SOURCE: Wiles, David. “A Midsummer Night's Dream as Epithalamium.” In Shakespeare's Almanac: A Midsummer Night's Dream: Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar, pp. 114-25. Cambridge, Mass.: D. S. Brewer, 1993.

[In the following essay, Wiles asserts that A Midsummer Night's Dream is effectively an epithalamium—a poem in honor of marriage.]

The closing speeches of A Midsummer Night's Dream constitute the kind of finale that we would expect to find at the end of a wedding masque. No other play by Shakespeare ends quite like it. Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest celebrate a betrothal, not a wedding. In As You Like It, the appearance of Hymen in a kind of masque suggests that the couples should be understood as married rather than betrothed at the end of the play, but the moment of marriage is left vague. Orthodox ceremonial does not seem to belong in the Forest of Arden. The formality of the ending is the formality of a conventional theatrical finale, with four couples gathered on stage for a celebratory dance. Unlike these three plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream displays a complete lack of concern with the process of courtship. The rites of courtship—a first encounter in a romantic environment, the interchanging of love-tokens, the composing of love-verses—are all completed before the action of the play begins. The play is concerned with the actual physical union of male and female.

For comparison, let us return to Munday's John-a-Kent and John-a-Cumber. Almost certainly, the play was a major source for Shakespeare's plot structure. There seems no reason why we should not follow Greg and identify the play with The Wise Man of Chester (or West Chester), first produced by the Admiral's company in December 1594 and a big popular success. The central figure in Munday's play is a ‘wise’ magican struggling to prove his supremacy over a rival, and the Chester setting receives much prominence.¹ It is easy to see how Munday could have inspired Shakespeare through the way he juggles levels of reality. In Munday's play we find a nocturnal elopement and a double wedding. A Puck-like figure serving a magician leads lovers astray by night, and makes them fall asleep. A group of clowns prepare a dramatic entertainment to mark the wedding. The Puck-figure intercalates himself in a performance. I suggested in the last chapter that the transformation of Bottom must be indebted to the scene in Munday where the magician is turned into a fool. For all the similarities, Munday's play is no epithalamium. It concludes not at the bedding but at the church door. The plot represents a power struggle for possession, and it is the tying of the legal knot that is at issue. While the humble players in A Midsummer Night's Dream intrude upon wedding night revels, where one would normally expect courtly masquers to be performing, the players in John-a-Kent perform where tenants should, in the open air. They welcome the bridegrooms on the evening before the wedding, and they provide a musical reveille the following morning to mark the brides' awakening. Further satirical entertainments, aristocratic and popular, take place on the castle green, when the brides have departed on their procession to the church and the men have yet to follow. The whole play is concerned with the public side of marriage rituals, and no heed is given to the private, carnal dimension. The use of an upper level lends support to the conclusion that Munday's play was written for the Rose playhouse, and not for a private gathering.

The finale of Shakespeare's play has all the attributes of an epithalamium. In Act IV we see a reveille, followed by a procession to the church. Unlike Spenser and Donne, Shakespeare omits the actual ceremony in the ‘temple’. He does stage the wedding masque (in a grotesque inverted form), and he represents the departure of the bridal couples to bed. The events within the bedchamber, transposed and burlesqued, are represented through the encounter of Bottom and Titania. At the end of Shakespeare's play it is after midnight, the new day is waxing, and it is time for the consummation. Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius have all left and are supposed in bed. Puck evokes the noises and spirits of the night that Spenser warned of in his Epithalamion:

Ne let the Pouke, nor other evil sprites,
Ne let mischievous witches with their charms,
Ne let Hobgoblins, names whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not.
Let not the screech-owl, nor the stork be heard:
Nor the night raven that still deadly yells
Nor damnèd ghosts called up with mighty spells.

When Shakespeare's Puck appears with his cleansing broom, he evokes the same ‘screech-owl’, the same ‘sprites’ arisen like ghosts from gaping graves. Unlike Spenser's Puck, Shakespeare's Puck alias ‘Hobgoblin’ (II.i.40) and his demonic companions cease to threaten and become instead protectors of the marriage bed.

Oberon and Titania arrive with a train of fairies who produce a ‘glimmering light’. This implies that they arrive with torches, like the pages who always served as torchbearers in a masque. The Unton memorial portrait illustrates such child torchbearers, attending upon masked adult dancers, and bearing tapered poles with a small flame at the tip. (The semantic distinction between taper and torch is not altogether clear.) In ‘The Haddington Masque’, the torchbearers are twelve Cupids, each bearing two torches. At the wedding night of James' daughter, the torchbearers were sixteen winged spirits bearing torches of virgin wax in either hand. These last were described by Peacham as they waited to escort the bride from the hall:

With torches' light the children stay,
Whose sparks (see how) ascend on high
As if there wanted stars in sky.

These winged spirits encouraged Donne to interpret all the dancers as fairies:

The masquers come too late, and, I think, will stay
Like fairies, till the cock crow them away.(2)

Titania in the course of Shakespeare's play (III.i.162) instructs her fairies to make night-tapers out of beeswax (i.e. virgin wax as distinct from recycled wax or tallow) in order to escort Bottom to bed. There is no sign that the fairies produce such tapers to honour Bottom, but they do take on the role of torch-bearers at the finale. These tapers or torches perhaps continued to serve a ceremonial purpose once the play was over.

There is an obvious parallel, as we have seen, between the fairies who appear at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream and those who appeared in the midnight masque at the end of Merry Wives of Windsor in April 1597, dancing the shape of Carey's Garter ribbon, and departing to bless St George's Chapel. In Merry Wives the fairies wear ‘rounds of waxen tapers on their heads’ (IV.iv.50), leaving them free to lock hands in the dance. Tapers in A Midsummer Night's Dream have a different symbolism and are clearly hand held. In Merry Wives the tapers are used for a trial by ordeal, but in A Midsummer Night's Dream they are the torches of the masque and procession to the bed-chamber.

The question arises as to who performed the parts of these fairies. An analysis of the casting suggests that A Midsummer Night's Dream is written for a standard complement of sixteen actors: four boys to play Hermia, Helena, Titania and Hippolyta, and twelve adults to play Bottom and the five mechanicals, Lysander and Demetrius, Oberon and Theseus, Egeus and Puck. Philostrate would double with Puck, and the other five speaking fairies would double with the five mechanicals. Supernumeraries would seem to be required to play the trains of Oberon and Titania.³ The role of these supernumeraries is not to act, but to sing and dance, and it is a role that would suit a group of choristers from an aristocratic household. These circumstances would help to explain why two dances seem to be omitted from our text of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with an exit for Oberon's train in Act II.⁴ The state of the surviving text is consistent with the hypothesis that the original dances and songs were attenuated when A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in the public theatre, without an available group of boys and without a wedding night context.

The two ‘trains’ of dancers, choristers or torchbearers are kept apart in Act II, when Oberon refuses to keep company with Titania and dance in her ‘round’; in Act II scene ii, Titania's fairies sing a lullaby around their somnolent mistress; and the two trains return only at the finale. It seems reasonable to infer that Oberon's train must comprise male fairies and Titania's train female fairies. Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed are male, of course, but the logic of the doubling required that these speaking roles should be written for adult actors, not for boy actors.

Oberon cues a lively dance when he instructs both groups (‘every elf and fairy sprite’) to perform a dance that might be a galliard or corranto (‘hop as light as bird from briar … and dance it trippingly’). Titania then seems to introduce not the same but a different dance with the speech which follows:

First rehearse your song by rote,
To each word a warbling note,
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing and bless this place.

This song is slower (‘warbling’) and formal (‘by rote’), and fulfils Oberon's earlier promise that the fairies would at midnight ‘solemnly’ dance in Theseus' house (IV.i.87). A circular dance would have particular significance because of the link between fairies and fairy rings. Titania's fairy has been delegated to ‘dew her orbs upon the green’, and a circular dance at the finale would lead naturally into Oberon's distribution of dew. The dialogue therefore suggests two unscripted dances, followed by Oberon's speech

Now until the break of day
Through the house each fairy stray …

which appears to introduce and explain the next action in the play. The problem is that no stage directions in the Quarto at any point offer guidance as to the nature and timing of the dances. In the Folio, Oberon's speech ‘Now until the break of day …’ is headed ‘The Song’ and italicized, suggesting that this is indeed the ‘ditty’ which Oberon requires the fairies to sing ‘after me’ as they dance trippingly. Yet the speech starts and ends with instructions, and scarcely seems to fit the term ‘ditty’. The Folio heading may have been introduced in the printing house (along with the italics, which are unlikely to be a feature of the manuscript). Alternatively, the Folio text may reflect the way the actors solved the problem of performing the play without an adequate number of child supernumeraries.

The latent choreoraphic structure that we glimpse in the Quarto text is consistent with the conventions of the wedding masque. In Hymenaei a group of female masquers balances the male group. When the two opposed forces which the dancers represent are reconciled, the males pair off with females. The dancing rises to an energetic climax with galliards and corrantoes, which is then followed by a solemn circular dance as two concentric circles are formed around Reason. ‘Lord Hay's Masque’ represents the norm in having a single group of male dancers, but the piece finishes likewise with galliards and corrantoes, followed by a symbolic round.⁵ In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the formal reconciliation of male and female fairies within the dance would have brought the theme of elemental conflict to a visually appropriate conclusion. The use of two choruses strengthens the idea that the play is concerned not with psychologically distinct individuals but with types of male and female.

The purpose of the final dance is to ‘bless this place’, and the ‘place’ in question seems to have a double identity:

Now, until the break of day,
Through this house, each fairy stray.
To the best bride bed will we:
Which by us shall blessed be:
And the issue, there create,
Ever shall be fortunate:

This ‘best bride bed’ which Oberon and Titania intend to bless appears to be that of a real bridal pair. If Shakespeare did not have a real wedding in mind, it is odd that he should have referred to a single ‘best’ bed rather than to three beds. The famous issue of Theseus and Hippolyta was of course the tragic Hippolytus, as Shakespeare knew from Seneca, but the drift of the text does not seem to be towards this mythic outcome. Shakespeare continues:

So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be

indicating quite explicitly that the three couples of the play are differentiated from the occupants of the best bride-bed.

The fairies now begin to ressemble the amoretti whom Spenser visualized as a beneficent presence around his bride-bed:

          an hundred little wingèd loves,
Like divers feathered doves,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed.

Oberon sends the fairies off with ‘field dew consecrate’. This dew, as we have seen, acquires its symbolic potency through association both with the moon and with May Day. It comes now to symbolize the holy water used in the old Catholic ritual of blessing the marriage bed. Using rather similar language, Shakespeare's Catherine of Aragon, as a good Catholic, wishes that the ‘dews of Heaven fall thick in blessings’ on her daughter Mary.⁶ We may turn for analogies to Herrick. In Herrick's epithalamium to Sir Robert Southwell and his lady, a poem that is classical rather than Christian in its references, it is not the bed which has to be anointed but the door-frame of the bed-chamber through which the reluctant bride has to be forced. When the couple are safely installed in bed, Herrick wishes that the blessing of the spheres may ‘fall like a spangling dew’. The dew acquires distinctly seminal associations.⁷

There is a certain irony in the fact that fairies bestow the blessing in Shakespeare's play, since one would normally expect a blessing to ward off the influence of fairies. Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for instance, complains that, because of the popularity of blessings, the Elf Queen and her fairies have vanished from the land.⁸ Oberon promises that

          the blots of Nature's hand
Shall not in their issue stand:
Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.

His blessing gains force from the fact that fairies were held responsible for handicapped children. Gill in the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Pageant, to quote a well-known example, explains the sheep found in her cradle as a changeling:

He was taken with an elf
I saw it myself
When the clock struck twelve
Was he forshapen.

Shakespeare's King Henry IV had a theory that Hal was a substitute for Hotspur, and had been placed in the royal cradle by ‘some night-tripping fairy’. Jonson describes Queen Mab, the Fairy Queen, as one who deceives midwives and ‘empties cradles, / Takes out children, puts in ladles’.⁹ The particular role of fairies in substituting deformed changelings for healthy babies must have meant that, in the context of a wedding night, the evocation of fairies touched an emotional chord.

Oberon ends with a compliment to the host of the wedding:

And each several chamber bless
Through this palace with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest,
Ever shall in safety rest.

It seems odd that Theseus should be blessed at this point, separating him as the Duke of Athens from his propertyless bride. There is no reason why his ‘safety’ should be more important than that of his wife. The real host of a real wedding is a more plausible addressee. In masques, a closing reference to the real host is entirely conventional. Jonson in Hymenaei bids the masquers salute James, who has hosted the wedding at court:

As you, in pairs, do front the state,
With grateful honours, thank His Grace,
That hath so glorified the place.(10)

Likewise in ‘Lord Hay's Masque’ the chorus concludes:

Yet, ere we vanish from this princely sight,
Let us bid Phoebus and his states good-night …

The masquers removed their masks as they approached the state. The same protocol is described in the two masques performed at the Somerset wedding in 1613.¹¹

Puck's epilogue would appear to have been written for performance in the public theatre, where the blessing of the ‘owner’ would have had little force as an ending. Harold Brooks argues in the New Arden edition that the actors' promise to ‘mend’ in future if they are pardoned now makes sense in the context of performance before a regular clientèle.¹² It is hard to conceive that a wedding audience might insult their host by hissing the actors (‘the serpent's tongue’). Puck's promise to ‘make amends ere long’ seems to look forward to the jig which followed the play in the public playhouse. Whatever the status of the epilogue, we should note that neither with nor without it does the finale make any reference to the presence of the Queen, unless the Queen be the ‘owner’ of the place where the play is performed. If the Queen were present, the actors could scarcely bless the host at the end of the play and ignore her. The idea that A Midsummer Night's Dream could have been written for a performance at which the Queen was principle guest is not compatible with the protocol that we find in the extant text.

Within the body of Shakespeare's play, Titania's bower is an obvious symbol of the marriage bed. We have seen how Spenser merges the concepts of the ‘bridal bower and genial bed’ by virtue of the herbs and flowers placed inside the bed-chamber. Wither in his ‘Epithalamion’ of 1613 rouses the bride in the morning because the ‘Bride-Chamber lies to dressing’.¹³ Jonson in Hymenaei speaks of ‘the nuptial-room’ as ‘the chaste bower, which Cypria strows / With many a lilly, many a rose’. In ‘Lord Hay's Masque’, roses are plucked from Flora's bower and strewn about the stage, and the masquers all pass into the bower after they have removed their green garments of chastity. It is easy to see the link between bed and bower when we recall that Elizabethan beds were surrounded by curtains. In performance, whether in the public playhouse or in a private dining hall, Titania would most likely have led Bottom behind a curtain. By extension, a ‘bower’ commonly becomes a metaphor for the enclosing body of the woman, and we have seen how this idea is exploited in ‘Lord Hay's Masque’.

The encounter between Bottom and Titania can be seen as an inversion or burlesque of the real consummation that will occur after the play is over. Like the secluded marriage bed blessed by holy water, Titania's bower is described as ‘consecrated’ (III.ii.7). Bottom like Spenser will sleep on pressed flowers. Titania confidently promises Bottom sexual satisfaction in her bower when she promises to purge his mortal grossness, and to have pearls fetched from the deep. In a double entendre, she tells her fairies to escort Bottom ‘to bed, and to arise’. Bottom's escort of male fairies can be equated with the bridegroom-men whose role would be to lead the groom to the bedchamber. The four fairies are instructed to dance and to feast Bottom before lighting him to bed. Their duty is to ensure that he does not have ‘sleeping eyes’ (III.i.166), but is sexually aroused. The names of the fairies suggest sexual attributes. Bottom's attention passes from Cobweb—used to staunch bleeding—to Peaseblossom—a flower which will grow into a phallic peascod—and finally to Mustardseed—the tiny potent seed which grows into a huge tree. When Jan Kott interprets peaseblossom, mustardseed, cobweb and moth as ingredients for an aphrodisiac, he misses only the element of parody, for these are folk remedies for common complaints.¹⁴ We might recall the electuaries which Chaucer's January took in a vain attempt to make himself capable of a bridegroom's duties. Bottom, like January, is the antithesis of the model bridegroom.

When the pair finally re-emerge from the bower, consummation must be deemed to have taken place. Many productions have succeeded in eliminating this possibility by conflating the off-stage bower with the on-stage flowery bank, and so keeping the couple safely in view.¹⁵ The text lends no support to this chaste interpretation. Bottom's garland of roses plucked from the bower symbolizes his sexual conquest. Titania still has appetite for more, but Bottom only wants to sleep. Sexually exhausted, he seeks a filled honey-bag. Titania offers him ‘new nuts’.¹⁶ Sensing that it is morning, and time to shave (‘I am marvellous hairy about the face’), he accepts the offer of breakfast, with rough music to accompany the reveille. The details owe not a little to The Merchant's Tale, where Chaucer refers to the bristly chin of January in the wedding bed, to his breakfasting and singing in the morning before he falls asleep, to his ‘coltish’ behaviour, and grotesque appearance with nightcap and lean, sagging neck.

The encounter between Bottom and Titania is a parodic inversion. A real bride should be modest, not sexually voracious, a virgin and not sexually experienced. The real groom should display more sexual enthusiasm, yet not surrender to animal instinct. Jonson is clear about the man's duty:

Tonight is Venus' vigil kept.
This night no bridegroom ever slept;
And if the fair bride do,
The married say 'tis his fault too.(17)

Bottom's failure to stay awake is conceived as the ultimate form of inappropriate behaviour in a nuptial context. In the context of a real wedding, we can see how the parody would have a social function of some importance. The night is to be an initiation for both parties, and is a rite of passage that has no modern equivalent. A couple who have only met each other a few times in relatively formal circumstances are suddenly going to meet naked under the sheets, with an obligation to give a good account of themselves the next morning.

The shyness and distress of the bride is a stock motif in epithalamia. Spenser urges:

Let no lamenting cries, nor doleful tears,
Be heard all night within nor yet without.

Jonson in Hymenaei pictures a ‘faint and trembling bride’ on her sacrificial altar, and he urges the thirteen year old girl:

Shrink not, soft virgin, you will love
Anon what you so fear to prove.(18)

For Herrick the bride is afraid of the physical experience which lies ahead, and the groom must be persistent:

O Venus! thou, to whom is known
The best way how to loose the zone
Of virgins! Tell the maid,
She need not be afraid:
And bid the youth apply
Close kisses, if she cry:
And charge, he not forebears
Her, though she woo with tears.

Herrick suggests that the bridesmaids are also likely to be weeping, faced with the loss of youth and companionship. He associates the grief of the bridesmaids with a festive cycle which, as we saw in the last chapter, is linked to rites of passage. A girl goes out with a partner in May, but if she has not secured a husband by Midsummer Eve, she tries at that point to foretell who she will be paired with in the coming spring.

Virgins, weep not; 'twill come, when,
As she, so you'll be ripe for men.
Then grieve her not, with saying
She must no more a-Maying:
Or by Rose-buds divine
Who'll be her Valentine.(19)

While Titania is the antithesis of the shrinking bride in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia is the embodiment. She denies Lysander ‘bed-room’ and insists that they behave as ‘Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid’ (II.ii.58). Her subsequent Freudian dream of a snake demonstrates her fear of sexuality. Her maidenly modesty, combined with a desire to sleep, results in her losing the love of Lysander. In the peculiar context of a wedding night, Hermia's behaviour becomes no more acceptable than that of Titania. A real bride is required to perform a dialectical miracle, and find an intermediate mode of behaviour that avoids both evils: modesty and lust.

Once the sexual act has taken place in Titania's bower, Oberon is able to obtain from Titania that which he most wants, the boy. Titania's withholding of the boy is the source of all the dissent in Fairyland, and the chaotic inversion of the seasons. Pregnancy is vividly and rapturously evoked, likened to the way a sail grows ‘big-bellied with the wanton wind’ (II.i.129). Titania is custodian of the boy, but after her consummation with Bottom, she transfers the boy to Oberon's bower. The symbolism is clear in an epithalamic context. The boy sought by Oberon parallels the male heir which all bridegrooms seek from their brides. The poets are explicit on this subject. Spenser hopes that Cynthia, who has charge of ‘women's labours’ may ‘the chaste womb inform with timely seed’. Genius is asked to ensure that the ‘timely fruit of this same night’ arrives safely. Jonson calls for ‘the birth, by Cynthia hasted’ in the epithalamium to Hymenaei, and in the epithalamium after the ‘Haddington Masque’ he calls for a babe who will ‘Wear the long honours of his father's deed’. The masculine pronoun seemed self-evident. Herrick echoes the theme, and we notice how dew is again associated with procreation:

May the bed, and this short night,
Know the fullness of delight!
Pleasures, many here attend ye,
And ere long, a boy, Love send ye,
Curled and comely, and so trim,
Maids (in time) may ravish him.
Thus a dew of graces fall
On ye both; goodnight to all.(20)

Aristocratic marriages were undertaken in order that a family line could be continued. Brides were under enormous psychological pressure to yield up a male child. The pressure which Oberon places upon a reluctant Titania echoes that urgent social demand. The entire central action of the play is a dreamlike (or nightmare) evocation of a wedding night. The Athenian scenes are associated with the public, patriarchal aspect of marriage. The young lovers have to obtain parental consent at the start of the play, and in the last act they conform to the social expectation that males will be capable of witty banter, females will be modestly silent. The woodland scenes are associated with the private, nocturnal, female-dominated aspect of marriage. The wood, closely associated with the maying ceremony, functions as an extended May/nuptial bower. As in a nuptial, it is ‘deep midnight’ when the lovers escape to the secrecy of the ‘bower’. Here they fall prey to Puck and other malicious spirits. The long-delayed sexual act is suggested mimetically by the dance when Oberon and Titania hold hands and ‘rock the ground whereon these sleepers be’ (IV.i.85). In the morning when the lovers are woken to the rough music of the hounds, they receive a humiliating reveille. The reveille, as we have seen, was a time when the newly-married couple had to give an account of themselves, and satisfy interrogators that intercourse had taken place. As in the dream, so in reality a hunting song was often used to awaken the newly-weds.²¹ What the lovers in the play have learned from their experience is not clear, but in the extra-theatrical world of the audience, an actual bridal couple may well have done their share of learning and adjusting. It was not only the Queen who found the conflict between Venus and Diana very hard to reconcile. Every young bride was expected on her wedding night to put aside the cult of chastity and in an instant become a votary of Venus.

Notes

1. See pp. lxiv-lxvi of the New Arden edition, which gives a summary of Coghill's fundamental study.

2. Campion ‘Lords' Masque’: Works ed. W.R. Davis (New York, 1967) 255; Peacham The Period of Mourning … together with Nuptial Hymns (London, 1789) 35; Donne ‘Epithalamion on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine’, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose ed. J. Hayward (New York, 1946) 105.

3. The fundamental study of doubling is William A. Ringler ‘The number of actors in Shakespeare's early plays’ in G. E. Bentley (ed.) The Seventeenth-Century Stage (Chicago, 1968). For the suggestion that choir boys were used, see E. K. Chambers William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930) ii.86. T. J. King in Casting Shakespeare's Plays (Cambridge, 1992) does not accept the doubling of fairies and mechanicals. His method of setting up a distinction between major and minor roles seems arbitrary in relation to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Snug has few lines but a demanding role.

4. The view outlined here follows that of Dr Johnson, accepted in outline by the New Arden editor. See Brooks' long note 3 to p. cxxiii of the New Arden edition.

5. Works 226, 230. The final song refers to a ‘round’, and to a ‘centre’.

6. Henry VIII IV.ii.133. For the dew as holy water, see C. L. Barber Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959) p. 139, and the fuller discussion in F. Douce Illustrations of Shakespeare (London, 1807) i.180.

7. Poetical Works 56.

8. The Wife of Bath's Tale 857-881. David Young notes Shakespeare's ‘reversal’ in Something of Great Constancy (New Haven, 1966) 22.

9. The Second Shepherds' Pageant 616-19; Henry the Fourth Part One, I.i.87; Jonson Entertainment at Althorpe 65-70; cf. Keith Thomas Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971) 612-13. For survivals of this belief, see K. M. Briggs The Vanishing People: A Study of Traditional Fairy Beliefs (London, 1978) 93-103.

10. Hymenaei 420-2.

11. John Nichols Progresses of King James I (1828) ii. 713-714, 723-724.

12. Note to V.i.416. Brooks does not consider the possibility that the actors may be addressing a regular spectator in the form of their patron.

13. George Wither Juvenilia (Spenser Society, London, 1871) 469.

14. Jan Kott Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London, 1965) 182; L. A. Reynolds & P. Sawyer ‘Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959) 518-21.

15. See Homer Swander ‘Editors vs. text: the scripted geography of A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Studies in Philology 87 (1990) 83-108. Robert Lepage in his 1992 production at the National Theatre went to the opposite extreme, allowing Titania and Bottom to copulate on a bed.

16. Although ‘nuts’ was not a regular slang term for testicles in the Elizabethan period, the metaphorical implications are clear, and were well brought out in Brook's production. See David Selbourne The Making of A Midsummer Night's Dream (London, 1982) 305.

17. ‘Haddington Masque’ 367-70.

18. Hymenaei 369, 408-9.

19. Poetical Works 56.

20. ‘The Good-night or Blessing’ in Poetical Works 124-5.

21. L. E. Pearson Elizabethans at Home (Stanford, 1957) 359.

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