Program Essay for "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Dream Analysis
by Thomas Canfield
A Midsummer Night’s Dream premiered more than three centuries before Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899. Unlike Freud’s psychoanalytical approach to the unconscious, Shakespeare’s romantic comedy makes no scientific claims. Yet the play’s insights into the human mind may have had a greater cultural impact than Freud’s on our perceptions of dreams today. Shakespeare’s authority on the matter has more successfully withstood the test of time, perhaps because it is a joy to analyze dreams in the theatre as opposed to confronting them on a psychiatric couch.
In the play, Shakespeare creates two contrasting settings to illustrate the psychological states of waking and dreaming. In the broad daylight of Athens governed by Theseus and his bride-to-be Hippolyta, a conscious devotion to the established order of human law reigns supreme. In this civilized realm, the romantic dreams of several young lovers are threatened by an unwavering legal system and fixed tradition. Meanwhile, in the enchanted forest outside the boundaries of mortal rule, Oberon and Titania preside over a supernatural and chaotic domain of nocturnal spirits. In this organic environment where anarchy, confusion, and disorder rule the night, dreams can come true–assisted by some magical interference.
When the inhabitants of the brick-and-mortar world venture into the ethereal sphere of the fairies, Shakespeare portrays how the boundaries separating conscious reality and unconscious illusion are not so clearly drawn. The two mental states often overlap with no apparent design. Leaving the concrete world behind, we fall into a dreamy slumber, just as the setting of the play’s rational, time-bound world shifts to an apparently irrational, timeless context that defies clear logic. While some harmless, nightmarish events occur in the moonlit countryside, they merely prove to be fanciful stopovers on the journey towards reconciliation in the clear light of day.
All is sorted out by the play’s festive conclusion, but we are left with the question of which of the two realms is really more enlightened, at least regarding the ideals of passion and reason. Even though the flesh-and-blood citizens of classical Greece claim to consciously value a rational society, they have constructed an artificial, rigid system that is sometimes capricious and illogical. Neither the emotions of the heart nor the common sense of the head are considered first and foremost in Athenian romantic affairs. In contrast, the airy denizens of the untamed, natural world—modeled on the native folklore of Elizabethan England—readily embrace a humane and forgiving attitude toward love. The fairies unconsciously assume, and quite rightly so, that fulfilling passionate dreams and romantic desires is the fundamental path to happiness.
This production, set in an abandoned theatre haunted by shadows of the past, celebrates the power of dreams to transform both performers and audience members. From time to time, we all must escape the superficial realm of the conscious and surrender to a primeval wilderness of delirious, playful fantasy.
