[In the following essay, Ramsey examines the scenic structure in A Midsummer Night's Dream, maintaining that it expresses diversity and opposition, and yet it also emphasizes harmony and integration. According to the critic, the scenic structure ultimately underscores the play's dual themes of the power of love and the power of imagination.]

The history of interpretation, and misinterpretation, of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream demonstrates more strikingly than that of most works a deep truth of literary history: changes in critical fashion, changes in the theory of literature and in approaches to particular literary works, virtually alter those works themselves. Criticism shapes our fundamental responses to the works of art it contemplates. Whatever Iliad we hear, it surely is not the poem Homer sang.

In our time we have come increasingly to accept the idea, notably articulated by T. S. Eliot and Northrop Frye, that the “primary context” of any individual work of literature is other literature, that all literature—not just that we call neoclassical—is inherently and inescapably traditional. We are also beginning to see that criticism itself is an intrinsic part of this “primary context,” that the history of literature is deeply interfused with the history of interpretation. Thus the Aeneid, as well as growing out of the Iliad, also recoils upon it. Virgil is involved in an act of criticism as well as an act of creation. Criticism, hardly less than creation itself, is a consequence of and gives expression to our deepest needs—needs that are often unacknowledged. Euripides could not write plays like Sophocles any more than he could accept Homer's gods. The Middle Ages had to moralize Ovid. Shakespeare's plays will mean what we need them to mean.

The Midsummer Night's Dream we see and study today is, in an almost literal sense, not the play Coleridge saw and studied, not the play Johnson saw and studied, perhaps not even the play Shakespeare wrote. My point is not simply that modern criticism of A Midsummer Night's Dream differs from that of earlier periods. We expect that. The point I want to stress is that the differences are more striking in the case of this play and therefore that a consideration of it may have much to tell us about the way we think critically today; certainly as much as the way we think critically today has to tell us about A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It might be imprudent to claim that today's audiences enjoy A Midsummer Night's Dream more than audiences of previous eras, but it does seem clear that today's scholars and critics—and teachers—pay it far more attention. We do know that a shrewd member of one audience three centuries ago could not enjoy it. On Michaelmas Day in 1662 Samuel Pepys wrote this comment in his diary:

To the King's Theatre, where we saw “Midsummer Night's Dream,” which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, and which was all my pleasure.

To give Pepys and the play their due, we can assume that he is likely to have witnessed a very uninspired and truncated version. But a century and a half later we can catch an unquestionably great Shakespearean critic—Coleridge, discussing the dating and sequence of the plays—observing that A Midsummer Night's Dream “hardly appeared to belong to the complete maturity of his genius” because when writing that comedy Shakespeare was “ripening his powers” for such works as Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. As late as 1951, in a standard Introduction to Shakespeare, one could find the then still fairly common opinion that the play was mostly a glittering fabric of “moonlight, with a touch of moonshine.” But by 1961, in an essay provocatively entitled “The Mature Comedies,” Frank Kermode was “prepared to maintain that A Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's best comedy.”

If we take A Midsummer Night's Dream more seriously than former eras did, it is partly because the idea of comedy, the genre itself, is now taken more seriously. (The same point might be made about romance and about pastoral, the other genres most prominent in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) We have begun to glimpse the profound suggestiveness lurking in Socrates' oracular assertion, made in the presence of the drowsy Aristophanes at the close of Plato's Symposium, that the genius of comedy and the genius of tragedy is the same. So in our time we find Northrop Frye perceiving a ritual pattern of death-and-resurrection lying behind both comedy and tragedy, and thence arguing that two things follow from this: “first, that tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy; second, that comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself.”

Such arguments are briefs for the parity of comedy and tragedy, not their identity. The genius of comedy and tragedy may be the same, they may be equally serious or equally profound, but their forms, their characteristic structures, will be different. The comic muse and the tragic muse dance to different rhythms. So Frye and modern critics like him stress the shape, the characteristic movement, of each genre: whereas the characteristic movement of tragedy is toward isolation, they theorize, that of comedy is toward integration. C. L. Barber describes “saturnalian” movement in Shakespearean comedy, a movement “through release to clarification.” Frye, in “The Argument of Comedy,” an account now so famous as to have become a shibboleth, speaks of Shakespeare's “drama of the green world” and defines the archetypal pattern of that drama as one of “withdrawal and return”: the characteristic action of a Shakespearean comedy, Frye hypothesizes, “begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” Perhaps the common thread in such theories is a willingness to take seriously the wish-fulfillment pattern of all comedy. Comedy may only present the “beautiful lie,” but for all our cynicism and secularism there is something in each of us that wants to believe in those happy endings. What the modern theorists of comedy are finally claiming is that the comic muse responds to the renewing cycles of time, and so refreshes time.

What of the structure of this particular comedy? I will suggest that the elements of external form in A Midsummer Night's Dream correspond to its internal elements, that the play's structure is precisely commensurate with its argument, that its shape is its vision. The play's “scenic” structure articulates its thematic design. (By “scene” I mean a formal unit that is both dramatic and spatial.) What we shall find, if we examine the scenic structure of this play, is that the organization of scenes—the juxtaposition and interplay of scenes, the movement between and through them—is everywhere expressive of diversity and variety and opposition, and yet at the same time paradoxically everywhere expressive also of harmony and concord and integration; that is, everywhere expressive of the play's twin themes, the power of love and the power of the imagination.

In focusing on the scenic structure of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I am following out the implications of a suggestion made by Madeleine Doran, who reminds us that the original quarto was not divided into acts and scenes. Taking the quarto as the authoritative text and taking a clear stage to represent a change of scene, Doran concludes that there are only seven scenes in the whole play (no other play by Shakespeare has so few scenes). According to Doran's scheme, the play begins and ends, respectively, with two scenes outside the wood (the same two, but in reverse order). Podlike, these first two and last two scenes enclose the core of the play, the three scenes in the wood. If we place the first and last scenes in the court of Theseus, and the second and sixth somewhere inside Athens where Peter Quince and his crew of patches can rehearse (possibly Quince's house), we could diagram the play's scenic structure like this: T;Q// W, W, W //Q;T. Such a scheme crystallizes the fundamental thrust of the play. Thus anatomized, there can be little doubt that its central action is the movement into and out of the wood. Such a scheme also crystallizes our awareness that there are three major domains within the play: the play occurs in three places only, occupies only three landscapes. Each of these three landscapes constitutes what might be called a separate “world.” Such talk of “worlds” seems more persuasive than usual because it is solidly rooted in the spatial and dramatic facts of the play's setting and organization. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, there is the world of the court, presided over by Theseus; there is the world of the hardhanded amateur actors, presided over by Peter Quince (this second world, like the first, is inside Athens); and there is the world of the magical wood, presided over by Oberon (this world is outside Athens and obeys none of its rules). These three places or landscapes, these three separate environments or milieus, constitute three different “worlds” in the sense that each projects different values and styles, each offers a different slice or dimension of experience. These three worlds of the play define three separate aspects of reality; they provide three perspectives on reality. Each world of the play gives “a local habitation and a name” to, a different way of looking at, apprehending, or organizing human experience. Furthermore, the way the play holds these worlds up against each other, makes them balance and mirror and qualify each other, how the play moves between and through these worlds, is at the heart of its comic meaning.

For a brief and partial illustration, observe the movement of the young lovers through these “worlds”: they flee the court or normal world; they enter the wood or “green” world, for them a scene first of confusion, then of resolution; and they finally return to the court where, having been changed, they can be assimilated. Admittedly, this is a rather facile account of the young lovers' experience in the play; experience never reduces itself to a diagram. I ought to indicate that the lovers, after their assimilation into the court world, are entertained by a parody of their incongruous nighttime experience in the wood (one way to take the mechanicals' presentation of the Pyramus and Thisby story). Too, I ought to acknowledge the possibility that the court has changed more than the lovers (all the members of the court did, after all, finally enter the wood), and the possibility that the court—having relaxed its laws and solemnized three weddings—is now free and flexible enough to make room for the young lovers. But even such a facile account can suggest how, by the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the young lovers, having shuttled between worlds, have undergone a change of perspective; and, in contemplating them, so have we. Matters are not so crystal clear as our diagram because the play throughout manifests an extraordinary diversity, but the notion of perspective may help guide us through the diversity. Indeed, I would be willing to maintain that almost everything in this play can be understood as either the comically incongruous clash, or the richly inclusive fusion, of perspectives.

Together, the first three scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream initiate its first major movement—the entrance into the wood. Individually, each scene defines one of the play's major worlds, one of its main perspectives on reality. The opening lines of the first scene quickly reveal an imposing world, the court of Athens. The first nineteen lines of the play introduce many of its most important concerns; these lines suggest what Theseus and his queen are like, and they orient us in the kind of world Theseus inhabits and controls, the kind of perspective he embodies. Theseus and Hippolyta open the play by speaking of their imminent nuptials:

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

Then Theseus instructs his master of revels, Philostrate, to stir the Athenian youth to merriment, to

Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth,
Turn melancholy forth to funerals;
The pale companion is not for our pomp.

After Philostrate exits, Theseus again addresses his Amazon bride-to-be:

Hippolyta, I wooed 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 reveling.

Here in these opening lines we already have the motifs of the moon, desire and dreams, mirth and solemnity. We have a sense of time as both a fructifying and a withering force, as something linked with the rhythms of nature and with the rhythms of human feeling and ceremony. Striking a dominant tone for the whole work, the first line's “nuptial hour” provides an overarching frame, an enveloping action, for the entire play. Partly a Renaissance prince, partly the great hero of antique fables, very much the Theseus of Plutarch and Chaucer, the lord of Athens seems established in these opening lines as a man of action and of reason, of authority and maturity and eloquence, as a figure of measured and civilized dignity. He seems very much in control of his world. Theseus knows what he feels and says what he means. Perhaps what most makes Theseus and Hippolyta imposing here is the cadence of their speech, their poised and urbane idiom. They seem to represent an achieved mastery of experience realized in great magnificence of style.

Here, and in the last scenes of the play too, Theseus is a figure of self-proclaimed potency. Pulsating just under the elegant surface of these first lines are Theseus's assertive energies: he wooed his Amazon queen with his sword, and he can't wait to get her into bed. Control may be less easy than it first appears. Such energies could have a darker, more threatening aspect. They could issue in injuries. In each of the play's first three scenes, we can observe a tendency for irrepressible desires to break out in quarreling or confusion. As modern critics unfailingly point out, these first scenes are haunted by the threat of contention.

Thus, immediately after the opening nineteen lines, Egeus comes in “full of vexation” (1.1.23) and appeals—against his daughter—to “the sharp Athenian law” (1.1.162), which “by no means” may be extenuated, according to Theseus (1.1.117 ff.). What is the “complaint” of Egeus?—simply that Hermia loves someone other than her father's choice. Theseus, less flexible than we might have hoped, leaves the stage ruling that Hermia must accept her father's choice or suffer the penalty of death or “single life.” Within a hundred lines, the court—at first a world ruled by thoughts of an imminent “nuptial hour”—has been revealed as a world inimical to young love, a world with little tolerance for “feigning” love or “feigning” verses (1.1.31). The rest of the play will be required to integrate the young lovers into the court. The rest of this first scene alternates, without resolution, between images of love as special pain (“The course of true love never did run smooth,” line 134) and images of love as special vision (“Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity. / Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” lines 232-34). Let me pause over one image where, as it were, the “pain” and the “vision” come together. I speak of Lysander's description of his plan to flee Athens with Hermia. The urgings of unfulfilled desire drive them out of Athens, one presumes, but an image of beauty and repose—of glittering moonmade reflections—is used to describe the moment of their fleeing; the young lovers intend to flee the city when Phoebe beholds “her silver visage in the wat'ry glass, / Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass” (1.1.209-11). In the image, if not yet in the action, frustration resolves itself into a dew.

From Theseus's court—a stately, aristocratic world of elegance and authority (though a world not yet elastic enough to accommodate the young lovers)—we pass to another, and startlingly different, version of the “normal” or “first” world. Athens is also the domain of Peter Quince and his handicraftsmen. The second scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes us into a more “barren sort” (3.2.13) of world. Quince and his “crew of patches” are “hempen homespuns,” “rude mechanicals” (3.1.74 and 3.2.9). Quince the Carpenter (and playwright), Snug the Joiner, Bottom the Weaver, Flute the Bellows-Mender, Snout the Tinker, and Robin Starveling the Tailor are “hard-handed men” that “never labored in their minds” until their interlude for Theseus's nuptial (5.1.72-75). In their world one must “hold” or “cut bowstrings” (1.2.111). Their language (unlike that of Theseus and Hippolyta or that of Oberon and Titania) consistently betrays disjunctions between intention and expression, fact and idiom. Today's critics see the mechanicals as well-intentioned literalists and stress the parodic value of their failure to comprehend the nature of dramatic illusion. The mechanicals repair plays much as they might repair houses. Quince's hope that “here is a play fitted” (1.2.66)—“Here is the scroll of every man's name which is thought fit, through all Athens, to play in our interlude before the Duke and the Duchess, on his wedding day at night” (1.2.4-7)—receives this judgment from Philostrate in the last scene: “in all the play / There is not one word apt, one player fitted.” Philostrate does admit, however, that he laughed until he cried (5.1.61-70).

Prosaic as the perspective of the mechanicals is, they project a world of sprawling energies. There is something vital about their good will and their rude wit. Like the young lovers, the mechanicals are headed for the wood too, where they expect to “rehearse most obscenely and courageously” (1.2.108). Yet at this point there is a sense in which the mechanicals, compared with the rather stiff, conventional, and undifferentiated lovers of the first scene, convince us that a “paramour” is, indeed, “a thing of naught” (4.2.14). Of course Bottom has his irrepressible desires too—he wants to play every role in Quince's interlude. No one ever had a stronger histrionic appetite than Nick Bottom. In fact, Bottom's irrepressible desires might have led to contentions like those of the first and third scenes (his desires do lead to a modest degree of confusion, one can safely say), if Quince were not able to “manage” his realm better than Theseus does his. Certainly Bottom well deserves the title “my mimic” that Puck gives him (3.2.19).

In a curious sense, Flute's hilarious pronouncement later that Bottom “hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens” (4.2.9-10) does not seem entirely unjustified. In his inadvertent way, Bottom often stumbles into some of the play's most trenchant utterances. In the third act, for example, Bottom tells Titania that she can “have little reason” for loving him and then utters lines that some critics find definitive of the play's theme:

And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity, that some honest neighbors will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.

[3.1.129-33]

In a fine recent essay, J. Dennis Huston has demonstrated that one of Bottom's earliest “gleeks” is one of his most trenchant. When Peter Quince tells Bottom that he is set down for Pyramus, Bottom asks, “What is Pyramus? A lover, or a tyrant?” (1.2.22). Apparently Bottom believes that these two parts, lover and tyrant, subsume all the roles a man could play; curiously enough, as Huston demonstrates, the play's opening scenes suggest that Bottom is virtually correct. Egeus surely acts like a tyrant. The behavior of Oberon and Titania in the next scene to some degree convicts them of the charge of tyranny. If we extend the idea of tyranny to include the caprice of passion's oppressive hold on us when infatuated, then the young lovers tell us something of tyranny too. Perhaps Bottom's query most revealingly recoils upon Theseus himself. Having entered the stage in the first scene as a lover, Theseus leaves it as a tyrant. But Egeus may not be on the stage at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as one of its final delights the play will appear to banish tyranny.

From the homely and literalistic yet strangely life-filled world of the mechanicals, we pass to yet another extraordinarily different scene, the green world of the wood and the exotic perspective of the fairies. Possibly expecting a world of fertility, we find a world of misrule. Oberon and Titania are contentious indeed. Their irrepressible desires for the “sweet” changeling boy have produced the most violent and pervasive disorder of the play, a “distemperature” throughout the natural world. Titania accuses Oberon of love for Hippolyta. Oberon in turn accuses his queen of love for Theseus. Titania's retort to Oberon's charges describes a world upside down, a scene of “brawls,” of the “forgeries of jealousy,” of “contagious fogs,” of flooding rivers, rotting grain, and diseased flocks:

The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
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. …
.....… The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

[2.1.101-17]

The cause of this “progeny of evils,” the “little changeling boy,” seems out of all proportion to the consequences.

The speech in which Titania explains her fervent determination to keep the changeling boy (2.1.121-37) is one of the most elusive and suggestive in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania tells Oberon to set his heart at rest; all fairyland cannot buy the child from her because she felt a deep attachment for his mother. Titania's remembrance of the delicately playful, affectionate relationship she had with the boy's mother seems at first to call up a happier and more perfect world:

His mother was a vot'ress of my order,
And, in the spicèd Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossiped by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking th' embarkèd traders on the flood;
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and swimming gait
Following—her womb then rich with my young squire—
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.

What Titania provides in these lines is a paradigm of visionary perception, a model of how the optics seeing generate the objects seen, a glimpse of poetic consciousness actively at work. Too, like Bottom, Titania and her votaress have rich histrionic sensibilities. Like Bottom, the votaress is a “mimic,” and with her at least imitation becomes transformation. But unlike Bottom, Titania and her votaress cannot be accused of literalness; they laugh all the while. Their visionary consciousness is suffused with self-consciousness.

Perhaps what is most important in Titania's speech is how she subtly, and yet very explicitly, interweaves love and the imagination. She and her big-bellied votaress playfully imagine the ships' sails to be big-bellied: “we have laughed to see the sails conceive / And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind.” The pun here on “conceive” is especially suggestive, and pertinent to the whole play. The lover and the poet both “conceive” a world, bring a world into being; each, being a visionary, returns from the voyage of experience “rich with merchandise.” But at this very moment Titania pulls us up short with what may be the most sobering and poignant lines in the play. Almost with casualness she reveals that this haunted grove is no paradise, reminds us that we inhabit a mutable, indeed a mortal, world. Titania tells the rest of her votaress's story:

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.

For the Renaissance, death is a corollary of the principle of plenitude. A world of growth is a world of change. A fecund world must be a mutable world. Does A Midsummer Night's Dream also hint that the reverse might be true? Is a world without change less fecund? Do Titania and Oberon possibly regret their immutability? Are they, like the Wife of Bath, possibly childless? Does their passionate desire for the changeling boy suggest that the creatures of eternity are in love with time?

In any event, Titania's loving remembrance of her votaress enforces an awareness of the human need to mythologize experience. Oberon continues in the same vein. He provides his own mythological remembrance of the powers of love and the imagination. Immediately after Titania leaves, Oberon asks Puck if he remembers the time

                    I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea maid's music.

[2.2.240-45]

Oberon has given us a compelling image of art making rude nature harmonious. At the same time the image suggests that the source of the harmony—the sea maid's music—was also a source of disruption. What Oberon then saw from his promontory (we are told that Puck could not see it) was Cupid's empurpling of the pansy—“maidens call it love-in-idleness”—with “love's wound” (2.1.155-74). What Oberon saw, in effect, was a myth about the power of love (a myth designed to recall the change of the mulberry from white to crimson in Ovid's account, in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, of the tragic love of Pyramus and Thisby). And just as certain stars shot “madly from their spheres” to hear the mermaid's song, the juice of love-in-idleness, laid upon sleeping eyelids, will make “man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees.” Oberon orders Puck to fetch him this herb, and at this point in the play the invasions of the wood by the Athenians begin.

The rest of the play's movement through this haunted grove will reveal it as simultaneously a scene of confusion and fertility, a place where folly is manifested and constancy is discovered, a place of midsummer madness and magical metamorphoses, of hateful fantasies and most rare visions; the play's movement, all this is to say, will reveal this “green plot” as the natural home of love and the imagination. In these first three scenes, A Midsummer Night's Dream has introduced three distinct realms, each radically different from the others, each thoroughly alive. What is most remarkable of all, by playing these three worlds off against each other, Shakespeare has somehow managed to affirm simultaneously their partialness and their integrity. Somehow the play's embrace of incompleteness assures its coherence. Building better than Peter Quince, Shakespeare “fits” all three worlds together on his stage.

These first three scenes get us into the wood. I would like to focus now on the precise moment when we begin to come back out; and then I would like to discuss the way we come out. The pivotal moment in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the moment where the movement back out of the wood begins, is that wonderful moment—almost a visual oxymoron—where Titania and Bottom embrace and fall asleep in each other's arms. Thoroughly enamored, Titania makes rapturous love to her ass:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
Oh, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

[4.1.43-48]

Shakespeare has indeed made his world “fit” together. This “sweet sight,” as Oberon calls it (4.1.49), is a moment of extreme incongruity, yet also a moment of great inclusiveness. The most diverse, indeed antithetical, perspectives have been fused in this single moment. The wood has done its utmost magic. I find it significant that Titania's language at the moment of her embrace of Bottom echoes precisely that of the earlier moment at the close of the third scene when Oberon had described her bower. Puck has returned with the love-in-idleness, and Oberon declares that he knows where to find Titania:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

[2.1.249-56]

Taken together, these two passages go far toward defining the reconciling and transfiguring power that the wood, at its best, is said to possess. After the pivotal embrace of Titania and Bottom, every Jack can begin to have his Jill (as Puck puts it, 3.2.448 ff.), and “all things shall be peace” (as Oberon puts it, 3.2.370-77). Then, but only then, the play's resolutions begin to occur. After the pivotal embrace, but only after this, a sense of inclusiveness begins to dominate the play. After this, but only after this, Oberon can “begin to pity” Titania's “dotage” (4.1.49 ff.). Now the other members of the court can enter the wood. Now all the sleeping lovers can begin to awaken. Now the play begins to drive toward that great final scene in Theseus's hall where love seems to be the common will.

Fundamentally, we get out of the wood by watching a series of dreaming lovers awaken from their visions. First, right after Titania winds Bottom in her arms, Oberon (he now has the changeling boy) releases the fairy queen from her vision. He and Titania dance, and then the “king of shadows” (3.2.347) declares that he and his queen, now “new in amity,” will “tomorrow midnight” solemnly and triumphantly dance in Duke Theseus's house and “bless it to all fair prosperity”: “There shall the pairs of faithful lovers be / Wedded, with Theseus, all in jollity” (4.1.90-95). At this exact moment the altogether palpable rulers of Athens enter the wood. Theseus and Hippolyta have been engaged in May Day rites, and they have decided to spend the rest of the morning hunting. Anxious to impress Hippolyta, Theseus orders the attendants to uncouple his hounds in the western valley so that his love can hear their “music”:

We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

This prompts Hippolyta to remember some rather spectacular hounds and hunts in her own past:

I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear
With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

Not to be outdone, Theseus makes strong claims for the extraordinary muscularity, and musicality, of his hounds:

My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flewed, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-kneed, and dew-lapped like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tuneable
Was never holloed to, nor cheered with horn,
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly.
Judge when you hear. …

[4.1.112-30]

Theseus must want to convince Hippolyta that he is as physically impressive, as potent, as his hounds. I suspect this passage puzzled many earlier critics, but modern critics exult over these lines as a remarkable illustration of the play's habitual concern to make concordant music out of potential clamor. This talk of the hounds' “sweet thunder” also serves an important structural function. Here in the third scene from the end of the play we have the enactment of a perceptual and poetic activity very similar to that which occurred in the third scene from the beginning of the play; much as the fairy king and queen had done earlier (in 2.1.121-74), the human king and queen are mythologizing experience. It is entirely characteristic of A Midsummer Night's Dream that in one of the passages where the characters most overtly revel in dynamism, the play itself—as an artifact—calls covert attention to its own symmetries.

Theseus and Hippolyta came to the wood to hunt; expecting one kind of “sport,” they find another and better game: they find the four young Athenians. Seeing that the young lovers have now more amicably paired up (“Saint Valentine is past. / Begin these woodbirds but to couple now?”), Theseus wonders, “How comes this gentle concord in the world?” (4.1.142 ff.). None of the four young lovers is able to answer him with confidence. All their replies are full of wonder and amazement. For each of them the visionary experience of the moonlit night in the haunted grove now seems blurred and indistinguishable.

The reply of the one lover most changed during the midsummer night deserves attention. Demetrius confesses that he followed Hermia and Lysander into the wood “in fury,” but he now affirms his love for Helena. Anticipating the exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta at the beginning of the last scene, and echoing Hermia's defiance of her father in the first scene (“I know not by what power I am made bold,” 1.1.59), Demetrius assures Theseus that, no matter how indefinable, something real has happened to him:

… 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. …

Possibly magical, certainly indefinable, but for Demetrius his change of heart seems as natural as growing up. Now that Demetrius has been in the wood, all his faith, all the virtue of his heart, the entire object and pleasure of his eye is “only Helena”; to her

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.

[4.1.163-79]

Does Theseus recognize the power Demetrius speaks of? We can never be certain, but it is at this precise moment that he decides to overbear the will of Egeus; he sets aside the “purposed hunting” and rules that “these couples shall eternally be knit” in the same ceremony with him and Hippolyta (4.1.180-88).

The last “lover” to awaken seems the least touched by his vision. Just when we might have allowed ourselves to believe that the stage had emptied, Bottom—irrepressibly histrionic as always—starts up and cries, “When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer” (4.1.2.3 ff.). At first Bottom does not seem to recall his amorous experience with Titania. Not hearing his next cue, he searches frantically all over the stage for his lost companions. But Bottom has been “translated” (3.1.120), and the “change” (3.1.115) wrought in the haunted grove is too intense for even Bottom to ignore. Glimmerings of remembrance begin to steal over him:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. …

Predictably, Bottom misquotes, but one of his sources here is Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 2:9). Realizing that, we can realize that we have just seen still another of the play's “translations”; we have watched the comically irrepressible slide into the profoundly inexpressible.

Bottom's dream may be too unfathomable to expound, but it seems too rare to waste; so having himself made his dream into “material for a performance,” as Alexander Leggatt puts it, Bottom will give it to Peter Quince as material for a work of art:

I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom's Dream,” because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

Bottom rebounds quickly. He is “a patched fool,” but his vitality is, indeed, bottomless.

After Bottom's momentary uncertainties, we return to the daylight world of Athens. After the brief scene (the sixth in the Doran scheme) of the reunion of Bottom with Quince and the other handicraftsmen, we turn to the poised urbanities of Theseus's famous pronouncement on love and the imagination (5.1.2-22). Bottom and Theseus—so unutterably different, yet so curiously alike. Each has the desire, and the capacity, to play many parts. Each is extraordinarily alive, and yet each achieves a kind of repose—each is, in today's vernacular, “unflappable.” For all that he is “but a patched fool,” Bottom is in some respects a more beguiling interpreter of visionary experience than the rational and detached and self-possessed Duke. Of course Bottom speaks from firsthand experience, whereas the Duke has only been a spectator; but then the Duke may not need magic spells to realize his desires.

Still, for us the Duke is almost too cool a customer. For all Theseus's eloquence, almost no critic today sees his speech as the play's last word on love and the imagination. His pronouncement, from one perspective, is cool reason's cogent demonstration that, as Rosalind disarmingly puts it in As You Like It (3.2.376), “Love is merely a madness.” Yet, from another perspective, Theseus's pronouncement recoils upon him (he is himself an “antic fable”), and today's critics relish the way Shakespeare has insidiously used this speech to defend his own imaginative achievement. Perhaps imagination and love are forms of lunacy, but as Orlando had just said to Rosalind before she called love a mere madness, “Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much” he loves. Surely A Midsummer Night's Dream has apprehended “more than cool reason ever comprehends.” Surely Shakespeare wants us to see the value of Theseus's common sense, but just as surely he wants us to see that, behind common sense and beyond cool reason, his imagination has bodied forth the “forms of things unknown,” his “pen” has given palpable shape to such “strange” things and given “airy nothing” a “local habitation and a name.”

Theseus does not even get the last word here; Hippolyta does:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable.

[5.1.23-27]

It is Hippolyta's speech, not that of Theseus, that today's critics have grown to love. At the very moment of her final words, as if to prove the queen's point, the newly married young lovers, “full of joy and mirth,” stroll onto the stage, and the whole last scene is a compelling emblem, visual as well as verbal, of consummation and communion.

A bit later in the scene Theseus will get a last word. Just as Hippolyta has amended his view of love and the imagination, he amends hers of plays and players. Wearying of Quince's “tedious brief” interlude, Hippolyta growls, “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (5.1.211). Theseus's response to her remark, and their subsequent exchange, is often perceived today as one of Shakespeare's most incisive comments on the necessary contribution of the audience to the power of any dramatic illusion:

THESEUS.
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA.
It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
THESEUS.
If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.

Now more amenable to the imagination than he appeared to be 180 lines earlier, Theseus seems to be acknowledging that we half create what we perceive. The idea of “amendment” will continue to reverberate throughout this final scene (most emphatically at the close in Puck's epilogue), and it might be said that A Midsummer Night's Dream is ultimately about the power of love and the imagination to amend the human condition. We might draw a moral for critics, as well as one for audiences, and speculate that criticism, too, must be a history of continuing amendment.

Have we, I wonder, finally accounted for this play's deep hold on the contemporary imagination? I have been trying to suggest that it is the dynamism and perspectivism of the play that fascinate modern critics. I would like further to suggest that the play's affirmations—self-conscious and guarded and mellow as they may be (Shakespeare never wears his heart on his sleeve)—engage us deeply too. The play may speak of things more “strange than true,” as Theseus declares (5.1.2); yet as well as being “strange,” such things, as Hippolyta urges, are also “admirable.” For the play's many ripe sports have abridged at least one evening, have forestalled and perhaps softened the “iron tongue of midnight” (5.1.39 and 365). Even Theseus, about to get Hippolyta into bed at last, slips and can be heard to exclaim “'tis almost fairy time.” Shakespeare does not of course expect us to believe literally that the fairies can keep “the blots of Nature's hand” from the “issue” of the newlyweds (5.1.403 ff.), but he may well expect us to agree that his “palpable-gross play hath well beguiled / The heavy gait of night” (5.1.368-69). Wouldn't Shakespeare ask of us, and have us ask in turn, “How shall we beguile / The lazy time, if not with some delight” (5.1.40-41)? We now regard A Midsummer Night's Dream as an authentic masterpiece because in it, better than in most works we know, we are persuaded that (to borrow words from Wallace Stevens) “Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”

Bibliographical Note

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564; he died in Stratford in 1616. A Midsummer Night's Dream was probably performed in 1594-95. It was first published in 1600.

I have used the Signet edition, edited by Wolfgang Clemen (New York: New American Library, 1963), but also recommend the Pelican edition for Madeleine Doran's excellent introduction (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959). I am in debt throughout this essay to the felicitous and comprehensive study by David Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). His book continues to be the point of departure for all serious study of this play. Most valuable for me among other studies have been essays by J. Dennis Huston, “Bottom Waking: Shakespeare's ‘Most Rare Vision,’” in Studies in English Literature 13 (1973): 208-22; Frank Kermode, “The Mature Comedies,” in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961); and Paul A. Olson, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage,” ELH 24 (1957):95-119. I owe the point that Demetrius seems to grow up in act 4 to Alexander Leggatt's useful chapter in Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974). On comic structure I refer to C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); to Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); and to Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays, 1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).

For general background material on Shakespeare see E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For Shakespeare's sources see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957-). For Elizabethan stage history see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923; rpt., 1945); and Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (New York: Macmillan, 1927). For additional material on Shakespeare see the bibliographical note to Mark Rose's essay on Hamlet in this volume.