[In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Barton comments on A Midsummer Night's Dream's “preoccupation with the idea of imagination” and contends that the products of imagination, including “dreams, the illusions of love, poetry and plays,” are central to the play.]

A Midsummer Night's Dream was first printed in a quarto edition in 1600. The comedy was first mentioned by Meres in 1598, but 1595-96 is usually accepted as the date of composition. It has certain stylistic affinities with Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, plays which must have been written at about the same time. More importantly, it seems to consolidate and conclude Shakespeare's first period of experiment with comic form. The synthesizing impulse characteristic of A Midsummer Night's Dream not only knits together a number of different historical times and places, literary traditions, character types, and modes of thought. It manifests itself in the play's unusual variety of metres and verse forms, as well as in the tendency, remarked on by several critics, for characters to stress the richness of their encompassing dramatic world by listing its components. Egeus is not content simply to state that Lysander has exchanged love-tokens with Hermia. He names them all: “bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, / Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats” (1.1.33-34). Almost all the characters are given to list-making. Oberon painstakingly itemizes every kind of wild beast that might conceivably wake Titania; Hermia and Lysander count all the obstacles that have ever threatened true love, while the fairies almost bury Bottom alive under a deluge of honey and butterflies, glow-worms, apricots and figs.

Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson was, in many of his plays, a compulsive maker of dramatic inventories of a superficially similar kind. Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair are filled with tallies, a sea of objects which continually threaten to engulf the characters. Nothing, however, could be more different in effect from the list-making of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Jonson's world of things is stifling and corrupt, inanimate, man-made and man-soiled, the dusty contents of some Gothic lumber-room of the imagination: “his copper rings, / His saffron jewel, with the toad-stone in't, / Or his embroidered suit, with the cope-stitch, / Made of a hearse-cloth, or his old tilt-feather” (Volpone, 2.5.11-14). Almost invariably, Jonson's enumerations evoke an incoherent urban world, so overcrowded that it has become impossible for human beings to walk about naturally among the detritus of a civilization out of control. By contrast, the lists in Shakespeare's comedy create the sense of a country world that is inexhaustibly rich and various, occasionally grotesque, but basically fresh, creative, and young. Moreover, where Jonson's lists are deliberately disjunctive, images of chaos, Shakespeare's relate and interact without sacrificing the individuality of the separate components. In the remarkably generous and inclusive order of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Bottom can converse amiably with the fairy queen without losing a jot of his own identity, there seems to be nothing which the shaping spirit of imagination cannot use and, in some way, make relevant to the whole.

Not surprisingly, a preoccupation with the idea of imagination, and with some of its products—dreams, the illusions of love, poetry and plays—is central to this comedy. Theseus may speak somewhat slightingly of “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” beings “of imagination all compact” whose fantasies are literally incredible: “more strange than true” (5.1.2). The play as a whole takes a far more complicated view of the matter. Theseus himself, for Shakespeare as for Chaucer and Sophocles, is preeminently the hero of a daylight world of practicalities, of the active as opposed to the contemplative life. His relationship with Hippolyta in the comedy presents an image of passion steadied by the relative maturity of the people involved. There are ages of love as well as of human life and Theseus and Hippolyta represent summer as opposed to the giddy spring fancies of the couples lost in the wood. Theseus is a wise ruler and a good man, but Shakespeare makes it plain that there are other, important areas of human experience with which he is incompetent to deal. When Theseus leads the bridal couples to bed at the end of act 5 with the mocking reminder that “'tis almost fairy time” (5.1.364), he intends the remark as a last jibe at Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius: people who, in his estimation, have been led all too easily by darkness and their own fear to suppose a bush a bear (5.1.22). The joke, however, is on Theseus. It is indeed almost fairy time. In fact, Puck, Oberon, and Titania have been waiting for this moment in order to take over the palace. For a few nocturnal hours the wood infiltrates the urban world. Even so, years before, a Titania in whom Theseus apparently does not believe led him “through the glimmering night / From Perigenia, whom he ravished,” and made him “with fair Aegles break his faith, / With Ariadne, and Antiopa” (2.1.77-80). The life of the self-appointed critic of imagination and the irrational is permeated by exactly those qualities he is concerned to minimize or reject. Gently, the comedy suggests that while it is certainly possible to mistake a bush for a bear, one may also err as Theseus does by confounding a genuine bear with a bush. The second mistake is, on the whole, the more dangerous.

The last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream is concerned principally, and even somewhat self-consciously, with the relationship between art and life, dreams and the waking world. In terms of plot, this fifth act is superfluous. Almost all the business of the comedy has been concluded at the end of act 4: the error of Titania's vision put right and she herself reconciled with Oberon, Hermia paired off happily with Lysander and Helena with Demetrius. Theseus has not only overruled the objections of old Egeus, but insisted upon associating these marriages with his own: “Away with us to Athens. Three and three / We'll hold a feast in great solemnity” (4.1.184-85). This couplet has the authentic ring of a comedy conclusion. Only one expectation generated by the action remains unfulfilled: the presentation of the Pyramus and Thisby play before the Duke and his bride. Out of this single remaining bit of material, Shakespeare constructs a fifth act which seems, in effect, to take place beyond the normal, plot-defined boundaries of comedy.

The new social order which has emerged from the ordeal of the wood makes its first public appearance at the performance of the mechanicals' play. It is sensitive and hopeful. Theseus, characteristically, is condescending about the actor's art: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (5.1.211-12). Richard Burbage would scarcely have thanked him. Such a view of the theatre overstresses the audience's lordly willingness-to-be-fooled at the expense of the power of illusion. Certainly a quite extraordinary effort of imagination would be required to extract Aristotelian pity and fear from the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby as enacted by Bottom and Flute. The courtly audience, like the theatre audience, laughs at the ineptitudes and absurdities of the play within the play. Unlike Berowne and his friends in the equivalent scene of Love's Labor's Lost, however, the on-stage spectators in A Midsummer Night's Dream remain courteous. Most of the remarks made by Theseus, Hippolyta, and the four lovers are not heard by the preoccupied actors. Those that do penetrate, suggestions as to the proper disposition of Moonshine's lantern, dog, and bush, cries of “Well roar'd, Lion” and “Well run, Thisby,” are entirely in the spirit of the performance. It was Bottom, after all, back in the rehearsal stage, who fondly imagined a success for Lion so great that the audience would intervene to request an encore: “Let him roar again.” Gratifyingly, this wish-dream just about comes true. As the play proceeds, tolerance ripens into geniality, into an unforced accord between actors and spectators based upon considerations far more complex than anything articulated by Theseus. Although the artistic merit of the Pyramus and Thisby play is virtually non-existent, the performance itself is a resounding success. No feelings have been hurt, and everyone has had a thoroughly good time. Even Theseus finds that “this palpable-gross play hath well beguil'd / The heavy gait of night” (5.1.367-68).

For the theatre audience, granted a perspective wider than the one enjoyed by Theseus and the members of his court, the Pyramus and Thisby story of love thwarted by parents and the enmity of the stars consolidates and in a sense defines the happy ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It reminds us of the initial dilemma of Hermia and Lysander, and also of how their story might well have ended: with blood and deprivation. The heavy rhetoric of the interlude fairly bristles with fate and disaster, introducing into act 5 a massing of images of death. The entire action of the play within the play is tragic in intention, although not in execution. Without meaning to do so, Bottom and his associates transform tragedy into farce before our eyes, converting that litany of true love crossed which was rehearsed in the very first scene by Hermia and Lysander to laughter. In doing so, they recapitulate the development of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a whole, reenacting its movement from potential calamity to an ending in which quick bright things come not to confusion, as once seemed inevitable, but to joy. An intelligent director can and should ensure that the on-stage audience demonstrates some awareness of the ground-bass of mortality sounding underneath the hilarity generated by Bottom's performance, that a line like Lysander's “he is dead, he is nothing” (5.1.308-9) is not lost in the merriment. Only the theatre audience, however, can capture the full resonance of the Pyramus and Thisby play.

When Theseus dismisses the actors after the Bergomask, and the members of the stage audience depart to their chambers, A Midsummer Night's Dream seems once again to have arrived at its ending. For the second time Theseus is given a couplet which sounds like the last lines of a play (5.1.369-70). When something like this happened at the end of act 4 it was Bottom, starting up out of his sleep, who set the comedy going again. This time it is the entrance of the fairies, but again the prolongation has nothing to do with plot. The appearance of Puck, Oberon, Titania and their train in the heart of Athens lends a symmetry to the action which would otherwise have been lacking and also gives the lie to Theseus's scepticism. Most important of all, however, is the way Puck's speech picks up and transforms precisely those ideas of death and destruction distanced through laughter in the Pyramus and Thisby play.

Now the hungry lion roars,
And the wolf behowls the moon;
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,
All with weary task foredone.
Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.
Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide.

All the images here are of sickness, toil, and death. Even the wasted brands, in context, suggest the inevitable running down of human life as it approaches the grave.

Once again, Shakespeare has adjusted the balance between art and life, reality and illusion. Puck's hungry lion is something genuinely savage, not at all the “very gentle beast, and of a good conscience” (5.1.227-28) impersonated by Snug. Even so, his talk of graves and shrouds, drudgery and exhaustion, brings the sense of mortality kept at bay in the Pyramus and Thisby interlude closer, preparing us for the true end of the comedy after so many feints and false conclusions. Puck's speech begins a modulation which will terminate, some fifty lines later, in direct address to the audience and in a player's request for applause. Actors and spectators alike will be turned out of Athens to face the workaday world. Yet Shakespeare refuses to concede that Theseus was right. In the first place, Puck's account of the terrors of the night is not final. It serves to introduce Oberon and Titania, the most fantastic characters in the play, and in their hands Puck's night fears turn into benediction and blessing. About the facts of mortality themselves the fairy king and queen can do nothing, even as Titania could do nothing to prevent the death, years before, of the votaress of her order. All they can do is to strengthen the fidelity and trust of the three pairs of lovers, to bless these marriages, and to stress the positive side of the night as a time for love and procreation as well as for death and fear. Certainly the emphasis on the fair, unblemished children to be born is not accidental, something to be explained purely in terms of the possible occasion of the play's first performance. These children summoned up by Oberon extend the comedy into the future, counteracting the artificial finality which always threatens to diminish happy endings. A beginning is made implicit in the final moments of the play, a further and wider circle.

Unlike characters in fairy-tale, Theseus and Hippolyta, Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia cannot live happily ever after. Only the qualified immortality to be obtained through offspring is available to them. It was an idea of survival in time which the Shakespeare of the sonnets came to distrust. Nevertheless, in the general atmosphere of celebration and blessing at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it seems for the moment enough. It is only after this final coming together in Theseus's palace of the two poles of the comedy, a world of fantasy and one of fact, of immortality and of death, that Puck turns to speak to the theatre audience. Like Theseus, he describes the actors as “shadows” and sums up the play now concluded as a “weak and idle theme, / No more yielding than a dream.” When John Lyly ended his court comedies with superficially similar words of deprecation and apology, he seems to have meant them literally. Shakespeare is far more devious. Images of sleep and dreams, shadows and illusions, have been used so constantly in the course of the comedy, examined and invested with such body and significance that they cannot be regarded now as simple terms of denigration and dismissal. As with that mock-apology for the author's “rough and all-unable pen” which concludes Henry V, Shakespeare seems to have felt able to trust his audience to take the point: to recognize the simplification, and to understand that the play has created its own reality, a reality touching our own at every point which

More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable.

(5.1.25-27)