Or, What's in Shakespeare For The Modern SF/F Fan? Playing Around in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In the last column, I told you some of the reasons I like Hamlet so much—or, to be more accurate, I focused on one big reason: that the ghost of Hamlet's father is pretty much my favorite Renaissance phantom of all time. This month I'd like to turn to comedy—and not just any comedy! This month I want to talk about A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, I have to admit, is only my second-favorite Shakespeare comedy. My favorite Shakespeare comedy is As You Like It, because I have a weakness for the "transvestite comedies," in which girls dress up as boys and go out to seek their fortunes. Unfortunately, with the exception of a minor goddess descending to deliver a few rhymed couplets and celebrate a marriage, As You Like It features no actual magic. A Midsummer Night's Dream, though, is full of magic. This is one reason it comes in at my personal Number Two, and is definitely why it qualifies as the greatest comedy of all for people interested in the fantastic.

As you'll know if you've studied the play, seen a production or movie version, or just read it for fun, A Midsummer Night's Dream is basically a pastoral sex farce. ("Pastoral" means, according to my desktop dictionary, "portraying or evoking country life, typically in a romanticized or idealized form." The etymology actually suggests a story set in a pasture—the two words are related, the whole deal having something to do with the Greek obsession with shepherds—whereas A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in the woods and contains no actual shepherds, but I feel like it's close enough. If you strongly disagree, you should feel free to write to my thesis advisor and denounce me.)

The play's three interlocking storylines make it a bit hard to summarize the plot, but I'll give it a whack. First of all, you have some upper-class mortals from the city of Athens—it's not really much like Athens, but you don't look for geographical or historical accuracy in Shakespeare—whose Duke, Theseus, is about to marry the lady Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. (If you know anything about the legendary Amazons, that setup may seem a little odd, but, again, it's Shakespeare; we roll with it.) Also from Athens, we've got four young lovers and a love triangle. Lysander and Hermia are in love, but Hermia's father has promised her to Demetrius instead. And this is the Renaissance: she's her father's property. So, showing a bit of spunk, Lysander and Hermia head out of Athens and elope into the woods. However, Hermia's childhood friend Helena, who has an unfortunate crush on Demetrius, spills the beans to him about the elopement, and then tags along behind like a pathetic puppy when Demetrius goes crashing into the forest after his runaway bride.

At the same time, we're introduced to a group of "rude mechanicals"—this means working-class people, in this case located on the social scale somewhere between artisans and manual laborers: a weaver, a carpenter, a bellows-mender, a tailor—who all happen to be huge theater buffs (despite their lack of education) and have put together a sort of grassroots community theater group. Led by Nick Bottom, the weaver, they are practicing a play which they hope will be selected for performance during the celebrations of Duke Theseus's wedding. And—because comedies always work this way—they happen to schedule a rehearsal in the woods for (you guessed it!) the very same day that the young Athenian lovebirds make their getaway.

Night falls. The mortals are scattered, sleeping, or lost in the woods. And this is when the magic happens . . . and the fairies come out.

Ah, the fairies! This, of course, is the third set of characters. They are the ones who will parallel the intrigues among the humans; they will take us out of the daytime world, and show us a new perspective. And they are the ones who really make the magic in this play. The arrival of the fairies marks a significant turning point: now everybody's in the woods, away from the human-run domain of the city and in the realm of the wild, pagan world. That allows us to move into the real meat of the play—where social structures will get overturned, the rules of city life will break down, and everyone will get to try on new identities and discover some things about who they really are. Delicious! Carnivalesque! And—I'm sure I don't have to point out—the basic set-up for a certain paradigm of the fantasy adventure story.

But let's go quickly through the rest of the plot. Conveniently for story purposes, it turns out that the Fairy King and Queen—that's Oberon and Titania, but I probably don't have to tell that to readers of Strange Horizons, do I?—are having a falling out: they're arguing bitterly over who gets to take a certain charming mortal boy into their entourage. (What exactly each intends to do with the boy . . . well, you're not the first to wonder. But fairy sexuality is a discussion for another time.) Anyway, after parting in anger from his wife, Oberon decides to stage a preemptive strike against Titania. He uses a magic flower to make her fall in love with Nick Bottom, the illiterate weaver and theater-lover, who has fallen asleep under a nearby tree. And, just to make things funnier, Oberon has his servant Puck give Bottom the head of a donkey! Never let it be said that the fairies don't have class.

Naturally, while they're at it, Oberon and Puck discover the four young Athenians sleeping in the woods. They apply the love potion to resolve their tangled situation. Mix-ups and hilarity ensue. In the end, though, Oberon's trick has its desired effect, Titania is released from her enchantment, Bottom gets his head back, and the four young lovers end up sorted into two happy couples. When the mortals wake up, they ascribe their memories of the past night to a dream. (The Midsummer Night's Dream! Get it?) And, since Hippolyta and Duke Theseus just happen to be on their way through the woods for an early-morning wedding, everyone winds up celebrating group nuptials with singing, dancing, a play-within-a-play (there's Nick Bottom, finally having his hour), and a blessing from the fairy court to crown things off.

It's a merry romp, cleverly paced and deftly executed. But, of course, it's not really the plot that makes this play so much fun. Nor is it the hapless young lovers, who, inevitably, can get a little hard to tell apart. What renders this play delightful is the language—beautifully rich, specific, and evocative—and all that magic. This is arguably the most magical of all Shakespeare's plays—only The Tempest can give it a run for its money—and, by mining the possibilities and potential of that magic for all it's worth, Shakespeare managed to create something that's survived four centuries of change in language and culture with remarkably undiminished appeal.

Part of the magic inheres in the play's characters. Rather than bringing in one or two half-seen sprites, Shakespeare sketches in an entire fairy court, whose structures and conflicts parallel the human social structures inside the city. And a few of the fairies are delineated in wonderfully specific detail: Oberon, Titania, and the unforgettable Puck. Shakespeare drew on British and Celtic folklore to create these characters, but his popular play has, in its turn, done a lot to cement modern views of them, affecting the way contemporary fantasy fans—and writers—perceive the British fairy traditions. To take one well-known example, it's no coincidence that the popular Sandman comics series, which conceived of its semi-divine protagonist as a "lord of stories" (and was written by the sometimes conspicuously literate English fantasist Neil Gaiman), essentially imported Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania wholesale to rule its version of the Land of Faerie. In one memorable issue, Gaiman went so far as to suggest that Shakespeare had written A Midsummer Night's Dream as a kind of farewell gift to the disappeared fairy court of Britain, commissioned by the series' title character on the eve of the fairies' departure from man's world in concession to the modern age to come. It's a compelling conceit, and the issue—which quotes heavily from the play in depicting the troupe performing before the "real" fairies—notably won the World Fantasy Award.

Another neat thing about Dream is how cleverly we see Shakespeare handling something that contemporary fantasists often wrack their brains over: how to bring together the worlds of the real and the supernatural. In much of his work, Shakespeare makes a point of showing characters from across the social spectrum—perhaps one reason that his plays still feel so full of life to us. His Henry V, for instance, explores the paradoxes of war by showing not only kings at their councils of war, but also footsoldiers arguing in Welsh or Scottish dialect around the camp fires, and even Hamlet periodically steps outside to talk to the night watch or a gravedigger.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the main romantic intrigues occur among members of the Athenian aristocracy, but the play's comic sub-plot centers on the group of stage-struck workingmen—Nick Bottom and his friends Snug, Flute, Quince, and the rest. Then we have the third group of characters, the fairies of the wood. They are glamorous and powerful, to be sure—but at the same time, Shakespeare's introduction of these characters undermines their majesty before we even see them. Consider the way Shakespeare sets us up: in the first fairy scene, the Oberona and Titania's entrance is preceded by an encounter between Oberon's servant Puck and a servant of Titania, who discuss how the two have been quarreling over the mortal boy that both want, and the fact that both have come to the woods near Athens to witness the marriage between Duke Theseus and Hippolyta. So far, so majestic. But when the king and queen actually enter, the audience quickly realizes the subtext of their argument. (I'm going to quote some dialogue here. I know that can get wearing, but I'll ask you to give it a shot: the speeches in this play are actually really lively):

OBERON:

Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

TITANIA:

What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:

I have forsworn his bed and company.

OBERON:

Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?

TITANIA:

. . .Why art thou here,

Come from the farthest Steppe of India?

But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,

Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love,

To Theseus must be wedded, and you come

To give their bed joy and prosperity.

OBERON:

How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,

Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,

Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night . . .

And make him with fair Aegle break his faith,

With Ariadne and Antiopa?

TITANIA:

These are the forgeries of jealousy.

(II.i.)

I love how, almost the second she sees him, Titania accuses Oberon of having come to see Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding only because Hippolyta used to be his mistress. And I love how she calls her "the bouncing Amazon!" I mean, what a thing to say about your husband's other woman. It conjures up so much: can't you instantly imagine the contrast between Titania (elegant? aloof? maybe a little frosty?), and the frisky, athletic, and obviously healthily-built Hippolyta? ("Buskin'd" implies she wore soldiers' boots. A lot of Shakespeare's plays betray a certain taste for women dressed as men, in which Oberon apparently shares at least to some degree.)

It gets even better, of course, when Oberon doesn't even bother denying the accusations, but instead points out that Titania has also been unfaithful with Theseus. (And, apparently, made him betray three different women, which leaves me seriously wondering what Theseus had been up to before he and Titania started glimmering.)

Titania, in turn, doesn't deny the charge, but simply looks for a new line of attack. And by this point we have a fairly good idea what kind of people we're dealing with. They may be the elegant, powerful monarchs of an ancient and alien civilization, but they're also prone to petty jealousies and driven by their sexual urges—rather as the Greeks imagined their Olympian deities to be.

I think Shakespeare's doing some pretty smart writing here. Not only is he drawing parallels between the fairy characters and the humans, each caught in their own tangles of envy and desire, but he's also "humanizing" the inhuman characters, showing them as subject to the most fundamental of human drives. Oberon and Titania may be incredibly powerful, but we understand their motivations, and that means we can get inside their minds and comprehend what makes them tick.

Another thing I really like about A Midsummer Night's Dream is the way that so much of the magic inheres in its words, and vice versa. Hearing that language spoken—or, as we can do today, reading it immersively and losing ourselves it its world—reminds us of the degree to which poetry is magic, summoning images and meaning from simple words. In this and other plays, Shakespeare reminds us of something that we tend to forget in our modern age: that in places or times when literacy is limited and only a few can afford the training and the materials for writing, the power of encoding and extracting information from lifeless materials was itself a kind of magic. It also reminds us of the oral traditions of sung and spoken magic: the medieval charms and rural witchcraft that existed before the age of printing, and are still found in less urban and globalized places around the world. It reminds us of the fact that, where education is itself not a right but a rare privilege, and where most people have no direct knowledge of the world beyond the boundaries of their birthplace, the very act of studying and the possession of knowledge may be felt to be beyond the norm, supernatural. In its etymologies, the English language has preserved for us these words' ancient associations. The words "chant," "enchant," and "incantation" all come from the Latin word "cantare," "to sing"; the word "charm," once used for a spell, comes from the Latin "carmen," a song. The word "spell"—in its senses of relation both to language, and to magic—comes from the same root as that of the German "spielen," to perform or act. And then we have the wonderful family of words related to "grammar." "Grimoire," "glamour," "grammarye"—all these words are derived from the same source—medieval Latin "grammatical," scholarship, also associated with what my dictionary delightfully describes as "the occult practices popularly associated with learning," and all pointing back to the understanding of the remarkable inherent properties of something that is written down.

Shakespeare was clearly very into the magical properties of language, a theme he touches on in several other plays: The Tempest, for instance, in which the magician Prospero holds sway over an island thanks to the power of his library full of books, or As You Like It, whose fugitive noblemen, when they're not tying love poems to tree branches, go about looking for "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones and good in every thing" (II.i).

Dream is wonderful in this regard, and one thing I love about it is the lyrical specificity of its magic. Shakespeare loads his fairies' dialogue with references to the natural world—which makes sense, given the midsummer themes of courtship and fertility. In the fairies' speeches, we get a tremendous sense of speed and motion, the freedom they have to wander through wilderness, tamed land, and human homes alike. At the same time, Shakespeare continually refers to very specific plants and flowers, as if reminding his audience that the fairies exist in the same everyday world of objects that they do: after all, any briar or flower might contain a spirit, even if we can't see it.

Embedded in all this is a dizzying array of transformations (flowers turn into jewels! Jewels turn into flowers!), shape-shifting, and curious phrases that evoke intriguing questions (how big is a fairy?). For instance, consider this exchange between Puck, Oberon's servant, and a fairy of Titania's entourage, when they first meet in the woods. (Once again, it's a little long, but I'm asking you to take my word for it and read it all the way down: cumulatively, it's pretty awesome.)

PUCK:

How now, spirit! whither wander you?

Fairy:

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon's sphere;

And I serve the fairy queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green.

The cowslips tall her pensioners be:

In their gold coats spots you see . . .

I must go seek some dewdrops here

And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.

Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone:

Our queen and all our elves come here anon.

PUCK:

The king doth keep his revels here to-night:

Take heed the queen come not within his sight;

For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

Because that she as her attendant hath

A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king . . .

And now they never meet in grove or green,

By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,

But, they do square, that all their elves for fear

Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.

(II.i.)

I've always been enchanted by the way that Titania's minor servant turns a bank of flowers into a squad of royal bodyguards ("pensioners"), and dewdrops into pearls. Aside from the image's richness and delicate precision, there's also some neat characterization going on here: I like that this fairy's sole job appears to be decorating the flowers, and scattering dew on the fairy circles (the "orbs"), so that everything will look nice when Titania gets there. It makes me think of the demands of touring celebrities ("only green M&Ms," "the scent of gardenias," "twenty-four peanut butter sandwiches and a box of condoms"). On Puck's side, I adore his comments about the royal catfights: when Oberon and Titania accidentally meet, we learn, their attendants all clear out fast. How do they do this? Do they teleport away? Do they hide behind the nearest oak? Do they simply dematerialize?

No, no: they climb into the cups of acorns. The specificity of this! I love the humor here. I love all the multileveled, nuanced magic it implies—that the fairies shrink themselves down enough to hide in an acorn top, and, furthermore, that they presumably do this because their nervousness at the impending brawl makes them want to be just that small. In fact, moments like this are just plain why I love Shakespeare. And why, most particularly, I love the way he writes about magic in this play.

One last thing before I leave the midsummer woods, and that thing is Puck. Ah, Puck! What exactly is he? "Puck" is both his name and his nature; he refers to himself at least once as "the Puck," and the consensus seems to be that Shakespeare's Puck is the same as the púca spirit of Irish myth (also seen spelled as pooka or pookah, among other variants). What that means is that he's a shapeshifter, who likes to play tricks on humans and lead them astray. As his other names suggest, he also seems to be a kind of household goblin—the sort that is sometimes helpful and sometimes malicious in domestic affairs. We get a good sense of who Puck is in this exchange:

Fairy:

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,

Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite

Call'd Robin Goodfellow: are not you he

That frights the maidens of the villagery . . .

And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;

Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?

Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,

You do their work, and they shall have good luck:

Are you not he?

PUCK:

Thou speak'st aright;

I am that merry wanderer of the night.

I jest to Oberon and make him smile

When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,

Neighing in likeness of a filly foal . . .

The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;

Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,

And 'tailor' cries, and falls into a cough;

And then the whole choir hold their hips and laugh,

And waxen in their mirth and sneeze and swear

A merrier hour was never wasted there.

So, what kind of spirit is Puck? Well, he likes to pretend to be a female horse, and—I really cannot get over this—he can be mistaken for a three-legged stool. (Obviously, what Shakespeare really means here is that Puck sometimes transforms himself into a stool. But for a while there, I tormented myself by wondering what kind of spirit could be "mistaken" for one.) Apparently, Puck also enjoys coming into villages and torturing old ladies. We can only imagine how these lines, doubtless delivered with the broad gestures beloved of the comedians of the troupe, would have made the audience roar. Also, I love that Shakespeare uses the word "bum."

Notice, though, that under the laughter there's an unmistakable edge of malice here. Misleading people and horses in the night can be no joke, and the idea that Puck "laugh[s] at their harm" is just sort of . . . well, it's plain creepy.

The business about frightening village girls suggests something that runs a little deeper, too. In the context of English Renaissance culture—just coming out of the Middle Ages, still living in a mostly agricultural and pre-urbanized society—the lives of humans felt very much tied to the cycles of nature. Anything that interfered with those cycles (harvest, fertility, etc.) menaced human civilization and life itself. Puck's causing the butter not to thicken or the beer not to rise might seem superficially harmless, but it's implicitly linked to more disturbing and threatening stuff: interrupting the cycle of the harvest on which people depend for their livelihoods; blighting crops with frost or disease; or disturbing the reproductive cycles of farm animals—or even human beings. Remember that for these people, strange births were literally un-, or super-, natural. A two-headed calf was a sign of impending catastrophe; a stillborn child could be a punishment for an offense committed by a parent. It's interesting to recall—etymology again!—that our word monster was originally applied to malformed plants and animals, and derives from the Latin word meaning "to warn": such births were considered a portent of things to come. The connection, therefore, between the supernatural world and the disturbance of natural cycles was, to the medieval mind, both self-evident and frightening.

In this sense, Puck is a menacing entity indeed: an evocation of a wild spirit from pagan times, presented as an object of both awe and menace to a late-sixteenth-century audience that had not yet fully left behind its forebears' ways of thinking, in a culture that was slowly, tentatively moving toward rationalism and modern science. Unlike Oberon and Titania, we also lack human-like motives and feelings with which to understand him: as far as we can tell, Puck makes trouble because that's all he really enjoys. In this play, then—one that, curiously, has no real villains—Puck comes across as more unsettling, more unknown and unknowable, than even the fairy king he works for. (In his Sandman adaptation of the story, Neil Gaiman highlighted the threatening aspect of the character: when an actor of Shakespeare's troupe delivers Puck's line, "Thou speak'st aright: I am that merry wanderer of the night," a member of the fairie court sitting in the audience comments, sotto voce: "'I am that merry wanderer of the night'? I am that giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb, more like it." This, Gaiman seems to suggest, is what anyone who knew the "real" Robin Goodfellow would say—a comment that feels highly apropos.)

It is, perhaps, the difficulty of understanding his motives that ultimately makes Puck so disquieting. By humanizing Oberon and Titania, Shakespeare makes those characters more accessible to us, but also, in a sense, disarms them: we feel that we can believe in and understand these fairy folk because we see ourselves in them, and in their desires, jealousies, insecurities, and fits of pride we understand what drives them. That is, as it always has been, an effective technique for bringing the alien down to earth. But Puck is not humanized in this way; as far as we can tell, he has no jealousies, no fear, no erotic desire. What he does have is a cunning intelligence and, we find, an enjoyment of seeing people argue and fall into confusion. "Those things do best please me / That befall preposterously," he says; and later, famously, adds, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" As far as we poor humans can see, the only thing that really motivates Puck is an interest in sowing discord. That only makes sense; after all, he's a goblin, a trickster spirit, and discord is in his nature. But that peculiar imbalance also, I think, makes Puck a particularly convincing magical character, I think. By imbuing him with life—the life of his stage presence, his plot importance, his rich language—but at the same time declining to make him psychologically comprehensible to us, Shakespeare creates a strikingly effective intelligent non-human: one of our literature's most intriguing early examples of an—of the—alien.