SOURCE: “Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy, Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 46-69.

[In the following essay, Leggatt surveys the plot, themes, and characters of A Midsummer Night's Dream,emphasizing the wide dispersal of power and authority in the play.]

A Midsummer Night's Dream, like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, is a creation of the public theatre. It was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, around 1595 or 1596, at the Theatre in the northern suburb of Shore-ditch. Many scholars have speculated that it was also performed at, and perhaps commissioned for, an aristocratic wedding; for some the speculation amounts to a certainty, and the only problem is to determine which wedding. In fact there is not a shred of evidence, internal or external, to support this theory; it is a self-perpetuating tradition with no basis in fact.¹ When we think of the play's original performance it is best to think not of an elegant occasion with a courtly audience in a candle-lit hall but of a normal afternoon in an outdoor playhouse (possibly a bit run-down: the Theatre was twenty years old by this time) with rulers, aristocrats, clowns and fairies exposed in daylight to an audience almost as miscellaneous as the play's cast of characters. Shakespeare was not, in the first instance, an entertainer to the court or the gentry but a working professional playwright, an actor and a shareholder in his company, which had established itself as the leading company of its time. He wrote for the paying public.

His comedy, like Greene's, has a wide focus. Power and authority are dispersed over various centres, and no one centre dominates the others. The play opens with Theseus, its highest temporal authority, not in his public role as ruler but in his private role as a man impatient for his wedding night. Like Endymion depending on Cynthia's power, he is waiting for the moon to change:

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon—but O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires
Like to a stepdame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man's revenue.

(1.1.1-6)²

In the Renaissance Theseus had an unsavoury reputation, which the play will later touch on (2.1.77-80), as a man who habitually raped and abandoned women.³ One hint of this in his opening speech may be the fact that he refers to his desires, not Hippolyta's. But if rape is an expression of uncontrolled male power, that power is now (like Edward's in Friar Bacon) reined in. Theseus has submitted to the conventional requirement of abstinence before marriage, on which Prospero will lay great stress in The Tempest, and he knows, despite his impatience, that he simply has to wait. He imagines himself not as a mighty ruler but as an ordinary man dependent on a relative for his estate. The moon, embodied in Cynthia in Endymion, will haunt the language of this play; it makes its first appearance as a malignant old woman, against whom Theseus feels powerless.

In reply, Hippolyta not only counsels patience but hints that he is making a needless fuss:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

(1.1.7-11)

In this debate Hippolyta may be said to have the edge. The play's doubletime scheme—by the end the four days have somehow collapsed into two—confirms her claim that the time will pass quickly. For the audience it will be more like two hours. The inconsistency may also suggest the belief that time spent among the fairies passes at a different rate from time in the normal world.⁴ In any case, Hippolyta's sense of time—lightness and speed—is a better prediction of the play's action and manner than Theseus's fear that the days will drag. Her view of the moon is also more positive; the new-bent bow suggests an arrow about to be fired (like Cupid's dart, which turns an ordinary flower into a love-charm), an action about to begin. It also evokes the moon-goddess Diana, huntress, protectress of women and patroness of chastity; Theseus will indeed have to wait. The issue between Theseus and Hippolyta is not just impatience versus patience but male desire against female control. It is a debate that will be repeated in the woods when Lysander asks to sleep beside Hermia and she insists he keep his distance.

This is also Hippolyta's last speech in the scene, though far from her last speech in the play. The silence into which she lapses having made her point reminds us that she is not just a bride but a captive. Our first impression is of an urbane, good-humoured couple who address each other on equal terms; but Theseus reveals what lies behind that relationship when he recalls, ‘Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’. When he promises to wed her ‘in another key— / With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling’ (1.1.16-19) we may reflect that a triumph traditionally included a procession of captives.⁵ As an Amazon she represents (like Radigund in Book V of The Faerie Queene) a female power threatening male authority; Theseus has subdued that power by force.⁶ Yet he sees his coming marriage as an ‘everlasting bond of fellowship’ (1.1.85). This mixed view of their relationship raises questions about the relations between men and women—passing fancy or permanent commitment, dominance or fellowship?—that will run through the play, providing a deeper exploration of love than we have seen in Endymion or Friar Bacon.

The impression of Theseus's power is quickly deflated when his command for general merrymaking is countered as soon as it is uttered: Egeus enters ‘Full of vexation … with complaint / Against my child, my daughter Hermia’ (1.1.22-3). Not only does Egeus cut across the mood Theseus has tried to establish; the ruler finds himself dealing with a domestic squabble in which his own hands are tied by the law. He is as far as he could be from the stage tyrant, the part to tear a cat in, that Bottom briefly impersonates. The issue shifts to Hermia, her control over her own life as opposed to her father's claim of absolute power over her; the next part of the scene centres on her. If Theseus tries to cover his power over Hippolyta by changing war to merrymaking and conquest to fellowship, Egeus's assertion of his power over his daughter is harshly naked. He wants her to marry Demetrius; she wants to marry Lysander; he invokes a law by which he can give her ‘either to this gentleman, / Or to her death’ (1.1.43-4). He virtually equates the two possibilities, since they both show his power. It is Theseus who recalls (prompted by Hermia, who seems to sense her father is not telling the whole truth) that there is a third possibility: she could enter a nunnery. Egeus wants her obedient, or dead.

Theseus claims to be bound by the law ‘Which by no means we may extenuate’ (1.1.120). The most he can do is drop hints that once he gets Egeus and Demetrius alone he will try to talk them around (1.1.114-16). He expounds the theory behind the law, a theory Louis Adrian Montrose has called ‘a fantasy of male parthenogenesis’:⁷

What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid.
To you your father should be as a god,
One that composed your beauties, yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax,
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.
Demetrius is a worthy gentleman.

(1.1.46-52)

He tries to speak gently, and in the end he offers a reason for submission other than Egeus's power. But that power, as he describes it, is total, and he expounds it with an eloquence that conveys his belief in it. Egeus, and Egeus alone, gave her life. The image Theseus uses is not organic but mechanical, the printing of a form on inert matter. He seems to forget that there was at some stage of this process a pregnant woman. This plays into Egeus's demand for obedience or death; she is her father's daughter, or she is nothing.⁸

The abolition of monastic orders in England denied women one means of independent life and, for those who could have risen to be abbesses, a chance to exercise authority. When Theseus describes to Hermia her other possibility, a cloistered life, he tries to make it sound unattractive:

For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
Thrice blessèd they that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness.

(1.1.71-8)

He is asking, in effect, wouldn't you rather go to bed with a man, any man, than live like this? Her reply is not the one he is fishing for:

So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord,
Ere I will yield my virgin patent up
Unto his lordship, whose unwishèd yoke
My soul consents not to give sovereignty.

(1.1.79-82)

She seems prepared to make the choice that Margaret made, and then rescinded, in Friar Bacon. The echoing of ‘my lord’ and ‘his lordship’ shows that in getting as much control over her own life as the law allows she is defying Demetrius and Theseus together, as well as Egeus. What is at stake for her in her desire for Lysander is not just her love for this one man but her freedom to make her own choice—Lysander, having listed his claims, makes it clear that her choice of him is the principal one (1.1.99-104)—and she determines to assert that freedom one way or another.

Once they are left alone, Lysander and Hermia share a stylized passage of lament in which he lists the crosses of true love and she responds with appropriate complaints. The male-female conflicts of the first part of the scene are left behind as the two voices work together. Even when they are actually disagreeing they appear to agree. Like Hippolyta, she counsels patience (1.1.150-2); having said, ‘A good persuasion. Therefore hear me, Hermia’ (1.1.156), he goes on to counsel action. His plan is to flee the male-dominated community of Athens to a place ruled by a benevolent mother-figure:

I have a widow aunt, a dowager
Of great revenue, and she hath no child.
From Athens is her house remote seven leagues—
And she respects me as her only son—
There, gentle Hermia, may I marry thee,
And to that place the sharp Athenian law
Cannot pursue us.

(1.1.157-63)

We glimpse, beyond the borders of the play, an alternative power. This time the dowager is not the sterile, oppressive figure of Theseus's opening description of the moon, and her childlessness is not mere barrenness but frees her for acts of charity. In every respect she offers a counter to the authority of Theseus. But her house lies beyond the borders of the play: the lovers never get there.

They find themselves trapped instead in the liminal space of the wood, which they thought of simply as the place they would journey through to find safety. And the wood is dominated by an extreme form of male-female conflict, the quarrel of Oberon and Titania. The lovers have no inkling of this, or even of the fairies' existence, but it spills over into their own relationships to produce comic chaos. The fairies operate in a natural world in which conflict is the norm. (Shakespeare, who came from the country, never sentimentalized nature.) Titania orders her attendants: ‘Some to kill cankers [caterpillars] in the musk-rose buds, / Some war with reremice for their leathern wings’ (2.2.3-4). The lullaby they sing to her is designed to ward off counterattack from snakes, spiders, beetles and other natural enemies. These conflicts are miniaturized and fantastic. But Titania also complains that her feud with Oberon has produced deepening chaos in the natural world, and this is presented more seriously. For an English audience in the 1590s, a period of bad weather, crop failures and famine,⁹ the speech has local resonance:

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.
The nine men's morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

(2.1.93-100)

The lush England of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, with its agricultural wealth and its country pastimes, is in ruins. The moon is, as for Theseus, malevolent:

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound …

(2.1.103-5)

Under a waning moon—and according to Theseus's opening speech that is the time of the play—Diana takes the form of ‘Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, death, and the underworld’.¹⁰

While the fairies are surrounded by a general sense of darkness and disorder, the terms of their own conflict are very specific, and very human. Oberon and Titania argue about authority, the issue in the debate over Hermia in Act 1, and fidelity, the problem of the lovers once they come to the forest. Oberon's ‘Am not I thy lord?’ draws Titania's retort, ‘Then I must be thy lady’ (2.1.63-4), which punningly combines an assertion of her authority with a claim that he should be faithful to her; and they go on to accuse each other of affairs with Hippolyta and Theseus. But the real issue between them is the Indian boy Oberon wants from her. Though he regularly appears in productions, he does not appear in the text. The question is not just who possesses him but how he is to be imagined,¹¹ and the conflict embodies the competing claims of men and women. Robin, speaking for Oberon's side of the question, calls him ‘A lovely boy stol'n from an Indian king’ (2.1.22)—no mention of a mother—and goes on to contrast his master's desire to involve the boy in manly action with Titania's treating him as a pet, and as a chance to do some flower arranging:

And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.
But she perforce withholds the lovèd boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy.

(2.1.24-7)

As Theseus imagines a child created without a mother, Titania, closer to reality but not quite there, suppresses all reference to the boy's father:

His mother was a vot'ress of my order,
And in the spicèd Indian air by night
Full often hath she gossiped by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking th'embarkèd traders on the flood,
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind,
Which she with pretty and with swimming gait
Following, her womb then rich with my young squire,
Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy;
And for her sake I will not part with him.

(2.1.123-37)

This bonding of two women, sharing private jokes and confidences, contemplating the mystery of life and death in a pregnant woman's body, is a richer and more poignant version of the schoolgirl friendship between Hermia and Helena that the latter will recall during their quarrel in the forest. It sets against the play's concentration on heterosexual love a glimpse of a life that only women can share. They joke about the votaress's parody of the male activity of trade; but the power and wealth her pregnancy embodies are also fatal to her. Women die giving life. Men (as in The Merchant of Venice) risk their merchandise; women risk everything. The bond this shared knowledge creates is the key to Titania's refusal to give up the boy to Oberon. Being a votaress her friend had taken vows, made a commitment to a female community, as Hermia would if she entered a nunnery; in return Titania is committed to her; the reiterated ‘For her sake’ locks the idea into place.

This is a challenge to Oberon, and his answer lies in the magic flower that creates, or rather enforces, heterosexual love.¹² The magic of Endymion and Friar Bacon had, as we saw, no power to compel love. The flower functions more like the magic of folk-belief, in which love-charms and aphrodisiacs played a major role.¹³ In one sense, however, it does not create love at all, in that it does not create love-relationships. It produces only single-minded obsession: its function, in Oberon's words, is to ‘make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees’ (2.1.171-2). Seeing Helena in the grip of unrequited love for Demetrius, Oberon plans to use the drug on Demetrius not to produce harmony between them but simply to reverse the roles of pursuer and pursued: ‘Ere he do leave this grove, / Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love’ (2.1.245-6). He orders Robin, ‘Effect it with some care, that he may prove / More fond on her than she upon her love’ (2.1.265-6). Even without Robin's mistake in applying the flower to Lysander, its effect as Oberon imagines it will be not to solve the male-female conflict but perpetuate it in a new form. Its effect on Lysander is not just to make him love Helena but make him hate Hermia. Undrugged, he showed he could respect her wishes; now, like Egeus, he sees her as his to dispose of: ‘And here with my good will, with all my heart, / In Hermia's love I yield you up my part’ (3.2.164-5). Joan Stansbury has argued that in the early scenes Demetrius and Helena show an inferior kind of love, childish and lacking in judgement, and the effect of the flower is to drag Titania and Lysander down to their level.¹⁴ It is rough magic, and the comedy it creates depends on its reductiveness.

When Oberon explains how the flower was hit by Cupid's dart he lets us glimpse, once again, a figure beyond the borders of the play, who embodies different values:

                                                            A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west …
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,
And the imperial vot'ress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

(2.1.157-64)

Elizabeth again.¹⁵ She is Lyly's Cynthia, beyond ordinary love; she is Greene's visionary figure, remote from the world of the play. She is a votaress, like Titania's friend, and a vestal, as Hermia would be to escape Demetrius. She represents a self-sufficiency that never needs to act, and (like Lysander's aunt) an authority that is never called on. No drama could be made out of her, certainly no comedy, and she emphasizes by contrast the fact that the drama and the comedy of this play stem from the conflicts of men and women, conflicts that the flower, which Cupid's dart hits instead of her, serves to inflame. If the play were performed for Elizabeth she would be made to feel not (as in Lyly) her centrality but her divine irrelevance.

Titania, who as fairy queen might be thought to suggest Elizabeth (Spenser's Faerie Queene) is not her representative but her opposite. Lyly's Cynthia is the unchanging, untouched recipient of adoration, bestowing one kiss as a unique concession. Titania is love's helpless victim, constantly kissing and embracing her strange lover (4.1.1-4, 39-44). Oberon aims to show his power over Titania by twisting her affections, making her bestow adoration, not receive it, and he is determined she will bestow it on ‘lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, / On meddling monkey, or on busy ape’ (2.1.180-1). He orders, as he anoints her eyes, ‘Wake when some vile thing is near’ (2.2.40). Oberon's plan is on the face of it bizarre: to make his own wife in love with someone (or something) else, getting power over her at the cost of making himself a cuckold. It is a price he seems willing to pay in order to humiliate and degrade her. The joke is on him, though he never quite realizes it: she gets not some vile thing but Bottom with the ass's head, and their relationship (as we shall see) is as decorous in manner as it is indecorous in appearance.

When Oberon sees Titania asleep with Bottom in her arms, the crudeness of his earlier fantasies of humiliation breaks up into a more shifting, contradictory reaction: ‘Welcome, good Robin. Seest thou this sweet sight? / Her dotage now I do begin to pity’ (4.1.45-6). He comes to gloat, but his feelings soften. In describing his ultimate victory, he reports dispassionately his own cruelty and her gentleness:

When I had at my pleasure taunted her,
And she in mild terms begged my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child,
Which straight she gave me …

(4.1.56-9)

He had earlier predicted, ‘I'll make her render up her page to me’ (2.1.185). Now, less coercively, he ‘asks’, and she grants. But if he can allow himself a touch of regret at the way he has treated her it is because, in the end, he has had his way: ‘And now I have the boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes’ (4.1.61-2).

Titania's commitment to the votaress vanishes like a dream. When Oberon reports that she has treated Bottom as she treated the Indian boy, crowning him with flowers, the logic of his plot becomes clear. Bottom replaces the boy in her affections, and (as with Lysander, though less obtrusively) when a new love is created an old one dies.¹⁶ It remains to kill the new love, and ‘all things shall be peace’ (3.2.377). Oberon has reasserted the claims of heterosexual love, and his own power as ruler and husband, through the crude magic of the flower. The result is a harmony celebrated in music and dance, designed to win us over; and thanks to the brilliant comedy of her scenes with Bottom, Titania's obsession has never seemed as degrading as Oberon imagined. But if as we watch Titania's placid submission to him we recall her speech about the votaress—and it is one of the play's most eloquent passages—we may feel that something has been lost: not just her own spirit and fire, which are dampened in the end, but a commitment the power of whose claims she made us feel and has now forgotten.

Titania's love for Bottom looks like an image of licence: in a free interval before order is restored, a fairy loves a mortal, a queen loves a commoner, and a man sports an ass's head like a carnival mask. To an outside view—that of Theseus—the mortal lovers' sojurn in the forest suggests a similar licence. Finding them lying together on the ground, he jokes about St Valentine's day, and the rite of May (4.1.131-2, 138-9). But Hermia has discouraged Lysander's attempt to lie too close to her, and when Demetrius threatens to rape Helena she simply does not believe him: ‘Your virtue is my privilege’ (2.1.220). Ironically, it is not licence but restraint that gets the lovers into trouble; finding Hermia and Lysander lying far apart, Robin assumes he has the right man, calling him ‘this lack-love, this kill-courtesy’ (2.2.83). He mistakes chastity for unkindness. Whatever suspicions Hermia or the audience may have of Lysander's real motives, he offers to lie close to her as a sign of commitment—‘One turf shall serve as pillow for us both: / One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth’ (2.2.47-8)—and in putting him off she inadvertently precipitates the breaking of that commitment.

If there is licence in the forest, it is the licence to break promises and betray loyalties, as Titania does. The lovers are caught up not so much in a game of cross-wooing as in angry arguments and recriminations. As the quarrel of Oberon and Titania affects the climate, it colours the relationships of those who enter their territory. Helena has already been betrayed by Demetrius, who loved her before he switched allegiance to Hermia. Perhaps thinking of her friend's experience, Hermia registers a persistent anxiety about Lysander's fidelity. Promising to meet him, she swears ‘By all the vows that ever men have broke— / In number more than ever women spoke’, invokes Aeneas's betrayal of Dido (1.1.173-6) and adds, ‘Keep word, Lysander’ (1.1.222). Her last words before they fall asleep in the forest are ‘Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end’ (2.2.67). She later insists, ‘The sun was not so true unto the day / As he to me’ (3.2.50-1), but she is in a night world governed by the inconstant moon, and the real anxiety behind her continued references to fidelity comes out in her dream of a serpent eating her heart while Lysander ‘sat smiling at his cruel prey’ (2.2.156).¹⁷

Lysander's image of commitment as two bosoms with a single troth is echoed when Helena recalls her schoolgirl friendship with Hermia; this too, like Titania's commitment to the votaress, is damaged by the power of magic when Helena imagines Hermia is in a confederacy against her:

We, Hermia, like two artificial gods
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry: seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.

(3.2.203-11)

Helena goes on to accuse Hermia of betraying that friendship by joining with the men in mockery of her, and she makes it, like the conflict over the Indian boy, a matter of men against women: ‘Our sex as well as I may chide you for it’ (3.2.218).

But there is, to use Helena's own word, something artificial about the commitment she describes. What makes Titania's speech about the votaress moving is its sense of a relationship between two utterly unlike beings: a mortal, pregnant woman and an immortal fairy. For Titania the votaress is something rich and strange, not just a repetition of herself. (The Bottom-Titania relationship is a comic version of this love of something quite other.) What Helena describes is not so much affection or relationship as cloning. Titania's betrayal of her friendship is a matter of regret, muted by the way it happens in silence. Helena's claim of schoolgirl affection collapses in broad farce as the women start insulting each other in playground taunts about their relative heights, Hermia demanding, ‘How low am I, thou painted maypole?’ (3.2.296) and Helena declaring, ‘She was a vixen when she went to school, / And though she be but little, she is fierce’ (3.2.324-5). So much for schoolgirl friendship, and identical cherries. Beneath the farce, Shakespeare offers something more subtle than the love-friendship debate of Endymion: Helena has idealized friendship as a compensation for the pain of love as she has experienced it, and more immediately as a way of making Hermia feel guilty. Under pressure, the idealized vision cracks quickly. The play's depiction of heterosexual love seems at first to confirm the Endymion view that it leads to unhappiness; this unhappiness centres on Helena. Of the four lovers she is the one who is made the object of love by magic; she is also the touchiest, the quickest to take offence. She is in tension from the beginning: beneath her professions of friendship for Lysander and Hermia there is a strong undercurrent of jealousy and resentment, and a suspicion that Hermia has somehow stolen Demetrius from her by trickery: ‘O, teach me how you look, and with what art / You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart’ (1.1.192-3). The mutual accusations of the forest are already latent in Athens; and Helena herself is already guilty of betraying friendship for the sake of love, as she reveals her friends' plans to Demetrius. Her frustration with Demetrius has already been, to put it mildly, bad for her self-esteem: ‘I am as ugly as a bear, / For beasts that meet me run away for fear’ (3.2.100-1). Offered love by Lysander and Demetrius, she takes it as a bad joke and reacts with anger. She assumes that ‘I love you’ really means ‘I hate you’: ‘Cannot you hate me—as I know you do— / But you must join in souls to mock me too?’ (3.2.149-50). Hermia, when she finds Lysander and Demetrius both professing love for Helena, goes through a long period of simple bewilderment, pleading for explanations, before she explodes in anger; Helena explodes at once.¹⁸

Yet all this confusion, painful to the lovers and amusing to the audience, is part of a move towards final harmony. In breaking friendship for the sake of love the magic imitates a natural process we have already glimpsed in Athens. There are suggestions of a transitional stage between same-sex bonding and heterosexual love, a three-way friendship of Helena, Hermia and Lysander: the meeting place in the forest is where they once met together to observe the rite of May (1.1.166-7). The forest itself, the place of transition, marks the successive stages of the lovers' developing relationships. It is the setting for schoolgirl confidences—according to Hermia, in the forest rendezvous she and Helena ‘Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie, / Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet’ (1.1.214-15)—then for a three-way friendship of a man and two women; and finally for heterosexual love acted out, turned into conflict and ultimately restored.

Bacon's magic, for all its entertainment value, is a dangerous power that finally does more harm than good, and he himself turns against it. The double effect of the fairies' magic is more finely balanced. It is not just a matter of creating disruptive obsessions and then curing them. When the lovers wake and prepare to return to Athens, they are both free of magic and bound by it. Lysander has been restored to his original love not by the wearing off of one drug but by the application of another that acts as an antidote. Demetrius is still under the first spell; but it has restored his original affection for Helena. In both cases it takes the intervention of magic to restore the normal. And more has happened than simply a realignment of two love affairs. As they slowly return to daylight the lovers' voices work together with a new smoothness and harmony:

Demetrius.
These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turnèd into clouds.
Hermia.
Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.
Helena.
So methinks,
And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own and not mine own.

(4.1.186-91)

Something like the original group of three friends has been restored, with the addition of Demetrius as a fourth. Two quarrelling sets of couples now form a larger, more harmonious unit. As they compare impressions they recognize they have just seen Theseus, Hippolyta and Egeus, and they return to the community Lysander and Hermia thought they had to leave. The proper alignment of love allows the creation of a larger network of relationships. More important, Helena's ‘Mine own and not mine own’ suggests an improvement in the quality of the love. In place of the obsessive, exclusive demands we have seen the lovers make is an acknowledgement that the possession of love is never total. Helena imagined Hermia as a clone of herself; Bottom wants to play both Pyramus and Thisbe. But love, as Helena now experiences it, recognizes the otherness of the other person, who is possessed and not possessed, as the men are enchanted and not enchanted and their experience is a dream and not a dream. Helena, the most obsessed and unhappy of the lovers, is the one who has this insight: the worse the ordeal, the deeper the final understanding.

The magic, apparently crude and disruptive, has been the agent in leading the lovers towards a deeper maturity and a richer experience of relationship. Robin's sense of the action as just a show of folly put on for his amusement—‘Shall we their fond pageant see? / Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (3.2.114-15)—is part of the truth, and embodies part of the audience's response. But it is not the whole truth. Nor is the play content with his view of the lovers' final relationship as simply a matter of men possessing women: ‘The man shall have his mare again, / And all shall be well’ (3.2.463-4). Helena has a finer sense than that of how far love means possession.

Robin is equally reductive in describing the Bottom-Titania affair: ‘My mistress with a monster is in love’ (3.2.6). While Oberon expects something crude and grotesque, Shakespeare knows a trick worth two of that. Helena, finding herself the recipient of unexpected love, is furious and counterattacks violently. Bottom is phegmatic and detached; above all, he is polite: ‘Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays—the more the pity, that some honest neighbours will not make them friends’ (3.1.135-9). He suggests, as tactfully as he can, that Titania is wrong to love him; the rebuke is softened by courtesy and tolerance. Titania picks up the spirit of Bottom's response, instructing her attendants, ‘Be kind and courteous to this gentleman’ (3.1.155). Instead of a lurid image of bestiality (we need to remember that Bottom's transformation is only from the neck up) we get a love affair couched in courtly politeness with, on Bottom's part, considerable restraint. Not quite sure what to make of Titania, he spends most of his time chatting amiably with her entourage. When she exerts her power over him, forbidding him to leave the wood and commanding his silence (3.1.143-4, 191), the potential harshness is softened by the promise of hospitality: ‘Feed him with apricots and dewberries, / With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries' (3.1.157-8). She thinks not just of what she wants from Bottom but of what Bottom might want.¹⁹ As there is more to the operation of the flower that the simple confusion Robin sees, there is more to Titania's love of Bottom than the grotesque humiliation Oberon expects. The comedy of incongruity gains unexpected subtlety from the consideration they show each other. Titania's reaction when she comes out of the spell, ‘O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!’ (4.1.77), does not quite do justice to the experience she has had and suggests once again that in returning to Oberon she has lost something.

Robin's commentary invites the audience to simple, mocking laughter, in line with the practical jokes he enjoys playing (especially, we note, on women (2.1.47-57)); the play itself invites a larger response, including Robin's perspective but not confined to it. As the magic flower invites us to think about the actual working of love, the other principal use of magic, Bottom's transformation, invites us to think about the working of theatre. The ass's head is quite frankly a theatrical prop. It comes from the same trunk as the different beards Bottom offers to wear (1.2.80-6) and it satisfies his ambition to play in a mask: ‘An I may hide my face, let me play Thisbe too’ (1.2.45). In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay a good deal of the magic is conveyed not by special effects but simply by actors acting: in the scenes with the glass, one set of characters spies on another set, supposedly miles away; distance is abolished simply by having them share the same stage. With equal simplicity, the effect of the magic flower is left entirely to the actors playing Titania, Lysander and Demetrius. Bottom, to don the ass's head, retires from the stage, puts it on in the tiring-house, and returns. No flash powder, no special effects. On Oberon's orders, Robin removes the head, on stage, as Bottom sleeps. Productions sometimes devise ways of hiding the moment from the audience to make it seem more like magic when Bottom appears as his old self again. But the open stage of an Elizabethan playhouse, lit by daylight, lacking in scenery and with a wrap-around audience, is no place to hide anything. I suspect Robin should remove the head in full view of the audience, so that we see Bottom emerge again as if we were in the tiring-house watching an actor shed his costume and his character, to emerge as himself. To watch the play's magic at work is, simply and frankly, to watch theatre at work.

Theatre is a power, and that power, like those of Theseus, Egeus and Oberon, is debated throughout the play, and its strengths and weaknesses are explored. Pyramus and Thisbe is the principal vehicle for this. Like other dramatic burlesques, from Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle through Buckingham's The Rehearsal to Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound, it makes us think, as it entertains us, about how theatre operates, about the assumptions it makes and the tricks it uses.²⁰ It does so in part by reversing the usual procedures. When in the show of the Nine Worthies in Love's Labour's Lost (c.1594) Costard declares ‘I Pompey am’ and Berowne retorts, ‘You lie; you are not he’ (V.ii.543), we see the audience rejecting one of the ground rules without which theatre is impossible: impersonation. Quince and his colleagues insist on breaking the rules themselves, informing the audience that the lion is really Snug, Pyramus is really Bottom and the swords will do no harm. The audience of A Midsummer Night's Dream agrees to imagine that the stage is a wood, and the normal-sized actors playing the fairies can hide in acorn-cups. Quince, arriving in the forest for a rehearsal, uncreates illusion: ‘This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house’ (3.1.3-4). Pointing, presumably, to the real stage and tiring-house, he turns them back into what they really are.²¹

At the same time he and his colleagues have great faith in their power to create illusion. Considering the problem of bringing moonshine on to the stage, they decide at first to leave the casement open and let the real moon do the job. But they evidently think Starveling will do it better. Is Shakespeare recalling that Lyly in Endymion let an actor impersonate the moon? Of all the actors Starveling gets the roughest treatment from the audience: he is the only one who is interrupted to the extent that he cannot carry on. But in general the actors imagine they are wielding a powerful force that if anything will have to be restrained. Bottom is confident about the emotional impact of his acting: ‘If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes. I will move storms’ (1.2.22-3). The raw energy of his performance as a lion—no lines, just roaring—could, Quince fears, go even further: ‘An you should do it too terribly you would fright the Duchess and the ladies that they would shriek, and that were enough to hang us all’ (1.2.66-8). Quince and his colleagues imagine their art as powerful enough to be dangerous; if they are not circumspect they will offend the greater, more dangerous power of the state, and suffer accordingly.²² It should be noted, in view of the scant respect for the feelings of women the play's more high-born men show, and of Robin's delight in teasing older women, that the actors are particularly concerned about the feelings of the ladies, who may be frightened by the lion and distressed by the killings.

Their solution is to restrain the power of theatrical illusion by constant reminders of reality. The lion, whose uncontrolled roaring may be terrifying, is given lines to speak that immediately humanize him, and bring the actor under control by restraining his freedom to improvise. The audience will be assured that the lion is really Snug, and that Pyramus is really Bottom. Shakespeare himself uses the same device to keep Bottom's transformation inoffensive: chatting with Titania and her attendants, he is thoroughly and unshakably himself, no more a monster than Snug is a lion.²³ In performance Quince's actors carry out this strategy with some success: Theseus pays tribute to the lion as ‘A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience’ (5.1.225). But Quince's nervousness shows in his mispunctuation of the Prologue. Not only does the sheer repetition of its claims of good will show anxiety in itself; he inadvertently turns some of them into insults, so that he is constantly treading a fine line between accommodation and the offence he is so anxious to avoid:

If we offend, it is with our good will.
                    That you should think, we come not to offend
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
                    That is the true beginning of our end.
Consider then we come but in despite.
                    We do not come as minding to content you,
Our true intent is. All for your delight
                    We are not here. That you should here repent you
The actors are at hand …

(5.1.108-18)

Later Bottom takes the risk of correcting Theseus, who has suggested that the wall, ‘being sensible’, should return Thisbe's curses: ‘No, in truth, sir he should not. “Deceiving me” is Thisbe's cue. She is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see, it will fall pat as I told you’ (5.1.180-5). Polite as always, he has spotted an audience member in need of help, and accordingly helps him. Even in this extempore moment the general strategy of Quince and his company holds. They have potentially great power over their audience, as their audience has over them; they must treat that audience with tact and courtesy.

Whether their courtesy is returned is another matter. When King Henry presides over the magic contest in Friar Bacon he can take a simple satisfaction in the general display of skill and the English magician's victory. Theseus and his fellow audience members have a more delicate task. Hippolyta does not want to face it: ‘I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged, / And duty in his service perishing’ (5.1.85-6); but Theseus determines to receive the show as the offering of ‘simpleness and duty’ (5.1.83), and he gives a lecture on the gracious acceptance of even the most incompetent expressions of loyalty (5.1.89-105). Yet his courtesy has a touch of condescension, and the actual reaction he and his fellow audience members give is a volatile combination of ironic praise—‘Well run, Thisbe.’ ‘Well shone, Moon’ (5.1.260-1)—witty criticism—‘This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad’ (5.1.282-3)—and simple rudeness. Theseus offers a final gracious tribute only after allowing himself a last insult, and he does not bother to link the two with an apology: ‘Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus and hanged himself in Thisbe's garter it would have been a fine tragedy; and so it is, truly, and very notably discharged’ (5.1.349-52). It is possible, however, for the actor to show Theseus realizing he has made a slip and offering the last part of the speech as reassurance; and Hippolyta's reaction to Pyramus's lament, ‘Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man’ (5.1.285), can be played as embarrassment for the actor or a genuine response to the character. The relations of play and audience involve tricky negotiations between offence and courtesy, on both sides, and different productions can strike the balance differently.

The main effect, of course, is that the actors have nothing like the power they think they have and if their feeble performance is to have any impact it must be because the audience uses its own power to help them out:

Theseus.
The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if
imagination amend them.
Hippolyta.
It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.

(5.1.210-13)

But at the time Shakespeare wrote, ‘the best in this kind’ were the Lord Chamberlain's men, who are performing the play. As Quince's company rehearses outside the town, Shakespeare's company rehearsed, and performed, in the suburbs. They were a commercial enterprise, and Flute imagines that Bottom's reward for playing Pyramus will be not the appreciation of the intelligentsia but sixpence a day (4.2.18-22). Both companies draw their personnel from the ranks of artisans and tradesmen. These hints of identification between Quince's company and Shakespeare's work more than one way. There is self-deprecating humour, as when Chaucer the poet shows Chaucer the pilgrim telling the worst of the Canterbury Tales. But there may also be a warning not to be too quick to dismiss the actors' show as merely feeble, drawing only condescending laughter. We are watching not just Athens's worst actors, but England's best, and the latter group may well be up to something.

In some ways, though not in the way Quince and company fear, Pyramus and Thisbe is genuinely disruptive. It may not produce unbearable pity and terror, but it brings another world, another kind of life, into Theseus's court, and the result is a liberating challenge to decorum. Egeus, trying to prevent the performance, insists the actors are the wrong class, ‘Hard-handed men that work in Athens here’, and tells his ruler, ‘It is not for you’ (5.1.72, 77).²⁴ He is overruled. The bergomask that, by Theseus's own choice, ends the performance is ‘Usually identified as a clownish, rustic dance’.²⁵ Peter Holland has pointed out that in choosing a classical story the mechanicals are trespassing on what was normally the territory of university students, learned amateurs and educated playwrights.²⁶ The love scene by the wall includes the scatological comedy associated with the subversive vice-characters of morality plays like Mankind: ‘My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones’; ‘I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all’ (5.1.189, 200).²⁷ Just by appearing at court, the actors are challenging a social barrier (unlike the professional companies of Shakespeare's time they are not under royal or aristocratic patronage); and one of the most striking incidents in their play is the disappearance of a wall.

They have a disruptive effect within A Midsummer Night's Dream itself, picking up and parodying motifs from the main play. Pyramus and Thisbe have parent trouble, they vow eternal fidelity, and they meet in the dark outside the town, where they become the victims of confusion. The bloodstained mantle, and Pyramus's lament that ‘lion vile hath here deflowered my dear’ (5.1.286), suggest both the staining of the flower by Cupid's dart and the experience the women will undergo on their wedding nights, not long after the play is over.²⁸ The obvious maleness of Flute, who resists playing Thisbe because he has a beard coming, reminds the audience of the maleness of the actors playing Titania, Hippolyta, Helena and Hermia.²⁹ I have suggested that the play raises serious issues about the relations between men and women; but all its females are really males, and we may wonder if this is one more example of male coercion or a warning not to take such questions too seriously. (The disruption, in other words, affects not just the play but my academic interpretation.)

There is, finally, something uncanny in theatre itself. There was a contemporary story of a performance of Doctor Faustus at Exeter at which, during the conjuring scene, one devil too many appeared on stage and there was a general rush for the doors.³⁰ Bottom is transformed while rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe; he misses an entrance cue (which, perhaps significantly, is a vow of fidelity, ‘As true as truest horse that yet would never tire’ (3.1.97-8)), and in the interval created by that missed cue Robin transforms him. In theatre as in other kinds of magic, one misstep can be serious. When at the end of the play the fairies invade the palace of Theseus (who does not believe in fairies) the invasion begins with Robin's line, ‘Now the hungry lion roars’ (5.1.362), making a link back to Pyramus and Thisbe. An invasion by one kind of shadows, the actors, leads to an invasion by another kind, the fairies. It is as though the mechanicals, by their indecorous and disruptive presence at court, have broken a hole in a wall, and anything can get through. When the actors imagine they are dealing with a troublesome power that needs to be handled with care, they may be speaking more truly than they know.

The fairy invasion offers both a blessing on Theseus's wedding and a final challenge to his authority. In general, the power relations that have been debated through the play are still under negotiation in the last act. When he saw the lovers asleep in the right configuration, Theseus forgot about the law and overruled Egeus. In the Quarto version of the last act Egeus is simply dropped; he does not appear, and there is no reference to him. The Folio gives him Philostrate's role of objecting to Pyramus and Thisbe, and he is overruled again. But he is still making his presence felt. (The new arrangement also allows him an unexpected sense of humour: he confesses that the preview of the mechanicals' play made him weep with laughter.) The Folio also has Lysander read out the titles of the alternative entertainments Theseus rejects, letting him share Egeus's role as master of ceremonies, and raising the possibility that as he has taken his daughter he is about to take his job. Hermia and Helena are completely silent throughout the act, suggesting that the men-versus-women debates are resolved by the assertion of male authority in marriage, in which the women are reduced to silence. But Hippolyta redresses the balance: having had only one speech in the first scene, she debates with Theseus throughout the last act.

Their key debate occurs at the beginning of that act: Theseus's disbelief in the lovers' story, part of his general disbelief in imagination and the supernatural, is countered by her insistence that the story ‘grows to something of great constancy’ (5.1.26). But what story have the lovers told? In a way their experience is the converse of Bottom's. He wakes back in his rehearsal, still waiting for his cue, then gradually realizes he has had ‘a most rare vision’—but a vision that is not to be spoken of: ‘Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream’ (4.1.202-4). His plan to get Peter Quince to write a ballad of his dream for him to sing before the Duke never materializes. On his return to his fellows, he is torn between a desire to tell all and a determination to tell nothing, and he tells nothing.³¹ During their forest sojurn, the lovers have, unlike Bottom, no sight of the fairies, no inkling of their existence. They think they have been dreaming, and they go off to recount their dreams. We never see what follows. (Shakespeare, like Bottom, can be reticent.) But they will presumably discover they have all had the same dream, and whatever story they construct to tell Theseus it leads him to remark, ‘I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys’ (5.1.2-3). The lovers (for our amusement) have been through mutual betrayal and humiliation; they have said terrible things to each other. Have they decided, as a way of coping with the discomfort, to blame it all on the fairies? If that is the case (and the play provokes the question without answering it) then Theseus's disbelief is, and is not, justified. The lovers have no evidence at all that fairy magic has been at work; they have devised the story for their own needs. They just happen to be right.

Theseus's scepticism is of course given the lie direct by the entrance of the fairies themselves into his own palace. His final couplet, ‘A fortnight hold we this solemnity / In nightly revels and new jollity’ (5.1.360-1), sounds like the ending of the play, and as the highest-ranking character he has the right, by a convention of Elizabethan playwriting, to the last word. But as his earlier call for merriment was disrupted by the entrance of Egeus, his final attempt at closure is broken by the entrance of Robin. The fairies' blessing of the bride-beds shows the limits of Theseus's thinking in another way. He has been looking forward with increasing impatience to that night's pleasure. They are thinking nine months ahead, and more:

So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be,
And the blots of nature's hand
Shall not in their issue stand.
Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious such as are
Despisèd in nativity
Shall upon their children be.

(5.1.398-405)

With the words ‘ever true in loving’ Oberon banishes the fear of infidelity, and heals the harm his magic has done. But the chief harm associated with fairies in Shakespeare's time was their threat to newborn children. Just when they were most vulnerable, the fairies might steal them, leaving a weak, sickly fairy child, a changeling, in their place. It was a warning to guard one's children carefully.³² Without explicitly recalling that belief, Oberon does what Quince and his actors do: reassures us that his power, much as we may fear it, will do no harm. Instead of threatening mortal children, they bless them. And to think of changelings is to raise another question the play provokes but does not answer: do these fairies, Shakespeare's fairies, have children? Robin calls the Indian boy a changeling, but there is no reference to a fairy child left in his place. He is simply stolen. There are no references to fairy children anywhere. Oberon and Titania's only offspring are figurative: Titania says of the evils their quarrel has produced in nature, ‘We are their parents and original’ (2.1.117). The fairies regularly call the other characters ‘mortals’; are they themselves outside the cycle of birth and death, unable to die or to reproduce? Traditional fairies, of course, have children, and there are tales of fairy funerals.³³ But if any writer can re-think tradition, Shakespeare can. The fairies are the most powerful characters in the play; but there may be one power, natural to mortals, that they lack. If so there is an extra poignancy in Titania's fascination with her pregnant friend, and in the final blessing of the bride-beds. Yet it is a power that makes the mortals vulnerable: it was in childbirth that the votaress died.

Throughout the play power is debated, and no one power, neither the authority of Theseus nor the magic of Oberon, holds final sway. In place of the single central authority of Lyly's Cynthia, the play presents two rulers, Theseus and Hippolyta, who from the beginning are engaged in debate, qualifying our sense that Thesus is simply, indisputably, in charge. (There is a more piquant contrast with Lyly: the Bottom-Titania affair reads almost as a parodic inversion of Cynthia's relations with Endymion; this time a queen helplessly adores a mortal, who responds with wary courtesy.) Greene's interest in competing forces becomes a more intricate exploration of different forms of authority: the coercive worldly power of Thesus and Egeus, the magic of Oberon, the magic of theatre. Robin is an ironic version of the Plautine clever slave, producing a period of confusion through being confused himself. That confusion becomes the occasion for a fuller view than Lyly and Greene have attempted of the nature of love, the demands it makes, the way it develops and matures. In the play's conflict of forces, there is coercion, resentment and, directed against the mechanicals, a certain amount of snobbery. Yet Annabel Patterson sees in A Midsummer Night's Dream ‘an idea of social play that could cross class boundaries without obscuring them, and by those crossings imagine the social body whole again’.³⁴ And there is a subtler sense of gender relations than we see in Margaret's surrender to Lacy. The ultimate benevolence of the play's vision lies in the possibilities it offers of courtesy, loyalty, self-deprecation; of the love embodied not in the magic flower but in Helena's ‘Mine own, and not mine own’; of the relations between art and its audience embodied not in the heckling of the courtiers but in the final offer of Robin, so like the goodwill of Quince and his actors, ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends’ (5.1.428-9).

Notes

1. For the arguments against the aristocratic-wedding theory, see Stanley Wells, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream Revisited’, Critical Survey, III, 1991, 14-18.

2. All references to A Midsummer Night's Dream are to the Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Peter Holland, Oxford and New York, 1994.

3. Holland, Introduction, pp. 53-4.

4. K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, London, 1959, p. 14; and see chapter 2, n. 24.

5. Productions have sometimes emphasized Hippolyta's captive state. In the 1935 film directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle she first appears ‘defeated and downcast, with a large snake coiled around her’: Jay L. Halio, Shakespeare in Performance: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Manchester and New York, 1994, p. 86. In John Hancock's 1966 production in San Francisco she was dragged on in a cage and ‘her lines snarled with biting sarcasm’ (Holland, commentary, p. 131).

6. Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1988, p. 36. John Weld sees the defeat of the Amazon as an allegory of passion subdued by reason: Meaning in Comedy: Studies in Elizabethan Romantic Comedy, Albany, 1975, p. 193.

7. ‘Shaping’, p. 40.

8. Egeus's view would have seemed almost as extreme in Shakespeare's time as it does now. General opinion seems to have favoured a sensible give-and-take, with parents and children showing due regard for each other's feelings. See Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680, London, 1982, repr. 1990, pp. 71-9, 115.

9. D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Later Tudors 1547-1603, 2nd edn, London and New York, 1992, pp. 58-9.

10. Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, London and New York, 1989, p. 144.

11. William W. E. Slights, ‘The Changeling in A Dream’, Studies in English Literature, XXVIII, 1988, 262.

12. Or at least that is how it functions in the play. What would happen if (for example) the first person Lysander saw on waking was Demetrius is a question the play does not address.

13. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, New York, 1971, pp. 233-4.

14. ‘Characterization of the Four Young Lovers in “A Midsummer Night's Dream”’, Shakespeare Survey, XXXV, 1982, 58. In Endymion Floscula compares love created by enchantment to artificial flowers and fish taken with poisoned bait (1.2.76-83).

15. For a full account of the imperial imagery compressed into this passage see Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, London, 1975, repr. 1985, pp. 29-120.

16. In a sentimental moment in the 1935 film the Indian boy, rejected, turns away in tears (Halio, Performance, p. 90). Shakespeare gives him no presence, and therefore no feelings; the effect is of a custody battle in which the child is never heard from.

17. As Peter Holland points out, this is the only genuine dream in the play (Introduction, p. 4); he offers a Freudian reading of it (pp. 13-15).

18. Helena's role as the problem child among the lovers is suggested in Peter Hall's 1968 film: as the four lovers sleep, Helena (Diana Rigg) is sucking her thumb.

19. As Montrose sees it, she treats him as a child (‘Shaping’, p. 35).

20. It is sometimes the occasion for theatrical in-jokes. In Adrian Noble's 1994 Royal Shakespeare Company production, for example, Quince bore a suspicious resemblance to Laurence Olivier during his period as director of the National Theatre.

21. Michael Shapiro, ‘The Casting of Flute: Planes of Illusion in A Midsummer Night's Deam and Bartholomew Fair’, The Elizabethan Theatre XIII, ed. A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee, Toronto, 1994, p. 152.

22. Theodore B. Leinwand, ‘“I Believe We Must Leave the Killing Out”: Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Renaissance Papers 1986, n.p., p. 13. Though there is no record of actors being hanged, the fear that the authorities would move against the theatre was sometimes borne out in the years following A Midsummer Night's Dream—notably in 1597, when a now-lost play called The Isle of Dogs gave such offence that some members of the company (including Ben Jonson) were imprisoned and the Privy Council threatened to ban all performances and demolish the playhouses.

23. As William C. Carroll puts it, ‘his identity is never clearer than when it has been lost in another shape’: The Metamporphoses of Shakespearean Comedy, Princeton, 1985, p. 150.

24. I follow the Oxford edition, which in turn follows the Folio in assigning to Egeus the role given to Philostrate in the Quarto. Most editions follow the Quarto.

25. Holland, commentary, p. 250.

26. Introduction, p. 92.

27. Thomas Clayton has suggested that Wall's chink might be not between his fingers but between his legs: ‘“Fie, What a Question's That If Thou Wert Near a Lewd Interpreter”: The Wall Scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Shakespeare Studies, VII, 1974, 101.

28. Holland, commentary, p. 247.

29. Shapiro, ‘Casting’, pp. 149-50.

30. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, III, Oxford, repr. 1951, p. 424.

31. Fairies were ‘jealous of their privacy’, and it was thought unwise to speak of one's dealings with them: Thomas, Religion, p. 614.

32. Briggs, Anatomy, p. 15; Thomas, Religion, p. 612.

33. Briggs, Anatomy, pp. 218-19.

34. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Cambridge and Oxford, 1989, p. 69.