A Midsummer Night's Dream (2 page)

Shortly after the Second World War, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published a short essay that inaugurated the modern understanding that Shakespeare's comedies, for all their lightness and play, are serious works of art, every bit as worthy of close attention as his tragedies. Entitled “The Argument of Comedy,” it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the “new comedy” of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The “new comedy” pattern, described by Frye as “a comic Oedipus situation,” turned on “the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice.”
^*

The girl's father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match, but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood's golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: “The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace.”

The union of the lovers brings “a renewed sense of social integration,” expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play—a marriage, a dance, or a feast. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others “who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness.” Malvolio in
Twelfth Night
, Don John in
Much Ado about Nothing
, Jaques in
As You Like It
, Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice:
Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
is his most joyous ending because there is no such figure here. At the outset, the fairies have been associated with chaos and disruption (mischief, rough weather, marital discord), but at the end they bring “blessing” and the restoring of “amends.”

Even here, though, one might wonder in retrospect whether all has quite ended well. The closing song expresses the hope that the children of all three united couples will not suffer “the blots of Nature's hand,” that they will not be marked by “hare-lip, nor scar” nor any other ill-boding deformation. The very act of warding off such portents brings their possibility into play, and the mythologically literate audience member might recall that the child of Theseus and Hippolyta would be Hippolytus. Some disturbing associations then become apparent: the Theseus of ancient Greek myth would desert Hippolyta and marry Phaedra, sister of Ariadne (whom, as the play reminds us, he had earlier seduced and deserted, after she had assisted him with the thread that led him out of the labyrinth after he had slain the Minotaur). Phaedra would fall in love with her stepson Hippolytus, a young man more interested in hunting than women. She would falsely accuse him of raping her and then commit suicide. Blaming his son, Theseus would exile Hippolytus, who would promptly be thrown to his death when his horse ran wild with fear as a bull-like monster rose from the sea. That monster is a reminder of the Minotaur, the monster in the labyrinth with the head of a bull and the body of a man, who was the fruit of the perverted sexual union between a white bull sent by the sea god and Queen Pasiphaë, the mother of Ariadne and Phaedra.

Neither Hippolytus nor Phaedra is mentioned in the play. Yet the wish in the final fairy song for the issue of Theseus and Hippolyta to be “fortunate,” coupled with the play's earlier enactment of the lovemaking between a queen and a beast (not to mention the reference to Theseus' history as a serial seducer and deserter of women), means that the tragic history surrounding the mythological prototypes of the characters is not entirely absent. Seneca's
Hippolytus
was one of the best-known classical tragedies in the sixteenth century and its hunting imagery seems to inform the play. As so often with Shakespeare, the context may be understood in diametrically opposed ways. Perhaps he is taking dark subject matter—violence, illicit desire, monstrous births—and transforming it into something life-affirming, emptying it of all sinister content, just as the play performed by Peter Quince and friends takes another tragic tale from classical mythology, that of Pyramus and Thisbe, and fills it with “mirth.” Or perhaps he is suggesting that, however joyous comedy's climactic festivity may be, it offers only a momentary suspension of life's complications. Midsummer night, May Day, Twelfth Night, the feast of fools in which for an evening the master becomes the servant and vice versa: these festive occasions are celebrations of life and social harmony, but they end in the knowledge that tomorrow we will have to go back to work, to the hierarchies and compromises of everyday normality. “How shall we find the concord of this discord?” asks Theseus of the paradox whereby the play of Pyramus and Thisbe is both “merry and tragical.” Every production and every reading of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
has to make a choice as to the extent to which the “discord” is still apparent behind the “concord” woven by the resolution of the plot.

Northrop Frye's “The Argument of Comedy” pinpoints a pervasive structure: “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly:

At the beginning of the final act, Theseus suggests that the dream world, which we may also call the green world, is illusory, “more strange than true,” a trick of the “strong imagination”:

Multiple ironies are at work here. Theseus himself is an “antic fable”—the adjective plays on “bizarre/grotesque” and “antique” (antiquated, belonging to a superannuated world of romance and mythology). And the play has suggested that fairies are not merely the invention of lunatics and lovers. Shakespeare's own loyalty must belong to “the poet's eye” and “the poet's pen” that keep company with the lunatic and the lover, the seething brain and the shaping fantasy. The language of poetry, like the art of the actor, is metamorphic: a play on words, a metaphor, an alliterative pairing, sends the imagination leaping from a bush to a bear.

Theseus regards poetry as mere artifice, and the language of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
does indeed include many an artificial rhetorical elaboration, many a passage of highly wrought rhyme. Yet the very speech in which Theseus expresses his skepticism about poetry embodies not only the artifice it condemns (the balancing of “from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,” the slippage from “apprehend” to “comprehends”), but also a fluidity of movement—the run of the sentence structure across the line endings imposed by the metrical structure—that enacts the processes of mature thought, of what Theseus calls “cool reason.”
A Midsummer Night's Dream
is a comedy of simultaneous innocence and experience. Of all the plays, it is the one that offers most to a child's way of seeing, and which should be everybody's introduction to Shakespeare, preferably well before the age of eleven. At the same time, it unleashes us into a world of desire that comes to the core of our adult humanity. And it is conceivably Shakespeare's most sophisticated meditation upon the power of theater and of poetry. It is an anatomy of the very imagination by which it is created. There's magic in the web.
^*

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn.

Generations of editors have adopted a “pick and mix” approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, sometimes creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the Quarto and Folio texts often represent discrete moments in the life of a script, that plays change in the course of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that many of the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.

If you look at printers' handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor's case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand which had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers' lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen. But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, as in the case of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare's will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the
RSC Shakespeare
, in both
Complete Works
and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in “Textual Notes.”