by Emma Smith
Our schoolroom version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has neutered a much darker, sexier play: the ‘dream’ of the title is more Dr Freud than Dr Seuss, and the vanilla framing device of marriage creates erotic space for a much raunchier and riskier set of options, from bestiality to pederasty, from wife-swapping to sexual masochism. This really isn’t a play for children, as a school party discovered at an unexpectedly raunchy Royal Shakespeare Company performance. Shocked staff hurriedly ushered them out when, as their teacher explained to journalists: ‘What we saw was not what we were expecting. It was sexually explicit. The production has driven a coach and carriage through our school’s religious and sex education policies.’ Nor is A Midsummer Night’s Dream a great hymn to marriage, as critics used to argue, perhaps originally performed at some aristocratic Tudor wedding. Rather, its attitude to marriage is knowingly sardonic. Rediscovering an X-rated A Midsummer Night’s Dream means engaging with its dark, adult depictions of dangerous desire.
From the outset, A Midsummer Night’s Dream casts a jaded eye on romantic conventions. Theseus, Duke of Athens, sighs impatiently for the new moon and his ‘nuptial hour’ (1.1.1), even as he acknowledges to his bride Hippolyta that: ‘I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’ (1.1.16–17). There is no reply from his Amazonian consort. Productions often take the hint, bringing the captive queen on stage in chains, or depicting her as a disdainful or unwilling partner in the anticipated marriage: the hints of coercive or sadomasochistic sex are sometimes present. The 2016 BBC television version adapted by Russell T. Davies and directed by David Kerr, for example, had Hippolyta muzzled and straitjacketed. As both prisoner and bride, Hippolyta establishes marriage as bondage (with its simultaneous associations of erotic and domestic servitude), setting the scene for Egeus, who brings for judgement by the duke the case of his disobedient daughter, Hermia. Hermia wishes to marry Demetrius; Egeus favours Lysander as her suitor. Again, marital choice is constrained, and love and imprisonment are aligned. Egeus threatens to kill Hermia ‘according to our law’ (1.1.44) if she refuses his chosen suitor: Hermia maintains that she will not accept ‘the unwishèd yoke’ (1.1.81) of marriage to Lysander. The stakes for her refusal are high, and the silent presence of Hippolyta on stage throughout this trial amplifies the presentation of Athens as a patriarchal world deeply inimical to women’s desires. No wonder the wood to which the lovers escape is so associated with powerful women – from the fairy queen herself, Titania, to an apparent allusion to Queen Elizabeth as ‘a fair vestal’ (2.1.158) or ‘imperial vot’ress … / In maiden meditation’ (2.1.163–4).
But neither are women’s desires endorsed and corroborated, as they usually are in Shakespearean comedy, where women typically know what they want and how to get it (think of Rosalind, or Viola, or Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well). Hermia’s childhood friend Helena is also in love with Demetrius (who was previously in love with her but has shifted his attentions to Hermia, earning the scornful designation of ‘spotted and inconstant man’ from his rival (1.1.110)). With two male and two female lovers, the plot is now set. Various twists and turns ensue, since, as the play archly remarks, the ‘course of true love never did run smooth’ (1.1.134), but in the end these two couples marry. But whereas later romantic comedies will work hard to characterize and differentiate their lovers, A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets both of its men from Shakespearean comedy central casting. It’s hard to remember, still less to care, who gets off with whom at the end, or to find any means by which to distinguish Demetrius from Lysander. Given that Hermia professes herself ready to become a ‘barren sister’ in a ‘shady cloister’ (1.1.71–2) rather than marry herself to Lysander, it is surely significant that the play gives her vehement preference so little encouragement. To all other eyes, Demetrius and Lysander are virtually interchangeable. The stress throughout the play is not on the lovers’ ultimate distinctiveness but on their interchangeability. ‘Demetrius is a worthy gentleman’, Theseus tells Hermia, trying to persuade her of her father’s preference. ‘So is Lysander’, comes the reply (1.1.52–3). Lysander urges his own claim as equivalence rather than superiority: ‘I am, my lord, as well derived as he, / As well possessed’ (1.1.99–100).
Elsewhere in Shakespeare, love rivals tend to be characterized as risibly unsuitable: the oafish Cloten who desires Imogen in Cymbeline, for instance, or the unfeasible desire of Phoebe for a woman-dressed-as-a-man in As You Like It. These plays present as alternatives suitors who are clearly implausible, and they are unsupported both by their love object and by the play plot. By contrast, A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives us two lovers who are similar rather than different, with equal social and personal claims to love Hermia – and, for that matter, Helena. The plot twist, aided by Puck’s bungling application of a love-potion, turns the men’s joint attention away from Hermia to Helena: again, they are in indistinguishable lockstep. Even Lysander himself can claim only to be as worthy as Demetrius. In place of romantic comedy’s usual valorization of its individual couples, A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests that any combination is as good as any other (although it’s striking that, contrary to the playfulness with sexuality that marks Twelfth Night, written five or six years later, here it seems unthinkable to Shakespeare that Puck’s mischief might result in – horror! – same-sex desire).
So A Midsummer Night’s Dream is less a romantic comedy in which boy meets girl than a satire on romantic comedy, in which boys ricochet between girls at random, revealing the shallowness of their impulses. The genre’s absurd conventions are thoroughly parodied, especially the trope of love at first sight, roundly satirized in the application of Puck’s love-potion. The botanical description of this elixir makes the bawdy implications clear: ‘a little western flower – / Before, milk-white; now, purple with love’s wound – / And maidens call it love-in-idleness’ (2.1.166–8). Purple with love’s wound, indeed. ‘The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid / Will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees’ (170–72). It’s a pharmaceutical skit on romantic comedy, for a play in which the eyes are the most prominent erogenous zones, and sight, rather than speech (as in the banter and flirtation of Much Ado About Nothing, for example), carries the frisson of sexual contact.
Puck uses his potion to mix up the Athenian lovers, but the play’s most savagely gleeful matchmaking comes as Oberon anoints the sleeping Titania. Enraged by Titania’s refusal to relinquish a changeling boy in her charge, Oberon seeks to humiliate her with the help of love-in-idleness:
What thou seest when thou dost wake,
Do it for thy true love take;
Love and languish for his sake.
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wak’st, it is thy dear.
Wake when some vile thing is near.
(2.2.33–40)
The ‘vile thing’ that Titania takes for her true love is indeed part-animal: it is the brash weaver-cum-actor Nick Bottom, who has been transformed with a magical ass’s head. Titania is immediately enamoured of this creature and takes him to her fairy bower.
Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare established a whimsical iconography for this scene, in which the queen of the fairies sat decorously in her flowery gazebo, bedecked with greenery, perhaps stroking the ears of a snoozing creature with an ass head garnished with flowers. Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1851 painting of the scene, Titania and Bottom, is a good example of this nineteenth-century interpretation: Titania, in a gauzy but modest frock, snuggles into her asinine paramour, overlooked by fairies and a disconcertingly alert white rabbit claimed to have inspired another alarming dream work, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. All very decorative and decorous. But surely the effects of the potion are intended to be more carnal than this enchanted whimsy, if they are to have the effect of making Titania relinquish her infant charge? ‘Tie up my lov
e’s tongue’ (3.1.193) (you’d have to silence the garrulous Bottom somehow if you had any other plans for him), Titania instructs her fairies, and ‘lead him to my bower’ (189). So she can stroke his ears? Come off it! A magically infatuated and passionate fairy queen, a man with a donkey head, an inviting grassy bower: it’s not rocket science. The sleeping Bottom probably hasn’t conked out because of his exertions preparing the duke’s wedding entertainment. This is a scene that toys with unshowable scenes of sex and bestiality and that invites us to unseemly speculations about a lover hung like a donkey (it’s a biblical phrase: a lustful woman in the Book of Ezekiel is described in the Geneva bible as ‘dot[ing] upon their servants whose members are as the members of asses’). It embodies a transgressive sexual encounter straight out of the pages of Shakespeare’s favourite reading, the classical manual of inter-species carnality, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The half-ass Bottom is a grotesque, comic version of Ovid’s Minotaur, the monstrous combination of bull and man that roamed the Cretan labyrinth and was ultimately killed by Theseus. Shakespeare’s comedy has suppressed this dark version of his mythical duke’s backstory, but not completely: in the figure of Bottom its dangerous energies are translated into lewd absurdity.
Titania’s word for her desires is, of course, ‘love’: ‘how I love thee, how I dote on thee!’ (4.1.44). In the sixteenth century, as now, this word encompassed a range of emotions and behaviours, from romantic yearning to passionate sex. Once we see Titania’s bower less as a sentimental nursery illustration and more as a site of pleasurable sexual transgression, we can recognize other sexualized meanings in the play. The issue of the Indian boy so beloved of both Titania and Oberon, and the source of the passionate discord between them, also carries an erotic charge. The repeated adjectives of Puck’s account make it clear that the boy, who never appears in the text of the play but is often incorporated in stage productions, is an object of heightened desire:
For Oberon is passing fell and wroth
Because that she, as her attendant, hath
A lovely boy stol’n from an Indian king.
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.
But she perforce withholds the lovèd boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy.
(2.1.20–27)
The adolescent boy who is a love object for both men and women is something Shakespeare will explore in his depiction of cross-dressing heroines later in his comic career: here, the desirable boy is kept in the margins. But his role seems to be to crystallize versions of impossible desire in the play, and their challenge, as here, to marriage. The fairy quarrel between Oberon and Titania over this child results in their violent estrangement. And their ‘dissension’ (2.1.116) has a catastrophic impact on the human ‘mazèd world’ (113): crop failure, extreme weather, climate change. Love here produces ‘a progeny of evils’ (115): those ‘monstrous’ births that were understood by the Elizabethans to register the sinfulness of the parents or their transgressive sexual union.
Just as Victorian ideas about childlike fairies have shaped the play’s reception, so too has the often-repeated assertion that the play was written for performance at some aristocratic marriage. Since there is no evidence for this, and no specific wedding has ever been convincingly identified as the occasion for the play, the idea looks like one of those critical myths that are useful largely in telling us what we would like to believe. Making A Midsummer Night’s Dream all about marriage is an attempt to regularize its depiction of desire, and turn its energies towards a celebration of the socially conservative institution of marriage rather than the transgressive energies of sexual desire. In fact, the play actually explores the disconnect between intense and discomfiting sexual desire on the one hand, and the social, patriarchal pragmatics of marriage on the other. Marriage is structurally necessary, both for Elizabethan society and for romantic comedy, but it is presented here as a conventional and compromised inversion of the powerful, unreciprocated and nightmarish passions the play explores so insistently.
Violent, uncontrollable, animal desire is the real dynamic that A Midsummer Night’s Dream lets loose – and then proceeds to try to bundle back up within the regulatory structures of marriage. Dreams are one way of indulging this alternative libidinous economy. Hermia’s panicky description of her dream of Lysander’s faithlessness is unmistakably phallic: ‘Methought a serpent ate my heart away, / And you sat smiling at his cruel prey’ (2.2.155–6). It follows from their exchange about how to regulate sexual desire in the dangerously unregulated and uncivilized wood: ‘Lie further off, in humane modesty. / Such separation as may well be said / Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid’ (2.2.63–5). Puck, the wood and desire itself conspire to challenge the stability of Hermia’s conventional morality, as she comes to see sex and sexual attraction as potentially dangerous and destructive. But Hermia is not the only sleeping, and dreaming, character in the play: Lysander, Helena, Demetrius, Titania and Bottom all also sleep for some part of the drama. This opens up the possibility that what happens to them afterwards is in their dream rather than reality (Dorothy’s faint just before she sees her Kansas house whirling away to the Technicolor Oz might be our prototype here). Bottom claims he will write an account of his erotic escapade and call it ‘Bottom’s Dream’. And right at the end of the play, Robin Goodfellow’s epilogue suggests the whole play has been ‘no more yielding but a dream’ (Epilogue 6). Like modern Hollywood, the early modern theatre is a kind of dream factory, providing theatregoers with an escapist fantasy from which they only reluctantly awake to return to their humdrum lives. But escapism has a darker side too: sometimes it’s a relief to wake up.
Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, influence and sometime collaborator, wrote a treatise about dreams that helps us to understand some of the Elizabethan meanings. For Nashe, dreams access a kind of primordial tumult: ‘no such figure as the first chaos whereout the world was extraught, as our dreams in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places, are confounded and meet together.’ We might see the play’s structural juxtaposition of the different worlds of the court and the wood, the human and the animal, upper and lower class, fairy and mortal, male and female, as corresponding to this pre-creation entropy into which Nashe suggests dreams pitch us anew. Nashe also suggests that dreams parody our waking experience: ‘On those images of memory whereon we build in the day comes some superfluous humour of ours, like a jackanapes, in the night, and erects a puppet stage, or some such ridiculous idle childish invention.’ A ridiculous idle puppet stage in the night? Surely this must be the mechanicals’ laughable play, ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ (1.2.11).
The play of the doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe that Peter Quince and his troupe of Athenian artisans have been rehearsing takes up much of the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In performance it is often extremely funny, in an over-the-top slapstick style – splicing physical comedy, an emphatically lacklustre script, Carry On innuendo and faux-poor technical execution. But in its central story, the playlet again shows us desire as destructive and violent. Like Hermia dreaming of attack by a snake, Thisbe is menaced by a lion. This seems to symbolize her own animal desires, or perhaps those of her lover, who announces that ‘lion vile hath here deflowered my dear’ (5.1.287) and discovers the tell-tale blood-stained garment that is equivocal evidence for both sex and death. Pyramus’ own suicide when he assumes Thisbe is dead underlines the ways in which desire is lethal, replaying the psycho-sexual dynamic of Romeo and Juliet. The chronology of Shakespeare’s plays is not sufficiently clear for us to be sure whether ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ follows and parodies Romeo and Juliet, or whether it might pre-empt that tragic play’s camp claims to high emotional seriousness. Wherever it fits into Shakespeare’s work, part of the problem with ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in the modern thea
tre is that it can play as just too effortfully funny, even hysterical, in its desperate attempt to overlay the play’s anxieties and displace its violently sexual urges into slapstick. The play’s real concerns – those desires that tempt us to our own destruction – keep bobbing up to the surface. A Midsummer Night’s Dream uses comedy not to perpetuate romantic clichés but to look beneath them. It is, writes Jan Kott, ‘the most erotic of Shakespeare’s plays’, adding that in no other play ‘except Troilus and Cressida, is the eroticism expressed so brutally’.
That desire might be the darker side of marriage is the play’s overarching thematic example of the structure of duality that shapes A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Those doubled lovers are part of a system of doubling and double-vision that extends throughout the play. For a start, A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes heavy use of rhymed couplets: more than half of its lines are rhymed, and this high proportion is amplified by companion rhetorical devices that repeat phrases and syntax to create linguistic echoes. We are tuned into this verbal music early in the play (it’s not surprising, given its lyrical energy, that this is one of the Shakespeare plays that has had most musical adaptations, from Purcell to Mendelssohn to Britten). In the opening scene we can hear Helena and Hermia’s parallel phrases and shared rhymes working to emphasize the mirroring or doubling of the two female characters.