From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire.
They are the books, the arts, the academes
That show, contain and nourish all the world.At an Interlude of the Nine Worthies, put on by characters from a comic subplot,
news comes that the Princess’s father has died. The comedy ends not in four
weddings but in a funeral and a year’s mourning. The men’s efforts to continue their
wooing are repulsed; Biron is reminded by his lady Rosaline that ‘A jest’s prosperity
lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it.’
She sends him to do charitable work, and ‘jest a twelve-month in a hospital’. The play
closes with the cuckoo’s song of Spring, answered by the owl’s song of Winter: ‘When
icicles hang by the wall.’
This ‘conceited comedy’ is carried off by a play of language and ideas so high-
spirited that its sudden stop, the loss of love’s labour in death, is a shock. After the
gallantry and laughter, the Messenger’s black clothes tell the Princess his news before
he speaks.To make action comment upon words thus at the climax shows mastery
of theatre. Death interrupts the Interlude, and the dismissal of love’s labourers is
followed by the cuckoo and the owl. Rosaline is the first typically Shakespearian
hero ine – a woman of sounder understanding than the man who swears love to her.
Love is folly, but necessary folly; for foolish mistakes are (in a love comedy) the only
way to learning. Biron: ‘Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves / Or else we lose
ourselv es to keep our oaths.’A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare’s wit and complexity go further in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,a play
involving four marriages and ‘a most rare vision’. Duke Theseus of Athens is to wed
the Amazon Queen, Hippolyta; two young Athenian couples (after much confusion
in a wood near Athens) also marry. The King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and
Titania,quarre l passionately over an Indian boy; Oberon makes Titania fall in love
with Bottom, a weaver who is rehearsing (in another part of the wood) a play for the
Duke’s wedding.
The source for the Athenian part of the story is Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale;
Shakespeare adds to the triangle of young lovers a second woman, in love with a man
who scorns her. (A foursome permits a happy ending without loss of life.) Puck,
servant to Oberon and the classical Titania, is a creature from English folklore. Bottom
and his friends,straight from the streets of Stratford, choose to play Pyramus and
Thisbe, a love-tragedy from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. With great assurance, Shakespeare
choreographs these disparate elements in an action on four levels: fairy king and
queen, legendary hero and heroine, fashionable young lovers, and English tradesmen.
Puck adds supernatural confusion to the effects of love and midsummer moon-
light. Directed by Oberon, he puts an ass’s head on Bottom, and squeezes the love-
inducing juice of a magic herb onto Titania’s eyelid. She wakes and loves the first
creature she sees – the asinine Bottom, whom she carries off to her bower. The love-
juice causes operatic mayhem among the four young lovers in the wood. But Jack
shall have Jill: Oberon makes Puck put everything right in time for the wedding. The
wedding-eve of the Duke (and the lovers) is taken up with the play of Pyramus and
Thisbe, lovers who, each convinced the other is dead, commit suicide. The innocent
artisans’ efforts at tragedy are met by the laughter of the court, and audiences always122 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA