Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare is the poet of double vision. The father of twins, he was a mingler of comedy and tragedy, low life and high, prose and verse. He was a countryman who worked in the city, a teller of English folktales who was equally versed in the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome. His mind and world were poised between Catholicism and Protestantism, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions, rational thinking and visceral instinct. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of his truly essential works because nowhere else is his double vision more apparent than in this play's movement between the city and the wood, day and night, reason and imagination, waking life and dream.

Wood, night, imagination, dream. These are the co-ordinates of the second form of sight, which is best described as magical thinking. It is the mode of being that belongs to visionaries, astrologers, 'wise women' and poets. It conjures up a world animated with energies and spirit forces; it finds correspondences between earthly things and divine. The eye that sees in this way rolls in a fine frenzy, glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. It bodies forth the forms of things unknown, turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.

Magical thinking answers a deep human need. It is a way of making sense of things that would otherwise seem painfully arbitrary – things like love and beauty. An ugly birthmark on a baby would be explained away by the suggestion that the infant might be a 'changeling child', swapped in the cradle by some night-tripping fairy. The sheer chance involved in the process of what we now call sexual chemistry may be rationalized in the story of the magic properties of the juice of the flower called love-in-idleness. And in a world dependent on an agricultural economy, bad harvests were somehow more palatable if explained by the intervention of malicious sprites upon the operation of the weather.

In the age of candle and rush-light, nights were seriously dark. The night was accordingly imagined to be seriously different from the day. The very fact of long hours of light itself conferred a kind of magic upon midsummer night. This is the night of the year when magical thinking is given full rein.

Theseus and Hippolyta never meet Oberon and Titania. In the original performance, the respective roles were likely to have been doubled. The contentious king and queen of fairies thus become the dark psychological doubles of the betrothed courtly couple. The correspondence inevitably calls into question the joy of the match between Athenian and Amazon. Oberon actually accuses Titania of having led Theseus 'through the glimmering night' when he deserted 'Perigenia whom he ravishèd', of having made the day duke break faith with a succession of paramours. Shakespeare loves to set up an antithesis, then knock it down. Here he implies that there is ultimately no sharp distinction between day and night: the sexual ethics of Theseus are perhaps as dubious as those of the adulterous child-possessor Titania.

Authority figures, representatives of the day world of political power, win little sympathy in A Midsummer Night's Dream . For the lovers, the forest may be a place of confused identity, but at least it is an escape from the patriarchal match-making of Egeus. In the audience, the characters with whom we engage most warmly are neither monarchs nor lords, but the mischief-making Robin Goodfellow and the ineffable weaver, Bottom. Each in his way is an embodiment of the theatrical spirit that animates everything that is most gloriously Shakespearean. Always a man of the theatre, Shakespeare lives in a world of illusion and make-believe that hits at deepest truths; he knows that his world is fundamentally sympathetic to those other counter-worlds which we call dream and magic.

Robin the Puck compares the mortals to fools in a fond pageant: he has a right to think of himself as author of the play, since it is his dispensing of the love juice that fuels the plot. As for Bottom, at one level he is a bad actor. In both rehearsal and performance of 'Pyramus and Thisbe', it becomes clear that he does not really understand the rules of the theatrical game. But at a deeper level, he is a true dramatic genius: he is gifted with the child's grace to suspend his disbelief. As Pyramus, he puts up a pretty poor performance; as Ass, it is another matter. The comical deficiency of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is that the actors keep telling us that they haven't become their characters. The Assification of Bottom is, by contrast, akin to those brilliant assumptions of disguise – Rosalind becoming Ganymede in As You Like It , Viola Cesario in Twelfth Night – through which Shakespeare simultaneously reminds us that we are in the theatre (an actor is always in disguise) and helps us to forget where we are (we willingly suspend our disbelief). In that forgetting, we participate in the mystery of magical thinking. With Bottom himself, we in the audience may say 'I have had a most rare vision.'

Many members of Shakespeare's original audience, steeped as they were in the New Testament, would have recognized Bottom's account of his dream as an allusion – with the attributes of the different senses comically garbled – to a famous passage in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, in which St Paul says that the eye of man has not seen and the ear of man has not heard the glories that will await us when we enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Geneva translation of the Bible, which Shakespeare knew well, the passage speaks of how the human spirit searches 'the bottom of God's secrets'. Jesus said that in order to enter his kingdom, one had to make oneself as a child. The same may be said of the kingdom of theatre. It is because Bottom has the uncynical, believing spirit of a child that he is vouchsafed his vision. At the same time, Shakespeare himself offers a dangerously grown up image of what heaven might be like: the weaver may be innocent but the fairy queen is an embodiment of sexual experience. The 'virgin queen' Elizabeth was also known as England's 'fairy queen' and the wood in which the action takes place, with its 'nine men's morris' and English wild flowers, is more domestic than Athenian, so there must have been an inherent political risk in the representation of a sexually voracious Titania. Shakespeare perhaps introduced Oberon's apparent allusion to a chaste Elizabeth – the 'fair vestal thronèd by the west' – in order to dismiss any identification of Titania with the real-life fairy queen whom he knew would at some point be a spectator of the play.

The comedy and the charm of the Dream depend on a certain fragility. Good comedy is tragedy narrowly averted, while fairy charm is only safe from sentimentality if attached to some potential for the grotesque. Fairies only deserve to be believed in when they have the capacity to be seriously unpleasant. Of course we laugh when Bottom wears the head of an ass and makes love to a queen, but the image deliberately courts the suggestion of bestiality. In Ovid's Metamorphoses , Shakespeare's favourite book and the source for the tale of 'Pyramus and Thisbe', people are driven by bestial desires and are rewarded by being transformed into animals. In Shakespeare, the ass's head is worn in play, but it remains the closest thing in the drama of his age to an actual animal metamorphosis on stage.

Ovid was rational Rome's great counter-visionary, its magical thinker. His theme is transformation, the inevitability of change. Book fifteen of the Metamorphoses offers a philosophical discourse on the subject, mediated via the philosophy of Pythagoras. From here Shakespeare got many of those images of transience that roll through his Sonnets, but in the Dream he celebrates the transfiguring and enduring power of night vision, of second sight.

Night is the time for fantasy and for love, the time in which your wildest hopes may be indulged but your worst nightmares may have to be confronted. The action in the forest fills the space between the betrothal and the wedding celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta. For the young lovers it is also a time-between, the time, that is to say, of maturation, of discovering who they really are and whom they really love. When Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius emerge after a midsummer night's madness in the wood, they don't quite know what's happened: 'Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double.' And they're not all quite sure if they've finally gained the person they want: 'And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own and not mine own.' But on reflection in the cold light of morning, the strangeness of the night has effected a material transformation, leading the lovers to a truer place than the one where they were at court the day before. Perhaps because she is herself a 'stranger', an outsider in the 'civilized' world of Athens, it is the Amazon queen Hippolyta who understands this best:

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy's images,

And grows to something of great constancy;

But howsoever, strange and admirable.

KEY FACTS

PLOT: Egeus orders his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius; she refuses because she and Lysander are in love. Her friend Helena is in love with Demetrius, who once loved her but now does not. Under the law of Athens, Duke Theseus gives Hermia four days to obey her father on pain of death or confinement to a nunnery. Hermia and Lysander escape this harsh law by running away to the woods. Demetrius pursues them there, with Helena pursing him. In the woods, Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of fairies, have quarrelled because Titania refuses to hand over an Indian changeling boy to be Oberon's page. Oberon instructs the mischievous Puck, Robin Goodfellow, to press the juice of a magic flower on Titania's eyes as she sleeps; it will make her fall in love with the first being she sees on waking. In an attempt to reconcile Demetrius and Helena, Oberon orders that juice should be put on his eyes whilst he is sleeping and she is near, but Robin mistakenly puts it on Lysander, who thus falls in love with Helena. She thinks she is being mocked. Love-juice is then placed on Demetrius' eyes in order to rectify the mistake, but the result is that he too falls for Helena. The boys fight over her and the girls quarrel. While Titania has been sleeping, a company of Athenian artisans under the leadership of Peter Quince has come to the wood to rehearse a play for the ensuing wedding festivities of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Robin puts an ass's head on Bottom the weaver and because of the love-juice Titania falls in love with him. Eventually all is restored to right and the artisans perform their comically tragic play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe'.

MAJOR PARTS: ( with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage ) Bottom (12%/59/5), Theseus (11%/48/3), Helena (11%/36/5), Robin Goodfellow (10%/33/6), Oberon (10%/29/5), Lysander (8%/50/5), Hermia (8%/48/5), Titania (7%/23/5), Demetrius (6%/48/5), Quince (5%/40/4), Flute (3%/18/4), Egeus (3%/13/3), Hippolyta (2%/14/3).

LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 80% verse, 20% prose. Fairly high incidence of rhyme, including deliberately bad rhyme in 'Pyramus and Thisbe'.

DATE: Mentioned in Francis Meres' 1598 list of Shakespeare's plays. Reference in Act 1 scene 2 to courtiers being afraid of a stage lion may allude to an incident in Scotland in August 1594. Strong stylistic resemblances to other 'lyrical' plays of Shakespeare's high Elizabethan period, such as Richard II and especially Romeo and Juliet : this group of plays is traditionally dated to 1595–96. It has often been speculated that the first performance was a private one at an aristocratic wedding celebration, but there is absolutely no evidence for this: in the Elizabethan period, masque-like entertainments rather than full-length plays were commissioned for festive occasions such as weddings.

SOURCES: The main plot is apparently without a direct source, which is unusual for Shakespeare. The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is derived principally from Ovid's Metamorphoses , book four. It also has strong structural resemblances to the Romeo and Juliet story, which Shakespeare dramatized around the same time. The play as a whole absorbs much of Shakespeare's eclectic reading: numerous borrowings of Ovidian mythology, some use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, influence from John Lyly's comedies (especially Endimion for dreaming and Gallathea for the interplay of aristocrats and artisans), an element of Chaucer ( The Knight's Tale for lovers at the court of Theseus, perhaps The Tale of Sir Thopas for the dream of sleeping with an 'elf-queen'), perhaps The Golden Ass of Apuleius (trans. William Adlington, 1566) for Bottom's transformation.

TEXT: Quarto 1600, 'as it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants', apparently typeset from Shakespeare's manuscript or a close transcription of it. Reprinted 1619 (Second Quarto). Folio text was set from a copy of the Second Quarto (thus repeating many of its corrections and errors), but with some consultation of an independent theatre-derived manuscript, which provided additional stage directions, some corrections, and signs of a few revisions, most notably an economizing on roles whereby the Philostrate of Quarto becomes a silent character who only appears in the first scene and the role of Master of the Revels introducing the entertainment in the final scene is taken over by Egeus (which makes for nice tension between him and Lysander, the new son-in-law he did not want). Our edition retains this innovation as well as many local Folio corrections and modernizations, but restores Quarto in many cases where words are mis-set, omitted or transposed as a result of what was almost certainly compositor's error as opposed to editorial alterations on the basis of the theatre manuscript.