[In the following essay, Montrose analyzes A Midsummer Night's Dream as it displays Shakespeare's concern with the artist's place in the Elizabethan social order.]

I

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the interplay among characters is structured by an interplay among categories—namely, the unstable Elizabethan hierarchies of gender, rank and age. For example, Titania treats Bottom as if he were both her child and her lover—which seems entirely appropriate, since he is a substitute for the changeling boy, who is, in turn, Oberon's rival for Titania's attentions. Titania herself is ambivalently benign and sinister, imperious and enthralled. She dotes upon Bottom, and indulges in him all those desires to be fed, scratched and coddled that render Bottom's dream recognisable to us as a parodic fantasy of infantile narcissism and dependency. But it is also, at the same time, a parodic fantasy of upward social mobility. Bottom's mistress mingles her enticements with threats:

Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore go with me.
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee;
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep:
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so,
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

(3.1.145-6)¹

The sublimation of matter into spirit is identified with the social elevation of the base artisan into the gentry: Titania orders her attendants to 'be kind and courteous to this gentleman' (3.1.157), to 'do him courtesies' (167), and to 'wait upon him' (190); she concludes the scene, however, with an order to enforce her minion's passivity, thus reducing him to the demeanour prescribed for women, children and servants: 'Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently' (104).

Titania vows that she will purge Bottom's mortal grossness and will make him her 'gentle joy' (4.1.4); Bottom's own company hope that the Duke will grant him a pension of sixpence a day for his performance as Pyramus. It is surely more than dramatic economy that motivated Shakespeare to make the artisan who is the queen's complacent paramour also an enthusiastic amateur actor who performs before the Duke. Bottom is a comically exorbitant figure for the common masculine subject of Queen Elizabeth. His interactions with the Queen of Faeries and with the Duke of Athens represent distinct modes of relationship to his sovereign: in the former, that relationship is figured as erotic intimacy; in the latter, it is figured as collective homage. Within Elizabethan society, relationships of authority and dependency, of desire and fear, were characteristic of both the public and the domestic domains. Domestic relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, were habitually politicised: the household was a microcosm of the state; at the same time, socio-economic and political relationships of patronage and clientage were habitually eroticised: the devoted suitor sought some loving return from his master-mistress. The collective and individual impact of Elizabethan symbolic forms frequently depended upon interchanges or conflations between these domains.

Like their companion Bottom in his liaison with Titania, the mechanicals are collectively presented in a childlike relationship to their social superiors. They characterise themselves, upon two occasions, as 'every mother's son' (1.2.73; 3.1.69); however, they hope to be 'made men' (4.2.18) by the patronage of their lord, Duke Theseus. Differences within the mortal and faery courts of A Midsummer Night's Dream are structured principally in terms of gender and generation. However, by the end of the fourth act, the multiple marriages arranged within the Athenian aristocracy and the marital reconciliation arranged between the King and Queen of Faeries have achieved domestic harmony and reestablished hierarchical norms. When Bottom and his company are introduced into the newly concordant courtly milieu in the final scene, social rank and social calling displace gender and generation as the play's most conspicuous markers of difference. The dramatic emphasis is now upon a contrast between the socially and stylistically refined mixed-sex communities of court and forest, and the 'crew of patches, rude mechanicals' (3.2.9), who 'have toiled their unbreathed memories' (5.1.72) in order to honour and entertain their betters. In the coming together of common artisan-actors and the leisured elite for whom they perform, socio-political realities and theatrical realities converge. Implicated in this particular dramatic dénouement are several larger historical developments: the policies and attitudes abetting Elizabethan state formation; the enormous growth of London as an administrative, economic and cultural centre; and the institutionalisation of a professional, secular and commercial theatre with a complex relationship to the dynastic state and the royal court on the one hand, and to the urban oligarchy and the public market on the other. In the present essay, I seek to articulate some of these implications.

II

The immediate reason for the presence of Bottom and his companions in A Midsummer Night's Dream is to rehearse and perform an 'interlude before the Duke and the Duchess, on his wedding-day at night' (1.2.5-7). However, their project simultaneously evokes what, only a generation before the production of Shakespeare's play, had been a central aspect of civic and artisanal culture in England—namely, the feast of Corpus Christi, with its ceremonial procession and its often elaborate dramatic performances. The civic and artisanal status of the amateur players is insisted upon with characteristic Shakespearean condescension: Puck describes them to his master, Oberon, as 'rude mechanicals, / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls' (3.2.9-10); and Philostrate describes them to his master, Theseus, as 'Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never laboured in their minds till now' (5.1.72-3). In the most material way, Bottom's name relates him to the practice of his craft—the 'bottom' was 'the core on which the weaver's skein of yarn was wound' (Arden MND, p. 3, n. 11); and it also relates him to his lowly position in the temporal order, to his social baseness. Furthermore, among artisans, weavers in particular were associated with Elizabethan food riots and other forms of social protest that were prevalent during the mid-1590s, the period during which A Midsummer Night's Dream was presumably written and first performed.² Thus, we may construe Bottom as the spokesman for the commons in the play—but with the proviso that this vox populi is not merely that of a generalised folk. Bottom is primarily the comic representative of a specific socio-economic group with its own highly articulated culture. He is not the voice of the dispossessed or the indigent but of the middling sort, in whose artisanal, civic and guild-centered ethos Shakespeare had his own roots.³ During his childhood in Stratford, Shakespeare would have had the opportunity and the occasion to experience the famed Corpus Christi play that was performed annually in nearby Coventry. Bottom himself, the most enthusiastic of amateur thespians, makes oblique allusion to the figures and acting traditions of the multi-pageant mystery plays.⁴ Thus, Bully Bottom, the weaver, is an over-determined signifier, encompassing not only a generalised common voice but also the particular socio-economic and cultural origins of William Shakespeare, the professional player-playwright—and, too, the collective socio-cultural origins of his craft. A Midsummer Night's Dream simultaneously acknowledges those origins and frames them at an ironic distance; it educes connections only in order to assert distinctions.

Recent studies in sixteenth-century English social history have emphasised that a major transformation in cultural life took place during the early decades of Elizabeth's reign, and that this cultural revolution manifested a complex interaction among religious, socio-economic and political processes. Mervyn James concludes that

the abandonment of the observance of Corpus Christi, of the mythology associated with the feast, and of the cycle plays . . . arose from the Protestant critique of Corpus Christi, in due course implemented by the Protestant Church, with the support of the Protestant state. . . .

The decline and impoverishment of gild organizations, the pauperization of town populations, the changing character and role of town societies, increasing government support of urban oligarchies, were all factors tending toward urban authoritarianism. As a result, urban ritual and urban drama no longer served a useful purpose; and were indeed increasingly seen as potentially disruptive to the kind of civil order which the magistracy existed to impose.⁵

In a study of the world the Elizabethans had lost, Charles Phythian-Adams emphasises that

for urban communities in particular, the middle and later years of the sixteenth century represented a more abrupt break with the past than any period since the era of the Black Death or before the age of industrialization. Not only were specific customs and institutions brusquely changed or abolished, but a whole, vigorous and variegated popular culture, the matrix of everyday life, was eroded and began to perish. . . .

If the opportunity for popular participation in public rituals was consequently largely removed, that especial meaning which sacred ceremonies and popular rites had periodically conferred on the citizens' tangible environment also fell victim to the new 'secular' order.⁶

The brilliant scholarship of these studies appears to proceed from a position that sees in the advent of the early modern Protestant state the fragmentation and loss of a pre-existing organic community. This tendency has been challenged recently in the work of Miri Rubin. Of Corpus Christi, she observes bluntly that 'a procession which excluded most working people, women, children, visitors and servants, was not a picture of the community. . . . By laying hierarchy bare it could incite the conflict of difference ever more powerfully sensed in a concentrated symbolic moment.'⁷ Taking her point, I wish to emphasise a shift not from sacramental civic communitas to disciplinary state hierarchy but rather from a culture focused upon social dynamics within the local community to one that incorporates the local within and subordinates it to the centre.

Throughout most of the sixteenth century, the Tudor regime had been engaged in a complex process of consolidating temporal and spiritual power in the hereditary ruler of a sovereign nation-state. Consistent with this project, the Elizabethan government was actively engaged in efforts to suppress traditional, amateur forms of popular entertainment, including the civic religious drama. The Elizabethan state perceived this culture to be tainted by the superstitions and idolatrous practices of the old faith; because its traditional loyalties were local, regional or papal, it was regarded as a seedbed for dissent and sedition. Popular and liturgical practices, ceremonial and dramatic forms, were not wholly suppressed by the royal government but were instead selectively appropriated. In court, town and countryside, they were transformed by various temporal authorities into elaborate and effusive celebrations of the monarchy and of civic oligarchies; they became part of the ideological apparatus of the state. Such ceremonies of power and authority are epitomised by the queen's occasional progresses to aristocratic estates and regional urban centres; by her annual Accession Day festivities, celebrated at Westminster with pageants and jousts, and in towns throughout England with fanfares and bonfires; and by the annual procession and pageant for the lord mayor and aldermen of London, and analogous ceremonies maintained by other local, urban elites.⁸

The suppression of religious and polemical drama and the curtailment of popular festivities were policy goals vigorously pursued by the Elizabethan regime from its very inception. The custom of celebrating the queen's Accession Day began to flourish following the suppression of the northern rebellion and the York Corpus Christi play in 1569, and the promulgation of the Papal Bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth on Corpus Christi Day 1570. The process of suppressing the mystery plays was virtually complete by 1580. As Mervyn James puts it, 'under Protestantism, the Corpus Christi becomes the Body of the Realm'.⁹ At the same time, the queen's Privy Council and the court nourished the professional theatre—if only to the limited extent that it could be construed as serving their own interests. Commencing scarcely two decades before the writing of A Midsummer Night's Dream, resident professional acting companies, under the patronage of the monarch and her leading courtiers, were established in the vicinity of the City of London and the royal court at Westminster. Thus, the beginning of the fully professional, secular and commercial theatre of Elizabethan London coincides with the effective end of the religious drama and the relative decline of local amateur acting traditions in the rest of England.¹⁰ As a means of entertaining the court and the people, the professional theatre seems to have been perceived by the crown as potentially if indirectly useful, both as an instrument for the aggrandisement of the dynastic nation state and for the supervision and diversion of its subjects.

The decay of Coventry's traditional civic culture during the mid- and late sixteenth century paralleled the city's economic decline. Such cultural changes were abetted, however, by the Tudor state's active suppression or cooptation of popular ceremonies and recreations. Some specific instances of this general process can provide a context for construing Shakespeare's comic representation of civic, artisanal culture and its relationship to the state. Queen Elizabeth visited Coventry on progress in 1566. In his speech of welcome, the City Recorder alluded to the role of Coventry in the overthrow of the Danes, 'a memorial whereof is kept unto this day by certain open shows in this City yearly'; the reference is to the elaborate and rowdy annual Hock Tuesday play, in which the role of women combatants was prominent. Upon her actual entrance into the city, the queen viewed the pageants of the Tanners, Drapers, Smiths and Weavers that formed parts of the Corpus Christi play.¹¹ Two years later, under the pressure of reformist preachers, the civic celebrations of the Hocktide shows were banned. Despite this, the queen had a subsequent opportunity to witness them at first hand. According to a putative eyewitness account, this was in 1575, during her celebrated visit to the earl of Leicester's estate at Kenilworth. Led by a mason who styled himself Captain Cox, the 'good-hearted men of Coventry' daringly presented their quaint show among the spectacular entertainments and displays with which the earl courted and counselled his royal mistress. The Coventrymen intended to make 'their humble petition unto Her Highness, that they might have their plays up again'.¹² Nevertheless, it appears that, after 1579, the citizens of Coventry ceased to entertain themselves with either their Hocktide show or their Corpus Christi play. At about the same time, in the city records for 1578, there occurs the first of a number of extant entries for payments in connection with celebrations 'on the quee[n']s holiday' (Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, p. 286). In these fragmentary records, we glimpse instances of the complex ideological process by which traditional ceremonial forms and events that were focused upon the articulation and celebration of the civic community itself either became occasions for the city's celebration of a royal visit, or were displaced outright by a newly instituted calendar of holidays that promoted the cult of the queen by honouring her birthday and her Accession Day.

A Midsummer Night's Dream incorporates allusions to this changed and diminished world of popular civic play forms. In its very title and in passing allusions—to the festivals of Midsummer Eve and St John's Day, to the rites of May and to St Valentine's Day—the play gestures towards a larger context of popular holiday-occasions and customs that mixed together pagan and Christian traditions. In this context, it is significant that Corpus Christi, though a moveable feast, was nevertheless a summer festival, occurring between 21 May and 24 June—a circumstance that made possible its extensive open-air ceremonies and entertainments.¹³ Furthermore, the institutional basis of civic ritual drama in the craft guilds survives in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the names of the mechanicals, as enumerated by Peter Quince: 'Nick Bottom, the weaver', 'Francis Flute, the bellows-mender', 'Robin Starveling, the tailor', 'Tom Snout, the tinker', 'Snug the joiner'. The identification of the mechanicals in terms of both their particular crafts or 'mysteries' and their collective dramatic endeavour strengthens the evocation of the Corpus Christi tradition. Nevertheless, despite the conspicuous title of Shakespeare's play, and despite the oblique allusions to the guild structure of the civic community, the occasion for the artisans' play-within-the-play is not the marking of the traditional agrarian calendar, nor the articulation of the collective urban social body through the celebration of customary holidays. Neither is it the observance of the ecclesiastical calendar, the annual cycle of holy days, nor the dramatisation of the paradigmatic events of sacred history from the Creation to the Final Doom. Instead, the rude mechanicals pool their talents and strain their wits in order to dramatise an episode from classical mythology that will celebrate the wedding of Duke Theseus—an event that focuses the collective interests of the Commonwealth upon the person of the ruler.

III

As has long been recognised, A Midsummer Night's Dream has affinities with Elizabethan royal iconography and courtly entertainments. The most obvious features are Shakespeare's incorporation of a play performed in celebration of an aristocratic wedding, and Oberon's allusion to 'a fair vestal, throned by the west. . . . the imperial votaress' (2.1.158, 163)—the latter being invoked in a scenario reminiscent of the pageantry presented to the queen on her progresses.¹⁴ From early in the reign, Elizabeth had been directly addressed and engaged by such performances at aristocratic estates and in urban centres. In these pageants, masques and plays, distinctions were effaced between the spatio-temporal locus of the royal spectator/actress and that of the characters being enacted before her. Debates were referred to the queen's arbitration; the magic of her presence civilised savage men, restored the blind to sight, released errant knights from enchantment, and rescued virgins from defilement. Such social dramas of celebration and coercion played out the delicately balanced relationship between the monarch and the nobility, gentry and urban elites who constituted the political nation. These events must also have evoked reverence and awe in the local common folk who assisted in and witnessed them. And because texts and descriptions of most of these processions, pageants and shows were in print within a year—sometimes within just a few weeks—of their performance, they may have had a cultural impact far more extensive and enduring than their occasional and ephemeral character might at first suggest. Such royal pageantry appropriated materials from popular late medieval romances, from Ovid, Petrarch and other literary sources; and when late Elizabethan poetry and drama such as Spenser's Faerie Queene or Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream reappropriated those sources, they were now inscribed by the allegorical discourse of Elizabethan royal courtship, panegyric and political negotiation. Thus, the deployment of Ovidian, Petrarchan and allegorical romance modes by late Elizabethan writers must be read in terms of an intertextuality that includes both the discourse of European literary history and the discourse of Elizabethan state power.

There is an obvious dramaturgical contrast between A Midsummer Night's Dream and the progress pageants, or panegyrical court plays such as George Peele's Arraignment of Paris. In such courtly performance genres, the resolution of the action, the completion of the form, is dependent upon the actual presence of the monarch as privileged auditor/spectator. Her judgement may be actively solicited, or, in propria persona, she may become the focus of the characters' collective celebration and veneration; frequently, as in Peele's play, the two strategies are combined.¹⁵ However, there are also Elizabethan plays that do not require the queen's active participation in the action but instead refer the dramatic resolution to an onstage character who is an allegorical personage readily if not wholly identifiable with the queen. Such is the authoritative figure of Cynthia, the queen/goddess who presides over the action in both John Lyly's Endymion and Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels. These formal strategies are presumably motivated in part by the practical concern to make the play playable in more than one venue, and for more than one audience. The professional players had more people to please than the monarch alone. In any case, the queen was frequently unavailable to play her part; and—as Ben Jonson discovered, having written her into Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)—for someone else to have explicitly personated the monarch would have been a grave offence.¹⁶ The formal and dramaturgical responses to such manifestly practical concerns may have had larger implications. Such plays preserve the theatrical illusion of a self-contained play world. In doing so, they necessarily produce a more mediated—and, thus, a potentially more ambiguous—mode of royal reference and encomium than do those plays which open the frame of the fiction to acknowledge the physically present sovereign and defer to her mastery of acting and action. Thus, plays performed in the playhouses had a relatively greater degree of both formal and ideological autonomy than did exclusively courtly entertainments.

In royal pageantry, the queen was always the cynosure; her virginity was the source of magical potency. And in courtly plays such as Lyly's Endymion, such representation of the charismatic royal virgin continued to enact such a role—although the limitations and resources of dramatic representation opened up new and perhaps unintended possibilities for equivocation and ambiguity in the apparent affirmation of royal wisdom, power and virtue. Like Lyly's Endymion, A Midsummer Night's Dream is permeated by images and devices that suggest characteristic forms of Elizabethan court culture. However, Shakespeare's ostensibly courtly wedding play is neither focused upon the queen nor structurally dependent upon her actual presence or her intervention in the action.¹⁷ Nor does it include among its onstage and speaking characters a transparent allegorical representation of the queen—a character who enjoys a central and determining authority over the action. It has often been suggested that the original occasion of A Midsummer Night's Dream was an aristocratic wedding at which Queen Elizabeth herself was present.¹⁸ Whatever the truth of this attractive but unproven hypothesis, what we know for certain is that the title page of the first quarto, printed in 1600, claims to present the play 'As it hath been sundry times publicly acted, by the right honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants'. Despite the legal fiction that public performances served to keep the privileged players of the Chamberlain's Men in readiness for performance at court, and despite whatever adaptations may have been made in repertory plays to suit them to the conditions of particular court performances, the dramaturgical and ideological matrix of Shakespearean drama was located not in the royal court but in the professional playhouse.

Although perhaps sometimes receiving their first and/or most lucrative performances at court or in aristocratic households, all of Shakespeare's plays seem to have been written with the possibility in mind of theatrical as well as courtly performance. Certainly, this practice provides evidence for the shared tastes of queen and commoner. And, needless to say, the advertisement that a play had been performed at court or before the queen was intended to enhance the interest of Elizabeth's theatre-going or play-reading subjects, who might thereby vicariously share the source of Her Majesty's entertainment. Nevertheless, despite the broad social appeal of Shakespearean and other plays, we should resist any impulse to homogenise Elizabethan culture and society into an organic unity. The courtly and popular audiences for Shakespeare's plays constituted frequently overlapping but nevertheless distinct and potentially divergent sources of socio-economic support and ideological constraint. The writing of plays that would be playable in both the commercial play-houses and in the royal court points towards the conditions of emergence of the professional theatre at a historically transitional moment. This theatre was sustained by a frequently advantageous but inherently unstable conjunction of two theoretically distinct modes of cultural production: one, based upon relations of patronage; the other, upon market relations.

IV

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the playwright's imagination 'bodies forth' the ruler and patron in the personage of Theseus. Shakespeare's antique Duke holds clear opinions as to the purpose of playing; and these opinions take two forms. One is that the drama should serve as a pleasant pastime for the sovereign, as an innocuous respite from princely care:

Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have,
To wear away this long age of three hours
Between our after-supper and bed-time?
Where is our usual manager of mirth?
What revels are in hand? Is there no play
To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?
Call Philostrate. . . .
Say, what abridgement have you for this evening,
What masque, what music? How shall we beguile
The lazy time, if not with some delight?

(5.1.32-41)

The Office of the Revels had been established in the reign of Queen Elizabeth's father, and its purpose had been 'to select, organise, and supervise all entertainment of the sovereign, wherever the court might be'.¹⁹ The expansion of the role of this court office to include the licensing of public dramatic performances as well as the provision of courtly ones indicates that the Elizabethan regime was attempting to subject the symbolic and interpretive activities of its subjects to increasing scrutiny and regulation—at the same time that it was inventing new sources of revenue for itself and its clients. In the personage of Philostrate, Shakespeare's play incorporates the courtly office of Master of the Revels, but limits it to its original charge, which was to provide entertainments for the monarch. Like the ambivalent term licence, Philostrate's alliterative title as Theseus's 'manager of mirth' suggests an official concern simultaneously to allow and to control the expression of potentially subversive festive, comic and erotic energies.

Of the four proffered entertainments, the first two—'The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp' and 'the riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage' (5.1.44-5; 48-9)—are dismissed by Theseus, ostensibly because their devices are overly familiar. (As I have suggested elsewhere, both allude to the play's classical mythological subtext of sexual and familial violence—a subtext over which the play's patriarchal comedy keeps a precarious control.)²⁰ The third prospect is excluded because it smacks of social protest:

'The thrice three Muses mourning for the death
Of learning, late deceased in beggary'?
That is some satire, keen and critical,
Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

(5.1.52-5)

This conspicuous irrelevance has two operative points: the first, that its subject is the familiar complaint of Elizabethan cultural producers that they lack generous and enlightened patronage from the great; the second, that Duke Theseus does not want to hear about it. His taste is for something that

is nothing, nothing in the world;
Unless you can find sport in their intents,
Extremely stretched and conned with cruel pain
To do you service.

This is the play that Theseus will hear, 'For never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it' (5.1.78-83). Thus, the other form taken by Theseus's opinions concerning the drama is that it should serve as a gratifying homage to princely power, simultaneously providing a politic opportunity for the exercise of royal magnanimity:

Our sport shall be to take what they mistake:
And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears,
And, in conclusion, dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome,
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.

(5.1.90-105)

The opinions of Shakespeare's Athenian duke bear a strong likeness to those of his own sovereign, as these were represented in her policies and in her own public performances. Thus, in the metatheatrical context of the play's long final scene, Duke Theseus is not so much Queen Elizabeth's masculine antithesis as he is her princely surrogate.

Theseus's attitude towards his subjects' offerings has analogues in the two printed texts that describe the queen's visit to the city of Norwich during her progress of 1578. In a curiously metadramatic speech directly addressed to Elizabeth, the figure of Mercury describes the process of creating and enacting entertainments for the queen—such as the one in which he is presently speaking:

And that so soon as out of door she goes
(If time do serve, and weather waxeth fair)
Some odd device shall meet Her Highness straight,
To make her smile, and ease her burdened breast,
And take away the cares and things of weight
That princes feel, that findeth greatest rest.

On another occasion, as the queen returned toward her lodgings,

within Bishops Gate at the Hospital door, Master Stephen Limbert, master of the grammar school in Norwich, stood ready to render her an oration. Her Majesty drew near unto him, and thinking him fearful, said graciously unto him: 'Be not afraid.' He answered her again in English: 'I thank Your Majesty for your good encouragement'; and then with good courage entered into this oration.

After printing the oration in the original Latin and in English translation, the account continues by describing the queen as

very attentive, even until the end thereof. And the oration ended, after she had given great thanks thereof to Master Limbert, she said to him: 'It is the best that ever I heard.'²²

The tone in which Theseus responds to the mechanicals' 'palpable gross play' catches the element of hyperbole in the queen's reported speech, and turns its gracious condescension towards mockery. For example, as Theseus says to Bottom: 'Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus, and hanged himself in Thisbe's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy—and so it is, truly, and very notably discharged' (5.1.343-7). I have suggested analogues from royal pageantry performed by children and amateurs because such performances most clearly equate to the mechanicals' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe within Shakespeare's play. However, the queen's attitude towards the uses of the adult, professional and commercial theatre seems to have differed little from what it was towards the uses of other forms of royal entertainment. As early as 1574, a company of professional players under the patronage of the earl of Leicester were licensed by the queen to perform in public so that they would be in readiness to play at court, 'as well for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them'.²³

Despite the apparently indifferent attitude of the sovereign—or, perhaps, precisely because of it—in A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare calls attention to the artistic distance between the professional players and their putatively crude predecessors; and he does so by incorporating a comic representation of such players into his play. This professional self-consciousness is the very hallmark of the play's celebrated metatheatricality—its calling of attention to its own artifice, to its own artistry. Such metatheatricality prescribes the interpretive schema of much modern scholarship in literary and theatre history, which envisions Shakespearean drama as the culmination of a long process of artistic evolution. A Midsummer Night's Dream parodies antecedent dramatic forms and performance styles: the amateur acting traditions that had been largely suppressed along with the civic drama by the end of the 1570s, and the work of the professional companies active during the 1570s and earlier 1580s; and it juxtaposes to them the representational powers of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and their playwright.²⁴ This contrast was made manifest by Shakespeare's company in the very process of performing A Midsummer Night's Dream. In particular, it was demonstrated in what we may presume was their consummately professional comic enactment of the mechanicals' vexed rehearsals and inept performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. The dramaturgical problems with which the mechanicals struggle show them to be incapable of comprehending the relationship between the actor and his part. They have no skill in the art of personation; they lack an adequate conception of playing. The contrast between amateur and professional modes of playing is incarnated in the performance of Bottom—by which I mean the Elizabethan player's performance of Bottom's performance of Pyramus. The amateur actor who wants to be cast in all the parts, the only character to be literally metamorphosed, is also the one who, despite his translations into an ass-headed monster and a fabled lover, remains immutably—fundamentally—Bottom. The fully professional collaboration between the imaginative playwright and the protean player of the Lord Chamberlain's Men creates the illusion of Bottom's character precisely by creating the illusion of his incapacity to translate himself into other parts.

The play-within-the-play device calls attention to the theatrical transaction between the players and their audience. In the process of foregrounding the imaginative and dramaturgical dynamics of this transaction, A Midsummer Night's Dream also calls attention to its socio-political dynamics. Shakespeare's Duke Theseus formulates policy when he proclaims that 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact'; that 'Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends' (5.1.7-8, 4-6). The social order of Theseus's Athens depends upon his authority to name the forms of mental disorder and his power to control its subjects. Theseus's analogising of the hyperactive imaginations of lunatics, lovers and poets accords with the orthodox perspective of Elizabethan medical and moral discourses. The latter insisted that the unregulated passions and disordered fantasies of the ruler's subjects—from Bedlam beggars to melancholy courtiers—were an inherent danger to themselves, to their fellows, and to the state.²⁵ For Theseus, no less than for the Elizabethan Privy Council, the ruler's task is to comprehend—to understand and to contain—the energies and motives, the diverse, unstable and potentially seditious apprehensions of the ruled. But the Duke—so self-assured and benignly condescending in his comprehension—might also have some cause for apprehension, for he himself and the fictional society over which he rules have been shaped by the fantasy of a poet.

Theseus's deprecation of lunatics, lovers and poets is his unwitting exposition of the scope and limits of his own wisdom. The wonderful musings of the newly awakened Bottom provide a serio-comic prelude to the Duke's set piece. Fitfully remembering his nocturnal adventure, Bottom apprehends something strange and admirable in his metamorphosis and his liaison with Titania:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. . . . The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called 'Bottom's Dream', because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. (4.1.203-16)

Bottom's (non-)exposition of his dream is a garbled allusion to a passage in St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians:

And we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: not the wisdom of this world, neither of the princes of this world, which come to nought.

But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hid wisdom, which God had determined before the world, unto our glory.

Which none of the princes of this world hath known; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But as it is written, The things which eye hath not seen, neither ear hath heard, neither came into man's heart, are, which God hath prepared for them that love him.

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.

(1 Corinthians 2: 6-10; Geneva Bible, 1560 ed.)

This allusion has often been remarked. Insufficiently remarked, however, is the political resonance that the passage may have had for Elizabethan playgoers and readers; and the possibility that, in selecting it for parody, the playwright may have had a point to make, however oblique its expression.²⁶ The New Testament passage is built upon an opposition between the misconceived and misdirected profane knowledge possessed by 'the princes of this world' and the spiritual wisdom accessible only to those who humble themselves before a transcendent source of power and love. The biblical text does more than construct a generalised opposition between the profane and the sacred: it gives that abstract moral opposition a political edge by proposing an inverse relationship between the temporal hierarchy of wealth and power and the spiritual hierarchy of wisdom and virtue.

The attitude displayed by the professional playwright towards Bottom, and towards the artisanal culture that he personifies, is a complex mixture of affection, indulgence, condescension and ridicule; and the complexity of that mixture is nowhere more conspicuous than in the speech about Bottom's dream. The comical garbling of the allusion and its farcical dramatic context function to mediate the sacred text, allowing Shakespeare to appropriate it for his own dramatic ends. An opposition between sacred and profane knowledge is displaced into an opposition between Bottom's capacity to apprehend the story of the night and Theseus's incapacity to comprehend it. Shakespeare's professional theatre implicitly repudiates Theseus's attitude towards the entertainer's art precisely by incorporating and ironically circumscribing it. I am suggesting, then, that Shakespeare evokes the scriptural context in order to provide a numinous resonance for the play's temporal, metatheatrical concerns; and that these concerns are rooted in the distinction and relationship between the instrumental authority of the state, as personified in Queen Elizabeth, and the imaginative authority of the public and professional theatre, as personified in the common player-playwright. At the same time, Bottom's dream mediates the relationship of the socio-economically ascendant artist-entrepreneur to his modest roots. It is fitting that the play's chosen instrument for its scriptural message of socio-spiritual inversion is a common artisan and amateur player named Bottom—one who, earlier in the play, has alluded to the raging tyrant of the Nativity pageants in the mystery cycles (1.2.19, 36). By casting Bottom to play in 'an interlude before the Duke and the Duchess, on his wedding-day at night' (1.2.5-7), Shakespeare's play firmly records the redirection of the popular dramatic impulse toward the celebration of 'the princes of this world'. Nevertheless, Bottom's rehearsal of his wondrous strange dream is an oblique marker, an incongruous evocation, of an ethos that A Midsummer Night's Dream and its playwright have ostensibly left behind—a trace of social, spiritual and (perhaps) autobiographical filiation.

V

When Puck addresses the audience in the epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, his reference to 'we shadows' (5.1.409) implies not only the personified spirits in the play but also the players of Shakespeare's company who have performed the play. Theseus registers this meaning when he says of the mechanicals' acting in Pyramus and Thisbe, that 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them' (5.1.208-9). The statement itself, however, is belied on two counts: on the one hand, the rehearsal and performance of the play-within-the-play invite the audience to make qualitative distinctions between the best and the worst of shadows; and, on the other hand, the onstage audience at the Athenian court refuses to amend imaginatively the theatrical limitations of the mechanicals. When Puck addresses his master as 'King of shadows' (3.2.347), the appellation recognises Oberon as the principal player in the action, whose powers of awareness and manipulation also mark him as the play's internal dramatist.²⁷ Although Titania has a limited power to manipulate Bottom, an artisan and an amateur actor, she herself is manipulated by this 'King of shadows', who is also her husband and her lord. Thus, in the triangulated relationship of Titania, Oberon and Bottom, a fantasy of masculine dependency upon woman is expressed and contained within a fantasy of masculine control over woman. And, more specifically, the social reality of the Elizabethan players' dependency upon Queen Elizabeth is inscribed within the imaginative reality of a player-dramatist's control over the Faery Queen.

The relationship of Shakespeare's play and its production to traditions of amateur and occasional dramatic entertainments is at once internalised and distanced in the mechanicals' ridiculous rehearsal and performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. And by the way in which it frames the attitudes of Theseus and the play-within-the-play's courtly audience, A Midsummer Night's Dream internalises and distances the relationship of the public and professional theatre to the pressures and constraints of noble and royal patronage. Its resonances of popular pastimes and amateur civic drama on the one hand, and of royal pageantry and courtly entertainments on the other, serve to locate A Midsummer Night's Dream in relationship to its cultural antecedents and its socio-economic context. Through the play of affinity and difference, these resonances serve to distinguish Shakespeare's comedy from both amateur and courtly modes, and to define it as a production of the professional and commercial theatre. The much noted metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night's Dream is nowhere more apparent and striking than in this process by which the play assimilates its own cultural determinants and produces them anew as its own dramatic effects. When I suggest that the play simultaneously subsumes and projects the conditions of its own possibility, I am not making a claim for its timelessness and universality. On the contrary, I am attempting to locate it more precisely in the ideological matrix of its original production. The foregrounding of theatricality as a mode of human cognition and human agency is a striking feature of Shakespearean drama.

Such theatricality becomes possible at a particular historical moment. By this means, the professional practitioners of an immensely popular and bitterly contested emergent cultural practice articulate their collective consciousness of their place in the social and cultural order—the paradoxical location of the theatre and of theatricality at once on the margins and at the centre of the Elizabethan world.

Notes

Quotations follow The

¹Arden Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (1979), abbreviated to MND and cited by act, scene and line.

² On the connection between weavers and social protest, see Theodore B. Leinwand, ' "I believe we must leave the killing out": Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night's Dream', Renaissance Papers (1986), 11-30, esp. pp. 14-21; also Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 56-7. On Elizabethan food riots, see John Walter and Keith Wrightson, 'Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England', Past & Present, 71 (1976), 22-42; Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660 (Berkeley, 1980); John Walter, 'A "Rising of the People"? The Oxford Rising of 1596', Past & Present, 107 (1985), 90-143.

³ On the playwright's social origins and his father's position in Stratford, see S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford, 1977), pp. 14-44.

⁴ See Clifford Davidson, ' "What hempen home-spuns have we swagg'ring here?" Amateur Actors in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Coventry Civic Plays and Pageants', Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987), 87-99.

⁵ 'Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town' (1983), rpt. in Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 16-47; quotation from pp. 38, 44. James emphasises the centrality of the feast of Corpus Christi to late medieval urban culture in England, and the dialectical relationship between procession and play.

⁶ Charles Phythian-Adams, 'Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450-1550', in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700: Essays in Urban History, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (1972), pp. 57-85; quotations from pp. 57, 80. Also see his monograph, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979).

⁷ Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), p. 266.

⁸ On the process by which cultural practices were appropriated and invented in order to aggrandise the Tudor state, see Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (1977); Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), pp. 293-310, 351-405; Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985), pp. 43-71; David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 1-129.

⁹ See Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture, p. 41; Harold C. Gardiner, S. J., Mysteries' End (New Haven, 1946); R. W. Ingram, 'Fifteen-seventy-nine and the Decline of Civic Religious Drama in Coventry', in The Elizabethan Theatre VIII, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Port Credit, Ontario), pp. 114-28.

¹⁰ Rubin points out that 'in those towns where political power and wealth were exercised through craft gilds, like York, Coventry, Beverley, Norwich, dramatic cycles were supported and presented by the crafts, expressing both the processional-communal and the sectional elements in town life.' (Corpus Christi, p. 275).

In some significant respects, the dramatic traditions of late medieval London differed from those of such towns. Mervyn James maintains that in London, even in the late middle ages, 'the celebration of Corpus Christi never acquired a public and civic status, and play cycles of the Corpus Christi type never developed. London had its great cycle plays; but the London cycle was performed by professional actors, and had no connection either with Corpus Christi or the city gilds.' (Society, Politics and Culture, pp. 41-2). Rubin appears to dispute this assertion, and presents a more complex picture of processional and dramatic elements in the capital's Corpus Christi festivities. She starts from the position that 'once we discard a view which imputes a necessary development of the Corpus Christi drama into full-cycle form we are better able to appreciate the variety of dramatic forms which evolved for Corpus Christi, and the ubiquity of dramatic creation.' (Corpus Christi, p. 275). She maintains that, although 'London never developed a town-wide celebration for the feast, a project which is almost unthinkable in so large and varied a city', it nevertheless sustained 'a series of processions related to parish churches, fraternities, crafts'. The most comprehensive of these was the 'great play' organised by the Skinners' Company, presented over several days 'in the form of tableaux vivants' (pp. 275-6).

¹¹ See the documents printed in Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. R. W. Ingram (Toronto, 1981), pp. 233-4. Also see Ingram, 'Fifteen-seventy-nine'.

¹² See Robert Langham, A Letter, with Introduction, Notes and Commentary by R. J. P. Kuin (Leiden, 1983), pp. 52-5. The performance of the Hocktide show was preceded by a rustic brideale, complete with such village pastimes as morris dancing and running at quintain (pp. 49-52). Significantly, neither of these common and amateur entertainments is mentioned in George Gascoigne's self-promoting courtly account, The Princely Pleasures at the Court at Kenilworth (1576).

¹³ On allusions to the rites of May in MND, see 1.1.167, 4.1.132; on St Valentine's Day, 4.1.138. On the inseparability of St John's Day and Midsummer Night 'in the religious and folk consciousness of the sixteenth century', see Anca Vlasopolos, 'The Ritual of Midsummer: A Pattern for A Midsummer Night's Dream', Renaissance Quarterly, 31 (1978), 21-9; esp. pp. 23-6. On rites and games of May Day and Midsummer Eve and Day, also see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form in Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, 1959), pp. 119-24; Francois Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1991), passim. On Corpus Christi as a summer festival, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 208-9, 213, 243, 271, 273.

¹⁴ In his Introduction to the Arden edition of MND, Brooks comments that 'Oberon's description of the mermaid and the shooting stars . . . reflects Shakespeare's acquaintance with the kind of elaborate courtly entertainment which combined a mythological water-pageant with fireworks, rather like those presented to Elizabeth by Leicester at Kenilworth [1575] and the earl of Hertford at Elvetham [1591]' (p. xxxix).

¹⁵ See Louis A. Montrose, 'Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele's Araygnement of Paris', ELH, A Journal of English Literary History, 47 (1980), 433-61.

¹⁶ See Helen M. Ostovich, ' "So Sudden and Strange a Cure": A Rudimentary Masque in Every Man Out of His Humour', English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 315-32; Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City, 1991), pp. 136-7.

¹⁷ Compare G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London, 1962), pp. 329-30.

¹⁸ The leading contenders for the aristocratic wedding at which the play was supposedly first performed are that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, with Lady Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the earl of Oxford and grand-daughter of Lord Burghley (26 January 1594/5), and that of Thomas, son of Lord Berkeley, with Elizabeth, daughter of Sir George Carey and granddaughter of Lord Hunsdon, the lord chamberlain and patron of Shakespeare's company (19 February 1595/6). For a summary of the arguments, see MND, liii-lvii.

¹⁹ Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time 1590-1642 (1971; rpt. Princeton, 1986), p. 147. On the Revels Office, also see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols., Oxford, 1923), I, 71-105; Janet Clare, 'Art made tongue-tied by authority ': Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester, 1990); and Dutton, Mastering the Revels.

²⁰ See Louis Adrian Montrose, '"Shaping Fantasies": Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture', Representations, 2 (1983), 61-94; rpt. in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 31-64. I have incorporated some passages from this earlier study into the present one; in revised form, both will be incorporated into a more comprehensive study of MND, the Elizabethan theatre, and the Elizabethan state.

²¹ Thomas Churchyard, A Discourse of The Queen's Majesty's Entertainment in Suffolk and Norfolk (1578), rpt. in Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, 1540-1642, ed. David Galloway (Toronto, 1984), p. 302.

²² B[ernard] G[arter], The Joyful Receiving of the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty into Her Highness' City of Norwich (1578), rpt. in Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, pp. 266-7, 271.

²³ Patent of 10 May 1574, rpt. in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, II, 87-8.

²⁴ Davidson convincingly suggests that the mechanicals' rehearsal and performance of Pyramus and Thisbe is designed to burlesque 'the older dramatic styles (including . . . the theatrical styles of the public theatre fashionable before c. 1585) with their tendency toward bombastic language and clumsy use of mythological subjects'; and to conjoin this burlesque with one directed toward the acting capacities of the amateurs who performed in the civic religious drama, which had been largely suppressed by the early 1580s (' "What hempen home-spuns have we swagg'ring here?'", p. 88).

²⁵ Among modern critical and historical studies, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, Mich., 1951); Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1981); Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton, 1986); Karin Coddon, '"Suche Strange Desygns": Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture', Renaissance Drama, n. s., 20 (1989), 51-75.

²⁶ The 'context of profound spiritual levelling' implied by Shakespeare's biblical parody is noted in Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, p. 68. Patterson pursues the 'genial thesis' that MND imagines 'an idea of social play that could cross class boundaries without obscuring them, and by those crossings imagine the social body whole again' (p. 69); accordingly, she focuses upon the integrative 'Christian communitas' suggested in 1 Corinthians 12: 14-15, rather than upon the obvious and immediate oppositional context of 1 Corinthians 2: 6-10. For another recent study of the relationship between late Elizabethan social conflict and the tensions of rank within MND, see Leinwand, '"I believe we must leave the killing out'". Less sanguine than Patterson, Leinwand concludes that 'Shakespeare criticises the relations of power in his culture, but does so with remarkable sensitivity to the nuances of threat and accommodation which animate these relations' (p. 30).

²⁷ For 'shadow' as 'applied rhetorically . . . to an actor or a play in contrast to the reality represented', see OED, s.v. 'Shadow', sense 1.6.b. The earliest usages cited by OED are in Lyly, Euphues, and Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.