SOURCE: Leinwand, Theodore B. “‘I Believe We Must Leave the Killing out’: Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays, edited by Dorothea Kehler, pp. 145-64. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Leinwand examines the conflict between social classes in A Midsummer Night's Dream and discusses its influence on the actions of the characters.]

No sooner has the artisan weaver Bottom begun to speak with the fairy queen Titania than he takes the occasion to “gleek.”¹ Observing that “reason and love keep little company together nowadays,” Bottom thinks it a “pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends” (III.i.140-141). It is at once an hilarious and a potentially subversive moment: an artisan finds himself spectacularly close to a queen. Of course, it has been noted that for all Bottom's and Titania's propinquity, “there is no communication between them: their kinds of understanding are totally different.”² But the conception of community relations that is at the heart of Bottom's gleeking suggests that the play's artisanate and its nobility may well share certain “kinds of understanding.” It is part of my purpose to show not only that the artisan-weaver is concerned with strategies of accommodation amenable to the play's nobility, but that the artisan-playwright, William Shakespeare, also accommodates himself to the aristocracy with whom he finds himself in such close proximity. The power of spectators like Theseus and Elizabeth to give meaning to command performances weighed heavily on playwrights and actors.³ But the quality of the latter's art afforded some room for negotiation: royal interpretations of dramatic texts did not necessarily exhaust all of their meaning. Bottom envisions reason and love as two townsfolk, perhaps acquaintances, perhaps husband and wife, who are at odds. It is noteworthy that in an age now deemed notorious for litigiousness and for hate-filled interpersonal relations, Bottom looks to neighbors to adjudicate a difference.⁴ His predominant conception of settlement is that of an accommodationist, not a litigant. “Honest neighbours” ought to be able to patch things up between love and reason. So too, when two seventeenth-century Yorkshire women, Emotte Belton and Katherine Hodgekinson, found themselves involved in a dispute, a fellow parishioner said that she “would to God you two were frend[es], for this is not the beste meanes for neighbours one to sue another.” The two women settled their differences and then “Katherine tooke the cupp and dranke the said Emotte who thanked her. …”⁵ J. A. Sharpe documents that this settlement was only one of many indicating “a widespread attitude which regarded litigation as a breach of proper neighbourly relations, and which saw arbitration or less formal methods of reconciling those at law as an attractive method of healing such a breach.”⁶ To maintain harmony in their communities, villagers persuaded neighbors and “frendes att home w[i]thout chardges or trouble in Lawe” to submit to arbitration. It was not uncommon for a man like Thomas Postgate, brother to the wives of both John Buttarie and Thomas Stor, to attempt as he did in 1594 to reconcile his brothers-in-law when they were at odds.⁷ Thus Bottom, always a gentle craftsman, gently reveals his layman's notion of local justice. Needless to say, his predilection for arbitration is not shared by all. Immediately after he has told Titania how “neighbours … make … friends,” she commands him to remain in the woods: “Out of this wood do not desire to go: / Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no” (III.i.145-146). And in the dispute that initiates the play, Egeus turns straightaway to “trouble in Lawe.” He comes “with complaint / Against my child” to Theseus (I.i.22-23); and “in this case,” Theseus renders his harsh judgment as spokesman for “the law of Athens” (I.i.63 and 119). Not until IV.i, when Egeus is still begging “the law, the law upon his [Lysander's] head” (l.154), does Theseus, who earlier would by no means “extenuate” the law, arbitrate in favor of “gentle concord” (IV.i.142).

Negotiation, arbitration, and accommodation characterize Bottom's and his fellow artisans' relations with their social superiors. It is often remarked that the artisans betray a most naive understanding of the theater. Their discussions in I.ii and in III.i revolve around technical problems, obstacles that may prevent them from convincing their audience.⁸ But their specific fears are resonant because they have to do with more than theatrical decorum. In particular, the players are anxious not to “fright the Duchess and the ladies” (I.ii.70-71) with their lion, or to seem to do harm with their swords (III.i.17). The artisans do not want to strike fear into the hearts of their social betters; indeed, such a reaction “were enough to hang us all.” “That would hang us, every mother's son” (I.ii.73), they chorus together. To “draw a sword” is to cause “a parlous fear” (III.i.10,11), and such a fear can only cost the crew their lives. They fear for their lives because they assume that indecorous actions on their part will cause their spectators to fear for their lives. Bottom knows that “If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life” (III.i.40-41). And Bottom's fear is not his alone. “Lion” takes Bottom's advice and announces that he is but Snug the joiner. He then reveals his anxiety, borrowing Bottom's very words: “For if I should as lion come in strife / Into this place, 'twere pity on my life” V.i.220-221).

The relationship that the artisans think they have with their superiors and the attitude that they assume their superiors have toward them betray considerable anxiety. Swords, fear of hanging, and strife are a part of this interaction from first to last act. Given the players' fear of potential retribution, there is something uncannily appropriate to Theseus' response to their play: “Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed. Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus, and hanged himself in Thisbe's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy …” (V.i.342-346). The players fear for their lives, and their audience jests them into oblivion. Bottom tells Snug to announce, “I am a man, as other men are” (III.i.42-43); but during the performance, Demetrius jests that Bottom is “Less than an ace, man; for he is dead, he is nothing” (V.i.297). Performance, especially strife- and sword-filled performance, is potentially life threatening in the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream. No wonder Starveling opines, “I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done” (III.i.13-14).

At least two responses to conflict or threat emerge from what I have described thus far. One might respond to drawn swords with one's own drawn sword or with the executioner's blade. Stephen Greenblatt has written brilliantly of Sidney's and Spenser's representations of such a response. Those in power crush those in revolt but manage to salvage their own honor (as well as their commitment to rhetoric over violence) in the face of engagements that threaten to darken their fame or to render persuasion ineffective.⁹ When Greenblatt turns to Shakespeare's representation of a thwarted rebellion in 2 Henry VI, he argues that property, not honor, is at stake, and that the sword used by the aristocrat (now the property-owner, Alexander Iden) can in no way be tainted by the blood of a “rude companion” (ll. 24-25). But the displacement of honor by property at the center of relations between unequal status groups also makes room for the displacement of violence by negotiation. Thus one may also respond to drawn swords and so counter provocation with arbitration and accommodation. It may be true, as Greenblatt writes, that Elizabethan “representations rarely depict the actual method most often used to punish those whom the magistrates deemed serious threats: the thousands of hangings carried out locally throughout Tudor and Stuart England” (p. 15). But it is also true (and here I take issue with Greenblatt) that Elizabethan artists might depict “the ordinary operation of the law”—instances of negotiation and accommodation through and beyond the courts that often replaced violence, and moments when it was clear that “feudal fantasies … of mass rebellion and knightly victories” were clearly inappropriate (p. 15). Artisans might be executed; they might also be accommodated.

Before returning to the relations between the carpenter, the weaver, the bellows-maker, the tinker, joiner, and tailor, and their betters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, I want to consider several occasions when actual artisans and their superiors came into conflict in Shakespeare's day. My point is not that Shakespeare was particularly alert to artisanal dissent in the counties, or that he carefully refracted such protest, or tamed it, or parodied it in his plays. Nor do I imagine that Shakespeare's response to laborers and artisans was univocal. But the demands of genre and of received history are not able to suppress entirely the tension that characterizes such apparently amicable interactions as those between, say, Bottom and Theseus, or Francis and Hal. Often distinct, but as often overlapping issues are at stake in the case of Jack Cade, in 2 Henry VI, or in the case of Sly and the Lord in The Taming of the Shrew (where threats to sanity and life are also mediated by performance). For the moment, I turn to one historical context for A Midsummer Night's Dream to begin the sort of rewriting that Fredric Jameson calls for in The Political Unconscious. Jameson urges us to rewrite “the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as a rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext, it being understood that the ‘subtext’ is not immediately present as such. …”¹⁰ The Elizabethan subtext in this instance has been uncovered by the work of numerous historians.

Bottom's primary craft, weaving, flickers to light mainly in puns. But in 1566, a Colchester weaver declared that the “Weavers' occupation is a dead science nowadays.” “We can get no work,” said another, “nor we have no money; and if we should steal we should be hanged, and if we should ask no man would give us. …”¹¹ The fear of hanging expressed here was at once legitimate and exaggerated. Felonies, which included the theft of goods valued at more than one shilling, were punishable by death.¹² For Sir Edmund Coke, it was “a lamentable case … to see so many … men and women strangled on that cursed tree of the gallows.”¹³ But it was also true that, between 1550 and 1800, the “number of convicted actually condemned to death … was between 10 and 20 per cent; while the proportion of those condemned who were actually executed probably averaged about one half.” Allowing for an acquittal rate of roughly one quarter to one half of all who were indicted, it would seem that “between 2.5 per cent and 7.5 per cent of those indicted for felony were actually executed.”¹⁴

That Bottom and his crew should nonetheless have hanging on their minds may have to do with the fact that in Elizabethan Essex, for instance, tradesmen and craftsmen accounted for one quarter of all the criminals on record.¹⁵ Coincident with the composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in the early and mid-1590s, prices soared while real wages fell markedly. Bad harvests in the period from 1592 to 1599 resulted in sustained and cruel scarcity throughout England.¹⁶ Such economic pressures had much to do with the unusually high incidence of crime in the 1590s. The smith Thomas Bynder complained in 1595 that food was too expensive. He then threatened that “if victuals did not grow better cheap … twenty victuallers would be hanged at their gates.”¹⁷ Clearly the threat of hanging might alarm the “haves” as well as the “have nots.” But those lowest in the social hierarchy had most to fear. Late in the Elizabethan period, gentlemen were able to avoid trial at a rate of seventy-nine percent, whereas tradesmen and craftsmen escaped only seventeen percent of the time.¹⁸ And even when the number of felonies was not increasing in response to deprivation, local magistrates, fearing disorder, showed themselves more willing to prosecute felons who might, in better circumstances, have been left alone. The 1590s were a decade of food shortage, and there was considerable fear on the part of those who took it upon themselves to maintain order. In the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean period, this decade saw the highest number of indictments in Essex, in Herfordshire, and in Sussex.¹⁹

The historian William Hunt stresses the critical nature of the 1590s: “Rhetorical promiscuity may have rendered the word crisis all but useless. Nevertheless, it is hard to describe English society in the 1590s without it. There was more to this crisis than inflation, bad harvests, war with Spain, and apprehensive impatience for the Queen's demise. … The crisis that culminated in the 1590s was brought to a peak by the conjuncture of climatic disorder [‘The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, / The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard’ (II.i.93-95)] and military expenditure,” which together “left social perceptions and public policy decisively altered.”²⁰ The felonies (mostly thefts) that were so common a feature of this crisis are only one index to its severity. Riots also had to be dealt with. Following the collapse of the export trade in East Kent clothmaking towns in 1587, severe unemployment, bad harvests, and high food prices made for social unrest. A Sandwich weaver, Thomas Bird, talked of insurrection with Thomas Bensted, a woolcomber, and two or three other textile workers. Bird was said to have declared that they “intended to hang up the rich farmers which had corn at their own doors.” On the fifth of June, the conspirators were arrested. Four were “shipped to fight in the Netherlands; Bird was also condemned to a flogging and the pillory.”²¹ In 1594 and 1595, artisans in the broadcloth industry in the Weald of Kent, protesting a shortage of wood due to enclosures and increased iron production, and reacting to decreasing corn supplies and wages, incited popular agitation. Several mill-working conspiracies were later discovered.²²

One further example of artisanal dissent illustrates what might happen when conflict was not accommodated or negotiated, when it terminated in the courts or hanging. The artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream agree to meet “a mile without the town, by moonlight” (I.ii.94-95) to plot their performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” When ten men turned up at Enslowe Hill, in Oxfordshire, on the night of 21 November 1596, a different sort of plot was to be hatched. From the middle of October, 1596, until late November, the Hampton Gay carpenter Bartholomew Stere and a miller, Richard Bradshawe, planned an uprising of poor artisans. They were enduring the familiar hardships of the mid-1590s, and like many of their contemporaries, they attributed their distress to enclosures and to hoarding. Expecting to enlist some three hundred followers, Stere and Bradshawe were said to have plans to “cast down enclosures, seize goods and arms, and then cut off the enclosers' heads.”²³ According to a report prepared for Sir Robert Cecil, Stere's “owtward pretense was to … helpe the poore cominaltie that were readie to famish for want of corne.”²⁴ Stere's band would then march to London, join with city apprentices, and foment a general insurrection.²⁵ When only ten men turned up at Enslowe Hill, the artisans dispersed and abandoned further plans. But Roger Symondes, a carpenter and father of six, who initially showed interest in the plan, had already revealed the plot to a local magistrate. As a result, five men were named as “principal offenders,” six were said to be “definitely involved,” and nine more were implicated. The “rebels” included carpenters, weavers, millers, a mason, a bricklayer, a carter, and a baker. The principals were brought to London “under guard, with their hands pinioned and their legs bound under their horses' bellies.” In 1597, a grand jury indicted three of the men for “levying war against the Queen.” Only two verdicts survive: the men were to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. No indictment against Stere survives, but his brother John (a weaver from nearby Witney) is recorded as having testified that “happ what would … [Bartholomew] could die but once … he would not allwaies live like a slave.”²⁶

Keith Wrightson, in a judicious chapter on “Order” in Elizabethan society between 1580 and 1680, suggests one reason for juxtaposing this Oxfordshire plot with the plotting of Shakespeare's Athenian artisans: theatricality is common to both stories. Wrightson describes a Somerset crowd (also in 1596) which seized a load of cheese. They were said to be motivated by the belief that “rich men had gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor.” But Wrightson doubts the seriousness of such sentiments; he thinks that “much of the drama of the government's statements and the crowd's menaces was indeed theatre. The government needed to present a stark portrait … to rally support … while the threatening postures of the poor were but a means to an end and very often no more sincere than their more accustomed postures of deference.”²⁷ In A Midsummer Night's Dream, we see both the drama and the deference, but not the riot—it turns out that lawlessness has been displaced to the disobedient and violent lovers. Off the stage and in a manner akin to “honest neighbours” who would help antagonists patch up their differences, potential rioters worked to stimulate official action. Elizabethan riots were rather orderly affairs. Rioters threatened in the name of such traditional and legitimate rights as the right to eat, to buy victuals at fair prices, and to be free of hoarders and speculators. And these were rights endorsed by the authorities, particularly at the national level. As a result, argues Wrightson, “there was a strong element of negotiation in the tradition of riot which both rioters and the governing class understood.”²⁸

Deference and accommodation might free up the courts and slow down traffic at the gallows. In 1596, in Canterbury, rioters consulted an attorney's clerk as to the law before preventing grain from leaving the city. From below, as well as from above, there was a desire to maintain order. The central government, in the form of Parliament, the Privy Council, and Assize judges, joined with the local poor and hard-pressed artificers to respond to dearth in the 1590s. Those highest and lowest in the social hierarchy turned their attention to those in the middle. “Such marginal elements as the morally ambivalent middlemen”—badgers and enclosers—were blamed for the hardships felt by potential rioters.²⁹ Time after time, the poor found that the state's explanation for dearth coincided with their own. Ignoring the bad weather and consequent bad harvests, which no one could alter, magistrates and artisans agreed that villainous men, those who profited from scarcity, were the appropriate target. At the very moment when customary views of the marketplace (founded on just price and neighborly harmony) were being undermined by harsh economic realities, the state sought to reinforce such views. Dearth was blamed on the covetous and the uncharitable.³⁰ Therefore rather than riot, the typically depressed artisan or tradesman petitioned a government which shared what Walter and Wrightson have called his “moralistic, even medieval” economic theory. And when he did riot, the artificer contemplated not anarchy or revolution, but remedial action on the part of the state.

The structure and logic of the relations between the artisanate and those in power were based on dependence. Those with authority were able to enhance their legitimacy to the extent that they could convince poor people that they shared their concerns and could respond to them. Moralistic and paternalistic strategies permitted the poor to hold on to their sense of the legitimacy of their complaints and at the same time reduced the threat of riot. Conversely, infantilized artisans might “manipulate the fears of their betters through formal petitions and indirect threats in order to galvanize them into action, to persuade them to fulfill those moral and legal obligations in defense of the weak which legitimized their authority.”³¹ A comparable dynamic is diffused throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream. The text offers accommodation and deference, but on its margins we note raised swords and threatening gallows. Starveling would have his fellows “leave the killing out.” Bottom would leave the killing in, but would devise a “prologue [a petition which would] seem to say we will do no harm with our swords” (III.i.13-17; emphasis added).

The paternalism inherent in Elizabethan social policy is writ large across the relationships in A Midsummer Night's Dream. So are deference and accommodation and the never-wholly-absent threats which follow when deference is exhausted. Theseus will patronize the artisans' play—not their labor. They are “Hard-handed men that work in Athens here / Which never labour'd in their minds till now; / And now have toil'd their unbreath'd memories …” (V.i.72-74, emphasis added). The skills which the artisans have practiced are effaced just as surely as the “battle with the Centaurs” and the “riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / … in their rage” (V.i.44, 48-49). Louis Adrian Montrose notes that “these brief scenarios encompass extremes of reciprocal violence between the sexes” and so they are rejected.³² In the context I am developing, the threat of “battle,” “riot,” and “rage” is equally sufficient grounds for rejection. Theseus “will hear that play” which is tendered in “simpleness and duty,” for in such cases, “never anything can be amiss” (V.i.81-83). In fact, the labor to be performed here will be that of Theseus. He will have to exert himself to “take what they [the players] mistake” (l. 90). What “poor duty cannot do” (l. 91), Theseus will make up for, since he is familiar enough with the childlike inarticulateness of his inferiors. He is used to clerks who “shiver and look pale, / Make periods in the midst of sentences, / Throttle their practis'd accents in their fears” (V.i.95-97). Perhaps he is already familiar with Quince. Momentarily, the carpenter will be shivering through his mispunctuated Prologue. It is the “modesty of fearful duty” (l. 101) not “audacious eloquence” (l. 103), that Theseus looks for, arranges for, but cannot guarantee. The child-like artisan, in “tongue-tied simplicity” (l. 104) will, like Elizabethan artisans in the 1590s, perform for rulers who may defend and reward him. And Theseus, like those in power in the 1590s, will go on at length, convincing himself of the commonality between the “least,” not “great clerks,” and his “capacity” (I.i.93 and 105).

The performance begins with deference: “If we offend. …” However, the meaning of the prologue is rendered ambivalent by its mispunctuation in delivery. Like Elizabethan artisans who rioted not to offend, but with good will, the prologue teeters back and forth between deference and offensiveness. “If we offend, it is with our good will” (V.i.108), declares Quince. Harold Brooks' note in the Arden edition reminds us that malpunctuation had been used for “Machiavellian ambiguity” in Edward II. There is nothing Machiavellian here, but ambiguity enough for those in the actual theater audience who must make sense of this show of deference. Quince means to say that the artisans have come to content and to delight their audience; but he voices an altogether different sentiment. “We do not come, as minding to content you,” he proclaims; “All for your delight, / We are not here” (ll. 114-115). It then slips out that “the actors are at hand” that the audience may take this opportunity to “repent” (ll. 115-116). While the theater audience may hear a provocation in this, Hippolyta chooses to reassert the equation between artisan and child (“Indeed he hath played on his prologue like a child on a recorder” (ll. 122-123). Theseus, taking his cue from his betrothed's concern that the playing is “not in government,” but perhaps hearing something of the prologue's challenge, adds impatiently that the “speech was … disordered” (ll. 123, 124-125). Offense, intended or not by Prologue, evokes a response that conjoins (dis)orderly children and government. The artisans, however, have conceived their performance in another way. They envision a performance that will enrich them: “sixpence a day during … life,” says Snug (IV.ii.19-20). Moreover if the performance goes forward, they will all be “made men” (IV.ii.18).

Though deferring, the artisans would be “men.” Bottom wants Lion to “entreat” the ladies “not to fear, not to tremble” (III.i.39-40). But Snug the joiner ought also to declare, “I am a man, as other men are” (III.i.42-43). The artisans seem implicitly to recognize the degree to which they are normally infantilized (or feminized), and so throughout the play and the play-within-the-play they work to assert their manhood. Flute would rather not “play a woman” just at the moment he is becoming a man: “I have a beard coming” (I.ii.43-44). As children, they are vulnerable and betray a common fear: “That [frighting the Duchess] would hang us, every mother's son” (I.ii.73, emphasis added). As men, they can play the role of “a tyrant” or “play Ercles rarely … to make all split” (I.ii.24-26). “Every man's name which is thought fit through all Athens to play in our interlude” is read out by Quince in response to Bottom's request that each ought to be called, “man by man” (I.ii.2-6, emphasis added). And as each name is called, each player is identified as a worker with a particular skill: “Nick Bottom, the weaver,” “Francis Flute, the bellowsmender,” “Robin Starveling, the tailor.” The company members assert themselves first as men, then as artificers. Their pride in their manhood, as well as their anxiety, is merely patronized by Theseus when he confidently tells Hippolyta, “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (V.i.211-212). For Theseus, their manhood, like their childishness, is contingent upon him.

Shakespeare's Theseus conceptualizes Bottom and his crew in much the same way North's Plutarch's Theseus thought of his Athenian workers. Plutarch's Theseus “suffered not the great multitude that came thither tagge and ragge, to be without distinction of degrees and orders. For he first divided the noble men, from husbandmen and artificers, appointing the noble men as judges and magistrates. …”³³ Thus Theseus promised “a common wealth … not subject to the power of any sole prince, but rather a popular state.” But it was to be a state, like Elizabeth's, with degrees and order. Circa 1600, John Vowell, alias Hooker, enunciated a similar vision: “albeit these laborers be of the most inferior in degree yet they be liberi homines and of a free condicion.”³⁴ Men like Quince and Bottom were seen first through their degree, as artificers, and then, perhaps, as men. Their degree insured their dependence, their impotence, and their childishness. All artificers were, for Sir Thomas Smith, among the “rascall sort” (for Puck, they are “that barren sort”—III.ii.13); and they were among the politically impotent as well.³⁵ But men like Smith and Hooker and William Harrison were categorizing Englishmen because they were unsure of their own power. The very business of categorization, defining degrees and roles, was a way to insure and then to ratify dependence. Imagining no worse of artificers than artificers did of themselves expressed the hope that they would not take it into their heads to imagine too well of themselves. The accommodation envisaged by both Theseuses assumes an agreement of interests: artisans or artificers will defer to judges, magistrates, and dukes who understand their values and essential needs. But in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is not on the basis of their handicrafts that artisans negotiate with their superiors. Instead, they are suffered to perform a children's book version of an Ovidian tale.

Not only is this the child's version—it is a story about adolescents. The artisans who would be men dramatize “the two yong folke,” not yet “man and wife,” who are trying to escape their “Parents['] … let.”³⁶ Whatever tragic point may attach to Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe story is rendered ludicrous in Shakespeare's. The desolation that accompanies thwarted desire in Ovid is somewhat mitigated by Pyramus's and Thisbe's youth, if not their deaths. This desolation is mitigated precisely by their farcical deaths in the translation of the story performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Erotic confrontations involving the artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream are undermined by the assertion of typically infantile artisanal impotence. There is no love story in this performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, only the “silliest stuff that ever I heard” (V.i.207). What passion there is, “and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad” (V.i.277-278). Neither is there much of a love story in Titania's bower, where once again we are presented with an artisan not as an artisan (rather, as an ass). Bottom is treated like a child; the “tongue-tied simplicity / In the least” that so pleases Theseus is translated into Titania's command, “Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently” (III.i.194). Perhaps it is performance and make-up which ultimately determine just how infantile or mature we find the conjunction of fairy queen and ass-headed artisan.³⁷ Titania issues commands, but Bottom is to share her bed (III.i.164). Whether the sexual dynamic between Bottom and Titania is pre-Oedipal, Oedipal, bestial, or adult and heterosexual, the problem of the social status of these lovers is taken up without delay. Titania sees a “gentle mortal” (III.i.132, emphasis added). And the attending fairies are expected to act courteously “to this gentleman” (III.i.157). It does not escape Bottom's notice that he has been translated into, among other things, a gentleman. He even expresses his concern that “cowardly giant-like ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of [Mustardseed's] … house” (III.i.185-186). Consider the translations at work here: while it was being asserted that enclosures were devouring the laboring and farming poor, an artisan weaver, now partially a beast himself, is translated into a gentleman who is concerned for the well-being of other gentlemen. On top of this, Titania has it in mind still further to translate Bottom, “to purge … [his] mortal grossness” (III.i.153). This does not seem to have to do with his ass-head; rather, it may have to do with elevating the “gentle mortal” weaver beyond the gentry to fairy immortality. For the moment she will treat him like a child, feeding him, doting on him, and watching over him as he sleeps.

Certainly Oberon conceives of Bottom in a more instrumental fashion than does Titania. His use of the weaver is part of the play's dramatization of statecraft, a dramatization most clearly centered on Oberon's mortal surrogate, Theseus. Duke Theseus' theory of governance might be summed up by the motto, “Our sport shall be to take what they mistake” (V.i.90). All of the mistaking, looking with “another's eyes,” looking “not with the eyes,” “misprision,” and seeing with “parted eye” that motivates the lovers' plot, Theseus transforms and forgives magnanimously.³⁸ At the same time, Theseus' fairy alterego, Oberon, gives a literal twist to Theseus' motto, finding sport in taking the changeling boy that he accuses Titania of mistaking, and finding still more sport in the knowledge that Titania has mistaken an ass for a gentle lover. Theseus has already established his lordship over Hippolyta; but Oberon must reestablish his lordship over Titania (“Tarry, rash wanton; am not I thy lord?” [II.i.63]). For the moment, the “mazed world” endures a “progeny of evils”: bad harvests, floods, frosts, and disease. Oberon must implement a policy that will restore order, and his instrument turns out to be Bottom. But it is unnecessary to translate the weaver-ass into a “scapegoat” whose sacrifice works “only to facilitate the reconciliation of those with superior social status.”³⁹ Just as he will profit—to the tune of “sixpence a day during his life”—from his role in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” so Bottom profits from his role in the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania. Newly awakened Bottom can “discourse wonders” (IV.i.28) based on his “most rare vision” (IV.i.203). Temporarily an ass, Bottom is not only made a man, but has been permitted a vision that may after all somewhat “purge … [his] mortal grossness.”

Bottom's company takes flight at the sight of their “monstrous” fellow (III.i.99-100). But Oberon and Puck make use of this literally many-headed Elizabethan monster. Half a century later, it was said that the “many-headed monster,” made up of “some turbulent spirits, backed by rude and tumultous mechanic persons would have the total subversion of the government of the state.”⁴⁰ And just as Puck manipulates one of the “rude mechanicals” (III.ii.9) in A Midsummer Night's Dream to restore harmony in the fairy kingdom, Parliamentary leaders were not afraid “to take advantage of popular initiative” to restore justice and harmony in Caroline England.⁴¹ But this is to allegorize and to suggest far-fetched foreshadowings in Shakespeare. It is more to the point to note that the designers of Elizabethan social policy were trying to determine the place of the poor and of artificers and husbandmen in an orderly realm. Confronted like Oberon with bad harvests and want of cheer, the Crown and Parliament tried to counter disorder with the 1563 Statute of Artificers, the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, the Book of Orders, issued in 1587 and 1594, and the Enclosure Act of 1598. Such statutes were meant to “take what they mistake”—to construe economic and social harmony where many poor laborers knew only cruel subsistence and chronic unemployment.

The Statute of Artificers was an attempt to control the conditions of employment for many workers, to restrict the mobility of labor, and to establish procedures to determine local wage rates.⁴² Conceived of as a way to remedy the “imperfection & contrarietie” in the many existing laws, the Statute appears to protect artificers in the face of “wages and allowances … [that] are in divers places to[o] small, and not aunswerable to this time, respecting the advauncement of pryces.”⁴³ But the statute goes on to fix maximum, not minimum, wages. The state sought to keep wages low, making a popular connection between large numbers of potential workers and low wages.⁴⁴ Not until 1603 did a statute order that the “assessment of minimum wages for clothmakers … [should] reflect the state of the economy.”⁴⁵ The long apprenticeships stipulated by crafts and by law further reflect the desire for cheap labor, not the difficulty of mastering a particular skill.⁴⁶ Elizabethan labor laws, like Elizabethan poor laws, were legislated to preserve order. It was assumed that the laborers as well as the elite of England would profit from stability. The “fit” Athenian artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream are rewarded for their industry and good will with the opportunity to perform for their Duke. The proximity of artisanate and nobility, the mutual celebration of aristocratic nuptials, and the expected pension for the performers make for a community of shared interests. Order is restored in Athens when all levels of society celebrate together.

Of course, those in power retain their power. They countenance the “modesty of fearful duty” (V.i.101) by bringing the artisans into their celebration. The pension in store for Bottom, “He would have deserved” (IV.ii.23). Nobles and artisans accommodate themselves to one another with ease because the latter are so obviously deserving. The English Poor Law, codified in 1598 and 1601, was the response of a ruling elite that had just made it through the difficult 1590s.⁴⁷ Those who were deemed lazy or insubordinate among the lower orders were to be punished, and the idle poor were set to work. The deserving poor were to be relieved.⁴⁸ For the most part it seems that relief measures (as well as the procedures outlined in the Statute of Artificers) were ineffective: there were few welfare or policing agencies, and few people received help. But it is important to remember that the old and orphans—the most deserving poor—never would have been a threat to social order. Artisans, freemen, and apprentices took the lead in disturbances, and they, not the poor widows and the elderly, had to be placated. Bottom is used by Oberon to counter the sort of disorder in nature that was threatening so many Elizabethan wage earners, who were worse off in the 1590s than they had been for a century.⁵⁰ Then Bottom and his company are brought into the harmonious community of the play's final act even though, as Puck knows, the “hungry lion” still roars, the “wolf behowls,” and the ploughman, “All with weary task fordone,” is dead tired after a day's labor (V.i.357-360).⁵¹

It remains to determine the extent to which Shakespeare accommodates himself, and is accommodated to, those in power. It would seem that his company was asked to perform their play at an aristocratic wedding.⁵² And it has been argued by Walter Cohen that Shakespeare's theater took a “fundamentally artisanal historical form.”⁵³ Thus an admittedly oversimplified analogy suggests itself: the Athenian artisans' play is to the dominant Athenian culture (represented by the wedding couples) as the London artisans' play is to the culture represented by the Stanleys, the Veres, Burghley, and Elizabeth. Bottom's bid to play the roles of both lover and tyrant comments upon love and tyranny in Athens. Pyramus's and Thisbe's filial rebellion and subsequent farcical-tragic fate comments upon Hermia's and Lysander's rebellion and eventual comic fate. The Athenian artisans' bid for favor and profit by means of what they take to be decorous performance comments upon the relations between high and low status groups in Athenian society. Corresponding dynamics which would correlate Shakespeare's company and play with the Elizabethan aristocracy may be sketched out. The four lovers' marriage plans in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the attention these plans receive in the Athenian court, glance at marriage brokering in Elizabeth's court and her much-publicized readiness to intervene when it suited her policy or fancy. Then too, artisan players, like those in Shakespeare's troupe in the 1590s and after, were regularly forced to accommodate themselves to numerous restrictions on playing. No doubt actors and playwrights and perhaps even the likes of Philip Henslowe met to discuss proper decorum in the face of statutes forbidding comment on religious controversy, personal satire at the expense of influential persons, criticism of court policies and foreign powers, and much more. Nonetheless, play after play that survived Edmund Tilney's and then Sir George Buc's scrutiny managed to comment on the powerful, the court, and religious controversy. Playwrights deferred and yet criticized, and both City and Court responded with tolerance at one moment, imprisonment at another.

A Midsummer Night's Dream describes relations of power in its play world that have, as we have seen, much to do with such relations in Elizabethan society. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that “Shakespeare relentlessly explores the relations of power in a given culture. That more than exploration is involved is much harder to demonstrate convincingly.”⁵⁴ I would modify this cautious assessment, and so propose that Shakespeare criticizes the relations of power in his culture, but does so with remarkable sensitivity to the nuances of threat and accommodation which animate these relations. Walter Cohen notes that “However aristocratic the explicit message of a play might be, the conditions of its production introduced alternative effects.”⁵⁵ Precisely these conditions of production are dramatized in A Midsummer Night's Dream, by means of the players within the play. The company that performs “Pyramus and Thisbe” reveals the company that performs A Midsummer Night's Dream perhaps more than the latter would care to admit. The desire to be made men but to receive a pension for life, to leave the killing out but to “gleek upon occasion”—these express the reasonable longings of artisans throughout the Elizabethan age.

Notes

1. A Midsummer Night's Dream, III.i.141. All MND [A Midsummer Night's Dream] quotations are from Harold F. Brooks, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979), and will be cited in the text in parentheses.

2. Brooks, p. cxv.

3. Cf. Stephen Orgel's argument in The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), “that private theaters are the creation of their audiences” (p. 6).

4. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 98: see also Stone's “Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300-1980,” Past & Present 101 (1983), 22-33.

5. J. A. Sharpe, “Enforcing the Law in the Seventeenth-Century English Village,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500, ed. V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (London: Europe Publications, 1980), p. 112.

6. J. A. Sharpe, “‘Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours’: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 175. Lawrence Stone, in his article in Past & Present (see above, n. 4), questions Sharpe's thesis but concludes that “The evidence seems ambiguous on this point” (p. 31). Stone seems to support the traditional view—that increasing litigation, even over slander, indicates “a breakdown of consensual community methods of dealing with conflict” (p. 32).

7. J. A. Sharpe, “‘Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours’ …,” p. 174.

8. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 99.

9. Stephen Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1 (1983), 16-23. Further citations from this article are noted in the text.

10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 81, cited in Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983), 87n.

11. J. S. Cockburn, “The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England 1559-1625: A Preliminary Survey,” in Crime in England 1550-1800, ed. J. S. Cockburn (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 61.

12. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 156.

13. Cited in Joel Samaha, Law and Order in Historical Perspective: The Case of Elizabethan Essex (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 44.

14. J. H. Baker, “Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law 1550-1800,” in Crime in England 1550-1880, p. 43.

15. Samaha, p. 27.

16. Samaha, p. 168; see also Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain 1530-1780 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), p. 73, and D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Late Tudors 1547-1603 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 50 and 387.

17. Samaha, p. 64.

18. Samaha, p. 55.

19. Cockburn, p. 55.

20. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 64.

21. Peter Clark, “Popular Protest and Disturbance in Kent, 1558-1640,” Economic History Review 29 (1976), 367.

22. Clark, pp. 371-373.

23. Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 20. A comprehensive account and interpretation of this failed uprising has appeared recently; see John Walter, “‘A Rising of the People?’ The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past & Present 107 (1985), 90-143.

24. Edwin F. Gay, “The Midland Revolt and the Inquisition of Depopulation of 1607,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (1904), 238.

25. In 1595, five London apprentices were executed. They had joined in riots at Tower Hill to protest the whipping and imprisonment of a few young men who had protested the price of butter. See Walter, pp. 92 and 108.

26. Sharp, pp. 21 and 40-41.

27. Wrightson, p. 174.

28. Wrightson, pp. 174-175; see also Clark, pp. 378-380.

29. John Walter and Keith Wrightson, “Dearth and Social Order in Early Modern England,” Past & Present 71 (1976), 41.

30. Walter and Wrightson, p. 31; see also E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971), 78-79 and 132.

31. Walter and Wrightson, p. 32.

32. Montrose, p. 75.

33. The relevant passage from Sir Thomas North's Plutarch is cited in the Arden edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, p. 135.

34. John Hooker, Synopsis Chorographical of Devonshire, cited in William J. Blake, “Hooker's Synopsis Chorographical of Devonshire,” Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association 47 (1915), 334-348.

35. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583), p. 31: see also Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, p. 41.

36. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), Bk. 4, II. 69 and 77-78.

37. See Montrose, p. 65.

38. On “misprision” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, see René Girard, “Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 189-212; and David Marshall, “Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream,” ELH 49 (1982), 543-575. Brooks notes that “Chaucer's Theseus, too, was magnanimous, forgiving …” (Arden edition, p. 97).

39. I have conflated and given emphasis to words written by Jeanne Addison Roberts (“Animals as Agents of Revelation: the Horizontalizing of the Chain of Being in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Maurice Charney [New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980], p. 85) and Elliot Krieger (A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies [New York: Harper and Row, 1979], p. 60). Krieger's argument is, however, akin to my own. He writes that A Midsummer Night's Dream “dramatizes the aristocratic fantasy of, and strategy for, creating complete social poise” (p. 67).

40. Christopher Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking,” in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Revolution, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 310-311 (emphasis added).

41. Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster …,” p. 316 and passim.

42. Donald Woodward, “The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558-63,” Economic History Review 33 (1980), 32.

43. “An Acte Touching Divers Orders of Artificers, Laborers, Servauntes of Husbandry, and Apprentices,” 5 Eliz.c.4, Anno Quinto Reginae Elizabeth … (London, 1563), C₄^v.

44. See D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review 8 (1956), 281; and see Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, p. 41.

45. Sharp, p. 54; a 1598 statute clarified the 1563 statute, making no mention of minimum wages, but tying wages to “times of plenty or scarcity.”

46. L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy of England 1500-1750 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1971), p. 17.

47. See Paul Slack, “Social Problems and Social Policies,” The Traditional Community under Stress (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Open University Press, 1977), p. 98.

48. See Hunt, pp. 66-79.

49. See Slack, p. 100. [Editor's note: reference number missing in the original text.]

50. See L. A. Clarkson, p. 212; but compare D. M. Palliser, p. 159.

51. Compare Krieger, p. 68.

52. James P. Bednarz makes a strong case for the Stanley-Vere wedding. See his “Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Renaissance Drama 14 (1983), 79-102. See also Brooks, p. lvii.

53. Walter Cohen, “The Artisan Theatres of Renaissance England and Spain,” Theatre Journal 35 (1983), 516. See also Cohen's Drama of a Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 179-185.

54. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 254.

55. Cohen, p. 517.

Originally published in Renaissance Papers 1986, ed. Dale B. J. Randall and Joseph Porter (Durham, NC: Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1986), 11-30. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference.