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Russell Jackson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.

‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’

A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with the promise of a concord, to resolve through marriage the discordant violence of Theseus’ conquest of the Amazonian queen:

‘Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my Sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries.
But I will wed thee in another key…’

But the achievement of harmony is interrupted by an angry father who demands the application of the ‘harsh Athenian law’ to his daughter, who has fallen in love with Lysander, a suitor he does not approve of. Theseus is obliged (he says) to insist that she must marry Demetrius, or incur one of two alternative punishments: death or a life of enforced chastity as a nun. By the end of the first scene two of the play’s trajectories have been established: in four days’ time Theseus and Hippolyta will be united and tonight Hermia will flee to the woods with her chosen lover, pursued by Demetrius who is himself pursued by Helena. Meanwhile, a band of Athenian workmen will be preparing a play for the wedding celebrations and – so as to avoid prying neighbours – they will do their rehearsing in the wood.

Nothing in this first movement of the play prepares us for the fairies, although the title and the references to the phases of the moon are a strong hint at the supernatural. The play reaches the wood before the lovers, and shows what awaits them there. Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow, may delight in playing practical jokes on mere mortals, but he is also a power who must be appeased. The fairy that might do your housework while you sleep is just as likely to sour the milk when you try to make butter or pull a stool from under your bum. Worse things had been known to happen: the fairies were capable of taking humans and subjecting them to indignity if not injury or even death, and there was a fine line between fairy and devil.

The really powerful fairies soon appear. The marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta – themselves legendary and heroic figures - is mirrored in the fairy world by the enmity between Oberon and Titania, which has affected everyday human life in what seems now like a prefiguring of global warming. The progress of the year has been disrupted, and unseasonable floods have encroached on pastures and even places of pastime (‘the nine men’s morris is filled up with mud.’) Both Oberon and Titania have loved mortals – including Theseus and Hippolyta - and enjoyed liaisons with them. Amorous involvement with these spirits of no common rate brings dangers as well as rewards, but they usually choose their favourites, and take them from the upper echelons of mortal life. When Oberon’s knowledge of magic flowers and Puck’s nonchalant devilment make Titania fall in love with Bottom, the transformed weaver, she is forfeiting her power to love where she chooses, and matching herself far below her social station as well as with an ass. There is cruelty in this, as well as in the mortal lovers’ behaviour: we are not dealing with benign or asexual beings, human or fairy.

Lurking in this famously lyrical play is a profound scepticism about what lovers do and say. The dramatist who made Demetrius and Hermia reflect lyrically (and in a duet) that ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’, also makes the same Demetrius desert his love and turn to Helena with all the clichés of amorous poetry:

‘O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy…’

And he is also the poet whose sonnets include trenchant mockery of the conventions of love poetry – ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.’ However hard one may try, attraction usually prevails over good sense. Bottom, on the receiving end of the Fairy Queen’s desires, and preening himself on his intelligence as well as his good looks, has wit enough to know this truism: ‘And yet, to say truth, reason and love keep little company nowadays.’

In the mortal world Bottom’s ambitions are focussed on making a grand impression in the tragic love story that he and his colleagues will perform for the wedding feast of Theseus and Hippolyta. Like the other mortals in the wood, he has no idea of the spectacle he presents to Puck and Oberon, or (of course) to the audience watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In fact, only one character in the play dreams – Hermia, who wakes from a nightmare to find her lover has deserted her. After their night in the wood, the four young lovers can only grope for an explanation of their experiences in terms of dreams, but even then they are not sure. Some power has brought them to the brink of tragedy, and then made them fall asleep in such a way that when they wake their love-lives will have been sorted out. In a move that owes more to the approaching end of the play than to consistency in government, Theseus overrules Hermia’s father, overturns the ‘strict Athenian law’ and invites them all to a wedding feast.

Bottom, who has undergone the most momentous transformation of them all, is sure that he has had ‘a most rare vision’ – quite what it was, he cannot say, but he is determined that he will get Peter Quince to write a ballad on it, and it shall be called (what else?) ‘Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.’ The ballad never gets performed, but the play is ‘preferred’ over the other unpromising entertainments offered to Theseus. A tragic tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe provides, as it promised, ‘very tragical mirth.’ The writing revels in the kind of poetic excess that Shakespeare enjoyed parodying, and (like the play’s scenes in the wood) it evokes moonshine:

‘Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams,
I thank thee, moon, for shining now so bright,
For by thy gracious, golden, glittering gleams,
I trust to take of truest Thisbe sight.’

Why say something once when you can say it three times? Just in case anyone fails to understand, and in ignorance of the simple and effective methods of Shakespeare’s theatre, an actor will both play the moon and explain the impersonation.

When the comical tragedy is over, Theseus invokes the world he and the other mortals only dimly apprehend: ‘Lovers, to bed. / ‘Tis almost fairy time.’ The story of Pyramus and Thisbe (‘this palpable-gross play’) has ‘beguiled’ the time dividing the end of the feast from bed-time. The four days announced at the beginning of the play seem in fact to have become only two days and the night between them, and this theatrical sleight-of-hand is in itself a kind of ‘magic’ bringing us to the borders between our belief in the play we have been watching and the ‘reason’ that tells us it is only a play. In a deferred ending that is not completed until Puck is alone on stage, we are taken back to a world the actors (also ‘shadows’ in Elizabethan parlance) have performed in, but of which many of the characters have no understanding. We remain – as we have been all along – on a level with Puck and Oberon, and for us the lovers’ jangling has been a sport. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’

Russell Jackson

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