As Pyramus, he puts up a pretty poor performance; as Ass, it is another matter. The comic deficiency of “Pyramus and Thisbe” is that the actors keep telling us that they haven’t become their characters. The Assification of Bottom is, by contrast, akin to those brilliant assumptions of disguise—Rosalind becoming Ganymede in As You Like It, Viola as Cesario in Twelfth Night—through which Shakespeare simultaneously reminds us that we are in the theater (an actor is always in disguise) and helps us to forget where we are (we willingly suspend our disbelief). In that forgetting, we participate in the mystery of magical thinking. With Bottom himself, we in the audience may say “I have had a most rare vision.”

Many members of Shakespeare’s original audience, steeped as they were in the New Testament, would have recognized Bottom’s account of his dream as an allusion—with the attributes of the different senses comically garbled—to a famous passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which St. Paul says that the eye of man has not seen and the ear of man has not heard the glories that will await us when we enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Geneva translation of the Bible, which Shakespeare knew well, the passage speaks of how the human spirit searches “the bottom of God’s secrets.” Jesus said that in order to enter his kingdom, one had to make oneself as a child. The same may be said of the kingdom of theater. It is because Bottom has the uncynical, believing spirit of a child that he is vouchsafed his vision. At the same time, Shakespeare himself offers a dangerously grown-up image of what heaven might be like: the weaver may be innocent but the fairy queen is an embodiment of sexual experience. The “virgin queen” Elizabeth was also known as England’s “fairy queen” and the wood in which the action takes place, with its “nine men’s morris” and English wildflowers, is more domestic than Athenian, so there must have been an inherent political risk in the representation of a sexually voracious Titania. Shakespeare perhaps introduced Oberon’s apparent allusion to a chaste Elizabeth—the “fair vestal thronèd by the west”—in order to dismiss any identification of Titania with the real-life fairy queen who he knew would at some point be a spectator of the play.

METAMORPHOSIS

The comedy and the charm of the Dream depend on a certain fragility. Good comedy is tragedy narrowly averted, while fairy charm is only safe from sentimentality if attached to some potential for the grotesque. Fairies only deserve to be believed in when they have the capacity to be seriously unpleasant. Of course we laugh when Bottom wears the head of an ass and makes love to a queen, but the image deliberately courts the suggestion of bestiality.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s favorite book and the source for the tale of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” people are driven by bestial desires and are rewarded by being transformed into animals. In Shakespeare, the ass’s head is worn in play, but it remains the closest thing in the drama of his age to an actual animal metamorphosis onstage.

Ovid was rational Rome’s great counter-visionary, its magical thinker. His theme is transformation, the inevitability of change. Book fifteen of the Metamorphoses offers a philosophical discourse on the subject, mediated via the philosophy of Pythagoras. From here Shakespeare got many of those images of transience that roll through his Sonnets, but in the Dream he celebrates the transfiguring and enduring power of night vision, of second sight.

Night is the time for fantasy and for love, the time in which your wildest hopes may be indulged but your worst nightmares may have to be confronted. The action in the forest fills the space between the betrothal and the wedding celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta. For the young lovers it is also a time-between, the time, that is to say, of maturation, of discovering who they really are and whom they really love. When Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius emerge after a midsummer night’s madness in the wood, they don’t quite know what’s happened: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double.” And they’re not all quite sure if they’ve finally gained the person they want: “And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own and not mine own.” But on reflection in the cold light of morning, the strangeness of the night has effected a material transformation, leading the lovers to a truer place than the one where they were at court the day before. Perhaps because she is herself a “stranger,” an outsider in the “civilized” world of Athens, it is the Amazon queen Hippolyta who understands this best:

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.