Gossamer Shakespeare

The dramas of human sleep are well portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and, in doing so, illumines her larger vulnerable being when the impressive self-controls of her daemon are down:

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

On the eve of Bosworth, Richard Crookback’s victims usurp his rest, illumining the Drang his malignity has exerted on that superb self-possession, an anxiety invisible until dream can provide x-ray of it. With exquisite tease and affection, Mercutio constructs for Romeo the fabulous dream of Queen Mab, conjuring the outlandishness of dream in the same impulse he subverts its actuality:

       True, I talk of dreams;

Which are the children of an idle brain

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy …

Here, and elsewhere in The Complete Works, are most delicate treatments of the oneiric as key to the illumining of ampler character. But only in one Shakespearean play does the word dream appear as part of the title and take a deliberated role in how the drama is meditated: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So I take this to invite the question: How searchingly does the dramatist evoke the displacements of the dreaming mind and create the very fabric of dreaming?

What do I mean by “dream-fabric”? We recognise our dreams to have an oblique imprint on consciousness. Gossamer-light in their touch on that consciousness, dreams nonetheless agitate, startle and estrange. Dream propels the dreaming-ego in a momentum that peculiarly compounds intense self-absorption with radical openness to what, a-dream, claims itself as natural narrative. Dream rehearses the nicety of our emotions by defamiliarising what might turn up in the wakeful world so that the up-front of our reaction is particular to a sense of first-time-ever. Dream begins in fug, concludes too frequently in interruption, but while its phantasmagoria is before the inner eye, it holds us with its internal consistency. To dream is to be both spelled and bound, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I observe, embeds these conditions finely. In its outlandishness it takes us to an immediacy of sensation that is quite distinct from Shakespeare’s other comedies, and yet no less astute in how it bears upon the well-being of human loves.

In observing this, of course, I must take care. Throughout the plays, Shakespeare’s perception of veritable actuality stresses its insubstantiality, its phantasma. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Prospero reminds us, as though the Shakespearean conception of the Real were fragile, a permeable membrane between the illusory and the palpable like those ocean-bed fissures where interior seismic pressure meets the atmospheric to form the original chemical combinations for sentient life.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the first sense of a dream fabric emerges from the list of dramatis personae, where the names from Greek antiquity—Theseus, Egeus, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, Oberon, Titania—make hotchpotch neighbourhood with the Anglo-Celtic names of the tradesmen/players—Peter Quince, Snug, Nick Bottom and Francis Flute, together with credible names from Anglo faery, Puck, Moth, Cobweb, Mustardseed. Of course we accept this neighbourhood of Greek aristocrats and English artisans, figures both mythic and folkloric, for all its discordance, because we are forewarned we are watching a dream unfold. So we expect the jolts of anachronism, whether in the name-language itself, or the behaviour of those who bear the names.

The very setting of the play “brings on” and then disperses a dream expectation. The play opens and closes amid the rational architecture of the Athenian court, quickly moves, via Peter Quince’s lowly house, to the profuse tangle of the forest in which the absurdities, reversals and displacements occur, a movement from geometry to scribble (as it were) and back to geometry. Furthermore, this forest, in addition to being the fluid territory one encounters in dream, is an intensified landscape as Oberon describes it:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.

I take that “luscious” for the key here. If the dynamic of dream is to make what “happens” simultaneously an involuntary and egotistical sequence, then dreamers cannot help what happens to them at the same time they experience their presence in events with a hallucinogenic urgency. In dream (my own for instance) we know/feel how the unkillable crone pursues us, how the nippled figments tease us. It is just a dream, but our trembles, our ejaculated sperm, are actual, which is to say the figments have charged the material effects.

But before all, dream lies—and tells its lies—in the action. And in this play there is no respite in the action’s onset through Acts 2 to 4. Pursuit, vehemence, the flickery presences against dark background which include both the fairies and the feral and avian life of the forest—horse, hound, hog, bear … at every turn, “the finch, the sparrow and the lark”, glowworm and butterfly. Here are what might be termed free radicals in play, so, to convey this dream-frenzy, let me, in one tumbling paragraph, give a resumé of the action in these central acts …

… Puck materialises; we learn how, in his errands, he can usurp the laws of physics, biology, scale and time. Next arrive Oberon and Titania with respective entourages; husband and wife in contention, weirdly petty as to its cause, exaggerated in its intransigence. Vitally Oberon reminds us of one moral consideration from the wakeful world, namely the violations, desertions and troth-breaking that belong to Theseus’s past. Why is this important? Theseus is head of state in this court, where marriages impend, and where our “dream’s” enactments are designed precisely to show life’s power to confront Love and troth with the strange and estranging. Then Demetrius and Helena arrive. He wants to possess his best mate’s girlfriend because her allure “kills” him, and so it follows he must “kill” his best mate to acquire her. With what incisive logic does he deter Helena, who worships him distractedly. Here is masochism, indecent desire, but also speech like a naked thing with all the temperate controls of wakefulness down, for all we behold at this juncture two fully wakeful lovers. Here is upset in the natural order; the dove preys upon the griffin, the deer hunts down the tiger. Next arrive Lysander and Hermia. They have lost their way and, after making extravagant vows to each other that almost immediately will be broken, subside into sleep. Puck smears his potion, Demetrius and Helena reappear, Lysander wakes, immediately to transfer his ardour to Helena who in turn is confounded by it and flees pursued by Lysander. Hermia wakes from a dream of being in the coils of a serpent. Act III opens with the absurd jabber about the play-within-the-play. There are puns and malapropisms galore. Bottom is given his ass’s head, affrights his fellow clowns, but infatuates Titania. Hermia arrives, pursued by Demetrius, Helena arrives, pursued by Lysander; again the exchanges have the intemperateness of dream and the mood is both distracted and murderous. Demetrius, having incensed Hermia, decides to sleep, so is smeared with the potion, wakes to see Helena to whom he transfers his ardour. She takes this reversal of attitude as a cruel joke, so it follows she must quarrel with her bosom friend, Hermia, Helena being the only principal unscathed by the potion. Then, all by Puck’s connivance lie down to sleep … Here is the widdershins of dream; it is feverish in pace, baffling in sense, and yet comme il faut in how the phantasma bears upon the imminence in the lives of Lysander/Hermia and Demetrius/Helena.

There is plot in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with its ointments, ass’s heads, and blind wandering through wild nature, there is a semblance of unplottedness to suit dream-scenario. And yet there is fortuity and symmetry intruding in strange ministrations. The antagonistic lovers arrive to sleep in the same glade. The elision from court orderliness to dream disorder and back go via Peter Quince’s house in both directions. These patterns are quiet, but laid down, and to my mind exquisite in terms of illumining Shakespeare’s fastidiousness in creating the texture of dream and its context. We have noted the tapestry, of wild beasts, of faery, of those instantaneous usurpations of scale that Puck appears to have within his self-possession. And self-possession does appear to be one key to well-being in this play. Puck has it, Hippolyta has it, Helena, for all her distress, has it, and the bumpkin artisans have it. But Theseus’s presence, for instance, is made opaque by ceremony and perhaps self-conscious by his former infidelities. His faery coeval, Oberon, is lessened by the paltriness of his marital quarrel, lampooned when his queen forsakes him for an ass. To trace the attribute of self-possession through Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays and two narrative poems might be one of the most profound studies of human well-being it is possible to pursue.

So who are the dreamers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Most conspicuously it is Ego, which is to say each witness or reader of the play in isolation and beset by the phantasmagoria of Shakespeare’s forest. Here is the neat conceit of the play. Whatsoever the shuffle and cough reminding us we are each part of an audience in a playhouse, that word dream in the comedy’s title reminds how each witness to dream is alone in these eerie deep-forest sequences where a beautiful queen can be distracted with love for an ass, where honest, good-mannered youths can traduce their beloveds and seek to murder their best friends.

To add to this eeriness, the play has a quality of echolalia. There is the play-within-the-play of Pyramus and Thisbe, but there is also dream-within-The-Dream. Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, Helena and Titania are dreamers like us in a way that Oberon and Puck are not. We have noted Hermia’s nightmare of the serpent:

Methought a serpent eat my heart away,

And you sat smiling at his cruel prey.

And here’s the point. The play’s focus is not, as it is in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Histories, and most of the Comedies, on the particularity of character. Rather it is on the character of Reality itself in respect to Love, the dynamic that forms itself when Dream and Wakefulness interact to prepare human beings for lifetime commitments to each other.

The dream concludes at the end of IV.i, and with bumpkin propriety Bottom ushers us back into The Real:

I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom.

And while bottomless and figmentary the dream may be, it has also been momentous in its purpose. Men and women, in troth to spend their lives intimately together, have witnessed behaviour of startling estrangement, self from self, and self from those where they have placed most trust. They have seen a queenly woman besotted by an ass. They have been both agents and victims of intemperance, cruelty, betrayal. If this is how dream deals, it is also how wakeful life might deal, as Theseus’s past shows. So the animus of the Dream has been to rehearse these troth-makers for the volatility by which Life’s unfolding can reverse or distort the circumstances and appearances in Life where we blithely trust. This is the subtle, charged purpose of dream in the experience of being human, and howsoever in the post-play Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena measure up as husbands and wives, keepers of the future, they have been rehearsed for the strangeness of their own natures. Wonderful comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, but it is also an acute study of humans being prepared for partnership.

And Theseus’s veteran consort, Hippolyta, understands this very well when she comments on “The Dream”:

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images,

And grows to something of great constancy:

But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

“More witnesseth.” Here, I take it, is the key to Shakespeare’s understanding of the dream phantasmagoria, and how it integrates itself with life’s perplexity and unfolding. There is character in the real world, and there are figmentary impersonations in dream, and the one informs the other and is modified thereby. Here is that permeable membrane, and here is a very high order of characterisation indeed.