Magic or illusion is that which calls for the spectator to question reality. It appears to defy the laws of science and nature. Although illusion can be explained, its charm lies in its obscurity. A dream is just like magic in that it can be explained, but is more enjoyable when not. In a sense, any play within itself is a dream. Plots unfold, people are wounded and interact with each other. However, when the audience goes home, or wakes up, they find that the plot never really happened, the wound was never made, and all is of no consequence. In Puck’s closing to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck himself tells us “That you but slumbered here, While these visions did appear, And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding than a dream” (Shakespeare, Act V, Scene i).
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then, is Shakespeare’s example of how the stage is not only illusion and magic, but a dream as well. In Francis Ferguson’s introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he says that Shakespeare “knew the old stories in several versions, and he uses the elements from all his sources, changing and combining them at will, to make a show as marvelous, and at the same time familiar as a dream” (Ferguson, 6). This paper explores the illusion of the play, and how it represents the stage as a dream.
Puck’s name is derived from a number of sources that identify him as a witch’s supernatural familiar spirit, and his actions can be easily be waved away as common household accidents. The fairies’ action of altering weather is also easily dispelled. Fairies are supposed to be tiny as they are small enough to “hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear,” and yet on stage must be represented by an actor very close to the size of the mortal characters (Act II sc i). There is a loss of time for the play, which adds to the dreamlike mood of the play. Puck himself tells us that the play is only a dream, but his very saying of it presents a paradox, as he is there to say this. A number of transformations occur in the play, and all can be compared to actors transforming themselves into characters. When the audience is watching the play, they are comparable to the lovers who all fall victim to the same dream in the forest. Lastly, Shakespeare also uses A Midsummer Night’s Dream to make the statement that life is only a dream. All these things question the very existence of the play and add a dreamlike and illusionary quality to it.
Puck’s name is thought to be derived from a number of sources. He is comparative to the Icelandic puki who was a small devil or imp, and the Welsh Pwcas (pronounced “Pookas”) which are “wicked-minded, black looking bad things...they do great hurt to benighted travelers” (Schliener, 66). A fairy says of Puck that he “Misleads night wanderers, laughing at their harm” (Act II sc i).
Perhaps the most striking resemblance to Puck comes from an account published in 1593 entitled Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of Three Witches of Warboys, arraigned, convicted, and executed at the last Asises at Huntingdon for the bewitching of the five daughters of Robert Throckmorton Esquire. The book describes a certain Alice Samuel who confessed to being a witch after being accused along with her husband and daughter. She spoke of sending out one of her familiar spirits, Pluck, and instructed him to torment but not harm the Throckmorton girls. Shakespeare’s Puck is comparable as he never really hurts anyone but plays pranks on them. This connection to witchcraft is mentioned in Dream when Puck says “we fairies that do run/By the triple Hecate’s team” (Act V Sci). Hecate is most often mispercepted as the goddess of witchcraft or evil.
Of course, Puck’s existence is invited to be questioned by the audience. After all, “Puck’s words assure us that his deeds can all be explained away as accident by those who are so inclined” (Miller, 257). The Discovery of Witchcraft describes “hurtfull witches” who “bring to passe, that chearne as long as you list, your butter will not come” (Henning, 485). In Act II Scene i, a fairy lists all the offenses that Puck commits:
are you not he That frights the maidens of the villagery; Puck confirms this statement, and boasts of other pranks he pulls:
Skim milk...and bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
(Act II sc i).
Thou speak’st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night...
Sometimes I lurk in a gossip’s bowl...
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale...
Sometime for three foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her bum and down topples she
(Act II sc i).These “hurtfull witches” also “alter mens minds to inordinate love or hate” (Henning, 485). This describes Oberon’s and Puck’s putting juice on the eyes of mortals to make them love people they otherwise wouldn’t. “The fairies [Puck] obliquely hint that our own offstage existence may be touched by mysteries no less genuine than those that disrupt the world of Theseus, Hermia, Bottom and the rest” (Miller, 255). An example of this directly from the play is Egeus saying that Lysander has “stol’n the impression of her [Hermia’s] fancy/With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits,/ Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats”(Act I sc i). This statement implies that the gifts have the same effect on Hermia as Oberon’s juice has on all mortals.
The fairies share a common characteristic in their alteration of weather. The fairies are said to “cause unseasonable weather as seen in 1594" (Doran, introduction). In Oberon and Titania’s quarrel, Titania points out that because of their quarrel “...the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change their wonted liveries” (Act II sc i).
However, Shakespeare doesn’t want the audience to either immediately accept the existence of the fairies or immediately deny it. He wants the audience to question it. He presents Bottom as a character who “sees the mysterious and accepts it as perfectly ordinary, he behaves as thought the inexplicable and explicable are no different at all” (Miller, 260). Bottom is also presented as a very stupid character. He oft makes malapropisms, such as using “defect” for “effect”, “odius” for “odours”, and “exposition” for “disposition” (Shakespeare, Act IV, sc i). This directs the audience to believe that if they accept the fairies without question like Bottom, then they are stupid like Bottom. However, the very presence of the fairies forces the audience to consider their reality. Shakespeare wants his audience to wonder, “It is your loss if you think fairies simply unreal or their works mere disorder, but as soon as you try like Bottom to capture them in words and treat them as thought they are literally there, they will be off in another wood dancing” (Miller, 268). This compares to a dream because in a dream, things are prone to question, and one wonders what is real of the dream and what isn’t.
Fairies are supposedly small enough to “hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear” and consider the “cowslips tall”(Shakespeare, Act II sc i). However, because actors are human, the fairies must be played by actors very close to the size of the mortals. This creates the magic of two sizes at once. Shakespeare could easily have written the play for fairies the same size as mortals, but very deliberately made them seem as though they should be small. This situation creates the feel of a dream where perspectives are asunder.
Another example of this twisted perspective lies in the loss of time for the play. In the opening scene, Hippolyta states that “Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time” before her and Theseus’s wedding (Act I sc i). As observed by a critic, “the dramatic action ought to cover five days, actually, only three are accounted for” (Paolucci, 317). Of course, no audience is going to sit through five days of theater, but there are a number of scenes where time is ignored. For example, in Act II scene i, Oberon instructs Puck to find the magic flower, and Puck responds “I’ll put a girdle about the earth in forty minutes” (Shakespeare, Act II, sc i). In his absence, Demetrius and Helena have a fight, but a short one: two pages in script and not more than five minutes acted out. Immediately after this, Puck returns. There is no scene break as would imply a passage of time. Even allowing for a certain condensing of time, the situation certainly does not make up for the two days lost.
But the wedding goes on as planned, with Theseus and Hippolyta saying nothing about it. Was it five days for them, but not the lovers and fairies, or have they too been placed under an illusion, one that lets them see more days than have actually passed? To put it in relationship to reality, “in the ‘unnatural’ setting of the magic wood, light and day–like familiar logic and emotional certainty–have temporarily been destroyed” (Paolucci, 319). In a dream, the passage of time is difficult to track. A night of eight hours can hold a dream spanning five minutes or days and a dream of several days can hold only a few days worth of action, as in Dream.
Oberon’s magic love flower causes Helena to become Hermia in the sense that she is pursued by both Lysander and Demetrius. In turn, Hermia becomes Helena as she is scorned and hated by her love, and both men despise her. Another magic transformation is that of Bottom into an ass by Puck by means of his magical capability. These happenings are viewed by the audience as supernatural. However, the play within a play performed by the mechanicals is not considered supernatural, even though this play is much the same thing. Bottom is transformed into Pyramus. Flute becomes Thisbe. Snug is transformed into a lion. The actors are transformed into characters. This is Shakespeare’s way of telling the audience that the magic of the stage is no different from the magic of Oberon’s flower. The only difference is that the audience is subjected to the stage form of magic much more often than that of Puck’s magic or Oberon’s flower, and therefore accepts it as perfectly normal. By placing all the situations in the same play, he hopes to draw attention to this fact. “Shakespeare is challenging the very basis of theatrical experience which most clearly distinguishes it from literary experience. What we see upon the stage keeps us in ‘false gaze,’ supposing we see characters where there are only walking shadows” (Weller, 69). The characters are shadows. Puck apologizes in his closing speech “If we shadows have offended,” and addresses Oberon with the title “king of shadows” (Act V sc i, and Act III sc ii).
Yet the actors are not the only transformation happening in the performance of the play. The audience is transformed into a singular mind. Even though each person may be relating the play to different parts of their different lives, they are all seeing the same exact play. Hippolyta says of the lovers “And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable” (Act V sc i). The lovers think that all is a dream, and Hippolyta comments on the striking concord of the dreams. This description is befitting of the audience, as they are all dreaming, or under the influence of the same illusion. The audience’s minds are “transfigured so together” (Act V sc i). Regardless of this, Hippolyta is still skeptic that the “dream” really happened. This makes sense when applied to the audience as well because “our shared reception does not render its fiction truth” (Weller, 71).
Shakespeare states in several different texts that the world is a stage. In The Merchant of Venice: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano–A stage, where every man must play a part.” (Shakespeare, Act I sc i). In Macbeth he words it as such: “The heavens, as troubled with man’s act Threaten his bloody stage.” (Shakespeare, Act II sc iv). Then in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” (Shakespeare, Act II, sc vii). With all these quotes saying the same thing, it is reasonable to assume that many of Shakespeare’s works try to convey the message that life itself is a stage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is among these. Shakespeare demonstrates and compares the stage to real life. With his fairies committing pranks that are everyday household accidents, days disappearing between one another and by pointing out transformations of actors, he shows his audience that their life is magical and dreamlike if they let it be so. And if this is all put together, it can be concluded that Shakespeare thinks the stage to be life, dreams like the stage, and life all a dream. Many authors draw on this. Poe says in “A Dream Within a Dream”: “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream”(Poe, 24). Lewis Carroll does the same in his closing poem for Through the Looking Glass: "Ever drifting down the stream/Lingering in the golden gleam/Life, what is it but a dream?"(Carroll, 224).
Shakespeare used A Midsummer Night’s Dream to tell audiences and actors that the stage is no more than a dream. With every element he incorporates into the play, especially magic and illusion, he is displaying characteristics of a dream. If one looks hard enough, one realizes that most plays incorporate these elements, however rarely so literally. Shakespeare’s work often shows his view of the stage, and how life is like the stage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows how life, and the stage, is nothing but a dream.
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Copyright Stephanie LeBlanc, 2001.
