SOURCE: Cox, Richard H. “Shakespeare: Poetic Understanding and Comic Action (A Weaver's Dream).” In The Artist and Political Vision, edited by Benjamin R. Barber and Michael J. Gargas McGrath, pp. 165-92. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1982.

[In the following essay, Cox examines the discordant nature of A Midsummer Night's Dream, asserting that in Shakespeare's comic treatment of Theseus, and in the serious undertones of his portrayal of the artisans and especially Bottom, the playwright used comedy to teach his audience serious lessons about civic life.]

… what hinders one to be merry and tell the truth? as good-natured teachers at first give cakes to their boys, that they may be willing to learn at first the rudiments.

Horace¹

… imitation is a kind of play, and not serious …

Socrates²

I

Political life generally is understood to be a serious matter. And in particular, founders of cities and regimes generally are understood to be serious men undertaking a supremely serious task: Lycurgus, Theseus, and Romulus, in the ancient world, and Washington, Lenin, and Hitler, in the modern world, are so regarded. How, then, are we to understand Shakespeare's playfulness in treating Theseus, legendary founder of Athens, one of the most extraordinary polities that ever existed, in a “comedy”?

This question is the starting point for my musings on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The musings are rooted in wonder and perplexity concerning the purpose of this dazzling display of Shakespeare's poetic art and buttressed by certain views I hold concerning how one should go about the study of a play by Shakespeare. Because those views underlie and inform the substance of the musings, it is necessary to say a few words about them at the outset.

It is easy to call Shakespeare a poet, and everyone does. It is a good deal more difficult, as the heap of critical works attests, to specify what Shakespeare himself conceived the poetic art to be: its nature; its purpose; its relationship to other human activities, including the making arts (e.g., carpentry), the doing arts (e.g., ruling), and not least, philosophy, in its original sense of the desire to become wise about the nature of things. It is instructive, on this point, to compare the problem as it pertains to Shakespeare and to Sir Philip Sidney, his distinguished contemporary.

Shakespeare, for whatever reason, left nothing but his poetic works: a series of intelligible yet partially enigmatic compounds of action and speech, much like Plato's dialogues. Sidney, on the other hand, wrote not just poetic works, such as the New Arcadia, but also a prose analysis of the poetic art, An Apology for Poetry (1595). Sidney argues that the true poet practices the noblest form of the art of imitation: he seeks, by his deeds and words, to teach men to be virtuous. He does so, first, by delighting men with his imitations of virtuous actions and repelling them with his imitations of vicious actions. Having thus enticed men's souls with his “speaking picture,”³ he then teaches them to seek virtue and flee vice. He does so at the lowest level by artfully drawing upon the soul's general moral tendency to imitate what is good and shun what is bad; and at the highest level, by stimulating the tendency of the reasoning part of the soul to seek the good, in and for itself. The poet, so understood, is the “right popular philosopher.” His mode of teaching is intrinsically superior not only to the historian, who necessarily deals in specific cases, but even to the moral philosopher, who seeks to give compelling precepts. Sidney recognizes that the moral philosopher—such as Aristotle, in his treatment of justice in Book V of the Nichomachean Ethics—seeks, and may even discover, conclusive definitions of virtue and of vice. But even though the moral philosopher may thus, in principle, furnish men with “infallible grounds of wisdom,” these must “lie dark before the imaginative and judging power if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy.”⁴

As for “comedy” in particular, it is, according to Sidney, that kind of poetic imitation that fuses actions and speeches that teach us by both “delighting” us, and by moving us to the “scornful tickling” called laughter. In Sidney's own words: “all the end of the comical part of comedy [is] not upon such scornful matters as stirreth laughter only, but mixed with it, that delightful teaching which is the end of poesy.”⁵

The task of musing on A Midsummer Night's Dream might be easier if we had a comparable argument by Shakespeare to turn to, but we do not. On the other hand, inasmuch as, as one scholar recently has shown,⁶ Shakespeare evidently knew and even at times drew upon Sidney's Apology, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that the two poets' understanding of the nature and purpose of poetry is similar if not identical. And yet, however suggestive such a procedure may be, it clearly is inconclusive, and we are thus compelled to recognize that Shakespeare's poetic works directly confront us, time and again, in all their puzzling and beguiling concreteness. If there is a “delightful teaching” imbedded in them, it seems that we must seek it in the interstices of the action and speech that make up the whole of a given work.

How, then, to proceed? I confess that I am not altogether sure, and that what follows on A Midsummer Night's Dream is, essentially, a playfully serious set of conjectures. The procedural premises that underlie its substance are these: First, Shakespeare's poetic works present themselves to us as “deeds”—something done by him, that is, but presented to us with no explicit explanation as to what the given work, as deed, seeks to do. Second, we thus seem always to have to work our way from the surface of the work toward an attempt to grasp the meaning of its parts, and then toward an understanding of the whole that makes up the context for the parts. Third, Shakespeare's general “deed” in constructing a given work includes specific “deeds”: the title, the setting, the names of the characters, the overall movement of the action, the placement as well as the content of the speeches, the interaction of speeches and actions, and the problems posed “in speech” that may be imitated by the “action.”⁷

II

A Midsummer Night's Dream is the only play in which Shakespeare treats one of the founders of antiquity.⁸ By that deed he singles out Theseus and Athens above all other ancient founders and cities. Furthermore, within the play, Shakespeare makes Hermia, whose name evokes that of the god Hermes, compare Athens to “paradise” (I, i, 205).⁹ Nowhere else in the corpus does Shakespeare make a character compare a city to “paradise.”

However one eventually construes Hermia's remark, the singling out of Theseus and of Athens is at once compelling and perplexing. It is compelling because it seems fitting: is not Athens the glory of the ancient world, indeed, the glory of Western civilization? Is it not the city renowned in its own time, and ever since, for its architecture, poetry, political greatness, military valor, and not least, for its being the city of antiquity famous for “philosophy”?

It is perplexing, however, because of these features of the play—features that constitute specific “deeds” by Shakespeare:

1. The title itself shrouds Theseus and Athens. Stated somewhat differently, Shakespeare's deed in titling this play, in contrast to Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus, wholly obscures the political setting. Furthermore, the title points away from the political world altogether: it suggests darkness, sleeping, and dreaming, rather than the light, wakefulness, and vivid consciousness ordinarily associated with the works of the mind and the body so gloriously displayed by Athens in her greatness.
2. “Midsummer” is connected with the notion “height of madness,” as is the lunar month in which “midsummer day,” or the summer solstice, occurs. And the word “wood,” in addition to its ordinary meaning, in Shakespeare's time, also had the meaning of “madness.”¹⁰ Given the fact that the central, longest, and most complex sequence of actions in the play occurs in the “wood” outside the walls of Athens, it seems that a triple madness is pointed to by the season, the moon, and the physical setting of the central action of the play.
3. The greatest part of the action concerns not Theseus and the display of the ruling art, but the adventures of lovers (whether humans or fairies); and even more puzzling, the antics of “rude mechanicals” (III, ii, 9), who have leapt out of their station to engage in a dramatic form of the poetic art.
4. The title, taken literally and in abstraction from the body of the work, evokes the notion of a particular dream that occurs on the eve of the summer solstice. Yet within the body of the play, not only is there no specific reference to that astronomical event—just as, in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, there is no specific reference to the Epiphany—but, in fact, Theseus' speech at the moment of discovering the young lovers in the woods seems to change the seasonal locus to that of May Day (IV, i, 133).
5. The title, taken in relation to the epilogue spoken by Puck, suggests that the entire body of the play may be “thought” of as but a “dream.” But given Puck's notorious penchant for mischief at the expense of humans, it surely is a problem whether to take him seriously or no. And even if we do, we are left to wonder how to interpret the play's words and deeds in terms of the involuntary activity of dreaming.

Stated in the language Bottom uses at one point, the question is: how to go about “expounding” the meaning of a poetic drama disguised as a “dream”? Or is it a dream disguised as a poetic drama? And whatever it is, how to expound its meaning? Indeed, should one even make the attempt to do so? Should one be warned of the folly one may thereby fall into, warned, that is, by Nick Bottom's wondering speech that he makes when he awakes from his “dream”: “Man is but an ass, if he go about [t'] expound this dream”? (IV, i, 206-7). But perhaps this is to take seriously what Shakespeare only means to be laughable. Perhaps a man is an ass who would apply to the poet's “dream” what the poet makes a weaver turned tragic actor for a day utter in his perplexity. And yet, could it be that a serious warning against “expounding” is meant to be conveyed by the playfulness of Shakespeare's treatment of Nick Bottom? Or is it, possibly, a playful warning against taking poetry seriously? But if the latter, what, then, should one take seriously? Political life? Philosophy? The revealed truth of the Bible? More questions than answers thus bubble up when one permits oneself the luxury of dwelling on titles and on the risible speech of a lowly weaver.

At the risk, then, of imitating Bottom, when one tries to expound on Shakespeare's “dream” one begins to wonder how to reconcile the discord between the sense of the play as a single dream and these two qualities of the action: (a) The play includes waking as well as dreaming activity. (b) The dreaming activity, which takes place only in the woods outside the city walls, is multiple: (1) Hermia's dream which occurs when she and Lysander first fall asleep in the woods (II, ii, 144-156); (2) the four lovers' dream-vision of what happened to them in the woods (IV, i, 187-199); (3) Bottom's dream-vision of what happened to him in the woods (IV, i, 200-219). If the title is meant to focus on one of these “dreams,” it certainly is not obvious which one. A case might be made that the lovers' dream is most crucial; and yet, to make that case requires that one consider it on its merits in relation to the dream that precedes and the one that follows.

These features of A Midsummer Night's Dream suggest that there is a “discord” among its elements. That discord reverberates in the poet's playing on the antinomies of dreaming/waking, madness/sanity, woods/city, fairies/humans, artisans/nobles, and the like. In attempting to discover whether there is an underlying concord in the discord, and whether such a concord might itself convey the kind of “delightful teaching” so praised by Sidney, I have been struck by the pains Shakespeare took to make the artisans play an integral part in the action of the whole. On the supposition that such a deed may be rooted in something more than a mere desire to reduce us to the “scornful tickling” Sidney refers to, I will scrutinize Shakespeare's treatment of the denizens of Athens's stalls.

I will begin again, by looking briefly at two classical treatments of Theseus: Plutarch's in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and Socrates' in Plato's Republic. I will do so to throw into sharper relief the strangeness of Shakespeare's comic treatment, a prime element of which is the prominence and the hilarity of the deeds and speeches of the artisans. I will then analyze certain features of the treatment of the artisans; most importantly, their place in the structure, and the nature of the problems that emerge from what they are made to do and say. Next, I will look closely at the most singular of the artisans, Nick Bottom the weaver. And I will conclude with a few observations on why I think that the treatment of the artisans has an underlying, serious purpose that makes the poetic art, strangely, become the ruling art.

III

Plutarch's Theseus—manifestly known to Shakespeare from his partial drawing on Sir Thomas North's translation of the Lives—is a fusion of hero and lawgiver. As hero, Theseus, whose descent from the gods is emphatically conveyed by Plutarch, had many adventures, amorous and military. Among the latter was his audacious slaying of the Minotaur, the monster that annually devoured seven each of the cream of Athenian youths and maidens. As lawgiver, Theseus—in North's words—“dyd gather a people together of all nations.” Further, he at length resigned his “regall power” to constitute a “common weale or popular estate.” The commonwealth had three “orders”: noblemen, husbandmen, and artificers. To the noblemen Theseus assigned the judging of “matters of religion,” the bearing of civil office, the determination of the laws, and the telling of “all holy and divine things.” And thus the noblemen “dyd passe the other [two orders] in honour: even so the artificers exceeded them in number, and the husbandmen in profit.”¹¹ In sum, although Plutarch's account of Theseus emphasizes his giving a place in the civil order to the common people, its focus is simply on Theseus, and its treatment of the common people is not only minimal but utterly sober, as contrasted to Shakespeare's treatment.

Socrates' Theseus—possibly known to Shakespeare—is also a hero and lawgiver, descended of the gods. However, Socrates, in speaking to young Adeimantus about the poetic education of the young in his “city in speech,” blames the poets' accounts that portray Theseus, son of Poseidon, and Perithous, son of Zeus, as “eagerly” undertaking “terrible rapes,” or as engaging in other “terrible and impious deeds.” Socrates then says to Adeimantus: “… we should compel the poets to deny either that such deeds are theirs, or that they are children of gods …”¹² Thus Socrates' brief account, though it says nothing directly about Theseus in relation to the common people, draws on the civic sense that Adeimantus has of that aspect of the lawgiving activity of Theseus at Athens, and portrays Theseus even more soberly than does Plutarch.

Shakespeare's comic framework for the portrayal of Theseus thus stands out the more sharply when one considers that classical treatments of the ancient lawgiver place him in a strictly sober, heroic context, and that those classical treatments were the very images that educated persons of Shakespeare's time would have brought to the play.¹³ It is true, of course, that Shakespeare seems to retain the sense of the heroic, and even the sense of the kinship to the gods (by Theseus' reference to Hercules as his “kinsman”). (V, i, 43ff). Even so, on balance, there is a great tension with the persistent sobriety of the classical treatments.

The tension between the sobriety of lawgiving and the comedy of mad adventures of lovers, fairies, and artisans in the woods is greatest precisely at the point where Theseus is made by Shakespeare to take his greatest political action: Theseus suddenly overrules the ancient marriage laws of Athens. Let us see how and why that is so.¹⁴

At the beginning of the action, when the play seems to have all the makings of a tragedy—in the mode of Romeo and Juliet, for example—Hermia appeals to Duke¹⁵ Theseus to override the ancient law of Athens which requires her either to marry the man her father chooses (Demetrius) instead of the man she loves (Lysander), or else suffer one of two other fates: to be killed, or to live out her life as a cloistered virgin. But Theseus at once replies that not even he has the power to “extenuate” its application (I, i, 120). What is the status of this law that makes it exempt from the power of a god-related heroic duke? It seems that it must be one of those awe-inspiring nomoi which exist from the most remote past of the city: a law derived from the gods, or at least having the aura of such divinity. And yet, in the aftermath of the lovers' and the artisans' often hilarious adventures in the woods, and as a prelude to the hilarity of the performance of the artisans' comic-tragedy in the Duke's palace, Theseus peremptorily overrules that ancient law. But then, taken in abstraction from Shakespeare's deliberate framing of Theseus' singular political action, that action must appear as an act of great impiety. Yet precisely by the way in which Shakespeare does frame it—above all by making the last phase of Bottom's adventures with Titania and his wondering and comical speech about those adventures constitute the immediate dramatic frame for Theseus' action—the impious act is greatly muted.¹⁶

That Shakespeare's comic framing of this singularly political episode is intended to have that moral effect is reinforced, I believe, by the framing that he also gives to what is, strictly speaking, Hermia's impious act in fleeing the reach of the city's laws. Following this act Hermia has a remarkable dream—the only dream that occurs in the woods as a natural dream, rather than as a retrospective, magic-induced dream-vision of waking events that actually occur there.

Hermia flees to the “wood”—the place of madness, in the punning sense of that word—in the company of Lysander. They manifestly intend to defy the city's law that forbids them to marry in opposition to Egeus' will. The lovers lose their way in the woods and at last fall asleep. When Hermia awakes, she is nearly mad with fear. Her fear, at first, is occasioned by starting into bewildered consciousness from a nightmare: a serpent has entered her breast and is eating her heart away; meanwhile, Lysander sits by and only smiles at that cruel act. But Hermia's fear becomes terror when she suddenly realizes that Lysander, who had been asleep nearby, has vanished. Hermia calls to him in great anguish. He does not respond. Hermia then races madly off to find him, determined to meet death if necessary.

Now as I have just summarized this episode, I have deliberately falsified it. I have, that is, torn it out of its framework in the whole play, and in so doing, I have made it appear much more an episode of fear and near-madness than it is when we react to it in that framework. For then we, the auditors/witnesses, are aware of two crucial circumstances: first, that nearly all of what is happening in the woods is somehow under the control of the fairies, and especially Oberon, who has already indicated his benevolence toward the young lovers. Second, that given the hilarity of the earlier deportment of Peter Quince and company, and given the expectation we have of soon seeing them cavort in these same woods, at the rehearsal of their ludicrous play, we have every reason to suppose that no harm can come to Hermia. But our assurance of that is, ultimately, the effect of the poet's deed—his practicing his poetic art on our souls. In particular, he makes us know what Hermia cannot know; and that knowledge works in us by causing the painful passions of fear and pity to be replaced, or overridden, by wonder, amusement, and perhaps even laughter.¹⁷

To restate the preceding point in relation to the problem of impiety: The natural moral consequence of willfully breaking man-made laws is that the offender deserves to be punished by human punishment. But the natural moral consequence of willfully breaking sacred laws is that the offender deserves to be punished by divine punishment. And we know from ancient tragedies that one form of punishment for breaking sacred laws is madness. Hermia, one may say, is portrayed as coming close to madness as an immediate aftermath of her fleeing the sacred law of marriage of the city, yet as being saved from it, in the action within the play, by the poet's deed in causing Oberon to reunite the lovers, and bless them. As for us, Shakespeare's so framing the episode saves us from the sense of dread that ordinarily derives from contemplating just punishment inflicted on one who has broken a sacred law.

To sum up: Shakespeare's comic framing of both Hermia's dream and of Theseus' bold action in overriding the sacred law of marriage gently assuages the awe that the nomoi naturally inspire in us. It seems that the poetic art, as practiced by Shakespeare, seeks to teach statesmen by indicating to them the reason and the means to assuage that awe.

IV

Now the most hilarious element in the comic framing of Theseus' action is what happens to Nick Bottom, weaver turned tragedian, metamorphosed into an ass/man, and beloved of Titania. In order to see more exactly how that element is integrated into the action and speech of the entire play, we need to look closely at the precision and care with which Shakespeare treats the “rude mechanicals.”

Dramatically speaking, the artisans' drollery first bursts upon us as a charming, comical discord in what seems to be an impending tragedy: Peter Quince calls the artisans to order to rehearse their play immediately following Helena's anguished soliloquy, which concludes with her fateful decision to betray Lysander and Hermia by revealing to Demetrius their plan to flee Athens. Historically speaking, the artisans' appearance is even more of a charming, comical discord: we suddenly hear Anglo-Saxon, presumably Christian, artisans who have somehow miraculously been transposed to the ancient pagan Athens of Theseus. Thus they are given, with one exception, Christian names: Peter, Nick (Nicholas), Francis, Tom (Thomas), and Robin (Robert). And each of their English surnames is either a technical word that refers to the art practiced, or alludes to it: Quince comes from quoins or quines, wedge-shaped blocks of wood used by carpenters; Bottom comes from the bottom or core of the skein on which the weaver winds the yarn; Flute comes from the flute stop of an organ, which a bellows mender would repair; Snug refers to the compact joining that a joiner would do; Snout refers to a spout of a kettle, a common object mended by tinkers; Starveling alludes to the proverbial leanness of tailors: according to an old phrase, “Nine tailors make a man.”¹⁸

I will comment later on the significance of this specification of the arts practiced by each artisan. For now, it suffices to remark that it is an integral element of the sudden, comic appearance of the artisans; and that the comic turning curiously and unexpectedly produces a shift in the political focus of the action: Up to this point, the focus is wholly on ruler and nobles; now, of a sudden, it is on men who represent the lowest order in the city, which is to say the people, or demos.

The initial, sudden shift in the political focus of the action proves, on reflection, to be linked to a series of shifts in the locus of the play's action. The action begins inside the city walls at the palace of Duke Theseus. It then moves to Peter Quince's cottage. The next, and much the longest part of the action, takes place outside the city walls in the “wood” of Athens. It then returns to Peter Quince's cottage. And it concludes in the great hall in the Duke's palace. The placement of the action, abstracted, thus proves to be highly symmetrical: palace, to carpenter's cottage, to woods, to carpenter's cottage, to palace. The mediation, then, between the palace, the place of rule, and the woods, the place of nature where no rule as such is characteristic, proves to be the abode of an artisan—and a carpenter, at that, whose natural material is the wood of trees. His art, as carpenter, is indispensable for transforming the natural material into shelter for men. But as such, it is an art that proves, in cities, to be dependent on other arts—on what has come to be called the “division of labor.” Shakespeare has seen fit, on the one hand, to make the artisans of this strange Athens practice six related arts that have to do with the provision of shelter and clothing within the city and, on the other hand, in contrast with Plutarch, to exclude any arts that have to do with agriculture. He also has seen fit, on the one hand, to specify the arts of his handicraftsmen and, on the other hand, to give no indication whatever of whether they are truly skilled at their art. Instead, these artisans take on themselves an art—the dramatic part of the art of imitation—for which they are, as their deeds and words at once make apparent, wholly unfit. One must wonder what will happen to Athens, simply in terms of its ability to survive, if Quince and Bottom are as inept at carpentering and weaving as they are at the imitative art. But of course, such a mundane question hardly arises, at least not now. Instead, we are charmed into a blissful state of hilarity by the antics of the group, especially by Nick Bottom. The acme of mirth produced by Bottom in the woods, and at the palace, is already foreshadowed in this opening scene, and comes to a focus on his being transformed in seeking to play many parts, even as Socrates' “democratic man” does play many parts in The Republic.¹⁹ Bottom is a thespian to keep an eye on.

In any case, the comic quality of the portrayal of the artisans depends decisively on their being made, temporarily, to forego the practice of the productive arts in order to engage, with stunning ineptitude, in one of the imitative arts—the dramatic art, the imitative art that has the greatest power to move men's souls, which is why Socrates seeks to purge it in his best city (kallipolis). Now the artisans' practice of the dramatic form of imitative art takes place in three phases: (1) the statement of the theme and the assignment of the parts (Quince's cottage: II,i); (2) the aborted rehearsal, during which certain problems concerning the presentation of the play are broached (the wood: III,i); (3) the actual presentation of the play (Theseus' palace: V,i). It thus happens that the central segment of the artisans' practice of the dramatic art coincides (1) with the central scene of the entire play (it is the fifth in a series of nine scenes), and; (2) with the central part of the action that takes place in the woods at night. It also thus happens that in a triple sense Shakespeare has formed his play so that the artisans of the city are at the center of the action; and so that at the center of that center, Bottom is made to enter for a time into the fairy world. The occasion for Bottom's temporary entry into that world is, of course, the intended rehearsal of the artisans' play. But the proximate cause of his entry proves to be the chance intersection of Puck's and Oberon's scheme with that of the artisans. The effect is that Bottom's adventures with Titania replace the rehearsal: a ludicrous, magic-induced transformation of a weaver into a man/beast, beloved of a fairy queen, replaces a ludicrous, self-induced transformation of that same weaver into an imitator of a tragic hero. What Shakespeare's purpose is in bringing about such a replacement—one that imitates and plays on the sense of “transformation”—is itself a good question, and one to which I shall turn a bit later, in looking more directly at Bottom's part in the whole action. For now, I observe only that by that transformation of a transformation, Shakespeare causes Bottom to be the only human privileged to enter directly into the fairy world. That is startling, when one ponders its political implication: Bottom is made to do that which not even great Duke Theseus, nor Hippolyta, nor any of the four young noble lovers, is permitted to do.

Let us now take a closer look at the central segment of the artisans' practice of the dramatic art. As I have previously noted, it opens as the artisans treat certain problems concerning how to mount their play. Those problems, one may say, are made by Shakespeare to focus on the artisans' curious—to say the least—understanding of how the dramatic art achieves its effects on the souls of the audience. The treatment falls into two phases. In the first phase, Bottom and Snug raise the question of the presumed fearful, even terrible, effect of two episodes on the ladies in the audience: Pyramus' suicide by stabbing, and the lion's roar. Nick Bottom, peerless at his newly-acquired art, divines the solution to both problems: let a prologue be spoken by Quince, which will remove the fear from the ladies' souls by reassuring them that the actions presented are not “real,” that Pyramus is really Bottom the weaver, and Lion really Snug the joiner.

In the second phase, two further problems are raised, one by one, by the poet, Peter Quince: how to bring in the needed moonlight, and how to depict the needed wall. Bottom, as eager to solve every problem as he was to play every part, now proposes, as a solution to the first problem, that the moonlight from the sky be permitted to enter the casement window of the chamber in the palace. It is a solution that depends on Quince's having first ascertained—from God help us, a printed almanac, in Thesean Athens!—that the moon “doth shine that night.” (III, i, 50-55). Yet Quince does not at once accept Bottom's suggestion; instead, he suggests an alternative: let the moonlight be personified, even as the lion will be personified. The second problem raised in the second phase, that of how to depict the wall, is resolved quickly by Bottom's suggestion that it, too, be personified.

Taking them in abstraction now, Bottom makes three kinds of proposals: the use of a prologue, the use of the moonlight from the sky, and the use of a man to personify the wall. His central proposal is set off against Quince's proposal, but no resolution is reached in this central segment of the artisans' practice of the dramatic art. We are thus left to wonder how it will be resolved, and we do not find that out until the night of the performance. Then at last in his prologue Quince tells us, as well as the three newly-married couples, that wall, moonshine, and lion all are to be personified. It thus happens that Quince's proposed personification triumphs over Bottom's proposed reliance on moonlight at the casement. And it thus also happens—oh blessed triumph of Quince over Bottom!—that we, as well as the lovers, are treated to a rare display of the imitative art. That is to say: If Bottom's solution had prevailed, the light of the moon from the casement would surely have been a tame business. But in the event, the triumph of the poet Quince's solution produces some of the most extended mirth in the play; for the personification of moonlight becomes the occasion, not just for the antics of Robin Starveling, the tailor, but for a comic interaction between him and four members of the audience.

I will turn to that interaction in a moment. But it first must be emphasized that Shakespeare's deed in so ordering the treatment of moonlight in the artisans' play is part of a complex set of deeds concerning moonlight. Perhaps the most obvious such deed is his setting the longest sequence of his play in the moonlit woods outside of Athens, and his making fairies, human lovers, and artisans alike, speak of the moonlight there on a number of occasions. A less obvious deed is forty-six uses of words referring to moonlight: moon (31), moonbeams (1), moonlight (6), and moonshine (8). This is the densest concentration of words about moonlight in any single play in Shakespeare's corpus, and by a considerable margin. Another less obvious deed is making the majority of these forty-six uses involve the artisans, and above all their comic-tragedy. I doubt that is merely accidental, in a play in which the centrality of the artisans and their play is thrice pointed to by the structure itself. Let us therefore more deliberately explore the emphasis on the moonlight in the artisans' play.

Bottom's first proposal, to use a prologue, depends on the power of speech to persuade the ladies that their fear is groundless. His last proposal, to personify the wall, depends on the power of action and speech to persuade the entire audience that a man dressed in rough garments and made to tell them that he is a massive human artifact is that artifact. But his central proposal, to admit moonlight at the casement, depends on the conjunction of two natural conditions being met—the moon has to be in its bright phase, and the sky has to be free of fog or clouds—with the enactment of Pyramus and Thisby. But the alternative solution—that of personifying moonlight—depends only on the power of words and deeds to exert a poetic charm. Shakespeare thus sets up a tension between a “natural” and a “poetic” solution, and causes that tension to come to a sharp focus on the artisans' words and deeds concerning the problem of moonlight.

When one scrutinizes the actual presentation of moonlight in the play within a play, three things stand out. First, Quince's poetic solution to the problem of bringing in moonlight contains an astronomical impossibility: On the one hand, Quince makes Moonshine three times claim to be the crescent moon (thus echoing the natural crescent moon that Theseus and Hippolyta awaited for their nuptials); and on the other hand, he makes Pyramus speak as though the moon were full. (V, i, 238-239, 272-275). Quince either is ignorant of the natural difference between a crescent and a full moon, or has forgotten what he wrote in his speech for Moonshine when he wrote his speech for Pyramus. In either case, the artisan-poet's ineptitude draws our attention all the more sharply to the problem of moonlight in the play within a play. And, as I shall argue a little later, it eventually directs our attention, by reflection, to the problem of moonlight in A Midsummer Night's Dream as a whole.

Second, the densest, most complex jesting by the royal and noble members of the audience occurs precisely in the eleven-speech sequence in which Moonshine makes his first appearance.²⁰ The jests' surface target is Moonshine's perfect ineptitude in the practice of the dramatic art. The jests' deeper target, however, is the artisan's intrinsic ineptitude as a human being. There is a complex interaction between the two levels of jests. That interaction is a remarkable example of Shakespeare's integration of the poetic with the political, as I shall now argue.

The jests' surface target is, to be more precise now, the perfect if wholly unintended comedy of Moonshine's serious attempt thrice to persuade the audience that he is the man in the moon, that the lantern he holds in his hand is the moon itself, and that the moon is in its crescent phase. In reply to Moonshine's central attempt to persuade, Theseus at once mocks Moonshine. The essence of that mocking is the absurdity of the man holding the thing within which he is supposed to be; stated generally, Theseus mocks the fundamental absurdity of making “the whole” be held by or contained in “the part.”

Now the sequence which provokes such mocking is, of course, itself a part of the whole enactment of Pyramus and Thisby. And the play within a play is, in turn, a part of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Moonshine “part” surely provokes us, as well as the interior audience, to laughter. But more fundamentally, its playing with the problem of the relation of part to whole incites us to thought—if we will let it—concerning the meaning of the play within a play in relation to the meaning of the whole of which it is a part. I suggest that the perfect ineptitude of the play within a play is itself part of the perfection of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that that perfect ineptitude is intended to throw light, by reflection, on the problematic character of the realization of poetic perfection.

Nor is that all. The problem of the realization of poetic perfection is intrinsically connected to that of the realization of political perfection. This is revealed by a further analysis of the deeper target of the royal and noble jesting. We must start, here, with this observation about the political situation that is depicted: It is the artisans of Athens, the lowest “part” of the political order—indeed, the part which is only problematically even in the political order as such—who unwittingly incite the royal and noble parts of the city to mockery. At the core of that mockery is a punning playfulness concerning the meaning of the “crescent” moon, whether as the thin bow of the waxing moon (which is the exact astronomical sense), or the thin bow of the waning moon (which is the more ambiguous general sense). Now in either case, of course, the “crescent” moon gives very little light. The punning on “crescent,” as signifying “little light,” is most pointed and revealing in the two-speech dialogue that takes place between the royal couple, Theseus and Hippolyta.

The dialogue begins with the first of three speeches Hippolyta makes about the moon, and the only speech she makes within the eleven-speech sequence with Moonshine. Hippolyta expresses weariness with “this moon,” and a punning desire that it would “change”—i.e., that it would quickly enter its last phase and thus disappear for good. Theseus' reply to this central speech of the five-speech rejoinder to Moonshine's central speech proves to be the densest punning speech in the whole of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is, in fact, a complex series of puns on “light,” “discretion,” “wane,” “courtesy,” (one of the meanings of discretion), “reason,” and “time.” I will not try to sort out all aspects of this double punning by the rulers of the city, but simply limit myself to these observations: Shakespeare makes the two most “political” characters of his play engage in a brief exchange that dwells, however playfully, on the intrinsic limitation of the artisan who plays Moonshine—on, that is, his weak “light” of “discretion.” Yet Shakespeare also makes Theseus, however playfully, indicate that in all civility, yes, even “in all reason,” they must accept the presence of that artisan: his “light,” it seems, dim though it is, is required by the city.

Third, the playful interaction between politically lowest and politically highest parts of the city concerning the problem of moonlight reaches its climax in Pyramus-Bottom's death scene. His final speech is: “Tongue, lose thy light! / Moon, take thy flight!” Whereupon Moonshine-Starveling, ever eager to please, and blessed, as Theseus observed, with but a “small light” of “discretion,” takes his leave of the action, considering himself dismissed by Pyramus-Bottom's imperative. This causes poor Thisby-Flute to try to discover her dead lover solely by the dim light of the stars, a fact gleefully commented on in Hippolyta's third and last speech on the moon, and Theseus' rejoinder to it.

This final comic collapse of Quince's poetic solution to the problem of bringing in moonlight depends, of course, on Bottom's strangely deranged speech. And the derangement, in turn, depends on the chance event that is wholly unknown to the royal couple, only confusedly known to Bottom, but clearly known to us: Bottom's temporary sojourn in the land of the fairies. For Bottom's unwitting transposition of “moon” and “tongue” is a sign, in speech, of a confusion in the soul that first afflicted him when he awakened in the woods. He then gave the first and most complex of four speeches which reveal that confusion: “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” (V, i, 211-213). All three of the later speeches take place back in the city; all three occur in or with respect to the play within a play; and all three continue the initial emphasis on a confusion, above all, concerning the sense of sight, the sense that is utterly dependent for its function on the existence of external light (whether the sun, in the natural realm, or a lantern, in the artificial realm). That Bottom's sojourn in the fairies' realm has the unexpected effect, at last, of making the moon disappear should make us reflect on Bottom's derangement and on what the disappearance of the moon may signify or point to. That reflection entails a closer consideration, first, of the light that is associated with the events in the woods; and second, of the traditional symbolic sense of light, in relation to the main actions of the play.

The sense of bright moonlight bathing the woods is conveyed by speeches of several of the characters, and is maintained except for one episode: Oberon makes a black fog temporarily cut off all heavenly light around the human lovers, to prevent Lysander and Demetrius from harming each other. The surface sense of the action in the woods thus is that of bright natural moonlight interrupted, for a short time, by the black, magically-induced fog that surrounds the lovers.

Let us consider, next, the traditional symbolic sense of light. According to a common understanding widespread in Shakespeare's time, an understanding going back to antiquity and exemplified in perhaps its most famous form in the eikon or “image” of the cave in Plato's Republic,²¹ the sun is symbolically connected to reason and the moon to unreason, or to reason paled by the operations of mere opinions and the force of the passions.²²

If we now apply this traditional symbolic sense of the meaning of “moonlight” to the surface impression of moonlight bathing the adventures of the human lovers and of Bottom, it seems to make sense: those moonlit adventures result from the wholly unforeseen, fortunate intersection of the humans with the fairies. But by the same token, the happiness of the human lovers, in particular, proves to depend decisively on fortune, not on knowledge, and hence is precarious, to say the least. And when one realizes that bright moonlight is made to give way, for a time, to utter blackness—when no light whatever from the heavens reaches the human lovers—the sense of that precariousness is reinforced. As moonlight—which at least gives the human eye some possibility of engaging in its natural function—gives way to utter darkness, the loss of function of the sense of sight naturally reaches its peak; and by analogy, the dependence of human happiness on the blindness of fortuna reaches its peak. It is true that in this instance the blackness is benevolent and thus not charged with the deepest sense of an utter dependence. But Shakespeare's playing, in two connected contexts, on the theme of the disappearance of the natural light of the heavens should make us consider further the implications of the disappearance of Moonshine from Pyramus and Thisby. To do this, we need to move from the impression of bright moonlight in the woods outside of Athens to an examination of the details of the treatment of moonlight in the play as a whole.

The play begins with Theseus and Hippolyta eagerly awaiting the appearance of the new moon, for the night when the “silver bow” of that moon appears in the heavens will be the night of their nuptials. Now the night in the woods—when Bottom, as well as the lovers, engage in their adventures by bright moonlight—is the night before the nuptials. But in astronomical terms, with respect to the natural phases of the moon, it is impossible for those adventures to take place by moonlight. The moon is invisible for a few nights between the last thin bow of the old and the first thin bow of the new moon. What is more, on the night when the crescent moon appears, it gives little light, and is visible only for a short time, near sunset.

What, then, does Shakespeare do? In his own way, he does what he makes his poetic counterpart, Peter Quince, seek to do. That is, Shakespeare, with consummate skill in the poetic art, calls on the charms of that art to induce in us a waking-dreaming state, such that we will “see” moonlight where, in nature, there can be none. But he also reminds us, by the artisans' bumbling efforts to bring in moonlight, by the jesting of the nobles and the rulers at those efforts, and above all, by the final foolishness of Bottom's inadvertently making the moon disappear, that there is a tension between the natural and the poetic solutions to the problem of bringing in moonlight, and that his own practice of the poetic art is the ultimate cause of making the poetic solution prevail over the natural one. The political bearing of that complex, playful, and imitative treatment of the relation of the poetic art to nature remains now to be explored, above all in its application to Bottom's adventures in the woods.

V

The delightful effect of A Midsummer Night's Dream surely is in part the product of the extraordinary beauty of the poetry, the hilarity of the artisans' adventures, the mischief of Puck, and so on. But it is also in part the product of the supposition, first of all, that war for now is at an end. Theseus has lately been at war, but that has been successfully concluded: indeed, from that war has come not just victory, but the winning of Hippolyta, and thus the prospect of the gratification of wedded erotic love. Second, the city is at peace within. The artisans, so far from being in a state of unrest or rebellion, are obedient. And so are the nobles: Lysander, far from seeking to challenge the rule of Theseus or the ancient laws, instead chooses to lead his love away from the city. Third, the city is possessed, it seems, of sufficient goods for the support of life and is sufficiently free of the ravages of disease that its denizens can indulge themselves in the revelry of feasting and entertainments. In short, the duke and the nobles, but no less the artisans can afford to enjoy the sweets of life.

It might seem that the portrayal of such a condition is easily managed by a poet: all he need do is imagine it, then figure it forth in deeds and words. But such a way of conceiving of the poetic art seems to presuppose that the poet need not be concerned with the problematic basis of such a condition—with the problem, that is, of the degree to which such a condition of civil peace, plenty, health, and leisure, is necessarily, in the real world, dependent on the arduous and often marginally successful transformation of nature by human arts. Is that Shakespeare's understanding of the poetic art? I seriously doubt it, for reasons that I will now elaborate.

A key aspect of Shakespeare's poetic art is his deed in causing Bottom's entry into the fairy world. That entry is central to the action of the play; it elevates Bottom, a mere “rude mechanical,” above nobles and duke; it provides the occasion for those experiences that give rise to the first speech in which he confuses the senses; and it thus also lays the basis for his later confused speech which causes the moon to disappear. It is also a key aspect of Shakespeare's poetic art so to construct the play that we are made to be the only humans privileged (1) to know what was done and said in the fairy world, and (2) to hear Bottom's first confused speech about what happened to him in that world. Our privileged status brings us, in a curious way, closer to Bottom, yet differentiates us from him. That is, we are made to know a great deal more than Bottom about what went on in the fairy world, and to know it in a way that he is not privileged to do: we are made to know it in a conscious way, whereas Bottom's residual “knowing” is but a dream that is “past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” Above all, as I shall now argue, we are thus privileged to know things that connect the fairy world's effects on nature to the ordinary world of human activity and that reveal a dependence of the latter on the former, a dependence that becomes inextricably interwoven with Bottom's adventures.

The revelry at the palace, which marks the threshold of a new generative activity by the three newly married couples, is framed by the adventures with the fairies in the woods and the unusual entry of the fairies into the palace. The revelry presupposes, as I have noted, peace, leisure, and plenty. But such a condition presupposes, in turn, that the ordinary transformation of nature by the human arts—the arts of the city and the arts of the country—has been successful. Whether it also presupposes that such a transformation of nature depends upon forces beyond human control is a question that does not obtrude itself on the revelers. It is we, the privileged ones, who are made to see that “framing” I have referred to, and perhaps to reflect on its connection to the joyousness of the revelers.

In the first part of the fairies' framing of the reverly, we learn, at once, of the quarrel between Titania and Oberon. We also learn that the quarrel can have a devastating effect on the natural world, and therefore also on the human world, especially on the human world's dependence on the transformation of nature through the human arts. In the longest speech in the entire play, Titania articulates the fateful consequences of their lovers' quarrel. The speech begins and ends with an emphasis on the quarrel itself. In between, it is a catalogue of disasters that characteristically accompany the actual quarreling: raging winds, contagious fogs, rampaging rivers, and a profound confusion of the seasons, which destroys the natural cycle of the seasons, and worse still, thus destroys the generative cycle itself. At the center of this “progeny of evils,” the effect on humans is brought into sharp and dismaying focus in one of only two passages in the play that refer to the “ploughman”: the “ploughman” loses his “sweat”; the cattle and the sheep die in droves from diseases; and the corn rots before it is ripe. As for humans, they are stricken with “rheumatic diseases,” a result of the angry activity of the moon, that same heavenly body about whose light Shakespeare takes such pains in every dimension of his “dream.”

Titania's speech, given its setting in the woods outside of Athens and its ominous contents, evokes in us, who are the privileged ones, memories of a terrible and altogether real natural catastrophe that did in fact befall that beautiful city. In the early part of the Peloponnesian Wars, in 430 b.c., when Pericles was still the leading man of the city, a devastating plague struck the Athenians. A most remarkable description of that catastrophe, and especially its political effects on civil life—such as the reduction of men to impiety and lawlessness on a great scale—is given by Thucydides. His account, in turn, forms the basis of the stark and even terrifying description of the plague that occurs at the end of one of the great classical philosophical poems, Lucretius' Of the Nature of Things.

Lucretius' poem begins with an invocation of Venus, the goddess of love and generation. That invocation becomes the basis of the hymn to Venus in Book IV of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, first published in 1596.²³ Listen, for a moment, to Lucretius as transformed by Spenser, Shakespeare's great contemporary:

Great Venus, queene of beautie and of grace, …
That with thy smyling looke doest pacifie
The raging seas, and makst the stormes to flie;
Thee, goddesse, thee the winds, the clouds doe feare,
And when thou Spredst thy mantle forth on hie,
The waters play, and pleasant lands appeare,
And heavens laugh, and al the world shews joyous cheare.
Then doth the daedale earth throw forth to thee
Out of her fruitful lap abundant flowres …(24)

The last book of Lucretius' poem begins and ends with passages on Athens, the only book in the poem to be so constructed. At the beginning, Lucretius praises Athens above all cities that have ever existed:

It was Athens of illustrious name that first in former days spread abroad the corn-bearing crops amongst unhappy mankind; Athens bestowed on them a new life and established laws; Athens first gave the sweet consolations of life, when she brought forth a man endowed with such wisdom, who in past days poured forth all revelations from truth-telling lips.²⁵

Reflection on this passage shows that, in order of ascending importance, Athens has established the arts, given laws, and brought forth philosophy. Lucretius has in mind, in particular, the philosophy of Epicurus; but that single example seems to stand for the activity of philosophy as such, as the highest human activity. Athens, then, is the city of philosophy. Yet the emergence of philosophy decisively presupposes the arts, above all the art of agriculture, and the political art, needed for the establishment of the city as a city. The activity of the founder, it seems, is central to the human activity of bringing forth not just the city, but what the city makes possible, the life of the mind. Theseus may not himself be philosophic, but his actions underlie the emergence of philosophia, or the love of being wise.

At the end of Lucretius' last book, however, we see that not even Athens is exempt from the devastation of natural calamities, which destroy the ordered life of the city. Furthermore, it is irony of the deepest kind that the very artisans whose art first gave rise to the settled life of the city should now be the proximate cause of the city's undoing: the calamity proceeds from the country into the city. Listen again to Lucretius:

And in no small degree this affliction was brought from the country into the city, for the fainting crowd of countrymen brought it, gathering from all quarters with seeds of disease. They filled all places and buildings; so, by the stifling heat, death all the more piled them in heaps, being thus packed.²⁶

Lucretius' intention in formulating a stark and startling contrast between the loveliness of Venus and of generation at the beginning and the ugliness of plague and civil destruction at the end has been summarized by Leo Strauss in these words:

The plague is as much the work of nature as the golden deeds of Venus, nay, as the understanding of nature. It is doubtful whether philosophy has any remedy against the helplessness and the debasement which afflicts anyone struck by such events as the plague.²⁷

Now as we well know, A Midsummer Night's Dream ends happily—not with deaths of lovers, let alone plagues and civil destruction, but with revelry. More exactly, as a final counterpoint to the human revelry, it ends with fairies dancing in an unusual place, in the Duke's palace, and with their pronouncement of a remarkable blessing. I will come to that blessing in a few moments. But first, I must take a further look at Titania's speech in relation to the sequence of actions in the whole play. Titania's speech catalogues natural disasters that accompany the quarrel of Oberon and Titania wherever they happen to be. Fortunately for Athens, the natural catastrophes have not as yet visited that fair city, for only belatedly have Oberon and Titania come to Athens from far-off India, and they separate just before, as Titania puts it, they are inclined to “chide downright.” (II,i,145). But if the quarrel is not ended very soon, what can prevent catastrophe of the kind so poignantly described in Lucretius?

And now, at this moment of potential peril for the city, lo and behold, it is Bottom to the rescue. Yes, Bottom, that weaver who has left his loom to become a master of the imitative arts. Bottom, who eagerly seeks to play any part and above all a tyrant, but who settles for the part of a tragic lover. Bottom, who will play the part of the lion so well that he will roar as “gently as any sucking dove,” so as not to frighten the ladies; or so well as to cause his ruler, the Duke, to say “Let him roar again; let him roar again!” (I,ii,30-73). In any case, it is Bottom, who happens to be the means of reconciliation between Oberon and Titania, hence also the means of forefending against natural catastrophes that may erupt from their quarrels, hence a kind of savior of Athens.

Not that Bottom has any intention of doing all those things, nor, of course, any real understanding of what has happened to him in the woods: he retains only that rare vision, that dream that it is past the wit of man to expound, and which is a strange blend of being lifted up—that is, being loved by a beautiful queen, with many servants at his command—and being driven down—that is, being possessed of the head of an ass, that most foolish, stubborn, and burden-bearing of beasts, which brays and cavorts, but cannot speak, let alone sing a song. Bottom has the consolation, that is to say, of not having lost his humanity, even if he has been made temporarily to wear the revolting head of an ass; for even in his extermity, he retains the faculty of speech, which depends decisively on the faculty of reason.

This is shown in a comic but instructive way in the first exchange between Titania and Bottom. Titania first becomes aware of Bottom's presence when she hears his braying song about the birds. She then sees him and exclaims that her ear is “enamoured” by his song, her eye “enthralled” by his shape, and her soul seized with love for his “fair virtue's force,” or the power of his beauty. Bottom modestly replies that Titania has “little reason” for loving him, then indulges in a “gleek,” or jest, the core of which is the problem of whether—and if so how—“reason” and “love” may be “friends.” Whereupon Titania says, “Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful,” and Bottom again modestly claims “Not so, neither …” (III,i,128-150).

This is the only place in A Midsummer Night's Dream where someone is called “wise” as well as “beautiful.” But for it to be Bottom is ridiculous: we laugh at Titania's remark, for we know that Bottom is no more wise than he is beautiful. The immediate comic effect of this episode depends, I think, on our eyes and our reason being simultaneously exempt from, yet naturally charmed by, the imagined transformations wrought on Bottom and Titania. But the comic effect's basis comes into view only when the charm gives way to reason's natural function of thinking how the effect is rooted in certain absurdities. That is to say that “love” gives way to “reason,” or that reason replaces that which is loved merely because it is charming with that which is loved because it is intelligible. But for this to happen, there has at first to be the charmed awareness of the discrepancy between what we see and know and what the deranged senses and perception of Titania cause her to see and know.

We are reminded of this episode in the perplexed speech Bottom gives on awakening from his adventures with Titania. Bottom is charmed by what he recalls; and he seeks to reason concerning what it means, as well as whether it can be expounded in speech. It happens, however, that Bottom's articulation of the problem of perceiving and expounding is confused in a way that echoes the confusion of the charmed Titania, in that it reveals a derangement of the function of the senses, above all the senses of sight and hearing. Yet Bottom's speech goes beyond Titania's, for it proves to be a parody of one of the most famous passages in the New Testament, Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter II vs. 9): “But as it is written, The things which eye hath not sene, nether eare hathe heard, nether came into man's heart, are, which God hathe prepared for them that loue him.”²⁸ In Bottom's confused state that becomes, as we have seen, “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.”

Now it is important to observe, first, that the context within which the original biblical verse is found is one of the New Testament's most important treatments of the tension between revelation and philosophy. To be more precise, Saint Paul's first chapter sets forth a profound tension between Christian revelation and Greek philosophy. Thus Saint Paul says: “… the Jewes require a signe, and the Grecians seke after wisdome. But we preache Christ crucified: unto the Jewes, even a stombling blocke, & unto the Grecians, foolishnes” (I: 22-23). Second, the parody spoken by Bottom draws our attention to the confusion of the senses; but in so doing, it also draws attention away from that which is omitted by Bottom's speech: Saint Paul's decisive emphasis on “the things” God “has prepared for them that love him.” Substituted for those “things” are the things that happened to Bottom in the woods, things that transcend the sphere of the natural understanding, but in a direction that is, by Saint Paul's lights, all but blasphemous. Third, not only has Shakespeare made Bottom's adventure cause a confusion in his soul concerning the senses, but he also has made the adventure somehow add to the senses dwelt on in the biblical original. That is, in Saint Paul's text the senses of sight and of hearing are set in contrast to the “things of God,” which are “revealed” to us by “the Spirit.” And later in the second chapter, Saint Paul stresses the conflict between that “revealing” and the operations of the soul of the “natural man” to whom such things are “foolishness.” (II: 14). But in Bottom's wondering speech the senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch are dwelt on, thus adding the two senses most integral to the demands of the body. Finally, added to the senses of that “natural man” so excoriated by Saint Paul is the faculty of “conceiving.” One wonders whether that faculty is not the root of the “natural man's” temptation to seek after that “wisdom” which the Grecians seek. I know that one ought not to put too much stock in what a confused weaver says in his perplexity. But it is worth recalling that Bottom's parodic speech in the woods outside of Athens provides an integral part of the comic framing for Theseus' overriding the nomoi of the city.

I must hasten, however, from the woods to the last sequence in the palace, the sequence in which the fairies leave their natural place in the woods in order to preside—unseen—over the removal of the human lovers to their respective nuptial beds.

Theseus' last speech urges all the lovers at last to bed, and jestingly adds, “'tis almost fairy time,” little suspecting that the fairies are indeed close at hand. His last speech then closes with the promise of a whole fortnight of “revels,” and new “jollity,” as befits ducal and noble nuptials.

Between Theseus' last speech and Oberon's last speech is a single speech by Puck. The beginning of Puck's speech is starkly in contrast to Theseus' benediction, for it evokes the ordinary harshness of the world of nature. It does this, for example, by speaking of a lion's roar, and a wolf's howl. But it does so even more tellingly with respect to the toil of the human arts in extracting the substance of life from nature, with these laconic words: “the heavy ploughman snores, / All with weary task fordone.” (V,i,373-74) This is the second and last time in the play that we are reminded of the ploughman, he who practices the art that underlies all the other arts on which the city depends, the art that stands closest to, and has most constantly to contend with, the world of living nature. The exhaustion of the ploughman is begotten of the practice of his art in extracting from nature what nature, in the absence of human art, provides in only the most minimal and problematically available way. That exhaustion is the condition, one may say, for the prolonged amorous revelry that Theseus has promised. But it is also the condition for the leisure in which the practice of the poetic art and the turning to philosophy may take place. When we place the last reference to the ploughman alongside the first reference, we may recall Titania's evocation of the fearful dislocations in nature that may afflict the city; we are reminded, that is, that the descent from the level of mere hard toil on the meager provisions of nature, as nature, to the level of natural catastrophe has been narrowly averted for this lovely city, whose potential for realizing the highest humans are capable of is yet to unfold.

Lest we forget that the saving of Athens took place in the woods, through the fortunate conjunction of the artisans' practice of the dramatic art with the appearance of the fairies, Shakespeare now makes the fairies leave their natural place, come into the palace, the seat of political rule, and pronounce a remarkable blessing on the married couples as their generative activity is about to commence. It is not just that they all will “Ever true in loving be.” More remarkable still, the promise is that all their children will be free of the “blots of nature's hand”: no deformities, not even a mole, let alone a “mark prodigious,” such as is “despised in nativity.” (V,i,401-415). The fairies thus assume, for a moment, the role of Venus, the goddess of love and generation. Their blessing on the couples replaces the somber ending of Lucretius' poem, even as Bottom's adventure replaces the rehearsal of the artisans' comic-tragedy.

VI

If action and speech are the warp and the woof of poetic drama, then it seems Shakespeare is a kind of weaver. I will conclude with a few remarks that indicate the way in which Shakespeare's weaving in A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to me to be akin to the royal art of weaving that is so praised in Plato's Statesman.²⁹

When the artisans first enter into the action, Bottom, weaver turned actor, says to Quince, carpenter turned poet: “First, good Peter Quince, say what the play treats on …” Quince says: “Marry, our play is The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby.” We are at once reduced to mirth, by Quince's seriousness, and even more by the title itself: this craftsman has unwittingly given his play a title that contains an arrant self-contradiction, a discord, a confusion of two distinct modes of dramatic poetry, tragedy and comedy. Later, in act V, Philostrate presents a list of possible entertainments to Theseus, who rejects the first three, then comes at last to Peter Quince's opus, now referred to as “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisby; very tragical mirth.” Whereupon Theseus laughingly exclaims:

Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!
That is hot ice and wondrous snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

(IV,i,59-60).

Stated in terms of the conventional names for two essentially different types of poetic drama, Theseus' question means: How is it possible to reconcile the fundamental discord between the end of tragedy and the end of comedy? The first seeks to move us to a catharsis of fear and pity, felt for those who are intrinsically noble; the second seeks to move us to a catharsis of contempt for those who are base and/or foolish.

The answer to Theseus' question (and to ours) proves to be the artisans' actual performance of their “lamentable comedy”: The artisans, that is, inadvertently transform the tragic into the comic, and thus also unintentionally overturn the traditional order of nobility and seriousness of the two forms of poetic drama. The effect of that overturning is to reduce the ruling and the noble parts of the city to mirth and jesting mockery; they are seized with what Sir Philip Sidney called a “scornful tickling.” Yet the tickling itself attenuates the hate-filled contempt that higher natures may feel for lower natures. We are reminded of the fundamental political problem represented by such contempt in various places in Shakespeare's “dream,” but nowhere more pointedly than in a single remark entrusted to Oberon. Having at first himself been reduced to mirth by the drollery of Titania's loving the ass-headed Bottom, Oberon at last says to Puck that he has begun to feel “pity” for Titania's mad “dotage,” which has reduced her to “seeking sweet favours” for Bottom, this “hateful fool.” (IV,i,49).

Shakespeare's poetic art causes that same “hateful fool” to be transformed, if only for a time, from a mere “rude mechanical” into an ardent yet ludicrous “hero” (and, as we alone see, into the savior of Athens). Bottom's nature, so transformed, is then briefly joined by the balm and the catharsis of laughter into a tenuous and fragile harmony with the other natures in the city. The comic as well as the fortuitous and transitory character of such a weaving together may well appear to be an exceedingly problematic solution to the fundamental political problem of joining essentially different natures into a well-ordered whole. But even Socrates, confronted with that problem, was compelled to yearn for a poet who could persuade all three kinds of “natures,” and not least those of the demiourgoi, whose technai provide the basis of civil existence, that their place in the city is itself wholly the product of nature, not of human acts, or of accidents. Indeed, Socrates was compelled to make that “noble lie” be the very cornerstone of his “city in speech,” the city that is simply kata phusin, or according to nature.

To say, then, that Shakespeare's and Socrates' respective poetic solutions to the problem of weaving essentially different natures together in the city are foolish, not least because they are so little likely to become actual, may only be to say that the modern mind's conviction that the solution to that problem is wholly within the power of human art is itself the most comical thing of all; or rather, it would be comical if modern men, who cling with unabated zeal to that conviction bred of the revolutionary possibilities opened by Shakespeare's countryman, Francis Bacon,³⁰ did not take themselves and their project with such deadly seriousness. I myself wonder, in fact, whether that deadly seriousness is not itself the obstacle, today, to every attempt to articulate the problem in the comprehensive terms in which it appears in Shakespeare's “dream.”

In any case, if the foolishness of the comic weaving together of natures in the city is foolishness of the first power, then surely it is foolishness raised to the second power to make the poetic art prevail over the natural solution to the problem of bringing in light, and foolishness raised to the third power to make a weaver who has been translated into an ass/man become the savior of the city by his accidental sojourn with a fairy queen in the woods outside of Athens. Yet who among us is so bold, then, as to tell exactly how that city did manage to rise from obscurity and ascend to the pinnacle of the possibilities available to human life? The rarity, and even more, the cause of such a remarkable realization have ever since reduced those who truly reflect on it to wonder and perplexity. Shakespeare's comical treatment of ancient Athens at its founding phase thus seems to me itself to be rooted in those states of the soul; and his artful weaving of action and speech seems to me to be his comically serious way of teaching us something about the possibilities, and yet the harsh and perhaps ultimately unpassable limits and dependencies, of life in the city as such.

Shakespeare knew full well that even Athens was at last subject to the ravages of political and natural destruction. He knew it well enough to write a somber work in which a cynic philosopher, Apemantus, says: “The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.”³¹ That Athens thus proved, like the love of unfortunate lovers, to be a “quick bright thing,” come, at last, to “confusion” (I,i,149), redirects our attention to the problem of what is highest and what it is rooted in. Or it does so if we will let Shakespeare's “dream” take us outside the city by reducing us to laughter about the things that are inside it. But whether we can learn again to imbibe the delightful pharmakon of such laughter is as uncertain as whether a Bottom will come, again, to be in our midst.

Notes

1. The Satires, I.1. 24-27, in The Works of Horace, trans. C. Smart (New York: Evert Cuyckinck et al., 1821), pp. 6-7.

2. Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 602b.

3. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 18 and 28.

4. Ibid., p. 28.

5. Ibid., p. 79. Cf. the following statement in James Amoyt's “To the Readers,” at the head of Sir Thomas North's rendering of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, a statement Shakespeare very likely had read: “such books as yield pleasure and profit, and do both delight and teache, have all that a man can desire why they should be universally liked and allowed of all sortes of men, according to the common saying of the poet Horace: ‘that he which matcheth profit with delight, / Doth winne the price in every poynt aright.’” Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Englished by Sir Thomas North anno 1579, ed. George Wyndham (London: David Nutt, 1895), vol. 1. p. 8.

6. See Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), especially pp. 42-48.

7. Jacob Klein's penetrating analysis of “action” and “speech” in Platonic dialogues, and in particular, his treatment of the mimetic function of action in relation to speech, seem to me to be very pertinent to the study of Shakespeare's plays. See Klein's introductory remarks to his A Commentary of Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 3-31.

8. Theseus appears, of course, in the play The Two Noble Kinsmen, but given the disputed authorship of that play, I have excluded it. See Hallet Smith's introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), pp. 1639-41.

9. All citations to the text of Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare. All statements about uses of words in the plays are based on Marvin Spevack's The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1973). The Spevack Concordance is keyed to the Evans text. In the speech in which Hermia refers to Athens as “paradise,” she is momentarily disenchanted with Athens because of its marriage law. All that is required for that enchantment to resume is for her to be permitted to marry Lysander.

10. See the various articles for these words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

11. See Plutarch's “Life of Theseus,” pp. 53-54.

12. Plato, The Republic, 391c.

13. It is possible that the classical sense of Theseus underlay Samuel Pepys's reaction, in 1622, to Shakespeare's “dream”; for Pepys called it “the most ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” See Anne Barton's introduction in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 217.

14. See Howard B. White's analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in his Copp'd Hills Towards Heaven: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1970), Chap. III. I have been much stimulated and influenced by White's general line of thought, but have sought to look more directly and intensively than he did at the specifically comic aspect of the play, and in particular at the comic aspect as it emerges in the treatment of the artisians.

15. The title “duke” seems to be used in this play—and other plays, such as Twelfth Night, or What you Will—in sense 1 in the OED; “A leader; a leader of an army, a captain or general; a chief, ruler.”

16. Act IV, scene i begins with the last phase of Bottom's involvement with Titania, it moves through the key episode in which the ancient law is overriden, and ends with Bottom's soliloquy.

17. See also what I argue, later on, concerning the intended moral effect of Quince's “prologue” that will overcome the fear of the ladies.

18. See the note to I, ii, p. 225 of The Riverside Shakespeare; and cf. the edition of the play edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 102.

19. Republic, 560c-d

20. MOON.

    This lanthorn doth the horned moon present—

    DEM.

    He should have worn the horns on his head.

    THE.

    He is no crescent, and his horns are invisible within the circumference.

    MOON.

    This lanthorn doth the horned moon present;

    Myself the man i' th' moon do seem to be.

    THE.

    This is the greatest error of all the rest. The man should be put into the lanthorn. How is it else the man i' th' moon?

    DEM.

    He dares not come there for the candle; for, you see, it is already in snuff.

    HIP.

    I am a-weary of this moon. Would he would change!

    THE.

    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.

    LYS.

    Proceed, Moon.

    MOON.

    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.

    DEM.

    Why, all these should be in the lanthorn; for all these are in the moon.

21. Plato, The Republic, 514a-517b.

22. On the title page of Robert Record's The Castle of Knowledge (1556), the sun is made to shine above the “sphere of destinye, whose gouenour is knowledge,” while the crescent of a new moon is made to shine above the “wheele of fortune, whose ruler is ignorance.” On the left side, Urania, or heavenly wisdom, with open eyes, holds a pair of compasses in her right hand, and the handle of the sphere of destiny in her left. On the right side, the goddess Fortuna, blindfolded, holds a cloth in her left hand, and pulls on the cord of the wheel of fortune with her right. The verses at the center treat the contest between the two, and conclude: “The heavens to fortune are not thralle / These spheres surmount al fortunes chance.” See plate 16 in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1134, for a reproduction of Record's title page.

23. See the account of “Lucretius and the Renaissance” in George D. Hadzsits, Lucretius and His Influence (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1935), pp. 248-83.

24. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, in The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908), Book IV, Canto X, sections xliv-xlv.

25. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), VI, ll. 1-9.

26. Ibid., VI, ll. 1259-1265.

27. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Lucretius,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 83.

28. It is a problem which translation of the Bible Shakespeare used. On balance, the evidence seems to me to point to the Geneva Bible. I have quoted from the 1560 version, published in a facsimile version by the University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. See p. 20 of the introduction for a brief treatment of Shakespeare's use of the Geneva Bible.

29. See especially the last speech by the Eleatic Stranger, at 311b-c.

30. See Howard B. White, Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968) especially chapter 1, “Political Faith and Utopian Thought.”

31. Timon of Athens, IV,iii,348.