SOURCE: Plasse, Marie A. “The Human Body as Performance Medium in Shakespeare: Some Theoretical Suggestions from A Midsummer Night's Dream.” College Literature 19, no. 1 (February 1992): 28-47.

[In the following essay, Plasse discusses the human body as a performance medium that conveys the various themes expressed in A Midsummer Night's Dream.]

It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life afterwards for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that, instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have to let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

Lamb (23-24)

Like much of the anti-theatrical criticism of Shakespearean productions in the nineteenth century, these remarks by Charles Lamb offer, under the guise of a complaint against the “straitlacing actuality” (Lamb 24) of the theater, an acute formulation of a crucial issue in Shakespearean dramaturgy. Although it was the performance of a tragedy which prompted Lamb's comments, the pertinence of his observations to the problems of theatrical representation in A Midsummer Night's Dream is striking. As it “embodies” and “realizes” such “conceptions” as the loving-hating lunacy of erotic desire, the tricks of the imagination, and the power of dreams and of art, A Midsummer Night's Dream shares Lamb's concern with the problem of representing “fine visions” in the theater, a medium which demands adherence to “the standard of flesh and blood.” The play's preoccupation with the mechanicals' hilariously homespun dramaturgy masks a more serious meditation upon the playwright's need to find theatrically effective ways to mediate between what Lamb's fellow-critic William Hazlitt would call “the regions of fancy” and the “boards of a theater” (Hazlitt 136). Through its depiction of the mechanicals' efforts to solve various problems of dramatic representation as they prepare their playlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests that the most viable intermediary between these two regions is to be found at the level of “flesh and blood” constituted by the actors' bodies. But while A Midsummer Night's Dream acknowledges the importance of the actor's body in this essential mediation, the play does more than merely proclaim the privileged status of the actor's body in the theater. The mechanicals' playlet not only dramatizes the fact of the body's crucial role in theatrical representation, it also explores some of the consequences of putting such representational pressure on the actor's body. The theatrical efforts of Peter Quince and company can be read not only as a comic satire of inept, naive theater craft, but also as an allegory of the performing body in Shakespearean dramaturgy.¹

1

Since the human body has been and continues to be an important object of study in areas of Renaissance and drama scholarship which intersect with my concerns here, before I pursue my analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I want to place this essay in relation to some recent approaches to the body in these areas. Investigations of the body in Shakespeare's plays have originated from a wide range of disciplines, including literary criticism, the history of ideas, theater arts, drama theory, semiotics, and cultural studies. We have had readings of the body as theme, image, master metaphor, and theatrical semiosis, considerations of Elizabethan acting techniques, and, most recently, analyses of the body as culturally determined locus of various social discourses and practices in the early modern period.² In view of the high level of ongoing interest in the topic, it is surprising that relatively little has been said about one of the most fascinating and potentially problematic aspects of the body in Shakespearean drama—namely that one of the chief materials in which the plays are constituted onstage is not only an artistic medium for the dramatist, but also a human being. In Shakespeare's plays, the medium is the man.

Various theater-oriented studies of the plays have, of course, acknowledged the highly charged corporeality of Shakespeare's art.³ But the large scope of such studies means that their treatments of the body are necessarily brief and their analyses of individual plays limited. More recent work by Michael Goldman, David Bevington, and Bert O. States has given more sustained attention to the performing body in Shakespeare and offered useful insights into the presence of the actor in relation to the text, the audience, and the expressive tools at his disposal, such as gestures, costumes, and props. Again, however, the broad conceptual bases of these important works preclude sustained focus on the fact of the body as Shakespearean performance medium as well as detailed readings of what a single play might suggest about that fact.

But this simple fact, which so clearly distinguishes the playwright's medium from the paints, pencils, clay, or marble employed in nondramatic, nonperformative arts, could not possibly go without expression and comment by one of the most self-reflexive dramatists working during a period of strikingly self-reflexive dramaturgy. As the metadramatic Shakespearean criticism of the 1960s and 70s has taught us, the plays consistently reveal things about their own art.⁴ They are not only “about various moral, social, political, and other thematic issues …” but also about “… dramatic art itself—its materials, its media of language and theater, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order …” (Calderwood, Metadrama 5). We can reasonably expect, therefore, that Shakespeare's plays—especially one as full of direct references to dramatic art as the Dream—must have much to tell us about the performing body, a crucial but relatively unexplored component of Shakespeare's dramaturgy.

In a judicious review article published nearly ten years ago, Michael Shapiro argued that the particular value of the metadramatic approach is that it “addresses those facts of dramatic art which have too often been excluded from critical discourse, those facts arising from our awareness of the physical conditions of playing.” He called for more metadramatic analyses of Shakespeare in order to determine “which [metadramatic] concerns were paramount in which plays” and “more metadramatic readings of other Elizabethan plays in order to set Shakespearean drama in its historical context” (161). It is, in part, as an effort to address a fact of Shakespeare's dramatic art which has largely been “excluded from critical discourse” that I offer this reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a play which ponders the situation of the performing body. Before I proceed, however, one further clarification is necessary.

It will be apparent to anyone involved in Renaissance and Shakespeare studies that the elaboration of metadramatic analysis which Shapiro called for in 1981 was never fully carried out.⁵ Rather, the need, which Shapiro recognizes, to “set Shakespearean drama in its historical context” became a paramount scholarly concern in the 1980s and fostered the development of new historicist and materialist approaches that appear to have deflected, or at least slowed, the metadramatic project that was then under way.⁶ While the main concern of metadramatic critics such as Lionel Abel, Anne Righter, Sigurd Burckhardt, and James Calderwood was to investigate various aspects of self-reflexivity in Renaissance drama, new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning), Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, and Steven Mullaney focused on representations of power within Renaissance literature. More specifically, this work sought to illuminate the interaction between state power and literary genres such as the pastoral, the masque, and the drama, which represent, legitimate, and sometimes contest that power. At the same time, the work of cultural materialists, operating at the intersections of history, sociology, and English studies, examined Renaissance literary texts in relation to a broad range of early modern social discourses and institutions such as gender, sexuality, class, subversion, state authority, patronage, education, the church, and the theater. Cultural materialists also produced analyses of the appropriation of Shakespeare's texts and authority by succeeding historical periods. A partial list of scholarship in this extensive field includes, among many others, Jonathan Dollimore (Radical Tragedy), Alan Sinfield, and Lisa Jardine, as well as the essays collected by Dollimore and Sinfield and Graham Holderness.⁷

The swerve away from metadramatic criticism effected by these new approaches has been, as I take it, a positive development, for Renaissance and Shakespeare studies in general, as well as for metadramatic criticism in particular. In addition to reenergizing the way many of us teach and write about Shakespeare, new historicist and materialist scholarship has also opened the way for a metadramatic analysis enriched by the various theoretical and interpretive strategies which inform this new work. Of such strategies, Michel Foucault's analyses of the human body as a locus of power relations (in Discipline and Punish, especially) have been suggestive for my readings of the performing body as a site at which relations of power are played out between performers and spectators. In addition, new historicist and materialist scholarship on the various discourses of the body in early modern culture has helped me to clarify my own readings of the body within the more circumscribed context of Shakespeare's theatrical practice.⁸ My approach in this essay is chiefly metadramatic, however, and my concern here is to explore some of the specifically theatrical dynamics in which the Shakespearean performing body participates.

2

The mechanicals' deliberations in Act 3, Scene 1 about how to “bring in” the moonlight and the wall required by their play rudimentarily articulate the representational range of the body as Shakespearean performance medium. These “two hard things” (3.1.45) which remain to be planned as Quince and his company meet to rehearse seem to mark out the most distant extremes on the wide spectrum of things that a dramatist might wish to represent onstage, and to reflect the conceptual polarities implicit in Lamb's response to the staging of a Shakespearean tragedy. Put in theoretical terms, the problem of representing moonlight is the problem of representing the intangible in drama, of bringing to the stage that which may be charged with significance and influence, but which has no palpable form; such things are representable and perceivable, like moonlight itself, only with the aid of a mediator that is as substantial as the heavenly body of the moon. The theoretical problem that “bringing in a wall” invokes, on the other hand, is the problem of bringing to the theatrical world that which is nothing but palpable substance and which may be found everywhere outside the world of the theater.

The mechanicals overcome both of these problems fairly quickly. During the discussion about how to stage moonlight, for instance, both Snout and Bottom come forward as proponents of a mode of representation that is hardly representational at all: they suggest leaving a window open and letting real moonlight shine in on the stage. With a terse “Ay,” Quince acknowledges the possibility that their plan might work, but he quickly dismisses it and offers the following alternative: “… or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine” (3.1.55-57).⁹ Imitating Quince's directorial pronouncements about moonlight, Bottom, when confronted with the problem of “bringing in” a Wall, declares, “Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some loam, or some roughcast about him, to signify Wall: and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper” (3.1.63-67). These solutions to the problems of staging moonlight and a wall, as many readers have noted, signal the mechanicals' affinity for an excessively literal method of dramatic representation as well as their misunderstanding of the imaginative powers of their audience. But at the same time, the fact that the mechanicals solve their dramaturgical problems by deciding that the moonlight and the wall should be impersonated by actors rather than represented by inanimate property devices suggests a Shakespearean acknowledgment of the human body as a primary mediator between the world of the theater and the world outside the theater, between the substantial world of the stage and the insubstantial world of conceptions.

Bottom's solution for the staging of the wall not only places the actor's body in the middle of the representational gap between the everyday and the theatrical, it also begins to describe some of the problematic ramifications of that position. Bottom's conception of a man-in-the-wall is even more ludicrous than Quince's man-in-the-moon, partly because it does not emerge from an established body of legendary lore, as does Moonshine (see Emerson), and partly because it ignores the fact that this company of artisans could easily build a suitable property wall, with no need to include a man inside a coat of loam and roughcast to “signify Wall.” Shakespeare is undoubtedly interested in the comic possibilities of Bottom's idea, as Pyramus' and Thisbe's comic dialogues with Wall later on show. But this comical personification also calls attention to the theatrical circumstances under which the body signifies “Wall,” and anything else, on Shakespeare's stage.

Snout-as-Wall, an actor literally stuck in his role, part flesh and blood, part loam and roughcast, seemingly caught at a liminal stage of some fantastical metamorphosis from person to theatrical signifier, is a perfect emblem of the complex situation of the actor's body in Shakespeare's theater. Among the complexities inherent in this situation is the constant pressure exerted upon the actor's body to signify something other than itself alone. The narratives that Shakespeare stages, like most dramatic plots, constantly encourage the audience to think of the actor as something other than a human presence alone by encoding his body, through the words and actions of his character, as a sign of certain meanings connected to the larger thematic and generic concerns of the play. Snout's role as wall clearly illustrates this dual signifying function. The role involves Snout's body in the representation not only of “Snout in the role of Wall,” that is, of a sentient human subject conscious of his own physical and mental activities as a performer, but also in the symbolic representation of the family enmity that separates Pyramus and Thisbe in the tragic narrative which is the source of the mechanicals' play (“that vile wall which did these lovers sunder” [5.1.131]). This relatively stable duality in Snout's significatory role is complicated considerably by the specific theatrical circumstances within which he plays this role—that is, as a member of the inept dramatic troupe of his fellow mechanicals onstage before Theseus's court. These circumstances involve Snout's body in the mechanicals' unintentional transformation of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe into a comic parody of the tragic original. Within this context, Snout signifies not only “Snout in the role of Wall” and the symbolic obstacle to young love, but also an actor who is, unwittingly, the target of the audience's derisive laughter and wisecracks. The audience laughs at Snout in his role as a result of what they read as a lack of theatrical sophistication in his personification of Wall and as a result of the physical awkwardness and embarrassment which this personification engenders when the inept actors of Pyramus's and Thisbe's parts apostrophize the wall that divides them and attempt to kiss through the “chink.” Snout's experience suggests that the potential for this sort of awkwardness and embarrassment is constitutive of the process of theatrical signification. This process not only highlights the basic duality that inheres in the actor's appearance onstage as both himself and his character, but also, and more problematically, it subjects the actor's body to whatever significatory pressure may be conjured up by the less predictable situation of his performance within specific theatrical circumstances.

A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes an anxious actorly response to the corporeal pressures of theatrical signifying in the mechanicals' painstaking efforts to diffuse what they believe will be the frightening theatrical presence of Snug-as-Lion by giving him an innocuous costume and a calming prologue. These efforts are most often, and rightly, interpreted as evidence of the mechanicals' misapprehension of their audience's ability to distinguish dramatic fiction from reality. But the prologue planned for Snug also telegraphs an actorly resistance to the constant allegorizing impulses of dramatic representation and to the corporeal self-occlusion which theatrical signifying requires. Declaring that “there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living,” Bottom insists that the Lion's prologue must “name his [Snug's] name” (3.1.35) and that “half his face must be seen through the lion's neck” (36). In addition, Snug “must speak through” the costume to the ladies in the audience, politely and humbly entreating them “not to fear, not to tremble” (40), for indeed, he is “no such thing” (42) as a lion, but “a man as other men are” (43).

The details of Snug's physical exposure and concealment in this costume give the effect, as does Wall's costume, of a human figure transformed and partially obscured by his theatrical role.¹⁰ At the same time, however, the prologue that Bottom has imagined for Snug works against the grotesque doubleness that Snug's role confers upon him, allowing the actor to assert his true identity (“Snug the joiner” [44]) and to proclaim his true human shape “through” the corporeal distortions of the role: “If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing; I am a man, as other men are” (3.1.40-43). These words resemble those that Bottom himself plans to recite as Pyramus, in which he, too, will reveal his true identity from within his role and declare that the fatal blow he suffers in the play is only an illusion (3.1.15-20). The disclaimers that Bottom suggests are motivated at one level by the mechanicals' earnest desires to please their audience and by their fundamental misunderstanding of the imaginative capacities of that audience. But at another level, these interpolations imply a certain uneasiness on the part of the amateur actors about the corporeal transformations and distortions they must undertake in the course of playing their roles. Bottom's seemingly foolish desire to break theatrical decorum in these supplemental speeches seeks to counteract the deliberate misrepresentation of bodily identity and physical state which acting requires.

The excessive politeness Bottom imagines in Snug's address to the ladies (“… ‘Ladies,’ or ‘Fair ladies, I would wish you,’ or ‘I would request you,’ or ‘I would entreat you’ …” [3.1.38-40]), laced with actorly humility and culminating in the offer to render “my life for yours,” also brings into focus a second source of the mechanicals' corporeal anxiety. This uneasiness has more to do with the power the actors attribute to their audience than with the disfigurements that their roles demand. As Bottom offers to “play the lion, too,” and with vigorous roaring to boot, his cohorts repeatedly voice their fear of being hanged for frightening the ladies in their audience:

QUI.:
And you should do it too terribly, you would fright the Duchess and the ladies, that they would shriek: and that were enough to hang us all.
ALL.:
That would hang us, every mother's son.
BOT.:
I grant you, friends, if you should fright the ladies out of their wits, they would have no more discretion but to hang us.

(1.2.70-76)

That the mechanicals should mention three times in five lines the possibility of being hanged as a result of their performance suggests that their own corporeal vulnerability before an audience which has the power to express such a fatal sort of disapproval is just as much on their minds as the possibility that they might “fright the ladies.” The mechanicals' urgent desire to please their royal audience and their fear of punishment, moreover, reflect the marginal, suspect, and legally precarious position occupied by Elizabethan actors.¹¹ Thus, while the repeated references to hanging undoubtedly partake of the hysteria and hyperbole that are characteristic of the mechanicals throughout the play, they also register an undercurrent of ambivalence about the theatrical situation which pervades all of the scenes in which Quince and company appear.¹²

Several moments during the mechanicals' rehearsals elaborate this ambivalence, registering the contrasting feelings of empowerment and vulnerability which Quince's assignment of roles catalyzes among his players. Bottom's brief remarks in response to being cast as Pyramus, for example, suggest a theatrical economy based on a sustained tension between bodily aggression and vulnerability. When Bottom learns that he is to play Pyramus, a lover “that kills himself most gallant for love,” he declares: “That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes: I will condole in some measure” (1.2.21-23). Here Bottom's sense of his histrionic powers and their effects on the audience is strictly corporeal.¹³ He thinks that the key to a successful rendition of Pyramus' tragic suicide depends upon the tears he will produce in “the true performing” of the role. These tears will, in turn, “move storms” of tears in the audience. Moreover, Bottom understands the actorly prowess to which both his tears and the tears of the audience attest exclusively in terms of a vague corporeal threat to the audience. When he boasts about the impressive rendition of Pyramus he will give, he feels compelled to warn, “let the audience look to their eyes,” implying that the power of his performance will surely overwhelm the audience's eyes with tears of grief for Pyramus.

True to his large actor's ego, Bottom's formulation of the theatrical economy I have described locates the aggression in the actor and the vulnerability in the audience. Francis Flute's reaction to Quince's assignment of his part, however, reverses these terms and posits a theatrical situation in which the potential for aggression is attributed to the spectators, while the greatest sense of corporeal and psychological vulnerability rests with the actor:

QUI.:
Flute, you must take Thisbe on you.
FLU.:
What is Thisbe? A wandering knight?
QUI.:
It is the lady that Pyramus must love.
FLU.:
Nay, faith, let me not play a woman: I have a beard coming.
QUI.:
That's all one: you shall play it in a mask; and you may speak as small as you will.

(1.2.39-46)

Flute hopes that Thisbe is a “wandering knight,” a character which would allow him to pretend to possess much more power and virility than he enjoys in his life as Francis Flute, smooth-faced bellows mender. But when he learns that Thisbe is “the lady that Pyramus must love,” Flute begs off, complaining that he can't play a woman because he has “a beard coming.” Quince thinks that Flute is worried that his beard will mar the female figure he is to play, so he assures Flute that he may use a mask to hide his bearded face from the audience. Flute's concern is not verisimilitude, however, but rather the ridicule to which he may be subjected when he appears before the audience in the role of Pyramus' female lover. Playing the woman's part apparently threatens Flute's masculinity.¹⁴ He invokes his supposedly incipient beard as if to fend off an onslaught of jibes accusing him of effeminacy, taunts which his smooth face might invite even when he is not playing a woman.

Flute's anxiety about his role is clearly evident at the moment in performance when the part requires him to kiss Pyramus-as-Bottom through the chink in the wall. After Bottom-as-Pyramus speaks the cue for the kiss, “O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall” (5.1.198), Flute-as-Thisbe responds with a telling, and seemingly ad-libbed, disclaimer: “I kiss the wall's hole and not your lips at all” (199). Thisbe's response to her lover's request for a kiss seems to emanate directly from Flute's uneasiness with the gesture he must perform rather than from the character. The line sounds like a direct appeal to the audience, not a reply to Pyramus, to whom this description of the logistics of the obstructed kiss would be old news. Apparently squeamish about how others will perceive him in his role as Pyramus' lover, Flute feels compelled to assure the audience that he is not a woman and that he is not kissing Bottom. But this attempt to distance himself from the suggestion that he is Bottom/Pyramus' chaste female lover by explaining that he is kissing the “wall's hole” and not Pyramus' lips only leads to a second joke at the hapless Flute's expense. Given the presence of a human actor as the personification of Wall in the scene, Flute's disclaimer puts him in yet another uncomfortable position, suggesting that instead of kissing Bottom, he is kissing the bottom of the actor playing Wall.¹⁵ Ironically, what is perhaps Flute's most embarrassing moment onstage derives not from the female part he was so afraid to play, but from his need to assert, indirectly, through his disclaimer about the kiss, the true gender identity of his body. But Flute can't win. His words in the scene position him as the female lover of Bottom and the male lover of Wall, roles which make his physical presence onstage at this moment inevitably the object of ridicule from the audience.¹⁶

As Flute's experience onstage indicates, the mechanicals' performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in Act 5 dramatizes far more explicitly than the earlier rehearsal scenes the anxieties and tensions that reverberate among these actors, their roles, and the audience before whom they play. Quince's preposterously mispunctuated prologue, for example, betrays the actor's apprehensiveness before his audience as well as the potentially “offensive” effects his performance might have upon the spectators. But while Quince's “tangled chain” of verse signals his stagefright, the subversion of language by his tortured syntax also suggests a subverted notion of the humble position actors traditionally occupy in relation to their audience:

If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end.
Consider then, we come but in despite.
We do not come, as minding to content you,
Our true intent is. All for your delight,
We are not here.

(5.1.108-15)

These lines sabotage the obsequious, submissive stance traditionally assumed by theatrical prologues and epilogues, taking the player's conventional promise to “content” and “delight” the audience and standing it on its head. Such phrases as “If we offend, it is with our good will” and “All for your delight, / We are not here” admit into Quince's solicitation of the patience and good will of his audience a suggestion of willfulness and aggression on the part of a group of players who are subject (in more ways than one) to the power of their courtly audience. The different experiences of Quince-Prologue, Flute-Thisbe, and Bottom-Pyramus during the performance not only mark these characters as individualized personalities in their own right, they also point to the volatility of the theatrical experience and to the instability of the paradoxical impulses towards goodwill and hostility which performers and spectators alike display within its context.

3

The theatrical context of the mechanicals' plot, however, is not the only level at which A Midsummer Night's Dream addresses the body's role as a representational medium. As the mechanicals' plot unfolds and becomes entangled with the plots of the young lovers and the fairies, the play's focus on the body as representational medium broadens to encompass the pressures exerted on the body in the highly charged arena of erotic desire, which, like theater, constantly involves the body in various acts of signification and mediation. During the course of this enlargement of its focus on the body, the play suffuses the corporeal interactions of the lovers' erotic chase with some of the theatrical dynamics explored in the mechanicals' plot, thereby suggesting an affinity between the theatricalized bodies of the mechanicals and the erotically charged bodies of the lovers. Bottom is central to the suggestion of this affinity in the play. His experience in the woods not only encapsulates the Dream's portrayal of the situation of the body in theatrical performance, but also begins to forge a link between the theatrical experiences of the mechanicals and the erotic experiences of the lovers in the play.

As Titania's ass-eared, hairy-faced lover, Bottom finally lands the multi-character role he has coveted all along (“Let me play Thisbe … Let me play the lion too”). Bottom's huge histrionic appetite is fed by the profusion of roles into which his privileged position in Titania's world casts him. As a temporary stand-in for Oberon, the true king of fairyland, Bottom gets to play the monarch, attended by Cobweb, Moth, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed, who hail him as their lord (3.1.168-71). He also gets to play a lover, an ass, and the good-natured fool he has always been as Nick Bottom.¹⁷ Bottom's transformation into an ass at the hands of Puck is the comic apotheosis of his overbearing desire to play all the parts in “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Moreover, like Snout-as-Wall, Bottom-as-Ass epitomizes the bodily transformation (or “hybridization,” to use Stallybrass's term) which so appalled 16th-century anti-theatricalists but which the Dream presents as constitutive of theatrical roleplaying.

But Bottom's benign sojourn in fairyland is more than just a fantastical vision of the theatrical situation of the actor's body articulated elsewhere in the Dream. Bottom's idyllic interlude with Titania, like the more frightening experiences of the four lovers in the woods, reconfigures in erotic terms the corporeal dynamics of theatrical roleplaying and spectatorship suggested in the mechanicals' rehearsals. When, for example, Titania awakens to the sound of Bottom's singing, she describes its effects on her in words which would serve equally well to characterize a spectator's enthrallment by the performance of an actor and a lover's enthrallment by the beloved:

I pray thee gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's face perforce doth move me
On first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

(3.1.132-36)

Bottom is literally performing when Titania awakens, though not exactly for her: he is singing and walking “up and down” (3.1.117) on the “green plot” of woodland that Peter Quince has designated as his company's “stage” (3.1.3) in order to show his compatriots, who have fled at the sight of his transformation, that he is “not afraid” (3.1.118). Titania's words upon awakening obliquely attribute her instant erotic enthrallment with Bottom to elements of his specifically theatrical self-presentation and to her own position as a spectator susceptible (thanks to Oberon's love juice) “on first view” to this presentation. The enthrallment of Titania's “eye” to Bottom's “shape” here is the erotic counterpart to the theatrical power that Bottom imagines he possesses as he boasts in Act 1, Scene 2 that his performance of the role of Pyramus will be so moving that the audience will have to “look to their eyes,” which will betray their theatrical enthrallment to him through tears.

This specular and essentially theatrical dynamic of erotic enthrallment characterizes the lovers' interactions throughout their confusing night in the woods as Lysander and Demetrius enact the potent effects of Oberon's love juice by falling in love “on first view” with the first person they see immediately after their eyes receive the juice. Even before the love juice is involved, however, this theatrical model of erotic desire characterizes the lovers' conflicts. Helena, for example, miserably jealous of Hermia's attractiveness to Demetrius, conceives of Hermia's erotic effect on Demetrius as an essentially theatrical visual and aural operation, similar to Bottom's effect on Titania. Helena describes this effect in theatrical terms that position Demetrius as a spectator to the “art” with which Hermia supposedly seduces him, in much the same way that Bottom seduces Titania with his melodious “note[s]” (3.1.133) and “shape” (134). Given their amorous power over Demetrius, Helena longs to achieve a perfect replication in her own person of Hermia's attractive “eye” and “voice”:

Sickness is catching; O were favour so,
Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go:
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody.
Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I'd give to be to you translated.
O, teach me how you look, and with what art
You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.

(1.1.186-93)

The metaphors of sickness and self-eradication in Helena's speech are typical of the self-deprecating imagery with which she responds throughout the first two acts to her situation as Demetrius' spurned lover. But Helena's desire to learn the “art” by which Hermia is able to “sway the motion of Demetrius' heart” also figures her unrequited desire for Demetrius as a theatrical fantasy in which Helena, seeking to win the heart of Demetrius, her audience of one, imagines Hermia as a kind of acting coach who could teach her to use her body and voice successfully to such a purpose. Helena's eagerness to exchange her own body for Hermia's positions her, within the play's metadramatic economy, as the temperamental opposite of Francis Flute, who so strongly resists taking on the role of Thisby, “the lady that Pyramus must love.” Whereas Flute bolsters his resistance to the role by protesting that one of his own physical characteristics—his (imminent) beard—makes him wrong for the role, Helena eagerly dedicates her “ear,” “eye,” and “tongue” to the role she desperately wishes to play. Thus, Flute and Helena mark out opposite extremes along the continuum of possible actorly responses to the bodily transformations required by roleplaying.

In addition to heightening our sense of the corporeal pressures of the lovers' erotic chase and extending the metadramatic vision suggested in the mechanicals' plot, the emphasis on the body in the lovers' plot has another important effect: it intensifies the play's preoccupation with the performing body by continually underscoring the corporeality of the four actors who play the lovers through both literal and figurative references to the body. During Acts 2 and 3, the four lovers and the other characters involved with them repeatedly describe, deride, threaten, and desire the bodies of others: they chase and flee one another (2.1.227ff.); they cling to, push, embrace, and menace one another (3.2.249ff.); their eyes become the conduits for love potions (2.2.26, 77; 3.2.102); each of the men threatens to slay his rival in a swordfight that is magically thwarted by Puck (3.2.401ff.); Hermia threatens to scratch Helena's eyes out, failing in her efforts only because Demetrius and Lysander physically restrain the women as they begin to fight (3.2.298ff.). As they portray the fictional characters who respond to, refer to, and act upon one another's bodies in these ways, the performers who play the lovers enact the constant reminders, which Shakespeare has written into their roles, of the fact of their palpable, corporeal presence onstage.

Like the mortal characters I have been discussing, the fairies also illustrate the Dream's preoccupation with the corporeal medium of theatrical representation. The bodies of these creatures are described as both invisible to human eyes and small enough to hide in acorn-cups. Nevertheless, they are represented onstage by visible, normal-sized human performers. As such they constitute crucial sites at which the literal and the figurative converge effectively in the corporeal presence of the actors. As critics have often noted, while Peter Quince's amateur theatrical company represents dramatists who struggle unsuccessfully with problems of dramatic representation, the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream exemplify Shakespeare's more effective solutions to similar dramaturgical questions. More specifically, the Dream demonstrates Shakespeare's interest in exploiting the versatility of his corporeal medium through the wide range of things which the palpable, human bodies of the fairies are made to represent in the play. A brief survey of fairy associations clearly sketches out this range. In addition to representing fairies qua fairies, the actors who portray the nonhuman inhabitants of the Athenian woods also personify nonhuman and sometimes inanimate elements in nature (Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, Moth, Cobweb); they represent abstract qualities such as misprision and folly (Puck as mistaking deliverer of the love-juice); they embody the spirit of mischief and mischance (Puck as the meddlesome Robin Goodfellow) as well as the spirits of peace, prosperity, and fertility that the play's comic ending invokes for the lovers (the full fairy band's song and blessing of Theseus's household in Act 5); finally, they represent the power of metamorphosis itself (Puck as “filly foal,” “roasted crab,” and “three-foot stool” [2.1.46, 48, 52], Oberon as “Corin” [2.1.66]) as well as the essence of speed (Puck's ability to “put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes” [2.1.175-76]).

As C. L. Barber has argued, the success of the fairies on Shakespeare's stage is ensured by the construction of a playful double-vision which continually encourages us simultaneously to accept the illusion of the fairies as “real” and to recognize them as the artificial products of the dramatist's imagination and technique (140). Unlike the apparently ponderous fairies of 19th-century illusionist stagecraft which so annoyed William Hazlitt (“Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so”), the fairy creatures which Shakespeare's words conjure up constantly call into question their own “reality” by insisting on their artificiality and winking at their own plausibility: they do not ask for our unconditional acceptance of their reality. I would add that it is precisely the disjunction between the abstract or nonhuman qualities attributed to the human actors who play the fairies, on the one hand, and their palpable, human-sized presence, on the other, that contributes to this playful questioning of the illusion. One of the most striking examples of this kind of self-conscious questioning is Oberon's playfully self-deprecating announcement in Act Two, Scene One, as he notices the entrance of Demetrius and Helena: “But who comes here? I am invisible” (2.1.186). At the same time that this line reminds us that within the play's fictional world, Oberon is not visible to the two mortals, it deliberately points to the fact that “Oberon” is also a visible, palpable human actor. Dramatic fiction and theatrical fact collide here, resulting in an ambiguous moment in which the play only half-seriously posits supernatural status for Oberon, while it simultaneously acknowledges the artificiality of that claim through the counterfactual “I am invisible.” These words, and the presence of this body contradicting them, put the illusion into question and in play expressly between the claims of the supernatural and the claims of the artificial.

Other telling references to the actors' corporeality appear when metaphorical invasions and fragmentations of the body escalate to threats of literal physical aggression as the lovers' night in the forest continues through what René Girard has described as a “process of increasing violence” (190). Alongside Helena's self-deprecating corporeal images, for instance, run the ominous suggestions of rape, mutilation, and violent death with which Demetrius laces his replies to her pleas for his love. Helena declares that Demetrius' rejections only make her love him more, and implies that she relishes the abuse: “I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. / Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, / Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, / Unworthy as I am, to follow you” (2.1.203-07). Demetrius replies:

You do impeach your modesty too much
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity.
.....I'll run from thee and hide me in the brakes,
And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.

(2.1.214-19; 227-28)

These threats, although they are articulated within the fictional tale of the lovers' strife and never carried out within it, consistently point to the flesh and blood targets of such aggression—the bodies of the actors playing the characters involved.

That Demetrius' wish to escape from Helena in order to pursue Hermia should be articulated in the form of physical, and explicitly sexual, threats to Helena's person is in keeping with Shakespeare's consistent association of sexual desire with violence against the body throughout the play, from Theseus' wooing of Hippolyta “with [his] sword” (1.1.16) and Egeus' death-threat to the disobedient Hermia to the lovers' quarrels in the woods. Epigrammatic versions of this dynamic abound in the text, especially in exchanges between Demetrius and Helena. “Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit; / For I am sick when I do look on thee” (2.2.211-12), Demetrius cautions Helena when they meet in the woods. “Where is Lysander and Hermia,” he asks, “The one I'll slay, the other slayeth me” (2.2.189-90).

The figurative component of many of these threats and descriptions is especially interesting in the context of the Dream's focus on the body as theatrical medium. Such associations of hyperbolic, figurative violence with sexuality are, of course, hardly original with Shakespeare but commonplace in the conventional discourse of courtly love. But what is worthy of note in Shakespeare's use of these clichés of courtly love poetry is the way in which the theatrical setting confers upon them a potency that intensifies the figurative power they possess in nontheatrical settings, such as conduct books and sonnet sequences. The innocuously figurative erotic invitations and despairing laments that are typical of such poems as Wyatt's “The long love that in my heart doth harbor” or Sidney's “Stella, whence doth this new assault arise” (Sonnet 37 in Astrophel and Stella) are reified when the principals are physically present to each other in the theater. Shakespeare's stage transforms the disembodied representations of sexuality and erotic strife common in conventional courtly love poetry, bringing lovers' bodies and thus the potential for physical enactment off the page and into the corporeal, performative realm of the stage.

This is precisely what happens during the course of Lysander's efforts in Act 2 to persuade Hermia to let him sleep beside her after they lose their way in the woods and decide to wait until daybreak to find their way out. As Lysander stretches himself out beside her, Hermia protests, “Nay, good Lysander: for my sake dear, / Lie further off yet; do not lie so near” (2.2.42-43). Lysander replies:

O, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence!
Love takes the meaning of love's conference.
I mean but that my heart unto yours is knit,
So that but one heart we can make of it:
Two bosoms interchained with an oath,
So then, two bosoms and a single troth.
Then by your side no bed-room me deny;
For lying so, Hermia, I do not lie.

(2.2.44-51)

Lysander's request to spend the night beside Hermia is here rendered in witty phrases which elide the sexual component of his desires. This riddling argument, agile as anything Jack Donne might construct, masks the literal, physical sense of “heart,” “bosom,” and “lie” with a smokescreen of love courtesies. Hermia's reply is that of a literalist who refuses to play the courtly game: “Lysander riddles very prettily. / Now much beshrew my manners and my pride, / If Hermia meant to say Lysander lied! / But, gentle friend, for love and courtesy, / Lie further off, in human modesty” (2.2.52-56). Hermia's responses to Lysander's courtly rhetoric in this scene always point away from the figurative and towards the corporeal and spatial referents his words invoke in the theater. Her logic, like many other aspects of A Midsummer Night's Dream which I have been exploring, insists on a recognition of the performing body as the site at which figurative and literal meanings converge, where conceptions become actions, and where a lover's “fancy” must express itself according to the “standard of flesh and blood.”

The intense physical agitation which the lovers enact in the woods, along with the ways in which the play highlights the literal basis for its many figurative references to the body, points not only to the volatile dynamics of aggression, vulnerabilty, attraction, and jealousy set in motion by desire, but also to the fact that while the lovers themselves are fictional, the actors who play them are not. The action and the many corporeal references in the lovers' plot compel our attentiveness to the bodily presence of the actors, just as the mechanicals' dramaturgical decisions and rehearsal anxieties prompt us to focus on their bodies as performance media.

Ultimately, it is sheer physical exhaustion, abetted by Puck's magic, which brings the “long and tedious night” in the woods to an end, as all four lovers finally cease their frenzied chase and fall asleep on the ground. Hermia's weary assessment of the night just before she joins her sleeping cohorts could serve as a motto for all four lovers: “Never so weary, never so in woe, / Bedabbled with the dew, and torn with briars, / I can no further crawl, no further go; / My legs can no longer keep pace with my desires” (3.2.442-45). Hermia's lament about “legs” and “desires” registers in her body the strain under which the lovers have labored throughout the night, playing out the erratic emotions and exhausting actions in which their desires have involved them. The link that is ultimately forged in the play between the erotic escapades of the lovers and the theatrical experiences of Peter Quince's “hard-handed men from Athens” suggests not merely that both groups are “of imagination all compact,” as Theseus contends. It also implies that, as they play out various desires, the bodies of both the lovers and the mechanicals are simultaneously empowered and put at risk by their function as the chief means by which a volatile combination of emotions and responses—desire, fear, ambivalence, aggression, vulnerability, surrender, enthrallment—are both represented and registered.¹⁸

Notes

1. For interpretations of the mechanicals as inept dramatists, see Ornstein (78), Young (150), Brooks (cxxxix), and Dent.

2. From literary criticism, see, for example, Spurgeon, Hodges, Cook, Fawcett, and Scarry; from the history of ideas, see Kantorowicz and Barkan; from theater arts, drama theory, and theater history, see Knight, Beckerman (Dynamics), Goldman (Energies), States, Bevington, Joseph, and Worthen; from semiotics, see Elam; from cultural studies, see Barker, Dollimore (“Transgression”), Stallybrass, Greenblatt (“Fiction”), and Tennenhouse.

3. Seminal works by Beckerman (Globe), Styan, and Brown, for example, present comprehensive overviews of the Shakespearean theatrical situation that emphasize the physical structure of the stage, performance conventions, the actor's craft, and the audience.

4. Useful surveys of metadramatic criticism from the 1960s through the early 80s include Calderwood (Metadrama, chapt. 1), Shapiro, and Fly.

5. Neither was the production of metadramatic criticism completely halted by the appearance of these new critical approaches in the early 1980s. I note rather a general shift of attention in the field. Some of the critics who continued to pursue metadramatic analysis in the 80s are Homan, Hornby, and Calderwood (Negation).

6. I use both “new historicist” and “materialist” here to acknowledge the different emphases that distinguish new historicism (mainly identified with the work of American scholars such as Greenblatt, Montrose, Orgel, Goldberg, and Mullaney) from cultural materialism (chiefly identified with British scholars such as Dollimore, Sinfield, Stallybrass, Holderness, Hawkes, and Jardine).

7. For more extended discussions of new historicist and materialist approaches and the distinctions between them, see Dollimore's introduction to Political Shakespeare, as well as Montrose and Howard.

8. See, for example, Barker, Dollimore (“Transgression”), Greenblatt (“Fiction”), Stallybrass, and Tennenhouse.

9. All quotations from A Midsummer Night's Dream are from the Arden paperback edition, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979).

10. The liminality projected by the costumes of both Lion and Wall also captures in a kind of comical freeze-frame the sort of shape-shifting for which Elizabethan actors were routinely reviled in contemporary anti-theatrical literature. William Rankins, for example, complains in A Mirror of Monsters (London, 1587) that “Plaiers transforme their bodies which is the image of Christ into the shape of brute beasts” (B2v). As Stallybrass points out, however, it was not only the actor's profanation of the body which so offended anti-theatricalists, but also the “hybridization located in the actor's body” which, during performance, became the site at which seemingly fixed categories such as “high and low, religion and profanation, male and female” lost their distinctness (“Reading” 126). Lion and Wall, like Bottom after his transformation by Puck in Act 3, Scene 1, epitomize such hybridization, mixing animate and inanimate, man and beast, at the site of the sacred “image of Christ.”

11. According to the provisions of a royal statute enacted in 1572, actors not officially in the service of a noble household were liable to the same punishments as beggars and vagabonds. See Chambers 269-70.

12. In The Actor's Freedom, Goldman suggests that the actor-audience relation is always informed by such ambivalence: “The roles playwrights devise for actors … engage a double impulse of attraction and repulsion. We come together to adore their fearful energies, to be infected by their risks and recklessness, to enjoy what happens to them” (13). States explains the “dangers” of the theatrical situation from a slightly different, but equally illuminating standpoint, suggesting that “in the theater our sympathetic involvement with the characters is attended by a secondary, and largely subliminal, line of empathy born of the possibility that the illusion may at any moment be shattered by a mistake or an accident” (120).

13. Bottom is not alone in this “corporeal” understanding of the dynamics of the actor-audience relationship. His tragic aesthetic in this scene is, for example, remarkably similar to the idea of tragedy expounded by the personification of Tragedy herself in the anonymous play Warning for Fair Women (1599). In the opening scene, as personifications of Comedy, Tragedy, and History compete for control of the stage, trading insults against each other's genres, Tragedy declares haughtily, “I must haue passions that must moue the soule, / Make the heart heauie, and throb within the bosome, / Extorting tears out of the driest eyes, / … / This is my office” (A2v).

14. It is difficult to determine accurately the corporeal effects of male actors in female roles, or to generalize about cultural attitudes concerning this practice. The censure of transvestite playing suggests an uneasiness, at least on the part of anti-theatricalists, with the blurring of sex roles and sexual difference effected by male bodies onstage in women's roles and apparel. But the attitudes expressed in the anti-theatrical tracts may not be representative of a univocal sixteenth-century response to boy actors. As Lorraine Helms points out, “The convention of the boy actor vexes critical speculation. Cross-casting marks the nexus of character and performer in subtle and shifting ways which historical inquiry cannot recover” (190). For further discussion of transvestite playing in Renaissance drama, see Jardine, Dusinberre, Rackin, and Case (19-27).

15. Thisbe's claim, in her address to Wall several lines earlier, “My cherry lips have often kiss'd thy stones, / Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee” (5.1 188-89), contains an anatomical pun on “stones” (i.e. testicles) that works in the same way as the reference to “the wall's hole” that I have been discussing. In each case, the physical details of stage blocking and the specific means by which Wall represents the “chink” in performance—with fingers, for example, or with legs spread apart—may strengthen the force of these puns by providing visual equivalents for the verbal hints.

16. I do not mean to suggest that Flute's experience is true for all Shakespearean actors in female roles, but that Flute's experience delineates one possible version of the actor-audience dynamic.

17. For a discussion of the various roles Bottom plays in fairyland, see Van Laan (57-58) and Young (104).

18. An earlier version of this essay was presented to a seminar on “Renaissance Acting” at the Shakespeare Association of America meetings in Montreal, 1986.

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