy to stage. Figuring out what is going on is not that hard.

"Puck And Fairies," a painting by Scottish painter Joseph Noel Paton, who used the play as the subject of many of his works. Puck is the one with the leer. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sofi01/6510297591

But the message of the play: less easy. It boils down to the trouble of romance, how people make bad choices when it comes to who and how they love, and double down on their choice when its folly is exposed:

HELENA

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. [Act I, scene i, lines 238-241]

Helena is one of four lab rats Shakespeare runs through this particular maze. These Athenians are paired boy-girl but as it works out both boys, Lysander and Demetrius, love the same girl, Hermia. Meanwhile, Hermia loves Lysander while Helena loves Demetrius, hopelessly but stubbornly. Hermia’s father Egeus worsens matters by insisting his daughter be forced to marry Demetrius – or else be put to death.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” Lysander notes, true enough even before the fairies get involved.

Olivia de Haviland (making her screen debut) as Hermia in a gaudy 1935 M-G-M production, playing opposite Dick Powell as her chosen Lysander. "Before the time I did Lysander see,/Seem'd Athens as a paradise to me:/O, then, what graces in my love do dwell,/That he hath turn'd a heaven unto a hell!" [Act I, scene i, lines 209-212]. Image from https://www.mfah.org/calendar/midsummer-nights-dream.

Among these fairies is the aforementioned Puck, given juice from a magical flower to put on the eyelids of drowsing Demetrius so he will fall for Helena, thus solving all problems. Only Puck confuses the two Athenian men, and suddenly both Demetrius and Lysander are craving Helena and leaving Hermia in the dust.

By the time Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he is believed to have been well established as a playwright, yet still in the flush of his early success. It is often described as his most lyrical work, a natural outgrowth of the poetry he had been producing as a stopgap while London theaters were closed to plague.

In the play itself, fairy queen Titania even acknowledges “contagious fogs” and its accompanying economic devastation:

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted before his youth ere attained a beard. [II, i, l. 96-98]

Why it has gotten so bad, Titania continues, that these humans no longer know what season they are supposed to be in. The “mazed world” needs order, and won’t get it until Oberon gets off her back about the Indian boy she has taken up with as a favored pet. Oberon in turn is not only jealous, but wants the boy for himself.

So it’s not just mortals screwing up everything for love.

A 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production went for trapeze sets and stilts. Here, Alan Howard as Oberon (in blue) bewitches Sara Kestelman's Titania while John Kane's Puck prepares to dose her with love potion. Image from https://www.rsc.org.uk/a-midsummer-nights-dream/past-productions/peter-brook-1970-production.

The lyrical qualities of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are second to none. Even job orders are given with grace and beauty:

OBERON

Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

ROBIN

I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes. [II, i, l. 175-182]

Comedy is the main business of the play, and it delivers, particularly with a crew of rustic workers who plan a play for the wedding of Theseus, duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. The play is the very serious romantic tragedy “Pyramus And Thisbe,” to be rendered into something much less dark in the hands of this crew.

The performers of "Pyramus And Thisbe" in costume, as they prepare to perform at the royal wedding. Costumes by Olivera Gajic, from her website: http://www.oliveragajic.com/theatre-2. 

For one thing, they feel a need to reassure their audience that one of the cast is playing a lion, and not really is one.

BOTTOM

Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must
be seen through the lion’s neck: and he himself
must speak through, saying thus, or to the same
defect, – ‘Ladies,’ – or ‘Fair-ladies – I would wish
You,’ – or ‘I would request you,’ – or ‘I would
entreat you, – not to fear, not to tremble: my life
for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it
were pity of my life: no I am no such thing; I am a
man as other men are;’ and there indeed let him name
his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner. [III, i, l. 36-45]

To be fair, we are told the Duke might execute them if their performance is too upsetting. But their hypersensitivity is comical. Ironically or not, the play ends with Shakespeare breaking the fourth wall to offer a similar sort of blandishment to us his audience: “If we shadows have offended/Think but this and all is mended…” [V, i, l. 440-441] But since he’s Shakespeare, this doesn’t come across so gormless.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has been staged as opera, orchestral piece, even ballet. Here, in a scene from the Madison [Wisconsin] Ballet, weaver Nick Bottom is given an ass head before Puck sends him off to woo Titania. Image from https://www.madisonballet.org/midsummer.

Shakespeare may well have been using the rustics’ excessive concerns about civic seemliness to lampoon censors and magistrates with whom he had tangled. He also sends up their mangling of lines and of punctuation, a dart shot in the direction of his fellow players.

These are some reasons A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains timely and teachable in classrooms today. You can relate to its concerns. But some scholars push past its surface charms to call out a hidden message of the play, an ominous one about the fickle finger of love.

The play-within-the-play, “Pyramus And Thisbe,” is the tip-off. The story of two star-crossed lovers, it inspired another famous Shakespeare play, Romeo And Juliet, which of course is its own warning label regarding romantic love. In this play love is as destabilizing a force, yet without the surface charms. It only renders believers ridiculous.

THESEUS

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact… [V, i, l. 3-8]

What is love doing to these people? Egeus begs he be allowed to kill his daughter for not finding Demetrius as attractive as he does. Demetrius speaks of loving Hermia but would rather have her dead than in the arms of the man she loves. Helena might draw our sympathy, but for the fact she decides to snitch on her best friend Hermia’s plans to escape Athens in order to curry favor with a man who wishes her dead.

Happy loving couples: While a pastoral mood predominates, there is a lot of ugly quarreling in the play, as depicted here in a 2013 Shakespeare's Globe production. Photo by Geraint Lewis from http://gmoyabtecactingblog.weebly.com/unit-4-historical-context-performance.html

The fairies aren’t immune, either. Titania is made to fall in love with Bottom the rustic, her husband’s idea of a fit joke for her refusal to supply him with a likely catamite. A Midsummer Night’s Dream keeps you in good cheer – even nasty Egeus is rendered into a silly caricature by the way he demands death for his daughter – but what is it saying about romance? That it comes and goes, and leaves behind mostly misery.

The fickleness of love is sent up throughout the play, especially when once-doting Lysander suddenly erupts against Hermia after he is bewitched into falling for Helena. The play should come with a trigger warning for short brunettes; dark-haired and petite Hermia endures a number of abusive, ethnically-insensitive epithets.

Given all this, it’s hard to get mad at Puck for messing things up when everything is already that way. As in many a Shakespeare play, it is the biggest clown on stage who has the best take on the matter:

BOTTOM

… and yet, to say the truth, reason and
love keep little company together now-a-days; the
more the pity that some honest neighbors will not
make them friends. [III, i, l. 145-148]

The title page of a 1600 quarto edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which according to the inscription was already by then "sundry times publicly acted." Shakespeare was still alive and in mid-career when this was printed. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night%27s_Dream.

To call A Midsummer Night’s Dream a great play is not to claim for it the same shadings and depth of other works by the Bard. It is entirely too genial and light to bear up to the same scrutiny. The characters are as thin as plyboard and the story a series of mere blackout sketches.

But for sheer entertainment, it holds up amazingly well for a farce going on its fifth century. And the comedy’s many jabs at the folly of romantic love haven’t aged a minute.