Dramaturgical Sociology in A Midsummer Night's Dream. From Shakespeare to Erving Goffman.

Dramaturgical Sociology in A Midsummer Night's Dream. From Shakespeare to Erving Goffman.

Love and dream are alike - intangible and elusive, frequently encountered, but hardly ever really grasped: ". momentary as a sound, / Swift as a shadow, short as any dream." (I, 1, 154) Therefore one must not get too serious about it, just enjoy it. Eroticism is a state of seclusion in a parallel world and the spectacle consists in the reflection of this dream world in the real world. Although they differ in the form that they present it, critics are generally in agreement that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about love, the illusion of it and the irrationality associated with Eros. (Brooks 136, Leggatt 114, Frye 137, Kott 212) Or even about chance and fate that unites the several strands of the play - the humans and the fairies. (Daiches 254) Even if some of the critics focused more on the theme of love and especially romantic love (Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy 108, Scragg 95), one must be aware of the intense eroticism of the play that is rooted in brute sexuality (Kott 212) and the manipulation of reason by senses (Evans 34). I have adopted this last view and tried to focus on the suddenness of desire (Kott 211) associated with the dream when reason is abolished.

Significant for the understanding of the theme of dream is the purpose of the play as envisaged by Shakespeare and its staging. Jan Kott in his influential book Shakespeare Our Contemporary gives a very interesting account from A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare's latest biographer, regarding the original performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream which took place in the old London palace of the Southampton family at the corner of Chancery Lane and Holborn. It was a spacious house in Late Gothic style, with larger and smaller galleries running on various levels round and open rectangular court, which adjoined a garden well suited for walks. (210) This is a simulation of a dream world, and one's imagination is free to wander through the galleries and rearrange the play as desired. It is difficult to imagine a more suited scenery for the real action of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play was staged for a first time as a topical, almost "private" comedy, part of wedding celebrations. So in itself the play was written for a celebration of love, as art and love are inseparable. Art, like love, is a limited and special vision; but like love it has by its very limits a transforming power, creating a small area of order in the vast chaos of the world. For that one must agree to modify his sense of reality and give way to alternatives. But for both it is required a bit of lunacy:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

(V, 1, 169)

Probably it was written in 1594 or 1595, either just before or just after Romeo and Juliet. In A Midsummer Night's Dream we know that what we feel overpoweringly is the woodland beauty of the dreaming summer night, and it is only when we look closer that we realise in some measure how this sensation is brought about. It is the most poetical of 141f51b the comedies and this is drawn largely from two sources, closely allied and sometimes melting into one: the high proportion of poetical images - ninety-five out of a total of a hundred and fourteen - considerably higher than in other comedy, and the very large number of nature images, including animals and birds. (Spurgeon 261) Shakespeare built his own plot from diverse elements of literature, drama, legend and folklore, supplemented by his imagination and observation.

Throughout the play, we seem to be witnessing a constant process of exorcism, as forces which could threaten the safety of the comic world are called up, only to be driven away. "The course of true love never did run smooth" (I, 1, 154) We must keep in mind that all is just a work of imagination, as A Midsummer Night's Dream moves us freely in and out of illusion, giving us a clear sense of both its fragility and its integrity. (Brooks 137, Leggatt 112) Love is a dream world, an exilic place dominated by the force of imagination. Their entering the forest suggests an escape from the real world, thus love needs refuge for accomplishment. Our detachment is aided by the presence of Puck and Oberon - who, ironically, are exactly the dream creatures - acting as an onstage audience and providing a comic perspective. Puck in particular regards the whole affair as a show put on for his amusement. The members of the theatre audience watch Oberon and Puck, Oberon and Puck watch the human lovers, while the human lovers watch the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. This adds a level of irony to the lovers' laughter as they watch Pyramus and Thisbe: they too, not so long ago, amused an audience with what for them was very serious. In short, all who are members of an audience on one level of reality are simultaneously players upon another, "the puppets of powers", or forces, beyond their control. (Scragg 98, Leggatt 113)

Critics have called the play an "anatomy of love" (Scragg 95). Love is the ultimate transforming force as in Helena's words:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity.

(I, 1, 155)

Indeed love and marriage is the central theme: love aspiring to and consummated in marriage, or to a harmonious partnership within it. For Elizabethans, to live was to love and to love was to love romantically. (Charlton, Comedy 108) Three phases of love are depicted: its renewal, after a breach, in the long-standing marriage of Oberon and Titania, adult love between mature people like Theseus and Hippolyta and the youthful love with its conflicts and resolution, so that stability is finally reached.  But much of the Dream presents not only the foes of love and the obstacles standing in its way, but also the aberrations of love itself. The foes and obstacles are essential to the romantic and the aberrations to the comic aspects of the play. But they are no less essential to its theme of love and marriage. For harmony between man and woman, the irrational in them must be in tune. (Brooks 136, Leggatt 114, Frye 137, 141)

First of all the play is composed of several strands, the first being the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta which provides the background or the enclosing brackets that contain the play. In the foreground are the two pairs of lovers, the women constant, the men changing their affections as the magic herb "love in idleness" bids them. In the background is the fairy world, centering on Oberon and Titania and their quarrel, which involves (though they do not know it) the human lovers.

(Daiches, 254)

All these plans of love affairs reflect and mirror each other, and it makes it even more interesting to analyse. First of all we must observe that love is centred upon the idea of marriage from the beginning. Theseus is to marry Hippolyta, the Greek queen of the Amazons, who he conquered by force. Here, love is an act of surrender on the battlefield, where the "loving" one is the conqueror and the "loved" one is the surrendering slave who has to obey his master.

Then we have love-marriage as an obligation: Hermia is forced by her father Egeon to marry Demetrius whom she does not love. She loves Lysander but she is urged by her father to give him up. If she refuses to do so and obey her father's will, under the Athenian law she will be put to death or sent to a nunnery. So marriage here is still a forced act but through parental authority. Hermia will be saved by Lysander's ingenuity, who will elope with her hoping that the law is gentler elsewhere. But Helena, Hermia's closest friend, who knew about their plans tells Demetrius in order to gain his appreciation. Helena is hopelessly in love with Demetrius who loved Hermia. So Helena is here in the position of the rejected lover but who pursues her dream (to be loved back by Demetrius) to the end. Her perception of her beloved, and in fact it can be generalised to all lovers, is peculiar and inexplicable, so much that even to the lovers themselves love seems blind:

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

(I, 1, 155)

Even if they do become a couple in the end, it will be only with the aid of the magical berry juices that Puck will have sprinkled in the eyes of Demetrius. So their becoming a couple needs outer, magical intervention. Therefore, a dream world is necessary for the accomplishment of their love. In the lines quoted above we also have a presentation of the quality of love, as love-sight, true and false, belongs to the wide ranging subject of appearance and reality; a subject which includes the genuine though not rational insights of imagination, and its irrational aberrations.

There is also the couple of the fairy king Oberon and fairy queen Titania. They are fighting over an Indian page boy who is claimed by Oberon; Titania refuses to give him up. Their already married couple is presented as affected by the problem of authority that is raised in every couple. Oberon, as masculine power demands it, requires obedience from the feminine part. Titania, a proud and capricious feminine figure, refuses to comply with his request, as she wants to impose her authority on her husband. Titania will finally submit to Oberon, but only through his using his magical tricks on her.

The forest is the place where the two worlds meet: the fairy world and the human world - the immortals and the mortals. But the humans are not aware of it. The forest itself, as an otherworld, creates the largest-scale pattern of the play. It prepares a place for poets and for lovers, functioning as a dream world. Its world is fairy-ridden, and its inhabitants are apt to the witchery of love. Its natural instruments are magic philtres and mischievous Pucks. (Charlton, Comedy 112) There are several associations with the "green world": dream, magic and spiritual energy as well as fertility and renewed natural energies. Magic in Shakespeare's day was an "art", and these two are attributes of a world in which nature and art are one. (Frye 143) The whole forest is the setting for the dream itself, and one powerful image that suggests that is the image of the moon present form the opening lines when the noble lovers impatiently measure the days to their wedding by the waning of the old moon and the coming of the new: ". like to a silver bow / New bent in heaven" (I, 1, 153) to the end, when Puck tells us "the wolf behowls the moon" (V, 2, 173), and that it is therefore the time of night for the fairies' frolic. Moon, moonlight and moonbeams are most frequently used in this play (three and a half times more than in any other play) and this of course has an artistic function of creating a dreamy atmosphere. (Spurgeon 260) Still, like the Forest of Arden in The Tempest, the forest here can be interpreted as an illusion, that there is no escape from the world's cruelty, and that sooner or later we shall have to pass through "This cold night [that] will turn us all to fools and madmen." (Brooks 95, Kott 208) This also gives another connotation to love as it becomes also a journey. The lover is lost and in order to find again wholeness, he has to complete a journey that is outer as well as inner.

The Dream is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays. (Kott 212) In no other tragedy or comedy of his, except Troilus and Cressida is eroticism expressed so brutally. It is this passing through animality that seems to be the most modern feature of the play. This is the main theme joining together all three separate plots running parallel in the play. (Kott 218) Titania and Bottoms will pass through animal love quite literally, but this aspect is present also in the quartet of lovers:

Helena . I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:

Use me but as you spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

(II, 1, 158)

What worser place can I beg in your love,

[.] Than to be used as you use your dog?

(II, 1, 158)

Power is another important issue in the play. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the first time Shakespeare uses an "outside force" which interferes and controls the affairs of men. This "force" is in a position of power regarding the others, therefore love is here subject to power. As we have seen, it was like that from the beginning, undertaking several means of coercive methods regarding marriage. But Oberon is the ultimate "force" that subjects the love of men and even of his own wife to his own good will.

Oberon moves unseen, unheard and unsuspected to the solution of the sole problem of the play (as far as the mortals are concerned) - that of restoring Demetrius's love to Helena. Although he differs in form and nature from Shakespeare later notable forces of control as markedly as they differ from one another, the fairy king is like them both in his essential dramatic function and in the attributes which enable him to perform his function - superior power and superior awareness. (Evans 34)

Oberon is like Fate that operates throughout Romeo and Juliet (according to the Prologue) but unlike Prospero in The Tempest, he is immortal and supernatural. Still, unlike Fate and more like Prospero in The Tempest he is benevolent, and with a twist of his magic wand can make the world go round, or the reverse. Oberon's interference in the dilemma of the four Athenian youths comes by chance. The juice of the flower for which he sends Puck was meant only for Titania's eyes, to compel her to surrender the little challenging boy. It is while he awaits for Puck's return that Demetrius and Helena enter, quarrelling. Due to the fact that he was invisible to humans, he decides to "overhear their conference". When they are gone, Oberon speaks:

Fare thee well, nymph: ere he do leave this grove,

Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love. -

(II, 2, 158)

Oberon acts without any seconds thoughts and decides to play God with the youths he overheard. Magic is subject to one fairy creature that can twist the world around as he pleases. Love itself becomes arbitrary. He orders Puck to anoint Demetrius's eyes so that when he will wake up and see Helena he will immediately fall in love with her. Puck is to recognise Demetrius by the Athenian garments he wears. But by thus instructing Puck, Oberon does a terrible mistake. He does not foresee the possibility of error. Puck finds Lysander and Hermia sleeping in the woods, and, as Lysander was also wearing Athenian garments, he mistakes him for Demetrius. Puck errs because Oberon erred in directing him. From this point on, a gap divides the human participants' view from ours. This gap is unique in Shakespeare's comedies and it remains open even at the end of the play. We alone know that and immortal spirit has manipulated human events and solved a mortal problem. (Evans 35)

Though it touches the eyes of only three, the magic juice affects directly or indirectly all the principal persons. Because they are not just under the influence of a magic herb, but they dwell in a magic world where they "breathe" a dreamy atmosphere. The flower is also a symbol of defloration - the common metaphor of the unplucked flower - as the "little western flower" is struck by the "bolt of Cupid" and the result is: "Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound." (II, 2, 158) Therefore the magic of it consists actually is sexual union. The enchantment is to see everything erotic. First, when Lysander awakes, he sees Helena through enchanted eyes and falls in love with her:

And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake. [Waking]

Transparent Helena! Nature shows art,

That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart.

(II, 3, 160)

Equally innocent of the truth, Helena mistakes Lysander's protestations for mockery, thus compounding the initial error, and, startled and angry, runs off into the forest pursued by her bewitched lover. Hermia, waking, is removed even further from the truth, being ignorant not only of the cause of Lysander's change but of the very fact that he has changed; filled with false imaginings, she too runs off, seeking Lysander.

A feature peculiar to Shakespeare is the suddenness of love. There is mutual fascination and infatuation from the very first glance, the first touch of hands. Love falls down like a hawk; the world has ceased to exist; the lovers see only each other. Love in Shakespeare fills the entire being with rapture and desire. All that is left in the Dream of these amorous passions in the suddenness of desire.

(Kott, 211)

The inconstancy and flickering emotions of the lovers, even if in a magic context, is to be supposed to characterise them in reality as well. In making all this switching look so natural to them, actually Shakespeare adds a fine irony to romantic love.

Lysander: I had no judgement when to her I swore.

Helena Nor none, in my mind, now you give her o'er.

Lysander: Demetrius loves her, and he loves not you.

Demetrius [Awaking]: O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine?

To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?

Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show

Thy lips, those kissing cherries, temping grow!

(III, 2, 163)

The lovers are no more then love-partners; they are exchangeable. Commentators have long since noticed that the lovers in this love quartet are scarcely distinguishable from each other. The girls differ only in height and in the colour of their hair. Perhaps only Hermia has one or two individual traits, linking her to an earlier version of Rosaline in Love's Labour Lost and the later Rosalind in As You Like It. The young men differ only in names. The lovers are exchangeable, lacking the distinctness and uniqueness of the other Shakespearean characters. The entire action of this hot night, everything that has happened at this drunken party, is based in the complete exchangeability of love partners. (Kott 212, Leggatt 195) Helena loves Demetrius, Demetrius loves Hermia, Hermia loves Lysander. Helena runs after Demetrius, Demetrius runs after Hermia. Later Lysander runs after Helena. This "mechanical reversal of the objects of desire" and the interchangeability of lovers is not just the basis of the plot; but the reduction of characters to love partners seems to be the most peculiar characteristic of this cruel dream and perhaps its most modern quality.

These shifts of identity are metamorphoses of an inner attitude, the one which Demetrius has allowed to come over him, and the one which Lysander suffers. Ovid's Metamorphoses was apt to be regarded as "a repertory of the deformations to which human nature was liable".

(Brooks, 101)

Thus, between the love partners and the worlds there is a mimetic desire that surpasses all. Actually behind almost any utterance we find the mimetic desire, the desire to imitate, to become like and one with the other as they are but facets of a sole anima. They are together in one - in eros.

The profound oblivion of the young men, neither knowing what has happened to him, each distrusting the other's motives, is the basis of the action. Each accepts unquestioningly the reversal of his affection, as a plausible and natural event - as in dreams one regards fantastic experiences as ordinary. Thus love is presented here as just a game of mirroring and reflection showing how shallow are in fact human feelings, how their love is sublunary, subject to change and reversal, everything being reflected in the world of the fairies, in order to stress the idea of frailty of love. (Leggatt 110) Love is an act of selfishness as it means not to want the other person's happiness, but just to want the other person.

Oberon wants the little boy, but in fact he wants Titania's gesture of surrender. Thus, he wants her. In order to get her, he is willing to humiliate and confuse her with the aid of the magic berry juice. Actually, his love is quite tyrannical. He muses:

I wonder if Titania be awak'd;

Then what it was that next came to her eye,

Which she must dote on in extremity.

(III, 2, 162)

Puck enters and announces: "Titania wak'd, and straightway lov'd an ass." (III, 2, 162) The ass was Bottom the waver transformed into a monster. The love scenes between Titania and the ass must seem at the same time real and unreal, fascinating, repulsive yet funny. She lures him into her dreamy world:

Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,

While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,

And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,

And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

(IV, 1, 167)

Oberon's punishment for Titania will be that she will sleep with a beast. But in this nightmarish night for her, the ass does not symbolise stupidity. From antiquity up to Renaissance the ass was credited with the strongest sexual potency. And its representations endow it with the biggest phallus. (Kott 220) To this Bottom alone of the mortals it is given to see the fairies, and not only that, but to be loved by their queen. It was by Puck's wit that he was selected, "the shallowest thickskin of that barren sort" (III, 2, 162), to be the object of Titania's passion. The lack of rationality implicit in the relationship between Bottom and Titania represents a heightened version of the repudiation of reason in love by Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander. Reason is incompatible with the dream.

Bottom's oblivion is fixed and immutable, he is unawareness concretised. Even when the spell is broken and he wakes up, he cannot understand a thing of what had happened to him:

I have had a dream of a most rare vision. I have had a dream - past the wit of man to say what dream it was. - Man is but an ass if he go about and expound this dream. Methought I was - there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had, - But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.

(IV, 1, 168)

Still, Freud says that every dream has a point at which it is unfathomable, a link with the unknown and it has been recognised that a dream is at the heart of the dreamer's private universe, and is therefore incommunicable.

The confused couples rush through moonlight and shadow in the enchanted forest, unknowingly observed by immortal spirits. The tension between them grows stronger and stronger. The men are oblivious and somewhat idle regarding the twist of their emotions, but Hermia and Helena are not so easily content with the present situation. Shakespeare grants them with more awareness of the unnatural turn of events proving to trust feminine intuition more. Hermia, who had never before had cause to doubt her power over men, seeks in vain a rational explanation:

Hate me! Wherefore? O me! What news, my love!

Am I not Hermia? Are not you Lysander?

I am as fair now as I was erewhile.

(III, 2, 165)

The young men are eager to settle the matter in a manly way, withdraw into the forest to fight it out with their swords.

But, in the enchanted forest of A Midsummer Night's Dream, governed by a fairy king, error can be introduced into mortal affairs by the anointement of human eyes with the juice of the flower, and it can also be removed by the simple expedient of crushing on the eyes another herb. As the couples sleep exhausted, Puck anoints Lysander's eyes, thus correcting his initial error. Still Demetrius is left with the magic juice in his eyes so that he will still love Helena when he wakes up. When the lovers awake, they remember nothing. Hermia is the one who recalls having had a dream, but not what it was about:

Methinks I see these things with parted eye,

When everything seems double.

(IV, 1, 168)

They are all ashamed. They can't recall what happened, but they know that something had happened. They don't want to talk about it, just as one does not want to talk about bad dreams. Titania wakes up and does not remember how it came that she had slept with an ass. She does not even want to remember. This is another peculiar feature of the play that nobody wants to remember what had happened during the night. The dream is viewed as a reduction and therefore must be quickly forgotten.

Titania: My Oberon, what visions have I seen! Methought I was 

enamoured of an ass.

Oberon: There lies your love.

Titania: How came these things to pass?

O, how mine eyes do loathe this visage now!

(IV, 1, 167)

She now surrenders to Oberon, without even remembering the cause of their quarrel. Oberon's magic has worked. Titania is again his submissive queen, the lovers are now happy couples and the wedding is about to start. It is like the dawn had brought a new world with it, where common sense reigns again. In the violent contrast between erotic madness liberated by the night and the censorship of the day that orders everything to be forgotten, Shakespeare seems most ahead of his time. (Kott, 226) And his view regarding the dream is not only theatrical, but also philosophical:

. We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

(The Tempest, IV, 1, 17)

The theme of love will be reflected once more in the old tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, a burlesque comedy performed at the end of the Dream by Master Quince's troupe. Viewed with sufficient detachment, human passions are ridiculous in the extreme, and the play-within-the-play allows audience to see love from this perspective. (Scragg 97) Another important issue in this tragedy is the ignorance and the failure of Pyramus to distinguish between appearance and reality when the finds the blood stained mantle. This leads to a general state of confusion developing in the sad end of the story. Love is too frail and blind to reason, it is merely a product of the senses. This theme will be later developed more in Romeo and Juliet. This final couple appears as a universal, final mirror that reflects all the real couples of the play. The word is mad and love is mad. But isn't it the sweetest madness of all, the pleasure of love, the lust of it and for it? It is like a dream. A dream that one never wants to wake from. Love is made for the dreamers, for those who can dream. And the dream world always mirrors the real world, but à rebours.

Theseus in the end, acting as the voice of the stage director, concludes:

Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.

(V, 1, 172)

The night brings again eroticism and thus the abolition of reason, so the dream is perpetuated into the carnal union of the lovers. This "fairy time" is the frame and also the only possible explanation of the play. During this night, which is a tempo, all things come to pass. Just as the forest is an Arcadia for the young lovers, so this night is a time of grace, when the world of the spirits and the world of the humans meet. The happy end of the play completes the comic circle.

Love and dream are alike - intangible and elusive, frequently encountered, but hardly ever really grasped: ". momentary as a sound, / Swift as a shadow, short as any dream." (I, 1, 154) Therefore one must not get too serious about it, just enjoy it.

It is a dream, a jest and a presentation of the comic irresponsibility of young love whose variations are light-heartedly attributed to the mischief making of Puck. All the story of the night is not only what the lovers have told: it is what the poet has dramatised. Marriage is to the comic dramatist the beneficent arrangement through which mankind achieves a maximum of human joy and minimum of social disability. And love is a tumultuous frenzy of fancy and of sentiment, unaware of reason and thus the source of comedy. And what better environment for such a "debauchery" of feeling and vision than a night's dream? A Midsummer Night's Dream is admittedly Shakespeare's first comic masterpiece.

Key Words

Dream, dream world, audience, stage director, appearance - reality, eroticism, love, marriage, couples, exchangeability of love partners, animality, mimetism, dichotomy day/night, censorship/liberation, oblivion, law, arbitrariness, metatheatre (play-within-play).

Works Cited

Badescu, Ilie. Noologia. Bucuresti: Valahia, 2002.

Brooks, Harold F. "Introduction", William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. London: Methuen, 1979. 89-143.

Charlton, H.B. Shakespearean Comedy. London: Methuen, 1961.

Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature. London: Secker and Warburg, 1970.

Evans, Bertrand. Comedies and Tragedies. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective. The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books, 1990

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare our Contemporary. London: Methuen, 1967.

Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Routledge, 1990.

Scragg, Leah. Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. New York: Gramercy Books, 1975.

Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.

Wells, Stanley. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.