SOURCE: Kott, Jan. “The Bottom Translation.” In The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition, translated by Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee, pp. 29-68. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Kott examines the significance of Bottom's metamorphosis in A Midsummer Night's Dream, particularly focusing on why Shakespeare alluded to both St. Paul and Apuleius in reference to Bottom's transformation.]

I

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” (1.1.234).¹ This soliloquy of Helena's is part of a discourse on love and madness. Does desire also look with “the mind” and not with “the eyes”? Titania awakens from her dream, looks at the monster, and desires him. When Lysander and Demetrius awaken, they see only a girl's body and desire it. Is desire “blind” and love “seeing”? Or is love “blind” and desire “seeing”? “And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind” (1.1.235). Puck is the culprit in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for he awakens desire by dropping a love potion into the eyes of the sleeping lovers. In the poetic rhetoric of A Midsummer Night's Dream, “blind Cupid” is the agent of love. Are Puck and Cupid interchangeable?

Helena's soliloquy is recited by a young actress or, as in Elizabethan theater, by a boy acting the woman's part. The soliloquy is the voice of the actor. But it is not, or not only, the voice of the character. It is a part of a polyphonic, or many-voiced, discourse on love. In A Midsummer Night's Dream this discourse is more than the poetic commentary to the events taking place onstage. And the action onstage is more than illustration of the text. The discourse and the action not only complement each other but also appear to contradict each other. The dramatic tension and the intellectual richness result from this confrontation of discourse and action.

The same similes and emblems recur from the first to the last act of the play. Emblem may be the most appropriate term, for Cupid is the most significant image in this discourse. This “child” (1.1.238), “the boy Love” (1.1.241), waggish, foreswearing, and beguiling, repeats the post-classical icon of the blind or blindfolded Cupid.

From the early medieval poem, “I am blind and I make blind” to Erasmus' Praise of Folly, the icon is constant: “But why is Cupide alwaies lyke a yonge boie? why? but that he is a trifler, neither doyng, nor thynkyng any wyse acte” (20.20).² But this blind or blindfolded Cupid, associated in the Middle Ages with personifications of evil and darkness—Night, Infidelity, and Fortune—became by the Renaissance a sign with two contradictory values set in semiotic opposition. “Blind” Cupid does “see,” but only at night, as in one of the most evocative lines in Marlowe's Hero and Leander, “dark night is Cupid's day”; or, once again he “sees” but “with an incorporeal eye,” as in Pico della Mirandola.³ This second Cupid, blind but seeing “with the mind,” appears soon after the first in Helena's soliloquy:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.

(1.1.232-33)

Who and what is spoken of? Hermia, who is “sweet” and “fair,” is hardly “base and vile.” Helena does not know yet that Hermia is soon to be her rival. The “real” Helena, a character in the comedy, cannot here be referring to Hermia. The voice of the actor speaking of the madness of Eros forecasts Titania's infatuation with the “monster.” But not only Bottom was “translated” that night. “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated” (3.1.113). “Translation” was the word used by Ben Jonson for metaphor. But in Shakespeare, “translation” is the sudden discovery of desire. Both couples of young lovers were “translated”: “Am I not Hermia? Are you not Lysander?” (3.2.273). Bottom's metamorphosis is only the climax of the events in the forest. This “night-rule” (3.2.5) ends immediately after Bottom's return to human shape. Oberon and Titania “vanish.” Theseus and Hippolyta return with the beginning of the new day in place of their night doubles. The lovers wake up from their “dream.” And Bottom too wakes up from his: “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream … The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (4.1.204-6, 209-12).

The source of these astonishing lines is well known. “It must be accepted,” wrote Frank Kermode in his Early Shakespeare (1961), “that this is a parody of 1 Corinthians 2:9-10”: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”

Kermode quoted the King James version. In Tyndale (1534) and in the Geneva New Testament (1557) the last verse reads, “the Spirite searcheth all thinges, ye the botome of Goddes secrettes.”⁴ The “Athenian” weaver probably inherited his name from Paul's letter in old versions of Scripture. The spirit which reaches to “the botome” of all mysteries haunts Bottom. But just “translated” into an ass, Bottom translates Paul in his own way: “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called ‘Bottom's Dream,’ because it hath no bottom” (4.1.212-15).

But Bottom was not the only one in A Midsummer Night's Dream to read 1 Corinthians. We find another echo of Paul's letter in Helena's soliloquy:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.

Paul had written, “And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not to bring to naught things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28). In Tyndale and in the Geneva Bible this verse starts, “and vile thinges of the worlde.” “Things base,” in Helena's lines, appears to be borrowed from the Geneva Bible, and “vile” repeats the wording of the Authorized Version.

For an interpreter a “text” does not exist independently of its readings. Great texts, and perhaps even more so quotations from classical texts, literal or parodistic, form, together with their readings, a literary and cultural tradition. The classical texts are constantly rewritten, they are “the writerly text,” to use Barthes's term.⁵ Interpretations and commentaries become a part of their life. Classical texts and quotations continuously repeated are active in intellectual emanation which gives them new meaning and changes old ones. This emanation is the history of the classical text as well as the history hidden in the literary text. Classical texts converse among themselves. But borrowings and quotations are never neutral. Each quotation enlists its own context to challenge the author's text for better understanding or for mockery. The literary tradition, “the writerly text,” works forward and backward, constructing and destroying the classical texts, illuminating or disintegrating them, consecrating or desecrating, or both. The literary history is, in a very literal sense, the eating and digesting of the classical texts.

The verse from Corinthians parodied by Bottom and the biblical “things base and vile” in Helena's lines refer to Bottom's transformation and to Titania's sudden infatuation with the monster—both borrowed from Apuleius' The Golden Ass. Shakespeare might have read Apuleius in Latin or in Adlington's translation of 1566.⁶ The riddle of A Midsummer Night's Dream is not only why Paul or Apuleius was evoked in it but also why both were evoked and involved in the dramatic nexus of Bottom's metamorphosis.

Both texts, Corinthians and The Golden Ass, were widely known, discussed, and quoted during the Renaissance. From the early sixteenth century until the late seventeenth century, both texts were read in two largely separate intellectual traditions having two discrete circuits, and interpreted in two codes which were complementary but contradictory. The first of these codes, which is simultaneously a tradition, a system of interpretation, and a “language,” can be called Neoplatonic or hermetic. The second is the code of the carnival or, in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, the tradition of serio ludere.

The carnival attitude possesses an indestructible vivacity and the mighty, life-giving power to transform. … For the first time in ancient literature the object of a serious (though at the same time comical) representation is presented without epical or tragical distance, presented not in the absolute past of myth and legend, but on the contemporary level, in direct and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries. In these genres mythical heroes and historical figures out of the past are deliberately and emphatically contemporarized …

The serio-comical genres are not based on legend and do not elucidate themselves by means of the legend—they are consciously based on experience and on free imagination; their relationship to legend is in most cases deeply critical, and at times bears the cynical nature of the expose. … They reject the stylistic unity. … For them multiplicity of tone in a story and a mixture of the high and low, the serious and the comic, are typical: they made wide use … of parodically reconstructed quotations. In some of these genres the mixture of prose and poetic speech is observed, living dialects and slang are introduced, and various authorial masks appear.⁷

II

Paul's letter to the Corinthians is often invoked in the writings of Neoplatonists. In Mirandola, Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and Bruno, Paul can be found next to the Sibyl of the Aeneid, King David, Orpheus, Moses, or Plato. For the hermetics and Florentine philosophers, as for Lévi-Strauss, “myths rethink each other in a certain manner” (“d'une certaine manière, les mythes se pensent entre eux”).⁸ While icons and signifiers are borrowed from Plato and Plotinus, Heraclitus and Dionysius the Areopagite, the Psalms, Orphic hymns and cabalistic writings, the signified is always one and the same: the One beyond Being, unity in plurality, the God concealed. At times the method of the Neoplatonists resembles strangely the belief of poststructuralism and the new hermeneutics—that the permutation of signs, the inversion of their value and exchanges performed according to the rules of symbolic logic, will, like the philosopher's stone, uncover the deep structure of Being.

The blind Cupid of desire, the emblem of Elizabethan brothels, unveiled divine mysteries to Ficino and Mirandola. The “things base and vile” signify in this new hermetic code the “botome of Goddes secrettes.” “Man,” wrote Ficino, “ascends to the higher realms without discarding the lower world, and can descend to the lower world without foresaking the higher.”⁹

As an epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud quotes from the Aeneid: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo [If I am unable to bend the gods above, I shall move the Underworld.]” Neoplatonic “topocosmos” reappear in Freud's “superego” and the underworld: the repressed, the unconscious, the id. In Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex Freud wrote: “The omnipotence of sex nowhere perhaps shows itself stronger than in this one of her aberrations. The highest and lowest in sexuality are everywhere most intimately connected (‘From heaven through the world to hell’).”¹⁰

In the Neoplatonic exchange of signs between heaven, earth, and hell, the celestial Venus is situated above, the Venus of animal sex below the sphere of the intellect. As in a mountain lake whose depths reflect the peaks of nearby mountains, the signs of the “bottom” are the image and the reflection of the “top.” Venus vulgaris, blind pleasure of sex, animal desire, becomes “a tool of the divine,” as Ficino called it, an initiation into mysteries which, as in Paul, “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.” “Love is said by Orpheus,” wrote Mirandola, “to be without eyes, because he is above the intellect.” Above and at the same time below. For the Neoplatonists the descent to the bottom is also an ascent into heaven. Darkness is only another lighting. Blindness is only another seeing.¹¹ Quoting Homer, Tiresias, and Paul as examples, Mirandola wrote: “Many who were rapt to the vision of spiritual beauty were by the same cause blinded in their corporeal eyes.”¹² To the cave prisoners of Plato's parable, everything seen is but a shadow. Shadows are nothing but misty reflections of true beings and things outside the cave. But the shadow indicates the source of the light. “Shadow,” a word frequently used by Shakespeare, has many meanings, including “double” and “actor.” Oberon, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is called the “king of shadows,” and Theseus says of theater: “The best in this kind are but shadows” (5.1.210). Theater is a shadow, that is, a double. “Revelry” also means “revelation.” In the Neoplatonic code the “revels” and plays performed by the actor-shadows are, like dreams, texts with a latent content.

And it may be said therefore that the mind has two powers. … The one is the vision of the sober mind, the other is the mind in a state of love: for when it loses its reason by becoming drunk with nectar, then it enters into a state of love, diffusing itself wholly into delight: and it is better for it thus to rage than to remain aloof from that drunkenness.

This paraphrased translation by Ficino from the Enneads of Plotinus could also be read as a Neoplatonic interpretation of Apuleius' Metamorphoses. In his famous commentary on the second Renaissance edition of The Golden Ass in 1600, Beroaldus quotes amply from Plato, Proclus, and Origen and sees in Apuleius' Metamorphoses the covert story and the mystical initiation into the secrets of divine love: “For Plato writes in the Symposium that the eyes of the mind begin to see clearly when the eyes of the body begin to fail.”¹³

This commentary might surprise a reader not familiar with the Neoplatonic exchange of signs, who reads in a straightforward way the crude story of Lucius transformed into an ass. His mistress, a maid in a witch's house, confused magic ointments and transformed him into a quadruped instead of a bird. Beaten, kicked, and starved by his successive owners, he wanders in his new shape through Thessaly all the way to Corinth. He witnesses kidnappings, murders, and rapes; sits with bandits in their cave; attends the blasphemous rituals of sodomites and eunuch priests, and nearly dies of exhaustion harnessed with slaves in a mill-house.

The Satyricon and The Golden Ass use the device of fictional autobiography. Each successive episode, like the picaresque novella later, yields a dry picture of human cruelty, lust for power, and untamed sex. Transformed into a thinking animal, Lucius wanders among unthinking men-animals. The most revealing episode is the meeting between Lucius, who performs tricks as a trained donkey in the circus, and the new Pasiphaë, a wealthy Corinthian matron who, like Titania under the influence of the love potion, has a specific urge for animal sex: “Thou art he whom I love, thou art he whom I onely desire.”

The infatuation of lunar Titania with a “sweet bully Bottom” (“So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape” [3.1.134]) is written under the spell of Apuleius: “how I should with my huge and great legs embrace so faire a Matron, or how I should touch her fine, dainty and silke skinne with my hard hoofes, or how it was possible to kisse her soft, her pretty and ruddy lips, with my monstrous great mouth and stony teeth, or how she, who was so young and tender, could be able to receive me.”¹⁴

Lucius is fearful that his monstrous endowment might “hurt the woman by any kind of meane,” but the Greek Titania hastens to dispel his fears: “I hold thee my cunny, I hold thee my nops, my sparrow, and therewithal she eftsoones embraced my body round about.” Even the grotesque humor of this strange mating was repeated in Midsummer Night's Dream:

Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks to coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

(4.1.1-4)

But The Golden Ass contains yet another story inserted into the realistic train of Lucius' adventures in the ass's shape. The love story of Cupid and Psyche, an anilibus fabula, or “pleasant old wives' tale,” as Adlington calls it, may be the oldest literary version of the fable of “Beauty and the Beast.”¹⁵ The fable is known in folk traditions of many nations and distant cultures; catalogs of folk motifs place it in Scandinavia and Sicily, in Portugal and Russia. It also appears in India. In all versions of the fable, a young maiden who is to marry a prince is forbidden to look at her husband at night. In the daytime, he is a beautiful youth. At night she is happy with him, but never sees him and is anxious to know with whom she is sleeping. When she lights the lamp in the bedroom, the lover turns out to be an animal; a white wolf, a bear, an ass in one Hindu version, and most often a monstrous snake. When the wife breaks the night-rule, the husband/night animal departs or dies. In The Golden Ass this tale is told by “the trifling and drunken woman” to a virgin named Charite, abducted on the eve of her wedding and threatened with being sold to a brothel. This shocking, realistic frame for the mythical tale of Cupid and Psyche is a true introduction for the testing of caritas by cupiditas, or of the “top” by the “bottom,” in Metamorphoses.

Venus herself was jealous of the princess Psyche, the most beautiful of all mortals. She sent out her own son, winged Cupid, to humiliate Psyche and with one of his “piercing darts” to make her fall madly in love “with the most miserablest creature living, the most poore, the most crooked and the most vile, that there may be none found in all the world of like wretchedness.” Afterward, like Shakespeare's Titania, she would “wake when some vile thing is near” (2.2.33). But Cupid himself fell in love with Psyche and married her under the condition that she would never cast her eyes upon him in bed. Psyche broke her vow and lit a lamp. A drop of hot oil sputtered from the lamp and Cupid, burnt, ran off forever.

The story of Psyche ends with her giving birth to a daughter called Voluptas. The story of Lucius ends with his resumption of human form and his initiation into the mysteries of Isis and, after the return to Rome, into the rites of Osiris. Initiations are costly, but Lucius, a lawyer in the collegium established by Sulla, is able to pay the price of secret rites. The story of Psyche, the most beautiful of all mortal maidens, leads from beauty through the tortures of love to eternal pleasure. The story of Lucius, always sexually fascinated by hair before his own transformation into a hairy ass, leads from earthy delights to humiliating baldness: he is ordered twice to shave his head, once as a high priest of Isis and once for the rites of Osiris.

For Bakhtin, the tradition of serio ludere starts with Petronius and Apuleius. But which of the two metamorphoses in The Golden Ass is serious and mystical, and in which does one hear only the mocking risus?

For Beroaldus, Metamorphoses is a Platonic message of transcendent love, written in a cryptic language on two levels above and below reason. From Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum (1472) to Calderón's auto sacramental, where the story of Psyche and Amor symbolizes the mystical union of the Church and Christ and ends with the glorification of the Eucharist, Apuleius was often read as an orphic, Platonic, or Christian allegory of mystical rapture or divine fury. But for at least three centuries The Golden Ass was also read in the code of “serious laughter.” In Decameron, two novellae were adopted from Apuleius. In Don Quixote, the episode of the charge on the jugs of wine was repeated after Metamorphoses. Adaptations are innumerable: from Molière's Psychè, La Fontaine's Les Amours du Psychè et Cupide, Le Sage's Gil Blas, to Anatole France's La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pedauque.¹⁶

In both the intellectual traditions and the codes of interpretation there are exchanges of icons and signs between the “top” and “bottom,” the above and below reason. In the “Platonic translation,” where the “above” logos outside the cave is the sole truth and the “below” is merely a murky shadow, the signs of the top are the ultimate test of the signs of the bottom. Venus vulgaris is but a reflection and a presentiment of the Celestial Venus. In serio ludere the top is only mythos; the bottom is the human condition. The signs and emblems of the bottom are the earthly probation of the signs and emblems of the top. Venus celestis is merely a projection, a mythical image of amore bestiale—the untamed libido. The true Olympus is the Hades of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead or of Aristophanes' Frogs, where the coward and buffoon Dionysus appears in the cloak of Hercules. Having its origins in Saturnalia, serio ludere is a festive parodia sacra.

In hermetic interpretations, the story of Psyche and Cupid is a mythic version of Lucius' metamorphosis. The transformation into a donkey is a covert story whose mystical sense is concealed. Within the “carnival” as a code, ritual and poetry, Lucius' adventures in an ass's skin form an overt story concealing the hidden mockery in the tale of Amor and Cupid.

Psyche's two sisters, jealous of her happy marriage, insinuate to her that she shared her bed with a snake and monster. The poor woman does not know what she is really feeling since “at least in one person she hateth the beast (bestiam) and loveth her husband.” As in dreams, the latent content of the story of Psyche and Cupid becomes manifest in Lucius' adventures. The signs of the top are an inversion and a displacement of the signs of the bottom. Like the Corinthian matron fascinated by “monstrosity,” and like Titania aroused by Bottom's “beastliness,” Psyche loved the beast and hated the husband “in one person.” The evil sisters, like a Freudian analyst, uncovered her deep secret: “this servile and dangerous pleasure [clandestinae Veneris faetidi periculesique concubitus] … do more delight thee.”

In the Neoplatonic metaphysics as well as in the serio ludere of the carnival, the microcosm represents and repeats the macrocosm, and man is the image of the universe. In the vertical imagery man is divided in half: from the waist up he represents the heavens, from the waist down hell. But all hells, from the antique Tartarus through the hells of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, are the image of Earth.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though woman all above:
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend's:
There's hell, there's darkness.

(King Lear 4.6.123-30)

In both systems the signs of the above and the below, the macro and the micro, correspond to each other and are interchangeable. But their values are opposed both in the Neoplatonic code and in the carnival tradition and, to a certain extent, in the poetics of tragedy and comedy. From the Saturnalia through the medieval and Renaissance carnivals and celebrations, the elevated and noble attributes of the human mind are exchanged—as Bakhtin shows convincingly—for the bodily functions (with a particular emphasis on the “lower stratum”: defecation, urination, copulation, and childbirth). In carnival wisdom they are the essence of life: a guarantee of its continuity.

Titania, like Psyche, was punished. The punishment is infatuation with the most “base and vile” of human beings. But this vile and base person is not transformed Cupid but the Bacchic donkey. Like the Corinthian matron of Apuleius, Titania sleeps with this carnival ass. In Shakespeare's adaptation of The Golden Ass, Psyche and the lascivious Corinthian matron are combined into the one person of Titania. In serio ludere piety and reverence do not exist as separate from mockery. Seriousness is mockery and mockery is seriousness.

The exchange of signs in serio ludere is the very same translation into the bottom, the low, and the obscene that takes place in folk rituals and carnival processions.¹⁷ The masterpiece of carnivalesque literature is Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the sixth chapter of the first book, Gargamelle feels birth pangs:

A few moments later, she began to groan, lament and cry out. Suddenly crowds of midwives came rushing in from all directions. Feeling and groping her below, they found certain loose shreds of skin, of rather unsavory odor, which they took to be a child. It was, on the contrary, her fundament which had escaped with the mollification of her right intestine (you call it the bumgut) because she had eaten too much tripe.¹⁸

Gargantua's mother had gorged herself so much the previous evening that the child found its natural exit blocked in this carnival physiology.

As a result of Gargamelle's discomfort, the cotyledons of the placenta of her matrix were enlarged. The child, leaping through the breach and entering the hollow vein, ascended through her diaphragm to a point above her shoulders. Here the vein divides into two: the child accordingly worked his way in a sinistral direction, to issue, finally, through the left ear.

In medieval moral treatises and sermons, the mystery of the virgin birth was explained again and again as the Holy Ghost entering the Virgin through her ear—invariably, through her left ear. The Holy Ghost descended to the Virgin Mary from the top to the bottom so she could conceive immaculately. A blow from the anus in Rabelais' parodia sacra propelled Gargantua from the bottom to the top so the child of carnival could be born in the upside-down world.¹⁹ In this bottom translation, earthly pneuma replaced the divine one and the movement along the vertical axis of the body, and of the cosmos as well, was reversed. Rabelais appeals directly to Corinthians. The patron saint of this carnival birth was Paul.

Now I suspect that you do not thoroughly believe this strange nativity. If you do not, I care but little, though an honest and sensible man believes what he is told and what he finds written. Does not Solomon say in Proverbs (14:15): Innocens credit omni verbo, the innocent believeth every word, and does not St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13) declare: Charitas omnia credit, Charity believeth all?²⁰

In carnivalesque literature, the first letter to the Corinthians is quoted as often as in the writings of the Neoplatonists. And the choice of the most favored quotes is nearly the same:

Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

(1.20)

And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are.

(1.28)

If any among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

(3.18-19)

For Florentine Neoplatonists, Paul is the teacher of supra intellectum mysteries. But in the carnival rites, the fool is wise and his madness is the wisdom of this world.²¹ For Rabelais, and perhaps even more so for Erasmus, the letter to the Corinthians was the praise of folly: “Therefore Salomon beyng so great a kynge, was naught ashamed of my name when he saied in his XXX chapitre, ‘I am most foole of all men:’ Nor Paule doctour of the gentiles … when writing to the Corinthians he said: ‘I speake it as unvise, hat I more than others, etc.,’ as who saieth it were a great dishonour for him to be ouercome in folie” (109.29 f.). In Erasmus' Moriae encomium Folly speaks in the first person and in its own name. In this most Menippean of Renaissance treatises, Folly appeals to Paul's “foolishness of God” on nearly every page. Near the end of The Praise of Folly, Erasmus describes heavenly raptures which, rarely occurring to mortals, may give the foretaste or “savour of that hieghest rewarde” and which, as in Paul, “was neuer mans eie sawe, nor eare heard.” But Erasmus' Folly, ever cynical and joyful, is more interested in returning to earth and awakening than in mystical raptures.

Who se euer therefore haue suche grace … by theyr life tyme to tast of this saied felicitee, they are subjecte to a certaine passion muche lyke vnto madnesse … or beyng in a truance, thei doo speake certaine thynges not hangyng one with an other … and sodeinely without any apparent cause why, dooe chaunge the state of theyr countenaunces. For now shall ye see theim of glad chere, now of as sadde againe, now thei wepe, now thei laugh, now thei sighe, for briefe, it is certaine, 192that they are wholly distraught and rapte out of theim selues.

(128.4 ff.)

Bottom speaks much as Folly after awakening from his own dream:

Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound his dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had.

(4.1.205-9)

We may now once more evoke the striking and ambivalent image of the return to daybreak after the mystical orgasm in The Praise of Folly.

In sort, that whan a little after thei come againe to their former wittes, thei denie plainly thei wote where thei became, or whether thei were than in theyr bodies, or out of theyr bodies, wakyng or slepyng: remembring also as little, either what they heard, saw, saied, or did than, sauyng as it were through a cloude, or by a dreame: but this they know certainely, that whiles their mindes so roued and wandred, thei were most happie and blisfull, so that they lament and wepe at theyr retourne vnto theyr former senses.

(128.16 ff.)

Let us now hear once more Bottom speak to his fellows:

BOTTOM:
Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am not a true Athenian. I will tell you every thing, right as it fell out.
QUINCE:
Let us hear, sweet Bottom.
BOTTOM:
Not a word of me.

The Praise of Folly, dedicated to Thomas More, was published in London in Chaloner's translation in 1549 and reprinted twice (1560, 1577), the last time almost twenty years before A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is hard to conceive that Shakespeare had never read one of the most provocative books of the century.²² Bottom's misquote from Corinthians appears after his sudden awakening after the stay in “heaven.” But what kind of heaven, the sexual climax in animal shape or mythical rapture? Apuleius, Paul, and Erasmus meet in Bottom's monologue. Of all encounters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, this one is least expected. “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream.” The same word “vision(s)” was already uttered by Titania in a preceding scene, upon her waking from a “dream”: “My Oberon, what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamour'd of an ass” (4.1.75-76).

III

From Saturnalia to medieval ludi the ass is one of the main actors in processions, comic rituals, and holiday revels. In Bakhtin's succinct formula the ass is “the Gospel—symbol of debasement and humility (as well as concomitant regeneration).” On festive days such as the Twelfth Night, Plough Monday, the Feast of Fools, and the Feast of the Ass, merry and often vulgar parodies of liturgy were allowed. On those days devoted to general folly, clerics often participated as masters of ceremony, and an “Asinine Mass” was the main event. An ass was occasionally brought into the church, and a hymn especially composed for the occasion would be sung:

Orientis partibus
Adventavit Asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus
Sarcinis aptissimus.

The symbolism of the carnival ass and sacred drôlerie survived from the Middle Ages until Elizabethan times.²³ At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign donkeys dressed up as bishops or dogs with Hosts in their teeth would appear in court masques. But more significant than these animal disguises, which were a mockery of Catholic liturgy, was the appearance of the Bacchic donkey onstage. In Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, performed in Croyden in 1592 or 1593, a few years before A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bacchus rode onto the stage atop an ass adorned with ivy and garlands of grapes.

Among all festival masques of animals the figure of the ass is most polysemic. The icon of an ass, for Bakhtin “the most ancient and lasting symbol of the material bodily lower stratum,” is the ritualistic and carnivalesque mediator between heaven and earth, which transforms the “top” into the earthly “bottom.” In its symbolic function of translation from the high to the low, the ass appears both in ancient tradition, in Apuleius, and in the Old and New Testaments as Balaam's she-ass, and as the ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the last time. “Tell ye the daughter of Si-on, Behold thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt foal of an ass” (Matt. 21:5). Graffiti from the third century on the wall of the Palace of Caesars on the Palatine in Rome represent Jesus on the cross with an ass's head. In the oldest mystic tradition an ass is a musician who has the knowledge of the divine rhythm and revelation. An ass appears in the medieval Processus prophetarum and speaks with a human voice to give testimony to the truth in French and English mystery plays.²⁴ In Agrippa's De vanitate scientiarum (1526) we find the extravagant and striking “The Praise of an Ass” (Encomium asinu), which is a succinct repetition of and analogue to Erasmus' Encomium moriae.

The bodily meets with the spiritual in the figura and the masque of the ass. That is why the mating of Bottom and the Queen of the Fairies, which culminates the night and forest revelry, is so ambivalent and rich in meanings. In traditional interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the personae of the comedy belong to three different “worlds”: the court of Theseus and Hippolyta; the “Athenian” mechanicals; and the “supernatural” world of Oberon, Titania, and the fairies. But particularly in this traditional interpretation, the night Titania spent with an ass in her “consecrated bower” must appear all the stranger and more unexpected.

Titania is the night double of Hippolyta, her dramatic and theatrical paradigm. Perhaps, since during the Elizabethan period the doubling of roles was very common, these two parts were performed by the same young boy. This Elizabethan convention was taken up by Peter Brook in his famous production. But even if performed by different actors, Hippolyta's metamorphosis into Titania and her return to the previous state, like Theseus' transformation into Oberon, must have seemed much more obvious and natural to Elizabethan patrons than to audiences brought up on conventions of the fake realism of nineteenth-century theater. A play on the marriage of the Duke of Athens with the Queen of the Amazons was most likely performed at an aristocratic wedding where courtly spectators knew the mythological emblems as well as the rules of a masque.

Court masques during the Tudor and Elizabethan period were composed of three sequels: (1) appearance in mythological or shepherds' costumes; (2) dancing, occasionally with recitation or song; and (3) the ending of the masque, during which the masquers invited the courtly audience to participate in a general dance. Professional actors did not take part in masques, which were courtly masquerades and social entertainment. “Going off” or “taking out,” as this last dance was called, ended the metamorphosis and was a return of the masquers to their places at court.

The disguises corresponded to social distinctions. The hierarchies were preserved. Dukes and lords would never consent to represent anyone below the mythological standing of Theseus. Theseus himself could only assume the shape of the “King of the Fairies” and Hippolyta that of the “Queen of the Fairies.” The annual Records at the Office of the Revels document the figures that appeared in court masques. Among fifteen sets of masking garments in 1555, there were “Venetian senators,” “Venuses,” “Huntresses,” and “Nymphs.” During the Jacobean period Nymphs of English rivers were added to the Amazons and Nymphs accompanying Diana, and Oberon with his knights was added to Actaeon and his hunters. In 1611, nearly fifteen years after A Midsummer Night's Dream, young Henry, the king's son, appeared in the costume of the “faery Prince” in Jonson's Oberon.²⁵

The most frequently portrayed and popular figure of both courtly and wedding masque was Cupid. In a painting of the wedding masque of Henry Unton in 1572, the guests seated at a table watch a procession of ten Cupids (five white and five black) acompanied by Mercury, Diana, and her six nymphs.²⁶ From the early Tudor masque to the sophisticated spectacles at the Jacobean court, Cupid appears with golden wings, in the same attire, and with the same accessories: “a small boye to be cladd in a canvas hose and doblett sylverd over with a payre of winges of gold with bow and aroves, his eyes binded.”²⁷ This Cupid—with or without a blindfold—would randomly shoot his arrows at shepherdesses, sometimes missing:

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon;
And the imperial votaress passed on.

(2.1.161-63)

But the Renaissance Cupid, who appears eight times in the poetic discourse of A Midsummer Night's Dream, has a different name, a different costume, and a different language as a person onstage. The blindfolded Cupid is “Anglicised” or “translated” into Puck, or Robin Goodfellow. On the oldest woodcut representing the folk Robin Goodfellow, in the 1628 story of his “Mad Pranks and Merry Jests,” he holds in his right hand a large phallic candle and in his left hand a large broom. He has goat horns on his head and a goat's cloven feet. He is wearing only a skirt made of animal skins and is accompanied by black figures of men and women dressed in contemporary garments and dancing in a circle. This “folk” Robin Goodfellow is an Anglicized metamorphosis of a Satyr dancing with Nymphs.

This oldest image of Robin Goodfellow might refresh the imagination of scenographers and directors of A Midsummer Night's Dream who still see Puck as a romantic elf. But this engraving is equally important for the interpretation of the play, in which Shakespeare's syncretism mixes mythological icons of court masques with the pranks and rites of carnival. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the love potion replaces the mythological arrow. In poetic discourse this love potion still comes from the flower which turns red from Cupid's shaft. Shakespeare might have found the “love juice” in Montemayor's pastoral Diana, but he transposed the conventional simile into a sharp and evocative gesture, a metaphor enacted onstage: Puck's squeezing the juice from the pansy onto the eyelids of the sleeping lovers.

“And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness’” (2.1.168). The pansy's other folk names are “Fancy,” “Kiss me,” “Cull me” or “Cuddle me to you,” “Tickle my fancy,” “Kiss me ere I arise,” “Kiss me at the garden gate,” and “Pink of my John.”²⁸ These are “bottom translations” of Cupid's shaft.

But in the discourse of A Midsummer Night's Dream there is not one flower, but two: “love-in-idleness” and its antidote. The opposition of “blind Cupid” and of Cupid with an “incorporeal eye” is translated into the opposition of mythic flowers: “Diana's bud o'er Cupid's flower / Hath ever such force and blessed power” (4.1.72-73).

The Neoplatonic unity of Love and Chastity is personified in the transformation of Venus into virginal Diana. Neoplatonists borrowed this exchange of signs from a line in Virgil's Aeneid, in which Venus appears to Aeneas, carrying “on her shoulder a bow as a huntress would” (1.327). In the semantics of emblems, the bow, as the weapon both of Cupid-love and of Amazon-virgo, was a mediation between Venus and Diana. The harmony of the bow, as Plato called it, was for Pico “harmony in discord,” a unity of opposites.²⁹ From the union of Cupid and Psyche, brutally interrupted on earth, the daughter Voluptas was born in the heavens; from the adulterous relation of Mars and Venus, the daughter Harmony was born. Harmony, as Neoplatonists repeated after Ovid, Horace, and Plutarch, is concordia discors and discordia concors.

For Elizabethan poets and for carpenters who designed court masques and entertainments, this exchange of icons and emblems became unexpectedly useful in the cult of the Virgin Queen. The transformation of Venus into Diana allowed them to praise Elizabeth simultaneously under the names of Cynthia/Diana and Venus, the goddess of love. In Paris's judgment, as Giordano Bruno explicated in Eroici furori, the apple awarded to the most beautiful goddess was symbolically given to the other two goddesses as well: “for in the simplicity of divine essence … all these perfections are equal because they are infinite.”³⁰

George Peele must have read Bruno. In his Arraignement of Paris, the first extant English pastoral play with songs and dances by nymphs and shepherdesses, Paris hands the golden prize to Venus.³¹ Offended, Diana appeals to the gods on Olympus; the golden orb is finally delivered to Elizabeth, “queen of Second Troy.” The nymph Elise is “Queen Juno's peer” and “Minerva's mate”: “As fair and lovely as the Queen of Love / As chaste as Dian in her chaste desires” (5.1.86-87).

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, “Titania” is one of Diana's names. The bow is an emblem of the Queen of Amazons. In the first scene of act 1, Hippolyta in her first lines evokes the image of a bow: “And then the moon, like to a silver bow / New bent in Heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities” (1.1.9-11). Liturgical carnival starts with the new moon after the winter solstice. The new moon resembles a strung bow. The moon, the “governess of floods” (2.1.103), is a sign of Titania; her nocturnal sports are “moonlight revels” (2.1.141). In the poetical discourse the bow of the Amazons and the bow of the moon relate Hippolyta and Titania.

A sophisticated game of the court, with allegorical eulogies and allusions, is played through the exchange of classical emblems called “hieroglyphiches” by Ben Jonson. Greek Arcadia was slowly moving from Italy to England. Mythical figures and classical themes in masques, entertainments, and plays easily lent themselves to pastoral settings. But in this new pastoral mode the “Queen of the Fairies” was still an allegory of Elizabeth. For the Entertainment of Elvetham behind the palace at the base of wooded hills, an artificial pond in the shape of a half-moon had been constructed. On an islet in the middle, the fairies dance with their queen, singing a song to the music of a consort:

Elisa is the fairest Queene
That euer trod vpon this greene …
O blessed bee each day and houre,
Where sweete Elisa builds her bowre.

The queen of the fairies, with a garland as an imperial crown, recites in blank verse:

I that abide in places under-ground
Aureola, the Queene of Fairy Land
… salute you with this chaplet,
Giuen me by Auberon, the fairy King.

The Entertainment at Elvetham took place in the autumn of 1591, only a few years before even the latest possible date of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Even if Shakespeare had not attended it, this magnificent event was prepared by poets, artists, and musicians with whom he was acquainted. The quarto with the libretto, the lyrics, and the songs of the four-day spectacle in Elizabeth's honor was published and twice reprinted.³² Oberon, Titania, and the fairies entered the Shakespearean comedy not from old romances such as Huon of Bordeaux, but from the stage, perhaps from Greene's play James IV in which Oberon dances with the fairies, and most certainly from that masque.

In masques and court pastorals, among the mythological figures next to Cupid we always find Mercury. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the place usually assigned to the messenger of the gods is empty. But Mercury is not merely the messenger, the psychopompos who induces and interrupts sleep as Puck and Ariel do.³³ Hermes-Mercury belongs to the family of tricksters. The trickster is the most invariable, universal, and constant mythic character in the folklore of all peoples. As a mediator between gods and men—the bottom and the top—the trickster is a special broker: he both deceives the gods and cheats men. The trickster is the personification of mobility and changeability and transcends all boundaries, overthrowing all hierarchies. He turns everything upside-down. Within this world gone mad a new order emerges from chaos, and life's continuity is renewed.³⁴

                                                                      Jack shall have Jill,
                                                                      Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

(3.2.461-63)

In the marvelous syncretism of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck the trickster is a bottom and carnivalesque translation of Cupid and Mercury.³⁵ The Harlequin, Fool, and Lord of Misrule—called in Scotland the Abbot of Unreason—belong to this theatrical family of tricksters. The Lord of Misrule was the medieval successor of the Rex of the Saturnalia. Puck's practical joke (“An ass's noll I fixed on his head” [3.2.17]) has its origin in the oldest tradition of folk festivities. In the Feast of Fools, or festum asinorum, the low clerics parodied the Holy Offices while disguising themselves with the masks of animals.³⁶ Mummery, painting the face red or white or covering it with grotesque or animal masks, is still often seen during Twelfth Night, Ash Wednesday, or Valentine's Day.

But putting on an ass's head was not only a theatrical repetition of mockeries and jokes of the Feast of Fools or the day of Boy-Bishop. Another universal rite is also repeated when a “boore,” a thing “base and vile,” or a mock-king of the carnival was crowned, and after his short reign, uncrowned, thrashed, mocked, and abused. As the drunken Christopher Sly, a tinker, is led into the palace in The Taming of the Shrew, so the bully Bottom is introduced into Titania's court of fairies. A coronet of flowers winds about his hairy temples, and the queen's servants fulfill all his fancies. Among Bottom's colleagues is also another “Athenian” tinker, Tom Snout. Like Christopher Sly and all mock-kings abused and uncrowned, Bottom, a weaver, wakes from his dream having played only the part of an ass at the court entertainment.

No one created Shakespearean scenes as strange and uncanny as those of Fuseli. “Fuseli's Shakespearean characters,” wrote Mario Praz in II patto col serpente, “stretch themselves, arch and contort, human catapaults about to burst through the walls of the narrow and suffocating world, oppressed by the pall of darkness on which speaks Lady Macbeth … It is a demonic world of obsessions, a museum filled with statues of athletes galvanised into action, galloping furies, falling down onto prostrate corpses in yawning sepulchres.”³⁷ But this demonic world of Shakespeare was recreated by Fuseli not only in his drawings and paintings of Macbeth, Lear, and Richard III: fear and trembling, rebellion and frenzy are also present in Fuseli's scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The famous Fuseli painting Titania caressing Bottom with an ass's head was executed three months after the siege of the Bastille. Titania in a frenetic dance assumes the pose of Leonardo's Leda. With only a small transparent sash around her left hip and covering her pudenda, she is almost nude, but her hair is carefully coiffed. She sees no one, her eyes are half closed. The fairies, Pease blossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed, are not from fairyland, but from a rococo party at Court, or from some bizarre masquerade with dwarfs and midgets. At least two fairies wear long robes of white mousseline with decolleté necklines and the English hats seen in the vignettes of Pamela and Grandisson.

Next to Titania sits the huge Bottom, hunched over. He is pensive and sad. He looks as though, by some strange and unpredictable turn of events, he has found himself at a feast whose sense he does not grasp. In another painting by Fuseli, from 1793-94, Bottom looks even more alienated. Titania, naked from the waist up, embraces him lasciviously, and Pease-blossom, once again with a hat à la mode, scratches his scalp between his “fair, large ears.” But Bottom, with the enormous legs of a rustic, does not belong to the orgy of Titania's court. The strangest being in this painting is a small homunculus with the head of an insect and open legs with masculine genitalia. What is the most strange and unexpected in Fuseli's vision is the atmosphere of fear and trembling at the mating of Titania and Bottom as on the last night at Court before the revolution.

This “insolite” syncretism of A Midsummer Night's Dream, as seen by Fuseli, was recreated by Rimbaud in one of the most enigmatic of his Illuminations under the title Bottom:

Reality being too prickly for my lofty character, I became at my lady's a big blue-gray bird flying up near the moldings of the ceiling and dragging my wings after me in the shadows of the evening.

At the foot of the baldaquino supporting her precious jewels and her physical masterpieces, I was a fat bear with purple gums and thick sorry-looking fur, my eyes of crystal and silver from the consoles.

Evening grew dark like a burning aquarium.

In the morning—a battling June dawn—I ran to the fields, an ass, trumpeting and brandishing my grievance, until the Sabines came from the suburbs to hurl themselves on my chest.³⁸

The raped Sabines from the new suburbs throw themselves upon the neck of the lost ass whining and running on the green. All metamorphoses from The Golden Ass and Beauty and the Beast are evoked in this short poem in prose. It is the most succinct and astonishing “writerly text” of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rimbaud, with rare intuition, discovered both the mystery and the sexuality (“a network with a thousand entrances”) of the strange translation of Bottom.

In traditional performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which present Bottom's night at Titania's court as a romantic ballet, and in the spectacle staged by Peter Brook and many of his followers which emphasizes Titania's sexual fascination with a monstrous phallus (mea culpa!),³⁹ the carnival ritual of Bottom's adventure is altogether lost. Even Lucius, as a frustrated ass in Apuleius, was amazed at the sexual eagerness of the Corinthian matron who, having “put off all her garments to her naked skinne … began to annoint all her body with balme” and caressed him more adeptly than “in the Courtesan schooles.” Bottom appreciates being treated as a very important person, but is more interested in the frugal pleasure of eating than in the bodily charms of Titania.

In Bottom's metamorphosis and in his encounters with Titania, not only do high and low, metaphysics and physics, pathos and burlesque, meet, but so do two theatrical traditions: the masque and the court entertainment meet the carnival world turned upside-down.⁴⁰ In masques and entertainments, “noble” characters were sometimes accompanied by Barbarians, Wild Men, Fishwives, and Marketwives. At the Entertainment of Elvetham an “ugly” Nereus showed up, frightening the court ladies.⁴¹ But for the first time in both the history of revels and the history of theater, Titania/Diana/the Queen of Fairies sleeps with a donkey in her “flowery bower.”⁴² This encounter of Titania and Bottom, the ass and the mock-king of the carnival, is the very beginning of modern comedy and one of its glorious opening nights.

IV

A musical interlude accompanies the transition from night to day: “To the winding of horns [within] enter THESEUS, HIPPOLITA, EGEUS, and Train” (stage direction, 4.1.101). In this poetic discourse, the blowing of the hunters' horns, the barking of the hounds, and the echo from the mountains are translated into a musical opposition in the Platonic tradition of “discord” and “concord.” In this opposition between day and night, not the night but precisely the musical orchestration of daybreak is called discord by Theseus and by Hippolyta. For Theseus this discord marks “the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction” (4.1.109-10). “I never heard,” replies Hippolyta, “so musical a discord, such sweet thunder” (4.1.116-17). Only a few lines further, when Lysander and Demetrius kneel at Theseus' feet after the end of “night-rule,” the “discord” of the night turns into the new “concord” of the day: “I know you two are rival enemies. / How comes this gentle concord in the world?” (4.1.142).⁴³

Both terms of the opposition, “concord” and “discord,” are connected by Theseus when Philostrate, his master of the revels, hands him the brief of an interlude to be presented by the “Athenian” mechanicals:

“A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth”?
Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?
That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow!
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

(5.1.56-60)

This new concordia discors is a tragicomedy, and good Peter Quince gives a perfect definition of it when he tells the title of the play to his actors: “Marry, our play is ‘The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe’” (1.2.11-12). Although merely an Athenian carpenter, as it turns out, Quince is quite well-read in English repertory, having styled the title of his play after the “new tragical comedy” Damon and Pithias by Edwards (1565), or after Preston's Cambises (published ca. 1570), a “lamentable comedy mixed full of pleasant mirth.”⁴⁴ The same traditional titles, judged by printers to be attractive to readers and spectators, appeared on playbills and title pages of quartos: The comicall History of the Merchant of Venice or The most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. The latter title would fit better the story of Pyramus and Thisbe.

We do not know, and probably will not discover, whether Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night's Dream was written earlier. History repeats itself twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Marx was right: world history and the theater teach us that opera buffa repeats the protagonists and situations of opera seria. The “most cruel death” of Romeo and Juliet is changed into a comedy, but this comedy is “lamentable.” The new tragicomedy, “concord of the discord,” is a double translation of tragedy into comedy and of comedy into burlesque. The burlesque and the parody are not only in the dialogue and in the songs; the “lamentable comedy” is played at Theseus' wedding by the clowns.

Burlesque is first the acting and stage business. A wall separates the lovers, and they can only whisper and try to kiss through a “hole,” a “cranny,” “chink.” This scene's crudity is both naive and sordid, as in sophomoric jokes and jests where innocent words possess obscene innuendo. Gestures here are more lewd than words.

The Wall was played by Snout. Bottom, who also meddled in directing, recommended: “Let him hold his fingers thus” (3.1.65-66). But what was this gesture supposed to be? Neither the text nor the stage directions (“Wall stretches out his fingers” [stage direction, 5.1.175]) are clear. In the nineteenth-century stage tradition, the Wall stretched out his fingers while the lovers kissed through the “cranny.” In Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company film (1969), the Wall holds in his hands a brick which he puts between his legs. Only then does he make a “cranny” with his thumb and index finger. But it could have been yet another gesture. The “hole,” as the letter V made by the middle and index finger, would be horizontal and vertical. As Thomas Clayton argues, Snout in the Elizabethan theater of clowns straddled and stretched out his fingers between his legs wide apart. “And this the cranny is, right and sinister” (5.1.162). Snout, although an “Athenian” tinker, had a touch of Latin or Italian and knew what “sinister” meant.⁴⁵

Romeo could not even touch Juliet when she leaned out the window. The Wall scene (“O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall” [198]) is the “bottom translation” of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. The sequel of suicides is the same in both plays. But Thisbe “dies” differently. The burlesque Juliet stabs herself perforce with the scabbard of Pyramus' sword.⁴⁶ This is all we know for certain about how A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in Shakespeare's lifetime.

The lovers from Athens did not meet a lion during their nightly adventure as Pyramus and Thisbe did in their forest, nor a dangerous lioness as Oliver and Orlando did in the very similar forest of Arden in As You Like It. But the menace of death hovers over the couple from the very beginning: “Either to die the death, or to abjure” (1.1.65). 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” (2.2.155); Lysander says of Helena: “Whom I do love, and will do till my death” (3.2.167); Helena says of Demetrius: “To die upon the hand I love so well” (2.1.244), and again: “tis partly my own fault. / Which death, or absence soon shall remedy” (3.2.243-44). Even sleep “with leaden legs and batty wings” is “death counterfeiting” (3.2.364).

In this polyphony of sexual frenzy, neither the classical Cupid with his “fiery shaft” nor the Neoplatonic Cupid with his “incorporeal eye” is present any longer. Desire ceases to hide under the symbolic cover. Now is the action of the body which seeks another body. In the language of the earthly gravitation, the eye sees the closeness of the other body, and the hand seeks rape or murder. The other is the flesh. But “I” is also the flesh. “My mistress with a monster is in love” (3.2.6).

“Death” and “dead” are uttered twenty-eight times; “dying” and “die” occur fourteen times. The field of “death” appears in nearly fifty verses of A Midsummer Night's Dream and is distributed almost evenly among the events in the forest and the play at Theseus' wedding. The frequency of “kill” and “killing” is thirteen, and “sick” and “sickness” occur six times. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, which has often been called a happy comedy of love, “kiss” and “kissing” occur only six times, always within the context of the burlesque; “joy” occurs eight times, “happy” six, and “happiness” none.

The forest happenings during the premarital night are only the first sports in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the main merriment is provided by clowns. In the “mirths,” in the forest and at court, Bottom is the leading actor. While rehearsing his part in the forest, “sweet Pyramus” was “translated” into an ass. He “dies” onstage as Pyramus, only to be called an ass by Theseus: “With the help of a surgeon, he might yet recover, and prove an ass” (5.1.298-300).

If Bottom's metamorphoses in the forest and at court are read synchronically, as one reads an opera score, the “sweet bully” boy in both of his roles—as an ass and as Pyramus—sleeps with the queen of the fairies, is crowned and uncrowned, dies, and is resurrected onstage. The true director of the night-rule in the woods is Puck, the Lord of Misrule. The interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe was chosen for the wedding ceremonies by Philostrate, the master of revels to Theseus. Within A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed as an interlude at an aristocratic wedding, the play within a play is a paradigm of comedy as a whole. The larger play has an enveloping structure: the small “box” repeats the larger one, as a wooden Russian doll contains smaller ones.

The change of partners during a single night and the mating with a “monster” on the eve of a marriage of convenience do not appear to be the most appropriate themes for wedding entertainment. Neither is the burlesque suicide of the antique models of Romeo and Juliet the most appropriate merriment for “a feast of great solemnity.”⁴⁷ All dignity and seriousness vanish from the presentation of the “most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” The night adventure of Titania and two young couples is reduced to a “dream.” “And think no more of this night's accidents / But as the fierce vexation of a dream” (4.1.67-68).

“The lunatic, the lover and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact” (5.1.7-8). These lines of Theseus, like those of Helena's monologue from the first scene in act 1, are a part of the poetic metadiscourse whose theme is self-referential: the dreams in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the whole play. And as in Helena's soliloquy, Neoplatonic oppositions return in it. Ficino, in In Platonis Phaedrum and in De amore, distinguishes four forms of inspired madness: furor divinus, the “fine frenzy” of the poet; “the ravishment of the diviner”; “the prophetic rapture of the mystic”; and the “ecstasy of the lover,” furor amatorius.⁴⁸

Even more important than the repetition of Neoplatonic categories of “madness” is the inversion by Theseus/Shakespeare of the values and hierarchy in this exchange of topos:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

(5.1.12-17)

As opposed to the “fine frenzy” of the Platonic poet, Shakespeare's pen gives earthly names to shadows, “airy nothing,” and relocates them on earth.⁴⁹ The “lunatic” who “sees more devil than vast hell can hold” (5.1.9) replaces Neoplatonic mystics. The frenzied lover “sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt” (5.1.11). All three—“the lunatic, the lover and the poet”—are similar to a Don Quixote who also gave to “phantasies,” shadows of wandering knights, the “local habitation and a name”; who saw a beautiful Dulcinea in a coarse country maid; and, like a Shakespearean madman who in a “bush supposed a bear” (5.1.22), would charge windmills with his lance, taking them to be giants, and stormed wineskins, thinking them to be brigands.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping phantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.

(5.1.4-6)

In this metadiscourse, which is at the same time self-defeating and self-defending, a manifesto of Shakespeare's dramatic art and a defense of his comedy are contained. “More than cool reason ever comprehends” is not the Platonic “shadow” and the metaphysical supra intellectum of Pico and Ficino. “More than cool reason ever comprehends” is, as in Paul, the “foolish things of the world” which God designed “to confound the wise.” This “foolishness of God,” taken from the Corinthians, read and repeated after the carnival tradition, is the defense of the Fool and the praise of Folly.

The lunatics—the Fool, the Lord of Misrule, the Abbot of Unreason—know well that when a true king, as well as the carnival mock-king, is thrown off, he is turned into a thing “base and vile, holding no quantity”; that there are “more devils than vast hell can hold” and that Dianas, Psyches, and Titanias sleep not with winged Cupids but with an ass. “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated.” You are translated. But into what language? Into a language of the earth. The bottom translation is the wisdom of Folly and delight of the Fool.

V

Bottom, soon after his death onstage, springs up and bids farewell to Wall with an indecent gesture. Thisbe is also resurrected; her body cannot remain onstage. The merry, joyful, and playful Bergomask ends the clowns' spectacle. It is midnight, and all three pairs of lovers are anxious to go to bed. In a ceremonial procession they leave the stage, illuminated by the torchbearers.

The stage is now empty for a moment. If A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in the evening during the wedding ceremony, the stage was by then cast in shadows. Only after a while does Puck, the Master of night-rule, return to the stage.

Now the hungry lion roars
And the wolf behowls the moon …
Now is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite
In the church-way paths to glide.

(5.1.357-58, 365-68)

The somber line of Puck would be more appropriate for the night when Duncan was murdered than as a solemn “epithalamium” for the wedding night of the noble couple. The “screeching loud” (5.1.362) of the owl and “the triple Hecate's team” (5.1.370) are evoked in Puck's lines, as they were on the night of the regicide in Macbeth. It is the same night during which Romeo and Juliet, and Pyramus and Thisbe, committed suicide, during which Hermia might have killed Helena and Demetrius might have killed Lysander.⁵⁰

Hecate is triformis: Proserpina in Hades, Diana on earth, and Luna in the heavens, Hecate/Luna/Titania is the mistress of this midnight hour when night starts changing into a new day. But it is still the night during which elves dance “following darkness like a dream” (5.1.372). Wedding follows the evocation of the rite of mourning.

Puck is holding a broom in his hand; the broom was a traditional prop of the rural Robin Goodfellow: “I am sent with broom before / To sweep the dust behind the door” (5.1.375-76). In this sweeping of the floor there is a strange and piercing sadness. Puck sweeps away dust from the stage, as one sweeps a house. Sweeping away recurs in all carnival and spring rituals in England, France, Italy, Germany, and Poland. The symbolism of sweeping is rich and complex. A broom is a polysemic sign. But invariably sweeping away is a symbol of the end and of the beginning of a new cycle. One sweeps rooms away after a death and before a wedding. Goethe beautifully shows this symbolism of sweeping on Saint John's Night:

Let the children enjoy
The fires of the night of Saint John,
Every broom must be worn out,
And children must be born.

In Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, Goethe quotes his poem and comments: “It is enough for me to look out of the window to see, in the brooms which are used to sweep the streets and in the children running about the streets, the symbols of life ever to be worn out and renewed.”⁵¹ Puck's sweeping of the stage with a broom is a sign of death and of a wedding which is a renewal. This is but the first epilogue of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

There is yet another. Oberon and Titania, with crowns of waxen tapers on their heads, enter the darkened stage with their train. They sing and dance a pavane. At a court wedding they might have invited the guests to participate in the dance together: “Every fairy take his gait” (5.1.402). Peter Brook, in his famous staging, had the house lights come up while the actors stretched their hands out to the audience and threw them flowers.

Titania and Oberon appear for the second time in the play as the night doubles of their day shapes. If they are the same pair of actors who play Theseus and Hippolyta, Puck's soliloquy would give them enough time to change their costumes. The enveloping structure of the play had led, with astounding dramatic logic, to its final conclusion. Theseus and Titania, Philostrate, Hermia and Helena, Lysander and Demetrius—the spectators onstage of the “most lamentable comedy”—are the doubles of the audience watching A Midsummer Night's Dream in the house. The illusion of reality, as in Northrop Frye's succinct and brilliant formulation, becomes the reality of illusion. “Shadows”—doubles—are actors. But if actors-shadows are the doubles of spectators, the spectators are the doubles of actors.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbr'd here,
While these visions did appear.

(5.1.409-12)

Only Puck is left on the stage. This is the third and last epilogue. “Gentles, do not reprehend” (5.1.415). As in As You Like It and The Tempest, the leading actor asks the public to applaud. But who is Puck in this third and last epilogue?

The spirit Comus (Revelry), to whom men owe their revelling, is stationed at the doors of chamber … Yet night is not represented as a person, but rather it is suggested by what is going on; and the splendid entrance indicated that it is a wealthy pair just married who are lying on the couch … And what else is there of the revel? Well, what but the revellers? Do you not hear the castanets and the flute's shrill note and the disorderly singing? The torches give a faint light, enough for the revellers to see what is close in front of them but not enough for us to see them. Peals of laughter arise, and women rush along with men, wearing men's sandals and garments girt in a strange fashion; for the revel permits women to masquerade as men, and men to “put on women's garb” and to ape the talk of women. Their crowns are no longer free but, crushed down to the head on account of the wild running of the dancers, they have lost their joyous look.⁵²

This quotation is from Philostratus, the Greek Sophist and scholar (ca. 176-245), whose Imagines became, during the Renaissance in Latin translation, one of the most popular textbooks and models for ancient icons of gods and mythical events. The most famous and most frequently quoted chapter of Imagines was “Comus.” Shakespeare could not have found a more appropriate name for Theseus' Master of the Revels. Philostratus became Philostrate at the “Athenian” court, so that in a system of successive exchanges he would be transformed into Puck, Lord of Misrule, and return in the epilogue to his antique prototype, the god of revelry and the festivities, Comus of the Imagines written by Philostratus the Sophist.⁵³

There will always remain two interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream: the light and the somber. And even as we choose the light one, let us not forget the dark one. Heraclitus wrote: “If it were not to Dionysus that they performed the procession and sang the hymn to the pudenda, most shameful things would have been done. Hades and Dionysus are the same, to whichever they rave and revel.”⁵⁴ In the scene described by Philostratus, Comus is holding a torch downward. He is standing with his legs crossed, in a slumbering stance, at the entrance to the wedding chamber. His pose is that of a funerary Eros of Roman sarcophagi.⁵⁵ At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream's first epilogue, Puck could assume the pose of the funerary Eros. Shakespeare is a legatee of all myths.

In both interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the bottom translation is full of different meanings. All of them, even in their contradiction, are important. The intellectual and dramatic richness of this most striking of Shakespeare's comedies consists in its evocation of the tradition of serio ludere. Only within “the concord of this discord” does blind Cupid meet the golden ass and the spiritual become transformed into the physical. The coincidentia oppositorum for the first time and most beautifully was presented onstage.

Notes

1. All quotations from A Midsummer Night's Dream are taken from The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979).

2. The Praise of Folie, “A booke made in Latine by that great clerke Erasmus Roterodame. Englisshed by sir Thomas Chaloner knight. Anno 1549.” All quotations after Clarence F. Miller ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

3. Erwin Panofsky, “Blind Cupid,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 95-128; Edgar Wind, “Orpheus in Praise of Blind Love,” in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 53-80.

4. Frank Kermode, “The Mature Comedies,” Early Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin's, 1961), pp. 214-20; Paul A. Olsen, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage,” ELH 24 (1957): 95-119.

5. “The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the ‘concrete’: the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances.” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), p. 12.

6. The Xi Bookes of The Golden Asse, Conteininge the Metamorphosie of Lucius Apuleius. “Translated out of Latine into Englishe by William Adlington. Anno 1566.” Rpt. 1571, 1582, 1596. All quotations after Ch. Whibley ed. (London, 1893).

7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), pp. 88-89.

8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), p. 20.

9. Quoted in Panofsky, “Blind Cupid,” p. 137.

10. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 572.

11. “Perhaps good king Oedipus had one eye too many” (Hölderlin, In Lovely Blueness).

12. Wind, “Orpheus,” p. 58.

13. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

14. Shakespeare's borrowings from The Golden Ass in A Midsummer Night's Dream (the meeting with the Corinthian lady, and the story of Psyche) were first noted by Sister M. Generosa in “Apuleius and A Midsummer Night's Dream: Analogue or Source. Which?” in Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 198-204. James A. S. McPeek, “The Psyche Myth and A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 69-79.

15. Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris: V. F. Vieweg, 1886), 1:xxxii and 2:214-30.

16. Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Apuleius and His Influence (New York: Cooper Square, 1963), pp. 90 ff.

17. “The theme of role reversal was commonplace in folk imagery from the end of the Middle Ages through the first half of the nineteenth century: engravings or pamphlets show, for instance, a man straddling an upside-down donkey and being beaten by his wife. In some pictures mice eat cats. A wolf watches over sheep; they devour him. Children spank parents. … Hens mount roosters, roosters lay eggs. The king goes on foot.” Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. M. Finey (New York: Braziller, 1979), p. 191. “Hot ice” and “wondrous strange snow” (5.1.59) belong to this carnival language.

18. Passages from Gargantua and Pantagruel in Jacques Leclerq's translation (New York: Heritage Press, 1964).

19. From twelfth-century liturgical songs (Gaude Virgo, mater Christi / Quae per aurem concepisti) up to Molière's The School for Wives (“She came and asked me in a puzzled way … if children are begotten through the ear”) we have an interrupted tradition, first pious, later parodic, of the virgin conceiving through the ear. See Gaston Hall, “Parody in L'Ecole des femmes: Agnès's Question,” MLR 57 (1962): 63-65. See also Claude Gaignebet, Le Carnaval (Paris: Payot, 1974), p. 120.

20. Rabelais possibly feared that the joke went too far, and this entire passage, beginning with “Does not Solomon” disappeared from the second and subsequent editions of Gargantua. Rabelais also ironically quotes from Corinthians in chapter 8, at the end of the description of his medallion with a picture of the hermaphrodite.

21. “Rabelais' entire approach, his serio ludere, the grotesque mask, is deeply justified by his conviction that true wisdom often disguises itself as foolishness. … Because he is the most foolish, Panurge receives the divine revelation: the ‘Propos des bien yvres,’ apparent gibberish, contains God's truth.” Florence M. Weinberg, The Wine and the Will: Rabelais's Bacchic Christianity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), p. 149.

22. Ronald F. Miller, in “A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Fairies, Bottom and the Mystery of Things,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 26 (1975), pointed out the possibility of a relation between Chaloner's translation and Bottom's monologue. This essay is perhaps the most advanced attempt at an allegorical, almost Neoplatonic interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream; the “mystery of the fairies” points to “other mysteries in the world offstage” (p. 266).

23. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1968), pp. 78, 199; Enid Welsford, The Fool (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), pp. 200 ff.; E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), 1:13-15.

24. Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), p. 68; Anderson, pp. 20-21. See also Grace Frank, The Medieval French Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954, rpt. 1967), pp. 40-42: “At Rouen the play, preserved in several manuscripts, is frankly entitled Ordo Processionis Asinorum, although Balaam is only one of the more than twenty-eight characters involved. … The ass itself was not necessarily a comic figure; it served as the mount of the Virgin for the Flight into Egypt and of Christ for the Entry into Jerusalem; moreover it was associated with the ox in praesepe observances and at all times has been regarded as a faithful, patient beast of burden. But at the feast of the subdeacons the ass undoubtedly became an object of fun, a fact apparent from later church decrees forbidding its presence there.”

    “Quite probably the appearance of Balaam and his obstinata bestia in the prophet play owes something to the revels of the Feast of Fools: though the Ordo Prophetarum is the older ceremony, it seems likely that the use of the ass there was introduced late, perhaps as a kind of counter-attraction to the merrymaking of the subdeacons, ‘an attempt to turn the established presence of the ass in the church to purposes of edification, rather than ribaldry’ (Chambers, ii. 57). In any case the curious title of the Rouen play must be due to the conspicuous figure of Balaam and his asina, a beast that seems to have wandered into the prophet play from the Feast of Fools.”

25. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 1:158 ff, 192. According to Chambers, Henry had appeared earlier in Daniel's masque Twelve Goddesses (1604), “taken out” and as a child “tost from hand to hand,” 1:199.

26. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 1:163-64: The reproduction of a painting on frontispiece in vol. 1.

27. Letter of George Ferrars, appointed Lord of Misrule by Edward VI. Quoted: Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (New York: Russell & Russell, 1927), p. 146.

28. A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Henry Cuningham, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1905), note to 2.1.168. The poetic name of the love-potion flower was “lunary.” In Lyly's Sapho and Phao: “an herbe called Lunary, that being bound to the pulses of the sick, causes nothinge but dreames of wedding and daunces” (3.3.43); in Endymion: “On yonder banke neuer grove any thing but Lunary, and hereafter I neuer haue any bed but that banke” (2.3.9-10). The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bend (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 3:38, 508.

29. The harmony of the string symbolized for the Neoplatonists the concordia discors between the passions and the intellect: the bow's arrows wound, but the bowstring itself is held immobile by the hand and guided by the controlling eye. Wind, “Orpheus,” pp. 78f, 86f.

30. Ibid., p. 77.

31. In The Arraignement of Paris, performed at court ca. 1581-84, published in 1584, Venus bribes Paris. In this “Venus show,” Helena appears accompanied by four Cupids. The court masque is mixed with pastoral play. Yet perhaps for the first time the “body” of a nymph who fell unhappily in love appears on stage with a “crooked churl”—a folk Fool. But even if Peele's play did not influence Shakespeare, it does nevertheless demonstrate how, at least ten years before A Midsummer Night's Dream, Neoplatonic similes of blind and seeing Cupid became a cliché of euphuistic poetry. (“And Cupid's bow is not alone in his triumph, but his rod … His shafts keep heaven and earth in awe, and shape rewards for shame” [3.5.33, 36]; “Alas, that ever Love was blind, to shoot so far amiss!” [3.5.7].) Only Shakespeare was able to put new life into these banalities.

32. The entertainment at Elvetham was prepared by, among others, Lyly, Thomas Morley, the organ player and choirmaster in St. Peters, and the composers John Baldwin and Edward Johnson. Ernest Brennecke, “The Entertainment at Elvetham, 1591,” in Music in English Renaissance Drama (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), pp. 32-172.

33. The locus classicus of Hermes, the psychopompos who induces and dispels dreams, is in the first lines of the last book of the Odyssey: “Meanwhile Cyllenian Hermes was gathering in the souls of the Suitors, armed with the splendid golden wand that he can use at will to cast a spell on our eyes or wake us from the soundest sleep. He roused them up and marshalled them with this, and they obeyed his summons gibbering like bats that squeak and flutter in the depths of some mysterious cave” (Odyssey, trans. R. V. Rieu [Baltimore: Penguin, 1946]).

34. “Fundamentally trickster tales represent the way a society defines the boundaries, states its rules and conventions (by showing what happens when the rules are broken), extracts order out of chaos, and reflects on the nature of its own identity, its differentiation from the rest of the universe.” Brian V. Street, “The Trickster Theme: Winnebago and Azanda,” in Zandae Themes, ed. André Singer and Brian V. Street (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 82-104. “Thus, like Ash-boy and Cinderella, the trickster is a mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position half-way between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality—namely an ambiguous and equivocal character.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1963), p. 226.

35. Puck was originally played by a mature actor, not by a young boy. Only since the Restoration has a ballerina played the part of Puck, as well as Oberon. Peter Brook, in his Midsummer Night's Dream (1970), repeated the Elizabethan tradition and had Puck's role performed by a tall and comical actor, John Kane (“thou lob of spirits” [2.1.16]).

36. See Anderson, p. 20.

37. Mario Praz, “Fuseli,” in Il patto col serpente (Milan: Mondadori, 1972), p. 15. See also T. S. R. Boase, “Illustrations of Shakespeare's Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 10 (1947). See also John Heinrich Fuseli (1741-1825) (Musée du Petit Palais, 1975.)

38. Rimbaud, Complete Works, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 227. On the impact of Fuseli on Gautier and on the debt of Rimbaud to Gautier, see Jean Richer, Etudes et recherches sur Théophile Gautier prosateur (Paris: Nizet, 1981), pp. 213-23.

39. “In the most solid and dramatic parts of his play [MND] Shakespeare is only giving an idealized version of courtly and country revels and of the people that played a part in them.” Welsford, The Court Masque, p. 332. The most valid interpretation of the festive world in Shakespeare's plays remains still, after over thirty years, C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy.

40. See Jan Kott, “Titania and the Ass's Head,” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 207-28.

41. On the second day of interrupted spectacles Nereus appeared “so ugly as he ran toward his shelter that he ‘affrighted a number of the country people, that they ran from him for feare, and thereby moved great laughter’” (Brennecke, “Entertainment,” p. 45). Snout's fears that the ladies will be frightened by a lion are usually considered to be an allusion to the harnessing of a black moor to a chariot instead of a lion during the festivities of the christening of Prince Henry in 1594; perhaps it is also an amusing echo of “ugly” Nereus who frightened the ladies at Elvetham.

42. Even in Ben Jonson, who introduced the “anti-Masque,” or false masque (in The Masque of Blackness, 1605), figures of the “anti-Masque” never mix with persons of the masque: they “vanish” after the “spectacle of strangenesse,” before the allegories of order and cosmic harmony start. As Jonson emphasized:

    For Dauncing is an exercise
    not only shews ye mouers wit,
    but maketh ye beholder wise
    as he hath powre to rise to it.

    (Works [1941], 7:489)

    See John C. Meagher, “The Dance and the Masques of Ben Jonson,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25 (1962): 258-77.

43. For Shakespeare's use of the terms “concord” and “discord” with musical connotations, see: Richard II, 5.5.40 ff., Two Gentlemen of Verona 1.2.93 ff., Romeo and Juliet 3.5.27, The Rape of Lucrece, line 1124. See also E. W. Naylor, Shakespeare and Music (New York: Da Capo, 1965), p. 24.

44. Grimald's Christus Redivivus, performed in Oxford in 1540 (published in 1543), bears the subtitle “Comoedia Tragica.” This is probably the earliest mixture in England of “comedy” and “tragedy” in one term. For the history of titles used by Peter Quince, it is interesting to note The lamentable historye of the Pryunce Oedipus (1563) and The lamentable and true tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent (1592). The tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, published by Geoffrey Bullough (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare [London, 1966], 3:411-22) as an “Analogue” to A Midsummer Night's Dream, bears the subtitle: “Tragoedia miserrima.” Chambers suspects that it is a seventeenth-century product, perhaps by Nathaniel Richards. Bullough holds that it dates from the sixteenth century. Richards' authorship appears to me out of the question; the language and Latin marginalia suggest that this “Tragoedia miserrima” is earlier than A Midsummer Night's Dream.

45. Thomas Clayton, “‘Fie What a Question That If Thou Wert Near a Lewd Interpreter’: The Wall Scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 101-12; I. W. Robinson, “Palpable Hot Ice: Dramatic Burlesque in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Studies in Philology 61 (1964): 192-204.

46. The last words of Juliet (“O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath; there rest, and let me die”) are not the most fortunate, and almost ask for burlesquing.

47. Three other interludes for wedding entertainments offered by Philostrate seem even less appropriate for the occasion. The strangest one is the first: “‘The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp’” (5.1.44-45). Commentators and notes invariably referred one to Ovid's Metamorphosis (12.210 ff.) or else to the “Life of Theseus” in North's Plutarch. But the locus classicus of this battle with centaurs in the Renaissance tradition was quite different. It is Lucian's Symposium or A Feast of Lapithae, in which the mythical battle of the Centaurs with the Lapiths is a part of a satirical description of a brawl of philosophers at a contemporary wedding: “The bridegroom … was taken off with head in bandages—in the carriage in which he was to have taken his bride home.” The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 4:144. In Apuleius' The Golden Ass unfortunate Charite also evokes the wedding interrupted by Centaurs in her story of her abduction by bandits from her would-be wedding: “In this sort was our marriage disturbed, like the marriage of Hypodame.” Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel also evokes that unfortunate wedding: “Do you call this a wedding? … Yes, by God, I call it the marriage described by Lucian in his Symposium. You remember; the philosopher of Samosata tells how the King of the Lapithae celebrates a marriage that ended in war between Lapithae and Centaurs” (4.15). Shakespeare's ironical intention in evoking this proverbially interrupted marriage appears self-evident.

48. Panofsky, “Blind Cupid,” p. 140; and Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 209: “To Pico, to Cornelius Agrippa, to Bruno, who distinguished nine kinds of fruitful love-blindness, this exaltation of the madness of love was both Christian and Orphic.”

49. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things (1966; New York: Vintage, 1971), discusses in his chapter on Don Quixote this new confrontation of poetry and madness, beginning at the age of Baroque: “But it is no longer the old Platonic theme of inspired madness. It is the mark of a new experience of language and things. At the fringes of a knowledge that separates beings, signs, and similitudes, and as though to limit its power, the madman fulfills the function of homosemanticism: he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases to proliferate. The poet fulfills the opposite function: his is the allegorical role; beneath the language of signs and beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions, he strains his ears to catch that ‘other language,’ the language, without words or discourse, of resemblance” (pp. 49-50). But the poet in Theseus' lines is compared to the madman, and his function is to destroy the “allegorization.” The exchange between the noble functions of mind and the low function of body is a radical criticism of all appearances, and an attempt to show a real similitude of “things” and “attitudes.”

50. Cf. the recitation of “fatal birds” by Bosola to the Duchess of Malfi in her cell before her strangling: “Hark, now everything is still, / The schreech owl, and the whistler shrill / Call upon our dame, aloud, / And bid her quickly don her shroud” (The Duchess of Malfi 4.2.179 ff.). An epithalamium, which bade such creatures to be silent on the wedding night, is astonishingly similar to the foreboding of the fearful events. In the carnival rites often, especially in the South, the images of death and wedding meet.

51. Conversations with Goethe, January 17, 1827. Quoted by Bakhtin, in Rabelais, pp. 250-51.

52. Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London: Heinemann, 1931), pp. 9 ff. Philostratus, a Greek writer (ca. 170-245), author of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana and of Imagines, was well known during the Renaissance. Opera quae extant in Greek with Latin translation had been published in Venice, 1501-4, 1535, 1550, and in Florence in 1517. The “Stephani Nigri elegatissima” translation had at least three editions (Milan, 1521, 1532; Basel, 1532). Imagines was translated into French by de Vigenere: at least one edition (Paris, 1578) dates from before A Midsummer Night's Dream (Paris, 1614; L'Angelier rpt., New York: Garland, 1976). Imagines was extensively commented upon and quoted by Gyraldus and Cartari, whose Le imagini dei degli antichi often reads like a transcript of Philostratus. Imagines was highly esteemed by Shakespeare's fellow dramatists. Jonson directly quoted Philostratus six times in his abundant notes to his masques (i.e. in a note to “Cupids” in The Masque of Beauty, 1608: “especially Phil. in Icon. Amor. whom I haue particularly followed in this description.” Works, Hereford and Simpson, ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941], 7:188). See Allan H. Gilbert, The Symbolic Persons in the Masques of Ben Jonson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1948), pp. 262-63. Samuel Daniel referred to Imagines and followed very precisely its image of Sleep in The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604): “And therefore was Sleep / as he is described by Philostratus in Amphiarai imagine / apparelled.” A Book of Masques (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 28.

53. For over a hundred years commentaries suggested the source of the name Philostrate is borrowed from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. But Chaucer's lover, who goes to Athens under the name of Philostrate, and Shakespeare's master of the revels have nothing in common. The author of Imagines as a possible source for the name of Philostrate is a guess one is tempted to make. Philostratus' “Comus” is generally thought to be the main source for the image of Comus opening Jonson's Pleasure Reconcild to Vertue (1618) and for Milton's Comus (1634). A Midsummer Night's Dream and the two plays have often been compared: Jonson's Pleasure with Comus (Paul Reyher, Les Masques anglaises [Paris, 1909; New York: B. Blom, 1964], pp. 212-13; Welsford, The Court Masque, pp. 314-20; the editors of Jonson, Works, 2:304-9); A Midsummer Night's Dream with Comus (Welsford, The Court Masque, pp. 330-35; Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969], pp. 181-84). But the real link between these three plays is the passage on Comus in Imagines (1.2). See also Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 151-69. Orgel compares the passage on Comus from Philostratus with Cartari's Le imagini and describes the iconographic tradition stemming from Imagines.

54. Fragment B 15. Quoted from Albert Cook, “Heraclitus and the Conditions of Utterance,” Arion, n.s. 2/4 (1976): 473.

55. Wind, “Orpheus,” pp. 104, 158.