Program Essay for "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Dream Analysis
by Thomas Canfield
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s fairy tale, 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 lighthearted romantic comedy makes no scientific claims. Yet perhaps the play’s insights into the human mind have had a cultural impact that is just as significant on our perception of dreams today. In fact, Shakespeare’s authority on the matter has more successfully withstood the test of time, possibly because it is a joy to analyze dreams on the stage as opposed to confronting them on a psychiatric couch.
In the play, Shakespeare creates two contrasting worlds–reality and fantasy–to illustrate the psychological states of waking and dreaming. In the cold, hard 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 purportedly civilized realm, the romantic dreams of two young lovers, Hermia and Lysander, are threatened by unwavering legal precedent and fixed tradition. The instrument of their unhappiness is Egeus, Hermia’s father, who demands that she be forced to wed another young man, Demetrius; if she refuses, Hermia’s dire alternatives are death or a nunnery. Meanwhile, Demetrius is himself the object of Helena’s frustrated affection.
The second setting is the enchanted forest outside the jurisdiction of mortal rule. Here, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, preside over a supernatural and chaotic domain of nocturnal spirits. Their entrance, attended by their own long-standing quarrel, demonstrates that problems in love are not restricted to human beings. Yet it is only in this organic environment where anarchy, confusion, and disorder rule the night that dreams really can come true–assisted by some magical meddling on the part of Puck, the “shrewd and knavish sprite” who anoints the eyes of the young lovers with the juice of “Cupid’s flower” to manipulate their affection.
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. These two states of mind often overlap with no apparent design. Leaving the tangible world behind, we descend into a dreamy slumber that is out of our control, just as the setting of the play’s concrete, time-bound world shifts to an apparently irrational, timeless context that defies clear logic.
A third plot concerns the “rude mechanicals,” several craftsmen from Athens who meet in the forest to rehearse a play for the Duke’s upcoming nuptials. The most notable member of this decidedly amateur troupe is Bottom, a natural-born “ham” who can’t wait for his stage debut. When Puck encounters these would-be thespians, he can’t resist having a laugh at their expense and the bewildered Bottom, abandoned by his fellow actors, becomes unwittingly entangled in the romantic confusion. Although some harmless, nightmarish events occur in the moonlit countryside, they merely prove to be fanciful stopovers on the comic journey towards reconciliation in the clear light of day.
All is rectified by the play’s festive conclusion. The practical jokes are sorted out, and the mistaken identities are remedied with “Dian’s bud,” an antidote to the flower of love. However, in the end 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 is considered first and foremost in Athenian romantic affairs. In contrast, the airy denizens of the unbridled, natural world–clearly modeled on the native folklore of Elizabethan England–readily embrace a more humane and forgiving attitude toward love. The fairies unconsciously assume, and quite rightly so, that fulfilling passionate dreams and romantic desire is the fundamental path to happiness.
As the finale to a triple wedding celebration in the final act, Bottom and the players take the stage to entertain the newlyweds with a play of “very tragical mirth,” which is in itself a contradiction in terms. Yet because A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates the power of dreams to transform both performers and audience members, Shakespeare’s ultimate message may be that the untamed state of illusion and gossamer shadows that we experience every night is an integral counterpart to the tiresome reality of our waking hours. From time to time, we all must escape the mundane, superficial realm of the conscious and surrender to a primeval wilderness of delirious, playful fantasy.
