950 shakespeare, William
The play’s various opening themes—love and
lust, rebellion, justice, and authority—begin a
process of disintegration of order that results in a
kind of controlled chaos as we move from Athens
to the forest world. In that wooded place, fairies
cavort, lovers woo without restraint, and enchant-
ment trumps true feeling and changes the course
of several of the narrative frames. Ultimately, the
play will end with social and civil order restored in
the forms of requited love, marriage, and righted
relationships wrested from the topsy-turvy “dream”
world signified by the eponymous midsummer
celebration.
Summer is the domain of the sun; its midpoint is
the longest day, the hot and fecund season of the year
when the real natural world is riotous with new life,
color, perfume, fruit, and sensory emanations. In the
play, nature also represents the wild, unrestrained,
impulse-driven underside of the human psyche, at
once and on all levels a world of appetites, instincts,
and the bogey woods of human imagination. Where
the city of Athens stands for society’s rules, the out-
lying woods serve as a kind of screen upon which is
projected the faculty of mind that modern audiences
would call the psychological unconscious. Nature is
the seat, therefore, of the instinctual and the fan-
tastic, the supernatural and the spiritual, as well as
art, magic, creativity, and procreativity. Without the
constraints of society, moreover, the setting of nature
allows for acts of free will and impulse. What can
never happen in the civilized realities of the story
under the light of the sun can and does happen
in the woods under the astrological domain of the
moon, the overriding natural image of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream.
The moon, in Shakespeare’s hands, is an elastic
natural image representing a host of ideas, such as the
contradictions between romance and virginity, love
and lust, artistry and lunacy. A Midsummer Night’s
Dream contains no fewer than 22 direct uses of the
word moon, and at least a dozen variations of or allu-
sions to it (“moonshine,” “moonbeams,” “moonlight,”
“Diana” [virgin moon goddess], “Phoebe” [the moon
or Diana]). The play, in fact, begins with Theseus’s
invocation of the moon as a widowed stepmother
who is using up the inheritance of her stepson by
living too long:
. . . Four happy days bring in
Another moon; but, O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my
desires,
Like to a stepdame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
(1.1.2–6)
Hippolyta responds to this, Theseus’s lustful impa-
tience, by reenvisioning the coming new moon with
imagery that is phallic and warlike, while also rev-
erential, “like to a silver bow / New-bent in heaven”
that shall “behold the night of ” their “solemnities”
(1.1.9–10). The “weapon” of a bow and arrow of lust
is also the “eye” that will view the rightful consecra-
tion of wedding vows. Instinct will bend to rule.
Shakespeare continues to use the image of the
moon through the end of the play, as it intertwines
with other images and symbols of nature. Puck,
for example, magically can “wander everywhere, /
Swifter than the moon’s sphere [orbit or influence]”
(2.1.6–7). In Oberon and Titania’s first quarrel
onstage, he accuses her of loving Theseus, and she
accuses him of loving Hippolyta; then the true
point of the argument becomes clear: Who will
have control of the boy who was the son of Titania’s
late, mortal priestess? Titania chides Oberon that he
is not doing his job of conferring nocturnal magi-
cal blessings upon humans because he is too busy
fighting her for the boy. The moon, therefore, has
become “the governess of floods, / Pale in her anger,
wash[ing] all the air, / That rheumatic diseases do
abound” (2.1.102–105).
The natural world enters into the consciousness
of the main characters through their senses of smell
and sight, and it serves as an intoxicant, reducing
natural inhibitions, revealing the shadow sides of
personalities, and relaxing normal restraints. In
the woods at night, both Demetrius and Lysander
are enchanted by Puck with the “love-in-idleness”
flower potion he has used on Titania. Both young
men fall in love with Helena, driving both Helena
and Hermia to mental disarrangement. Helena
thinks they are mocking her; Hermia, who has
run away with Lysander to marry him against her
father’s wishes, is distraught at his apparent loss of
interest in her.