SOURCE: Mikics, Davis. “Poetry and Politics in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Raritan 18, no. 2 (fall 1998): 99-119.

[In the following essay, Mikics examines the dichotomy between poetry and politics in A Midsummer Night's Dream and contends that Shakespeare makes a claim “for poetry in the face of power.”]

James Nohrnberg begins his vast summa of Spenser and Renaissance poetics, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, with a line from Pico: “He who cannot attract Pan, approaches Proteus in vain.” For a long time Renaissance studies wrestled Proteus, trying to whip the various energies of the era into encyclopedic shape. But new historicism, the alpha and omega of current Renaissance criticism, has largely abandoned the earlier critical interest in coherence and harmony. This is true, sadly, on a programmatic as well as a thematic level. Current work on Shakespeare rarely attempts an explanatory account of a given play in light of its whole critical and literary-historical legacy. Instead, critics busy themselves with polemical reflection, with the poses now fashionably known as “interventions.” In this essay, I want to illuminate some of the costs of the shift in emphasis from synthesis to polemical maneuvering by exploring how synthesis, and the literary imagination that produces it, works itself out in one Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Dream is a favorite text for new historicists, who use it to illustrate the way that sovereign power, in the rather unattractive person of Theseus, imposes its will. In making this point, though, historicizing critics ignore Shakespeare's view of poetic imagination as a synthesizing and coordinating rather than a willful, dictatorial power. In short, a protoromantic text like the Dream uses its interest in wholeness, the harmony that only literary creation can engender, to distinguish poetic from political work. In doing so, the play runs counter to the array of Renaissance practices that equate poets with courtiers or rulers. A Midsummer Night's Dream shows what art can do that politics cannot: an assertion that, contrary to much current criticism, is not merely (though it is also) the expression of an historical situation in which political absolutism encroaches on writerly work. The standoff between imaginative action and political manipulation remains permanent and unresolvable. The result is that poetry begins where politics leaves off, and the poet, though constrained as well as informed by politics, accomplishes what the politician does not begin to dream of.

I will name Shakespeare's mode in A Midsummer Night's Dream metamorphic, though the play's festive conclusion obviously contrasts with the punishing, allegorical fixity that ends many of Ovid's tales. Metamorphosis, real and imagined, is prominent in the Dream for a reason. It allows Shakespeare to incorporate in his play the disfigurement and delusion that desire induces, and by doing so to domesticate eros in time for a comic finish. Shakespeare's poetic means of moderating and controlling desire through its outrageous literalization is meant to contrast, I suggest, with Theseus's way of ruling, which proves unable to coordinate the harmony that comedy requires. The action of A Midsummer Night's Dream is driven, not by Theseus's commands, but by the larger, magical powers exploited by Oberon, Puck, and Shakespeare himself. Theseus's wishful version of patriarchal power differs radically from the sway of these other figures, who work their will by manipulating sexual desire. For Theseus, sex is a foreign force, embodied in Hippolyta and in the waning moon that, as he remarks in the play's first scene, “lingers my desires”: a force to be tamed, so far as possible, rather than enjoyed. At the end of their metamorphic journey, Shakespeare's young lovers acknowledge a confusion about the workings of desire that must be repressed in the case of ruler (Theseus) and subject (Hippolyta, his conquered bride). Each beloved in the play is also a lover, with the exception of Bottom, and each is dependent on, as well as resistant to, a lover's gaze. The poet creates first confusion and then harmony by drawing on the perspectival distortions that desire engenders, its “wicked and dissembling glass.” During the lovers' night in the woods, the glass's distortions can make the same character look “ugly as a bear” or beautiful as a “goddess, nymph, perfect, divine.” Both hyperboles are, of course, severely partial, and one is induced by magic love-juice; but in love, whether magically induced or not, hyperbole is the irresistible rule.

Shakespeare engages in metaphoric theater so that he can break the rule of hyperbole by fulfilling and literalizing it, rather than mocking it as Theseus does in his comparison of poet, lover, and madman in act 5. Shakespeare's flagrant literalizations—most memorably, Bottom's ass's head—drew Hazlitt's criticism of the Dream as a play that ought not to be staged. Though “Bottom's head” on the page is “a fantastic illustion,” Hazlitt wrote, “on the stage it is an ass's head, and nothing more. … Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine.”

Equating Shakespeare's play with the mechanicals' efforts, Hazlitt ignores the point of Shakespeare's deliberate awkwardness. The Dream's blunt, often shocking metamorphoses serve a purpose: Shakespeare enacts love's illusions in their most extreme form in order to dispel them. Part of our frustration as the audience of a play, as Hazlitt reminds us, is that the stage's costumed actors embody a story too fully: they reveal fantasies to us so concretely that the fantasies are dissipated. We are denied the vision we want, the consummation and—therefore—the dissolution of theater, what James Calderwood calls “perfect access to a world of imagined presence.” The perfect finding of beloved presence, a dream compared to which “crystal is muddy” (as Demetrius puts it during the high jinks of act 3), would allow the spectator to become invisible, the scene and its actors to melt into an audience's imagination: an impossible situation, by definition, in the theater. If theater aspires toward the dream of perfect sight (for us, toward the condition of cinema), at the same time it frustrates the aspiration. In the comedy of Shakespeare's Dream, the frustration occurs not, as Stanley Cavell powerfully suggests in the case of tragedy, in order to call the audience to account, but rather to release us from such accounting. Shakespeare underlines the impossibility of innocent, perfect vision, of a realized erotic idealism, in order to orchestrate a congeries of amorous relations that can incorporate, instead of trying to rise above, the varied foolishness that drives the loves of mortals. The Shakespearean realization of foolishness attains therapeutic purpose by combining a sense of the erotic as central to our lives with a healthy disillusionment concerning the distortions that eros relies on to do its work. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, knowledge of imagination's mechanics, of how the poetic process works, provides the necessary detachment from both erotic and patriarchal manipulations.

Hazlitt complained that he wanted to read rather than see A Midsummer Night's Dream because the play's magical transformations take on an appearance too palpably gross when enacted on stage. But the clumsiness of asshead Bottom, like that of the mechanicals' rehearsals, provides the thematic center of the Dream. The literal fact of metamorphosis is crucial to poetic embodiment. It is exactly the crudeness of desire's literal enacting that Shakespeare relies on, especially in the mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe playlet, in order to tame desire's pervasive capacity for delusion. Helena, the play's most thoughtful character, tries to discipline her desires through reflection, but she falls short of this aim: she too fails to evade the ludicrous shapeshifting that love imposes on us. It is only through the broadest of comedies, Shakespeare here implies, that the subtlest of imaginative visions can emerge.

Visions are reticent by definition, in literary tradition at least. As in the Faerie Queene's scenes of interrupted pastoral liaisons, or as in its Faunus-Diana story, in the Dream the excited presence of an observer or lover makes the goddess depart. Whether she is Hermia, Helena, or Titania, the beloved shares the constitutional shyness of all ideals. An acknowledged dynamic of mutuality displays the humor of the play's magic, showing the ridiculous character of the loving, and hating, perspectives that magic defines so drastically. At the same time, though, the play fulfills its impulse to poetic conjuring by giving it consummately dramatic form.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream the poet's enterprise of engineering harmony requires him to reunite one of the play's parental couples, Oberon and Titania, as well as its pairs of lovers. If union is the Dream's telos, the separations, errors, and anxieties that desire causes provide its starting point. We learn in act 2 that Oberon and Titania have split up over Titania's possession of a fair “changeling boy,” whom Oberon determines to steal from her: the pair's division causes serious meteorological upheavals. The changeling boy, who never appears in the play, is as Northrop Frye notes, magnified in the Cupid-like figure of Puck, who is akin to Mozart's Cherubino in his role as unmoved mover of erotic action. Puck's magic finally reconciles the play's characters through substitution: he makes the transformed Bottom take the place of the changeling boy whom Titania “crowns … with flowers, and makes … all her joy.” Here is a narratological puzzle. We want to know how the play's final union comes about, with its awakening from a dream of mismatching and delusion into the fresh symmetry of a new order. But the charm of the plot's solution lies in its surprisingly inexplicable emergence. As often in comedy, this conclusive shift has the air of rebirth, a shocking change to contrast with the remorselessly logical conclusions that tragedy specializes in.

Oberon's orders to Puck seem to enjoin the creation of an asymmetry rather than a balance. “A sweet Athenian lady is in love / With a disdainful youth,” Oberon tells Puck: “Anoint his eyes,” so that “he may prove / More fond on her, than she upon her love.” More fond: though Oberon wants the reconciliation of the lovers as he wants the renewal of his marriage with Titania, these unions can only be pursued through an amour that thrives on imbalance. But at play's end the imbalance will, apparently, disappear with an unblotted flick of the Shakespearean pen. As he gives Puck his instructions, Oberon underlines the flagrant and sudden shift from night's labyrinthine confusion to the lasting hymeneal clarity of day:

Hie therefore, Robin, overcast the night,
The starry welkin cover thou anon …
Like to Lysander sometime frame thy tongue,
Then stir Demetrius up with bitter wrong;
And sometime rail thou like Demetrius:
And from each other look thou lead them thus,
Till o'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep
With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep.
Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye,
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all error with his might,
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight.
When next they wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision;
And back to Athens shall the lovers wend,
With league whose date till death shall never end.

As we shall see, Theseus in fact considers the night's affairs to be what Oberon jestingly describes them as: “fruitless vision,” an inconsequential collective hallucination. But the night does bear fruit. Its errors lead directly to the play's conclusion, a sudden maturation of desire into married truth. Shakespeare establishes the relevance of the lovers' Puck-induced dreams by enacting a literalization of the figurative metamorphoses that the lover effects in her or his beloved. In the speech cited above, Puck is credited with the Protean, metamorphic capacity that Bottom claims during the mechanicals' rehearsal when he urges that he himself play both parts, lover and tyrant. The flaw in tyrannical power that Shakespeare exposes is its antimetamorphic insistence on a fixed, hierarchical relation between father and daughter, master and servant, a relation that gives the former interpretive freedom over the latter. As the case of Oberon and Titania demonstrates, the symbolic child, the “changeling boy” that Oberon wants from Titania, can be appropriated by either party, and it must be repossessed by magical means rather than patriarchal commands. The more fluid, openly contentious universe of the fairy couple shadows the world of Theseus and Hippolyta, who have warred openly against each other but whose relation has now solidified into a hierarchy, with Theseus on top. The solid character of Theseus's victory over his amazon, the play shows, is precisely what renders him a faulty reader of poetry. He cannot admit the mutuality of desire's power struggles, and therefore cannot sway the world as Oberon can.

At this point I owe the reader a brief description of that world. On occasion, I will compare A Midsummer Night's Dream with another Renaissance story of marriage, Milton's Paradise Lost. If this seems an unlikely pairing, it will, I hope, suggest the pervasiveness, even across genres, of the Renaissance ideal of imaginative harmony—and perhaps the source of the appeal that Shakespeare's play had for the young Milton, who alludes to it frequently in “L'Allegro” and Comus.

Readers have traditionally seen in much Renaissance fiction-making the vision of a Protean but unified cosmos. The enterprise of unification allows writers like Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton a vast poetic privilege: these authors are masters of the universe. Shakespeare's grand prerogative, especially, is his elaboration of a hugely varied coherence. His Gesamtkunst joins poetry and prose, masculine and feminine, noble and commoner, magic and reality. In Harry Berger's words, the Renaissance author presides over:

the norm of a complex harmony, an equilibrium in which opposites are at once distinct and reconciled, an experience in which the mind reveals not only the ability to organize the diversity of existence into a unified whole but also the ability to fix and vividly convey this whole in the immediacy of a visual or verbal or aural image.

Here Berger the contemporary critic echoes a Renaissance text, Elyot's Governor, on the symbolic import of dancing, the way it suggests a fully orchestrated universe, a complex harmony or equilibrium in which opposites are reconciled. As if to prove that the ultimate grace of such movement is its nearness to still perfection, Renaissance images of the mind's powers of discernment and unification seem most powerful when they rise to emblematic form: the dance of Spenser's graces on Mt. Acidale, the privileged repose of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra as a latter-day Mars and Venus, and perhaps most of all, the subtle and complete harmony of Milton's Adam and Eve before the fall. Here is vision fully realized, a paradisal universe of art.

There is a substantial critical tradition devoted to harmony as the dominant Renaissance ideal. The best book on Shakespeare's comedies, C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, emphasizes balance and reconciliation as the ends of Shakespeare's art: festive practice upends the usual pattern of civic interaction only in order to render it more stable, because it has been proven capable of accommodating misrule. Barber saw festivity not as a case of Marcusean repressive tolerance but as a desirable enhancement of social health. Barber's picture of a Shakespeare fundamentally interested in the health that comes from balance, from a fuller acknowledgement and working through of destructive impulses, carried over into later psychoanalytic accounts (by Richard Wheeler and Janet Adelman) of how Shakespeare's romances complete his career by taming the masculine aggression that magnificently unhinges the tragedies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the customary emphasis of Renaissance studies on what Berger called a “complex harmony” yielded to a new focus on the imposition of power. New historicists began to suspect the older idealizations of concordia discors, and accused previous critics of covering up for the corrupt works of Renaissance ambition. Earlier readers have devoted themselves to aspects of Renaissance fictions that, they claimed, offer us the liberating image of human life as a spontaneous yet finely ordered conversation. The valuing of play, flexibility, and ceremonial attunement now gave way to a sense that form is always strategy, a rhetorical act that serves aggressive, usually political, intent.

In the new historicist version, authors are often seen as agents of a power system larger than they are. Lawrence Danson reminds us that the word agency carries a double meaning: it can suggest loyal submission, like that of the secret agent, as well as self-sufficiency and independence. According to Stephen Greenblatt's formula in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the two meanings are layered, with the impersonal-systematic one on top. Autonomy can only be gained through submission to an entity larger than the self.

Everywhere Renaissance critics prided, and still pride, themselves on their efforts to historicize the works of the period, in keeping with Jameson's transhistorical dictum, “Always historicize!” By the mid-eighties, historicizing ceased to mean the placing of literary works in the proper cultural surroundings, seeing them as artifacts of the period. Renaissance scholars have always done that. Instead, to historicize came to mean to efface the boundary between an act of literature and an act of political power. Both the writer and the monarch, we were instructed, achieve power through ideological imposition, what Franco Moretti called “the drama conceived by the sovereign.” Moretti's statement appears in his essay in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, an influential collection edited by Greenblatt in 1982. In the same volume, Stephen Orgel claimed that Elizabethan “theatrical pageantry … employs precisely the same methods the crown was using to assert and validate its authority.” And Jonathan Goldberg chimed in: “The poet claims an unequivocal univocality, giving voice to the language of sovereignty, taking on a sovereign voice of power.”

Little mention of the conversational model occurs anymore in Renaissance studies, certainly not among new historicists. Instead, these critics suggest that powerful works, like powerful leaders, issue commanding statements (even if ambivalent ones) in defense of, or in protest against, Renaissance patriarchy. Sovereignty imposes. Even if authors, no real sovereigns, have to be careful about asserting themselves, they dream after kingly privileges, in the characteristic new historicist reading.

For all their emphasis on the way that ideology, rather than personality, ruled the Renaissance, some new historicists attribute a preeminence to the absolute monarch's agency that surpasses anything in Burckhardt. Frequently, the new historicist conjures up a sovereign authority—whether that authority is personal or impersonal—working its will with an utter, artful effectiveness that needs no partner. The emblem of the ideal is no longer the graceful intertwined dance, or the sexual bliss of the united couple, but a different sort of performance: the ruler or magus—or the patriarchal system they represent—conjuring a vision of the world, even creating that world, through sheer force of authorship.

The sovereign's imposition of will takes, in some recent readings, a graceful shape. Sovereignty requires not the mere threat or practice of violence, but, as Machiavelli suggests, the ability to sustain an imagination of authority sufficient to compel the people's and the nobles' loyalty. That is to say, political authority relies on poetry; it takes poetic form. Daniel Javitch, in his elegant and influential study Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (1978), laid the groundwork for new historicism by displaying in some detail the emulative as well as competitive relations between poet and courtier. But while the faithful new historicist insists that poet and politician are true counterparts, Javitch showed that the very difference between them spurred politicians' adoption of poetic devices, and vice versa. If Puttenham proposed that English poets, as yet rude and uncouth, attempt the sophistication of court life, Spenser reversed the charges, alleging that poets were truer heirs to courtly grace than corrupt Elizabethan politicians, whose courtliness was merely instrumental, a means of manipulation and profitable disguise. From Elizabeth on down, the politicians of sixteenth-century England adopted poetic devices to secure their positions and to prevent politics from looking like what it often was, a disciplined project of bullying and exploitation. Frequently, a poet like Spenser adopts the courtier's role in order to suggest, faintly but unmistakably, that real courtiers all too often lack poetic grace. Spenser ends the Faerie Queene's book 6, as Donald Cheney has argued, with a resounding sense of the fragility of the poetic game-world when it finds itself threatened by the blatant verities of political power. If Spenser is on the defensive, his poetry exceptionally vulnerable to the competing force of politics, in the last three books of the Faerie Queene, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream takes the offensive against this force.

Stephen Orgel, persuasively evolving the power of a Renaissance magus like Prospero, links his bookish capabilities to the real-world dominion of the prince. The magus practices an artistry analogous to that of the absolute ruler; his works are “the mirrors of his mind.” “Imagination here is really power,” Orgel writes in The Illusion of Power,

to rule, to control and order the world, to change or subdue other men, to create; and the source of the power is imagination, the ability to make images, to project the workings of the mind outward in a physical, active form, to actualize ideas, to conceive actions.

Stephen Greenblatt agrees with Orgel that, in the Renaissance at least, “We can scarcely write of prince or poet without accepting the fiction that power directly emanates from him and that society draws upon this power.” Recently historicists have been citing the fashionable models of “negotiation” and “circulation of social energy,” which picture Renaissance worlds as authorless, yet purposive in their ideological leanings. But an adulation of the sheer force of authorship, its ability to fashion a consummate, distinctive world, remains central to critics like Orgel and Greenblatt.

Is the godlike power of organization that artist and writer enjoy in fact shared, as Burckhardt and the new historicists alike claim, by the political ruler? Dreams of a successful narcissism, a proudly autonomous and therefore truly creative self-fashioning, have been central to our image of the Renaissance since Burckhardt. Idealizing creative power as sovereign did come naturally to this ambitious era. So, however, did an insistence on the distinction between two forms of agency, poetic and political. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, my proof-text in this essay, only the poetic imagination, not princely power, can sustain, because only it is fundamentally interested in, the idea of a cosmos as concerted form or concordia discors. A Midsummer Night's Dream privileges poetic realization as a form superior to the conquests engineered by rulers like Theseus, the ragged assertions of political will in which an unpoetic world trades. In A Midsummer Night's Dream this harmony works to clarify the difference between the world of poetic drama, akin to fairyland's magic, and the far less innocent realm of politics over which Theseus presides. While this is an unfashionable emphasis, it is, I believe, a just one. Previous generations of readers sometimes yielded too much to Theseus by idealizing him as a wise, moderate ruler; but current readers also grant him more power than he actually has by construing his domain, now recognized as patriarchially sinister, as coextensive with the play itself, and with Shakespeare's art.

There has been a certain inheritance in current criticism of Jan Kott's and Peter Brook's long-ago debunking of the Victorian notion that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a gently whimsical piece of sugar candy. Harold Brooks responded in his Arden edition with a defense of the old school's fey wispiness, and the comment that Brook's production, which replaced festive innocence with orgiastic brutality, “lacked charm.” Finally, Empson cast a comic plague on both houses in one of his last published pieces, a review of Brooks's edition in the New York Review of Books. New historicists feel strangely duty-bound to sustain the monotonous fantasy, derived from Kott, that A Midsummer Night's Dream lays bare our darker, exploitative instincts; while the effort to purge any Shakespeare play of mortal grossness and make it harmlessly festive remains cowardly and nostalgically misguided. Empson's critique suggests that the alternative of dreamy mystification and cynical shock tactics fails to capture the point of Shakespeare's art, which supersedes both these reductive views. The Dream does not shirk human reality, but it trusts in the ways that poetry and sexual desire mediate that reality, rather than stripping it naked. In doing so, Shakespeare the creator-god builds a greater real, a true golden world.

Theseus delivers the initial statement of patriarchal authority in A Midsummer Night's Dream when he advises Hermia, in act 1, scene 1:

To you your father should be as a god,
One that composed your beauties; yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.

In the case of Theseus, unlike that of Titania and Oberon, parental will aims at a controlling distance from its filial object, rather than wishing for reunion or recovery of that object, as in the case of the changeling boy. Theseus's will, in contrast to Oberon's, is solitary. He tries to deny the fact that parental power must by definition be the product of a contentious but united twosome, father and mother.

Theseus's glorified reference to the quasi-divine father as “composer” of feminine “beauties” turns brutal in the lines that follow. That father is not, in fact, a composer or maker like the poet, but rather a bullying unmaker. Theseus sees woman, not as a site of beauty to be artistically organized, but as mere dull matter, a waxy glob to be either left mercifully alone or else “disfigured” by masculine force. The image is itself disfiguring. It reveals a lack of trust in art's metamorphic potency, so richly established by the action of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck can truly figure and disfigure—that is, cause metamorphoses in the Dream's characters—as Theseus cannot. It is not surprising that Theseus, in his famous speech at the beginning of act 5, slanders all poetry as “apprehending” in loose, confused fashion, rather than “comprehending” in a more organized way. Before he sees the mechanicals' play, Theseus even finds a model for dramatic art in the stuttering fear of a court underling. Shakespeare's fairy king Oberon manages the world of art as Theseus cannot, and is therefore a truer ruler. (Prospero in The Tempest neatly combines Oberon and Theseus, conjurer and authoritarian.).

Oberon, against Theseus, proves that there is more than one way to lend form to chaos. In act 2, Oberon and Titania have been arguing about order and disorder; their conversation both shapes and shakes the nightworld they preside over. Oberon demands of Titania the changeling boy. She refuses and stalks off. The mutuality and overtness of Oberon and Titania's contention is a far cry from Theseus's overbearing sway and Hippolyta's covert criticism of him (in 5.1, for example, during their discussion of poetic theory). Here comic bluster—“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”—offers hope of freedom. The recognition that, as Titania puts it, “we are their parents and original,” that the cosmos is out of kilter in delicate response to a fairy king and queen who are on the rocks, suggests our wish, the world's wish, to repair the ruin of this primal couple. Instead of Theseus's fantasy, which requires the silencing of the woman, we want her satisfaction, along with that of her husband; so that, if not erotically inseparable, they are at least partners in the play's final dance. Titania and Oberon have separate fairy staffs and separate amorous interests—but, with contention quieted for the moment, they return to harmony. This is a vastly less homebound version of an integrated marriage than Milton's, and the difference may have a source in biographical fact, since Shakespeare probably saw Anne Hathaway only once or twice a year during most of their married life. But Titania and Oberon are a truly equal, because independent, couple in a way that is impossible in Milton, for whom subordination founds and circumscribes independence. At no point in A Midsummer Night's Dream is Titania subordinate to Oberon. Oberon, jealous and plotting as he is, remains starkly unlike Theseus in his utter lack of desire to subject Titania to his rule. Trick her, embarrass her, win the changeling boy, yes; but not subject her. As William Flesch suggests, the play's final vision of a happy, reconciled-enough Titania and Oberon may hint at our adult fantasy of making reparations to our parents, whose marital disasters we often see as our own fault. Shades of Paradise Lost indeed; but in the case of Shakespeare's drama reparation takes the form of renewed play utterly free from Milton's preoccupation, his need to negotiate the license for play. Not a Miltonic refounding, and refinding, of marriage occurs here, but rather a purely occasional healing of it, a relief and respite from its miserable wrangling won by the simple tactic of making that wrangling joyous, revealing its basis in partnership. The fairy couple's past is wide open matter for one-upmanship: Oberon has romanced Hippolyta, his queen asserts, when he protests her “love to Theseus.” Oberon and Titania throw the book of past flirtations and affairs at each other. But the past is malleable, legendary: the stuff of present charge and countercharge, not potent and ineradicable as in Shakespearean tragedy and Miltonic epic.

Of course, it is finally Oberon, rather than Titania, who wins the game. In act 4, scene 1 she gives him the changeling child, and he celebrates by stage-managing their newfound “amity” and the ensuing wedding of the lovers. But the manner of Oberon's victory is crucial. Struck with sudden pity, Oberon judges that Titania's pathetic infatuation with Bottom has gone on long enough—now that he has won the changeling from her! Like a proto-Prospero ending his revels, he gives up the cruel “taunting” of his fairy queen, ordering Puck to undo his spell. Titania, rubbing her eyes, reacts to Oberon not with the rebellious grudging that Hippolyta aims at Theseus, but instead with a simple wonder at her own case. “My Oberon!” she exclaims. “What visions I have seen! / Methought I was enamour'd of an ass.” Now seeing herself as a fictional character, becoming spectator of her own foolishness, Titania gains a magical neutrality like Bottom's. She resembles the “weird fairy tale image” of the artistic creator mentioned in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, who achieves strange dignity in knowing that he himself, like the work he produces, is a mere projection on the screen of existence. Both Titania and Bottom are like, in Nietzsche's words, “the creature that can turn its eyes around and look at itself … at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and audience.”

There is, to be sure, a real imbalance of power here. Oberon commands the impressive talents of Puck; Titania, the merely decorative attentions of her miniaturized fairy attendants. Moreover, Titania lacks the barbed wit that Shakespeare's women characteristically employ against their male partners in other early comedies like Much Ado About Nothing or Love's Labour's Lost. But the inequality in the royal couple's powers does not imply the sort of hierarchical need felt by Theseus, who inclines toward the repression rather than the Puck inspired acting out of contention. Titania is bested at the play's end, but this does not mean that she submits to Oberon in recognition of ideological principle—the kind of recognition that Theseus and Egeus want. Rather than surrendering her will, she finds willfulness suddenly beside the point. Everything indicates that, rather than being overmastered by the play's ending, Titania enjoys the freedom offered by this resounding, unexpected pause in marital strife. The fight over the changeling looks distant and unreal now, just last night's dream.

Titania's stunned vision of herself corresponds to the new mood of harmony that Oberon strikes through all levels of the play. Egeus now seems a vain irrelevance, even to Theseus, who echoes Oberon by “overbearing” the angry father's will. Theseus has been swayed, but not converted from his attachment to power: his main interest remains a condescending, detached enjoyment of the “mistakes” that the mechanicals make during their play. Oberon, by contrast, recognizes such mistakes, the crazy misapprehensions summed up in Titania's love for Bottom, as the very stuff of desire.

It is significant that Oberon is not just a ruler but, in contrast to Theseus, an appreciative, aesthetically sophisticated spectator. Speaking to Puck in 2.1, Oberon pictures himself as the charmed observer in a sensuous ecstasy:

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

As Furness's variorum explains at length, these lines, along with the ensuing passage on the “imperial votress” whom Cupid aims at and the “little Western flower” his arrow lands on, have provoked endless streams of historical allegorizing, with Mary Queen of Scots a special obsession. I wish for the moment to discount the possibility of historical reference and take the passage straight. Here civility is born, not from a patriarch's threats, but from the magical soothing voice of a woman. (Milton will remember this in the Lady's song in Comus.) The ravishing song of the mermaid provides the model for Oberon's own use of love-in-idleness, the magic juice that Oberon commands Puck to search out. The love-in-idleness produces, finally, a “dulcet and harmonious” pairing of the lovers, but not before they dissolve into a beautiful and witty madness.

The combination in Oberon's speech of the calmed waves and the wild energy of “certain stars shot madly from their spheres” is echoed, in his lowly way, by Bottom. Bottom announces during the rehearsal of the Pyramus and Thisbe play that, as a theatrical lion, he will “roar you gently as any sucking dove.” “I will move storms,” he says, yet “I will condole in some measure.” It is just such measure, a balance of tension and release, frenzied desire and married peace, that animates Shakespeare's whole play. Oberon's image, a few lines further on from the passage I have quoted, of “young Cupid's fiery shaft / Quencht in the chaste beams of the watry moon” answers Theseus's threat in the play's first scene that, unless Hermia obey her father, she will “live a barren sister all” her “life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.” Here chastity, like Diana herself, spurs an elegance of “quenched” (ameliorated? fulfilled?) desire that shines down on us, rather than refusing to answer our prayers, as in Theseus's lines. Oberon's power, which finally unites the couples, harmonizes sexuality, bringing it to a graceful quenching both chaste and fiery. Theseus, by contrast, clamps down on wild daughters by brandishing against their desires the cold prison of enforced virginity.

Early on in Richard Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham, addressing the queen, writes that she is herself “the most excellent Poet,” or maker:

Forsooth by your Princely purse favours and countenance, making in maner what ye list, the poore man rich, the lewd i.e., ignorant well learned, the coward courageous, and vile both noble and valiant.

Yet Puttenham's praise of his ruler, though it doubtless pleased Elizabeth's flattery-tuned ears, rings false: at one point he claims that, as a poet, his dear queen puts Sidney, Wyatt, and all the rest to shame. This queen was no doubt a consummate “maker,” though not, pace Puttenham, an especially poetic one. Those courtiers, including Puttenham himself, whose lives were redirected to the fast lane by the royalty industry did become made men in the mafioso sense, but not in any truly metamorphic one. Elizabeth did not magically alter her nation. Though she made herself famous for charity and for expressing love for her people, one's prevailing sense is that her subjects liked her, at least until her drop in popularity in the 1590s, because she let them alone. The sovereign's main force is felt, not in the education or transformation of her people, but in her safeguarding of social order and her punishment of wrongdoers. Elizabethan sovereignty preserves the reigning system, rather than using it to transmute or reorganize the nation.

Poetry can transform and enchant where political rule cannot. For all the convoluted magic of Shakespeare's fabulous midsummer night, its changes coalesce into (as Hippolyta puts it in the play's last act) “something of great constancy,” a story “strange and admirable.” This is real metamorphosis. The lovers appear in one another's dreams, and, as in Kushner's Angels in America, this interpenetration of different characters' desires makes the difference between mere solitary hallucination and true collective vision. As I have noted, the story is set in motion by the dissension of a fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. From their strife, and from Puck's trickery and Bottom's credulity, grows a work all the more constant for its ludicrous mismatches and confusion. Shakespeare here manages, through sheer art, to give form to the amorphous arena of desire, as Theseus and his ilk cannot do through the less exalted method of laying down the law. Despite this, David Marshall in his essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream writes that he will “show that the realm of politics and the realm of poetry here … figure each other.” But just as Cupid's arrow misses the “imperial votress” of 2.1, presumably Elizabeth, so her regal power falls short of Shakespeare's dramatic art.

If Helena is the play's central victim of love, foreshadowing the bright stars of two later Shakespearean comedies, Viola and Rosalind, Bottom is its central nonvictim. Helena does not want to drop out of the romantic game, however much it pains her. “I am your spaniel,” she tells Demetrius in act 2: “The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.” The childlike Bottom, a homespun realist, has never truly been in the game. His interest in imaginative vision eclipses whatever potential erotic identity he might have. He is simply fascinated, as we are, by the play's most astonishing tableau: Bottom himself luxuriously attended by the adoring Titania and her fairies. Shakespeare, by means of Bottom's surprised, spectatorial detachment from his own situation, draws a limit to the power of eros, here as in no other of his comedies.

Bottom's obliviousness to the erotic often tempts critics to sociopolitical explanation. Louis Montrose, for example, approaches Bottom's unique stature with a warmed-over conflation of vulgar Freud and vulgar Marx. “Bottom's dream,” as Montrose would have it, is “recognizable to us as a parodic fantasy of infantile narcissism and dependency. But it is also, at the same time, a parodic fantasy of upward social mobility.” Malvolio, who does fantasize social advancement, is a sort of sour version of Bottom; but the good, naive Bottom has no such crass ambitions. When he fantasizes in act 4 about Peter Quince setting his dream to music so that it might be played before the Duke, Bottom has in mind not currying favor with the powers that be, but rather simply indulging in the delights of mimesis, an indulgence as pure in its way as the good Christian's urge to spread the news of salvation. Bottom, like Christopher Sly at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew, takes center stage in a parody of the fairy-tale motif of the commoner who suddenly finds himself treated as royalty and decides to play along, since the new situation, however absurd it may be, is clearly to his advantage. But Bottom differs from Christopher Sly, who resists the illusion for some time before finally admitting “I am a lord indeed.” Bottom, unlike Sly, has no such canny sense of the practical advantages of being a lord. (Snug's motives are more suspect: “If our sport had gone forward,” he says, “we had all been made men.”) As for infantile narcissism, Bottom's reluctance to recount his vision furnishes a rebuke to Montrose's facile reduction. For Bottom, dreams have no such explanatory bottom: they ask for further pondering, rather than quick translation into the easy language of waking reality. Even as he garbles scripture, the stunned Bottom, reflecting on the night he has just passed, remains both an oaf and a master of tact.

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

Bottom gets his text, from 1 Corinthians 2.9-10, back-asswards, confusing the senses and body parts as he himself was confused when a bottom displaced his top. The ass's head is somehow fitting, as is Bottom's rhapsodic speech in its hints at a revealed and inexpressible truth: whether from above or below, at any rate beyond commonsense realism's power to conceive.

Alone among Shakespeare's comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream restricts the sphere of sexual desire to focus, in its conclusion, on imagination instead. The wedding night that looms at the end of act 4 is deferred so that, in act 5, we may see a drama, Pyramus and Thisbe, which is really about the mechanics of representation rather than its mechanical lovers, and so that we may hear comments on the reception and significance of plays. Bottom, it seems, does not have sex with Titania. Rather, he remains sublimely and hilariously ignorant of her advances. In the other comedies agency centers on the issue of coming into one's own as a sexual being. Bottom's dream is not a rite of passage, not a maturation ritual. He remains, always, just what he is. This does not mean he is an infantile narcissist, as Montrose claims, but rather an admirably self-assured, and therefore somewhat oblivious, adult. As he remarks, “I am a man as other men are.” The fantastic coherence of Bottom's sensibility displays the coordinating power of imagination as much as does the tangled, yet organized, action of the play itself.

Peter Quince refers to the mechanicals' efforts to “disfigure, or to present the person of Moonshine.” A force as mystically influential as moonlight, which plays a great role in this play, cannot in fact be conveyed in such a cloddish manner. The mechanicals falter, in imaginative terms, because they disfigure instead of figuring forth. But this is a different kind of disfiguring from the kind that Theseus attributes to the father Egeus, since it is the opposite of threatening. By trying to fix meaning through theatrical overemphasis, Pyramus and Thisbe lets it loose. During the mechanicals' play the magic dissolves. Illusion has no room here, and therefore no power. The royal audience's noisy commentary makes up for the vast awkwardness of the mechanicals, who have failed to cast a spell over the house. Bottom's dream, the consummate illusion, at first seems the very opposite of such clumsiness—yet it is also akin to it, in its flagrant display of the mortal grossness that Hazlitt objected to in the Dream. The display is purgative or, as Leonard Barkan puts it, apotropaic. In the mechanicals' play, as in Titania's hilarious praises of asshead Bottom, desire has been deprived of its insidious, delusive powers: Pyramus's belief that the lion has killed Thisbe is a crude, silent comedy mistake. As a result of this reduction of desire's work to blunt, comic shenanigans, the lovers are freed, awakened to the prosy, solid footing that marriage promises.

Bottom's dream still remains magical and mysterious, as any attentive audience will realize, and not merely ludicrous. It is doubtful that Theseus could discern its peculiar mating of subtlety and overemphasis, just as he could not see the difference between the mechanicals' play and a play by Shakespeare. As he remarks, speaking of stage plays, even “the best in this kind are but shadows.” For Theseus, theater is less consequential than the flesh and blood strivings of war and governance. But Bottom proves him wrong. Bottom, the one truly magical participant among the play's mortals, the only one who actually gets to see fairies, knows that there are strong imaginations that worldly power cannot explain. In pointing out this rift between poetry and politics, A Midsummer Night's Dream generates the potential offense to a “gentle” audience that Puck invokes in his epilogue. Shakespeare has given us a disruptive coherence, rebellious in the claim it makes for poetry in the face of power. The play ends with a dance, one that “rocks the ground.”