This is the last of the three mini essays that I'm hoping to submit to the Wooden O Symposium at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Unlike the other two, this one focuses on the entirety of the play instead of exclusively on the female characters. It's also the weakest of the essays, so I'll likely have to rewrite this thing and change the organization of the entire submission.
There's no doubt that, despite all of the lovers pairing up appropriately by the last scene (and act, as it so happens), there is no longer any bottom to the play. It stands on nothing because it seeks romps, not relationships. In many ways, the characters reflect this, with the four Athenians being interchangeable for most audience members. (I have to use a mnemonic to remember who's supposed to be with whom, so similar are the lovers.) Many productions use Theseus as Oberon and Hippolyta as Titania, their doubling adding to the sense that there is little to differentiate the characters from each other, save some outward trappings. Their stories all revolve around sex in the face of pronounced death--and that, perhaps, is one way of considering the purpose of life.
Hooking Up: A Midsummer Night's Dream
I'm not the first to observe that
it's in some ways inconsistent that middle school students are often exposed to
Shakespeare via Romeo and Juliet.
It's a play about teenagers mistaking the early stages of infatuation, assuming
it's the kind of love that can last, and then killing themselves when it
doesn't go the way they'd hoped. Hardly the morals that we're trying to instill
in Utah's youth. So perhaps there's a better play to put into the hands of
resistant striplings in order to infuse them with the intoxicating drafts of
bardolatry? A gateway play, if you will?
Thanks in large part to the
Romantics' fascination with and recreation of what faeries are--and, I'd venture
to guess, also in part to Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler--the play that fits that
requirement is A Midsummer Night's Dream.
And, indeed, it is the faeries (and the fact that it's a comedy) that keeps
this play permanently playing.
At first blush, the play is a
lighthearted romp through the Athenian woods. There's mistaken identity,
spurned love, reconciliation, and a free license to say the word
"ass" and not have your mother chide you for the indulgence. What
better way to get kids excited about Shakespeare than to watch the energetic
Puck prance about the stage, or the good-natured Bottom fumble after the best
part in their tragical-comedy?
But what the Bowdlers and later Victorians
would respond to in Shakespeare is one in which the clear themes and
"naughty bits" were excised and painted over--which reminds me of Polonius
in Hamlet, who says, "'Tis too much proved--that with devotion's visage/And
pious action we do sugar o'er/The devil himself" (3.1). I'm not asserting
that Shakespeare is like William Blake's Milton, and "of the devil's party
without knowing it" (Blake); Shakespeare is of the human's party and knows
it well. As a result, Shakespeare puts emphasis on the capriciousness of those
in power, the well-meaning but oft erring middle- and lower classes, and the
beautiful mess of humans trying to find a balance between autonomy, desire,
hope, love, fear, and despair. That is, the complexities of life are sometimes
"sugar[ed] o'er" by well-meaning intentions.
So is A Midsummer Night's Dream's focus on casual sex almost completely
lost in our post-Victorian readings and stagings. As Dr. Emma Smith points out
in her series of lectures, Approaching
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream is as an exploration of sexuality
more than any treatise about marriage. Sure, we point out that, not only is it
funny, but it follows classical tropes about what makes for a comedy,
particularly with the lovers (four pairs of them!) get together by the end.
There is, however, a much more
permissive attitude toward those pairings by the end of the play. In our most
modern--and perhaps disturbing--terms, Puck essentially slips a roofie into Demetrius'
and Lysander's eyes. The marriage of Helena to Demetrius is one built upon chemical
manipulation (though Puck would argue it's faerie magic), rather than the
genuine feelings of Lysander and Hermia. Hippolyta is wedded because of
Theseus' conquest; Oberon manipulates events to get Titania back in his favor
(and to secure the changeling boy he wants, though we are never told why).
Essentially, everyone is doing everything they can to get hooked up, even if it
is in the least admirable ways possible.
Now, this "hook up"
play has more to say than "people are horny", not the least of which in
the concept of a woman (Helena) who has a strong sexual desire and does things
that, for the time and her gender, are considered improper. Her plight is
pitiable, yes, but she defends herself, her desires, and the object of her
affection, even if she can't understand why he's behaving the way he is.
In this, the Athenian women
become the anchor of the play. The boys are essentially interchangeable--as the
play goes to great lengths to demonstrate--so having the girls echo with their
own personalities and differences helps to undercut the more cynical point of
view: That the play is all about hooking up, and it doesn't matter with whom.
Hermia and Helena, however, are under
immense pressure, and it may not be too much to say that they buckle under it.
While both women show great wit and wonderful wordplay, they can never move
into any sort of thought, growth, or analysis about their position. Unlike the
more thoughtful Juliet, the women of Dream
are focused on the exceptionality of their plight. Indeed, the easiest
summation of their entire perplexity is said by Hermia: "I am amazed, and
know not what to say" (3.2).
The Dream is encapsulated by Bottom's speech, of course, and the
ambiguity of his meaning is likewise the moral ambiguity of the whole play:
I
have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say
what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.
Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought
I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I
had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is
not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my
dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be
called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom. (4.1)
There's no doubt that, despite all of the lovers pairing up appropriately by the last scene (and act, as it so happens), there is no longer any bottom to the play. It stands on nothing because it seeks romps, not relationships. In many ways, the characters reflect this, with the four Athenians being interchangeable for most audience members. (I have to use a mnemonic to remember who's supposed to be with whom, so similar are the lovers.) Many productions use Theseus as Oberon and Hippolyta as Titania, their doubling adding to the sense that there is little to differentiate the characters from each other, save some outward trappings. Their stories all revolve around sex in the face of pronounced death--and that, perhaps, is one way of considering the purpose of life.