My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Midsummer is one of Shakespeare’s from court-to-woods-back-to-court comedies. Everyone flees to the forest to escape the restrictions of court life, or a death penalty (like poor Hermia here), or mean parents forbidding you to marry the one you love, etc. Everyone finds freedom in the woods, the shackles of society broken. All kinds of transgressive things happen in the woods, including transformation: women dress like men, Bottom not only turns into an ass, but a queen falls in love with him! Transformation is great but there’s anxiety too. What if you can’t turn back? What if you are stuck forever in your transformed state? Being transformed is only okay when you can find the pathway back to yourself. People come back to court, then, with more self-knowledge and a sense of being able to freely choose their fate. You can’t STAY in the woods. Unfortunately.

So this is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I know for a fact it was the first Shakespeare play I ever sat down and read, start to finish. I might have seen the movie on TV, the one with Mickey Rooney, but why I read it – because these are the bread crumbs to culture, how you follow them where they lead you: Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfield, was not just a beloved book when I was a kid. It was an organizing principle. I was 9 or 10 when I read it, and the image of these three orphan !! girls, going to a dramatic arts school was captivating. Plus they were British! British orphan actors? Are you kidding me?? And the drama school put on two productions, that I can remember: Maurice Maeterlink’s The Bluebird and Midsummer Night’s Dream. Same as it ever was, I immediately sought out both plays to read. Both literary works seemed real to me already because I went through the rehearsal process with the three sisters in Ballet Shoes. They weren’t words on a page. They were part of a theatrical process. I was already doing drama stuff, and had my first “hit” at age 10 playing a cranky over-it looking-glass in Alice in Wonderland. I still remember getting my first laugh. The feeling was like CRACK.

It took me a second, but I knew I had a picture of it somewhere.

In other words, this is where I was at – physically – when I was digging into the works of Maurice Maeterlinck and Shakespeare. I was just following in the footsteps of the orphan girls in Ballet Shoes and every kid actor everywhere. Oh, and I made that costume.

I was a very imaginative child and swept away by descriptions of natural beauty, which I credit almost solely to Anne Shirley, who nearly fainted in her opening scene in Anne of Green Gables when she saw a corridor of white-blossomed cherry trees, and said rapturously she would call it “the White Way of Delight”. I remember consciously thinking, “I have never in my life reacted to a tree this way. I need to pay more attention to nature”, lol.

Well! Midsummer Night’s Dream is all about nature. I can’t think of another play by Shakespeare where nature so predominates, although nature makes an appearance in all of his best. Maybe the storm in King Lear but that’s just one scene. The rest of the play isn’t stormy. But all of Midsummer takes place outside, on a dewy moonlit night, and the whole atmosphere is saturated with moonshine and glimmering water and shining dew-drops. Everything is liquid and gleams silver. The moon’s light is “wat’ry”. (Member Romeo and Juliet where silver = good and Ggld = bad. Midsummer is an even more extreme version.) My little Anne-Shirley-influenced soul shivered at all the descriptive language. I could SEE it.

In my teenage years I discovered the rest of the plays, working on them in acting classes, etc. I played the Nurse. I played Rosalind. I learned about these plays by working on them, and also going to see productions, which … I just feel like is the best way to learn them, although I realize most people don’t do it that way. The Nurse is a whole other THING when you try to PLAY her.

Midsummer has been under-estimated by scholars, mainly because … it seems like fluff, maybe? Fairies and stuff? But it’s so not fluff. It’s a statement of purpose, practically. Theatrical purpose: imagination and transformation, two of the essential things you need to make theatre. There’s even a play-within-a-play, the riotous Pyramus and Thisby play we see in rehearsal throughout before finally getting to to see the production itself in Act V. Pyramus and Thisby is heckled by the crowd, and yet … not with viciousness. Everyone gets into the spirit of it, even as they murmur asides to each other. Nobody is mad the play is bad. It’s a perfect entertainment for a joyous occasion and everyone has a good time.

You have to really TRY to mess up Midsummer. Puck can sometimes be a problem. He’s a mischievous fairy, first of all, so how does one pick the appropriate tone to play him? Puck can be stiflingly twee if you’re not careful. Puck is an old old word, pre-dating the play, meaning kind of a hobgoblin/spirit – and cousin to Mercutio’s Queen Mab … “What fools these mortals be!” is not really a “twee” sentiment. He likes making fools of us. The best Pucks have an EDGE.

Famously, Midsummer doesn’t really have a source, or at least not one as easily identifiable as with the history plays. It’s very English-based, the language evokes the English countryside, not Venice or Athens or whatever. Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queen came out around this time, or maybe a couple years before, and Shakespeare would have known it. Queen Elizabeth was on the throne. There was a fear about succession, because she – again, famously – was not married, was never going to BE married, and was known as “the virgin queen”, even though she probably wasn’t a virgin. The anxiety about succession is here in the play – which features not one but TWO Queens. And Hippolyta’s story is rather alarming when you really think about it, even though Hippolyta seems fairly chill with it. She was taken prisoner by Theseus, who considered her a prize. She is being trafficked, basically. But again, she’s pretty okay with it? She was Queen of the Amazons, another “nickname” for Queen Elizabeth.

Bottom is not the only character who transforms, although his is the most dramatic. The love potion Oberon wants to use, with “ingredients” gathered by Puck, brings out an emotional transformation, where the young Athenian lovers – four of them – wake up and their affections have transferred. Hermia loves Lysander, but her father has forbidden the match: she must marry Demetrius. (The humorous thing is there is literally no difference between Lysander and Demetrius. It’s not like in Romeo & Juliet, where the match is taboo because of the family feud. Here … what the hell does it matter? The men are literally the same person.) Hermia and Lysander decide to run away together, and Hermia confides in her best friend Helena. To repeat: there is literally no difference between Helena and Hermia, and they even grew up together as basically one person. So whether or not Hermia loves Lysander or Demetrius, or Helena loves Demetrius, or Lysander loves Helena … whichever way it shakes out … nobody is distinct. Nobody is obviously the right choice. You could mix and match them endlessly. Which is what happens with the love potion: Puck sprinkles it on the wrong lovers’ eyelids. He also sprinkles it on Titania’s eyelids, and so when she wakes up she will love the first “person” she sees. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) when she wakes up the first thing she sees is Bottom – transferred into a donkey – staggering towards her. She falls madly in love.

Love is totally random, in other words. There’s no rhyme or reason. The lovers are not star-cross’d. They are just victims of mischief, and since nobody has distinguishing characteristics anyway … who cares?

A local theatre company in my town puts on Shakespeare plays in the summer in the little park behind the theatre building. (I had my first kiss nearby back in high school. But never mind.) We’ve seen them do Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, and – last summer – Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was magical, and funny, and playful – I was so impressed! Watching this particular play outside – on a hot summer night – is obviously the best way to experience it. My favorite part of that night was, occasionally I’d hear this periodic long low tone – I thought it might be a sound effect or maybe someone’s car alarm? It had no rhyme or reason – and my niece Lucy whispered, “The bullfrog.” We were giggling every time we heard his throaty low cry. This play is in progress, and right over there, next to the river, in the darkness, a little bullfrog was doing his thing, adding to the music of the play. He was so much a part of it! He just could NOT stay silent!

From last summer: Titania and her train of little fairies – who were adorable – dancing around the sleeping ass-headed Bottom.

I find it endlessly interesting that Bottom is the only character who sees and interacts with the fairies. The fairies are right there, they are life-size, for the most part, and none of the humans perceive them. But Bottom does. This calls to mind Bottom’s famous re-counting of the dream he (thinks?) he had. He says he wants to turn it into a ballad (or … play maybe?) And he will call it Bottom’s Dream. So we’re looping around here into a fractal. It will never stop dividing and sub-dividing. Because … who actually is the dreamer here? Is it Bottom all along? The four lovers say to each other upon awaking that they all had weird dreams. Are we the dreamer?

Everyone thinks Bottom is a clown and of course he is, in a way. But clowns are often very very wise. They can interact freely with the world, maybe because the world underestimates them. Bottom is the only human person in the cast who can actually SEE the magic.

So let’s get to it.

A word on the quotes I’ve been compiling: I am including basically everything I come across, whether I agree with it or not. Maybe this isn’t a wise choice, especially with Shakespeare or with online “discourse” in general, where literally everything you say (or don’t say) is evidence of “endorsement”. I just feel like with over 400 years of near-constant chatter, it might be interesting to sort of toss together what I personally have in my own library. Including the expansive Harold Bloom … who is undeniably unbelievably obnoxious. I wrestled with it because he makes too large claims, and even the title of his Shakespeare book – The Invention of the Human – is just … ridiculous. His Falstaff commentary borders on fanfic. One could say Harold Bloom had a parasocial relationship with Falstaff. However, I have gotten a lot from the two books of his I have, and so I separate the good stuff out from the eyerolling over-statement. I get it in some ways. You need to make big claims if you stroll into a field as crowded as Shakespeare scholarship. I felt this way a little bit when I strolled into Elvis-Land and disagreed with the accepted parts of the narrative around him. I wasn’t doing this cynically, it came from a genuine place: I didn’t LIKE how a lot of these things were talked about and so I wanted to provide a counter-narrative. I DID get attention for this. But saying Shakespeare basically invented what it means to be human … I mean, come on. Maybe in literature? He invented living breathing humans in literature? I don’t know. Shakespeare is great, you don’t have to DO that, Harold. Yes, now we can say “he’s like Hamlet” and everyone knows we mean self-consciousness (in the literal sense of being constantly in touch with his own interiority). We have a reference – for all time. But did Shakespeare INVENT awareness of self? Or was he just DESCRIBING it? It’s a rhetorical question with – to me – an obvious answer. No. He did not INVENT awareness but his presenTAtion of it onstage represented not just “a” breakthrough but THE breakthrough.

Like I said, I wrestled with including Bloom but I’ve actually been having fun reading Inventing the Human, even with all the hot-air-puffery.

Quotes on the play

 

“The congruity, in spite of their differences, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with The Tempest is one of the most striking demonstrations of the continuity and integrity of Shakespeare’s genius that his works afford.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The very incongruities, anachronisms, contradictions, and impossible juxtapositions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the triumphant manner in which the poet reduces them to a harmony, are what more than anything else make this play a masterpiece.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw.”
— Samuel Pepys, diary entry, 1662

“What, indeed, is more insubstantial than a midsummer night’s dream? And yet from about this time, if not from the beginning, he never lost faith in ‘bright things,’ in the power of the imagination to transmute the lead of life into its own gold.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Dream, play, love, art. Surely it’s no coincidence that these four ‘subjects’ which are here interwoven with such consummate polyphony represent the four main aspects under which imagination reveals itself in human life.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“With the attainment of [Imagination], the first becomes last, dream comes full circle as Vision, an immediate conscious apprehension of an invisible world, or, if you will, transubstantiation of the world of sense into something beyond itself.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

On Bottom’s dream:

“For a moment in this scene however for over the horizon, we sense the Shakespeare who was to describe the death of Falstaff, compose King Lear, and create Caliban.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Bottom is an ass. If Bottom can be redeemed matter itself and men in all his materiality can be redeemed also. Democracy becomes possible. Nothing less than this is what this incident implies.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“In a way you could say that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Romeo & Juliet turned inside out.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“… it represents a way of coming to terms — aesthetic and dramatic as well as political and social terms — with the tremendous cultural enigma posed by the female ruler: the pressure placed upon the society and the culture by the very fact of Elizabeth’s rule. In this context Shakespeare’s play must be said to dramatize the tension between the part of Elizabeth that was like Theseus and the part of Elizabeth that was like Hippolyta.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“As so frequently in Shakespearean comedy, the ‘low’ characters and the comic plot point up by contrast the shortcomings of the aristocrats. Just as Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost is closely a tune with the nature of desire (‘Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh’) so Bottom knows more about love than do the Athenian lovers.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“As in Romeo & Juliet, so also in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the question of women’s eroticism is addressed directly in a manner both sophisticated and advanced.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“There is freedom in fleeing from a repressive parent and a repressive law, as Hermia does to follow her lover into the woods; there is freedom and possibility in choosing love and marriage over the nunnery. But there is a parallel danger, as we have seen, in excessive sexuality and desire…”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On Bottom’s suggestions for the theatrical performance (break the fiction):

“This is a kind of theatrical unmasking that the 20th century would associate with Brecht or with Pirandillo.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Ariel is a minster of retribution, who is touched with a sense of pity at the woes he inflicts. Puck is a madcap sprite, full of wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads — ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittery gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists; but with Oberon and his fairies, we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies.”
— William Hazlitt, Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. — Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile then in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The IDEAL can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the foreground… Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted.”
— William Hazlitt, Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Plays

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream shines like Romeo & Juliet in darkness, but shines merrily.”
— William Hazlitt, Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Plays

^^ This is lovely.

“Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt copied Addison in saying that if there could be persons like these they would act like them. Their tribute was to the naturalness of Shakespeare’s supernatural.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream is drenched with dew when it is not saturated with rain. A film of water spreads over it, enhances and enlarges it miraculously… Moon, water, and wet flowers conspire to extend the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream until it is as large as all imaginable life. That is why the play is both so natural and so mysterious.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

On Theseus and Hippolyta exchange about the hounds in Act IV, sc i:

“Had Shakespeare written nothing else than this he still might be the best of English poets.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Bully Bottom and his friends have lived three centuries to good purpose, but to no better purpose at any time than the one they first had — namely, in their sublime innocence, their earthbound idiot openness and charity of soul, to bring it about that their creator should become not only the finest of poets, but the one who makes the fewest claims for poetry.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[A Midsummer Night’s Dream] is … the first play to show Shakespeare’s unique contribution as a dramatist, presenting not only the sense of the relations of human characters to each other but also to objects, to nature. Ibsen is the only dramatist who can approach Shakespeare in this respect.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“One bad day your feeling is ‘Things are against me.’ It isn’t just temperament, circumstances must also conspire. That’s Puck.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“They enter Dante’s Wood of Error or Alice’s world in Through the Looking Glass, which initiates an era of conquest of themselves or others. The quarrel between Oberon and Titania represents a disorder in nature that man is called upon to reconcile.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Puck’s use of the herb shows how dangerous the general fulfillment of such daydreams would be.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Condescension to the comedy as a matter of gossamer and moonsine, a charming trifle to be eked out theatrically by as much music and spectacle as possible, dominated both the criticism and the stage representation of this play from the Restoration until the second half of the 20th century. Only comparatively recently has it become possible to see that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a complex and exacting work of art.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“The influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is evident both in the unifying theme of transformation and in the introduction of the Pyramus and Thisby story, which Ovid had related, and which Shakespeare must have known in the original Latin.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“[The wood] is a compelling invention, precisely because its true nature remains mysterious. Are its moonlit glades beneficent and beautiful or merely frightening, the place of error and unreason? Certainly this sylvan world is complex.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

This below is fun. On the amount of lists in Midsummer: everyone makes lists, the items on every list proliferte:

“Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson was, in many of his plays, a compulsive maker of dramatic inventions of a superficially similar kind. Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair are filled with tallies, a sea of objects which continually threaten to engulf the characters. Nothing, however, could be more different in effect from the list-making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jonson’s world of things is stifling and corrupt, inanimate, man-made and man-soiled, the dusty contents of some Gothic lumber-room of the imagination … Jonson’s enumerations evoke an incoherent urban world, so overcrowded that it has become impossible for human beings to walk about naturally among the detritus of a civilization out of control. By contrast, the lists in Shakespeare’s comedy create the sense of a country world that is inexhaustibly rich and various, occasionally grotesque, but basically fresh, creative, and young.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Like Theseus, [Puck] describes the actors as ‘shadows’ and sums up the play now concluded as ‘a weak and idle theme, / No more yielding than a dream.’ When John Lily ended his court comedies with superficially similar words of deprecation and apology, he seems to have meant them literally. Shakespeare is far more devious. Images of sleep and dreams, shadow and illusions, have been used so constantly in the course of the comedy, examined and invested with such body and significance that they cannot be regarded now in simple terms of denigration and dismissal. As with the mock-apology for the author: ‘rough and all-unable pen’ which concludes Henry V, Shakespeare seems to have felt able to trust his audience to take the point: to recognize the simplification, and to understand that the play has created its own reality, a reality touhing our own at every point.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Nothing by Shakespeare before Midsummer is its equal, and in some respects nothing by him afterward surpasses it. It is his first undoubled masterpiece, without flaw, and one of his dozen or so plays of overwhelming originality and power.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“For [Bottom] there is no musical discord or confusion in the overlapping realms of the Dream. It is absurd to condescend to Bottom: he is at once a sublime clown and a great visionary.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

On Titania’s famous “forgeries of jealousy” speech:

“No previous poetry by Shakespeare achieved this extraordinary quality: he finds here one of his many authentic voices, the paean of natural lament.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Nothing else in the Dream is as pithy an account of its erotic confusions: ‘reason and love keep little company together nowadays.'”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“[Bottom’s dream is] the finest speech Shakespeare had yet written. Bottom’s parody of 1 Corinthians 2.9 is audacious and allows Shakespeare to anticipate William Blake’s Romantic vision, with its repudiation of the Pauline split between flesh and spirit.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Bottom, to be sure, is asinine, but it takes no magical transformation to reveal this fact. Indeed, what is revealed is not so much his folly — he does not have one moment of embarrassment or shame, and his friends do not laugh at him — as his intrepidity… He is surprised at the Fairy Queen’s declaration of love, but he takes it in his stride.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

On “I know a bank where the wild thyme grows” soliloquy:

“What Shakespeare articulated in Midsummer was a deep cultural fantasy .. of a world of magical beauty, shot through with hidden forces, and producing a free-floating intense erotic energy to which all creatures, save one alone — the “fair vestal throned by the west” — had to succumb … the players in Midsummer entertain the wild hope that they might be rewarded with a pension of sixpence per day apiece. For the playwright relied not on elaborate machinery but on language, simpy the most beautiful language any English audience ever heard.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

^^ Stephen Greenblatt’s book – hailed as a breakthrough upon its arrival – has useful information about the cultural practices of Shakespeare’s day, as well as the political change sweeping across the land. He places the plays in a larger context, which – I already know most of this stuff, mainly from theatre history classes where we would go from the Greeks up to Ibsen, tracking where these plays come from. It helps to understand Clifford Odets’ world if you’re going to play in it, or William Inge or whatever – but what Greenblatt then does is take the leap: “Shakespeare must have seen the blah blah … Shakespeare was obviously struck by” and, okay, you can locate themes and even repeat obsessions in his work – he’s obsessed with Time, maybe above and beyond every other obsession in existence). But recognizing themes is different than saying “Shakespeare must have loved Maypole dancing” or whatever. Stop it. You can’t know that.

“The laughter in Act V of Midsummer — and it is one of the most enduringly funny scenes Shakespeare ever wrote — is built on a sense of superiority in intelligence, training, cultivation, and skill. The audience is invited to join the charmed circle of the upper-class mockers onstage … On the one hand he mocked the amateurs … on the other hand, he conferred an odd, unexpected dignity upon Bottom and his fellows, a dignity that contrasts favorably with the sardonic rudeness of the aristocratic spectators.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“When in Midsummer the 30-year-old Shakespeare … thought about his profession, he split the theatre between a magical, virtually nonhuman element, which he associated with the power of the imagination to lift itself away from the constraints of reality, and an all-too-human element, which he associated with the artisans’ trades … that gave the imagination a local structure and a name … He wanted the audience to understand that the theatre had to have both, both the visionary flight and the solid, ordinary earthiness.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

^^ See what I mean?

“Can one get to the bottom of Bottom’s Dream — or to the bottom of its bottomlessness?”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

^^ I know I’ve written about this before but if you haven’t already done so, you have to read Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars.

“There’s much more in Bottom’s Dream than meets the eye; it deserves deeper consideration than its comic context suggests. It is one of those nodes, one of those knots in the grain of Shakespeare’s work, that discloses a glimpse, a more palpable sense of what is meant by “Shakespearean”, what is exceptional about the Shakespearean experience.”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

“There are actually two aspects of Bottom’s Dream that make it the rare vision it is: its synesthesia and its bottomlessness. Bottom actually describes a confused negative synesthesia, one might say, ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen.’ In Bottom’s synesthesia the tongue can’t ?? what the heart reports or speaks — it’s beyond speech.”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

“Shakespeare himself seems drawn to the experience of bottomlessness. In Troilus and Cressida he conjures up ‘the incomprehensible deep’. In Hamlet, Horatio warns Hamlet against following the ghost because it might tempt him toward ‘the dreadful summit of the cliff … And draw you into madness’, There’s a strikingly similar moment in Lear in which Edgar, the good son, conjures up a dizzying vista of bottomlessness in the mind of his blinded father Gloucester … In Henry IV the elusive secrets of the future ‘sound the bottom of the after-times’. In The Tempest ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’ conjures up the temporal dimension of bottomlessness, the bottomless pit of the past … And when Bottom the weaver decides that he should write a ballad about his dream … he declares ‘It shall be called Bottom’s Dream because it hath no bottom.'”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

Sorry, one MUST read the book: the whole chapter is about Bottom’s Dream, and Ron Rosenbaum talking to scholars – directors – basically everyone – about the abyss of Shakespeare and his bottomlessness, which was, for him, a personal experience after seeing Peter Brook’s famous Midsummer in 1970.

“This, to me, is one of the wonders and enigmas: is there no end, no bottom to Shakespearean resonances? It is like Rosalind’s declaration of her fathomless affection in As You Like It: it ‘hath an unknown bottom like the Bay of Portugal.'”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

“The moment when Bottom emerges from his dream is Shakespeare at one of his pinnacles. By a stroke of genius he turns a purely farcical incident into nothing less than a parable of the Awakening of Imagination within Gross Matter. It is the poet’s way of saying that even within the head of this foolish plebeian weaver a divine light can be kindled. Bottom is conscious of transcendent things when he comes to himself. A creation has taken place within him.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d.
— THESEUS, Act I, sc i, 76

And she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes inidolatry
Upon this spotted and inconstant man.
— LYSANDER, Act I, sc i, 108-110

I must confess that I have heard so much,
And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof,
But, being over-full of self-affairs,
My mind did lose it.
— THESUS, Act I, sc i, 111-114

This is such a flowery way of saying “Sorry, I’m just too self-centered right now to keep any of your problems in my head.”

Sickness is catching; O, were favor so.
HELENA, Act I, sc i, 196

Why is this so true??

For ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne,
He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine;
And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolv’d and show’rs of oaths did melt.
— HELENA, Act I, sc i, 242-246

I always feel so bad for Helena.

We will meet, and then we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously.
— BOTTOM Act I, sc ii, line 107

I don’t think “obscenely” is the word you’re looking for there, Bottom.

I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
— FAIRY, Act II, sc i, 14-15

And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
But they do square, that all their elvis for fear
Creep into acorn-cups, and hide them there.
— PUCK, Act II, sc i, 28-31

The spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now know not which is which.
— TITANIA, Act II, sc i, 111-114

Global warming.

Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell,
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
— THESEUS, Act II, sc i, 165-168

I love the richness of the imagery – beauty – but the whole thing is actually violent. Love is a wound.

You draw me, you hard-headed adamant.
But yet you draw not iron, for my heart
Is true as steel.
— HELENA, Act II, sc i, 195-197

You deserved better, Helena.

Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex.
We cannot fight for love, as men do.
We should be woo’d, and were not made to woo.
— HELENA, Act II, sc i, 240-242

At the risk of sounding retro, in general when I have initiated the wooing, it doesn’t go so great. I consider myself a liberated woman, and I will woo whenever I want to … it’s just an observation that a man wooing ME tends to have better results. Don’t tase me, bro.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
— OBERON, Act II, sc i, 249-256

The will of man is by his reason sway’d.
— LYSANDER, Act II, sc ii, 115

But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber, for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.
— QUINCE, Act III, sc i, 47-49

I wrote about this line in my essay a long time ago about Before Sunrise, and what “bring the moonlight into a chamber” means to me. Any and all art starts with a challenge: How do you bring moonlight into a chamber? How do you create the illusion of the thing itself?

BOTTOM:
“Thisby, the flowers of odious savors sweet–”
QUINCE:
Odorous, odorous.
— Act III, sc i, 82-83

This is why I laugh out loud when reading Midsummer Night’s Dream. And when you see a good production? (like Comedy of Erros, it’s hard to mess this one up – although judging from the opening scenes of the amazing series Slings & Arrows, artistic director Oliver has found a way. “Without the bleats, there’s no IRONY, Maria.” But when it’s done well? You can barely hear the dialogue if the cast is really going for it. “Odious savors.” Another example to follow:

FLUTE:
“I’ll meet thee at Ninny’s tomb.”
QUINCE:
“Ninus’ tomb,” man.

Poor Quince.

What angel wakes me from my flow’ry bed?
— TITANIA, Act III, sc i, 129

^^ One of the funniest moments in any Shakespeare play ever.

“And yet to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together ‘now-a-days.
— BOTTOM, Act III, sc i, 43-44

“Now’a-days” is really more like “always.”

The moon methinks looks with a wat’ry eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
— TITANIA, Act III, sc i, 198-200

I’ll believe as soon
This whole earth may be bor’d, and that the moon
May through the center creep, and so displease
Her brother’s noontide with th’Antipodes.
— HERMIA, Act III, sc ii, 52-55

It just occurred to me that this image of the moon creeping through the hole “bored” in the earth … is reflected in the wall in the Pyramus and Thisby play.

When truth kills truth, O devilish-holy fray!
— HELENA, Act III, sc ii, 129

So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
And yet an union in partition.
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.
— HELENA, Act III, sc ii, 208-214

Codependent. But I love the image of the “double cherry”.

What though I be not so in grace as you,
So hung upon with love, so fortunate
But miserable must, to love unlov’d?
Then you should pity rather than despise.
— HELENA, Act III, sc ii, 232-235

It’s a comedy, but the heartbreak is real.

For Night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,
At whose approach, ghosts wand’ring here and there,
Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all!
— PUCK, Act III, sc ii, 379-382

I wish the Morning’s love have oft made sport,
And like a forester, the groves may tread
Even till the eastern gate all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turn into yellow gold with salt-stream greens.
— OBERON, Act III, sc ii, 389-393

Just so beautiful.

And sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye,
Steal me a while from my own company.
— HELENA, Act III, sc ii, 435-436

I so know this feeling. Let me just sleep so I don’t have to BE with myself anymore.

Cupid is a knavish lad,
Thus to make poor females mad.
— PUCK, Act III, sc ii, 440-441

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!
— TITANIA, Act IV, sc i, 42-45

And that same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flouriets’ eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.
— OBERON, Act IV, sc i, 53-56

And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
— THESEUS, Act IV, sc i, 110-111

Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding, for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
— HIPPOLYTA, Act IV, sc i, 114-118

Gorgeous.

DEMETRIUS:
These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turnèd into clouds.
HERMIA:
Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.
HELENA:
So methinks.
And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own and not mine own.
DEMETRIUS:
Are you sure
That we are awake? It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream. Do not you think
The Duke was here and bid us follow him?
HERMIA:
Yea, and my father.
HELENA:
And Hippolyta.
LYSANDER:
And he did bid us follow to the temple.
DEMETRIUS:
Why, then, we are awake. Let’s follow him,
And by the way let us recount our dreams.
— Act IV, sc i, 186-198

I love this idea of them not knowing if they are awake or dreaming.

Man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom.
— BOTTOM, Act IV, sc i, 209-216

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth tonheaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
— THESEUS, Act V, sc i, 3-17

“A tedius brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisby, very tragical mirth.”
“Merry” and “tragical”? “Tedious” and “brief”?
That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow!
How shall we find the concord of this discord?
— THESEUS, Act V, sc i, 56-60

If you put the emphasis on both “and”s in line 3, you’ll get a laugh. I promise.

I will hear the play
For never any thing can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
— THESEUS, Act V, sc i, 81-83

I feel this way sometimes as a critic. A film’s execution might be faulty but if there’s something simple and tender behind it … you can feel it.

HIPPOLYTA:
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS:
The best in this kind are but shadows, and
the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA:
It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.
THESEUS:
If we imagine no worse of them than they of
themselves, they may pass for excellent men.
— ACT V, sc i, 210-216

“This is the silliest stuff” usually gets a HUGE laugh. It’s a heckle from the audience member, but if she says it flat out – even deadpan – the audience will be rolling. That’s how the actress did it when we saw a local theatre do it last summer. People were dying. But with all the laughter of this crazy sequence, is embedded this beautiful image of art and “shadows” and performance and imagination – an expression of the play’s whole point.

His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his
valor, for the goose carries not the fox. It is well.
Leave it to his discretion, and let us listen to the
Moon.
— THESEUS, Act V, sc i, 234-237

“let us listen to the Moon” meaning – the actor playing the Moon has just walked onstage. lol

Now die, die, die, die, die.
— “PYRAMUS” Act V, sc i, 17

Lovers, to bed, ’tis almost fairy time.
— THESEUS, Act V, sc i, 384

And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecat’s team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream.
— PUCK, Act V, sc i, 383,386

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream …
— PUCK, Act V, sc i, 427-432

Again, I love this – the lines are so well-known but in the context of the play: Were we the dreamers all along? Who is dreaming whom?