SOURCE: Clayton, Tom. “‘So quick bright things come to confusion’: or, What Else was A Midsummer Night's Dream About?”¹ In Shakespeare: Text and Theater, edited by Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, pp. 62-91. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Clayton highlights the brighter, more lighthearted aspects of A Midsummer Night's Dream, emphasizing the civilized and complementary features of the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta and downplaying the bestial connotation in the relationship between the transformed Bottom and Titania.]

In the now ancient history of Shakespeare's birth-quatercentenary year of 1964, it would not have been easy to find in the year's publications a pair of perspectives less alike than those of R. W. Dent,

Rather than being a foe to good living, poetic imagination can be its comfort and its guide, far “more yielding” than most dreams. Whether A Midsummer Night's Dream has an unplumbed “bottom” as well as its inescapable Bottom, I hesitate to say. But it provides us “a most rare vision,” one that offers us a disarmingly unpretentious defense of poetry by the greatest of England's poets;

and Jan Kott: “The Dream is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays. In no other tragedy or comedy of his, except Troilus and Cressida, is the eroticism expressed so brutally.”²

Each essay was original in its own way. Dent's is historical in emphasis, modest in assertion, and consistently illuminating, a classic. Kott's was groundbreaking, rough—“brutal”?—and provocative, and has been widely influential, especially as partial source of what is probably the most famous production of the century, Peter Brook's, in 1970 (see Halio 48-69). Brook's preface to Kott's book suggests why: it “is Poland that in our time has come closest to the tumult, the danger, the intensity, the imaginativeness and the daily involvement with the social process that made life so horrible, subtle and ecstatic to an Elizabethan” (x-xi).³ True or not, the perception had its sway. Kott revealed and dwelt on the darker side of Shakespeare—or he projected it, or both. In any case, it was a side especially congenial to the time and has become durably postmodern. Accordingly, something of the character of Shakespeare's Dream has been thrust into the shade in succeeding decades, and critical editions as well as productions have undergone their own notable, not always unquestionable, alterations in the past decade or so.⁴ My aim here is to try to restore light and a measure of balance of perspective in a few of Dream's quarters that have suffered neglect or occasionally worse.

Theatrical production cannot stand still, of course, and by no means every Dream should ring changes on moonlight, roses, and transcendental imagination. But some recent professional productions have seemed to perform everything but the script, often adhering to the letter but relentlessly violating the spirit, something few living playwrights would readily permit. “Adaptation … of one sort or another seems to be the rule, … but how far can one carry this process and still call it Shakespeare?” (Halio 7). A view current among post-literary academics at present is that nothing has perennial value because all is culturally determined, including “Shakespeare” and his (currency) value. But this view is routinely falsified by individual and collective experience in the reading and often in the theater.

Performance and understanding begin with the script and text. For plays with more than one substantive text, the ultimate witness is the one inferred to be closer to holograph, usually but not always the longer—with Hamlet the longest—version.⁵ “Holograph” may be foul papers (most often), fair copy, or revised manuscript; with inferred scribal transcript (Shakespeare's, anonymous, or by Ralph Crane) intervening between print and holograph (of whatever kind). Revisionists argue that “revised” versions showing signs of “promptbook” influence and accordingly closer to theatrical practice are more authoritative, at least as far as their additions, cuts, and other alterations are concerned. But the assumption that the “more theatrical” text is the “better” is circular and rests on a somewhat limited view of genre, intention, and effect.

The modern textual situation of Dream was “stable” until 1986, when the Oxford Shakespeare innovated in incorporating F's—the Folio's—assignment to Egeus and Lysander of speeches in 5.1 that are Philostrate's and Theseus', respectively, in Q1 (1600), the sole wholly substantive text and the most authoritative as the source of Q2, in turn the source of most of F. The received explanation is that Q1 came from autograph foul papers, and F from Q2 altered here and there from a playhouse promptbook. It is easy enough to see expediency as a hypothetical reason for such changes in performance, but not as a good reason to adopt them, much less as revisions supposed to be by Shakespeare. In fact, they serve well enough to open up anew the question of extent in so-called Shakespearean revision.

“'TIS STRANGE, MY THESEUS” (5.1.1)

The critical and performing fate of these dramatic and mythical lovers has been mixed, especially in the past quarter century: not infrequently, Hippolyta has been aggrandized, Theseus demonized.⁶ The script seems to give them about equal measure, a suggestion Shakespeare didn't need but Plutarch supplied in explaining the end of the war brought to Athens “within the precinct of the very cittie it selfe” by the Amazons:

at the ende of foure moneths, peace was taken betwene them by meanes of one of the women called Hyppolita. … Nevertheles, some saye that she was slayne (fighting on Theseus side). … In memorie whereof, the piller which is joyning to the temple of the Olympian ground, was set up in her honour. We are not to marvell, if the historie of things so auncient, be founde so diversely written.

(Bullough 386, 387)

Amen. So much context explains the mythic site and character of Theseus' recently most infamous lines, the first two of

Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword,
And won thy love doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling.

(1.1.16-19)

His subject is the familiar progress of wooing, winning, wedding, with the paradox that the wars of myth were paradoxically the scene of contest turned to courtship; but the wedding will be triumphant “in another” and its own traditional “key.”

The plotline of the impending nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta constitutes Dream's opening; it is joined in 2.1 by the alienation-reconciliation and amatory-management plotline of Oberon, Titania, and Puck/Robin that constitutes the closing. The parallels are obvious enough, and significant; and much has been written that is sensitive and wise about the propriety of doubling Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania, which was certainly done as early as 1661 (Holland 96-97). But two points need making about doubling. First, doubling (to economize, for example) does not entail special affinities between the characters doubled. Second, and just as important, affinities between two characters may be seen without their doubling.

Theseus was clearly intended to be overshadowed at the end by Oberon and company, the inescapable effect of the order of events, with the diurnal world of waking reason giving way to the nocturnal world of dreamtime and imagination. But Theseus is no less important for that: if the day needs the night for rest and dreaming, night needs the day for enlightenment and exercise; and Theseus' reason transcends its own limitations, through his imagination (sic) and sentiment, which it is partly the business of his two act-5 setpieces—“More strange than true” and “The kinder we”—to demonstrate. One might say that if there were not a Theseus to deliver these speeches, a speaker might have had to be created from scratch. Not, of course, that the speeches came first, but they have a primacy and significance that Dream would be different and the worse for being without.

Theseus and Hippolyta are never separated, appearing together in 1.1, 4.1, and 5.1; and their dialogue is very much reciprocal from the opening exchange to their last banter on “Pyramus and Thisbe” (5.1.300-05).⁷ Her mere four-and-a-half lines in the opening subscene have served every interpretative purpose, but they are sufficient in content and context to convey mutuality more readily than they can, without strain, express discontent and aloofness:

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

(1.1.7-11)

In Dream, Theseus has a good deal of the country squire about him, and Hippolyta herself is on the horsy side, the two of them dog-fanciers together in their telling exchange in 4.1, just before they come upon the sleeping lovers. The pair's mutuality, similarity of expression, and shared “lifestyle”—as Anglo-Athenian-mythical country gentry—are far more in evidence than is a raw or even cooked competitiveness here, where their speeches even run to nearly equal length: Theseus has three lines opening (4.1.109-11), then she seven (112-18) and he eight-and-a-half, his last line completed by the transitional “But soft, what nymphs are these?” (119-27). This pattern of easy reciprocity obtains throughout, even when they disagree. Theirs is, on the showing, a civil(ized) relationship of “mutual love and good liking”;⁸ and that is expressed most succinctly by “my Theseus” (5.1.1): one doesn't address a stranger to one's affections thus, and this is the opening note of act 5.

The social motion of their duologue here is marked by the echoing of Hippolyta's “'Tis strange” in (1) Theseus' extended reply beginning “More strange than true,” and (2) Hippolyta's closing, “But howsoever, strange and admirable”—‘to be wondered at,’ with a trace of ‘deserving admiration’ (l. 27). The speeches of both express the complementarity of the speakers, as well as their differences, which are also complementary. Theseus' skeptical voice of reason confidently pronouncing in error transcends the limitations of what he “may believe” when it comes to the poet, whose flights of imagination are exquisitely and accurately described; in spite of himself, he speaks for the play and of the play, and of himself at one remove, if not for Shakespeare. But how not?

Some now hastily if not facilely dismiss Theseus and this setpiece by inflating the truisms that (1) his view should not be taken for Shakespeare's; (2) he is wrong about the imagination and much else, and Hippolyta is right; and (3) Theseus himself is an “antique” figment of imagination and therefore a butt of his own joke. But “antic fables”—bizarre narratives—is almost certainly correct, despite the fact that most current editions have “antique fables,” as in Q1.⁹ This is a problem of appropriate modern spelling, but it is not clear why editors who often follow F prefer Q1 here. Since “antique” makes inferior sense otherwise, one supposes the preference due to its ready association with Theseus, who is routinely faulted, accordingly, for disbelieving in his own mythical identity. No one can resist this joke who hasn't been pressed to explain how the “fables” just told are “antique” meaning ancient.

Theseus is not wrong about the value of “cool reason,” even if it has limitations as applied here. But if he is “wrong” about the imagination, he nevertheless brings his own powerful imagination into play to deprecate the poet, who could scarcely be better appreciated by downright eulogy. Did Shakespeare give Theseus these splendid lines to make him risibly pompous and transcendently wrong? The former not really, the latter most certainly, in a special way.

There is general acceptance of Dover Wilson's argument that Shakespeare added the poet to a shorter speech on the imagination of the lover and the madman, which affords a ready explanation for mislining and overcrowded lines in Q1 at that point.¹⁰ Whether the poet arrived at once or on second thought, he dominates the speech as we have it:

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 aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.

(12-17)

Even delivered with skepticism and irony, this is breathtaking, a towering tribute to the poet as vates and as maker. It is a masterstroke to make Theseus its author, the rational skeptic pronouncing judgment on the irrationality of the imagination by using its highest resources to do so, condemning and commending simultaneously—to its and the poet's credit. Theseus may be talking through his philosopher's hat, but he has been given the poet's own eloquence to do it with. Transported by imagination unawares, he returns to practicalities with his last four lines—and those of the original version of the speech (if the poet was added). Hippolyta's rejoinder, sound, sympathetic, reasonable, and appreciative, complements Theseus' sweeping survey by bringing “something of great constancy” into the space of the poet's shapes and airy nothing. She is made utterly gracious in joining him at an esthetic distance from the object of their contemplation: “howsoever, strange and admirable.” One of the most notable things about the exchange is that Theseus' imagination exceeds his reason here, and Hippolyta's reason her imagination—ultimately to the harmony and credit of them both.

In both exchanges of genial one-upmanship or simple disagreement Hippolyta fares as well as Theseus or better. It is (as always already) easy to read the gender wars into them. But the two characters read and perform most cohesively and intelligibly, and with least strain, as social and personal—and military—equals of partly shared background: mythic nobility from different countries of the classical and post-classical mind joined in late-Renaissance (or Early Modern) English-poetical matrimony.

The only non-fairy in the play who mentions fairies at all—twice—is Theseus. The lovers nowhere show the slightest awareness of their existence, even though Theseus' “fairy toys” implies that fairies figured in the lovers' accounts. For us to supply fairies to their hypothetical account would be to forget about the “discrepant awareness” of dramatic characters and ourselves, who know so much more than they.¹¹ Bottom alone has “reason” to swear there are fairies, but he does no such thing. The only bare hint of fairies by others is Demetrius' “I wot not by what power / (But by some power it is)” (4.1.164-65): fairy power, but he knows not that. Whatever the lovers' fables, as Hippolyta logically infers—she does not intuit—their experience was real and shared, and the fairies are no less real to us or, invisible, to them.

Theseus has two setpieces, or “arias,”¹² in act 5, so it might seem curious that the first gets far more attention than the second, “the kinder we” (89-105), which has often been ignored and is now read by some as hypocritical. But the speech seems in earnest for both Shakespeare and Theseus, and there are no textual grounds, as opposed to categorical aprioristic judgments, for taking it otherwise. It is in earnest for good reason, its theme noblesse oblige, which might not be necessary in a genuinely classless society of the sort the world has yet to see. Where there are inequalities, their effects are substantially ameliorated when the more fortunate—or powerful—show care for the less. And where there is personal contact between power and vulnerability, kindness finds a way to level differences in some degree. “The kinder we” episode speaks well for Theseus, and it appears to speak also for the play, not pompously preaching but eloquently pleading, with metaphor, anecdote, and subsequent example, advocating compassion of attitude and noblesse oblige in behavior, a socioethical message of some importance in Shakespeare's day and once again—rather urgently—in our own. The affluent and socially sophisticated find this banal and bourgeois. Directors who find it so, who wish to concentrate on other matters, or who do not like Theseus, either make the delivery effete and ineffectual or cut the speech.¹³

Both Theseus' speech itself and the dialogue that precedes it make a case for obligatory as well as obliging kindness that is in no way offset by the comic mockery of the courtiers during the performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” although there is obvious theoretical inconsistency. But this entire part of the play is a rich amalgam of the serious and the comic that in a sympathetic production has no trouble with either the serious or the—superficially—inconsistent comedy. Told colorfully and wittily by Philostrate how bad the homespuns' play is (61-70), Theseus asks, “What are they that do play it?” “Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never labor'd in their minds till now,” etc. His response is, “And we will hear it.” This is ad hominem with benevolence. Warned a second time by Philostrate that “it is nothing, nothing in the world; / Unless you can find sport in their intents” (78-79), Theseus insists that “I will hear that play; / For never any thing can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it” (80-82). “Find sport” prepares for the courtiers' comments, and “their intents” stresses the primacy of intentions and the applicability of the golden rule in such cases. The homespuns are honored in having their play preferred, and audiences diverted by shortcomings of which the players are unaware and that they have no need to know.¹⁴

Hippolyta's “He says they can do nothing in this kind” elicits Theseus' cheerful asteism, “The kinder we” (85-89), the beginning of Shakespeare's setpiece and Theseus' poetic and substantial reflections on sympathetic imagination illuminated with the colors of rhetoric everywhere present in Shakespeare's earlier plays. “What poor duty cannot do, noble respect / Takes it in might, not merit” (91-92) at once defines noblesse oblige (“magnanimous or generous consideration,” Foakes 120); gives an allegorical instance with personification; and concludes with an elliptical and emphatic short line strikingly expressive in its use of “might,” a signal instance of pointed antanaclasis. “Might” is used to mean both “power” (“might” is more powerful than “merit”) and potentiality (what they “might” do).¹⁵ An exemplum follows as a general anecdote based on Theseus' past experience:

Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practic'd accent in their fears,
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome.

Their failure became success, however, because,

                                                                      Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome;
And in the modesty of fearful duty,

complementing the earlier “poor duty”

I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.

(5.1.93-105)

Hippolyta's “It must be your imagination then, and not theirs” (5.1.214), though ironic, spells out what is implied throughout this speech, in which Theseus advocates and exercises the very faculty of imagination he decried in theory at the beginning of the scene, a benign inconsistency to his moral credit.

The Amazonian Hippolyta, entirely at home in the Athenian court, joins the men in commenting wittily (and in prose) on the play and performance: “Indeed he [Quince] hath played on this prologue like a child on a recorder—a sound, but not in government” (122-23). When Wall walks off, her “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (210) elicits Theseus'—thematic and didactic—reply, “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. … If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (211-18). Her next comment, “I am a-weary of this moon. Would he would change!” (251), together with Theseus' response, epitomizes the complex of dramatic effects centering on “Pyramus and Thisbe,” a theatrical and literary three-ring circus of burlesque (meta)drama, witty commentary, and extemporaneous and illicit dialogue by the players with their immediate audience—with the seriously humane undercurrent rising to the surface here, again, with Theseus' answer concerning Moon: “It appears by his small light of discretion that he is in the wane; but yet in courtesy, in all reason, we must stay the time” (254-55). For this function of reason Theseus deserves credit that he is now seldom accorded by critics.

The last of Theseus and the courtiers is Theseus' speech concluding,

This palpable-gross play hath well beguil'd
The heavy gait of night. Sweet friends, to bed.
A fortnight hold we this solemnity,
In nightly revels and new jollity. [Exeunt.]

(367-70)

The jokes made by the courtiers about the palpable-gross play can be played as callous and as overheard and taken so by the players, in which case the audience will be disconcerted accordingly; it is just as obvious in the dialogue and often in performance that they are neither.¹⁶ In fact, the entire social event centering on “Pyramus and Thisbe” is at once hugely comic and tacitly serious in its performing and the reasons for its being preferred. The punctuation of the drama by courtiers' comments is made more bond than brake, and this is still more so with the interaction between courtiers and players, notably Pyramus (184-87), Moon (257-59), and Pyramus again, rising from the dead to reassure Demetrius about Wall and offer the options of a terminal epilogue or a Bergomask (351-54). The latter is shortly forthcoming, bringing to an end “Pyramus and Thisbe” and, soon after, the play of the courtiers of Athens. Then with the fairies the Dream resumes.

“DO YOU AMEND IT THEN; IT LIES IN YOU” (2.1.118)

Oberon and Titania are not Theseus and Hippolyta. They are a married king and queen different from their mythical, aristocratic human counterparts in being folkloric supernaturals. Their behavior is that of (im)mortals with higher powers, like Greek-mythical gods except that the fairies are better behaved and motivated. Their estrangement and reconciliation is the central plot-line, even the main plot determining the progress of all other plots; at the center of it, in turn, is the fairy-queen-and-commoner romance of Titania and Bottom, its catalyst the refusal of Titania to give Oberon the changeling boy. Notwithstanding that he is the subject of a custody fight (as well as one with dire meteorological consequences, Titania claims), it is not very common for critics to discuss the boy's interests; and he does not routinely appear, since he is not among the dramatis personae. According to the social norms implicit in the relations between the principals, it must be about the time that the boy would be fairy bar mitzvahed and join the men—or elder fairies—if he is ready to be a “henchman.” So, in the patriarchal fairy culture, his interests are best served by his joining Oberon. Moreover, while Oberon “beg”s Titania to give him the boy, she withholds him, not for his sake but for the sake of his deceased mother, her late votary. The loyalty part of the sentiment is creditable but the rest and the effects are not: withholding the boy is made a willful refusal to yield responsibly and sympathetically to Oberon's begging: it has no evident benefits for the boy, the boy's deceased mother, herself, or Oberon, now or hereafter.

It is easy and now common to take the situation out of the play or away from the dialogue, anachronize it, and paraphrase it into male bullying and female righteous resistance; but the particular wording of the dialogue stresses the play's principled view of the relative right and wrong of the case, with Oberon given the dialogue to have the better of it, despite Titania's speaking at much greater length and with considerable rhetorical force—and extraordinary poetical eloquence.¹⁷ One could scarcely claim that all of Oberon's responses should be mild in delivery, as most are in phrasing, because some are clearly meant not to be (e.g., 2.1.63);¹⁸ but they are mostly laconic (excepting 74-80) and matter-of-fact; it is Titania's speeches that are lengthy and heated. Oberon is hardly guiltless in his mischievous reaction, but his pitying her and regretting his harshness show him twice “human.” To her famous setpiece on the disordered state of the land (2.1.81-117), he replies mildly,

Do you amend it then; it lies in you.
Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
I do but beg a little changeling boy,
To be my henchman.

(2.1.118-21)

He repeats his appeal plaintively and companionably: “Give me that boy, and I will go with thee” (143). He is refused, Titania leaves, and the plot thickens and in degree darkens—more in some productions than in others: “Well, go thy way. Thou shalt not from this grove / Till I torment thee for this injury” (2.1.146-47). If it is his “torment,” it is Titania's “injury”; or vice versa.

It is apparently Titania's jealousy that prompts her to accuse him of infidelity in courting the pastoral figment “Phillida” and of coming here from India because

                              … the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskin'd mistress, and your warrior love,(19)
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity.

(70-73)

A supernatural kindness, and they come to share in conferring it. The reciprocal “forgeries of jealousy” are important not because they seem true but because they evaporate as soon as the quarrel ceases—with Oberon having the boy as henchman and Titania being released from the effects of love-in-idlness.²⁰

Oberon's “I wonder if Titania be awak'd; / Then what it was that next came in her eye, / Which she must dote on in extremity” (3.2.1-3) can be taken to express some solicitude as well as eagerness to hear the worst, but the comic worst is what it heralds: it is an audience incitement with characterological detail. The denouement is 4.1.46-103, in the middle of which is an imperative that cries out for a youth musical, “rock the ground whereon these sleepers be” (86); and I am familiar with at least one rock-musical version, The Dream, directed by Chris Bond at the Half Moon Theatre in Mile End Road, London, in the spring of 1984.²¹ The reunited couple indeed “will to-morrow midnight solemnly / Dance in Duke Theseus' house triumphantly, / And bless it to all fair prosperity” (4.1.88-90)—and so they do and so ends the play. The reconciliation of Oberon and Titania thus completes the harmonizing of the play's lovers eight and expresses it in the way and spirit of the time of Sir John Davies's nearly contemporary Orchestra (1594) in a dance.²²

FLOWER POWER: THE DOTING AND THE ANTI-DOTE

Three are anointed into redirected affections: Titania and Lysander in 2.2 (27-34, 78-82), and Demetrius in 3.2 (102-09). Oberon initiates the dotings—and later supplies the antidote—with the best intentions, except for his practical joke played on Titania by means of flower power such that “The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid / Will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees” (2.1.170-72). Invisible, he sympathetically apostrophizes Helena, just departed in pursuit of Demetrius: “Fare thee well, nymph. Ere he do leave this grove, / Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love” (2.1.245-46). And he directs Puck, in disastrously general terms but according to his best lights (he hasn't seen Hermia and Lysander), to anoint the eyes of the “disdainful youth” in “Athenian garments” (2.2.260-66). So much for Hermia's Lysander, for the nonce.

Much concern is expressed by Demetriologists: is he restored to his original love, or is he compelled by Oberon's psychopharmacology to love Helena for evermore? He is anointed with the doting flower: “Flower of this purple dye, / Hit with Cupid's archery, / Sink in apple of his eye” (3.2.102-4). Both the “flower” and Demetrius' Lysander-like infatuated exclamations of adoration upon awakening and seeing Helena seem to say so. So also says the fact that Lysander is cured of doting by a different, antidotal herb that Puck is supposed to “crush … into Lysander's eye,” which with its “liquor hath this virtuous property, / To take from thence all error with his might, / And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight” (3.2.366-69). But though Demetrius is anointed with the flower that makes Titania and Lysander dote, his seems a case of homeopathic medicine, in effect a cure of the infection of doting upon Hermia's eyes (1.1.230) that, unlike the others, he had contracted without floral influence.

And the incantation over Demetrius is different from that over the others. Shakespeare attuned the heptasyllabic incantations accompanying each of the anointings to the individual case and left little room for doubt about any.²³ Sympathetic as before with the young lovers' plight, Oberon sends Puck to fetch Helena, saying he “will charm” Demetrius' “eyes against she do appear” (3.2.99). His incantation is carefully distinctive:

When his love he doth espy,
Let her shine as gloriously
As the Venus of the sky.
When thou wak'st, if she be by,
Beg of her for remedy.

(3.2.102-09)

“His love” is unequivocally specific, by contrast with the incantation over Lysander, meant for Demetrius but made general in expression by Puck as in Oberon's instructions: “When thou wak'st, let love forbid / Sleep his seat on thy eyelid” (2.2.79-80). “His love” contrasts all the more with the horridly specific incantation over Titania—“What thou seest when thou dost wake, / Do it for thy true-love take; … / Wake when some vile thing is near” (2.2.27-28, 34). The “apple of his eye” (pupil, but object, too) is equally specific, and “Beg of her for remedy” says that Demetrius needs no other and no antidote, which he has had already.

Finally, Demetrius is made to be at pains to explain his case to Theseus (and to us) thus:

… my good lord, I wot not by what power
(But by some power it is), my love to Hermia
(Melted as the snow) seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud,
Which in my childhood I did dote upon;
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I [saw] Hermia;
But like a sickness did I loathe this food;
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will for evermore be true to it.

(4.1.164-76)²⁴

These measured but enthusiastic lines have the ring of sincerity and truth, and are some distance from the sheer infatuation and excess of the lovers in a trance.

The others' “doting” is cured by applying the “anti[-]dote”—with an implicit etymological joke; Shakespeare uses “antidote” once only, without jest, in Macbeth, who yearns for “some sweet oblivious antidote” to “Cleanse the stuff'd bosom” (5.3.43-44). The spells of curative reanointing are equally differentiated: wittily ironical and generic in Lysander's case (3.2.448-63), personal and affectionate in Titania's.

          Be as thou wast wont to be;
          See as thou wast wont to see.
          Dian's bud [o'er] Cupid's flower
          Hath such force and blessed power.
Now, my Titania, wake you, my sweet queen.

(4.1.71-75)

But suppose Demetrius were in a permanent trance. True love is partly that, and for lasting and reciprocated love it is a small—and unconscious—price to pay. Oberon prophesies (or proclaims), “back to Athens shall the lovers wend / With league whose date till death shall never end” (3.2.372-73).

Bottom's deliverance is Puck's removing of the ass-head with a single line of unceremonious blank verse: “Now, when thou wak'st, with thine own fool's eyes peep” (4.1.84).

BOTTOM, BESTIALITY, AND NOBLESSE OBLIGE

The rise of the phallus in Dream production probably dates from Peter Brook's priapic scenario for his post-1960s Dream (1970). What still had some shock value then—even after Hair (1968) and Oh, Calcutta! (1969), but this was Shakespeare—has come to be de rigueur in many quarters of the book trade as well as on stage, as witness the covers or dust jackets of (1) Selbourne's Making of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (1982), with its photograph of Bottom borne sitting on the backs of his fellows, one of whom has a fisted, upraised forearm thrust up between Bottom's legs; (2) the Oxford/World's Classics edition (1994), with 1628 woodcut of Robin Goodfellow with notable erection (1628); and (3) Shakespeare in Performance: “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (1994), without phallics but with Titania topless (for all practical purposes, near-transparent body stocking notwithstanding). Few major productions since Brook's have failed to show the pressure of Kott and Brook.

But Bottom's conduct as Titania's pampered and enthralling gentle-mortal guest is unexceptionably punctilious and as courtly as it can be, which in its way is very: Titania's “ear is much enamour'd” of “his note” (3.1.138), and he is “a very paramour for a sweet voice,” as Quince malapropises later (4.2.11-12). I doubt whether the conceit of Bottom's copulating with Titania much precedes Brook's 1970 production, but it has certainly been rampant since. I agree entirely with part of Holland's comment, “What is so remarkable about Titania's night with Bottom is not a subdued, suppressed sexual bestiality that has only been properly uncovered in the twentieth century but rather the innocence which transforms something that might so easily have been full of animal sexuality into something touchingly naïve” (73); but the “sexual bestiality” seems to me not so much “properly uncovered” as untimely ripped. Such explicit eroticism is distinct from bawdy, a wholly different and typically comic and Shakespearean way of mediating sexuality in art. Titania says presumably with reference to the dewfall that “The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye, / And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, / Lamenting some enforced chastity” (3.1.198-200). This is not a proclamation of celibacy but neither is it of sex at any price: it explicitly deplores sex by force. In a recent RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, by something of a compromise Bottom and Titania, in decorous, half-dressed semi-private, copulated modestly and traditionally in the “missionary position,” in a huge, inverted umbrella.²⁵

It seems worth noting a quite different form of conceit in a glancing sally of ecclesiastical satire, or witticism without the satire, in Quince's exclamation, “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated” (3.1.118-19), from one sort of ass to another, as it were. This must have been accompanied by Quince's making the sign of the cross, and it quite possibly carried an allusion to a bishop's mitre and episcopal “translation” from see to shining see. Robin also uses the word in “I … left sweet Pyramus translated there” (3.2.31-32).

Bottom rises to the requirements of his courtly translation and himself practices noblesse oblige, the particular form of socially benevolent behavior that Helena speaks for more generally as “manners,” a value well above the “honor” of the infatuated young men and their brash devotion to their mistress Helena, and correspondingly harsh rejection of their sometime favorite, Hermia. Perhaps partly because the idea of “manners” has contracted from a stronger moral purport to something close to mere etiquette, it tends to be not much noticed in Dream, but, as already noted in connection with Theseus, it is certainly there and important, to Shakespeare as to his characters and some of his contemporaries. Bottom is at his gracious best as an ideal courtier translated favorite of the fairy queen (3.1, 4.1), and she is not wholly fool to find him “as wise as thou art beautiful” (3.1.148)—in manners, if not to the unbiased eye.²⁶ Titania tells her fairy courtiers to “Be kind and courteous to this gentleman” and “do him courtesies” (164, 174), and Bottom responds in kind with genial humor as he learns the fairies' names (179-96). And so he continues in 4.1 until he has “an exposition of sleep come upon me” (39), when the court fairies leave and Titania ends their dialogue with “Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. / … O how I love thee! How I dote on thee!” (40-45). The lack of stage directions at this point might be taken as performance latitude if not license for licentiousness. But both Q1 and F have Oberon present “behind” (i.e., “unseen,” eds.) for the entire action, which could hardly pass uninterrupted if it were played as in some recent productions and Oberon were truly “jealous Oberon.” After Titania's last line, both she and Bottom inferentially now sleeping, Oberon bids “Welcome, good Robin. Seest thou this sweet sight? / Her dotage now I do begin to pity” (46-47).

DREAM AS MORE THAN DREAM

The manifold ramifications of literary and figurative dream in Dream have understandably occupied the attention and sometimes obsessed the imagination of theatrical and academic exponents alike, often with a regrettable suppressing of the play's socioethical implications. That these were important to Shakespeare is evident in the emphasis they receive in Dream, comic at one end of the aesthetic scale in Bottom's delightful attempt, like Christopher Sly's, to rise to the greatness thrust upon him; serious at the other end to the point of—near—deadly earnest in the discord between the lovers. Helena as sentient victim is one of Shakespeare's most persuasive spokespersons for the theme:

HELENA.
If you were civil and knew courtesy,
You would not do me thus much injury. …
If you were men, as men you are in show,
You would not use a gentle lady so.

(3.2.147-48, 151-52)

The sentiment is significant enough—as well as dramatically pertinent and compelling—to be repeated, still more plaintively and with a keen sense of the modes of mockery, when Helena includes her dearest, oldest friend Hermia:

If you have any pity, grace, or manners,
You would not make me such an argument.

(3.2.241-42)

What is said here is—again—socially important, unequivocal, and psychologically and philosophically true, not less now than in Shakespeare's day. To bury such humane and ethical sentiments in stage business, gender psychology, and mesmerism is to maim the play and abuse the audience and its civil culture simultaneously.

Demetrius remarks that “It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream” (4.1.193-94); and the lovers' experience, including Titania's and Bottom's, is very dreamlike, whereas much of the play's internal experience is less so, even as it centers on the fairies. And yet. Bottom's dream “hath no bottom” because he hath it, for good and always.

BLESS THEE, AEGEUS, BLESS THEE, THOU ART TRANSLATED; OR WHENCE AND WHITHER A PATERNAL SENEX IRATUS AND A PANTALOON?

Disappearing without a trace in act 4, Egeus by his incorrigible irritability and intolerance would seem to have written himself out of the script before the matrimonial action of act 5 (in Q1), pronouncing his own epitaph, in effect, with his terminal Shylock-like, epizeuxis-laden lines calling for “the law, the law upon his [Lysander's] head,” etc. (4.1.154-59). Among important recent editions, only the Oxford and Norton Complete Works, and the Oxford/World's Classics single-play text, replace Q1's act-5 Philostrate with F's Egeus and give some of Theseus' Q1 lines to Lysander (F).²⁷ The reasons were critical judgment and a belief that Folio changes represent Shakespearean revision, especially if they seem to have a theatrical orientation.²⁸ The scholarly consensus (both Oxfords included) is that Q1 (1600) derives from autograph foul papers, whereas F derives from Q2 (the 1619 reprint disguised as “1600”) to some extent collated with and reflecting the promptbook, “the source for many of F's substantive variants from Q” (279). William B. Long, Randall McLeod, and others have argued that the playbook of Shakespeare's day was nothing like so orderly and consistent as Greg's and textual posterity's theoretical “prompt-book,” an entity of importance in modern theatrical practice (see, e.g., Maguire 23 f. and Long 125-43). “If a rule is needed for judging what happened to a playwright's manuscript in the theater, it should be, ‘as little as possible’” (Long 127); and only as much as was essential to clarify performance.

There is no very specific evidence for dating act 5 changes involving Egeus and Lysander. F's act divisions postdate 1609;²⁹ the F stage direction, “‘Tawyer with a Trumpet before them’” (5.1.125.1/TLN 1924), probably “originated in a relatively late revival,” since there is no known record of Tawyer “(presumably William)” before 1624.³⁰ Yet Taylor argues for other Folio variants:

Some of these clearly originate in the prompt-book; others are clearly necessary; others involve the alteration of Q readings which seem acceptable to a casual or even an alert reader, and which therefore can hardly have originated in the whims of an unassisted printing-house ‘editor’. Without strong evidence to the contrary, one must therefore assume that the prompt-book is the authority for all added or substantially altered Folio directions and speech-prefixes. Some of these variants might derive from late revivals, over which Shakespeare had no control; but none certainly do, and only the act divisions and Tawyer's name can be confidently associated with performances later than those in the mid 1590s. Although each direction has been considered on its merits, we have found no reason to doubt that the bulk of the Folio directions represent the play as originally and authoritatively staged. Those directions which clearly envisage a different staging from that implied by Q seem to us to be dramatic improvements for which Shakespeare was probably responsible.

(279-80)

This is a good example of what appears to be the Folio bias in action and effect. If there were no such bias, one might expect the practice described above to be reversed, thus: “Although each [F variant] has been considered on its merits, we have found no reason to doubt that the bulk of the [Q1] directions represent the play as originally and authoritatively staged”—or at least authoritatively conceived and composed, since authority qualifies conception and composition better than it can qualify staging as such. Such quartos as Q1 are (and historically were) certainly—as well as by definition—closer to their authorial origins than was “the prompt-book,” a playbook of usually mixed authority lying somewhere between holograph and F. From his study of manuscript playbooks of the period, in this case especially John a Kent and John a Cumber, William B. Long concludes,

On the basis of this earliest surviving example, the difference between the literary document—the fair copy of the play manuscript sold to the company by a fledgling playwright nevertheless aware of an ongoing theatrical tradition—and the theatrical document—the play as adapted to playing needs by the company—was merely seven short annotations indicating how few markings a given company felt it necessary to employ in its playbook.

(139-40)

Critical judgment of variants is not easily separated from assumptions or inferences about their origin, and these work in a circle—hermeneutic, not necessarily vicious: if the F variants are thought superior, they must have come from an authoritative source. Since it has been demonstrated that F was set from Q2 (1619), the ultimate source of “Shakespearean” alterations had to be “the prompt-book,” from which details were copied into the copy of Q2. It seems likely that such details were copied from the promptbook, but it seems quite as likely—even more likely, to my way of thinking—that some changes made in Q2 between 1619 and 1623 reflected evolving theatrical practice unconnected with Shakespeare. If so, which changes were Shakespeare's?

Since there is no apparent theatrical reason for Egeus to replace Philostrate—the same actor could have played both parts without altering the script³¹—the purpose must have been to bring back and reconcile Egeus, who otherwise disappears in act 4, very like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice—dismissed to unhappiness, as it were. Holland notes that “audiences are unlikely to object if Egeus proves to be the person at court who fulfills that role [of Master of Revels], as in Bill Alexander's 1986 production” (267-68). Alexander went only half way, however; he rejected F's Lysander and “retained the quarto's assignment to Theseus of V.i.44-60” (Halio 82). And “audiences are unlikely to object” is not compelling: is it a reason for making a change? Of course, Egeus' newly and miraculously congenial and solicitous presence can be defended thematically, socially, structurally, symbolically, and otherwise as necessary and transcendently fulfilling, supremely imaginative, and therefore profoundly Shakespearean: nothing comes easier than symmetry, sentiment, and sophistry. Less grandly, it ties up loose ends and satisfies supposed audience expectations or desires—good enough theatrical and commercial reasons for making changes, but slight and arbitrary in this instance.

In F these perfunctory changes of speech assignment could have been made by virtually anyone—especially incompletely (one of the six speeches is still Philostrate's in F at 5.1.76). Shakespeare's complicity cannot in reason be forced much further than Brooks's description of a “change Shakespeare cannot have wished for, though he might acquiesce in it as an expedient” (xxxii). Even if Shakespeare made the change—how shall we know?—he must have done so mechanically and in haste, altering nothing for sense or consonance, merely reassigning speeches. This is hardly what one would expect of the author of the inferred addition of the poet to the company of the lover and madman in Theseus' great setpiece, or of any other addition or revision with content enough to evaluate. In short, there seems no reason to dignify such “revision” by finding Shakespeare guilty of it. It should be axiomatic that a “revision” anyone could execute—above all a cut but any purely mechanical change as well—not only need not but should not be assigned to Shakespeare—or to any other playwright—without strong positive reasons.

The respective stage directions are

• Enter Theseus, Hyppolita, and Philostrate. Q1, TLN 1736
• Enter Theseus, Hippolita, Egeus and his Lords. F, TLN 1792

The sole business assuredly Shakespeare's is Q1's, which opens with a subscene's intimate conversation between Theseus and Hippolyta that Philostrate need not overhear even if “present” for 1-27.

Replying to Theseus' enquiry, Philostrate (or Egeus) says, “There is a brief how many sports are ripe. / Make choice of which your Highness will see first” (42-43). This has no stage direction in Q1 and needs none; it has none in F, which could well use something to explain how not Theseus, to whom the brief is offered (Q1), but Lysander (Lis. F), comes to read the titles of the entertainments, with Theseus responding only with a comment on each. In Q1 Theseus both reads the title and makes the comment, which has obvious stageworthiness and makes sense of Philostrate's presentation lines. Theseus is the ruler, after all. Here Brooks follows Q1 but the Oxford et al. follow F. Holland explains,

While some commentators have worried why Lysander should be given the task, whether Philostrate has had his place usurped or has turned away in a huff, and whether the hierarchies and niceties of court behaviour have been disrupted, the dialogue certainly works more effectively when split between Lysander and Theseus, involving one more character in the action.

(265)

Whether F's version works more effectively depends very much upon what confidence and ingenuity are invested in performance, but it seems quite as gratuitous as the reassignment of Philostrate's lines to Egeus. There is no cogent explanation available for either and not much to be said for them in effect, whatever may be said of them in theory, so there is little reason to think they are Shakespeare's. Instances of virtually certain Shakespearean revision there are, Theseus' setpiece poet probably prominent among them.³² But it requires no strain to conclude that there was less Shakespearean revision than has recently been asserted.

THE EPILOGUE OF PUCK AND ROBIN

These are one and the same fairy with the significant but long-neglected difference that “Puck” is a Puck, a species of fairy.³³ In Dream he is identified for us first by a nameless fairy as “that shrewd and knavish sprite / Call'd Robin Goodfellow” (2.2.33-34), very likely a propitiatory name.³⁴ The fairy adds, “Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, / You do their work, and they shall have good luck. / Are not you he?” General awareness of the distinction considerably postdated Katharine Briggs's Anatomy of Puck (1959). Both “Puck” and “Robin” occur together as speech headings (with and without abbreviation) in the earliest editions (Qq, F), but “Puck” has been the received normalization. Only recently has “Robin” become the normalized—unambiguous—speech heading, in the Oxford (and Norton) editions. “Puck” may well survive, however, since it is traditional and everyone knows who is intended: though there are many fairies in Dream, there is only one Puck.³⁵

Shakespeare sometimes seems to mark by name the changing faces and functions of this character obedient to the letter of command but mischief-loving most of the time, who is thoroughly benign in the terminal couplet of the Epilogue, but with darker edges and affinities manifested here and there before. In 3.2, for example, Oberon bids “Robin, overcast the night,” and “The starry welkin cover thou anon / With drooping fog as black as Acheron” (355-57). “Puck” (his speech heading in Qq, F) replies,

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For Night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger,
At whose approach, ghosts, wand'ring here and there,
Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone.
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They willfully themselves exile from light,
And must for aye consort with black-brow'd Night.

(3.2.378-87)

From this poetical digression into the world of Hamlet or Macbeth he is quickly recalled by Oberon's reminder that “we are spirits of another sort.” “Puck” assumes the darker character again and flirts with a pre-Gothic genre when he enters, alone, after the lovers have gone to bed, beginning, “Now the hungry lion roars,” and going on to other gloomy and chilling “Now” events in

Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide,

a deliberate, spine-tingling, ghost-story warmup (371-82) before he modulates to “we fairies … / Now are frolic” and his present office: “I am sent with broom before / To sweep the dust behind the door” (390).

Is anything to be made of the separate names and designations? Is the Puck a sinister species given to recalcitrance at best, and Robin an exceptional member with a better nature made evident as such by the use of his name? Or to put that differently, is anything to be made of the uses of “his” multiple names in the play—in the text, the stage directions, and the speech headings? Brooks notes that the “most striking variations [in speech-prefixes] are between ‘Puck’ and some version of ‘Robin Goodfellow’. These can readily be understood as corresponding each to the aspect of the character then uppermost in Shakespeare's mind” (xxiv). This plausible and intelligent interpretation may well be right. His detailed “explanation of how they came to alternate in the Q1 text” (xxiv-v) distinguishes between “Puck” as Oberon's messenger and “Robin” as the mischief-maker “acting on his own initiative.”

I am inclined to see (the) “Puck” as having the darker nature, “Robin” as the more sociable. But the distribution of names in Dream does not seem to support the distinction (or Brooks's). The names occur in dialogue only nine times. In stage directions and speech headings they distribute pretty much—not by formes but—by the printer's sheet in Q1, with “Robin” in sheets B, D, and F; and “Puck” in C and E.³⁶ Uses in the dialogue are not much more evidently deliberate except in the Epilogue.

There has been no grave harm done in normalizing to “Puck” (or “Robin”) throughout, but doing so—like normalizing to the personal name “Othello” or “Shylock”—obscures a distinction and a conjunction that the inconsistent speech-headings of the early editions emphasize, presumably inadvertently: the identity of the individual and the anomaly of the group (“Moor,” “Jew,” “Puck”). Shakespeare himself seems to use both in close proximity and interchangeably but for the meter: “Welcome, good Robin. Seest thou this sweet sight?” (4.1.45/TLN 1513), where “Puck” would be unmetrical; “And, gentle Puck, take this transformed scalp” (63/1531), where either name could be used, depending upon “transforme/'d.”³⁷ In that context both names have a positive valence, even if “good” is mainly phatic and “gentle” reflects status more than behavior (oxymoronically), itself as much phatic as flattering.

In any case, editorial normalizing and a sense of the interchangeability of names seem to have prevented readers from noting the Epilogue's—differential—use of both names. The stage direction says “Enter Pucke,” and “Pucke”—5.1.370.1-71/TLN 2080-81, H3v—speaks the “prologue” to the fairies' song and dance; but “Robin”—l. 423/2133, H4—speaks the Epilogue.³⁸ Whether these differential speech headings represent deliberate division of character is doubtful, but in the Epilogue the use of both names appears to make a significant distinction between a threatening generic Puck and the obliging individual Robin. As “an honest Puck”—the Real Thing—the first appeals for “unearned luck / Now to scape the serpent's tongue” (432-33), promising “amends ere long” (434) if favored (cf. 2.1.32-43); but at the same time slyly threatens with “Else the Puck a liar call” (435), a very imprudent thing to do. After the Puck-in-effect concludes his part with “So, goodnight unto you all,” by contrast, Robin-in-effect adds a genial terminal couplet, “Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends” (437-38)—a clear advance from “amends ere long” (434).

It is no accident that the Epilogue, characteristically (for fairies) in heptasyllabics, opens with a falling rhythm in a trochaic-tetrameter couplet, and closes with a rising rhythm in an iambic-tetrameter couplet. The only other variation is an iambic-tetrameter line (431) beginning what is in effect the second octave. The first octave is impersonal and collective (beginning “we shadows”), and asks the “Gentles” to “think but this,” that they have been asleep and dreaming; and “not [to] reprehend” a “theme / … yielding but a dream” (427-28).³⁹ It concludes equally generally, “If you pardon, we will mend” (430). Then the second octave turns personal with “I … an honest Puck” and “me” (Puck and/or Robin), and the semi-formal “Gentles” gives way to “if we be friends” (437), audience and Robin together. One takes “me” to be “Robin” exclusively, because he is named in the next, last line; but the point seems to be that the audience's giving their hands brings out the reciprocating Robin in the Puck. Anyhow, all are one in this conclusion.

Perhaps a pause cueing applause was intended or practiced between “So goodnight unto you all”—which has a terminal ring—and the closing couplet, “Give me your hands,” which is affably forthcoming—and does mean “applaud,” of course, the practical purport of all epilogues. But here the phrase must surely have been intended also to initiate hand-shaking. It is used in that way by Shakespeare many times with “hand” and four to six other times with “hands.” Nearest in sense is Julius Caesar with Brutus' “Give me your hands all over, one by one” (2.1.112); and The Tempest, where Alonso says to Ferdinand and Miranda, “Give me your hands. / Let grief and sorrow still embrace his heart / That doth not wish you joy!” (5.1.213-15).⁴⁰ The gesture of taking hands is exactly right for Robin here, and it must have been the business of public performance in Shakespeare's day, when “the crowd of ‘understanders’” would be “jostling alongside the amphitheatre platforms” (Gurr 179). With an elevated platform like the new Bankside Globe's, the natural action accompanying the lines would be the speaker's bending or kneeling to take the hands of spectators closest to the platform, whether right to right hand or, more likely, one by each hand, two by two.

“At the end” of Brook's Dream, “Puck and all his colleagues deliberately broke the magic—the magic created by theatre—by advancing into the audience on his final lines … and shaking hands with everyone they could reach. But of course such a tactic subtly continues the magic as well, making it linger in a way analogous to Puck's last speech, which both breaks and extends the illusion” (Dawson 24-25). The notion that all Puck does is invite applause is so deeply ingrained that no one seems to have remarked that Brook in effect rediscovered and elaborated on what must have been the original design, though Trewin comes close: “Puck, in his last two lines, … is inviting applause. Peter Brook interpreted the first words literally: his Puck (John Kane) jumped from the stage and came through the house, shaking hands left and right, the rest of the company at his heels. That was, and is, a fitting end to A Midsummer Night's Dream: all, on stage or off, must be at peace beneath the visiting moon” (105).

Such an “interactive” gesture, rather Michelangelic, makes an energetic kindred connection between the persons in and of the theater, and symbolically between the dramatic “shadows” brought together by the play for communal performance: of roles on the stage by players, and understanding and appreciation—their roles—off the stage by audience and spectators—for we too are shadows as such stuff as dreams—including this one—are made on, whose own little lives are rounded with a sleep. The script itself, itself shared, is the shadow of dialogue passing from actor to auditor and spectator, and through author, scribe, and printer (and editor) to reader: withal from poet-playwright to admirers of his making.

Notes

1. Or perhaps “Like.” G. K. Hunter: “The question that is central to my discussion is … less ‘what is this play about?’ than ‘what is this play like?’” (5). Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed.; and italics used for emphasis within quotations are mine unless otherwise specified. For familiarity's sake, I refer to Robin Goodfellow as “Puck” throughout.

2. Dent, “Imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” 129; Kott, “Titania and the Ass's Head,” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, published in Poland in 1961 as Szkice o Szekspirze, in the U.S. in English in 1964, 175.

3. The two influenced each other, Brook through his 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, Kott by his book and through personal association. See Brook's Preface.

4. This is not meant to imply that there were not many—sometimes egregious—departures in preceding centuries, especially in production, on which see Halio, chs. 1-2.

5. The most substantial survey of contemporary thinking is to be found in Wells and Taylor's indispensable Textual Companion; see the condensed “Summary of Control-Texts,” 145-47; and cf. the introduction to “Shakespeare's Text” in Riverside 55-69.

6. Belittling Theseus goes some way back; cf. even Young 138, 139; he quotes Hippolyta's 5.1.23-27 all or in part 4 times: [vii] epigraph with only 5 lines of Theseus' speech immediately preceding, 8, 140, and 180 as the last 2 lines of his book; since the title is Something of Great Constancy, this is not surprising.

7. Hippolyta has only 1.56٪ of Dream's words by comparison with Theseus' 10٪. Bottom has the highest percentage of all at 12.6 (10.3 as himself and 2.3 as Pyramus); Helena has 11.3 and Oberon 10. These figures should in general surprise no one, since the speakers variously speak best as well as most, except for Hippolyta, whose paucity of dialogue is quite sufficient in quality and content to articulate the queen she is. The use of word counts eliminates the arbitrary disparity between verse and prose arising from “line counts” in editions of different size and design (e.g., quarto vs. folio). Spevack's Concordance provides the data for word counts based on Riverside (1st ed.).

8. See the section of this title and the whole of Cressy's chap. 10 on “Courtship and the Making of Marriage” (233-66).

9. For example, the New Arden and the Oxfords + Norton read antique. Pelican (1959, rev. 1971) and Riverside (1974, 1997) read “antic fables” (anticke F). As OED2 notes, the spelling “antique” was used sometimes (as presumably in Q1) for the different word, “antic” (see both antic and antique).

10. “Wilson showed that if the irregular lines were removed, the text would still make excellent sense. … As W. W. Greg has said, ‘There is no escaping the conclusion that in this we have the original writing, which was supplemented by fresh lines crowded into the margin so that their metrical structure was obscured.’ … The obvious way of accounting for confusions in lineation in the quarto is to suppose that they result from alterations and reworkings made by the author in the course of composition” (Foakes 137).

11. The useful term is Bertrand Evans's.

12. “Several major speeches in this play are important not because they further the action or elaborate a character, but because they represent an explicit verbal development of ideas hinted at in other parts of the play. They are as it were arias in which snatches of melody heard elsewhere are fully developed” (Wells, ed. Dream 24).

13. In two post-1970s productions about a decade apart at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, director Liviu Ciulei did the former (1985) and Joe Dowling the latter (1997).

14. “Rude mechanicals” rather than “hempen homespuns” (both borrowed from Puck) is the form of reference preferred by most contemporary commentators.

15. Might as the third-person subjunctive of may (OED2 v1). The New Variorum Dream records the difficulties of earlier editors with this passage; e.g., Johnson's note begins, “The sense of this passage as it now stands, if it has any sense, is this.” Steevens alone seems to have recognized the wordplay, which has persistently gone unnoticed: “‘In might’ is, perhaps, an elliptical expression for what might have been” (210). It is apt and usual to gloss by the proverb, “To take the will for the deed” and “Everything is as it is taken” (Tilley, Dent, W393).

16. Demetrius' “No wonder, my lord; one lion may [speak], when many asses do” (153-54) works as a joke fitting the ineptitude rather than as a snide judgment on the men playing their parts. It has been suggested that Moon is distraught by the courtiers' comments (232-45) and shows it when to Lysander's “Proceed, Moon” he replies, obligingly, “All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon, I the man i' th' moon, this thorn-bush my thorn-bush, and this dog my dog” (257-59). He certainly could be played distraught, but at the expense of the manifest comic design, where the jokes and sociability, not the personal feelings of the player, are consistently foregrounded.

17. Notable exchanges and speeches by or about Oberon in this connection are 2.1.18-80, 118-47, 175-85; 3.2.374-77; 4.1.45-63, 70-82, 84-90 (87: “Now thou and I are new in amity”).

18. In slanted productions Oberon tends to wax stentorian at every opportunity given or taken, partly on the hint, no doubt, of Puck's telling a fairy that “The King doth keep his revels here to-night; / Take heed the Queen come not within his sight; / For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,” etc. (2.1.18-31). Puck's hyperbolical description expresses his swaggering for effect.

19. Neither “mistress” nor “love” implies coition; the case on this evidence is one of courtly courtship.

20. Greenblatt's reading differs: “Oberon and Titania have, we learn, long histories of amorous adventures; they are aware of each other's wayward passions; and, endowed with an extraordinary eroticizing rhetoric, they move endlessly through the spiced, moonlit night” (Norton 810-11). The character with a long history of amorous adventures is Theseus, four of whose liaisons are mentioned by Oberon (Perigenia, Aegles, Ariadne, and Antiopa; 2.1.77-80) in reproaching Hippolyta for her love of Theseus. Hippolyta and Antiopa are plainly differentiated here, but they were alternative names of the same Amazon, Antiopa/e the more common.

21. I saw it on 22 May. As an exuberant adaptation, it was arguably closer to the spirit—and therefore to the original letter—of Dream than many a recent “production.” Bottom also played electric bass in the rock group providing the music, the “Hempen Homespuns.”

22. The orchestra in ancient Greek and Greece was a dancing place. Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, in rhyme royal like Orchestra, also was printed in 1594.

23. Heptasyllabics are a distinctive verse-form of the fairies in Dream (though Puck usually speaks in pentameters) and of the Shakespearean Weïrd Sisters (but not Hecate) in Macbeth, among other uses. It has been written that “the brief waves of verse in other meters” than blank verse “serve mainly to change the rhythm or to provide a verse mode more appropriate for certain kinds of characters. The fairies … signal their peculiar status (at least part of the time) through tetrameter couplets” (Wright 114). But (acatalectic, octosyllabic) tetrameters are the exceptions to heptasyllabic lines rather than the rule; and trochaics are still less frequent than occasional iambic tetrameters—e.g., the first two and last two lines of the Epilogue.

    Heptasyllabics have a unique and variously exploitable lilt, and they are perhaps the most sense-enforcing kind of verse: the lines are almost invariably regular and the stresses especially serviceable in forcing the sense(s) and emphases intended. But most of Shakespeare's verse, including his blank verse, expresses its intended sense partly through meter, so it is a mistake to decide upon the sense and rhetoric of the words before entertaining the meter's dictates. This is one reason why it is useful for actors to understand versification—not technically, but functionally and semantically.

24. Demetrius' waking declaration of love for Helena (3.2.137-44) is similar to Lysander's (2.2.102-05, 111-22) and is taken so by Helena, but this is part of the (not uneasy) comedy of mistaken identity at midplay: “There's no art / to find the mind's construction in the face” (Macbeth 1.4.11-12)—or in the amatory utterance.

25. Dir. Adrian Noble, 1994-95; I saw it at the RST on 25 August 1994. In the 1970s a tergo became fashionable in productions of Jacobean tragedy, especially The Changeling.

26. Greenblatt finds him “the most flatulently absurd of the mechanicals” (Norton 807).

27. The F-based New Variorum Dream reads likewise.

28. So far as I know, no one has made a strong case for the changes. Oxford cites Barbara Hodgdon's “Gaining a Father” as making a critical case for following F with Egeus, but her case is mainly rhetorical. She dismisses Brooks's thoughtful argument in favor of Q1's Philostrate as “mask[ing] only slightly the subjectivity of equating Shakespeare's wishes with his own; I would counter his argument by noting that rejections of the Folio variants as theatrical expediency are themselves speculative” (535). She handles the awkwardness of Egeus as “our usual manager of mirth” by saying that, “since Theseus asks four questions in rapid succession, all of which have to do with the evening's entertainment, it is most unlikely that an audience will pick up on only one and thus question Philostrate's absence. Even if they do, the inconsistency is of a kind Shakespeare is all too famous for elsewhere” (538).

29. “The King's men appear not to have made use of such intervals before about 1609 (see Taylor, ‘The Structure of Performance’)” (Textual Companion 279b).

30. Textual Companion 279b; if “Tawyer” came so late, why not Egeus and Lysander? “William Tawyer, as we know from the record of his burial [‘June 1625, at St. Saviour's, Southwark’], was ‘Mr. Heminges man’” (Brooks xxx). Extrapolating backward by way of Heminges, who was associated with Shakespeare's company from 1594 on, Berger infers that “Tawyer and his trumpet … could have been added at any time after the composition of the foul papers in the mid-1590s” (xi), whenever he was old enough, but we do not know when he was born.

31. And “Assertions that” the change “was made for reasons of doubling are unfounded and implausible” (Textual Companion 285a, 5.1.0.1/1700.1n).

32. Recent writings on revision are by now legion, among the seminal works being those by Warren (1978), Urkowitz (1980), the collection edited by Taylor and Warren (1983), and Ioppolo (1991).

33. In “All we like sheep …” elsewhere in this collection Susan Snyder includes consideration of Puck/Robin as an editorial problem in deciding how to designate characters in speech headings and stage directions.

34. Used in full otherwise only—and curiously, given its unnecessary length, which seems not likely to be authorial—in Q1 SDs (2.1.0.1/TLN 367, 3.2.0.1/988, and 4.1.45.1/1512).

35. “Robin Goodfellow, hobgoblins and pucks all belonged to the same group [genus?] of fairies. … Scot [Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584] lists all three as distinct and separate types of ‘bug[bear]s’” (Holland 35).

36. Spellings vary: “Pu,” “Puck,” and “Pucke”; and “Ro,” “Rob,” “Robi,” and “Robin.” All could be Shakespearean. Some are instances of “decremental repetition,” which occurs also in the Shakespearean pages of the MS of Sir Thomas More (see Clayton, “Today” 67, 73).

37. The word occurs with both 'd and ed pronunciations in Shakespeare.

38. Cf. Brooks: at 5.1.371 “on his mission as Oberon's and the fairies' harbinger, he enters and speaks as ‘Puck’; but he addresses the audience in the Epilogue in the folk-lore character familiar to them: the epilogue prefix is Robin, and the last line promises: ‘Robin shall restore amends.’ Yet in the course of his address he has called himself ‘the Puck’ and ‘an honest Puck’ (l. [431]). By this time, no doubt, both appellations, ‘Robin’ and ‘Puck’, were always present in Shakespeare's mind” (xxv).

39. No one seems to gloss “theme,” but perhaps it is not superfluous to give OED2 1b: “A subject treated by action (instead of by discourse, etc.); hence, that which is the cause of or for specified action, circumstance, or feeling; matter, subject. Obs.”—and note that the first examples are from Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus 5.2.80 (“See heere he comes, and I must play my theame”); and Hamlet. “Hamlet. Why I will fight with him vppon this Theme” (5.1.289) and “Queen. “Oh my sonne, what Theame? Hamlet. I lou'd Ophelia [etc.].”

40. The other plurals of the kind are Richard II 3.3.202 and The Taming of the Shrew 2.1.318. Two misleading “concordance cousins” are Henry VI, Part 3, 4.6.38 and The Two Noble Kinsmen 5.3.109; in these the speaker asks for the hands of two in order to join them together (Henry VI to Warwick and Clarence, Theseus to Emily and Arcite).

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