laugh at the lovers’ suicide: ‘very tragical mirth’. It is a brilliantly unsuitable play for
a wedding. Shakespeare had used a similar tragedy of errors to end his immediately
previous play,Romeo and Juliet.
If comedy is tragedy averted, it is often in Shakespeare averted narrowly. The
passions of the lovers in the wood read conventionally, but this predictability and
interchangeability is intended by Shakespeare – as is brought out in Benjamin
Britten’s 1960 opera of the play, where the four voices sing duets of love and hate,
which turn into a final harmonious ensemble. The fierce jealousy of the fairies is
expressed in a sumptuously baroque poetry, while the irrationality of sexual infatu-
ation and possession is suggested only lightly in the love of the goddess Titania for
Bottom. The unimaginative Bottom says when he wakes up:
‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream
it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was – there is
no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but 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’s’ and ‘bottomless’ would sound the same in Bottom’s accent. The inno-
cent Bottom puts his enjoyment of the fairy queen in terms that parody St Paul’s
account of Heaven (1 Corinthians 2:9). Bottom’s bottomless dream is the subject of
the play: love, moonlight and madness. Hippolyta observes: ‘’Tis strange, my
Theseus, that these lovers speak of.’ Theseus replies:
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
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.
... 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. ...To the Athenian reason of Theseus, the story of the night is incredible; to Hippolyta
it testifies to something real.
HIPPOLYTA: But all the stor y of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy.The bride and groom exchange roles in their reactions to the Interlude.
HIPPOLYTA: This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst shadows actors
are no wor se ifimagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA: It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.
THESEUS: If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, then
they may pass for excellent men.WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 123