Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

presents one of the clearest examples of the characteristic Shakespearean triple pattern: from (1) a world of apparent reality and order, with seeds of disorder, to (2) a middle place, an interior world of transformation, in which things become far more evidently disordered

and then out again into (3) the exterior world, the world of so-called reality—though still onstage—armed with new knowledge, and better prepared to rejoin the ongoing world of social action.

pattern is consistently present in Shakespeare's plays regardless of their genre; it is not solely a comic mode, but rather represents as fundamental the inside/outside structure of dramaturgy as well as of theme and setting.

The title of the play comes from the concept of “midsummer madness,” the idea in folk culture in England (and also in Ireland, Sweden, and elsewhere in medieval Europe) that on Midsummer Eve, June 23, the longest day and shortest night of the year, madness, enchantment, and witchcraft would invade and transform the world.

The transformations in the wood are of two kinds: literal and figurative. Which kind is implemented seems to be a matter of social decorum; a “low” character like

Bottom is literally turned into an ass and becomes the object of amusement, horror, or—for Titania—sexual desire, whereas the young aristocrats are transformed more genteelly by the use of language and dramatic action.

“This is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could” (3.1.106–107). He alone does not see that he is physically altered. In other words,

he is already an ass. The wood world and the fairies un-metaphor these metaphors, literalizing figures of speech, creating an interior space—we could call it the unconscious— where people who act like asses look like asses.

Bottom with an ass's head is more like himself than before, just as Demetrius, his eyes anointed with

the magic love-juice and imagining himself in love with Helena, is more like himself than he was before. The play is careful to tell us that he once did love Helena; this is a return to sanity through the alembic of madness.

In dramatic terms, what is most important about the little Indian changeling is that he is the object of desire. He represents, in effect, the powerful irrationality

of desire itself, as well as the element of “change” that afflicts every aspect of the play.

Unseasonable weather, sickness, and disorder are rampant in the “mazèd world,” and the cause is the quarrel between Oberon and Titania,

A discord in temperament becomes, in the un-metaphored world of the wood, a discord in temperature.

This play presents the audience with three parallel worlds, and three rulers or stage managers who try to dictate action and choice:

Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays…. 3.1.126-128

Reason—and Theseus's defense of it—is constantly being undermined in the course of the play,

If Theseus's world is based on reason and law and rank and hierarchy and a father's authority—and on slow-moving time (“how slow / This old moon wanes”)—Oberon's

Oberon's world, the fairy world, is in many ways its opposite. The fairy world is a world of instantaneous time, in which Puck can circumnavigate the globe in less than an hour

for Puck is to Oberon what Bottom is to Peter Quince.

Puck, we should note, is not Shakespeare's invention. The word was used, without the capital P, as early as 1000 b.c.e. to describe an evil, malicious, or mischievous spirit

They are, in fact, very close to what Theseus dismisses as “airy nothing” in his speech about lunatics, lovers, and poets.

The fairies. The speech of Theseus in Act Five should not be taken at face value.

By making his fairies diminutive, Shakespeare, like the playwright John Lyly in his Endimion (printed 1591), emphasized their relation to the subconscious and the unconscious—which is to say, to human psychology and desire.

As he progresses from Bottom the weaver to Titania's ass-headed

headed lover to the classical hero Pyramus, Bottom does so with unflagging zeal, equanimity, and enthusiasm, all qualities Theseus and the others might do well to emulate. As so frequently in Shakespearean comedy, the “low” characters and the comic plot point up by contrast the shortcomings of the aristocrats.

What, after all, are those lovers like? For one thing, they are apparently indistinguishable from one another,

Lysander and Demetrius are somewhat akin to the twin brothers in The Comedy of Errors. Distinguishing between them is all-important, but also virtually impossible;

The comic energies of the play will pull in another direction. Differentiated by their male suitors, these heretofore identical young women, whose very names seem twinned, suddenly appear as opposites.

Directors obligingly follow what seem to be clear hints here, casting a tall blonde as Helena and a shorter brunette as Hermia. But surely they are also missing the point, which is that appearances are relative or,

as Helena remarks, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” (1.1.234–235). Surely the scene would be even more comical if the difference between the two women were slight or nonexistent.

Finally Demetrius, awakening in the fourth act, explains to Theseus as best he can why he has returned to Helena: “[M]y love to Hermia, / Melted

as the snow, seems to me now / As the remembrance of an idle gaud / Which in my childhood I did dote upon” (4.1.162-165).

Taken together, the stories of Titania and Bottom, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius—and Thisbe and Pyramus—tell a complicated tale about sexual desire.

The play thus strikes a careful, though also a playful, balance between “cool reason” and the dangers of the irrational.

Like the equally anarchic and inept pageant of the “Nine Worthies” in Love's Labour's Lost, this play-within-the-play, performed by social inferiors for their putative betters, confronts the themes, aspirations, and pretensions of the aristocrats and comments on the larger play that contains it.

A play is a fiction, art is an illusion, “no more yielding but a dream.”

Can we be blamed if we wonder—now that we have been told that we are reality—when someone else will wake and recognize that we are only dream? Can we be blamed for looking over our shoulders, and wondering who is watching the play in which we are acting, while we watch, onstage, actors watching actors who play actors performing a play?

The final ambiguity is the ambiguity of all drama, and of art that always shadows the dream world: “It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream.”

Published in quarto form during Shakespeare's lifetime as The Tragedie of Richard II, the play we call simply Richard II became in the First Folio The Life & death of Richard the Second.

an explosion of history plays appeared on the scene in Elizabethan England, some two hundred of them written between the date of the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and the beginning of the new century. These dates may well be significant, because they

coincide with a time when England was highly self-conscious and aware of itself as a political power, proud of its absolute monarch, Queen Elizabeth, and worried about the problem of succession—since the Queen had no children—and that of the ever-present possibility of civil war and usurpation.

A central fact about history plays is that they can be seen to take place in several time periods at once:

In this sense a history play is perpetually “timely”—or, as we like to say, rather misleadingly, it is “timeless.” It can readily be juxtaposed to the current events of any time and find new and startling relevance. Shakespeare's tragedies—Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello—are often staged today to coincide with contemporary political figures and debates.

Some reports say that Queen Elizabeth, learning of this, observed, “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?”

The four plays often called the Henry IV plays or the Henriad—Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, and Henry V—were not initially designed by the playwright to be considered as a group.

But the plays do concern themselves with the same cast of characters, and they provide a continuous pattern from one to the next—a pattern of transition, as we will see, from one worldview to another.

As one of the Gardener's men asks, in a question addressed as much to the audience as to the Gardener, Why should we, in the compass of a pale, Keep law and form and due proportion, Showing as in a model our firm estate, When our sea-wallèd garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars? 3.4.41–48

Among these “caterpillars” are the high-ranking social pests Bolingbroke scornfully labels “[t]he caterpillars of the commonwealth,” Richard's sycophantic flatterers,

the garden scene is an echo in dramatic terms, with characters and setting, of an analogy first presented to the audience in poetic and rhetorical terms in this play, most strikingly in John of Gaunt's deathbed speech in act 2, our first image of England as a sea-walled garden now in the condition of a fall. This is one of the great speeches of all early Shakespearean drama,

Like the death of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, the death of John of Gaunt is an epochal event in this play's development, a turning point from which there is no going back.