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.
THE FESTIVE WORLD
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 Pasiphae, 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:
This world of fairies, dreams, disembodied souls, and pastoral lovers may not be a "real" world, but, if not, there is something equally illusory in the stumbling and blinded follies of the "normal" world, of Theseus' Athens with its idiotic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny [in As You Like It], of Leontes and his mad jealousy [in The Winter's Tale], of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues. The famous speech of Prospero about the dream nature of reality applies equally to Milan and the enchanted island. We spend our lives partly in a waking world we call normal and partly in a dream world which we create out of our own desires. Shakespeare endows both worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other.
"THE POET'S EYE ... THE POET'S PEN"
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":
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,