How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (6 page)

Pleading for a lover’s
FEE
.

Shall we their fond pageant
SEE?

Lord, what fools these mortals
BE!

The Story of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
has four plots, all spinning along at the same time. The play is a miracle of dramatic architecture: Despite the constant crisscrossing of the plots, we’re never confused for an instant about what’s going on in the story.

One of the plots (the Lovers’ Plot) revolves around two young women, Hermia and Helena, and the two young men with whom they’re in love,
Lysander and Demetrius. In this plot, the lovers keep changing partners, creating one love triangle after another.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, with Tam Williams as Lysander, Ben Mansfield as Demetrius, Annabel Scholey as Hermia, and Rachael Stirling as Helena
(photo credit 6.1)

The story begins when Hermia’s father forbids her to marry the man she loves. To make matters worse, under Athenian law, if she doesn’t obey her father, she can be put to death or be confined to a convent for the rest of her life. One of my favorite passages in the play is where the Duke of Athens urges Hermia to reconsider her decision.

DUKE THESEUS

What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid
.

To you, your father should be as a god
,

Whenever I read this passage to my children, I stop and repeat the phrase
To you, your father should be as a god
. Needless to say, they roll their eyes and say “Oh, sure, Dad.”

DUKE THESEUS

What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid
.

To you, your father should be as a god,…

HERMIA

I do entreat your Grace to pardon me
.

I know not by what power I am made bold,…

But I beseech
[beg]
your Grace that I may know

The worst that may befall me
[happen to me]
in this case

If I refuse to wed Demetrius
.

DUKE THESEUS

Either to die the death, or to abjure
[give up]

Forever the society of men
.

Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires
,

Know of your youth, examine well your blood,…

For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d
,

[Forever to be caged up in a nunnery,]

To live a barren sister all your life
,

Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon.…

HERMIA

So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord
,

Ere I will yield my virgin patent up…

[Before I will give up my virginity].

Two things I find especially moving about this passage are that the Duke is so clearly on Hermia’s side, and that Hermia simply cannot yield because she is so deeply in love.

When the Duke leaves Hermia alone to reconsider her decision, what does Hermia do? She does what every headstrong teenager in the world dreams of doing: She elopes. That night she and Lysander flee into the woods outside Athens. Then, to make matters more interesting, Demetrius runs after them—and Helena runs after Demetrius.

The Woods	Hermia	Demetrius	Helena
Near		loves		wants		wants
Athens	Lysander	Hermia	Demetrius

And when these four hormonal, mismatched, articulate teenagers arrive in the famous Wood near Athens, what do they find?

Magic!

Point out to your children that the whole story sounds a bit like a Harry Potter novel: Ordinary teenagers encounter a magical world, and it changes their lives forever. (That Shakespeare fellow knew what he was doing.) It is at this point that Shakespeare decides to mix together the Lovers’ Plot and the Fairies’ Plot, and he does it in a fiendishly clever way. He has Oberon tell Puck to use the magic flower on Demetrius to try to straighten out Helena’s love life. But Puck puts the juice of the flower in the eyes of the wrong lover (Lysander) by mistake, at which point everything goes wrong.

Bonus Passage

When Oberon first realizes Puck’s mistake, he orders him to hurry as fast as he can and go find Helena. To which Puck replies:

I go, I go, look how I go
,

Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow
.

In our family, this is one of our favorite speeches, and we use it whenever we’re in a hurry.

I go, I go, look how I go
,

Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow
.

See if your children can learn these two lines right now, on the spot. Note: A
Tartar
is an ancient Oriental fighter with a strong bow.

I go, I go, look how I go
,

Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow
.

Make a point of using this speech with your children the next time you’re in a hurry. Chances are, they’ll repeat it back to you.

Digging Deeper into
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

H
ermia. Helena. Lysander. Demetrius. Is it hard to keep these lovers straight when we read the play? Absolutely. Should we care? Absolutely not. When
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is played onstage, the Lovers’ Plot is crystal clear. However, we should bear in mind that Shakespeare is up to something with all these teenage lovers who keep falling in and out of love with each other, and it has to do with the nature of love itself.

It could be argued that all the round-robin shenanigans in the play about who loves whom are caused by the magic flower and not by the actual desires of the lovers. And yet isn’t falling in love a bit like magic? A gift, a song, a look—all these can alter our hearts in an instant. Shakespeare seems to be acknowledging this and using the flower as a colorful, theatrical literary device. Indeed, the magic flower is a metaphor for the central theme of the play, which, it seems to me, is the power of love in its many guises.

Love is the theme of most of Shakespeare’s comedies, but in each one he treats the theme in a different way. Sometimes he emphasizes the melancholy, more philosophical side of love (
Twelfth Night
); sometimes the irrepressible, youthful side (
Love’s Labour’s Lost
); sometimes it’s farcical (
The Merry Wives of Windsor
); sometimes sardonic (
Troilus and Cressida
);
sometimes wise (As
You Like It
); sometimes clear-sighted and earthy (
Much Ado About Nothing
); and sometimes ironic (The
Taming of the Shrew
). In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Shakespeare is focusing on the intellectual side of love, turning love over and over, analyzing its odd behaviors and unique powers.

Shakespeare, as usual, tells us clearly, right up front, what he’s up to:

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind
.

(Cupid was the Roman god of erotic love and was frequently depicted with wings and a blindfold.) These two lines occur in the middle of a soliloquy by Helena when she is railing against her fate: Why should Demetrius love Hermia and not me?! I’m as pretty as she is! Everyone in Athens thinks so!

How happy some o’er other some can be!

Through Athens I am thought as fair as she
.

But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so
.

He will not know what all but he do know
.

Shakespeare makes it clear that Helena and Hermia are equally beautiful by objective standards. And yet Demetrius thinks Hermia is more beautiful because he sees her that way. Then when the juice of the magic flower is squeezed into his eyes, he falls in love with Helena and thinks that she’s more beautiful. Love is fickle, says Shakespeare. We see what we want to see. We don’t fall in love because of what our eyes tell us, but what our minds tell us.