SOURCE: Paster, Gail Kern and Skiles Howard, eds. Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts, edited by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, pp. 1-9. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

[In the following essay, Paster and Howard survey the themes and central action of A Midsummer Night's Dream and provide a general review of critical trends.]

A Midsummer Night's Dream is enchanting, lyrical, and very funny. So say generations of readers and audiences captivated by the play's eclectic mingling of lovers, fairies, and artisan actors in an action filled with mythological allusions and moved by the combined power of love, magic, and self-conscious theatricality. Thematically, the play stands forth as a comedy about romantic desire and the trials of imagination. Its two central actions—the love chase of Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius and the encounter between a metamorphosed Bottom and the fairy queen Titania—symbolize the arbitrary power of lovers' imaginations to transform the beloved from just another human being into an incomparable individual. In its framing and subsidiary actions—the nuptial festivities of Theseus and Hippolyta and the artisans' hilarious rehearsal and performance of their version of “Pyramus and Thisbe”—the play extends its social reach to bring figures from classical legend together with humble (but aspiring) workingmen. In the melding of these comic materials, Shakespeare suggests that courtship, marriage, and putting on a play have much in common. All three are unpredictable, creative enterprises requiring daring, hope, and a willingness to look foolish in the eyes of others.

In the Athens of Theseus, the protocols of love are full of comic potential. Bottom opines wisely to Titania that “reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (3.1.119-20). In this summary judgment and commonplace wisdom, only the qualifying adverb “nowadays” is suspect. Nothing in the play's texture of allusion and mythology suggests that love was ever rational or comprehensible to the spectator from the outside or the desiring subject from within. In action, the onset of love produces events that are painful and/or hilarious to witness. From the opening of the play, Shakespeare hints at what troubles lovers in the passage from courtship to marriage. Theseus has had to conquer a woman's desire for autonomy—symbolized here by the Amazon Hippolyta. The four young lovers have to conquer various obstacles, both internal and external, ranging from the volatility of male desire to the opposition of Hermia's father and the mutual suspicions harbored by all four of them. These young lovers, while seeming overwhelmed by passion, have reason to be suspicious of love. When the men change from loving Hermia to loving Helena, their change of heart is violently expressed as hatred for the disavowed one: “Hang off, thou cat, thou burr,” Lysander shouts to the bewildered Hermia, “Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent!” (3.2.260-61). Lysander and Demetrius seem to know no intermediate form of address to the women, oscillating between extremes of adoration and degradation. Oberon has transformed their vision, has altered the object of their desire, but he is not responsible for everything that Lysander and Demetrius say. And, given Oberon's (mis)management of his powers to create and destroy desire through magical love juice, the three couples at the end of the play will need fairy blessings and more to stay faithful to one another, to bear and raise happy children, and to keep their houses from harm.

For their part, the fairy spouses quarrel so bitterly over custody of Titania's foster child that Oberon is moved to punish and humiliate his queen by causing her to dote absurdly on Bottom. When Puck reports how it came to pass that “Titania waked and straightway loved an ass,” Oberon replies with delight: “This falls out better than I could devise” (3.2.34-35). But its depiction of love as irrational, sudden, and even self-destructive does not prevent A Midsummer Night's Dream from finally endorsing romantic love as the basis of marriage, even if such endorsement requires myth, magic, and amnesia for its consummation. “These things seem small and undistinguishable,” Demetrius says with puzzlement when the four lovers awake after their strife-filled night in the woods, “Like far-off mountains turnèd into clouds” (4.1.182-83). The job of comedy—so the play's joyous conclusion implies—is to imagine the attainment of long life, true love, and good children not as an arbitrary accident of fortune but as a reward for suffering, albeit the limited and predictable kind of suffering that goes here under the fanciful rubric of romantic misadventure in the woods. Perhaps it is this complex combination of recognition and endorsement that has recommended the play to generation after generation of playgoers.

Its enduring popularity and its undeniable charm are proof of A Midsummer Night's Dream's greatness as comedy. But questions other than the play's greatness have also preoccupied scholars for a long time; we intend to address them, at least in part, through the documents included in this volume. In the last two decades, much literary scholarship has been engaged in showing that Shakespeare's plays, including the romantic comedies, are deeply entwined in the sociocultural circumstances of early modern England. In the case of A Midsummer Night's Dream, understanding of the play has been complicated and deepened by critical attention to the political tensions and social conflicts embedded in its contextual history. Scholars have investigated, for example, the play's reproduction of the social structures of rank and gender. They have noted that the play treats Peter Quince and his fellow laboring men as less than fully adult. The mechanicals even seem to acquiesce in such infantilizing treatment, referring repeatedly to themselves as “every mother's son.” Some scholars have wondered whether this affectionate but somewhat condescending portrayal is linked, defensively, to Elizabethan social tensions in the wake of widespread unrest and local uprisings in the mid-1590s (Leinwand, “‘I believe’”); others have seen the mechanicals as a complexly ironic self-representation by Shakespeare the professional man of the theater, as a playful strategy for distancing his company of the Lord Chamberlain's Men from amateur players (Montrose, Purpose 205).

As with the mechanicals, so with other elements of the play: tracing out the play's complex interconnections with its culture has led scholarship in many directions. Thus some scholars have wished to follow the leads offered by the text's geographical allusions to “the farthest step of India” (2.1.69), where Titania's beloved foster child was born and whence Oberon has come to witness the wedding of Hippolyta to Theseus. In these geographical references, post-colonialist critics argue, we may glimpse the early traces of England's imperial future and its emerging preoccupation with the structures of racial and geographical difference (Hendricks). For feminist historians in particular, the play's opening allusion to the conquered Amazons and Theseus's strange pronouncement to Hippolyta that he has “won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.17) have prompted historical and theoretical critique. Feminists have noted the gender tensions, the note of complaint directed at all women, implied in the impatient bridegroom Theseus's comparison of the moon to “a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man's revenue” (1.1.5-6). Rather than dismissing the opening dispute between Hermia and her father as merely the generic furniture of comedy, the romantic conflict required to move the action, scholars have paid serious historical attention to the generational, gender, and religious tensions suggested by so prominent a disagreement over whose desire counts most in the matter of marital choice. To them, Theseus's dictum to Hermia that “to you your father should be as a god” (1.1.47) sounds less like a patriarch's serene orthodoxy and more like his embattled hope. And, of course, cultural historians of all stripes have sought to understand the full force and political implications of the play's several allusions to Queen Elizabeth. It is she, and not Titania, whom literate Elizabethans would have identified as “the fairy queen,” whether or not they had read Edmund Spenser's great romantic poem. More specifically, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is Elizabeth to whom Oberon refers as “a fair vestal thronèd by the west,” the “imperial vot'ress” (2.1.158, 163). In the play's mythmaking, she alone is said to be immune to the lovebolts of Cupid, in her “maiden meditation, fancy-free” (164).

Flattering acknowledgment of offstage royal beings is characteristic—indeed virtually required—of court entertainments. It is one reason why arguments continue to flourish about whether or not A Midsummer Night's Dream was originally commissioned to celebrate an aristocratic wedding (Chambers 1: 358). Evidence to support such claims remains inconclusive (if tantalizing), and it seems safer to assume with Louis Montrose that Shakespeare, the public playwright, would have wanted to write plays with broad appeal, plays suitable for private performance at court or an aristocratic household (Purpose 160-61). Even so, flattery of royal personages is much less characteristic of plays written for the public theaters where kings and queens never came. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the play's treatment of its fairy queen is far more complex and ambivalent than mere flattery would warrant. Hence scholars have seen real if ambiguous tensions in the play's relations to the monarch, perhaps fueled by what Montrose has called “processes of disenchantment,” which are “increasingly evident in Elizabethan cultural productions of the 1580s and 1590s” (Purpose 165). It has been important for recent scholarship to explicate the play's varied strategies of allusion and disenchantment, to note the tensions of class, gender, and generation often embedded in the play's metaphorical language or, as with the Amazons and the Indian boy, given importance through reference rather than representation. In such metaphors and allusions we may trace the cultural dialogue in which the play is rooted.

In the commentary and documents of this volume, we have sought to include what seem to us the most important of the many perspectives introduced by such recent historical scholarship, though to do them all justice would require many more pages and many more documents than we have space for. Suffice it to say that we, like others before us, see the play's text saturated by the massive, overarching social and cultural changes occurring in post-Reformation England over the course of the sixteenth century. While it may always be difficult to detail the effect of such changes on the production of specific literary texts, it is almost impossible to overstate their overall transformation of cultural practices. As historian Charles Phythian-Adams has suggested,

for urban communities in particular, the middle and later years of the sixteenth century represented a more abrupt break with the past than any period since the era of the Black Death or before the age of industrialization. Not only were specific customs and institutions brusquely changed or abolished, but a whole, vigorous, and variegated popular culture, the matrix of everyday life, was eroded and began to perish.

(57)

In England, the kind of changes that we highlight in this volume were wrought, directly and indirectly, by the Protestant Reformation—what happened during the 1530s when the English abandoned their allegiance to Roman Catholicism and created the national church, today's Church of England. We understand that Reformation not merely as a change in religious practice and doctrine, but rather as a large-scale social, cultural, and intellectual transformation. The revolutionary changes of most interest to us here include (but obviously are not limited to) the following: a transformation of holiday customs, festive practices, and the official calendar; the disappearance of monastic ways of life, especially for women; the centralization of state power around a charismatic ruler and the regularization of the patriarchal nuclear family; and a massive redefinition of supernatural agency and the proper objects of belief.

A history of the English Reformation is of course well beyond our intentions or authority. But our selection of documents is intended to illustrate our firm conviction—and that of other historical scholars of the play—that the Protestant Reformation spreads across the cultural map of early modern England like the letters on a road map, which get harder to see as they increase in size and sprawl across the page. The Reformation's influence on the play is so pervasive and widespread as to be almost invisible. This influence extends, for example, well beyond the obvious effect on the play's representation of marriage and the family (which we document especially in Chapter 3) into such apparently unlikely areas as the play's representation of holiday customs (Chapter 1), its allusive treatment of the Amazons (Chapter 3), and its characterization of the fairies (Chapter 4).

The Reformation's several effects on early modern English culture are of course interrelated. In the later Middle Ages, some 9,300 English men and women (or about 0.26 percent of the population) lived in monasteries or convents, with convents numbering approximately 138 (Crawford, Women and Religion 219, n.10). After the dissolution of monastic ways of life, many adults of both sexes, but women especially, found their life choices significantly constrained. Convent life had offered women an honored vocation, a large degree of self-government under the authority of abbesses and prioresses, and independence from the demands of family (Crawford, Women and Religion 22). The modern model of an affectionate marriage within a small, nuclear household became the newly normative—and even perhaps the only truly acceptable—basis of mature social identity. This relatively new cultural insistence upon marriage for women suggests why the defeat of the Amazons, that community of self-governing women, should serve as historical precursor for the opening events of the play. The state's dissolution of the conventual way of life may also account for Theseus's disparagement of female celibacy when he informs a defiant Hermia of the harsh Athenian law concerning women's marriages. It is your choice, Theseus informs her without a trace of irony, whether to die by state-sponsored execution (its exact means unspecified), to “live a barren sister all your life” (1.1.72), or to marry the man whom father Egeus wants as son-in-law. Students may gauge the extent of this social transformation by remembering Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who begins her own self-portrait as a much-married woman by defending marriage as a worthy way of life for men and women against the superior perfection of virginity. “Virginitee is greet perfeccion, / And continence eek with devocioun,” she admits, but defiantly declares “I wol bistowe the flour of al my age, / In the actes and the fruyt of mariage” (Wife of Bath's Prologue 105-06, 113-14). In England two centuries later, she need not have bothered to defend herself or the goodness and necessity of marriage.

Of other major changes brought about in the wake of the Reformation most relevant to A Midsummer Night's Dream, we have selected documents that highlight the change in belief practices implied in the play's treatment of the supernatural. As we will spell out in chapter 4, change in the official religion changed the consensus about the nature of supernatural agency. Belief in fairies, like belief in witches, became a matter of real debate instead of a matter of indifference or neutral disagreement. Medieval Catholicism had considered belief in fairies as paganism. Ironically, now that Catholicism was itself the superseded religion in England, Protestant reformers identified it with superstitious beliefs and practices. Placating fairies with gifts of food, as country people were said to do, now smacked of ignorant superstition or worse. But such disagreement about the supernatural is linked—as we shall see—to redefinitions of the natural and a reexamination of the possible. Are marvels the direct work and judgment of God, people increasingly began to wonder, or events susceptible to scientific explanation?

It is this complex of interlinked and overlapping historical issues on which we focus in the following chapters. Chapter 1 has the most general application to English culture, since it concerns holiday celebrations at a moment in the nation's social history when festive practices—May Day observances, civic theatricals, royal entertainments—had begun to divide and differentiate, had begun to signify “popular” or “elite.” Chapter 2 takes up the play's representation of male hierarchy and narratives of male development, both the normative development of an upper-class English male and the exceptional but still broadly symbolic development of a legendary hero such as Theseus. The social tensions surrounding the proper formation of the male subject surface in the fairies' custody dispute over the Indian boy. (They would have not quarreled at all, we must remember, had the child been a girl: Oberon's court is a household of male intimates.) Chapter 3 turns to women, first to representations of those who, both alone and in communities, sought to elude or resist marriage, then to representative selections from the literature that prescribed the duties of daughters and wives and narrated the exemplary lives and deaths of dutiful wives. Chapter 4 is occupied by many elements of the play's dazzling supernaturalism. We understand the play's magic as motivated, at least in part, by a rich post-Reformation debate about the causes of things (especially extraordinary or monstrous things). By highlighting this debate, we seek to offer an alternative to the folkloric interpretations that have sentimentalized the fairies—and often the rest of the play as a result. We define the play's make-believe as an intervention in competing post-Reformation beliefs and practices with the fairies as unknowing players in the religious controversies of late Elizabethan culture. In this context, the following parts of the play come together: Titania's allusions to the wet summers and successive bad harvests of the mid-1590s, the comic treatment of current theological debates about the scope and nature of supernatural agency, Ovidian mythological narratives about wonderful metamorphoses, Bottom's transformation and erotic encounter with Titania, the sin of bestiality, and contemporary theories of monstrous birth.

Romantic comedy's representation of love and marriage cannot escape the determinations of its historical moment, even when the romantic comedy in question is, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, explicitly distanced in time and place from the society where it was first performed. Thus when Titania and Oberon meet onstage for the first time and, for their benefit and our own, rehearse the grounds of their profound marital quarrel, we learn that their separation has had disastrous consequences in the natural order:

No night is now with hymn or carol blessed.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter. …

(2.1.102-07)

These references to wet weather, bad air, and poor harvests must have reminded Shakespeare's audiences of the succession of stormy springs and cold, wet summers that had caused several years of harvest failure not just in England but also in many parts of northern Europe. These events in nature had affected them all. Perhaps the lines evoked, more generally, the sense of crisis that hung over the last decade of the sixteenth century. For Europeans living in those years, and for the historians who have studied them, the 1590s seem to have been a terrible time. Political disorder, religious warfare, widespread inflation in the price of basic goods, collapse of the agricultural economy in many countries, subsistence and mortality crises, recurrent epidemics of plague—all these factors in combination created a general sense of crisis, even of catastrophe. Predictions of the end of the world were not uncommon (Clark, “Introduction” 4). England did not suffer the depopulation that afflicted other parts of Europe, including northern Ireland; indeed London was then undergoing a population explosion thanks to an influx of newcomers from elsewhere in England and abroad. To many, the urban landscape was violent and crime-infested, inundated with foreigners, threatened by rioting apprentices and other sources of unrest (some included in this category the theaters themselves). England was also spared the internal religious warfare that devastated France, though it too suffered ferocious ideological conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism of the sort that had spawned warfare on the continent. But overseas warfare—naval expeditions against Spain, military involvement in the Netherlands and France, and recurrent forays against the Irish—took a high toll on English society in the 1590s. It hindered trade, raised taxes, and took a steady stream of able-bodied men out of the labor force only to return some of them, much less able-bodied, as veterans.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, written during difficult years, cannot help being influenced by them, especially since the perception of crisis was a contemporary one. More to the point, Titania's obvious allusions to the recent bad weather seem to invite an audience's critical attention, to offer up the play's action and characters as magical encodings of their own time and space. This impression is reinforced by the play's unusually specific allusions to Queen Elizabeth, mentioned above. But the allusion seems to function here almost as a disclaimer, preventing the scandalous liaison between Titania and Bottom from being understood as a satiric attack on Queen Elizabeth and her manner of bestowing favors and attention upon favorites. The disclaimer cannot work, except tactically, of course. In Elizabethan England, no representation of a fairy queen could ever claim not to concern the real queen at some level. The question, as always, is to figure out just what social meanings are encoded in fictive transformations of the real.

Bibliography

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. London, 1596.

Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1928.

Clark, Peter. Introduction. The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History. Ed. Clark. London: Allen, 1985.

Crawford, Patricia. Women and Religion in England 1500-1720. London: Routledge, 1993.

Hendricks, Margo. “‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 37-60.

Leinwand, Theodore. “‘I believe we must leave the killing out’: Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Renaissance Papers, 1986. 11-30.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Phythian-Adams, Charles. “Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450-1550.” Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700: Essays in Urban History. Ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack. London: Routledge, 1972. 57-85.