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NOTES- AMND
DREAMS, SEX AND REALITY

Freud wrote in his The Interpretation of Dreams that in a dream ‘one person can be
substituted for another’: perhaps the fairy world is the unconscious of Athens, where the
repressed anger of Theseus’s domination over his captured Amazonian bride breaks out into
the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, and where the stifling patriarchy represented by
Egeus’s ultimatum of obedience or the convent is swept aside for the thrilling dangers of
sexual freedom. In the topsy-turvy dreamscape of the woods, lovers swap allegiances and
the fairy queen couples with a donkey-man: the dark side of romantic desire is revealed to
be disturbingly carnal. Bottom recalls his erotic encounter with Titania in her bower as ‘a
dream, past the wit of man, to say, what dream it was’ (4.1.205–06). Awaking from a dream
that is more akin to a nightmare, Hermia ‘quake[s] with fear’ to recall a distinctly phallic
snake that ‘eat my heart away’ (2.2.148–49). The action of the play, framed in the opening
scene as the frustrating infill before the marriage night of Theseus and Hippolyta, reveals
that sexual desire is troublingly anarchic and urgent – threatening the play’s own generic Commented [SN[TM1]: EROS- desire
movement towards romantic comedy ending in multiple marriages.
Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s plays neutralised the erotic charge of this play,
rewriting it to make its fairies dainty creatures from the nursery and establishing A
Midsummer Night’s Dream as a play particularly suitable for children. They couldn’t have
been more wrong. Shakespeare makes his love-potion derive from a flower transformed by
Cupid’s arrow into the distinctly suggestive ‘before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound’
(2.1.167). An illustration of Robin Goodfellow from the 1620s shows a hairy-legged satyr
sporting an impressive phallus: to be puckish in the early modern period was thus to be
involved in sexual, rather than innocent, forms of mischief. The Polish director and critic Jan
Kott saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream as ‘the most erotic of Shakespeare’s plays’, but he
saw this as a dark force: ‘in no other comedy or tragedy of his, except Troilus and Cressida,
is the eroticism expressed so brutally …The lovers are exchangeable. The partner is now
nameless and faceless. He or she just happens to be the nearest’. The love-tragedy
performed at the end of the play for the marriage celebrations, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is often
hilarious on stage, but it, too, offers a kind of structural or generic double. The tragic
outcome for these performed lovers hints at the darker associations of sex and death, the
unacknowledged or suppressed dream unconscious of romantic comedy.
DOUBLE VISION
Reviewing their adventures in the woods, Hermia reflects that ‘Methinks I see these things
with parted eye, / When everything seems double’ (4.1.188–89). Everything does indeed
seem double in a plot marked by duplications rather than by distinctiveness. By mistakenly
applying a love-potion to the eyes of the male Athenians, Robin Goodfellow confuses the
play’s couples, making both Lysander and Demetrius turn their attentions from Hermia to
Helena. The strong suggestion here is that the lovers are interchangeable: the convention of
‘love at first sight’ is being satirised. Demetrius has turned from Helena to Hermia back to
Helena again (perhaps still under magical influence); Lysander turns from Hermia to Helena
back to Hermia. These confusions, however, merely amplify the play’s apparent
disinclination properly to distinguish between the two men or to establish them as Commented [SN[TM2]: REASON- V/S- EMOTION
significantly different characters. Hermia is willing to enter a convent rather than marry her
father’s choice, Demetrius, but the play does nothing to indicate why she should so strongly
prefer Lysander. Even Hermia herself is able only to claim that Lysander is just as good as
Demetrius. ‘Demetrius is a worthy gentleman’, Theseus admonishes. ‘So is Lysander’, she
replies (1.1.152–53).
The fact of actors playing dual roles makes doubleness part of the imaginative
technology of the play in performance; the apparent swappability of the lovers
introduces doubleness as one of its thematic challenges to romantic comedy. At the
micro-level, the language of the play is also preoccupied with the same structural
ideas. Over half the lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are rhyming. This high
proportion of rhyme goes along with repetitive rhetorical structures such as
parallelism (repeating the same grammar, rhythm or construction), and a more
specific rhetorical device, isocolon (repeating syntactic structures of the same
length). In this example from the play’s first scene, we see parallelism, isocolon and
rhyme working together to emphasise the mirroring or doubling of the two female
characters:
HERMIA I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.

HELENA O that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill!
HERMIA I give him curses, yet he gives me love Commented [SN[TM3]: TEMPORAL PACE- increasing
HELENA O that my prayers could such affection move conflict/tension
HERMIA The more I hate, the more he follows me.
HELENA The more I love, the more he hateth me. (1.1.194–99)
Just as Freud later identified the dreamworld as place ‘where ideas can be linked by
verbal similarities’, so these rhyming and parallel lines are a good example of the
way in which Shakespeare’s sentence- or speech-level construction often echoes in
miniature the wider concerns of his plays.
FANTASTICAL SEMI-TAWDRY PUCK

Puck or Robin Goodfellow is one of the most popular characters in English and Celtic
folklore, being a faerie, goblin or devil. In fact, “Pouk” was a typical medieval term for the
devil. Sometimes Puck was pictured as a frightening creature with the head of an ass, or as
a queer little figure, long and grotesque, or as a rough, hairy creature, or as the
representation of the Greek god Pan,. As a shape-shifter, Puck had many appearances, and
he used them to make mischief. The term “Robin Goodfellow” was a medieval nickname for
the devil as well. Robin Goodfellow is one of the faeries known as “hobgoblins”, also famous
for shape-shifting and misleading travellers, but sometimes a helpful domestic sprite.
The mischievous and witty sprite sets many of the play’s events with his magic, through
deliberate pranks on the human characters and unfortunate mistakes. Sure, he does support
his master in the Fairy King Oberon, but he has his own charisma and magic that he uses
not just for Oberon, but for his own purposes which are usually for his perverse pleasure.
The first view of Puck can be compared to the god Cupid, in the essence and bringing of
love to a mortal’s life or at least the assistant of Cupid. If taken in the view of bringer of love,
one would realize that although the concept was Oberon’s, the giving of the same function to
the mortals is not important enough for him to take care of himself, thus he gives the flower
to Puck and tells him to take care of the mortals. Puck does his best, but his own personality
wins out in that even without trying he creates havoc rather than everlasting love. Puck
creates such a mess that it is up to Oberon to fix the love of the mortals, which had he done
the work himself, would never have happened. The second way in which to view the
character of Puck is as he sees himself; a goblin, or a fairy or thing of the night, a creature of
chaos. Even though he is reminded by Oberon that he is of a different sort of fairy, Puck
would not agree. He knows that his inherent characteristics are to create chaos. Oberon
knows that Puck is a mischief maker and thus still relies on him to do something correct.
SETTING
A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in ancient Athens, but with little attempt at historical
accuracy. In many respects the play sounds as if it is set in Elizabethan England.
Theseus may be a character from ancient myth, but he is called a Duke and behaves like
an English aristocrat. References to a natural world of cuckoos, choughs and violets, and
a social world of Saint Valentine's day, Maying and the board game nine men's morris,
create a sense of English country life. The fairies, despite their world travels, come
straight from English folklore, as Oberon confirms by his reference to Queen Elizabeth I
(II.1.163). The craftsmen, similarly, speak in English idioms and perform a play which is
English in style.
However, there are several reasons why the choice of ancient Athens as a setting is a
good one. It takes the audience into a world which is distinct from their own, where
fantastic events do not seem so jarringly unbelievable. Once we have imagined that we
are in the time of Theseus, it is no big step to imagine mischievous spirits and magic
spells. We also find ourselves in a world before Christianity, so it is possible to introduce
fairies and show humans controlled by spirits without causing offence. The play does not
look as if it is questioning or mocking religion, only having fun at the expense of the
ancient past.
Moreover, Athens is a famous city in the history of philosophy, known for its great
thinkers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. This reputation enhances the contrast between
the rational daylight world of Athens and the night-time world of the wood outside. The
wood (a word which in Elizabethan English could also mean 'mad') is a place of dreams
and imagination, where the mortal characters blunder uncertainly in the dark and are
beset by nasty surprises and miraculous joys. Shakespeare does not spoil the effect by
spelling out that the wood represents the mysteries of love, which perplex the four lovers,
and of art, which overwhelm the craftsmen, though he does seem to indicate it later
through Theseus's comment that The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination
all compact (V.1.7–8). Commented [SN[TM4]: DRAMATIC
GENRE: COMEDY
Tension,
disharmony,
Multiple plots- 3 types-
chaos
(fairies/mechanicals/lov
ers)
Exposition:
Conflict

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NOTES- AMND

DREAMS, SEX AND REALITY

HERMIA I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.

FANTASTICAL SEMI-TAWDRY PUCK

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