Midsummer Madness, Dangerous Dreams:
Shakespeare's Sources for A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's
most-performed plays: a delightful comedy, but full of enough potential
tragedy to avoid becoming saccharine. Much of that tragic possibility
comes from Shakespeare's sources, as he directly acknowledges in Act V.
The entertainments Philostrate proposes, all stories taken from Ovid's
Metamorphoses, show the unhappy endings all too likely to
spring from tales like that of the four lovers of Shakespeare's play,
or the strife-torn fairy rulers.
"The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch
with the harp" (V.i.44-5) is the first of Philostrate's suggestions,
and the most blatant. Centaurs are almost an epitome of the dangerous
fairy-world that underlies so much of Shakespeare's play: half-man,
half-beast, they recall Bottom's similar, albeit more humorous, condition.
Lust and jealousy cause the undoing of the marriage feast, for the
Centaurs' theft of women provokes a battle. Thanks to the fairy
intervention, all in Shakespeare's play are happy with their spouses:
but how might the wedding have been marred if Demetrius and Lysander both
still loved Hermia? "These are the forgeries of jealousy"
(II.i.81) cries Titania to Oberon, and their contention, likewise a result
of lust and jealousy and unbridled nature, luckily enters the play only
peripherally. Theseus' law, and fairy medicine, overrules the lusty,
animal side of love and prevents such violence from marring, indeed
unmaking, the comedy.
"The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer
[Orpheus] in their rage" (V.i.48-9) is an alternate selection, but
one just as significant. "The mad Ciconian women" (p.259) cry
"There is our despiser!" before killing Orpheus -- they destroy
him because, in his grief for the dead Eurydice, he will not join them,
will not make love to these revellers in the rites of Bacchus, to women
caught in the spirit of wild unbridled romantic revelry. Again, love can
be a dangerous and destructive emotion, and it is only the demands of the
comic plot, the machinations and mistakes of the fairies, and Shakespeare's
dramatist's hand above all that have brought characters and audience to a
safe and comfortable conclusion.
"A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisby: very
tragical mirth" (V.i.57-8) is the only of the offered entertainments
to be performed, and it, too, hints at the dangers of unbridled love.
Interestingly, the frame-story for this and the other of Ovid's tales in
Book IV of the Metamorphoses is the daughter's of Minyas'
refusal to engage in the Bacchic rites, instead remaining at home to tell
tales. Bacchus' rites are indeed a far cry from the Diana who figures so
prominently in the Dream, and here Minyas' daughters try to
impose Theseus' peace, where destructive emotion is abjured. Yet the
tale itself reveals much about Shakespeare's own play as well.
Pyramus and Thisbe cannot marry because "their parents forbade
it" -- much the same irrational law-giving with which Theseus and
Egeus trouble Lysander and Hermia early in the Dream. And,
indeed, this tragic tale shows how the lovers' tale probably should
have ended: a journey to the dangerous wild (here the woods around Ninus'
tomb) followed by overthrow by the frightening forces of Nature (the
lion) and the sorrowful death of both lovers. Yet the fairies and
Shakespeare have ensured otherwise, so we have not a tragedy but the
comedy of Shakespeare's play and the reconciliation and marriage of Act V.
Even the Mechanical's presentation of "Pyramus and Thisbe"
keeps off its tragic nature. Their inept presentation never lets us
forget that they are actors: the actors themselves are present more than
the characters. Never can we fall into suspension of disbelief and
believe that Pyramus has died for love: it is always Bottom, striving
mightily to perform an affecting (indeed, over-done) death scene. The
meta-drama overcomes the actual play, and what was tragic becomes
"tragical mirth," what was a dire warning to heed society's
laws or fear the consequences is a gross entertainment and slapstick.
Theseus' laws have overcome the bloody, passionate side of love: the
man himself appears to have ceased his earlier, youthful amours
to settle down with a wife, Hippolyta, vigorous enough to match his own
martial nature. Indeed, he discounts the entertainments as those which
he has already heard or told -- they are old news to him, settled affairs,
and he needs hear of them no more. The only reason "Pyramus and
Thisbe" receives a hearing is its odd synopsis -- and equally odd
presentation! Shakespeare shows the alternate endings his play could all
too easily have taken, to make us relish all the more the happy solution
he and the characters have found.