SOURCE: “Varieties of Love, Variations of Genre,” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 1997, pp. 32-46.

[In the following essay, Hackett explores the way A Midsummer Night's Dream vascillates between tragic and comic possibilities.]

Comedy is above all the drama of love; the conventional marker of a comic happy ending is at least one marriage, founded on the mutual desire of the two partners. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, we get marriage three times over—four if we count the reunion of Oberon and Titania—emphatically confirming that what we have witnessed is a comedy. It is a play where ‘Jack shall have Jill, / Naught shall go ill’ (III. ii. 461-2), forming an outright contrast to another comedy by Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (1594-5), composed not long before A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the nuptials of another four couples are deferred and ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Gill’ (V. ii. 874-5). Whereas in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare experiments with disruption of the conventional marriage-ending, the Dream ends precisely like an old play, and takes pleasure in convention and a sense of ritual.

Part of the sense of happiness at this play's ending is created by its participation in the relatively new ideology that marriage should be predominantly based on love. This is not the place to give a comprehensive history of attitudes to marriage, but in very general terms sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage-theory can be contrasted with that of the Middle Ages. In the earlier period, upper-class marriages were usually dynastic alliances rather than love-matches, and literary culture tended to locate passion outside marriage in what has been called ‘courtly love’ or ‘fin amour’ (Cuddon, pp. 163-5), the devotion of a lover who self-deprecatingly styled himself as servant to his married mistress. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church emphatically advocated virginity, especially female virginity, as a higher state of virtue than matrimony. The Reformation brought shifts in these ideologies: marriage began to be prized as a means of preventing sexual irregularity and as a virtuous state in its own right; this in turn meant that marriage had to be what has been termed ‘companionate’, based on the contented monogamy of each partner; and this in turn meant that marriage needed to be based on mutual love (Haller and Haller; George and George). Enforced marriage was increasingly seen as a greater threat to the stability of family and society than clandestine marriage for love: thus a writer addressing ‘the Gentlewomen and others of England’ in 1593 asked, rhetorically, ‘What is the cause of so many household breaches, divorcements, and continual discontentments, but unnatural disagreements by unmutual contracts?’ (Bell, pp. 286-7).

A number of recent discussions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage have concluded that, although companionate marriage allowed some degrees of autonomy to women, these remained within restricted limits (Jardine, pp. 39-48; Neely, pp. 8-16). It created a social structure in which in theory ‘[m]arriage is an equal partnership’, but in practice ‘some partners are more equal than others’ (Jardine, p. 48). As we have seen, in A Midsummer Night's Dream the final marriages are achieved through patriarchal means and on patriarchal terms; not only does Jack have Jill, but, as Puck goes on to sing, ‘The man shall have his mare again, / And all shall be well’ (III. ii. 463-4). Nevertheless, the final scenes show a fortunate coincidence of free choice in love, including female choice, with the patriarchal social order. The strength of patriarchal matrimony is most powerfully reinforced if it is something to which the potentially wayward and wilful female voluntarily submits: if, like Rosalind in As You Like It, she willingly says ‘To you I give myself, for I am yours’ (V. iv. 116); or if, like Portia in The Merchant of Venice, she freely says ‘Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours / Is now converted’ (II. ii. 166-7). We find the same joyful self-surrender in the Dream. Besides the resolution of Hermia's and Helena's affairs to their own satisfaction, Titania on waking warmly greets ‘My Oberon’ (IV. i. 75), and even Hippolyta, however we read her demeanour at the beginning of the play, begins Act V by affectionately addressing ‘my Theseus’ (V. i. 1).

However, in the course of A Midsummer Night's Dream other possible love-outcomes have been indicated, and, along with them, potential generic diversions away from comedy into tragedy. Various elements in the play give a sense that things could easily have turned out otherwise. The very first scene activates a sense of the obstacles to love and of conflicts from which a happy resolution will only be forged with difficulty. Theseus has won Hippolyta by violence and must now win her affection to validate the marriage, while Hermia is offered a blank choice between obedience, death, or enforced celibacy. Lysander reflects not only that ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’, but that even a fortunate love is subject to ‘War, death, or sickness’ such that ‘The jaws of darkness do devour it up’ (ll. 134-48).

Between this foreboding beginning and the fortunate ending, the middle part of the play oscillates between tragic and comic potentials, to both of which love is central. There is much emphasis upon the volatility and vulnerability of love, and a sense of how easily love can take the wrong track. Love is represented as in conflict with reason, and reason in turn is most often invoked when it is least in evidence, such as when Lysander, under the influence of the love-charm, abruptly transfers his affection to Helena:

The will of man is by his reason swayed,
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
Things growing are not ripe until their season,
So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason.

(II. ii. 121-4)

There is acute irony in Lysander's portentous attribution to reason and maturity of what we know to be the sudden transformative effect of not only magical interference, but a mistaken intervention at that. Yet this accords with a wider recognition in the play of the arbitrariness of love, and its imperviousness to reason. There is no ostensible reason why Hermia should prefer Lysander to Demetrius; ‘Demetrius is a worthy gentleman’, and having her father's approval, ‘must be held the worthier’ (I. i. 52-55). The two suitors are virtually indistinguishable; on the other side, Lysander is ‘as well derived’ as Demetrius, ‘As well possessed … My fortunes every way as fairly ranked’ (I. i. 99-101). Here Shakespeare echoes Chaucer's Knight's Tale, a source to which he would return late in his career for The Two Noble Kinsmen. In Chaucer's narrative it is extremely difficult to detect reasons to prefer Palamon over Arcite or vice versa, and indeed the lady for whom they compete, Emelye, is made to transfer her affection rapidly and equably from one to the other. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare squares Chaucer's isosceles triangle by adding another woman, and does make some superficial distinctions between the two females—Helena is taller and fairer, Hermia is more spirited—but even here, there is no logical reason to prefer one over another. The switches of affection among the four lovers are facilitated by a sense that the two men and two women concerned are effectively interchangeable; indeed it is a symptom of this that in writing or talking about the play it is all too easy to get their names scrambled.

Attempts in the play to justify love-choices on grounds of reason are thus exposed as specious. Instead, the source and strength of love is attributed not to the mind, but to the eye. Time and again eyes are referred to, either as the organs which receive the subjective impression of the beloved which provokes desire, or as the organs whose beauty is the object which inspires desire. Thus Hermia wishes that ‘my father looked but with my eyes’ (I. i. 56); Helena laments that Demetrius dotes on Hermia's eyes, which to him are like lodestars (I. i. 230, 242, 183); and both Lysander's and Demetrius's newfound passions for Helena lead them to eulogize her eyes (II. ii. 127, III. ii. 138-9). The eyes are both the subject and the object of desire, both active and passive, reflecting the scientific debate in the Renaissance as to whether sight was produced by beams from the eye striking the object, or by beams from the object imprinting an image on the eye (Donne, pp. 183-4, note on ‘The Extasie’, ll. 7-8). The eyes can therefore serve as a metonym for both desire and that which provokes desire.

At the same time, of course, sight is a faculty which can be impeded, and this in turn becomes a figure of the vulnerability of love. The darkness of night ‘from the eye his function takes’ (III. ii. 177), forcing the lovers to fall back on the even less reliable faculty of hearing, which Puck exploits to exacerbate their confusion and exhaustion (III. ii. 354-430). Most significantly, it is to the eye that the love-charm is applied; as Oberon says of Titania, ‘with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes, / And make her full of hateful fantasies’ (II. i. 257-8). The eye, it is implied, is at once a lens which can be distorted, and an aperture through which the mind can be entered and altered. In relation to the rest of the play, Helena's lament that love is blind and ‘looks not with the eyes, but with the mind’ (I. i. 234-5) can only mean not so much that love is utterly incapable of sight, as that it is incapable of seeing accurately, and is an instrument of fantasy rather than reason.

Moreover, the shadowy tragic possibilities which are indicated in the course of the play include not only the wrong choice of love-partner, but choice of the wrong kind of love, including sex outside marriage, homoeroticism, and self-slaughter for love. Possibilities of pre-marital sex are suggested by the temporal setting of the play. By ‘midsummer night’, Shakespeare may mean to imply specifically Midsummer's Eve, the shortest night of the year, and the turning point at the middle of the summer. However, as in his inconsistent treatment of the passage of time between the first and last scenes of the play, and of the phases of the moon, he also operates a kind of double time-scheme in relation to the placing of the play within the annual calendar. At several points it is implied to be May Morning, the dawning of the first day of May, the festival of the beginning of summer. On stumbling across the sleeping lovers, Theseus suggests that ‘No doubt they rose up early to observe / The rite of May’ (IV. i. 131-2). Other allusions keep the idea of May Day before us: Lysander arranges to meet Hermia in the wood ‘Where I did meet thee once with Helena / To do observance to a morn of May’ (I. i. 166-7); and when the women trade insults about their relative heights, Hermia calls Helena a ‘painted maypole’ (III. ii. 296).

May Day was an ancient English rural festival which was marked by the young men and women of each parish going out into the woods to gather and bring back hawthorn branches (Barber, pp. 18-24, ch. 6). It could also be fairy-time: in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender the King and Queen of the May are attended by ‘A fayre flocke of Faeries’ (Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 89, l. 32). Since hawthorn blossom was known as may, the expression ‘bringing in the May’ meant bringing in both the month and the flowers, and indeed there are some incidental references to hawthorn in the play (I. i. 185, III. i. 4). The ritual thus denoted both the arrival of summer and the bringing of nature into the town, and in keeping with these themes it was also an occasion for courtship games. It is the subject of a poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), ‘Corinna's going a Maying’, in which he describes the bedecking of the town with ‘white-thorn’, such that ‘each field turns a street; each street a park / Made green, and trimm'd with trees’. He also emphasizes youth and love:

There's not a budding Boy, or Girl, this day,
But is got up, and gone to bring in May …
And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted Troth,
And chose their Priest.

(Norbrook and Woudhuysen, pp. 455-7, no. 206, ll. 30-31, 43-4, 49-50)

On the one hand, all of this makes May Morning an extremely apt and happy setting for a play about love leading to marriage. On the other hand, however, according to Phillip Stubbes, a Puritan who condemned the festival as pagan and immoral, ‘I have heard it credibly reported … that of forty, three-score, or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have been scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled’ (The Anatomy of Abuses, 1583, quoted in Barber, p. 22). Indeed, in Herrick's poem there is a strong sense that finding a priest to perform the proprieties of marriage is not the only end in view; there is sexual innuendo in the suggestion that there has been ‘Many a jest told of the key's betraying / This night, and locks picked’ (ll. 55-6). Herrick's light-hearted jocularity is more like the tone of A Midsummer Night's Dream than is Stubbes's didactic moral opprobrium, but even so the play shares with Stubbes an anxiety that female virginity should be preserved until after marriage to the right man, and that May Morning, and/or Midsummer Night, could be a time not purely of merry-making but also of threat to this preservation. Demetrius warns the abjectly submissive Helena,

You do impeach your modesty too much,
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not;
To trust the opportunity of night,
And the ill counsel of a desert place,
With the rich worth of your virginity.

(II. i. 214-19)

Hermia meets with ardent physical advances from Lysander and has to persuade him at some length to ‘Lie further off, in human modesty’ (II. ii. 63); Puck clearly expects that lovers in such circumstances would lie together, and that Lysander must be some ‘lack-love’ or ‘kill-courtesy’ (II. ii. 83). Both women are fortunate in their lovers' gracious restraint, but the danger that it might have been otherwise is partly indicated by the invocation of the erotically charged rite of May.

May Morning and Midsummer Eve blur into one in A Midsummer Night's Dream on the basis of their shared properties. May Morning, as the transition from spring to summer, and Midsummer Eve, as the transition from early to late summer, each serve as appropriate symbols of the turning point from youth to maturity, from maidenhood to wifehood, from adolescent virgin innocence to adult sexual knowledge. Angela Carter, a writer much influenced by this play as we shall see again later, coins a phrase for both dates as ‘green hinges’ of the year. In Nights at the Circus, Carter's winged heroine, Fevvers, goes through two pubescent rites of passage: her first attempt at flight, which takes place very early on Midsummer Morning; and her near-deflowerment by a Gothic villain, which happens on May Morning. Both occasions are described by Carter as ‘the year's green hinge’ (pp. 33, 78); like Shakespeare, she has it both ways, merging the two dates. Also as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when the calendrical turning point coincides with readiness in a girl's life for her to become a woman, this coincidence confers an air of propitiousness and cosmic fitness upon a personal event, like Fevvers' first flight; but if that point of readiness has not been reached, the ‘green hinge’ is a potentially threatening time of forced submission to rapacious male sexuality.

The unsettling or even traumatic properties of the ‘green hinge’ from girlhood to womanhood are suggested in A Midsummer Night's Dream by moments of nostalgia for an earlier, more placid time of childhood. In the past, we are told, Hermia and Helena would enact their observance of the rites of May together, as girlhood companions. This was just one activity of what seemed an indissoluble female-female bond. As Helena reminds Hermia, they shared ‘schooldays' friendship, childhood innocence’, and, in a delightful simile,

                              grew together,
Like to a double cherry: seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem
… with two seeming bodies but one heart.

(III. ii. 202-12)

In the Petrarchan poetry of the Elizabethan period the poet's mistress was frequently and conventionally praised for lips which were like cherries, an image which conveyed at once enticing rosy ripeness and untouched, unbitten wholeness. This is exactly the language which Demetrius uses when he awakes to see the newly beloved Helena—‘O, how ripe in show / Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!’ (III. ii. 139-40)—and even Flute's Thisbe has cherry lips (V. i. 189). In Helena's speech to Hermia, the image of the cherry for the two girls has a similar mingled effect: it suggests at once an incipient ripeness to be plucked and an as yet unplucked, unspoilt completeness.

Of course the symmetry of a double cherry is also essential to Helena's representation of perfect friendship. David Marshall illuminatingly points out the relevance of the Symposium by the Greek philosopher Plato, an extremely important text for Renaissance philosophies of love (1982, in Bloom, pp. 105-6). In the Symposium, a fictional debate among different real speakers about the nature of love, the comic playwright Aristophanes constructs a semi-comic myth about the origins of human desire. He relates how each human being was originally a pair of our present bodies, with four arms, four legs and two sets of genitals; but when these creatures became over-ambitious and challenged the gods, they were punished by being split in two. The consequent sense of loss, says Aristophanes, is the source of human desire; when an individual encounters their missing half, they are consumed by a longing to rush into their arms and reunite their bodies. An original double creature which was half-male, half-female produces a heterosexual couple; all-male doubles produce homosexuals; and all-female doubles produce lesbians (Plato, pp. 59-65).

When Helena says that she and Hermia used to enjoy a unity ‘As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds / Had been incorporate’ (III. ii. 207-8)—that is, ‘of one body’—there is a distinct echo of this fable. Aristophanes' story is a Fall-narrative: it identifies the desire for absolute union with a lover as a desire to return to paradisiacal pre-lapsarian happiness. This is what Helena craves from Hermia, a return to an uncomplicated idyll of contented all-female innocence before the tricky business of relationships with men intervened. However, the signal that this would be a backward and fruitless step is also there in her language, when she reminds Hermia of their ‘sisters' vows’ (III. ii. 199). Here the echo is of Theseus's threat to Hermia of the nunnery, where she would ‘live a barren sister all your life’ (I. i. 72). His conclusion—‘earthlier happy is the rose distilled’ (I. i. 76)—overshadows Helena's nostalgic plea for a regression to preadolescence, and makes clear that, whatever the temporary pains of the transition, the movement forwards into male-female union is one which must be made.

Valerie Traub finds in Helena's lines to Hermia an expression of female homoeroticism, and draws a parallel with the affection between Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It. There, Celia reminds her father that

                                        We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And whersoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.

(I. iii. 73-6)

The term ‘homoeroticism’ perhaps needs some clarification and some distinction from homosexuality. There is nothing in either play to suggest that Rosalind and Celia, or Helena and Hermia, have had a physically consummated sexual relationship. In this sense their attachments are asexual or pre-sexual. However, it would be an exaggeration to deny that there is any erotic element in each female couple's pubescent intimacy, which has clearly been both intense and based on attraction to one another's physical likeness. In this sense it is literally ‘homo-erotic’—that is, based on desire for sameness.

Traub is self-conscious about the fact that she is highlighting these passages in a deliberate quest to find examples of lesbian desire in Renaissance literature, and that unequivocal examples are elusive. She is also keenly aware that in both cases female homoeroticism is elegiacally placed in the past, such that its very function within the plays is that of something to be displaced and superseded by heterosexual desire. It is invoked as a valuable preliminary to heterosexual desire, a kind of training in affection and loyalty which softens a woman's heart and prepares her for ‘real’ love while safely preserving her physical purity; but at the same time it is shown as a false track, a dead end from which she must be turned aside and led towards her proper adult destiny of marriage.

A similar reading can be made of Titania's friendship with her Indian votaress. Her defiance of Oberon over the Indian prince is produced not solely by affection for the boy in his own right, but by her debt of affection for his mother. She intones ceremoniously, in the form of an incontrovertible vow,

And for her sake do I rear up her boy;
And for her sake I will not part with him.

(II. i. 136-7)

As we have seen, she describes how she and the votaress indulged themselves in impudently mocking the masculine merchant ships as hollow travesties of pregnancy, and indeed how the two women revelled in the sensual spectacle of the votaress's richly pregnant female body. Yet all of this exclusive female-female affection and pleasure is also placed elegiacally in the past: ‘she, being mortal, of that boy did die’ (l. 135). Titania, too, has to be educated away from her loyalty to a female bond, whose time is over, to renewed loyalty to her marital bond. And Hippolyta is yet a further parallel case, in that she must be wooed away from another form of all-female community, the sisterhood of the Amazonian gynocracy, which has been defeated and dissolved by the masculine force of Theseus.

In general, same-sex love undermines the argument of comedy, and tends to be introduced in Shakespeare's plays only to be averted or superseded; other examples include Olivia's attraction to Viola in Twelfth Night, and, between men, the affection of Antonio for Sebastian in the same play, or that of another Antonio for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. For Helena and Hermia, heterosexual desire fractures their girlhood unity in a way which is temporarily antagonistic and even descends to vitriolic abuse. It causes Helena, only a few minutes after her ‘double cherry’ speech, to reverse her account of the past: ‘O, when she is angry she is keen and shrewd. / She was a vixen when she went to school’ (III. ii. 323-4). ‘Shrewd’ here means ‘shrewish’, like the uncontrollably violent and unruly Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. Ruth Nevo has pointed out that critics who say that all of the four Athenian lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream change partners are not correct: the women never waver at all in their attachments to the men (1980, in Bloom, p. 58). What does go through a diametrical shift, however, is the women's affection for one another. This temporary estrangement dramatizes their conversion to more compelling heterosexual allegiances. Once the male-female couplings have been sorted out, female-female harmony can be restored too, but now as a secondary supportive substructure to the primary unity of marriage. The outcome is realignment in a new, doubled symmetry: ‘Two of both kinds makes up four’ (III. ii. 438). Just as the girls were once like a double cherry, now they are twinned again in a double wedding, a twinning to the power of two. This stress on symmetries, parallels and geometrical patterns, creating a sense of harmony and alignment, accentuates the happy feeling of the multiple marriage-ending. Premature defloration has been averted, regression to girlhood homoeroticism has been abandoned, and broken friendships have been mended on new terms.

This tidy patterning at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a necessary counterpart to a coexistent sense that comic closure has been achieved by somewhat haphazard means, and more by accident than design. The final happy pairings of the young Athenians are largely attributable to the impetuosity of Theseus, who in Act IV, scene i abruptly overrules not only Egeus, but also his own earlier judgment and the law of Athens, which in Act I ‘by no means we may extenuate’ (i. 120). The only reason for his conversion seems to be that he is in a good mood and, in tune with the play, is anxious to move towards a happy ending to coincide with his own nuptials. He is at once the absolute authority in the mortal world of the play, and a rather capricious and arbitrary ruler, very like the Theseus of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, a work which, as we have seen, seems to have been in Shakespeare's mind as he composed the Dream (Fender, pp. 7, 12, 16-20, 25-6, 60; Brooks, pp. 129-34). The other chief agency which brings about the happy ending shares in this capriciousness, being the somewhat unreliable magic of Puck and Oberon. In fact, Demetrius must remain perpetually under the love-charm's spell, not cured by its antidote as are Lysander and Titania, in order for him to fall into position as Helena's willing husband. The troubling implications of this are only suppressed by the conventions of comic closure, by the sense of a neat and satisfying tying-up of ends, and by the general emphasis of the play on the limitations of reason, encouraging us to desist from rational objections. The closing mood of stability and order is thus built on somewhat unstable foundations; yet the sense that the ending is a happy one can be seen as precisely dependent upon this combination of stability and instability. The symmetries and parallels among the couples give a sense that the right ending has been achieved, while the sense that the means to achieve it were a matter of mere luck, of comedy fortuitously snatched from the jaws of tragedy, creates an air of relief and cause for celebration.

Besides the wrong kinds of love, another threat to comedy which constantly hovers over the play is that of death. Jan Kott attributes this to the fact that

The furor of love always calls forth death as its only equal partner. Hermia says to Lysander: ‘Either death or you I'll find immediately’ (II. ii. 162); Lysander says of Helena: ‘Whom I do love, and will do till my death’ (III. ii. 167); Helena says of Demetrius: ‘To die upon the hand I love so well’ (II. i. 244), and again: “Tis partly mine own fault, / Which death, or absence soon shall remedy' (III. ii. 243-4). Even sleep ‘With leaden legs and batty wings’ is ‘death-counterfeiting’ (III. ii. 364-5).

(Kott, 1981, in Bloom, p. 82.)

Harold Brooks has shown that one of Shakespeare's sources in the Dream, perhaps surprisingly, is Seneca, the Roman author of notoriously gory tragedies (pp. lii-lxiii, lxxxiv-lxxxv). There are particular echoes of Seneca's Phaedra, the story of the ill-fated son of Theseus and his Amazon bride, which Shakespeare would also have found in his Ovid (Calderwood, pp. 5, 58; Ovid, XV. 497-546). Hippolytus meets a brutal end when his libidinous stepmother, Phaedra, falsely accuses him of seducing her. As he flees in his chariot, his horses lose control and run wild, so that he is thrown to the ground, dragged along by his harness, and savagely torn to pieces:

The ground was reddened with a trail of blood;
His head was dashed from rock to rock, his hair
Torn off by thorns, his handsome face despoiled
By flinty stones.

His body is ‘broken into pieces / Hanging on every tree’ (Seneca, pp. 141-2). In its relation to Seneca's story, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comic ‘prequel’ to an excoriating tragedy of misplaced desire and doomed youth: the celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta's nuptials will have its outcome in Hippolytus's beautiful body violently torn to fragments on the shore. As Seneca puts it, ‘That beauty, / That form, to come to this!’

Shakespeare accentuates the link between Hippolytus and his Amazon mother by choosing to name Theseus's bride Hippolyta, the name given to her in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, rather than Antiope, the name given in Seneca and most other sources (Chaucer, p. 25, ll. 866-8). Another connection between the Dream and the tragedy of Hippolytus is the fact that Phaedra was the daughter of Pasiphae, whose union with a bull produced the Minotaur; thus the child of Theseus's union with Hippolyta will be annihilated by the child of a mother who engaged in a dark analogue to Titania's comic coupling with a beast. Beyond the opening lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Theseus incidentally expresses to his bride the innate antipathy between domineering stepdames and energetic young men, lies the future supplantation of Hippolyta by an evil stepmother who will tragically desire and destroy her youthful son.

Such peripheral threats of mortality, violence and tragedy can serve to intensify comedy, and there has long been recognition of the presence of darker elements in Shakespeare's plays. Often they can have a ‘carpe diem’—‘seize the day’—effect, as in Twelfth Night, where Feste's remedy for the fact that ‘Youth's a stuff will not endure’ is to urge ‘Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty’ (II. iii. 51-2). There is a similar effect to Lysander's observation in Act I of the Dream that ‘quick bright things come to confusion’ (I. i. 149); if love is ‘momentany [sic] as a sound, / Swift as a shadow, short as any dream’ (ll. 143-4) then its happiness must be fully and intensely enjoyed while it lasts, just as the audience are invited to enjoy the brief interlude of comic entertainment as a relief from the trials of daily life.

This speech by Lysander in the first scene of the play also catalogues the different varieties of doomed loves. In so doing, it invokes not only general griefs and dangers, but also a specific work of tragedy by Shakespeare himself. Lysander reflects on loves thwarted by difference of blood or choice of relatives, and Hermia replies that ‘true lovers have been ever crossed’ (I. i. 135, 139, 150). It is hard not to be reminded of Romeo and Juliet, that notable pair of ‘star-cross'd loyers’ (Prologue), and subjects of a play composed at around the same period in Shakespeare's career (1595-6). Mercutio mocks Romeo as stereotypically lovelorn in his tendency to cry ‘Ay me!’ and rhyme ‘love’ and ‘dove’ (II. i. 10); Lysander indulges in just such conventional coupleting when he falls in love with Helena (II. ii. 119-20; Fender, p. 42). Mercutio's fantastical Queen Mab speech (I. iv. 53-95) also anticipates the more extended exploration of fairyland in the Dream.

In addition, a further pair of tragically star-crossed lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, actually make a lengthy appearance in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Like both Romeo and Juliet, and Lysander and Hermia, they are divided by the will of their parents and they make a secret nocturnal assignation to evade the prohibition on their love; like Romeo and Juliet, but, in the end, not Lysander and Hermia, a series of accidents results in their violent deaths. The inset play of the Dream thus reinforces the sense that the outer story of the Athenian lovers has tragic possibilities which have only narrowly been averted. At the same time, though, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as performed by the mechanicals presents us with a tragic tale which has comic effect. The parallels with the vicissitudes of the Athenian lovers highlight ways in which tragedy and comedy alike depend upon mistaken identity, mishap, mistiming and misinterpretation.

The apparent oxymorons in the mechanicals' description of their play as a ‘Most Lamentable Comedy’ of ‘very tragical mirth’ (I. ii. 11, V. i. 57) are thus another joke with serious overtones: A Midsummer Night's Dream as a whole is a play in which Shakespeare actively explores the intersections of comedy and tragedy and the fluidity of generic boundaries. Jacques Derrida has argued that we might initially think of genre as a matter of definition and of essential qualities which cannot or at least should not be mixed (Derrida, p. 57). However, Derrida's general position as a deconstructionist is that there is no such thing as pure definition: each word in language, or each sign in any system of signification, takes on meaning through its difference from other words or signs, which it simultaneously excludes yet implicitly depends upon for contrast and distinction. Hence, for instance, the word ‘masculinity’ depends for its meaning upon its opposition to the word ‘femininity’; ‘femininity’ is the other of ‘masculinity’, that which it excludes, but also that against which it defines its boundaries and without which it therefore cannot exist. ‘Femininity’ may even be that which ‘masculinity’ needs to exclude in order to conceal its own likeness to femininity, its own impurity (Eagleton, pp. 132-3). Similarly, for Derrida there is no such thing as pure genre, since any genre depends upon other genres for definition: what he calls ‘the law of the law of genre’ is ‘precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy’ (Derrida, p. 59). Thus a work which seems to belong predominantly to a particular generic category will always contain traces of other and opposite genres, by contrast with which the boundaries of the dominant genre are delineated. Much as a photograph is produced from a negative, or much as a silhouette is an image in black which would be formless without the white space which surrounds it, so comedy depends upon the implicit presence of tragedy, and vice versa.

In its allusions to wrong paths in love, to lurking threats of mortality, and to specific tragic analogues, A Midsummer Night's Dream offers particularly vivid illustration of this impurity and interdependence of genres. The next chapter will look further at the presence of alternatives in the play, at how they have enabled widely variant interpretations of its mood and meaning, and at how they have shaped different productions.

Select Bibliography and References

Editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Brooks, Harold F., The Arden Shakespeare (1979; London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Comprehensive and scholarly account of sources, followed by equally thorough account of the play. Useful compendium of source materials in appendix.

Critical Works

Barber, C. L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: a study of dramatic form and its relation to social custom (1959; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pb. edn, 1972), pp. 18-24, 119-62. Invaluable account of the play in relation to traditional May and Midsummer festivals.

Bloom, Harold (ed.), William Shakespeare's ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Modern Critical Interpretations series (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987). Wide-ranging collection of illuminating essays, including Anne Barton, Jan Kott, and Northrop Frye.

Calderwood, James L., A Midsummer Night's Dream, Harvester New Critical Editions to Shakespeare series (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). A psychoanalytical reading. Concentrates on relationships, the gaze, and liminality; less on dreams than one might expect.

Fender, Stephen, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Studies in English Literature series, no. 35 (London: Edward Arnold, 1968). Centres on the figure of Theseus to consider truth and rationality and their ambiguities in the play. Insightful analysis of language.

Other References

Bell, Ilona, Passion Lends Them Power: the poetry, politics and practice of Elizabethan courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd edn (1957; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

Cuddon, J. A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms, rev. edn (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).

Derrida, Jacques, ‘The law of genre’, trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, 7:1 (Autumn 1980), On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, pp. 55-81.

Donne, John, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).

Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: an introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

George, C. and K. George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

Haller, W. and M. Haller, ‘The Puritan Art of Love’, Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941-2), pp. 235-72.

Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters: women and drama in the age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn (1983; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).

Neely, Carol Thomas, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).

Norbrook, David, and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659 (London: Allen Lane-Penguin, 1992).

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX-XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1916).

Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951).

Seneca, Phaedra, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

Spencer, Edmund, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spencer, eds William A. Oram et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).