SOURCE: Nuttall, A. D. “A Midsummer Night's Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth.” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 49-59.

[In the following essay, Nuttall contends that in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare used comedy to suppress, however incompletely, the darker aspects of the myths that influence the play.]

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 revelling.

(1.1.16-19)

Thus Theseus, benignly, to Hippolyta in the opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Everyone watching, in 1595 or 1596, would have known that the speaker was an important personage. He enters, splendidly dressed (we may be certain) and, according to the Folio stage direction, ‘with others’ (rightly interpreted by Theobald as implying a train of attendants). His speech contrives, within a small compass, to be stately. It at once receives from Egeus, a kind of underlining, a graceful, articulate equivalent of loyal (servile?) applause: ‘Happy be Theseus, our renowned Duke.’ Now we are clearly aware of the exact social status of Theseus, which is of course very high. The cadence of Egeus' words anticipates that of the courtier Amiens in As You Like it, ‘Happy is your grace’, after Duke Senior's similarly stately (if deeply implausible) speech on the merits of the simple life, although, interestingly, Amiens' ‘happy’ carries, as Egeus' ‘happy’ does not, a connotation of stylistic felicity. Theseus, then, is a grand fellow of whom we should all take notice. Do we know anything else? Do we know—to put the question more precisely—who he is?

A little more than eighty years after the London audience listened to the words of Shakespeare's Duke of Athens, another audience in another country could be found listening to the words of one Thésée (or Theseus) in another play. This other play—Racine's Phèdre—is, to put it mildly, different from Shakespeare's. It is black tragedy. This Theseus is a harsh figure of sexual violence. Racine builds explicitly on Euripides and Seneca.

The full mythological information is made available. Indeed it impregnates the semantic fabric of the drama. This, we are left in no doubt, is the Herculean hero who with his sword defeated the army of women, the Amazons, and afterwards carried off their queen, Antiope, begetting on her his son, Hippolytus—that Hippolytus who describes his father as the deliverer of Crete, ‘fumant du sang du Minotaure’ (1.i.82). Behind this line stands a passage in Shakespeare's favourite poet, Ovid, beginning,

                                                                                          Te, Maxime Theseu,
Mirata est Marathon, Cretaei sanguine tauri

(Metamorphoses, vii.433-4)

You, greatest Theseus, Marathon adores for the blood shed of the Cretan bull.

Racine, however, has actually darkened the bestial allusion. Where Ovid evokes the slaying of the Marathonian bull, Racine slides to the far more frightening Minotaur, half bull, half man (equally part of the Theseus myth). The Minotaur was the creature who lived in the labyrinth, the monstrous issue of the unnatural coupling of Pasiphae with a bull. We now meet perhaps the most grotesque, the most disturbing, of all the Greek myths. When Pasiphae was overcome with lust for the beautiful bull she was at first at a loss how to contrive physical intercourse with the brute. To solve her problem she had a wooden cow constructed, to attract the bull. He mounted the wooden cow and she, straddling within, received the bull's member. The story is so gross that even Ovid seems to flinch from it, in his uncharacteristically hurried account of Pasiphae ‘quae torvum ligno decepit adultera taurum’, literally, ‘who, unchaste, deceived the savage bull with wood’ (Metamorphoses, viii.132). Theseus was aided in his defeat of this monster by a daughter of the same Pasiphae, Ariadne, whom he later ditched in Naxos. After the death of the Amazon queen Antiope he married (in the normal version of the myth) Phaedra (Racine's Phèdre), another daughter of Pasiphae. She it is, in Racine, who, infected by her terrible lineage (‘la fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé’, 1.i.36) is incestuously drawn to her son-in-law, Hippolytus. We are, quite obviously, in another world. On the one hand, in the English comedy, we have moonlight, fairies and happy love. On the other, in the French tragedy, we have sexual horror. Can Shakespeare's Theseus be in any sense the same person as the one we meet in Racine?

When we passed from Racine to Ovid we crossed over from drama to narrative poetry. Yet the answer, from the point of view of a mythographer, is, ‘Yes, Shakespeare's Theseus is quite clearly the Theseus of Greek myth; it is the same man.’ Racine's tragedy is in immediate accord with ancient story. Shakespeare's comedy, perhaps, is not. The first thing Shakespeare's Theseus tells us, however, is that he wooed Hippolyta ‘with my sword’ (1.1.16). This is—must be—an allusion to the war with the Amazons. Good scholarly editions of the play accordingly cite at this point Shakespeare's source, which is, once more narrative: North's Plutarch.

Touching the voyage he made by the sea Major, Philochorus, and some other holde opinion, that he went thither with Hercules against the Amazones: and that to honour his valiantnes, Hercules gave him Antiopa the Amazone. But the more part of the other Historiographers, namely Hellanicus, Pherecydes, and Herodotus, doe write, that Theseus went thither alone, after Hercules voyage, and that he tooke this Amazone prisoner, which is likeliest to be true.¹

At this point we have in North's margin the shoulder-note, ‘Antiopa the Amazone ravished by Theseus’. Then, a little later, after the shoulder-note, ‘Theseus fighteth a battell with the Amazones’, we are told how

The graves of the women which dyed in this first encounter, are founde yet in the great streete, which goeth towards the gate Piraica, neere unto the chappell of the litle god Chalcodus. And the Athenians … were in this place repulsed by the Amazones, even to the place where the images of Eumenides are, that is to saye, of the furies. But on th'other side also, the Athenians comming towards the quarters of Palladium, Ardettus and Lucium, drove backe their right poynte even to within their campe, and slewe a great number of them. Afterwards, at the ende of foure moneths, peace was taken betwene them by meanes of one of the women called Hypollita. For this Historiographer calleth the Amazone which Theseus maried, Hyppolita, and not Antiopa … It is very true, that after the death of Antiopa, Theseus maried Phaedra, having had before of Antiopa a sonne called Hippolytus …²

Far more lightly than Racine but nevertheless unmistakably Shakespeare is touching on this Greek story. Near the beginning of Act 2 Oberon and Titania are squabbling, each half-accusing the other of adulterous desires. Oberon says,

How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,
Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,
Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?
Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night
From Perigouna, whom he ravishèd,
And make him with fair Aegles break his faith,
With Ariadne and Antiopa?

(2.1.74-80)

The myth wobbles as myths do. Antiope, queen of the conquered Amazons can, as we saw already in Plutarch, reappear with another name, Hippolyta—a name which seems somehow to have moved, with the necessary change of gender, from Hippolytus, Theseus' son. Shakespeare went for ‘Hippolyta’ in his main action, yet Antiopa is still there in Oberon's speech. Theseus appears alternately as ravisher and bridegroom. Most wonderfully, when the story is told by the king of the fairies, the myth itself is drawn into the distinctive magic of Shakespeare's comedy: Theseus, we learn, was led through a ‘glimmering night’ by a fairy to his harsh conquests. Titania, it seems, played Robin Goodfellow to the erotic Hercules of antiquity.

Obviously the scholars are not wrong to cite North's Plutarch. But still, it might be said, the source, though certainly that, a source, remains poetically extraneous. Does the Theseus of myth figure in the theatrical experience of A Midsummer Night's Dream? I think the answer to this question must be blurred. The mythological Theseus will be there for some, not there for others. Those who see only the benign conquering bridegroom will be happy. Others, however, will not be able to help knowing more (and Shakespeare knows that some will know more). The flowery train of names in Oberon's speech especially will be largely dead matter to the former class. To the latter it will work, as allusive poetry properly works, as a series of casements opening on the wild foam of European story. Shakespeare, I am sure, would not have allowed Theseus his reference to the sword used in winning Hippolyta if he had not wanted such thoughts to arise. He reminds us—very swiftly, I grant—of past violence in the opening sequence of the play; it is a prominent, mind-setting speech.

And of course if we admit the ravisher Theseus we at once let in a strand of meaning which is as congenial to feminist criticism as it is uncongenial to old-fashioned bardolatry. It is, I suppose, a good rule in criticism to be especially mistrustful of anything you find with delight and, conversely, to be prepared to concede, as it were, with clenched teeth, the presence of undesired matter. It is for the reader to judge which of these injunctions (if either) is being followed in the rest of this essay.

Surely nothing can be more evident—and more obstinately irremovable—than the contrast to which I carefully alluded at the outset. Racine's Phèdre and Shakespeare's comedy, whatever off-stage links may be discovered in the hinterland of sources, present substantially different universes. Mythologically this may be the same Theseus, but poetically this is another person altogether. What happens in Theseus' wholly benevolent speech to Hippolyta is a successful banishing of the old dark narrative from the play. With these words the myth is turned on its head; the harsh Theseus drops out of sight and the smiling Duke of Athens springs up in its place. What we see is a verbal equivalent of a visual transformation in a masque. Still more it resembles a transition in music (Theseus himself says ‘in another key’, 1.1.18). The whole point of A Midsummer Night's Dream is its gossamer beauty. The twentieth century is marked by a prejudice in favour of the discordant. Shakespeare is saying, as clearly as it can be said, that this is not what he is after. Préjudice de siècle is nowhere so evident as in Jan Kott. His notorious description of Titania as ‘longing for animal love’³ (as if Titania were Pasiphae) is simply ludicrous. Has he not noticed that Titania is deluded? She is attracted by what she sees as a wise and beautiful being. She cannot see the grotesque half-donkey available to the rest of us. A play in which Titania said, ‘Give me a beast to make love to me’ would be essentially different from Shakespeare's. In his words to Hippolyta Theseus actually changes the story itself; it is now another story, one (why should we be so reluctant to receive it?) of happy love.

All of that sounds like good sense. It is, I think, 90 per cent true. This leaves, the alert will perceive, a troubling 10 per cent which I propose now to consider. I have just said that Shakespeare has changed the myth and moved on to new territory. If he had wished simply to produce a new story why did he allow Theseus to mention his sword at all? Why, after the great switch, did he let the word ‘ravished’ appear in Oberon's speech? Why did he not present a smiling wooer who could quite easily have been called by some other name than Theseus?

When I was trying to describe the transformation of the myth the phrase ‘turns all to favour and to prettiness’ came into my mind. These of course are the words of Laertes as he looks at Ophelia. The full speech runs,

Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself
She turns to favour and to prettiness.

(Hamlet 4.5.186-7)

Laertes is responding to a speech by Ophelia which is, in fact, faintly evocative of the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream: it is all flowers and greenery and ends with a snatch from the song ‘Sweet Robin’. There is a robin—Robin Goodfellow—in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The effect of this sequence of speeches in Hamlet is not to enforce the absolute division of tragedy from comedy, Phèdre from the Dream, but to mediate between them. Just as triple Hecate, goddess of hell in Ovid and Seneca⁴ finds her way into A Midsummer Night's Dream, drawing the fairies after her from the rising sun (5.2.14), so hell and passion, the stuff of Phèdre are the matter of Ophelia's feat of transformation. If we had no sense of the material, we would not know that a feat had been performed. Of course in the tragic world of Hamlet, confronted as we are by the wreckage of Ophelia's mind, we cannot forget these things. In A Midsummer Night's Dream it is all so much lighter, so much swifter, that we can forget. Nevertheless A Midsummer Night's Dream, likewise, presents not the accomplished fact of terror disarmed but a feat of disarming. To understand the feat, to feel the proper energy within the lines, we must be aware in some degree, if only for a moment, of background terror.

George Herbert in his ‘Jordan’ poems did not make an editorial decision in advance to exclude all artful ingenuity from his divine poems; instead he risked his soul and made poetry from the act of exclusion. Shakespeare similarly did not decide in advance not to use the old myth. Instead he chose to exhibit the exclusion, as a process within the drama. Having said this, I will now push the thesis a little further. The suppression of dark forces is not only incomplete at the beginning of the play; there is a sense in which it remains incomplete throughout. The play is haunted to the end by that residual ten per cent.

Listen again to Theseus:

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 revelling.

I wish now to draw attention to the fact that a certain disquiet can persist, even in the latter, supposedly joyous half of this ‘over-turning’ speech. Instead of making Theseus say ‘I won you by violence but now I will seek to gain your trust by a loving devotion’, Shakespeare makes him say, ‘I won you with my sword, but now we will proceed in joyous triumph.’ The second half of the antithesis actually fails to achieve a fully antithetical status. ‘Triumph’ remains, obstinately, an arrogant, masculine word. It carries the idea of military victory into the new world of marriage. The actor who delivers this speech is in no danger of kneeling to his lady, as Lear would have knelt to Cordelia. Rather the very words will cause him almost to strut.

Later in the play, in the famous dialogue about the lunatic, the lover and the poet, Theseus (who certainly won the battle of the citations-index since his are the words endlessly quoted in anthologies) uncomprehendingly occludes the far subtler observations of Hippolyta. It is not too much to say that the entire ‘Coherence Theory’ of truth is sketched in her phrase ‘grows to something of great constancy’ (5.1.26). Her IQ is as far above Theseus' as her real status is, quite evidently, below. As Graham Bradshaw saw, there is a delicious gaucherie in a lover telling his lady, de haut en bas, that all lovers are crazy.⁵ It is not galant.

Thus the new, smiling Theseus remains oddly stiff. He is indeed no longer the ravisher. Nor does he ever come close to bullying Hippolyta. But he is still harshly masculine. We cannot quite say, with a whole heart, ‘Now all is well!’ It is as if, after all, Shakespeare wants a half-memory to continue, at the edge of consciousness.

Another work famous for turning enmity into beauty and lightness is Pope's Rape of the Lock, written, it is said, to laugh quarrelling parties out of their difference. The very title enacts, within a monosyllable, the healing transformation. The word ‘rape’, then as now, applied to forced sexual intercourse. But as we reach the words ‘of the lock’ we begin to guess, with relief, that the word is being used in its milder, Latin sense: ‘seizure’, ‘carrying off’. Nevertheless, having achieved the soothing modification and dispelled all anxieties (we might suppose), Pope keeps the harsher meaning alive, at the back of the reader's mind, through imagery of cracked porcelain, scissors (‘the glittering forfex’) and the like. The alternatives before us are, first, that A Midsummer Night's Dream enacts a complete suppression of sexual violence, replacing it with unbroken felicity and, second, that there is indeed just such a suppression but it is laced with a nervous, intermittent memory of the matter suppressed. It will be obvious by now that I am going for the second alternative.

I want at this point to shift focus from Theseus to the fairies. If Theseus is, by mythological birthright, the figure who could have brought a Greek violence into the play had he not been softened, the very English fairies are surely the obvious agents of that softening, powerfully assist the change of tone, embody the opposite principle, the principle of beauty. Once more, however, the absoluteness of our initial distinction will not survive close inspection. The fairies, no less than Theseus, carry the burden of a dark history. Shakespeare's fairies, indeed, are miniature, pretty creatures, but to say this is very like saying that Shakespeare's Theseus is a benign figure. We can no longer assert with Latham that Shakespeare was the first to present minuscule fairies, since earlier examples have been found, but we can say that he chose the then unusual miniature fairy, in preference to the more usual version. And of course Titania, herself a fairy, is clearly full-size; she can entwine Bottom the Weaver in her arms. Even if Peaseblossom and the rest were played by children, children are not nearly small enough to lie in a cowslip's bell (from The Tempest, I know, but really a bit of A Midsummer Night's Dream which has somehow strayed into The Tempest, at 5.1.89). The truth is that Shakespeare knows that one element in the pleasure taken in all this pretty flimsiness will be relief. The fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with their redemptive beauty chasing away all tragic elements may be the same people as the fairies who were once feared. At the end of the play Oberon has to promise that no child born from the marriages forged on that magic night will be deformed:

Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despisèd in nativity
Shall upon their children be.

(5.2.41-4)

The promise is urgently required because the fear of these effects is still there—fairies are notorious for pranks, but the infliction of a hare-lip on a new born child is something worse than a prank.

In a way everything I have been saying is already present in the phrase, ‘The Good Folk’, a minor anthropological curiosity in its own right. The fairies were called ‘The Good Folk’ not because they were benevolent but in the hope of making them so—we can almost say, because they were in fact the reverse of benevolent. The phrase does not occur in A Midsummer Night's Dream but ‘Goodfellow’ does, as another name for Puck. There is a seventeenth-century woodcut of Robin Goodfellow which shows him with horns, shaggy thighs, cloven hooves and graphically emphasized animal genitalia.⁶ ‘Good Folk’, then, is a conciliating, propitiatory description, which can be paralleled in other languages. For example the avenging Furies whom we have already met in Plutarch and can find again in Aeschylus were called the ‘Eumenides’, ‘The Kindly Ones’. In Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus the chorus sings …

As we call them the kindly ones, that they may receive the supplicant safe, with kindly heart.⁷

Near the end of the seventeenth century Robert Kirk wrote in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, ‘These sith's or Fairies, they call sluagh-maith or the good people (it would seem, to prevent the dint of their ill attempts: for the Irish use to bless all they fear harme of)’.⁸

We are dealing with a kind of euphemism, but not the kind we employ simply to avoid an undesired image (as in ‘passed away’ for ‘died’). Rather, this euphemism is put to work (presumably in the hope of inducing the hearer to conform to the flattering description) with the design of turning away hostility. It is therefore an apotropaic euphemism, from the Greek … ‘turning away’. Richard Wilson applies the term ‘apotropaic’ to this comedy in his brilliant essay, ‘The Kindly Ones: The Death of the Author in Shakespearian Athens’.⁹ He observes that the play procedes through a series of rejected scripts, ‘Seneca's Hercules, Euripides' Bacchae … all are evaded during the action’.¹⁰ Of course I want to say ‘not quite rejected, not exactly evaded’, but Wilson is basically right. Duke Theseus performs an apotrope of his former self at the beginning of the play. Could A Midsummer Night's Dream constitute, as a whole, an apotrope? Myths are essentially recounted; the story of the things that happened long ago is told, and re-told. But apotrope is not narrative but action upon those very beings whose exploits are set forth in myth. It is the product of efficacious ritual. Remember here how drama in Greek once meant ‘doing’. When Theseus re-describes himself in that opening volta, in a euphemism which we hope will ‘take’, like an inoculation, Shakespeare is perhaps banishing, or ‘praying-away’ from his drama that mythic darkness which Racine will later let back in. But Shakespeare also knows that the joy and relief consequent upon the apotrope will lose their keenness if all sense of danger is lost. Hence the keeping-alive of the disquiet after the opening apotrope.

How does Bully Bottom figure in this play of nervous delight? The answer (which may strike the reader as vacuously pious) is ‘With a deep, very Shakespearian complex coherence’. Once more, the first thing to be said is that Bottom, translated into the form of a beast, is (hilariously) innocent. He lolls, like some degenerate Roman emperor, in the midst of a feast, as a beautiful woman climbs all over him, and his great hairy head is full of thoughts of food, not sex. He is like a small boy. Yeats famously said (in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’) that Keats was like a schoolboy ‘with face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window’, which makes some sense if one thinks of The Eve of Saint Agnes. But, in spite of the notorious ‘feast in the dorm’ passage, we are in fact clearly aware that Porphyro in that poem is interested in sex as well as food. Bottom is interested only in the jellies and ice-creams (or rather, since the donkey is beginning to take over, in hay).

I am now repeating the move I made at the beginning of this essay. I said then that the most obvious thing—and the most obvious thing can be the most important thing—about Shakespeare's Theseus is that he differs from Racine's Thésée, as A Midsummer Night's Dream differs from Phèdre, toto coelo. But then I admitted a darker penumbra of meaning. So here, having asserted the comic innocence of Bottom, I must acknowledge that the mere sight of a woman entwined with a beast or half-beast of itself suggests monstrosity. Again I have to ask, are the demons completely removed? Is our laughter simple, unmixed, or is it the louder because energized by a surviving anxiety? Again, I go for the second alternative.

While the ‘primary move’ of Theseus is from hostility to benevolence, the ‘primary move’ of Bottom, at the level of action, is in the opposite direction, from human being to beast. That is why the Bottom sequence is immediately funny, as Theseus is not. In Bottom's case there is an element of shock to be surmounted and this supplies the incongruity needed. ‘Jupiter / Became a bull, and bellowed’, says Florizel in The Winter's Tale, (4.4.28) (apparently in the hope of cheering up the rustic Perdita with august precedents of sexual condescension). But Bottom, who becomes not a bull but half an ass, is no Jupiter but a hard-handed mechanical. Yet Europa and the bull, Leda and the swan and all the other ancient stories of bestial coupling remain critically relevant. They are part of the material to be comically inverted or apotropaically defused. Again, a quantum of anxiety survives the apotrope. As I have said, it is difficult to look at a woman entwined with something which is turning, as we watch, into an animal—Beauty and the Beast—without worrying. The worry, at the back of one's mind, may be partly about physiology. ‘Will she be hurt if they have sexual intercourse? Oh, no danger of that, I see’ (laughter here)—but then the thought returns.

This obstinate refusal ever quite to go away is admirably caught by Peter Holland in his essay, ‘Theseus' Shadows in A Midsummer Night's Dream’.¹¹ Holland quotes the sinister jingle of Hughes Mearns,

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

For Holland, Seneca's Hippolytus is a shadow—an absence-presence—in the play, ‘a man on the stair’. Surely sane persons take care not to be seriously distracted by such things? Holland writes, ‘Hippolytus cannot be ignored, but does that mean he should be noticed?’ It is a good question. That criticism which soldifies the properly fluid, changes glimpses into full percepts, must be falsifying its material. But meanwhile it remains just (as Holland sees) to register shadows as—merely—shadows. Moreover our relation to these shadows may be more dynamically charged than at first appears. The last line of the jingle expresses a wish. Translate that wish into magical action and you have, once more, apotrope.

As the Plutarchian Theseus stands behind the Duke of Athens, so the Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius stands behind Bottom the Weaver. Once more, the scholarly editions rightly cite Adlington's translation of 1566 as a source. Here is Lucius' account of how he, transformed into an ass, became involved with a lustful matron. In this passage all the anxieties I was just alluding to are explicit.

Then she put off all her Garments to her naked skinne, and taking the Lampe that stood next to her, began to anoint her body with balme, and mine likewise, but especially my nose … Then she tooke me by the halter and cast me downe upon the bed, which was nothing strange unto me, considering that she was so beautifull a matron and I so wel boldened out with wine, and perfumed with balme, whereby I was readily prepared for the purpose: But nothing grieved me so much as to think, how I should with my huge and great legs imbrace so fair a Matron, or how I should touch her fine, dainty and silken skinne, with my hard hoofes, or how it was possible to kisse her soft, pretty and ruddy lips, with my monstrous mouth and stony teeth, or how she, who was young and tender, could be able to receive me.¹²

That last word, ‘me’ is a euphemism, on Adlington's part, a euphemism of the ordinary kind. The Latin at this point (x.22) is ‘Tam vastum genitale’. Remember Pasiphae, within the wooden cow, receiving the organ of the bull. Apuleius, certainly, has not forgotten. He writes how the matron ‘had her pleasure with me, whereby I thought the mother of Minotarus [sic] did not causelesse quench her inordinate desire with a Bull’.¹³ Earlier, when the matron is introduced, she is likened to Pasiphae. Here Adlington says, simply ‘as Pasiphae had with a Bull’, eliding the note of comic incongruity, essential to the Shakespearian version, which is present in the Latin, instar asinariae Pasiphaae ‘like some asinine Pasiphae’.

With Bottom, as with Theseus, if we read backwards into prior myth, we are led into the world of Phèdre. Bottom is a happily averted Minotaur, or Bull, Titania Pasiphae. In Peter Holland's essay the Minotaur is the second major ‘shadow’ of the play, after Hippolytus.¹⁴ It will be said, ‘There is nothing in Shakespeare about a huge penis.’ True. But this thought must lie behind the physiological anxiety, the physiological comic incongruity. Titania's words,

While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head

(4.1.2-3)

are funny because, as she speaks, we are looking at a monstrous, hairy head. She herself betrays, a line later, that even to the eye of infatuation Bottom's ears are oddly large. A moment afterwards he says himself, ‘I am marvellous hairy about the face’ and the scratchy word ‘scratch’ appears twice in the same speech (4.1.22-5). A sense of physical incompatibility is present in the faint Ovidian surrealism of Titania's image of ‘the female ivy’ encircling ‘the barky fingers of the elm’ at 4.1.42-3. Think of Apollo feeling the breast of Daphne as the bark began to form over it, the heart fluttering under the roughened surface, at Metamorphoses, i.554. Horror is successfully averted. We laugh and we are happy. But the horror is there, to be averted, and in some degree survive the act of aversion. The director who caused Bottom to cast on the backcloth a shadow (Peter Holland's word!) that looked for a moment more like a minotaur than a donkey would not, I suggest, be exceeding his interpretative brief.

There is a nasty poem by Martial about a promiscuous lady, one Marulla, whose children can be seen by their looks to have many fathers, none of which is the lady's husband. One with frizzy hair looks like the African cook; another, with flat nose and thickened lips is the very image of Pannicus, the wrestler and so on. The poem includes these lines,

Hunc vero acuto capite, et auribus longis,
Quae sic moventur ut solent assellorum
Quis morionis filium neget Cyrrhae?(15)

And this one with his tapering head and long ears which have a way of twitching like those of an ass, who will deny that he is the son of the idiot Cyrrha?

No grand mythology now, but a sneer at the woman who will go with anyone, even a cretin. Bottom may not be an idiot, which seems to be the sense of morio here. But another sense of morio is ‘one kept as a laughing stock, a fool’, and this is not a million miles away from Bottom's function in relation to the grand persons of the play. Although Shakespeare gives him the most profound speech in the comedy, ‘It shall be called “Bottom's Dream”, because it hath no bottom’ (4.1.213-4), his best friend could not call him wise. When the love-crazed Titania applies this word to him at 3.1.140 (‘Thou art as wise as thou are beautiful’), it always gets a laugh. I cite Martial's donkey-man not because I am sure—or even think—that Shakespeare read this poem but because it highlights discomforts of a more trivial kind than those broached in the more ancient myths—discomforts arising from perceived social and intellectual disparity. This is also relevant to the comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the myths, with their deeper violence, though they may seem more remote from comedy, really are more deeply pertinent to the major effects of this play.

It is often said that Shakespeare continued to be an adventurous, experimental poet to the very end. The Tempest, his last complete play, is a very strange pastoral. A displaced duke and his entourage find themselves in an uncivilized place, where the issues of nature and nurture are debated and all are sorted out, so that they can begin their lives afresh at the end. Thus far I could be describing As You Like it. But we are not in Arden or Arcadia. We are on a supposedly Mediterranean island which is removed by more than Atlantic distances from the North African coast, in a place having its own physical laws and lawlessness—almost an alternative, science-fiction world. The Tempest, therefore, is transposed pastoral. But long before all this, A Midsummer Night's Dream was also, in its own way, a transposed pastoral. The transposition is achieved by darkening, and by placing the trees closer together. In ordinary pastoral there are spaces for the sheep to crop the grass, spaces for reflection, singing-competitions and so on. But the dense, tangled wood—an Athenian labyrinth to answer that of Crete—is frightening. This is the same wood that we find in Milton's Comus or in Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows—the Wild Wood. Shakespeare has in this early play given us a Nocturnal Pastoral, itself, generically, a strange thing. Even the weather is unpastorally bad. You hear people say ‘Oh, we don't have summers now like the summers I remember in my childhood.’ A Midsummer Night's Dream, if indistinctly remembered, can seem (there are so many flowers in it) to embody this golden world. Yet if we re-enter the play we meet people complaining, exactly as people complain today, about the rotten weather this year.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard,
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.
The nine-men's morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are indistinguishable

(2.1.88-100)

Even this speech, which might seem the purest contemporary realism, has its roots in ancient materials. There is a running reference to ancient plague: the plague of Aegina in Ovid (Metamorphoses, vii), the plague of Thebes in Seneca's Oedipus, Medea and Hippolytus (the last of these is of course Seneca's ‘Phèdre’). But the reader may say, ‘Stop! You are reading backwards again’.

In what sense is A Midsummer Night's Dream an apotropaic work? Shakespeare has performed an active, suasive euphemism upon ancient myth, and this, I have suggested is in accord with the element of quasi-ritual efficacy still present in comic drama but absent from pure narrative. But presumably in this irreligious, unsuperstitious age we cannot believe that a full apotrope, in the old sense, has occurred. We cannot believe that demons have been driven off, because we do not believe in demons. Could the play, nevertheless, have been a full apotrope for the original audience, in the 1590s? I am not sure, but I suspect not. The magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream is not like the magic of The Tempest. Prospero is a serious (highly fashionable) proto-scientific magician, a little like the real Dr Dee, but the magic and fairies of the earlier play are perceptibly becoming picturesque, the stuff of the old tales at which city people now smile. If that is right, this apotrope never had the status of an efficacious ritual, actually turning aside malign spirits. Weakening of belief makes inversion of tone easier. It is obviously a simpler matter to vary a mere tale than to alter a known, inherited truth. If people in the seventeenth century had really believed that, once, Apollo pursued Daphne, it would have been harder for Andrew Marvell in ‘The Garden’ to turn the myth on its head, suggesting that the god, so far from being frustrated when Daphne was turned into a laurel, was actually pursuing her, with dendrophiliac intent, because she was turning into a very attractive plant.

It might be thought that Theseus would have been history not myth for Shakespeare because he is in Plutarch. But it is pretty evident that we are not in the historically constrained environment of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare knows his audience will have some notion of Theseus as a character but will have few rigid expectations. But all of this, while it facilitates the transformation we see in A Midsummer Night's Dream, seems at the same time to deprive it of apotropaic force.

Indeed, we have made it all too easy. While we may not believe in demons, we still believe in what those demons mean. The fears remain. Could Shakespeare have performed a real apotrope not at the level of spirits and demons but at the psychological level? Has he turned away fear, not only within his fiction but in the minds and hearts of those who watch?

Within the fiction he has turned aside not only ancient myth but also incipient tragedy. We have the Hippolytus of Euripides and Seneca, the Phèdre of Racine, but we know, when we see Duke Theseus smiling on Hippolyta, that we are not going to get Shakespeare's—I suspect that it would have been called—Hippolytus and Phaedra. While Shakespeare is carefully not writing Phèdre the mechanicals are carefully not performing Romeo and Juliet. ‘I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done,’ says Starveling (3.1.12-13) and they all assent. At the same time Shakespeare is concerned not simply that his audience should be happy but that it should experience the more specific pleasure of relief. The myths, though not felt to be literally true, are still full of meaning and that meaning is black. Shakespeare triumphs over horror not only with humour but with a still-ambiguous beauty, a beauty mediated by the pale fire of moonlight, itself somehow half-way between darkness and day. In America at Halloween little children shriek with alarm at the first appearance of witches and goblins and then the shrieks turn to peals of laughter. Most of them (not all) are, I think, psychically strengthened and protected by the process. A successful apotrope of fear is performed. We seem now very close indeed to the real apotrope of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It is, however, one thing to comfort a person by saying ‘It's all right—wake up—the thing you feared was never real at all’ and another to say, ‘You can deal with your fear if you pretend it isn't there—tell a different story to yourself—give the demons smiling faces.’ The former kind gives the more complete victory; indeed it is not so much an apotrope as a complete exorcism, or abolition. There is no need, in this scheme, to evoke the notion of suasive euphemism, for there is no malign entity to be flatteringly re-described. But the latter scheme—‘Give the demons smiling faces’—implicitly allows that the dark forces continue in existence. We turn them aside, keep them off, at least for a while, by pretending in their hearing—as a placating courtesy—that they are benevolent. Which of these is the scheme of A Midsummer Night's Dream? Puck's epilogue in which he draws a line under the whole experience by terming it a mere dream—‘you have but slumber'd here’ (Epilogue.3)—is the first. The logic is the re-assuring logic of Theseus' ‘lunatic/lover’ speech, always obscurely annoying to lovers of poetry. But Hippolyta's reply to Theseus, Bottom's ‘It hath no bottom’ and Demetrius' love for Helena, which, wonderfully, spills over from the enchanted night into the following, civil day, are the other. These powers and their effects are not, after all, so easily erased. Thus a sense of euphemism survives the close of the play. This entails a negotiation—with a long spoon, as it were—between comedy and tragedy, between comedy and myth, a negotiation, that is, between joy and fear, resulting in an apotrope of the latter. Just that, apotrope, not abolition.

Notes

1. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (London:, 1957), p. 386.

2. Ibid., pp. 387-8.

3. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (2nd edn (London, 1967)), p. 183.

4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, vii.194; Seneca, Hippolytus, 406-17.

5. Shakespeare's Scepticism (Brighton, 1987), p. 44.

6. Reproduced in Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (London, 1994), p. 257.

7. The Greek is tricky. … See Sir Richard Jebb's edn (Cambridge, 1885), p. 85.

8. Ed. Stewart Anderson (Cambridge, 1976), p. 49.

9. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, ‘New Casebooks’, ed. Richard Dutton (London, 1996), pp. 198-222, at p. 213. See also D'Orsay W. Pearson, ‘“Unkinde Theseus': A Study of Renaissance Mythography”, English Literary Renaissance, 4 (1974), 276-98; M. E. Lamb, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 21 (1979), 478-91; David Ormerod, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth’, Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 39-52; Barbara A. Mowat, ‘“A Local Habitation and a Name”: Shakespeare's text as construct’, Style, 23 (1989), 335-51.

10. Ibid., p. 205.

11. Shakespeare Survey 47 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 139-51.

12. The Golden Ass of Apuleius, translated by William Adlington. The Tudor Translations, ed. W. E. Henley, iv (London, 1893), p. 218.

13. Ibid., p. 217.

14. ‘Theseus' Shadows in A Midsummer Night's Dream’, pp. 149 f.

15. Epigrams. vi.39. ‘To Cinna’.