SOURCE: Nevo, Ruth. “Fancy's Images.” In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 57-72. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1980, Nevo contends that A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's original inventions—“a complex and witty exploration of the infirmities and frailties and deficiencies and possibilities of the imaginative faculty itself.”]

“A Midsummer Night's Dream is best seen,” says G. K. Hunter, “as a lyric divertissement … Shakespeare has lavished his art on the separate excellencies of the different parts, but has not sought to show them growing out of one another in a process analogous to that of symphonic ‘development.’” I would claim, on the contrary, symphonic development of a particularly subtle kind; both itself an impressive achievement in the unifying of complexities, and a distinct conquest in the zig-zag progress towards Shakespeare's comic paradigm. This is a highly intellectual, highly speculative comedy, like Love's Labour's Lost not the refashioning of a previously-treated story or play but an original invention. Through his basic comic structure of initial privation or perversity, comic device both deceptive and remedial, knots of errors and final recognitions, Shakespeare has achieved not only a benign resolution to the dialectic of folly and wisdom, but a complex and witty exploration of the infirmities and frailties and deficiencies and possibilities of the imaginative faculty itself.

The problem presented to Theseus four days before his wedding is a knotty one. From the point of view of the father, what is required is that his daughter yield to his bidding and accept the suitor he has approved. But this would please no one but himself (and Demetrius). Theseus adopts the patriarchal view, naturally enough. But suppose (in another age and another clime) the young people had been left to choose their own mates? This procedure would not have solved the problem any more satisfactorily than the first, since the predicament we are asked to take in consists precisely of the asymmetry in the feelings of these four young people. The father's peremptoriness and the Duke's supportive edict lend urgency to their problem, but do not create it. The initial presentation of the situation invites us to perceive that while the tyrannical senex provides the outward and immediate obstacle to be surmounted, the root of the problem is elsewhere and within. The initiating recalcitrancy is the fact that two young men are competing with each other for one girl, when there is another available, and willing, to turn a triangle into a suitable set of couples. Two of both kinds makes up four, as Puck succinctly expresses it. And, it seems, some such arrangement had once been contemplated by these young Athenians themselves. Lysander (and later Helena) tells us that Demetrius made love to Helena before obtaining Egeus's consent to a match with Hermia. He deserted her then, it seems, for Hermia. But why? And when? “This man,” says Egeus (of Demetrius) “hath my consent to marry her” (Hermia). “This man” (of Lysander), “hath bewitch'd the bosom of my child.” But it is impossible to determine the sequence of tenses. Did the bewitching occur before the consent, or since, or simultaneously? Was it perhaps some sudden new interest in Hermia on the part of Demetrius that stimulated Lysander's desire for her? Or could it possibly be a case of the other foot? Did Lysander's interest in Hermia deflect Demetrius's previous affection for Helena and draw it with magnetic attraction towards the object of Lysander's love?

The square-dance view of these proceedings is less helpful than it seems, mainly because it takes no account of the girls. “The lovers are like dancers,” says G. K. Hunter, “who change partners in the middle of a figure; the point at which partners are exchanged is determined by the dance, the pattern, and not by the psychological state of the dancers.” But we are asked to attend quite closely to “the psychological state of the dancers,” to the “fierce vexations” of their dream. The girls, in point of fact, do not change partners at all. They are subjected to drastic changes in their lovers' attitudes, to which they bewilderedly respond, but their own attachments do not waver. Moreover, the play's peripeteia is a comic reversal which leaves in effect everything exactly where it was: Puck's mistake with the magic juice—designed by Oberon to rectify unrequited love—in fact compounds error and disturbance by causing the two young men to continue to be both in love with the same love object, though this time in the shape of the other girl. It is thus not a question of mistaken identity, or of disguise, those time-honoured sources of identity confusion in New Comedy plots. Nor it is quite true to say, though it is often said, that the lovers simply don't know what they want, are fickle, capricious and unreasonable, creatures of the senses, of the eye merely. It is worth attending to Helena's observations at the play's outset:

How happy some o'er other some can be!
Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.
But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so;
He will not know what all but he do know;
And as he errs, doting on Hermia's eyes,
So I, admiring of his qualities.
Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste;
Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste;
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.
As waggish boys in game themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjur'd every where;
For ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's eyne,
He hail'd down oaths that he was only mine;
And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolv'd, and show'rs of oaths did melt.

(1.1.226-45)

If only Demetrius would use his eyes she says in effect, he would see that I am as fair as Hermia. If Demetrius' infected will did not betray him he would recognize this open and palpable truth. But if Helena and Hermia are identical in this cardinal matter of their beauty, then there are no visual grounds for preference either way, and therefore there can be no question of errors in choice. Helena intelligently perceives this catch and she also perceives that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. “So I” (err), she says, “admiring in his qualities.” Helena announces with bitterness this insight concerning the total and wayward non-dependence of erotic preference upon visual perception: “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; / And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.” The comedy of the speech lies, of course, in Helena's asumption that “eyes” offer a more objective basis for judgment in love than mind. Eyes don't indeed provide any security for love, nor any true representation of reality, as the woods prove; but then neither does (rational) mind. Later the bewitched Lysander's assertion that “the will of man is by his reason sway'd; / And reason says you are the worthier maid” will be sufficient evidence of that. Helena's “mind” is Desdemona's: “I saw Othello's visage in his mind” (1.3.252) and Othello's: “I therefore beg it not … But to be free and bounteous to her mind” (1.3.-265). Only there (tragically) and here (comically) the mind, that subjective source of value, of form and of dignity, is subject to all kinds of disabilities and derangements. Mind, in its aspect as the image-making and image-perceiving faculty, is an errant faculty indeed, unstable, uncertain, wavering, and seeking anchorage among a welter of rival images and self-images. It is to these, I believe, that the opening of the play draws our attention.

What we are invited to perceive is a falling out among rivals, and what we are invited to infer is that, at a deeper psychic level than they are aware of, they do indeed know what they want: each wants what his brother-at-arms or rival has. We have the case of Proteus and Valentine for confirmation of Shakespeare's interest in the phenomenon. Says Proteus, with admirable candour:

Even as one heat another heat expels,
Or as one nail by strength drives out another,
So the remembrance of my former love
Is by a newer object quite forgotten.
[Is it] mine [eye], or Valentinus' praise,
Her true perfection, or my false transgression,
That makes me, reasonless, to reason thus?

(2.4.192-98)

Consider the extremely provoking nature of Lysander's remark to Demetrius:

You have her father's love, Demetrius,
Let me have Hermia's; do you marry him

(my italics; 1.1.93-94)

Consider too the amplitude and intensity with which the sisterly affection between the two girls is treated:

          all the counsel that we two have shar'd,
The sister's vows, the hours that we have spent
.....All school-day's friendship, childhood innocence
.....Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key
.....                                        So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry.

(3.2. 198-209 passim)

It furthermore transpires, as the play winds deeper into its conflicts in act 2, that Oberon and Titania are also at odds over a love object they both want. The competitive marital duel of this couple features antecedent jealousies, but at the moment in time the play dramatizes they are quarrelling over possession of the changeling child. We find immediate parodic confirmation of the incidence of this malady as early as act 1, scene 2, where the good Bottom, magnifier of folly, wants to play all the parts Peter Quince distributes to his cast—tyrants, lovers, ladies and lions—and is in his comic hubris convinced that he can do better at them all than any of his fellows.

Rivalry, then, fraternal or quasi-sibling, or marital is the comic disposition which the comic device exposes and exacerbates. It is also worth noting that the story of the night is set within a frame of concordia discors between erstwhile military rivals. Theseus wooed Hippolyta, we learn, with his sword, and won her love doing her injuries. This reconciliatory concordia discors is symbolized in the description of the hunt in act 4, scene 1, just before the royal pair discovers the one time “rival enemies” now “new in amity.” Theseus invites his Queen to the mountain top to

                    mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction

(4.1.110-11)

and she, remembering the hounds of Sparta, transforms his notion of dissonant confusion into the perception of a higher harmony:

                                                                                                              Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

(4.1.114-18)

Hippolyta is consistently Theseus's informant in the play and indeed Egeus might have done well to appeal to her judgment rather than his at the beginning. Fortunately, however, for what the play enables us to discover about rivalries, he did not. Rivalry is benign when it leads to differentiation, since concord requires distinct entities between which to exist; and harmful when it leads to the blurring of boundaries, to “unnatural” imitative, or confusing conjunctions. Hippolyta is no longer playing the role of a man-woman Amazon by this time. The play explores the comedy of mimicry in four different and complementary perspectives—that of the quasi-fraternal lovers, the quasi-sibling “sisters,” the Fairy Queen and her votaress, and the amateur comedians, the artisans of Athens, with the putative arch-mimic Bottom, who is never anything but himself, at their head.

Sibling rivalry takes the form of unconscious mimicry, an identification with the brother who must therefore be outdone in his sphere. I am as good as he. I am better than he. I must have what he has. “I am, my lord as well deriv'd as he, / As well possess'd,” says Lysander, and what is more, beloved of beauteous Hermia. And Demetrius later: “I love thee more than he can do.” From the girls' side of the picture we have Helena: “Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.” Sensible siblings fight their way into maturity by seeking, finding, exploiting, inventing if necessary, precisely those differences and distinctions between them which establish their individual identities, on the basis of which they can freely choose their mates. This is no doubt why identical twins are such a problem, and so disturbing we are told, to the primitive mind encountering sameness where difference is not only in order, is not only expected, but is indispensable to individuation. But identical twins are an accident of nature which the comic artist may exploit for errors, if he wishes. What we have in Midsummer Night's Dream is imagined identical twinship. It is just such an idealized childhood twinship that Helena invokes in her remonstrance to Hermia over the latter's treacherous confederacy (as she believes) with the men, both now in pursuit of her to mock her:

Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us—O, is all forgot?
All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart,
.....And will you rent our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?

(3.2.198-212; 215-16)

A replica of such an “incorporation” at a later and more complex stage of a woman's life is Titania's relationship with her favourite votaress. Titania's account of her friendship with the boy's mother contains a wonderfully articulated image of imaginative mimicry:

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

(2.1. 123-34)

Peter Quince's troupe literalize metaphors, too, but here the Indian maid's imitation of the big-bellied sails has a function other than reductio ad absurdum. The friends share the playful vision of the billowing sails as pregnant, which the expectant mother then playfully mimes, for the amusement and gratification of her companion. What is rendered here, we are invited to infer, is a vividly emphathetic, imaginative sharing of the experience of pregnancy; and therefore when the mother dies it is no wonder that Titania's attachment to the child is more than the charitable rearing of an orphan. “And for her sake do I rear up her boy: / And for her sake I will not part with him” has the ring of self-justification—she is claiming nothing for this adoption but an act of conventional piety—but what we see is that she has so identified herself with her votaress that the child has become her own. Oberon, furiously observing his exclusion from this relationship, wants to possess himself of the love object she is so wrapped up in, and, failing, will punish her by caricaturing her defection. She is to dote upon the first living creature she sees:

(Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape),

(2.1.180-81)

The animus, however, of

                                                            Set your heart at rest;
The fairy land buys not the child of me.

(2.1.121-22)

invites us to infer (especially if we remember “childing” autumn in her description of the disordered and distemperatured seasons) that Oberon might mend his marriage more effectively by getting Titania with child than by trying to get Titania without child. But rivalry and revenge (for previous peccadilloes real or imagined, with Theseus and Hippolyta) is the order of the day at this stage—a midsummer madness—of the battle of the sexes, and at this stage of the comic development, which is the laying bare of the particular comic disposition dominant in the play.

The double plotting of A Midsummer Night's Dream is superb because it is so subtly related. Marital rivalry is more complex because double-decked: marriage partners must maintain their distinctive personalities, recognize each other's and enter into a new corporate personality, or transaction of personalities. But in this marriage on the rocks, with Titania playing the part of imagined twin to her votaress, and Oberon competing with her for possession of the Indian boy, rivalry has taken the place of reciprocity, competition of co-operation, and a riotous mimicry of clearly differentiated sexual roles.

We begin to perceive the nature of the comic infirmity in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is that fluidity and instability of imagination which causes an individual to be either too identified or not identified enough; to resemble when to discriminate would be more politic and more appropriate; to represent reality in images generated by the desires of the mind.

Nature spirits that they are, these fairies, nature perfectly reflects their marital dissensions:

Therefore the winds
.....As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents
.....                                                   and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard
.....The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable
.....                                                  hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Heims' [thin] and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

(2.1.88-114 passim)

“Undistinguishability” and the wilder follies of not knowing which is which receive their richest comic gloss from the good artisans of Athens in their entanglement with the problems of dramatic representation—when a wall is a wall for example, or a lion Snug the Joiner; but the message of this paysage moralisé is quite clear: confusion, disorder, disarray, mock mimicry reign in the woods, and with all distinction gone, all relations are perverse or fruitless or unnatural. Puck's mischievous translation of Bottom literally embodies asininity. But it also reflects Titania's wrong-headed “incorporation” of the Indian boy. It is a bonus for Oberon's punitive plan (he did not envisage monsters), while the metamorphosis and the coupling of Titania with this comic monster inflates the folly of misconceived images ad absurdum, revealing (but not to the victims) truth in motley.

The strategy of comedy is to maximalize error before matters will mend; the maximalizing indeed generates the mending. To Helena there does come a glimmer of liberating wisdom in the woods when she says: “What wicked and dissembling glass of mine / Made me compare with Hermia's sphery eyne?’ (2.2.98-99). This anticipates remedy but is as yet in too self-abasing a form. The processus turbarum, with its cumulative and preposterous turbulence brings about for the lovers an intensification of folly to the point of giddying exhaustion; and discernment—the wisdom of discrimination, of getting images right—will emerge from the chaos, or de-composition of topsy-turvydom.

There should be no expounding of dreams, as Bottom knows, but the magic juice applied to sleeping eyes—the comic device—reveals in this play its fully Shakespearean iridescence. It is both delusive and applied in error and so causes the knot of errors and perturbations; but it is also the cause of ultimate reclamation and recognition. The magic at work operates therapeutically, cathartically, like dreams indeed. It discovers, enlarging as in a distorting mirror, the shadowy wishes and fears of the mind, and by so doing enables the victims to enfranchize themselves from their obsessions. Shakespeare's moonlit wood, alive with trolls, grotesques and ambivalence is a potent symbol for the creative subconscious. And Puck, conveyor of dreams and potions, impish homogenizer, can be seen as a genius of comedy itself, mimicking (in the likeness of a filly foal, or a roasted crab), mocking, decreating as he gives all nature's ingredients a great stir. As does Bottom, counterpoint Buffoon to Puck's Eiron (and unwitting Impostor as Titania's lover), giving all the theatre's ingredients a great stir:

Nay; you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion's neck, and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect: … my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life.

(3.2.36-43)

Puck's error—to him all Athenians are alike—is homeopathic. It reflects the comic disposition of the play, exposes it, and is exactly what is required to exacerbate and exorcise it.

Thus, so far from the warblings of one song in one key, the fierce vexations of misprision in act 3 bring about a positively inflamed consciousness of difference: “‘Little’ again? Nothing but ‘low’ and ‘little’?” Abuse and vilification are not lacking on all sides: “Thou cat, thou bur! Vile thing … tawny Tartar … loathed medicine” are a string of epithets from a sometime lover sufficient to draw from Hermia (to Helena) “You juggler! You canker-blossom! You thief of love!” For which she gets as good as she gives with Helena's “Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you!” “‘Puppet’?” shouts Hermia at this point:

                                        Ay, that way goes the game.
Now I perceive that she hath made compare
Between our statures: she hath urg'd her height,
And with her personage, her tall personage,
Her height, forsooth, she hath prevail'd with him.
And are you grown so high in his esteem,
Because I am so dwarfish and so low?
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak!
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.

(3.2.289-98)

“O, when she is angry,” retorts a onetime part of an incorporate double cherry,

                                                  she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.

(3.2.323-35)

This knot of errors is the world upside down, and Helena's idyllic and lost childhood “incorporation” is well and truly mocked, as are Lysander's protestations of love to Hermia when transposed to

                                                  Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hind'ring knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.

(3.2.328-30)

At the same time these frenetic hyperboles are the fulfilment and the acting out of everyone's deepest anxieties, misgivings and obsessions. Hermia foresaw all and foresuffered all when she dreamt of Lysander watching a serpent eating her heart away, and Helena's masochism—her seeking to “enrich her pain”—to cause the pain she dreads and loves—has progressed from her embracing of the role of fawning and beaten spaniel (1.1.246-51) to a paroxysm of self-abasement: “No, no; I am as ugly as a bear” (2.2.94). And this even before she becomes convinced of her victimization at the hand of all.

The processus turbarum of act 3, by intensifying aberration and detonating hidden psychic dynamite discomposes, disorients and disintegrates. They all collapse in the end, exhausted by these traumas and by the hectic pursuit through the woods, and when they awake they are tranquil and clear-seeing. Now that vision is improved they are able to look back upon their “dream” experience as upon something distant and blurred. Hermia says: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When every thing seems double”, and Helena concurs: “So methinks; / And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own” (4.1.189-92). These are pregnant sayings, these musings of the wondering and half-enlightened lovers. Perception and self-perception have passed through the alembic of dream and have been catalyzed. Demetrius, now seeing his love for Hermia as a childhood gaud and Helena as once again “the object and the pleasure of (his) eye” speaks for all four when he says:

These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.

(4.1.187-88)

It is an interesting word “undistinguishable.” And it occurs only once again in Shakespeare: in Titania's description of confusion and disorder in nature already quoted.

The formal remedy, as Puck himself calls it, of the play is purely ophthalmic. Oberon's corrective juice causes the lovers when they awake from their sleep to sort themselves out into suitable couples—Jacks and Jills, as Puck puts it with benign contempt—and Titania to be released from her unsuitable coupling with sweet bully Bottom. But the whole question of corrected vision, of the tutored imagination, goes beyond the merely technical exigencies of plot. It is the essential mediator of the benign, non-disjunctive dialectic which conjures rejoicing out of mockery, and wisdom out of folly.

In the lovers' case errors of “vision” are removed so that true relations can be re-discerned. The lovers recuperate, literally, from their “trip.” Lysander, it is now clear, fell into an infatuation with Helena when he was really in love with Hermia, and Demetrius fell into an infatuation with Hermia when he was really in love with Helena. But in the fairies' case, Titania, chastened by the onslaughts of the tender passion, relinquishes the child; and this yielding to Oberon's will produces in him the impulse of compassion required to melt hard-heartedness, soften anger and renounce retaliation. The passage is worth particular attention:

Her dotage now I do begin to pity.
For meeting her of late behind the wood,
Seeking sweet favors for this hateful fool,
I did upbraid her, and fall out with her.
For she his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers;
And that same dew which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flouriets' eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.
When I had at my pleasure taunted her,
And she in mild terms begg'd my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child;
Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent
To bear him to my bower in fairy land.
And now I have the boy, I will undo
This hateful imperfection of her eyes.

(4.1.47-63)

In this recognition scene Oberon sees her, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time since “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania” in act 2, with detachment and tenderness.

Eyes are organs of visions; eyes (especially when starry) are beautiful objects of vision. But eyes are also vessels for tears. Titania's amorous fantasy as she orders Bottom led away to her bower will be recalled:

The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.

(3.2.198-200)

Drugs, potions, condiments alter vision and visibility, but the true transfigurations are those which take place invisibly at the heart. Bottom himself makes this point, as modestly as ever. When told by Peter Quince that Pyramus had been a lover “that kills himself most gallant for love,” “That,” remarks the sage Bottom, “will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes.”

A Midsummer Night's Dream juggles conspicuously with multiple levels of representation, with plays-within-plays and visions within dreams. What is performed, what is meant, what is seen are often, as Theseus said of Peter Quince's prologue “like a tangled chain; nothing impair'd, but all disorder'd” (5.1.125-26). The Athenian lovers, Lysander and Hermia, fall asleep and dream (in act 2), fall asleep and wake (in act 4), and what happens to them is ambiguously dream/reality, just as Oberon king of shadows, is ambiguously real/not real, visible to the audience but not to the lovers; and the “angel” that wakes Titania “from her flow'ry bed” (3.1.129) is visible to her but not to the audience, who perceive only Nick Bottom assified. Puck stage-manages these “transfigurations” for Oberon's delectation just as Peter Quince does for Theseus' and Shakespeare for ours. And the audience is more than once pointedly invited to conflate these frames. When Theseus says “The best in this kind are but shadows,” his remark applies with equal validity to the artisans of Athens and the Lord Chamberlain's Men. By the same token Puck's “shadows” in the epilogue (“if we shadows have offended”) refers, intentionally, both to the fairies and the actors—the visible and the invisible.

Act 5 dazzlingly catches up and re-focuses the issues of the play, recapitulating its schooling of the imagination. When Theseus tempers Hippolyta's impatience with the mechanicals' efforts: “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (5.1.210) with “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (5.1.211-12) he is retracting his previous repudiation of the imagination as the faculty which “sees more devils than vast hell can hold,” or “Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt,” or some bringer of what is a merely “apprehended” joy, or a bear in a bush on a dark night. The rationalistic and empirically minded duke has been more than cautious about the seething tricks of that fertile and moonstruck faculty; and it is in reply to his dismissal of the lovers' story as so much irrational and illusory dream stuff that Hippolyta enters her caveat concerning the story of the night:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur'd so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy

(5.1. 23-26)

The ducal pair, as we have seen, are a model of concordia discors (“How shall we find the concord of this discord?” Theseus asks of the “very tragical mirth” about to be presented by the artisans) and so it is fitting that they should conduct the dialectic of real and imaginary, meant and performed, visible and invisible towards a resolution for theatre-goers and lovers alike. When Hippolyta reflects upon the story of the night, she is inviting not only Theseus but the theatre audience as well to further reflection. She is inviting a retrospective reappraisal of all that has been enacted in the moonlit woods. Hippolyta's organic metaphor is interesting; cognition, it says, or re-cognition, grows in the mind in the process of recounting, re-telling. What the play celebrates as remedial, beneficient, recuperative it will have discovered by working its way through the fantastic follies the initial deficiencies or infirmities generated. These follies, reduced (or expanded) to absurdity, will prove to have been homeopathically therapeutic, if imagination amend them by making them intelligible. “It must be your imagination then, not theirs,” says wise Hippolyta, knowing that to stout bully Bottom nothing is invisible, not even a voice from behind a wall. So far as that parodic literalist of the imagination is concerned, moonlight cannot be better represented than by moonlight, shining in at the casement in all its factual actuality. And when a person is a wall, he must be well and truly plastered and roughcast. No fancy Brechtian placards will do for him, any more than he can conceive that anyone (of any size) called Mustardseed should not be instantly applied to roast beef.

Pyramus and Thisbe presents a tragedy of lovers misprisions, and neutralizes disaster with its ludicrous comicality. It is irresistibly amusing in itself and needs no amending, by imagination or any other means; and it is also the vehicle of Shakespeare's most ironic private joke to his audience over the heads, so to speak, of Peter Quince and his. The latter possess the capacity to distinguish between walls and witty partitions, between run-on and end-stopped pentameters, between a lion and a goose and between a man and a moon. But they haven't always been so good at distinguishing. Their own follies have been, in their own way, no less de-constructive; but also no less recreative.

“Your play needs no excuse,” says Theseus, amused, ironic and kind. “Marry, if he that writ it had play'd Pyramus, and hang'd himself in Thisby's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy; and so it is truly, and very notably discharg'd” (5.1.357-61). A great deal, and of great constancy, has been “discharged” in this play. And not only Hippolyta, it has been suggested, has had an inkling that the fantasy of folly may grow into the wisdom of the imagination.

This resonant insight marks, at the level of overt theme, the dramatic growth in A Midsummer Night's Dream of the dramatist's capacity to conceive and render the interlacing of sexual and individual roles. Further growth will issue, in due course, in the achievement of a comic form completely adequate for the dialectical battle of sex and self, a form which will resolve the ambivalencies of that warfare's tamings and matings. Here the idea is still inchoate, for it lacks as yet the crystallizing force of the heroine protagonist in all the fullness of her virtuosity and her autonomy.