Shakespeare, over and over in the text, reminds us this play is nothing but a dream. Nothing more, nothing less. What happens in your dreams? Last night I had one in which I was some kind of cruel dictator punishing people for speaking out against my rule. That's about as far from my personality as possible, but...? Tortured 21st-century analyses like these miss Shakespeare's point completely. It seems modern comparative analysis is incapable of taking a text at face value. Sometime, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.
I took a Shakespeare class last Fall at the local university, and we read Midsummer (and ended the semester watching the movie version with Kevin Kline as Bottom and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania). So fun to read your take on it.
Excellent analysis. Reminds me of a piece I wrote for a graduate-level English class in which I showed how Aristotle's The Poetics formed the basis for the long-running television drama Falcon Crest. The professor pronounced it the best comparative analysis he had ever read.
A couple things to keep in mind — a comedy, performed live, is full of mugging and pratfalls and the unavoidable front-and-center consciousness that what you are seeing is a farce played out upon a stage. Films, especially films of a certain immersive-realistic bent, can feel more intimately-real than our own real lives. Othello loved not wisely but too well, leaving death and devastation in his wake, and leaving the audience devastated by how *everyone* loses. But A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a lark, a snowballing series of absurdities, and the play-within-the-play of the mechanicals is not a non-sequitur, it’s the point — it’s the meta-consciousness of the purpose of a play and what an audience does with it. The audience for Midsummer Night’s Dream is not sitting passively in comfy chairs absorbing the story. The audience is packed in with half the neighborhood, mostly on their feet the whole time and half drunk, or making crude jokes about who looks good in tights and whether what happened to Helena is just like what happened with Jane down the block last month! Context is everything — and context collapse being a blight particularly powerful in our age, I think we should push against it.
Years ago I came across the term "limerence," which explains everything in the entire world ever. It's the Key to all Mythologies (not a Shakespeare reference, but a George Eliot one, which is even better). Google it! It's so much more satisfying then having someone just hand you a link.
I watched The Heartbreak Kid after reading this. The ending reminded me very much of this Gatsby moment with the very true final line:
"Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."
Replying two years belatedly to say we liked "Ishtar," too. (Actually, my girlfriend loved it.) The two leads do seem, oddly, to be cast in each other's roles, like Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dean in "The King of Marvin Gardens," but it's really pretty funny. Their songwriting sessions alone, where they marvel at their own genius and inspiration, are hilarious. That's not poverty, baby!
As you like it
Shakespeare, over and over in the text, reminds us this play is nothing but a dream. Nothing more, nothing less. What happens in your dreams? Last night I had one in which I was some kind of cruel dictator punishing people for speaking out against my rule. That's about as far from my personality as possible, but...? Tortured 21st-century analyses like these miss Shakespeare's point completely. It seems modern comparative analysis is incapable of taking a text at face value. Sometime, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.
Puck's final epilogue to the audience/reader:
"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."
Wake up, Tim.
I took a Shakespeare class last Fall at the local university, and we read Midsummer (and ended the semester watching the movie version with Kevin Kline as Bottom and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania). So fun to read your take on it.
Excellent analysis. Reminds me of a piece I wrote for a graduate-level English class in which I showed how Aristotle's The Poetics formed the basis for the long-running television drama Falcon Crest. The professor pronounced it the best comparative analysis he had ever read.
A couple things to keep in mind — a comedy, performed live, is full of mugging and pratfalls and the unavoidable front-and-center consciousness that what you are seeing is a farce played out upon a stage. Films, especially films of a certain immersive-realistic bent, can feel more intimately-real than our own real lives. Othello loved not wisely but too well, leaving death and devastation in his wake, and leaving the audience devastated by how *everyone* loses. But A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a lark, a snowballing series of absurdities, and the play-within-the-play of the mechanicals is not a non-sequitur, it’s the point — it’s the meta-consciousness of the purpose of a play and what an audience does with it. The audience for Midsummer Night’s Dream is not sitting passively in comfy chairs absorbing the story. The audience is packed in with half the neighborhood, mostly on their feet the whole time and half drunk, or making crude jokes about who looks good in tights and whether what happened to Helena is just like what happened with Jane down the block last month! Context is everything — and context collapse being a blight particularly powerful in our age, I think we should push against it.
Years ago I came across the term "limerence," which explains everything in the entire world ever. It's the Key to all Mythologies (not a Shakespeare reference, but a George Eliot one, which is even better). Google it! It's so much more satisfying then having someone just hand you a link.
I watched The Heartbreak Kid after reading this. The ending reminded me very much of this Gatsby moment with the very true final line:
"Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."
Marvelous, thoroughly enjoyable. Thank you!
I’d nominate you for a MacArthur grant if I could.
Well feel free to put that suggestion out there. You never know how many degrees of separation you might be from someone on the committee.
"No dance tonight."
Replying two years belatedly to say we liked "Ishtar," too. (Actually, my girlfriend loved it.) The two leads do seem, oddly, to be cast in each other's roles, like Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dean in "The King of Marvin Gardens," but it's really pretty funny. Their songwriting sessions alone, where they marvel at their own genius and inspiration, are hilarious. That's not poverty, baby!