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The Ritual and Rhetoric of A Midsummer Night's Dream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James E. Robinson
James E. Robinson*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Ind.
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Abstract

Two comic ideas inform the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The traditions of festival and ritual help to explain the one idea of celebrating man's quest for renewal in communion with nature and divinity; the traditions of Roman comedy and rhetoric help to explain the other, the idea of understanding man's folly in his quest for order in society. Shakespeare creates two contexts, finite society with its mores and laws, and nature with its transcendent gods, and then assimilates the two in the action and language of the play. The action combines a dialectical sequence based on social conflict and a symbolic sequence based on magic and myth. The language ranges between debate and song, argument and incantation. The gods of nature become both measure and mirror of the absurdity of human love, and the result is both satiric and celebrative: folly is understood as folly and celebrated as myth. Shakespeare's amusement at the artist's power through language to comprehend the relation of nature and experience and translate the comprehension into comic myth is apparent throughout. Bottom's wedding to Titania is summary of the comprehension and the play-within-a-play is a burlesque of the power.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , May 1968 , pp. 380 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 The Origin of Attic Comedy (London, 1914), p. 3.

2 ' “The Meanings of Comedy,” in Comedy (Garden City, ?. Y., 1956), pp. 216, 220.

3 Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), p. 331.

4 “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays: 1948 (New York, 1949), pp. 64, 68.

5 Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), p. 8.

6 G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, I (Oxford, 1904), 248.

7 The Mediaeval Stage, i (Oxford, 1903), 218.

8 John Henry Freese, tr., Cicero the Speeches, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1945), pp. 161, 163.

9 “Comoediam esse Cicero ait imitationem vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imagmem veritatis.” P. Tereniii Afri Poetae Lepidissimi Comoediae (Parisiis, 1552), p. 39.

10 Harry Caplan, tr., Ad C. Eerennium De Ratione Dicendi, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1954), p. 5.

11 “Sunt in singulis Comoediis certae quaedam theses de hominum diversis moribus, ingeniis, & officiis propositae, quae multum f aciunt ad vitam sapienter & civiliter instituendam.” Terentii,. Comoediae, p. 675.

12 “Commendat enim virtutes, & vitia insectatur, & in qualibet aetate, sexu, & conditione, virtutis materiam praebet. Omnium ferè actionum domesticarum imago & typus expressus hîc cernitur.” Terentii … Comoediae, p. 675.

13 An Apology for Poetry, ed. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 176–177. See “Comedy” in Smith's index for references to discussions by Lodge, Puttenham, Harington, and others. See also Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg, Everyman's Library (London and New York, 1962), pp. 47–48.

14 For a detailed study of comic theory and technique as developed in Terentian commentary, see Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, 111., 1950).

15 H. E. Butler, tr., The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, The Loeb Classical Library, iv (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1958), 39, 41.

16 See my unpubl. diss. (Illinois, 1959), “The Dramatic Unities in the Renaissance,” pp. 172–179.

17 For a detailed study of this structure as worked out by the Terentian commentators, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana, 111., 1947).

18 Andria, The First Comoedie of Terence in English (London, 1588), pp. Biiv-Biiir. Cf. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, Wis., 1954), pp. 224 ff. For a detailed study of character as explained in Terentian commentary, see Edwin W. Robbins, Dramatic Characterization in Printed Commentaries on Terence, 1473–1600 (Urbana, 111., 1951).

19 My quotations are according to the text in George Lyman Kittredge, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Boston, 1936).

20 The pattern and idea of “May-game action” are of central importance in C. L. Barber's interpretation of the play (Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 119^162), but he believes that critics make a mistake in assuming that the reference to the “rite of May” necessarily refers the time of the play's action to May Day, since “people went Maying at various times” (p. 120). Barber (pp. 123–124) also reviews English midsummer customs and beliefs as they might have relevance to the play (e.g., greenery decoration, wandering spirits, divinations whereby maidens might come to know their true loves); however, he believes that the play's title seeks not so much “association with the specific customs of Midsummer Eve” as “suggestions of a magic time.” For records of English holiday customs, see John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, with the additions of Sir Henry Ellis (London, 1877).

21 Concerning the relation of the symbolism of love and the actuality of love in the play, cf. ?. ?. Chambers' essay on the play in Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925).

22 Cf. Mable Buland, The Presentation of Time in the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1912), p. 107. For other discussions of the time of the play see the Variorum edition, H. H. Furness, éd., A Midsommer Nights Dreame (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. xxvii-xxxiv, 297–298, and Henry Cunningham, ed. The Works of Shakespeare: A Midsummer-Night's Dream, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1905), pp. xx-xxi, lii-lui, 161–162.

23 Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., cites the passage as an example of “amphibology,” one of the “vices of language” Shakespeare employed for comic effect, a device previously used in Ralph Roister Doister. See Sister Miriam Joseph's Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947), pp. 66–67.