A Dream Within A Dream…

‘Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?’

The poet Edgar Allen Poe was the child of actors, in all probability named after the figure from King Lear, and while his immediate literary influences seemed to be the romantics rather than The Bard, he understood the powerful lens that fantasy and dream-like realms brings to storytelling. In fact, most forms of enacted narrative (theatre, screen media) can be understood as a form of communal dreaming, this is then a handy notion for deconstructing a medium for audiences, with Christopher Nolan’s Inception an astonishing recent example.

For now, I will spare you my personal adoration for both Poe and Nolan. After the reflective quality of my last post on Romeo and Juliet, some readers may feel they know me probably a little too well. While I’ll try and keep the biography to a minimum from this point onwards, it would simply be dishonest of me to say A Midsummer Night’s Dream has no personal significance. I have a little history with this play, and will share it now… this is a blog, after all.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the only dramatic work of William Shakespeare that I chose to read, simply for the enjoyment of it. When first making my way at university, I bought a paperback of the play for $2 from a stall in King William Street one winter’s morning. The play was scheduled to pop up in first year Drama and English topics, so I bought the discount text in a bid to keep the student costs at bay. I climbed aboard my bus, opened the paperback and from that point onwards, the play went with me everywhere.

The text could be found folded into the pocket of my overcoat as I haunted train stations, slept on busses, killed time in coffee houses or drew pictures of Batman in boring lectures. As a matter of habit, I began to mine the yellowing pages for the mythical characters, outlandish romping and intoxicating verse. That paperback of Dream seemed like a totem of balmy fantasy that transcended the chilly, banal months of winter study.

So, I fell in love with Dream, and felt a keen sympathy for its warm sense of mischief, quirky magic, poetic yearning and outright smut. I quickly turned to the films, hiring the then new cheesy adaption with Michelle Pfeiffer as a breath-taking Titania, then also the classic cheesy adaption with Mickey Rooney hamming about as Puck. I even taped a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ballet… I only lasted about thirty seconds into that but I gave it a shot out of respect. Sadly, to this day I have never seen the play actually performed.

Broadly, I suspect there is something universal to Dream. For those of us with more anglo-european backgrounds, deep within our cultural memory we can recall the pagan notion that there is a reality within nocturnal spaces, not a domain of cold darkness, but a plane of bright, chirping life where fairy gods pine and muck about. This recollection evokes those hot summers when the night is softer than the day, when the heat of noon subsides and the breeze that falls after dusk is warm and sweet. We can imagine kids bolting through the streets laughing, playing pranks in Puck-like fashion. We picture weary tradesmen, drinking beer on porches, figuratively acting like jack-asses. This redolent time is often when people fall in love, become heartbroken and gather round to tell stories and dream of something exotic and divine. This distant memory, whether archetypal or trivial, is where A Midsummer Night’s Dream evokes something in us all.

Indeed, the evocative notion of ‘the dream’ represents the interior realm in which our desires know no bounds, and the text sees the characters transcend restraint, logic and even reality and species. Shakespeare typically invokes structures of authority into his work: kings, dukes, priests, soldiers, etc. These figures bring a sense of parameter and consequence to the drama (the prince banishes Romeo, the duke sentences Egeon to death, etc). Such figures are absent from Dream’s plot, un-tethered havoc being the result. In fact, Shakespeare shucks the whole status quo for this play, with no political figures or larger Judeo-Christian framework to be seen. With no kings, no cops and no God anywhere to be seen, this is Shakespeare having an awful lot of fun.

Aside: The Elizabethans had quite an eclectic religious experience. King Henry 8th had of course devised his own ecclesiastical structure for political reasons. His daughter Elizabeth had managed to keep the social chaos of the Protestant/Catholic schism at bay. This was also the Renaissance and a young humanism (a broad term then and now) had begun to gather momentum.

So Shakespeare’s audience had inherited an English depiction of Yahweh, arguably the first universal deity, whose existence was coherent with Greek philosophy thanks to Augustine and whose will approved the throes of empire thanks to Constantine. The King James Bible was about to hit the presses, but the Bishop’s Bible had already become the society’s central text, offering cosmology, morality, folklore, hygienic protocols and the general mythos that any coherent civilization requires. Shakespeare’s work is inseparable from this fascinating religious ethos… except for Dream, which abandons all restraint for the magical antics of fairy jesters with love potions and gigolo donkeys named Bottom.

More specifically, Dream takes place within a genre-crossing framework of ancient Greek mythology and Renaissance fantasy, with Athenian characters mixing with figures drawn from Germanic myth. So the play weds the worlds of such diverse figures as the Greek gods Theseus and Hyppolyta, the Renaissance fairies Oberon and Titania and the English trickster Puck. It may be difficult to understand how this rearranging of ancient icons, literary characters and pop clowns may have struck the Elizabethans, but let’s try a contemporary allusion: imagine a love story involving a number of young 21st century couples bumbling around beneath the capricious antics of St Peter, Superman and Bugs Bunny. A flawed parallel, but it’s a start.

Textually, there’s more than enough traditional Shakespearean motifs at work here: a play within a play, mistaken identity, love triangles, clowns, class distinction, marriage as resolution etc. There may not be prior sources at work here, akin to Love Labour’s Lost, and Shakespeare seems to be writing from scratch, relishing every opportunity to crank the mayhem and subvert the craft. Given the results, this bodes well for the Bard’s sole creative spirit.

Now, as I read Dream again it seems hard to separate the text from my time intimately spent with the play. I could continue to spin some evocative prose around how the book impacted my world, riffing off the sweet melancholy of youth and resonant potency of Shakespeare’s verse. Indeed, I have a ton of ripe guff I could throw about, but I did that last week. In closing, all I will say is this: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare at his most fantastic, bawdy and mischievous and it is unforgettable as a result.

I was amused by Ben’s recollection of the poor essay he wrote on Dream years before at university. You see, I wrote that exact essay as well, making the usual drab observations (the gods as an old married couple fussing over child custody in a rom-com with a fantasy plot-wheel) and getting an academic beat down from one very unimpressed tutor. Maybe it’s a rite of passage for young literature students to draw some banal analogies on this play and receive the dreaded red ink as punishment. The irony here was that I adored this play, yet my analysis was so trite as a result.

History repeats itself and taste trumps critique (see my last post). In instances where we feel unable to rise above the audience stalls, higher observations are often absent. I’ve said nothing new on A Midsummer Night’s Dream here. Perhaps that is the power of the play, as an escapist vision of unfettered fantasy and desire that leaves dryer thoughts behind.

At the play’s end, the characters each conclude that the magic mayhem they have witnessed must have been a dream. Puck even suggests this of the play itself:

‘And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream,’

For William Shakespeare to frame the play’s occurrence as a communal dream is to contextualise the event as something simultaneously fantasy and reality, for a dream is both an abstract vision and a keen experience. Here, the play becomes something universal, transcending reality for the audience.

As did my $2 paperback all those years ago…

Anthony