A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594)

All I knew was that Tolkien hated it.  That's how it was for the longest time.  Sure I'd heard of the play in passing, here and there.  I even knew who had written it (and no, there is no confusion or open question in my mind on that subject).  Hell, I'd even learned how to become a fan of his long ago by the time I checked out this particular work for myself.  I first made the acquaintance of the Bard of Avon in what now amounts to not just another time, but also something of another world, in many ways.  I think I might have been a high school freshman at the time I'm thinking back on now, yet it's difficult to be precise about things like this, even if you're not old.  What I now know for certain (after a bit of rummaging around in the old memory banks) is that the first time I ever had a personal encounter with the writings of William Shakespeare was way back in an old English class.  The play we were given to study is often cited as the writer's major breakout success.  It's the one with the line that askes, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo"?  That was also the first time I ever got a chance to study Elizabethan Blank Verse for myself.  It sounded a bit strange, at first.  Like listening to a foreign language.  At first, it was like trying to to pick up fragments of just discernable meaning scattered amidst the pages of a new and peculiar dictionary.

Perhaps the strangest thing to come out of pouring over one of the key moments in the development in the history of English Literature is that it is possible to say I came away more or less impressed.  I'm not sure I can call Romeo and Juliet my favorite of the Bard's works.  At the same time, there's got to have been at least something of value in this early, energetic effort.  It was enough to get my attention to the point where I began to get interested.  It let me be curious enough to want to ask, just who was this curious sounding, yet somehow entertaining scribbler from Stratford, England?  Not long after that, I happened to catch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where none other than Hamlet was the feature attraction.  Fans of the show complain it's not the best entry in the series, but I didn't come away just amused.  Somehow, the Best Brains behind that production turned me into a Shakespeare fan.  Looking back on how it all happened now, the whole thing seems to have been one of those gradual processes.  Somehow, all the right choices were made that were required to first get my attention, then my genuine interest in the one the writer who bears the most responsibility for the shape and nature of modern fiction.  I'm sure it's not an isolated incident, by any means.  Odds are even the brief bit of backstory I've just told is the sort of thing that's been replicated more than once out there.  What makes my case almost unique is that it happened in a classroom setting, which is not a normal occurrence.

If there's any thing like a good rule of thumb when it comes to engaging with the Classics of Western Literature, then one of the few hard and fast rules, for the most part, seems to be to avoid any first introductions that involves a school curriculum setting.  This is something Stephen King once talked about in a now almost obscure essay.  He was writing about the difference between the texts that naturally caught the attention of the reader, versus those that our school system at least tries to get us interested in.  King defines these semi-related phenomenon under the helpful rubric of "Wanna Read", and "Gotta Read".  Each amounts to no more than what it says on the label.  Wanna Read applies to all the works of fiction (regardless of medium) that have won your heart, and introduced you to the world of the life-long fan.  Gotta Read describes the literary equivalent of the grown-ups telling you to eat your vegetables.  I feel like I should step in here to note that King does present one caveat to the problem of Gotta Read.  Sometimes it is possible for teachers to make the right choice, and assign you a genuine work of art that can win over the audience.  It is possible to see the beauty of the fiction of Jane Austen or the Bronte Sisters.  However, it seems like making them "important" isn't the way to do it.

It takes something else in order to allow works like Pride and Prejudice to plant the right hook in the readers mind; the one that is able to reel them in as a new catch.  This is something that any well told story can do on its own steam.  I think part of the problem that a lot English 101 teachers have trouble with is understanding how that is, and what's the best way of passing on that sort of enthusiasm to all their young charges.  Whatever the case, the usual results are just as King outlines.  "As a high-school student I found Edgar Allan Poe a prolix, leather-lunged bore who was about as scary as the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks; I condemned Robert Frost as a pedestrian hick; considered Hemingway a macho jerk with an elephant gun where his heart should be; felt that John Updike's first book of short stories, Pigeon Feathers, was one of the most boring things I'd ever read in my life.  I felt like demanding an EEG after finishing it, just to make sure I wasn't brain-dead.  Now...years after high-school, I still feel exactly the same way about Pigeon Feathers...The others?  We-elll...that's a different story.  Hamlet?  Tremendously exciting.  A study of madness and obsession that probably has no peer.  And a darn fine ghost story, in the bargain...and if Hamlet is the greatest play ever written in English, then Great Expectations may be the greatest novel (356-7)".  This is just one example among many others.

It's a testament to the staying power a writer like Shakespeare can have so long as he's given either (1) the right sort of classroom environment, or better yet (2) the best level playing field possible for the Stratford Bard to shop his wares to the audience.  At least that's what happened to me, anyway.  It's even gotten to the point where Shakespeare's Blank Verse "house style" no longer sounds strange to my ears at all.  It just flows like well tuned music.  The trick on that score is the realization that all the Bard has done is to take the rhythms and cadences of ordinary Elizabethan conversation, raised its diction up to the level of Poetry, and then bracketed it in the kind of structure that is nowadays more typically reserved for the composition of song lyrics.  It's an outmoded way of writing so far as any of us are concerned today.  However the fact that someone a long time ago was able to be so good at it that we've kept him around has to be just one demonstration of the level of talent involved in writing a work like Hamlet.  Still, it's like I say.  In all the time that I was broadening my outlook on all things Shakespearean, a play like the Midsummer Night always remained something of a periphery concern.

At last, one day, I decided to knuckle under and set aside some time to taking a look at this bit of Elizabethan Fantasy for myself.  The result is worth talking about.  As I think I can say I've found some..."interesting" elements of the play.  They may definitely be worth commenting on.  I'm just not sure I ever imagined I would have to talk about it all the way I'm about to now.  Here's a bit of fair warning for the reader going forward.  What I have to say next is going to be a bit tricky or delicate to discuss.  There's a lot of heady and hot topics to talk about with a story like this.  These subjects can include what happens when a play ends up brining up questions about what makes a healthy relationship?  Or whether or not an artist can be forced into writing against his best interests?  It might go all the way up to including what happens when an artist is forced to perform his art in a fundamentally toxic venue?  If all of that sounds like a tall order for a play that concerns a couple of run-ins with the Fair Folk, all I can say is these are the questions and discoveries that the final results of Shakespeare's Woodland drama first forced me to ask, and in looking for the answers, to arrive at a picture that somehow proves it's possible for real life to be more confused and messed up than any piece of fiction the best can conjure up.  With fair warning, this is my look at A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Story.

Conclusion: A Tangled and Troubling Web of a Plot.

To say that an amateur critic is nervous in trying to approach the work of Shakespeare, is a bit like saying that Niagara Falls has no choice in the matter except to run downhill.  Make no mistake, anyone who decides to tackle so much as a single line of dialogue from this guy is more or less in same position of a man with his head on the chopping block.  It all comes down to a question of doing the writer justice.  When it comes to someone with a reputation like the creator of Hamlet, it's almost as if the very word loses all sense of meaning, and proportion.  A lot of the reason for that is down to the legacy Shakespeare has left behind for us.  In some ways, he's a lot like the literary equivalent of Aristotle.  He's managed the astounding trick of shaping not just literature, but also the way we respond and think about it all to such a degree that trying to step outside of this Shakespearean paradigm is akin to sawing off the branch you're sitting on.  I'm not sure it can be done.  At least I know for a fact I'm not the one to do it.  Nor do I count as any sort of expert in the field of Bardolatry.  I'm just a guy who caught a presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream one evening, and have been trying to figure out the right words to describe my reaction ever since.  Everything I have to say next will have to be my two cents.  Even if my take on this play gains no further traction, I can at least say that I've followed my own conscience in the matter.  So far as I'm concerned, that's enough when it comes to this story.

Let's start by going back to the beginning.  For the longest time, all I knew about the Midsummer was that Tolkien hated it.  He seemed to think it was one of the worst creative ideas ever set to paper.  For the moment, let's just note that there goes one hell of a gauntlet for one writer to throw down at another.  When the duelists in the dispute are two of the most famous names in either English or World literature, that strikes me as the kind of thing you don't soon forget.  I think it's got to say something for just how high a regard we as an audience hold for the creator of Middle Earth that none of his negativity toward his Elizabethan predecessor has ever done anything to put a dent in his reputation.  As of this writing, Tolkien's popularity remains on the same Parnassus its been on since its first flowering in the 1960s, and later rediscovery during the 80s and 90s.  It takes a special kind of talent to be able to hold onto that much goodwill from readers over such a long span of time.  It's a testament not only to Tolkien's skills as an artist, but also of the respect his opinions on Art are held in, even when he says something most would be inclined to disagree with.  So where do I stand on Tolkien's verdict?  I'll start the answer to that question by offering a healthy caveat.  Just because the writer of Lord of the Rings said something dismissive of a play by the Bard of Avon, that's not quite the same as having to believe he had a negative view of Shakespeare's works across the board.  The picture could be more complex.

For all we know, Tolkien might not have had a liking for this one, particular performance, and yet still have been an eager fan of a lot of the rest of the Bard's output.  To summarize a long story, Tolkien's main complaint with Midsummer has to do with the way the Bard handles the world of traditional folklore.  His initial charge was that the playwright's words carried the risk of degenerating the sense of Enchantment that can come with the concept of a magical otherworld, and its ethereal inhabitants.  While this was a piece of background knowledge I carried around with me for a long while, it wasn't until recently that I gave myself the chance to compare notes.  After having watched a presentation of the Dream play, I'm left with a number of questions.  To start out with the simplest one, it goes something like this.  Did Shakespeare ever write a bad play?  As it turns out, neither the question, nor its answer amounts to all that much of a blasphemy as you might suppose.  In fact, whenever someone does decide to broach the topic, there is, in fact, a regular list of candidates that gets brought up time and again.  The most common nominees in this rarified category include such likes as Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, and last but not least, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, and Titus Andronicus.  The last example is often held as the writer's worst ever.

It's pretty easy to see why that's the case, as it represents in terms of style, subject matter, and overall dramatic technique, everything that Shakespeare would go on to define himself against.  In other words, whenever people refer to him as the Bard, they typically mean who he ultimately became in contradistinction to works like Titus.  In that sense, it is possible to speak of the artist having to undergo a slow-burn manner of apprenticeship to maturity during his early years.  Another way to put it is that just as Rome wasn't built in a day, so Shakespeare never began his public career as Avon's Bard.  That was a position he had to work his way towards, and it shows in the nascent sense of dramaturgy displayed in a lot of his earliest writings.  In fact, it is the words of a now obscure scholar called Charles Williams who summed up the nature of Will's first achievements in dramatic poetry.  "Every poet, like every man, sets out to enjoy himself...Even Milton wasn't born old... Of this early delight Shakespeare had his full share. The diction of the plays is part of it: consider the dance of words, the puns and the rhymes, for instance in the antiphon between Luciana and Antipholus in the Comedy of Errors. 

"And more even than in the diction this enjoyment is felt in the manner of emotional apprehension. The bodies in Titus Andronicus, the proclaimed villainy of Richard III, the reckless and unconvincing pardon of Proteus in Two Gentlemen, are all examples of Shakespeare 'having a good time'. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet contains the best example of all; hardly anywhere else has death, while remaining sad, been made more purely luxurious than in Romeo's great speech, and this speech is in accord with the play. There is no malice and no injustice, except by chance. Quarrels do break out; letters do go wrong; appointments are missed; and death happens. What can one do about it? Nothing but enjoy (30-32)".  Such is the general nature of the majority of Shakespeare's early writings.  In play's like Richard III we begin to get our first sense of the kind of Bard the artist will one day become.  Even if the final voice in this early play is still nascent, it's still marks out a crucial moment when the author's own poetic genius has begun to make itself both known and felt.  It wasn't until sometime after the composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream that we find Shakespeare really beginning to get his artistic gifts together, and developing his talents into all of those various sources of Inspiration that would allow him to become the Artist of English Literature.  I have to wonder if it wasn't the experience of first writing, and then performing the Elvish play that might have acted as a necessary catalyst for the writer's true voice? 

This is a question I've asked myself ever since getting to know the story of what happens when a quartet of quarreling couples, and a ragtag group of amateur theater kids find themselves lost in an enchanted forest on the outskirts of Athens.  I can think of at least one good, though complex reason why the experience of creating this play in particular might have acted as either a spur, or a wake-up call of sorts for the artist.  How it could have acted as the kind of mental clarion necessary to drive his artistry to heights greater than what he and it had become at that point.  What I'd like to posit now is just this.  That writing this specific Fantasy story brought about a very complicated yet genuine realization out of the Bard.  I have referred to it as a clarion call, of sorts, yet another way to put it might be to say that it was a case of the writer being awakened from his own slumber.  It goes back to the question of whether or not Shakespeare ever wrote a bad play.  While it's always possible for both audiences and critics to gather up the usual suspects, I'm not sure how much or often anyone has ever considered whether A Midsummer Night's Dream belongs on that list as well.  I also don't know whether I've just spoken either a blasphemy, or a mere truism so far as others are concerned.  Tolkien might claim that I was doing nothing else except stating the honest truth, however painful.  Bardologists would probably be screaming for my blood.  All I can do is give the reasons for thinking the Dream a particular flaw.

It all starts with one simple element that gets out of control, and somehow manages to encompass the whole plot.  To be fair, the idea of a simple mishap snowballing into an avalanche that risks burying the entire cast is nothing new in a Shakespeare tale.  In fact, you could says its one of his most common tropes.  The kind of plot device that the writer keeps coming back to time and again in his plays.  If I had to find any particular reason for why Shakespeare likes this kind of narrative development so much, then the best solution is the simplest.  The author was able to rely on the idea of a fictional situation getting out of control because it proved so durable at a dramatic level.  In other words, if it works, and is reliable, use it.  That same basic idea is in play with the Midsummer Dream, yet this is the first time that this particular literary device was ever applied to a situation that brought everything to dead halt.  The situation I'm talking about now didn't just take me out of the proceedings, it managed to cast the whole story in a problematic light.  It's something that I found so uncomfortable that I really couldn't go along with the rest of what I was seeing, even if it all was make-believe.  This is what happened.  It starts with what sounds like a typical Shakespearean lover's quarrel.  A husband and wife are in a bit of "domestic dispute" over where the latter has been placing all of her time, effort, and priorities for a while now.

The husband is named Oberon.  His wife is Titania.  And while they might qualify as monarchs of an enchanted kingdom (the Erl King and his Queen) the way the story's written still casts them, in the last resort, as a quarreling couple.  Again, this in and of itself is nothing out of the ordinary for Shakespeare.  Much like with the device of plans and events getting out of hand, the lover's quarrel appears to have been another dramatic commonplace that worked for the Bard's artistry.  So much so that even after this play, it functions as yet another Well of Inspiration that he keeps returning to time and again in his writings.  What makes his use of it in the Dream stand out from all the others times he's done it is the of level skin-crawling wrongness that lingers over the whole event.  You see, like any situation in a Bard play, the situation starts out relatively normal, and then takes a turn for worst.  What happens is a friend of Titania's has passed on recently, and left her orphan son behind.  The Queen of the Woods decides to take this child into her care, out of a sense of loyalty to her deceased friend.  So far, nothing out of the ordinary, even if the situation takes place in a realm of characters who aren't human, and instead all count as fantastical creatures.  The trouble starts when the King begins to get a bit too "needy" for his, or anyone else's own good.  He demands that Titania pay more attention to his desires, even if it comes at the expense of an orphaned little kid.  His wife is smart, and doesn't put up with it.

The reader gets the sense that Titania is the sort of girl who doesn't take herself or others frivolously.  In other words, if she sees or notices something wrong and out of joint, she's the sort who's libel to put her foot down and mend things as quick as possible.  So far, so admirable.  It's the sort of character introduction and delineation that carries a surprising amount of meritorious qualities to it.  Even a certain level creaks and groans in the dialogue the character is given is thankfully still not enough to erase this initial note of strength as well as nobility that this woman carries about with her.  The language may be clunky, yet the character is the exact opposite.  You get the sense that in another scenario, and with a stronger sense of diction and style (in other words, with the Bard operating at the top of his usual game) this could have been one of Shakespeare's best drawn female heroines.  If I'm being honest, I wish that's what we got instead of the rest of the play as it is.  What happens is that Oberon tries to "take control of the situation" only for his wife to put him in his place, and send him on his way.  The sight of a grasping, insecure idiot trying to tyrannize the woman he claims to love is uncomfortable enough.  It's what he does next, and how it plays out in the rest of the narrative that tilts everything about this story for me out of simple discomfort, and into the realm of the problematic.

Since he's frustrated that his wife won't pay more attention to him.  Instead of being a real man about it, and maybe even helping her by seeing if he can be a foster father to a surrogate child (which might have even gotten a bit of merited admiration for himself) Oberon decides to get his hands on the chemicals found in a certain plant, mix up a drug from its chemistry, and use it on his wife in order first to humiliate her, and then to get her to "only have eyes" for him.  In order to do so, he gets one of his henchman, a certain Robin Goodfellow by name (sometimes known as Puck) to get the formula, and then apply it to Titania while she's asleep.  Through the usual round of mishaps, the "magic potion" is applied to the right victim, yet it happens at the wrong time, and the results draw in the rest of the cast.  By this point, I'm guessing (or at least I have to hope) that most reading this will have begun to spot the whole damn problem with this entire scenario.  What we're seeing play out on-stage is a plot to take a woman through the use of chemical drugs, only to have this scenario broaden to include the rest of the figures in the story.  This is all treated as an opportunity for comedy!  For the record, there is now an entire catalogue of legal prohibitions on the books for what Oberon gets started here, both in Britain and America.  What in the hell possessed Shakespeare to think any of this sounded like some good idea?!

It's something that bothers me more than any of the usual round of tragic deaths that litter the stage in any of Shakespeare's other productions.  This reaction is in some ways all the more bewildering considering the usual round of grief and sorrow the plays like to visit on the majority of their casts.  Compared to the fate of someone like Desdemona in Othello, what happens to Titania is not only bloodless, she's also able to emerge alive at the final curtain call.  It's still an open question of what her ordeal has done to her mind, though.  I think it's the fact that the violation of a woman happens in such an almost hands-off, indirect way that makes it so skin-crawling, if that even makes sense.  It's the fact that you are watching a drugging and manipulation against a woman's free will at this, second-hand, detached angle that makes that makes it all the worse.  This somehow unspoken horror at the center of the Dream is then doubled by the fact that it's never properly addressed at any point further on in the play.  The story is allowed to come to a close without this crucial plot ever being resolved.  A violation has been treated as a joke.  What makes that whole scenario all the more confusing is the jarring clash it sets up with the rest of Shakespeare's oeuvre.  At no other point in the rest of his work is there an instance of a female character being treated in such a shameless fashion, begging the question, why?

It's a question I've spent some time in trying to find the best possible answer for in preparation for this review.  The good news (if you want to call it that) is I've found what I think is the answer.  The just plain weird news is that in doing so I've somehow uncovered one of the most convoluted and twisted web of context underlying the entire writing and production of this play, it's impact on the author, and how this in turn might have gone on to shape the sort of writer Shakespeare would one day become.  The first step to understanding the somehow callous nature of this play seems to lie in realizing its specific point of origin.  When most of us think of how stories are created, we tend to imagine the artist just going about their daily routine, and then, just like that, a Creative Idea pops into their head.  They have become Inspired by the Muse.  However cliche that description might sound, it still seems to be the basic fact of the matter.  Stephen King once likened writing to any other workaday job, like bricklaying, or constructing a house.  In the beginning is the Inspiration, and you'd better hope the word is good, and that the idea can translate into a fine entertainment.  In order to find that out, however, the writer has to put in the work.  Which makes the art of storytelling one of those 1% cogitation, 99% aggravation type deals, just like the rest.  It's how most author's write, and Shakespeare was no different for the most part.  The truth seems to be he was just this ink-stained wretch trying to do a good job.

He was capable of working in feats of clever stagecraft, or various sorts of thematic richness.  Yet that was all just bells and whistles at the end of the day.  When you cut away all that stuff and are left with core of the Bard's craft, it just amount to another working stiff looking for his next idea.  This appears to have been how it went for most of Shakespeare's career.  Which is what makes the conception and development of the Dream stick out like a sore thumb in comparison with how most of stories were composed.  To start with, there's a high degree of probability that it wasn't a normal case of Inspiration, but rather one of invitation.  A better way to say it is that the critical consensus to the background of this play is that it was all the result of a Command Performance.  In other words, the writer wasn't allowed to develop this idea on and under his own steam, like usual.  Instead, he seems to have been contacted by someone in the nobility.  His services as an entertainer were not so much requested as ordered for the purpose of putting on a show for a select audience, rather than his regular fandom of groundlings.  

The best book about the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream is David P. Young's Something of Great Constancy.  And it's in that study that we read how "The play was probably commissioned as part of a wedding celebration and played first before a courtly audience, but it was also seen on the public stage, so that it reached, finally, a cross section of Elizabethan society (14)".  In a footnote aside on the same page, Young adds the following bit of trivia: "Commentators find it hard to agree on which wedding the play was commissioned for (ibid)".  These words were written back in 1966.  So far as I can tell, this remains one of those niche debates that continues off and on in the field of Bardolatry.  It's a topic I'll have to return to in a minute for the sake of the argument of this article.  For the moment it's enough of a start to suggest the significance of Shakespeare being asked to entertain at a wedding.  When critics like Young, E.K. Chambers, and J. Dover Wilson tell us that someone contacted the Bard of Avon to write a play for a gathering of family nuptials, we need to replace a few possible misconceptions if it's a clear picture we're looking for about the circumstances of the Dream's birth.  We're not talking about a young talent on the make being given a break in the form of an easy gig paycheck, like a local garage band playing for neighborhood money.  It's not like the Beatles performing in a backyard somewhere.

If it makes any sense to compare Shakespeare's commission to a struggling artist being given their first big break, then there's a whole lot of other qualifiers you have to add into this particular bargain.  Another misconception we've got to clear our heads on is that wouldn't have been the type of straightforward deal most of us are thinking of.  This isn't like Elvis winning an invitation to come in and lay down few audition tracks at Sun Records.  For one thing, that event was a totally free and open gesture with no strings attached.  All the King had to do was decide whether he wanted to give his ambitions a shot, and that was it, more or less.  Every choice made by the people involved with that case was their own.  It would probably not have been the same case as far as the Bard and his play were concerned.  When Midsummer was commissioned as part of a wedding entertainment it was less like an audition call by a generous and equitable host, and more like Don Corleone summoning a Frank Sinatra expy to perform his due diligence for his daughter and her "guests".  It sounds like an alien custom from another time, or planet.  And in a sense, that's pretty much what it was.  This was how the English ruling class conducted their business when dealing with peans such as a mere stage player from Stratford.  

If you were fingered to play a gig at the estate of a noble gentry, questions of the freedom of artistic expression wouldn't have really had a chance to enter the conversation.  Part of the deal when performing for the ruling class was that you couldn't just do whatever Art you pleased.  Whatever great entertainment meant to you was so far out the window by this point, it might as well have been all the way on the Moon for all the flying fuck your employer for the evening cared.  When you were summoned to play for the guests, there was only one thing Shakespeare could do.  First off, he would have to dance to whatever tune his host chose, and however he wanted it.  Second of all, whenever the father of the bride said "Jump!" the only thing the Bard was expected to ask was "How high"?  Anything beyond this would potentially have been career suicide, and Big Bill was never that eager to make a mistake.  Now if any of this sounds ridiculous, like someone could just make the poor, talented bastard try to walk a tightrope while trying to keep any number of plates spinning in the air at the same time, all I can say is that's how the ruling class operated in Queen Elizabeth's England.  So you say this is short notice?  Fuck you, pay me.  You don't have enough time to polish the script?  Fuck you, pay me.  You don't even know where to begin?  How to assemble the cast in time?  Not enough hours in the day for rehearsals, and the budget's thin?

Fuck you and the horse your rode in on.  Now fucking pay me!  It was either pony up, stand, and deliver as best you can, even if everyone's there for the sole purpose of hurling peanuts at you regardless (at best) or even because (at worst) of your talent, or else get shafted.  This was one of those "offers you can't refuse" type deals.  For any struggling playwright on the make to turn down a private performance commission like this meant putting a severe crimp in your ability to earn a living in Elizabethan showbusiness.  Because back then, every single damn thing about the theater was centralized and at the beck and call of the nobles and the crown.  Play nice or get run over.  Those were the options.  Nor was that the only problem with being a creative type back in those days.  If anything, having to be a performing clown for a bunch of rich pricks who probably wouldn't know St. George from the Dragon was just the tip of the iceberg.  According to at least one Shakespearean scholar, sometimes even just putting on a show could be a hazardous undertaking in the powder keg that was the English Renaissance.  Here's where we sort of enter the real tangled part of an immense, historical, web.  Part of the reason I decided to go ahead and write this article was to find out just why the fuck a sophisticated sounding cat like Shakespeare could write something that stands as basically an insult to garbage?!

So far as I can tell, it turns out a lot of the answer to that can be found in the demands made on the playwright by the tricky historical situation he had either the dumb, or else just plain bad luck to find himself in.  Entertain conjecture of a time when the Bard was seen almost like this statue.  He was the very picture of creative Genius at its height.  There's still a lot of truth in that, yet the mistake a lot of folks, even the sympathetic critics made was in thinking they could take the guy in isolation.  Like he was this Euripides surveying the scene with detachment from some vaunted Parnassus, way high up in the sky.  The same mistake they all make is they forgot who they were dealing with.  

Here's this working class schlub from the sticks who comes to the big city all on account of how he wants to be a writer, and that's it.  Or at least that's how things like this start.  I mean most creative type have dreams of leaving their mark on the landscape in one way or another.  At least I've never heard of on who didn't fit that sort of profile.  And to be fair, that might have been all that Big Bill had for himself in terms of any kind of life goal when he first set foot in London town proper.  Just to come in, make a name for himself, and from then on, just be happy and enjoy his talent or gift for playing make-believe.  It should be that simple, right?  Let a bit of time go on, however, and pretty soon even a country hick will begin to get a better lay of the land, and of how he's to survive in it if he wants to keep on doing what he loves.  That's what happened in Shakespeare's case.  He might have gone into the world of the theater with an idea of being able to keep his head down and focus on his craft.  However, a lot of recent study tells me that even before then, he might have know he had to walk a tightrope. 

That's because even if he was a country mouse, it's not the same as saying he didn't have eyes and couldn't put two and two together.  What critics like Clare Asquith are a pains to stress is that Shakespeare didn't have the luxury of being the Bard in perfect and serene isolation.  Instead, it was more like learning to live through the endurance test that was the heady and often volatile life of Great Britain in reign of good Queen Bess.  "Over the past fifteen years...certain historians—some of them, like Peter Lake, cautiously deferential, others, like Curtis Breight, angrily incensed—have begun to invade the territory of Shakespeare scholarship. Initially this was to challenge the recent ‘New Historicist’ angle on the sixteenth century, which aimed to reassess the literature and drama by setting it in what was understood to be the cultural and intellectual context of the time. Normally the first step in studying the creative work of the past, this approach, especially in the case of the context-free Shakespeare, was long overdue. But the historicists found they had stumbled into a hornets’ nest. Elizabeth’s reign, the last years in particular, have been undergoing a lengthy and contentious process of reassessment. According to many current historians, the New Historicists were working on an outdated and misconceived version of the period. They had been given the wrong handbook.

"Stephen Greenblatt’s influential 1989 analysis of the plays, Shakespearean Negotiations, drew on a series of long-held assumptions about Elizabeth’s reign.  Power lay with the queen: yet, in material terms, she was weak. She had no standing army, no bureaucracy, and no police force to speak of. She relied instead on theatrical display and rhetorical persuasion: and with such success that, though ‘a weak and feeble woman’, she retained power for almost fifty years—and commanded the devotion of her subjects throughout, which, as she often declared, ‘I do esteem more than any treasure or riches’.  This was an age, then, when theatricality was the source of power: a great starting point for Shakespeare scholars.    But late Tudor power is not seen this way anymore. Instead, the latest body of evidence indicates that Elizabeth presided over a highly successful police state. In the view of Curtis Breight, her weakness had from the start compelled her ‘to make alliances with some of the most clever and ruthless men ever to control the English state, lawyerly humanists who knew how to weave plots and engineer harsh legislation’. Scholars such as Breight paint a picture of a country kept in check by terror and by the deliberate fomenting of aggressive wars abroad. They have highlighted damning evidence of the corrupt political dominance of Lord Burghley (William Cecil) and his son Robert, and have revised the traditional image of their doomed opponent, the Earl of Essex. 

"So brilliant was the  propaganda machine under the Cecils that Essex has been seen ever since his fall as an inept victim of a struggle between court factions. Over the past twenty years, however, thanks to the work of scholars led by Paul Hammer and Alexandra Gajda, Essex has emerged as a political and intellectual heavyweight whose ideals and character mobilized all those who had become disgusted by the self-serving rule of what was then known as the regnum Cecilianum, the reign of the Cecils. Power, it now appears, resided not in the dazzling spectacle of the queen, but in the iron fist of her ministers: and this means, say historians, that as far as Shakespeare goes, the historicists have got the story wrong. Elizabeth’s men, as hitherto marginalized evidence demonstrates, were experts in the use of torture, intimidation, propaganda, and the use of agents provocateurs to create the ‘mass paranoia’ of a society ridden with informers.  

"A further aspect of the opposition to the Cecils has also recently come under scrutiny: the huge and varied corpus of political writings by Elizabethan exiles, many of them senior academics from Oxford and Cambridge. In 1594, the Jesuit Robert Persons’s Conference About the Next Succession, a controversial analysis of the English political system...was circulated in England. Merely to possess it was treasonable. Often vilified but rarely read, it has recently been described as a ‘great tract’ by the historian Peter Lake—an attitude unthinkable even ten years ago, when these often lucid and well-informed works were dismissed by mainstream academics as mere Catholic propaganda.7 Altogether, says Breight, ‘it is necessary that someone yank the Elizabethan Myth from its traditionally privileged position and thereby help to counter some four centuries of what Christopher Haigh calls “reverential historiography”’. But the myth has deep roots.  In 2016, Peter Lake published a study of Shakespeare’s history plays interpreting them in the light of the newly rehabilitated opposition discourse. The long preface is diffident, even apologetic, attempting—in vain, as it turned out—to deflect the disdain of Shakespeare scholars. Yet what Lake unearths is, he believes, of such importance that, as a historian, he has no hesitation in regarding the plays as source material, as an insight into the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries ‘actually thought about “politics”’. ‘If I noticed these parallels,’ he asks, ‘might not members of an Elizabethan audience have noticed them as well (x-xiii)"?

My own response to that question is like I said, even the country mice would have kenned if that kind of insanity was going around.  The whole gist of troubles like the one Asquith talks about is that word of it tends to get around, and lot of the reason for that isn't just because "People will talk", and it makes for a good exucse to escape from boredom.  No, this is the sort of information that could determine the safety of a person's actual life here.  Where for serf or a noble, the popular idea of the Renaissance Court of Intrigue had a nasty habit of not confining itself to the pages of storybooks.  What Asquith is talking about is the first rumblings of a national crisis for Old Britain that later on erupted into the English Civil War.  The gist of her words is that this was a turmoil a long time in the making, and guys like Shakespeare were around to witness the start of the whole mess.  I'd argue that everything she says above is true enough, so far as it goes.  The one caveat I do have with her train of thought comes in the form of her surmise about Shakespeare's political loyalties.  In her book, Asquith posits that the Bard was something of a loyalist in the aforementioned Essex Faction, and that's the part where her thinking and mine part company.  I'm willing to go with the idea that Shakespeare was never the Crown's Man.

I just take the meaning of that statement farther than Asquith does.  It goes back to something I mentioned in passing a while back in another Bard related post.  In my review of a now obscure 2022 flick, The Lost King, I spared a few thoughts for where the Bard's politics might have lain.  What I thought there still holds now.  I share the conviction with Hadfield, Greenblatt, and Asquith that the Bard of Avon's own political views came to rest in a form of pre-American Liberal political thought.  Like many of the other great names of his age, Shakespeare began to see how it was possible for a people to live free from the yoke of any sort of crown.  Part of the tension that fired his imagination, then, stemmed from the burden of this growing sense of Democracy, coupled with the fact that his own society offered little chance for a man to realize such ideals.  A related strand of thought which completed the artist's crisis was the growing awareness that the overall policies of the crown both at home and abroad was in danger of draining the life out of English culture, leaving behind nothing but people as hollowed out husks, rather than free citizens in an open culture capable of thriving under the best possible Humanist ideals.  It was this double awareness both of the tyranny of monarchy and its threat to the ideals of justice that fired his Imagination throughout his career, and allowed him to become the Immortal Bard that we know and can still remember to this day (web).  That would have included a healthy skepticism not just about the crown, but also those who try and make a grab for it.

It's something Chris Fitter does a good job of proving in his study text Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe.  Taken in tandem together, both Asquith and Fitter's writings are able to support and correct one another, and allow us a picture of the Stratford author as an artist trying to survive a hostile cultural moment, and trying to claim some room in all the power-grabbing for his own nascent, Democratic voice.  Even if there's anything at all fascinating about an historical excavation such as this, it still begs one important question.  What has all this to do with the problematic aspect of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I'd argue that the context just outlined above can go a long way toward answering that question.  This could be particularly true when we keep in mind the critical consensus that the play counts not as a moment of genuine artistic Inspiration, and more as a case of mere, uninspired Invention on demand, as part of a commission for a Nobility wedding.  If we couple this agreed upon fact in conjunction with the writings of Asquith, Fitter, Breight, and Hadfield on the fundamentally volatile nature of the Elizabethan cultural moment into which Shakespeare was born, then it does provide perhaps the beginnings of an answer for the seeming inherent wrongness of the way the character of Titania is handled.  It might even explain why the play as a whole treats the subject of love and romance in such a toxic and flippant manner, and how to square it with Shakespeare's other writings.

The idea that the demands of a particular venue might enforce the shape and nature of a theatrical performance, and on the nature and content of the play to be performed, is very much a foreign concept to our current way of thinking about the Arts.  More than a hundred years of Democratic experiment has accustomed us to the notion that Art and the artist are, by their nature, free agents.  The Imagination must be allowed to work its own particular forms of "magic", and the only restriction on the artist must be to remain as true to the Creative Idea as possible.  This is very much the modern, current idea of how art works.  If we turn the page on this mode of thought all the way back to the era of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, the student of history is confronted with a very ironic paradox.  On the one hand, it is possible to see various examples of what we now think of as the modern conception of how the Imagination and the Arts work in the thinking of not just the artists, but also the philosophies of the Renaissance period.  This can be seen from a close examination of the scattered writings on the nature of Art and Storytelling as it was conceived in Shakespeare's time.  A more or less typical example of this train of thought is demonstrated by Kenneth Borris his study on Edmund Spenser and Early Modern Poetic Theory.  "In The Faerie Queene's commendatory poems, Sir Walter Raleigh calls Spenser a Promethean conduit of divine fire, while Gabriel Harvey lauds his "sacred fury".  In many ways the inaugural text of the Elizabethan literary renaissance, his Shepheardes Calender endorses such poetics of...instilled ecstatic furor, and his Faerie Queene invokes Muses who infuse "goodly fury (1)".

The language used to describe the creative process is a bit more majestic and grandiloquent than what any artist of today would say.  Yet behind all the big philosophical-existential terminology, and mythological metaphors is more or less the same idea as the one we have today.  The Imagination is a free agent, one whose sole purpose is to create Art (if you're lucky).  It may be a dime store oracle that only works in fits and starts half the time, if at all.  Yet even if that's the case, it's valuable enough in itself.  The job of the artist is to give the Muse a fair and level playing field in which to perform its Art.  This is just one aspect of the esteem with which Storytelling was held in Shakespeare's era, however.  The second aspect of Renaissance thought about the Imagination was that almost none of it meant a damn where the ruling classes were concerned.  All the pretty speeches about the Value of Art that guys like Sidney or Spenser could conjure up might as well have been so much spit in the ocean to those who held the power in England.  To people like the Cecils, seeing a play or reading a poem amounted to just one thing.  It was a minor and infrequent bit of diversion in between playing the real life Game of Thrones.  That was where all the real action was as far as England's nobility and monarchs were concerned.  The rest was just so much bullshit, so who could even bother to give much of a fuck?

I think it's necessary to stress how far removed this kind of outlook is from the rest of what might be termed the groundlings worldview.  Most of us tend to treat books, films, and even plays, poetry, and painting as a form of diversion as well.  What sets the average face in the aisles apart from the likes of William Cecil is that the vast majority of us can't even imagine claiming that just because we use Art as a diversion is the same as claiming it has no value whatsoever.  Even those who find it difficult to become bookworms and cinephiles are smart enough to know that all that stuff has got some kind of valuable function in the wider world.  Most of us may never know what that value is, yet we're also willing to take it on a kind of faith that it's there.  Men like Lord Burghley, on the other hand, tend to a kind of worldview that kills the world.  It's a frame of mind in which all is grist for the mill of your own desires, and God help anyone dumb enough to be in your way when you decide to use and discard whatever or whoever you like as you see fit.  What does a play like Hamlet or Julius Caesar mean to a way of thinking such as that?  At best, it's a momentary bit of the mildest sort of amusement in between trying to be Coriolanus Snow in real life.  At worst, it's like Art never even existed to begin with.

That's the best summary description I can give for the ruling class of England as Shakespeare knew it.  I'd further argue it's also this same, rapacious mindset that was in play when he was, not much assigned, as commanded or ordered to produce a play for some noble household.  It's a situation that a lot of the poets and playwrights of the Era found themselves in on numerous occasions.  It was the type of situation that was always fraught with peril and promise in equal measure.  Do the show right, and you might just be able to find yourself in a better paying position to subsidize the kind of Art you want to make.  Do something that could be interpreted as stepping even so much as an inch out of line, and you could be reduced to anything from an exile, a beggar, or a man with his head in a noose.  If any of that sounds ridiculous, then again, that was the condition and the paradox that Shakespeare and all the best literary lights of the Renaissance found themselves having to operate in.  I'd claim that the writing and the performance of the Midsummer Night's Dream was no different.  It's a case of the artist writing a made-to-order play that doesn't tell a story, so much as it is made to flatter and nurse the egos of the writer's hosts for the evening.  In doing so, Shakespeare seems to have found himself in an "interesting" situation.  What we have here might described as a fascinating case study of forced entertainment.

What makes it unique is that it's a phenomenon that was most likely common during the entirety of the Renaissance, and yet to my knowledge, no one has ever paid much attention to the social implications of it.  Shakespeare's Dream provides the most interesting example of entertainment-on-demand because not only is the writer in question the one most often touted at the best in the business, but also because the nature of the final product might be able to tell us something about the kind of play the Bard was ordered to write.  Writing an evening's entertainment for a noble household in the Early Modern Period also meant working in an environment where the idea of the Rights of Man (and Women, in particular, in this case) was more of a troubling rumor circulating amongst the common rabble, rather than a standard that was to be adhered to.  What this meant in practice was that any writer tapped to give what was known as a Pageant for the rich was thereby limited in his choice of artistic options.  He could conjure up any Fancy he wanted...so long as it met the expectations of his host and their guests.  He could scale the "Towerless Tops of Ilium"...as long as neither the action nor the plot stepped out of line with whatever the household in question thought to be "proper".  It is precisely there where the expectations of the English nobility collides with those of the Bard and the rest of the 99 percent that I believe the origin of the problematic elements of the Dream lies, and it's summed up in a maxim.

"My ways are not your ways".  That's a line from somewhere in a very old Book.  However, when you apply it to the kind of household where Shakespeare had to both write the Dream and give the play its debut performance for, then the idea takes on this very ironic and nasty sort of twist.  It really is a case of different worlds and different values.  The trick to the tale is that we're also talking about the kind of world that thinks nothing of destroying values, especially when it's for the sake of a night's diversion.  What I mean is that it is not going too far out of bounds to suggest that the idea of drugging a women for the sake of some sick joke whose humor is so toxic it has no meaning outside of maybe a very select circle is a good description for the kind of household that belonged the ruling classes in Elizabethan Britain.  This was by no means an isolated phenomenon during the Renaissance.  Then as now, the usual boundary lines between what is and isn't acceptable ethical behavior has a nasty habit of becoming blurred in the society of wealth.  A good way to frame this moral conundrum is to paraphrase an old observation from Rudyard Kipling.  Past a certain point in the social stratosphere of life, "some hold", the direct control of morality ceases once you reach the level of the 1%.  Ethics, norms, and above all, humans being handed over to the household idols and ever-fluid "rules" of the upper class.  With the normal laws of sanity "only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of" the rest of us (web).  This also applies to the correct exercise of relations between the sexes, or the lack thereof.

It's all too easy to imagine a woman having her voice and choices stifled once you enter a level of society where questions of free will are at the beck and call of an overpowering appetite of caprice.  This is a general maxim that held just as true in Shakespeare's day as it does in ours.  The only major difference was that back then, no woman had any protection, support, or advocacy to fall back on.  Hell, looking through the timeline of Women's Rights in Great Britain reveals a very troubling and problematic history.  As far back as 1939, when Tolkien first made his complaint about A Midsummer Night's Dream, there were still no real laws or recourses that any woman could go to in order to be protected from such crimes as stalking and abuse.  There was a Matrimonial Causes Act established in 37.  However, this seems to have done little to alter the plight of Women suffering from assault and battery (web).  Meaning that even if anyone wanted to help a girl in that kind of distress, there still wasn't much she or anyone else could do about it, except perhaps maybe to learn the fine arts of self-defense.  As it turns out, the act of rape wasn't recognized as a crime in Great Britain until all the way in the 1950s.  Now ask yourself this.  If that's how long it took for women to get their voices heard, what kind of resources did any of them have to fall back on when Shakespeare was making a name for himself?  The answer is next to none, and that went double for the houses of lords and the nobility.

And then, one day, just like that, one of these greaseballs ordered the Bard to write a play, not to entertain, so much as to "divert" them.  Like I say, the situation itself provides an interesting snapshot of Art being forced to perform under pressure and duress.  We've grown so used to Freedom of Expression now that learning Shakespeare of all people had to put up with such demands comes off sounding like something out of a bad and troubling fairy tale.  If this is how you choose to view it, then all I can say is the problem with fairy tales is that sometimes they have a nasty way of being all too true, for both better or worse.  All I know is that the most nightmarish pictures in the book began to move in their frames all of a sudden, and then began to crawl out of their pages to wreak havoc in the real world.  And trust me when I say those guys don't give a fuck who or what they step on, regardless of talent or gender.  Whatever the case, this is the one that Shakespeare found himself confronted with.  In an earlier study text Clare Asquith posits the theory that wedding at which the Midsummer Dream debuted for the first time was for the nuptials of Elizabeth De Vere, in celebration of her marrying into the family of Lord William Cecil (106).  According to Asquith, "it was celebrated at Greenwich Palace in the presence of the Queen on 26 January 1595 (ibid)".  She then suggest a further bit of court intrigue to the picture.

"It appears that the Queen herself commissioned the evening’s entertainment from the Lord Chamberlain’s new company for her beloved ‘spirit’, the seventy-five-year old William Cecil. Few tasks could have been less congenial to a writer who" as Sitter and Hadfield argue, was of Democratically oriented anti-royalist sympathies.  As Asquith notes, " It appears that "few plays could have had a more intimidating first-night audience. Their reaction was critical to Shakespeare’s future.  Foremost among the spectators would have been the Queen and the expectant William Cecil, not normally a great play-goer but eager to see his granddaughter’s triumph fittingly celebrated: ‘I am ready in mind to dance with my heart’, he told the Queen when she teased him about dancing at the wedding, vowing that until the day “I will be a precise keeper of myself from all cold (106-7).  Whether or not it was Elizabeth herself who commissioned the Dream, and wherever the play debuted, what I think Asquith gets accurate enough is this idea or image of the celebrated Greatest Writer of All Time reduced to the role of performing monkey for the evening.  Of Shakespeare having to jump through hoops, and say all right sort of flattering things necessary to salvage both his reputation, and maybe even his life.  He would have had to do this, even if it meant bowing to a toxic sexual politics against his own knowing, and better judgment.  These were the rules of Elizabethan society for play-actors and writers like the Bard.

With all this in mind, when it comes to making a final judgment call, there are just two things I can say.  It seems possible enough to salvage Shakespeare's reputation.  However there's no way I can encourage anyone to see or read A Midsummer Night's Dream.  One of the few silver linings in writing this review has been the discovery that sometimes even the artist is eager to separate himself from a creative expression that could be considered toxic at best.  Whatever else one may think about her thesis, I'd argue that Clare Asquith presents us with an accurate picture of what Shakespeare thought of the Dream, when he writes the following lines of Sonnet 110: "Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what was most dear Made old offences of acquaintance new…(112)".  Are you beginning to understand what I mean when I say that the creation of the Dream presents an interesting case study?  It allows us the a picture of a sane man, someone who's mind is basically right-side-up, having to navigate his way through a land and situation that is upside down.  For whatever reason, it puts me in mind of Captain John Yossarian, from Joseph Heller's Catch-22.  That whole novel is about an ordinary Everyman trying to hold on to his sanity in the face of a constant barrage of irrational orders.  That's Shakespeare to me in this instance.

Like Yossarian, he was in a Catch 22 type situation where he had to play a twisted game according to the toxic sexual politics of others.  He might have been able to walk away from the whole affair with his neck still firmly attached, and maybe even a boost to his professional reputation.  If the lines from the Sonnet above are anything to go by, however.  Shakespeare probably knew what it meant to feel the sting of being something of a sellout, even if it was the not entirely metaphorical equivalent of having to perform at gunpoint.  It begs the question of just what sort of effect such a firsthand experience of tyranny could have had on the artist?  In answer to that question, I'll have to bring one final study text onboard.  This would be Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, by Theodore Spencer.  It was written way back in 1942, and together with The English Poetic Mind, it remains the best summation of the artistry of the Bard of Avon and its overall meaning.  It is the shared thesis of Spencer and Charles Williams that at some point, the World's Most Famous Writer hit a moment of Crisis, both personal and professional, and that its commencement and resolution is reflected in the themes and ideas of his plays.  In terms of when to date this Crisis, both Spencer and Williams tend to place it somewhere before Shakespeare began work on Julius Caesar.  I think it's possible to clarify things a bit more.

With the further addition of insights from Asquith, Curtis Breight, Hadfield, and Sitter, we can begin to gain a better picture of the Crisis that Shakespeare eventually found himself in.  If I had to provide any competent summation of the issue at the heart of the Bard's dilemma, then it might have to go like this.  His problem was figuring out how Man, as a Microcosm both in society and the world at large, could be able to maintain the dignity of his human nature in a culture that works toward stifling the life out of him (or her, as was just as often the case)?  To call that one hell of a heady subject is like saying that Magellan sometimes had to navigate by the light of Moon.  It's the kind of topic that any talented writer could spend an entire lifetime working on in various fictional scenarios, and that seems to have been just what Shakespeare did with the rest of his career.  Perhaps a further insight into the possible salvageability of the Bard's reputation can come from two further illustrations in his career.  One of them happened later, near the end of his life on the stage, while the date of the other might carry an intriguing bit of significance in light of the Dream.  If Shakespeare's story of a supernatural night in the woods counts as an example of enforced toxicity from above, then a poem like The Rape of Lucrece, however dire and tragic, somehow manages to prove a fitting contrast to the play's mandated toxicity .

The plot of that poem is exactly as it says on the label.  There is an act of violation, followed not long after by a death.  It is, in essence, the basic idea behind the events of Midsummer shorn of any pretense of false enchantment.  Instead, with this poem, we find the author treating the subject matter with all of the proper weight and gravity that comes from a rightful exploration, even if it is just a work of fiction.  It's a mistake to call this a delicate poem, by any means.  Instead, what makes it the polar opposite of the Dream comes from the sense of recognition that stems from the voice of the narrative.  If the tone of Midsummer comes off as frivolous and flippant, this one is grounded, and dead serious.  The voice of Midsummer takes even the subject of potential abuse against women as something to be treated as a joke.  Here, the titled violation is seen as nothing less than the tragedy that it is, with plenty of harmful fallout left in its wake.  The vocalization and atmosphere of The Rape of Lucrece showcase the talents of an author who knows the stakes involved with trying to tackle this subject matter in a work of fiction.  In fact, there really does seem to be a sense in which this poem marks the first appearance of the Shakespeare most of us are now familiar with in various ways and means.  Something tells me it's useful to see the Rape as a very ironic, yet necessary antidote to the toxicity of the Midsummer Night.

The major reason I'm able to say that with a good enough deal of assurity is because the publication of the poem is dated to 1594.  For what it's worth, that was also at the same time that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written and received its initial debut on the stage.  If Asquith's surmise that the content of Sonnet 110 contains the writer's lament at having "sold cheap what was most dear", then I can't help wondering two things.  (1) Whether the writing of Midsummer was the on-set of the author's Crisis, as Spencer has it, and if that's so, then maybe (2) The Rape of Lucrece and the vast majority of the plays and poems written in the aftermath of this toxic wedding ceremony was the Bard's way of trying to apologize.  To see if it was possible to preserve the dignity, not just of man, but of himself as well.  In The English Poetic Mind, Charles Williams dates the onset of Shakespeare's personal/professional Crisis to somewhere around the publication of King John in 1623.  I think this revised chronology suggested here would make 1594, the year of the Midsummer Mistake, as the more likely candidate for the event that shattered the author's up till then complacent worldview.  The experience of power exercised as coercion against both Art and the Dignity of Women, in my view, is enough to turn a mere play-actor into one of the great commentators of a time out of joint.  The writer who proposed that the goal of any Art worthy of that title, was one that was able to hold up a mirror to human nature.

Anyway, there's my two cents on that.  I suppose I'm open to the criticism that I haven't spent half as much time talking about the play proper in all of this.  My only defense for that is just this.  It is an ineradicable result of my first initial viewing of the play.  I caught a performance of it on a YouTube video a while back.  If it's production value you want to get fixated on, then I'll have to admit that this one did count as one of the stylistically better versions out there.  However, I'd argue that just made the moments between Titania, Puck, and Oberon all that more distressing when the import of what I was watching hit home for me.  It didn't elevate the scenery and stage setting, it just proved how there's no way on this, or any other possible Earth where anyone will ever be able to polish up a turd.  When the play came to close and I realized no one was going to say anything about a clear act of abuse and manipulation of not one, but several women...Well, I'm afraid I can offer no apologies for my gut reaction that night.  I came away pretty damn good and pissed, and I'll note that it's interesting to see that the passage of time hasn't dulled this sense of moral outrage.  This can be demonstrated well enough by the clear way all that hostility to the work came pouring out in composing this piece.

I see no reason to recant what I've said there, either.  What I can do is demonstrate that the ultimate fault lied neither with Shakespeare, nor the stars.  Instead, it all came from the demands made on him by a social strata for whom the Rights of Women are even more of an insult than the Rights of Men.  Whether the initial performance of the Dream came from a wedding of the Cecils, or some other noble household, what I am ready to argue for is that the writing and production of that whole fiasco was something of a skin-crawling educational experience for Shakespeare.  He got enough of a glimpse and understanding of how the one-percent class regarded humans beings in general (and women in particular).  The whole affair left him shaken enough to feel the need to write The Rape of Lucrece to start with, and then to work his way through a lot of heady themes and issues just in order to feel right with himself again.  For whatever it's worth, both Spencer and Williams maintain that it worked out alright in the end.  Shakespeare was able to end his career on an upbeat note.  It seems that, in the end, he was able to find some Dignity in Man the Microcosm.  As for what Shakespeare thought of women in his own write?  Well, I'll have to let Williams fill that one in, because he tells the story with more eloquence than I can.  In giving the Bard's views on the Fairer Sex, he points to just one character.

"The noblest of Shakespeare's women, Imogen, has been been condemned by her husband Posthumus to death for (he thinks) disloyalty.  She supposes him to be in love with someone else, and to desire her death, and she rebukes him to herself with the phrase: 'My dear lord, Thou art one of the false ones'.  It's the tenderest reproach in literature.  But in the last act she does not wait for him to ask her forgiveness; the word isn't named.  It is true that he has in fact already repented of his intention to have her killed, though he still believes her guilty.  But the supposed murder lies heavy on him and, solitary and in prison, he broods upon it.  He also desires to die on her account, though he doesn't think the gods, "more clement than vile men," desire it.  His repentance is by them, "desired more than constrained."  The gods made his life, and therefore...it may be weighed equal with Imogen's.  He has a passion for repentance, and perhaps it is this yielding of his life which is, to himself, the only exposition of repentance.  He is so far worthy of and prepared for his forgiveness.  But the real difference is the resentment and the lack of resentment with which they separately feel the original offence, real of supposed.

"In the final crisis she turns to him with a cry of protest-in-love and of renewal-in-love: 'Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?  Think that you are upon a rock, and now Throw me again'.  She can even make a play on the word "throw" in her high delight; and Posthumus can only accepts the beauty with a renewed fidelity.  It is true that they are in a special relationship of love; the other pardons in the play are of a more distant kind and have to be more formally expressed.  The last act of Cymbeline, let it be admitted, is a wild dance of melodramatic recognitions and long-lost children with strawberry-marks.  But the style of Imogen is the keynote of all; the pardon of Imogen the pattern of all; and both style and pardon, though so heavenly, are as realistic as anything in Shakespeare.  Her father says of her that she looks at those present hitting 'each object with a joy; the counterchange Is severally in all (9-10)".  It's as if the writer of A Midsummer Night's Dream had taken to the quarreling couple of that aborted story, and somehow found a way of giving the abused woman a happy ending after years of constant search and struggle for sone constancy in the meaning of the very word know as justice. 

For better or worse, that's some of the best critical writing I've ever heard about the Bard of Avon.  As for the Dream play, in and of itself.  There are a number of things that have to be said about it here.  The first is that Shakespeare himself seems to have recognized that he had a dud on his hands when the writing was through.  He knew somehow that the story wasn't done with him, but the other way around.  He'd written nothing in the strictest sense, merely fulfilled an "obligation", and he said this in so many words at the play's denouement, when the closing monologue proclaims the work as "a weak and idle theme".  That was as far as he could go without offending his hosts, yet the "subtweet" is present all the same.  The last observation I have to give on this stillborn idea comes not from me, but the work of David P. Young.  I've called his study of the Dream the best work of criticism of the play, and that's still true when looked at in the proper light.  You're not bound to find a better book that details all the various potential levels of literacy that went into the finished product.  The one thing that's missing from Young's study is the ability to grasp the weight of the atrocity displayed in plain sight, for all to see.  It's this blindness to the flagrant flaw at the heart of Midsummer that keeps the best book on the play from being as complete as it probably should have been, with a greater deal of hindsight or clarity in mind.

It's this lack of clarity on Young's part that allows the critic to sum up the nature of the problem, and then miss the full significance of his words.  "Discussions of the lovers, for instance, almost always produce comments to the effect that they are poorly characterized, difficult to to tell apart, puppets who speak in couplets that are artificial to the point of absurdity.  This, it is often remarked, is evidence of Shakespeare's dramatic immaturity; later on, he will learn to provide fuller characterizations and less stilted dialogue (68)".  Now, in all fairness to the Avon author, while the criticism of puppetry as applied to the Dream in particular is more than valid, I'm not sure I go so far as to apply that all of his early work.  Romeo and Juliet works just fine for what it is, so far as I can see.  Indeed, I'd almost have to point to that as the work where the Bard's true artistic voice begins to make its first impressive performance.  And others, like Two Gentlemen of Verona are perfectly good for what they are.  Even the Greatest Writer of All Time penned a few clunkers here and there in his early days, and A Midsummer Night's Dream is the worst offender of that lot for me.  However, the good news there is it's impossible to say that they were all idle themes and puppets shows.  Big Bill deserves a bit more credit than that.

What Young gets very wrong, however, is when he first admits the truth about the Puck play, and then proceeds to try and defend the indefensible.  "The four lovers, after all, are puppets while they are in the woods, the helpless victims of supernatural enchantments (ibid)".  It gets even worse when you hear how Young try's to justify this "idle" artificiality.  "Their state is pointed up and made amusing by the artificiality of their movements and their speech.  Were they more fully characterized we would develop an interest in and sympathy for them which the pace of the play does not allow, and the detachment that we need to laugh at their misfortunes would be threatened (69-9)".  So, just to keep score, we've got a critic who champions treating the victims of toxic sexual politics as figures of fun to be mocked and depreciated, all for the sake of the formalities of the Comedic conventions of Shakespeare's time.  Young does this, even when the inherent dignity of the Renaissance Comedic and Fantastical forms has been defiled just as much as the cast of characters.  To be fair, it's clear the guy was operating under a genuine blindness, as opposed to wearing malicious blinders on purpose.  For whatever reason, he just genuinely couldn't see the actual dictated malice at the heart of the piece that also ruins all of it.

At the same time that's it's impossible to say I'm reading the words of a bad person, it's also true that they belong to someone who is too short-sighted for his own good, or that of others.  The Oberon production really is a dumb puppet show made to order for people who are used to getting their way at the expense of others, and it shows.  If I had to sum up my final thoughts on it, then it would go like this.  Talent exercised on an "idle theme" is talent wasted.  I can't call A Midsummer Night's Dream even a good play.  Not by a longshot, no.  However, if there's to be any consolation for such a transgression, then it might be just this.  At least it forced on Shakespeare the need to confront the ethical crisis at the heart of his era, and in doing so, the effort transformed him from a good writer, and into a Great one.  At the close of Heller's Catch-22 Yossarian finds it in him to break away from the twisted games that those in power are playing with the lives of others.  I'd argue that's one other thing he and the Bard had in common.  They knew when to rebel for the sake of others, as well as themselves.  There was a slogan that was pretty popular back in grand old days of the 60s.  You could find it spray painted on walls, and such.  The slogan went "Yossarian Lives".  If the Captain managed it, then so did Shakespeare as well.