1 00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:06,220 Molly, thanks for coming. My lecture today is about Midsummer Night's Dream. 2 00:00:06,220 --> 00:00:10,540 So it's a nice dreams, written in about fifteen ninety five or six, 3 00:00:10,540 --> 00:00:17,080 so it's closest relations chronologically are probably Richard the Second and Romeo and Juliet. 4 00:00:17,080 --> 00:00:17,710 They're both plays, 5 00:00:17,710 --> 00:00:25,870 which are quite interesting to look alongside Midsummer Night's Dream and particularly in terms of linguistic and structural formality. 6 00:00:25,870 --> 00:00:31,430 It's first published in sixteen hundred. Quite interesting corto text. 7 00:00:31,430 --> 00:00:35,050 Look at sixteen hundred and then again in sixteen twenty three. 8 00:00:35,050 --> 00:00:41,980 So three plot lines, as you almost certainly know, are interwoven in Midsummer Night's Dream. 9 00:00:41,980 --> 00:00:48,670 The human world of Athens is awaiting the marriage of Duke Theseus to his bride Hippolyta. 10 00:00:48,670 --> 00:00:54,280 Just as the case of Hermia, who prefers Lysander over her father's chosen suitor. 11 00:00:54,280 --> 00:01:02,800 Demetrius comes before Theseus for judgement Theseus Backes Aegeus Hermès father. 12 00:01:02,800 --> 00:01:10,270 He backs a G.S. in saying that Demitrius is a more appropriate husband for Hermia than Lysander. 13 00:01:10,270 --> 00:01:16,420 And so the lovers Hermia and Lysander run away into the wood outside the city. 14 00:01:16,420 --> 00:01:24,680 They're followed by Demetrius, and he in turn is followed by Helena, who is in love with him. 15 00:01:24,680 --> 00:01:34,510 The wood is the territory of the fairy world. Its rulers, Oberon and Titania, are quarrelling over custody of an Indian boy. 16 00:01:34,510 --> 00:01:42,640 Oberon's mischievous servant, Robin Goodfellow, or Park, mixes up the lovers by applying a love potion to the men's eyes. 17 00:01:42,640 --> 00:01:48,090 They both then turn their amorous attentions onto a bewildered Helena. 18 00:01:48,090 --> 00:01:53,070 Meanwhile, a group of Athenian tradesmen are practising a play to be performed at Theseus, his wedding. 19 00:01:53,070 --> 00:02:00,420 Robin puts an acid head onto their boisterous ringleader bottom and makes Titania fall in love with him. 20 00:02:00,420 --> 00:02:07,770 In the end, all the magics are revoked. Titania Seeds Oper on the contested child bottoms as his head is removed. 21 00:02:07,770 --> 00:02:12,720 The play is performed and the Athenian lovers form two couples. 22 00:02:12,720 --> 00:02:17,130 My question for thinking about the play was remind me who marries whom. 23 00:02:17,130 --> 00:02:24,930 I want to use this to discuss the way this most apparently romantic of comedies is actually rather satirical about its main subject. 24 00:02:24,930 --> 00:02:34,320 Romantic love and turns out to be a play more about sex than about marriage. 25 00:02:34,320 --> 00:02:41,920 Now, even I know that the literal answer to the question, who marries who is really quite simple while in the play. 26 00:02:41,920 --> 00:02:50,730 Past, Demetrius has been wooing Helena and then turns to Hermia and wild bald metres and Lysander both turned to Heleno in the wood. 27 00:02:50,730 --> 00:02:57,690 Things do sort themselves out. Hermia marries Lysander, Helena Murry's Demetrius. 28 00:02:57,690 --> 00:03:06,240 We might set aside the possibility that Demetrius is still under the influence of the magic potion and see and said instead that whether he is or not, 29 00:03:06,240 --> 00:03:12,780 this is an inevitable comedy conclusion for lovers must make two couples. 30 00:03:12,780 --> 00:03:20,600 Hermia and Lysander get what they wanted at the beginning. Demetrius and Helena settled down as the structural foil. 31 00:03:20,600 --> 00:03:25,130 So the plot of Midsummer Night's Dream has amplified a common plot type, 32 00:03:25,130 --> 00:03:28,880 which is hard before in these lectures and we had last week thinking about much ado about nothing. 33 00:03:28,880 --> 00:03:33,680 Of two men who are jealously rivalrous over a single love object. 34 00:03:33,680 --> 00:03:38,390 That's an absolutely common structural trope in Shakespearean comedies. 35 00:03:38,390 --> 00:03:43,850 We might think about two Noble Kinsman or two gentlemen of Verona as key examples of this plot type. 36 00:03:43,850 --> 00:03:48,920 But this plot has amplified that by doubling it. The two men are double rivals. 37 00:03:48,920 --> 00:03:56,390 First for Hermia and then under the influence of Robin's potion for Helena. 38 00:03:56,390 --> 00:04:04,340 This shift from Hermia to Helena and then in some cases back again, plus the similarity and names of the two women. 39 00:04:04,340 --> 00:04:15,690 Combines, I think, with a stress throughout Midsummer Night's Dream, not on the lovers distinctiveness, but on their complete interchangeability. 40 00:04:15,690 --> 00:04:17,970 Demetrius is a worthy gentleman. 41 00:04:17,970 --> 00:04:26,340 Theseus tells Hermia and all she can reply, which is, remember, this is her reason why she can't marry Demetrius and she's got to marry Lysander. 42 00:04:26,340 --> 00:04:32,130 Her own reply is, So is Lysander. These's has to agree to that. 43 00:04:32,130 --> 00:04:39,630 So nobody is contesting that these are completely different people. Lysander urges his own claim to marry Hermia. 44 00:04:39,630 --> 00:04:45,120 I am my lord as well, derived as he Demitrius as well possessed. 45 00:04:45,120 --> 00:04:52,410 So Lysander two sets his highest claim to marry me that he is as good as Demetrius. 46 00:04:52,410 --> 00:05:02,310 So the claim is not as Ensay Cymbeline where Posthumus that sort of true suitor is set against the elfish close turn or in as you like it, 47 00:05:02,310 --> 00:05:10,260 where it is variously impossible that Phoebes should marry Ganymede. These plays represent the alternative suitor as clearly implausible. 48 00:05:10,260 --> 00:05:13,850 Clearly someone who has to be suppressed by the plot too. 49 00:05:13,850 --> 00:05:19,320 We have to get this woman away from it's not possible. Midsummer Night's Dream doesn't do that. 50 00:05:19,320 --> 00:05:28,500 In fact, when it introduces Dimitris and Lysander in the first scene, it seems concerned to give us two lovers who are similar rather than different, 51 00:05:28,500 --> 00:05:35,220 who have equal social and personal claims to love Hermia, even Hermia and Lysander. 52 00:05:35,220 --> 00:05:42,230 That's to say, can only claim that Lysander is as worthy as Demetrius. 53 00:05:42,230 --> 00:05:47,070 Now that the lovers here, a double then, rather than being opposites, 54 00:05:47,070 --> 00:05:52,790 is part of a system of doubling and of double vision that extends throughout the play. 55 00:05:52,790 --> 00:06:00,650 And we might start actually at the kind of micro level. The play has an extraordinarily heavy use of rhyme. 56 00:06:00,650 --> 00:06:05,000 As you know, what blank verse means is the blank means, um, rhymed. 57 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:11,840 This is a play which is hardly really in blank verse at all. More than 50 percent of its lines are rhymed. 58 00:06:11,840 --> 00:06:18,080 Only Love's Labour's lost. Another highly formal and intricate play has a higher proportion. 59 00:06:18,080 --> 00:06:21,340 So it has a very high proportion of rhyming lines. 60 00:06:21,340 --> 00:06:30,390 And this high proportion of rhyme goes along often with repetitive rhetorical structures, types of parallelism. 61 00:06:30,390 --> 00:06:40,100 So types of rhetoric which shadow or or reiterate syntactic structures by emphasising them in subsequent lines. 62 00:06:40,100 --> 00:06:49,860 More particularly, perhaps I saw code on that, a particular rhetorical structure which gives us syntactic units have the same length. 63 00:06:49,860 --> 00:06:58,050 So here's an example from the place for a scene where we can see that rhetorical idea of syntactic doubling icicle on and rhyme, 64 00:06:58,050 --> 00:07:04,700 working together to emphasise the way the two female characters mirror or double each other. 65 00:07:04,700 --> 00:07:10,550 This is Hermia talking about Demitrius. I frown on him, yet he loves me still. 66 00:07:10,550 --> 00:07:16,290 Helena. Oh, that your frowns would teach my smile's such skill. 67 00:07:16,290 --> 00:07:21,780 I give him curses. Yet he gives me love. Oh, that my prayers. 68 00:07:21,780 --> 00:07:33,250 Could such a faction move? The more I hate, the more he follows me, the more I love, the more he hates me. 69 00:07:33,250 --> 00:07:43,900 So it's the signals of alternate lines each. Each is a rhyming couplet, and the third couplet is where the soul parallel structures converge. 70 00:07:43,900 --> 00:07:52,090 I think the use of the same word me as the rhyme, the more I hate, the more he follows me, the more I love, the more he hates me. 71 00:07:52,090 --> 00:07:55,210 This is a collapse of rhyme because it in fact the same the same word. 72 00:07:55,210 --> 00:07:59,410 We could see that that syntactic structure has been leading towards that similitude. 73 00:07:59,410 --> 00:08:06,190 Rhyme always brings things together at couples, things together. But here is coupling together something which is the same or in both. 74 00:08:06,190 --> 00:08:14,580 In both lines. Me and me. The rhyme there enacts, I think, the collapse of individual difference that the play develops elsewhere. 75 00:08:14,580 --> 00:08:19,860 For all the comic emphasis later on, the physical difference between the two women is the scene, 76 00:08:19,860 --> 00:08:24,450 as you'll remember, where they're different sizes, they're different. 77 00:08:24,450 --> 00:08:30,720 Colouring seems to be the subject of kind of comic rivalry between them. 78 00:08:30,720 --> 00:08:36,130 The overall emphasis of the play is to stress their interchangeability. 79 00:08:36,130 --> 00:08:47,870 Young Kot writes, This mechanical reversal of the objects of the of desire and the interchangeability of lovers is not just the basis of the plot. 80 00:08:47,870 --> 00:08:54,780 The reduction of characters to love partners seems to me the most peculiar characteristic of this cruel 81 00:08:54,780 --> 00:08:59,760 dream will come back to the idea of cruel treatment a minute and perhaps its most modern quality. 82 00:08:59,760 --> 00:09:05,580 This is the bit from court, which I think is so interesting here. The partner is now nameless and faceless. 83 00:09:05,580 --> 00:09:10,600 He or she just happens to be the nearest. 84 00:09:10,600 --> 00:09:18,850 So one thing that does happen in this place is we're going to go into this explore is how Shakespeare repeatedly shows up the absurdity of dramatic 85 00:09:18,850 --> 00:09:28,030 conventions of love at first sight in the way the play target site with the magic flower and therefore shows its operations to be arbitrary. 86 00:09:28,030 --> 00:09:36,850 But I think something of what Kott gets there about cruelty is something that will become clearer as I go on. 87 00:09:36,850 --> 00:09:42,690 So linguistic and rhetorical, doubling through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme. 88 00:09:42,690 --> 00:09:48,130 I think this this these formal characteristics must be one of the reasons Midsummer Night's Dream has been so, 89 00:09:48,130 --> 00:09:55,660 so much taken up by choreographers, by musicians, by sort of nonverbal or non-representational forms of art, 90 00:09:55,660 --> 00:10:02,320 ballet, opera music and so on, that it has these formal, formal linguistic quality already, 91 00:10:02,320 --> 00:10:10,110 which is not mostly referential, but it but it's kind of rhythmic and aesthetic. 92 00:10:10,110 --> 00:10:14,390 So linguistic and rhetorical, doubling through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme shows us the 93 00:10:14,390 --> 00:10:18,380 way that Shakespeare's language here is a microcosm of his wider dramatic art. 94 00:10:18,380 --> 00:10:26,390 So what's happening at the level of a sentence or a speech is miniaturising a wider theme or debate. 95 00:10:26,390 --> 00:10:33,680 So the larger scale, the kind of macrocosm of these microcosmic linguistic doublings and writings include, 96 00:10:33,680 --> 00:10:42,470 I think here in Midsummer Night's Dream, probably the most prominent structural use of doubling in Shakespeare's canon. 97 00:10:42,470 --> 00:10:50,850 So most notably, Midsummer Night's Dream seems written to allow or indeed to demand that Theseus and Hippolyta, 98 00:10:50,850 --> 00:10:59,190 the rulers of Athens, be doubled by that is played by the same actors as Oberon and Titania. 99 00:10:59,190 --> 00:11:05,190 Now, if not elsewhere in these lectures about the interpretive possibilities of having the same actors playing different characters, 100 00:11:05,190 --> 00:11:12,750 I think it's a really interesting way to see in some ways non psychological connexions between the bit, 101 00:11:12,750 --> 00:11:17,760 between characters, between figures in Shakespeare's plays. We might think about the Winter's Tale or the Comedy of errors. 102 00:11:17,760 --> 00:11:28,500 For instance, in those plays, as here, doubling is less a simple matter of the actual logistics and more part of the play's thematic construction. 103 00:11:28,500 --> 00:11:37,290 The doubling of the rulers of the two worlds means that the fairy world comes to stand as the night time to the courts de. 104 00:11:37,290 --> 00:11:45,600 Productions often also Double Theseus as master of ceremonies Phyllis Strait with Oberon's factotum Puck. 105 00:11:45,600 --> 00:11:50,520 It's often suggested also that the four Athenian workmen who are practising the play Pyramus 106 00:11:50,520 --> 00:11:56,280 and Thisbe would have been the same actors as those playing to Tanya's fairy entourage. 107 00:11:56,280 --> 00:12:00,120 So that flug, flute and snugged snout would have played. 108 00:12:00,120 --> 00:12:09,210 Blossom and moat and mustard seed. Seeing these heavy booted working men as the distinctly human sized faries is one 109 00:12:09,210 --> 00:12:14,130 of the ways we need to challenge over sentimentalised readings of this play, 110 00:12:14,130 --> 00:12:20,200 which derive from its reinvention as a play particularly suitable for children in the 19th century, 111 00:12:20,200 --> 00:12:24,810 at the 19th century, constructed an idea of fairies as diminutives or Tinkerbelle type creatures. 112 00:12:24,810 --> 00:12:28,950 Peter Pan is itself and add to that a sugary idea. 113 00:12:28,950 --> 00:12:36,410 Do you believe in fairies? So the idea that the worst may be a dream would. 114 00:12:36,410 --> 00:12:44,200 A dream world in which the courts unconscious life is played out via those elements of dreams 115 00:12:44,200 --> 00:12:49,480 which post Freudian analysis has taught us to see a very close to literary processes, 116 00:12:49,480 --> 00:12:58,540 ideas like displacement or condensation or symbolisation ideas like metonymy and metaphor, or as being crucial to how dreams work. 117 00:12:58,540 --> 00:13:03,700 There also clearly terms with which literary criticism is very clear. 118 00:13:03,700 --> 00:13:09,490 It might be helpful for us to remember that the first book, called The Interpretation of Dreams, 119 00:13:09,490 --> 00:13:16,780 was written not by Freud at the end of 1899, but by Thomas Hill in fifteen seventy six. 120 00:13:16,780 --> 00:13:22,290 Hill argued in his book, The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams, 121 00:13:22,290 --> 00:13:32,840 that dreams were looking glasses of the body placed it might so behold and for show matters imminent. 122 00:13:32,840 --> 00:13:37,430 Hill's interpretation of dreams is quite an interesting counter to what comes later, 123 00:13:37,430 --> 00:13:43,280 that we're used to thinking of dreams as being a way of dealing with the past, with memory or or something. 124 00:13:43,280 --> 00:13:48,140 Hill tells us that actually dreams are prophetic. They look forward. 125 00:13:48,140 --> 00:13:51,980 What I want to do in this middle part of the lecture is to think about some of the different ways early, 126 00:13:51,980 --> 00:13:56,240 modern and more modern ways of thinking about dreams might help us with this play. 127 00:13:56,240 --> 00:14:04,830 So preoccupied with dreaming, what might the dream have meant to Shakespeare's audiences? 128 00:14:04,830 --> 00:14:09,750 Perhaps one notable point to mention before we start is that while mediaeval literature 129 00:14:09,750 --> 00:14:17,400 is preoccupied by the dream narrative as as a as or trope for organising fictions, 130 00:14:17,400 --> 00:14:23,640 as as you will all know, in the early modern period, the dream narrative is a much less used literary trope. 131 00:14:23,640 --> 00:14:33,000 It falls away for some reason. Between the mediaeval period and the early modern in Shakespeare's work, only perhaps The Taming of the Shrew, 132 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:37,660 which I'll be talking about next week, might be thought to be a dream play. 133 00:14:37,660 --> 00:14:43,740 The induction with the Drunken Tinker Christopher Sligh has him fall asleep at the opening. 134 00:14:43,740 --> 00:14:49,350 Only to be awoken. But maybe he isn't by lords who are out hunting and decide to play a trick on him. 135 00:14:49,350 --> 00:14:55,510 Pretend he's a nobleman and invite him to watch a play of Catherine and Pachuco. 136 00:14:55,510 --> 00:14:58,690 So apart from The Taming of the Shrew, it's Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare, 137 00:14:58,690 --> 00:15:07,360 most seems to explore how the dream and theatre or the dream and imagination might be connected in Midsummer Night's Dream. 138 00:15:07,360 --> 00:15:11,130 Almost every character falls asleep at some point in the play. 139 00:15:11,130 --> 00:15:18,230 Does at least opening the possibility that what happens afterwards is thus is thus their dream rather than reality. 140 00:15:18,230 --> 00:15:25,090 And we understand that trope that if a person falls asleep and wakes up and then weird things happen to them in a in a film or, 141 00:15:25,090 --> 00:15:30,010 you know, some kind of narrative fiction of any sort, we understand that to be a dream. 142 00:15:30,010 --> 00:15:40,840 It was all a dream. After Lysander, who's been touched by Robin Goodfellows love in idleness potion, vows to reject Hermia until love Helena. 143 00:15:40,840 --> 00:15:48,820 Instead, Hermia wakes from a nightmare in which she seach, in which she says he thought a serpent. 144 00:15:48,820 --> 00:15:54,280 Eat my heart away. And yet sad, smiling at his cruel prey. 145 00:15:54,280 --> 00:15:58,420 That's the first of the of the actual dreams in the play. 146 00:15:58,420 --> 00:16:00,910 Stage directions in the early text suggest that, of course, 147 00:16:00,910 --> 00:16:07,330 the sleeping lovers need to remain on stage all the time while the fairy world pursues its business, 148 00:16:07,330 --> 00:16:12,810 giving us the idea that the fairies are some kind of dream projection by the lovers. 149 00:16:12,810 --> 00:16:17,080 And in the sequence of a waking at the end of Act four, where to, Tanya? 150 00:16:17,080 --> 00:16:21,910 The Lovers and then Bottum are all serially roused from sleep. 151 00:16:21,910 --> 00:16:29,040 Demetrius describes first their experiences as a dream, and the lovers depart for Athens, vowing to tell their dreams. 152 00:16:29,040 --> 00:16:35,590 In the immediately following scene, Bottom identifies what has happened to him as a wonderful dream. 153 00:16:35,590 --> 00:16:42,240 I have had a most rare vision. I had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. 154 00:16:42,240 --> 00:16:48,010 Man is but an arse if he go about to expand this dream he thought I was. 155 00:16:48,010 --> 00:16:53,440 There is no man can tell what he thought I was and he thought I had. 156 00:16:53,440 --> 00:16:59,800 But managed is better patched fool. If he were offered to see if he will offer to say what he thought I had. 157 00:16:59,800 --> 00:17:07,040 You will, he says, get Peter Quint's to make a ballad of these wonderful events and call it Bottoms Dream. 158 00:17:07,040 --> 00:17:11,690 Some critics have suggested that's what we should call the whole plague right at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, 159 00:17:11,690 --> 00:17:19,340 Robin Goodfellows epilogue performs the act of simultaneous praise for modesty about the play performed that's typical of surviving epilogues. 160 00:17:19,340 --> 00:17:24,370 If we châteaux have offended think. But this and all is mended that you knew. 161 00:17:24,370 --> 00:17:32,740 But slumbered here while these visions did appear on this weekend Idol theme no more yielding than a dream. 162 00:17:32,740 --> 00:17:40,150 The whole play, Robin suggests, is our dream like modern Hollywood, then the early modern theatre is a kind of dream factory, 163 00:17:40,150 --> 00:17:48,970 providing theatregoers with an escapist fantasy from which they only reluctantly awake to return to their humdrum waking lives. 164 00:17:48,970 --> 00:17:57,040 Adrian Noble's 1996 film of the play had the whole thing seen through the eyes of a young, pyjama clad boy. 165 00:17:57,040 --> 00:18:07,900 It was all his dream, drawing on tropes from Wizard of Oz and thinking about childish imagination and the doubling of waking and dreaming worlds. 166 00:18:07,900 --> 00:18:15,640 So that tells us that the play itself, beyond its title, has the dream as a running motif. 167 00:18:15,640 --> 00:18:19,690 One important source for early modern ideas about dreams comes in Thomas Nash's 168 00:18:19,690 --> 00:18:25,440 prose pamphlet published in 50 Ninety four as The Terrors of the Night. 169 00:18:25,440 --> 00:18:30,610 Here discusses a wide range of nocturnal spooks from ghosts to dreams. 170 00:18:30,610 --> 00:18:36,960 We know lots of points of connexion between Shakespeare and Nas. I thought to be co-authors of Henry the Sixth Part one. 171 00:18:36,960 --> 00:18:42,400 There are probable allusions to Nash's texts in Henry, the fourth part one in Hamlet and in Love's Labour's Lost. 172 00:18:42,400 --> 00:18:47,650 It may well be, I think that Midsummer Night's Dream draws on, draws directly on the terrace of the night. 173 00:18:47,650 --> 00:18:55,220 And even if it doesn't, Nash gives us some sense of what dream theory, if such existed, might have been in the early modern period. 174 00:18:55,220 --> 00:19:01,170 I'm just going to spend a bit of time on some of Nash's ideas about dreams. 175 00:19:01,170 --> 00:19:05,990 Now, like many things in the early modern period, from religious belief to the self. 176 00:19:05,990 --> 00:19:12,890 Dreams were being re understood and reinterpreted less as something that invaded from outside. 177 00:19:12,890 --> 00:19:16,020 And more as something created internally. 178 00:19:16,020 --> 00:19:23,450 So that's a general movement in this period towards the kind of interior is the place where things happen or things are generated. 179 00:19:23,450 --> 00:19:34,610 A lot less sense of the operation of external factors, metaphysical factors or whatever on on human human behaviour. 180 00:19:34,610 --> 00:19:41,150 So the older view was that dreams or communication from some metaphysical realm, perhaps God, 181 00:19:41,150 --> 00:19:48,830 hence bottom's famous bundling of loans from St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians when he recalls his dreamlike encounter with Titania. 182 00:19:48,830 --> 00:19:55,190 Or perhaps from elsewhere. Shakespeare often depicts ghosts as appearing in dreams. 183 00:19:55,190 --> 00:20:02,450 And there's something about the kind of double unreality of that structure, which seems useful, 184 00:20:02,450 --> 00:20:06,590 as in, for example, the appearance of the ghost of Julius Caesar to Brutus, 185 00:20:06,590 --> 00:20:15,090 or the encounters that Richard the Third and Richmond have with the play's dead, who ritually curse Richard and bless his challenger. 186 00:20:15,090 --> 00:20:22,230 So the question about whether dreams come from outside or inside the human relate to broader cultural debates about human agency, 187 00:20:22,230 --> 00:20:27,300 that's something I talk about quite a lot in my lecture. Beth. 188 00:20:27,300 --> 00:20:34,280 Nash's views in the terrors of the night tend towards a sceptical idea about where dreams come from. 189 00:20:34,280 --> 00:20:40,130 He does not feel that dreams are the result of divine or diabolic possession. 190 00:20:40,130 --> 00:20:49,850 For Nash, dreams are nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fantasy which the day has left and digested. 191 00:20:49,850 --> 00:20:55,880 Or an after feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations, Masada, 192 00:20:55,880 --> 00:21:02,500 nothing else but the bubbling scum of froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested. 193 00:21:02,500 --> 00:21:10,370 So Nash has a sense that it's probably quite common to us that what what dreams do is to process some elements of raw or, 194 00:21:10,370 --> 00:21:14,490 as he says, undigested material from from waking life. 195 00:21:14,490 --> 00:21:22,550 They do some work of psychic processing. That's quite a that's an idea which which many of us would would think explains are dreams. 196 00:21:22,550 --> 00:21:30,230 Now, sometimes Nash's ideas seem to echo quite specifically with Midsummer Night's Dream. 197 00:21:30,230 --> 00:21:38,660 Nash describes the dream world as a kind of puppet stage which travesties or reaper forms the things that we have done during the day. 198 00:21:38,660 --> 00:21:43,070 It's a kind of performing reverse of the everyday world, 199 00:21:43,070 --> 00:21:49,370 a theatre that might help us think both about Midsummer Night's Dream itself and also about the play within the play. 200 00:21:49,370 --> 00:21:56,450 Pyramus and Thisbe A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is not one of these things which are most known to us. 201 00:21:56,450 --> 00:22:01,940 Some of us that have most brains make to ourselves images of memory. 202 00:22:01,940 --> 00:22:08,120 On these images of memory whereon we build in the day comes some superfluous humour of ours, 203 00:22:08,120 --> 00:22:18,060 like a jackanapes in the night and directs a puppet stage or some such ridiculous, idle, childish invention. 204 00:22:18,060 --> 00:22:23,830 And he argues that when all is said, melancholy is the mother of dreams and of all terrors of the night. 205 00:22:23,830 --> 00:22:31,270 Let it but affirm it has seen a spirit, though it be. But the moonshine on the wall, the best reason we have cannot infringe it. 206 00:22:31,270 --> 00:22:40,890 Which echoes this or dramaturge of Pyramus and Thisbe ridiculous emphasis in that play on the materiality of moonshine and wall. 207 00:22:40,890 --> 00:22:44,740 And most interestingly, I think for what we might want to say about Midsummer Night's Dream, 208 00:22:44,740 --> 00:22:55,090 Nash likens the sleeping world to that initial darkness out of which, according to biblical accounts of creation, the world was born. 209 00:22:55,090 --> 00:22:58,480 No such figure as the first chaos wear out. 210 00:22:58,480 --> 00:23:10,770 The world was extraordinary as our dreams in the night in them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded and meet together. 211 00:23:10,770 --> 00:23:18,870 So that idea, that dream somehow access some primaeval time before the creation of the world in which all states, 212 00:23:18,870 --> 00:23:26,730 all sexes, all places are confounded and meet together, I think is quite helpful for thinking about this play. 213 00:23:26,730 --> 00:23:32,340 The idea that the idea of this confounding and meeting together gives us a sense of the way in which the 214 00:23:32,340 --> 00:23:39,990 whole play might be imagined as a dream and that the juxtaposition of different worlds within the play. 215 00:23:39,990 --> 00:23:44,520 The court and the wood, the human and the animal. The upper and lower class. 216 00:23:44,520 --> 00:23:56,570 Fairy and mortal, male and female. This all corresponds to a kind of procreation chaos into which nasty Nash suggests our dreams, pictures. 217 00:23:56,570 --> 00:24:02,930 So now sense is that dreams offer a kind of suspension of the rules of the created world. 218 00:24:02,930 --> 00:24:09,580 Rather like theatre. Useful, I think, for the operation of the dream motif in the play. 219 00:24:09,580 --> 00:24:14,800 And useful in part to show that in order to think seriously about what the dream might mean here, 220 00:24:14,800 --> 00:24:20,830 we don't need necessarily to turn to modern psychoanalysis. That that, too, has its advantages. 221 00:24:20,830 --> 00:24:27,560 But there is an early modern discourse about dreams which could enable us to think about this historically. 222 00:24:27,560 --> 00:24:32,420 What more modern assessments of the implication of the dream in Midsummer Night's Dream have usefully emphasised, 223 00:24:32,420 --> 00:24:38,060 though post Freud, is that the dream world is entirely preoccupied with sex. 224 00:24:38,060 --> 00:24:43,340 That the froth or scum that comes to our minds as a result of our daytime work 225 00:24:43,340 --> 00:24:50,450 is almost always that of suppressed or illicit or excessive sexual desire. 226 00:24:50,450 --> 00:24:58,070 Freud identified dreams as wish fulfilment, a place where we do the things that we can't normally do. 227 00:24:58,070 --> 00:25:04,130 And that's a useful concept, perhaps, for thinking about the play's dreamers. 228 00:25:04,130 --> 00:25:09,680 The prominence of sex then in the player's imagination means that the question of who marries, 229 00:25:09,680 --> 00:25:15,290 who registers, rather the arbitrariness of the social structure of marriage. 230 00:25:15,290 --> 00:25:22,340 Marriage serves, of course, in the modern comedy as the regulator of potentially anarchic sexual desire. 231 00:25:22,340 --> 00:25:28,430 It's very much an awake daytime form of repression in this reading. 232 00:25:28,430 --> 00:25:30,380 It doesn't really matter then who marries who. 233 00:25:30,380 --> 00:25:37,970 It just matters that they are married because this is a necessary structure to contain the play's excessively sexual imagination. 234 00:25:37,970 --> 00:25:45,490 If you like. It's unconscious. Now to talk about Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most insistently sexual plays. 235 00:25:45,490 --> 00:25:50,240 It's very uneasily alongside the idea of it being suitable for children. 236 00:25:50,240 --> 00:25:57,280 And as I've already suggested, something of this idea arises from Victorian and Edwardian ideas about fairies and childhood, 237 00:25:57,280 --> 00:26:05,680 like other sentimental manifestations of that in the Victorian period, like fairy paintings, which often draw Drew on Midsummer Night's Dream. 238 00:26:05,680 --> 00:26:11,590 The inheritance of this view of the play meant that it was established in the UK in the lower school curriculum. 239 00:26:11,590 --> 00:26:17,300 It was for a time, a set play for 14 year olds in UK schools. 240 00:26:17,300 --> 00:26:24,380 These assumptions about the players led to the following mismatch of views, as reported by BBC News Online. 241 00:26:24,380 --> 00:26:30,200 A group of red faced schoolchildren walked out of the production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, 242 00:26:30,200 --> 00:26:33,890 upset by the sexually explicit nature of the play. 243 00:26:33,890 --> 00:26:39,980 Coventry teacher Steven McGraw led his class of 11 year olds from the theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. 244 00:26:39,980 --> 00:26:49,070 After the fairy queen Titania and Bottom, dressed as a donkey, started writhing round on a bed, Mr MacGraw said the children were all embarrassed. 245 00:26:49,070 --> 00:26:53,390 What we saw was not what we were expecting. It was sexually explicit. 246 00:26:53,390 --> 00:26:55,580 The production has driven. This is a very fine phrase. 247 00:26:55,580 --> 00:27:02,880 The production has driven a coach and carriage through our school's religious and sex education policies. 248 00:27:02,880 --> 00:27:09,650 Now, poor Mr McGraw's feeling that sexually explicit was not what we were expecting. 249 00:27:09,650 --> 00:27:15,980 Shows just how far popular plays of popular perceptions of the play's wholesomeness had overlaid. 250 00:27:15,980 --> 00:27:20,690 What was I thinking? Instead, we should see as its insistence sexuality. 251 00:27:20,690 --> 00:27:25,330 Let's take that scene that the article suggests was the final straw for those Coventry schoolchildren. 252 00:27:25,330 --> 00:27:33,760 It lasted quite a long time. If they got to Titania and Bottom writhing on the bed, thought the maze will just go on with it by by that point. 253 00:27:33,760 --> 00:27:38,570 But clearly, it was just too much. So let's just let's set that scene. 254 00:27:38,570 --> 00:27:42,680 The encounter between Titania and Bottom Victorian illustrated Shakespeare's. 255 00:27:42,680 --> 00:27:50,390 It's really well worth Googling pictures of this because you can see how this this image became completely whimsically, 256 00:27:50,390 --> 00:27:54,630 iconically pictured by by Victorian late Victorian culture, 257 00:27:54,630 --> 00:27:59,930 became the the picture that you would get in an in an edition of Midsummer Night's Dream, 258 00:27:59,930 --> 00:28:09,890 but an entirely kind of cleaned up version where the queen of the fairies sits decorously in a flowery bower bedecked with greenery. 259 00:28:09,890 --> 00:28:20,920 And perhaps she strokes the ears of a snoozing, rather beautiful arse as headed off humanoid in her in her power. 260 00:28:20,920 --> 00:28:26,440 The effects of Robin Goodfellows potion must surely be intended to be more carnal than this. 261 00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:30,370 Not least because it's hard to imagine that spending time stroking the ears of a donkey 262 00:28:30,370 --> 00:28:34,300 man could quite humiliate Titania enough to make her relinquish the Indian boy. 263 00:28:34,300 --> 00:28:40,750 That is, after all, the point of this whole scene. According to O'Brien, that's what O'Brien is aiming at. 264 00:28:40,750 --> 00:28:49,510 So we have a magically infatuated fairy queen, a man with a donkey head and a grassy bower doesn't seem to me rocket science. 265 00:28:49,510 --> 00:28:55,060 Do we think we find bottom asleep because he's been working so hard, learning his lines? 266 00:28:55,060 --> 00:29:00,470 I think not. I think the bouncin we can get twice in the play. 267 00:29:00,470 --> 00:29:10,360 The plays really is really interested in what's happening in that bar. That's a sequence which toys with unshockable scenes of bestiality that invites 268 00:29:10,360 --> 00:29:15,910 us to speculate in decorously about Bottum hung like a donkey and stresses 269 00:29:15,910 --> 00:29:24,940 the sexual encounter from the pages of of its metamorphosis that transcends the social and category differences between the two people involved. 270 00:29:24,940 --> 00:29:29,600 Now to time is word for desire is, of course, love. 271 00:29:29,600 --> 00:29:35,330 Sleep, though, and I will wind the in my arms faries be gone and be always away. 272 00:29:35,330 --> 00:29:40,270 So does the Woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle, gently in twist, the female ivy. 273 00:29:40,270 --> 00:29:45,110 So it rings the baqi fingers of the elm. Oh, how I love thee. 274 00:29:45,110 --> 00:29:51,020 How I dote on the Midsummer Night's Dream reveals here is that love can, of course. 275 00:29:51,020 --> 00:29:55,120 Then as now be it mean both sex and romance. 276 00:29:55,120 --> 00:30:03,050 And that we tend to assume in Shakespeare that it means the latter romance when more often it means the former sex, 277 00:30:03,050 --> 00:30:06,590 just as Victorian ideas about fairies have shaped the play's reception. 278 00:30:06,590 --> 00:30:13,580 So, as the often repeated assertion that this play was written for performance at some aristocratic Elizabethan marriage, 279 00:30:13,580 --> 00:30:19,550 there is absolutely no evidence for this, and no specific wedding has ever been CCMS convincingly identified. 280 00:30:19,550 --> 00:30:25,340 It's part, in fact, of a kind of critical attempt to clean this up, to make this a play, which is about marriage, 281 00:30:25,340 --> 00:30:36,590 to make it more decorous, more regular, a celebration of of kind of nuptial regulation rather than of sexual desire and transgression. 282 00:30:36,590 --> 00:30:42,410 But into Tanya's speech, I think love here means sex, not romance. The wood is the space of desire. 283 00:30:42,410 --> 00:30:48,320 In fact, perhaps it does just represent desire itself, since it has almost no other characteristics. 284 00:30:48,320 --> 00:30:55,790 If you think back to the lecturer's giving on as you like it, talking about how the how the wood, how the forest of Ardern is depicted, 285 00:30:55,790 --> 00:31:02,360 the natural world of the forest of Avadon, we get none of that in the wood of Midsummer Night's Dream. 286 00:31:02,360 --> 00:31:07,220 There's no interest in making it into anything like a real place or an alternative place. 287 00:31:07,220 --> 00:31:13,290 It seems as if it is just in some sense the aid or the space of desire. 288 00:31:13,290 --> 00:31:16,490 There is very little in the language of Midsummer Night's Dream that characterises the wood 289 00:31:16,490 --> 00:31:21,920 outside Athens as anything other than a metaphor or a metaphor or a metaphor for desire, 290 00:31:21,920 --> 00:31:28,100 which is not always comfortable or nice. Thus, the question of who marries who is a bourgeois fiction. 291 00:31:28,100 --> 00:31:33,050 This is not a play about marriage. It begins and ends with marriage, but it used them. 292 00:31:33,050 --> 00:31:42,840 It uses the majority of the plot to explore tantalising alternatives. Threesomes, partners, swapping bestiality, sadomasochism. 293 00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:47,280 When somebody told me the bishop of subduct sometimes listen to the podcast, my first thought was, that's brilliant. 294 00:31:47,280 --> 00:31:51,300 My second thought was there's gonna be a point where that will pop into my mind. 295 00:31:51,300 --> 00:31:56,550 That was the point. Just shut your ears, Bishop. 296 00:31:56,550 --> 00:32:04,690 So this this the idea that the plot tries to explore sexual alternatives to marriage has been cued from the very start. 297 00:32:04,690 --> 00:32:13,830 Theseus marriage to Hippolyta, with which the play opens, is explicitly established as the result of conquest rather than courtship. 298 00:32:13,830 --> 00:32:20,950 And the opening scene is structured so that Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, is given no opportunity to reply to Theseus. 299 00:32:20,950 --> 00:32:22,920 This is this is Theseus Ippolita. 300 00:32:22,920 --> 00:32:33,690 I wooed thee with my sword and one that I love doing the injuries, but I will weddady in another key with pomp, with triumph and with revelling. 301 00:32:33,690 --> 00:32:37,910 What happens immediately after that is Aegeus comes in with Hermia, Dimitrius and Lysander. 302 00:32:37,910 --> 00:32:47,520 So Hippolyta never replies. Isn't is one of those silences that Shakespeare is so good at because we don't know what Hippolytus response is. 303 00:32:47,520 --> 00:32:54,600 This is a gap into which directors and actors can and do move. Many Hippolytus seem quite happy with this arrangement. 304 00:32:54,600 --> 00:33:02,570 But there are also productions and a large number of production histories which can read about Trevor Griffith's production history. 305 00:33:02,570 --> 00:33:09,090 There are productions in which the captive queen is brought in in chains or depicted as a disdainful, 306 00:33:09,090 --> 00:33:14,340 unwilling or enforced partner in the anticipated marriage. 307 00:33:14,340 --> 00:33:21,240 Hints of coercive or sadomasochistic sex are often present in the staging of that opening scene. 308 00:33:21,240 --> 00:33:27,600 We get a sense of this later when Helena wishes herself to be Demetrius dog. 309 00:33:27,600 --> 00:33:31,090 The more you beat me, I will fawn on you use me. 310 00:33:31,090 --> 00:33:36,030 But as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me elsewhere. 311 00:33:36,030 --> 00:33:40,470 Recent productions have been concerned to excavate the play's sexual unconscious. 312 00:33:40,470 --> 00:33:48,360 Elizabethan fairies and pucks seem to have had more obviously sexual mischief in mind as they slipped in and out of the human world. 313 00:33:48,360 --> 00:33:58,260 And an early modern illustration of Robin Goodfellow depicts him not as the kind of sexless figure who moves or jumps around the stage, 314 00:33:58,260 --> 00:34:03,810 but rather as a hairy legged satyr supporting an impressive phallus. 315 00:34:03,810 --> 00:34:10,110 The issue of the Indian boy, so beloved of both Titania and Oberon and the source of the passionate discord between them, 316 00:34:10,110 --> 00:34:18,340 has also tended to be understood recently sexually. The Indian boy becomes less a tiny child, a more a pretty adolescent. 317 00:34:18,340 --> 00:34:23,460 The boy, who never appears in the play text but is often incorporated into stage productions, 318 00:34:23,460 --> 00:34:30,780 seems to crystallise the violent impossibility of desire in the play and its challenge as here to marriage. 319 00:34:30,780 --> 00:34:34,620 The Indian boy is very definitely not their own child. 320 00:34:34,620 --> 00:34:41,700 It's a token between them which threatens to break up rather than confirm the relationship between Oberon and Titania. 321 00:34:41,700 --> 00:34:50,400 So the play seems to trace the relationships or disconnections between sexual desire as a transgressive and disturbing emotion on the one hand, 322 00:34:50,400 --> 00:34:54,530 and the social pragmatics of marriage on the other. 323 00:34:54,530 --> 00:35:02,660 Perhaps the plot suggests to us that the lovers desires and their trajectory towards marriage are not entirely the same. 324 00:35:02,660 --> 00:35:12,100 Marriage is revealed as the inadequate social structural response to desire a kind of vanilla daytime version. 325 00:35:12,100 --> 00:35:16,930 So if violent and uncontrollable desire is the real dynamic that Midsummer Night's Dream lets loose, 326 00:35:16,930 --> 00:35:24,100 then it proceeds to try to bundle it back up within these regulatory structures of marriage. 327 00:35:24,100 --> 00:35:30,340 Hermès description of her dream of Lysander is faithlessness is in this light, unmistakeably Fallick. 328 00:35:30,340 --> 00:35:35,710 The serpent at her heart away. People in Shakespeare always dreaming about about snakes. 329 00:35:35,710 --> 00:35:42,370 And it follows from that exchange about the regulation of sexual desire in the potentially unregulated world. 330 00:35:42,370 --> 00:35:49,120 Having run away from that, from the court of Athens, having run away from parental strictures, 331 00:35:49,120 --> 00:35:55,190 Hermia and Lysander have to negotiate whether how they're going to sleep in the woods. 332 00:35:55,190 --> 00:36:03,130 Hermia, you'll remember, tells Lysander, lie a little further off. So sexual attraction is potentially dangerous in this world. 333 00:36:03,130 --> 00:36:07,510 One reading of what Hermia is saying there is that suddenly she realises she is in this 334 00:36:07,510 --> 00:36:13,390 unregulated space where what she actually wants could turn out to be quite frightening. 335 00:36:13,390 --> 00:36:18,130 Love is darkly physical and anarchic here, not decorously romantic. 336 00:36:18,130 --> 00:36:21,130 Midsummer Night's Dream, I think, is not a romantic comedy, 337 00:36:21,130 --> 00:36:28,780 but rather a comedy which looks beneath the conventions of courtship and romance and is actually rather frightened by what it sees. 338 00:36:28,780 --> 00:36:34,060 Midsummer Night's Dream, writes, Young Kott is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays. 339 00:36:34,060 --> 00:36:46,060 But he goes on to say, in no other tragedy or comedy of his except Troilus and Cressida is the eroticism expressed so brutally. 340 00:36:46,060 --> 00:36:52,440 We might see a kind of parodic version of this, perhaps in the mechanicals laughable play. 341 00:36:52,440 --> 00:37:01,440 The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe takes up much of the play's final act. 342 00:37:01,440 --> 00:37:10,620 It's often very funny in a slapstick and usually over the top way in performance splicing physical comedy with absurd innuendo. 343 00:37:10,620 --> 00:37:18,210 The stones of the world through which the lovers speak invariably draw on the meaning of stones as testicles, for instance. 344 00:37:18,210 --> 00:37:23,430 But the central story of Paris, I don't mean to suggest that it isn't funny, or to say that we can't find it funny, 345 00:37:23,430 --> 00:37:30,480 or even to suggest that something being funny is somehow the opposite of the darkness that I'm talking about elsewhere in the play, I think. 346 00:37:30,480 --> 00:37:38,910 I think that's entirely compatible. But we could see that the playlet appearance in this bee again shows us that desire is destructive and violent. 347 00:37:38,910 --> 00:37:45,300 This bee is menaced by a lion. Perhaps we could see that that's the menacing of her own desires. 348 00:37:45,300 --> 00:37:52,410 Lion violent, a lion vile hath here deflowered, my dear announces primness. 349 00:37:52,410 --> 00:37:56,790 Ridiculous phrase lion and ridiculous syntax. Lion vile here. 350 00:37:56,790 --> 00:38:03,720 Deflowered, my dear. But the word deflowered is it is definitely a sexual one. 351 00:38:03,720 --> 00:38:11,550 His own Souci promotes his own suicide, establishes desire as destructive, replaying the psychosexual dynamic of Romeo and Juliet. 352 00:38:11,550 --> 00:38:17,280 Because the chronology of these places is unclear. It is not. It's not easy to know whether Pyramus and there's been Paradies, 353 00:38:17,280 --> 00:38:26,040 Romeo and Juliet that has already been performed or pre-emptively undermines its rather camp claims to seriousness. 354 00:38:26,040 --> 00:38:34,590 And Juliette, that has already been performed or pre-emptively undermines its rather camp claims to seriousness. 355 00:38:34,590 --> 00:38:43,360 And Juliette, that has already been performed or pre-emptively undermines its rather camp claims to seriousness. 356 00:38:43,360 --> 00:38:49,930 But part of the trouble with Pyramus and Thisbe, perhaps in the modern theatre is this is sometimes just too funny, 357 00:38:49,930 --> 00:39:01,240 trying too hard to be hilarious, almost hysterical in its anxieties to overlay the play's anxieties, to display sexual urges into slapstick. 358 00:39:01,240 --> 00:39:02,770 But even as it tries to do that, 359 00:39:02,770 --> 00:39:12,260 as we've seen the story of Pyramus and Thisbe means that the real concerns of the play keep bobbing back to the surface. 360 00:39:12,260 --> 00:39:22,610 So what I've been trying to suggest here in this lecture so far is that the confusions over who marries are not just light-hearted fun in the play. 361 00:39:22,610 --> 00:39:30,650 What they point up to us is the incompatibility of different varying compatibility of 362 00:39:30,650 --> 00:39:37,160 comic structure in the play with the kind of desire which the wood is able to mobilise. 363 00:39:37,160 --> 00:39:44,240 It doesn't matter who marries who because marriage is revealed to be kind of arbitrary form of control, 364 00:39:44,240 --> 00:39:50,570 a way of taking back the frightening aspects of the of the wood and of submitting to 365 00:39:50,570 --> 00:39:56,600 the authority represented so decisively in the opening by Theseus and by Aegeus. 366 00:39:56,600 --> 00:40:03,890 I think we misread the place. We think that Hermia escapes her father's lore, is able to marry the person she wants to, 367 00:40:03,890 --> 00:40:08,660 and therefore kind of wrong foot soldiers really as well as as I was saying at the beginning. 368 00:40:08,660 --> 00:40:13,430 It doesn't matter whether Hermia marries Demitrius or Lysander. 369 00:40:13,430 --> 00:40:21,570 What matters is that she gets married. So I've also been suggesting that the dream motif is a significant one that has 370 00:40:21,570 --> 00:40:25,320 possibility for both modern and early modern readings that to think about. 371 00:40:25,320 --> 00:40:37,224 To think that dreams are significant in this play doesn't mean turning to Freud necessarily, but could mean turning to Hill or Tinashe.