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The Ritual of Midsummer: A Pattern for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Anca Vlasopolos
Anca Vlasopolos*
Affiliation:
Wayne State University
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Extract

Interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream have suffered from a hesitation or a downright refusal on the part of critics to consider the full significance of the ritual of Midsummer, or Saint John's Day, in Shakespeare's comedy. The play, like the ritual which informs its structure, maintains a dual frame of reference, Christian and pagan. Within this frame such seemingly unrelated subjects as the moon and dew imagery, the frequent reference to eyes, and the business of magic plants, particularly the peacemaking ‘Dians bud,’ become thematic components of the comic movement toward reconciliation of natural and lawful love. The lovers’ progression from the night of misrule to the light of the holy day parallels the pagan nature of the Midsummer festival and its Christian conclusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring 1978 , pp. 21 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1978

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References

1 The Enciclopedia Cattolica, s.v. Giovanni Battista, Folklore; Sir Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough, x (London, 1913; rpt. 1955)Google Scholar, “The Midsummer Fires,’ 160-219, and XI (London, 1913; rpt. 1955). “The Magic Flowers of Midsummer Eve,’ 45-75. All further references are to this edition. The volume and page numbers, preceded by the identification Fr., will be supplied in parentheses following each reference in the text.

2 Of the three languages, only Rumanian has an equivalent for the pagan holiday, ‘Noaptea de sînziene.’ In French and German, the translator could change Midsummer Night to Saint John's Night. Ernest Schanzer discusses the attempts to translate accurately the title in German in his article ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ in Oeuvres complètes de Shakespeare, ed. Pierre Leyris and Henri Evans (Paris, 1958), trans, and abr. rpt. in Shakespeare: The Comedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kenneth Muir (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), p. 26.

3 ‘Two French Versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ French Review, 33 (May, 1960), 341-350; see p. 341.

4 In Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, N.J., 1959; rpt. Cleveland, Ohio, 1963), Barber writes that he is more concerned with the sexual customs of Maying than with the specific rituals of either Midsummer Eve or May Day (pp. 120,123-124).

5 Dale M. Blount, ‘Shakespeare's Use of the Folklore of Fairies and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest,’ Diss. Indiana, 1969, p. 54; Hunter, G. K., ‘ A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ in Shakespeare: The Later Comedies, Writers and Their Works, No. 143 (London, 1962), pp. 7–20 Google Scholar, rpt. in Shakespeare: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean, 2nd ed., rev. (New York, 1957; rpt. 1967), p. 93; Lewis, Allan, ‘ A Midsummer Night's Dream—Fairy Fantasy or Erotic Nightmare?’, Educational Theatre Journal, 21 (1969), 251–258 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see p. 255; and Young, David P., Something of Great Constancy: The Art of'A Midsummer Night's Dream’ (New Haven and London, 1966), p. 24 Google Scholar. Blount, Hunter, and Lewis simply refer to the time of the play as ‘Midsummer Eve or May Day.’ Young comments on Shakespeare's intentional dismissal of calendar dates in favor of ‘a more elusive festival time.’

6 Cutts, ‘ “The Fierce Vexation of a [Midsummer Night's] Dreame,” ‘ Shakespeare Quarterly, 14 (1963), 183-185; Olsen, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage,’ ELH, 24 (1957), 95-119.

7 “The Mature Comedies,’ Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, No. 3, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1961), p. 220.

8 Schanzer, p. 27.

9 Sewell, Elizabeth, for example, speaks of the absence of moral tone from the ritual in The Orphic Voice (New Haven, 1960), pp. 112, 113, 122-124Google Scholar.

10 The Enciclopedia Cattolica states: ‘la festa di s. G.B. [Santo Giovanni Battista] è quella che da luogo alle più importanti e caratteristiche manifestation! del culto popolare in tutti i paesi dell'Europa.’

11 The New Variorum Shakespeare: A Midsommer Nights Dreame, ed. Horace Howard Furness, 6th ed. (Philadelphia, 1895), I.i.222-224; III.i.206-208. All further references will be to this edition and will be listed in parentheses after every quotation. I have followed modern typographical conventions in respect to the use of i/j and u/v whenever they appear in the text.

12 Brand, John, Observations on Popular Antiquities, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1913), pp. 173, 181-183, 209; and Frazer, xr, 45-75Google Scholar.

13 In their article ‘Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 513-521, Lou Agnes Reynolds and Paul Sawyer advance the suggestion that love-in-idleness might be identified as Saint John's Wort on account of its magical purple juice. However, love-in-idleness is known as a love charm, as Grieve, M. points out in A Modem Herbal (New York, 1931), 1, 387 Google Scholar, whereas Saint John's Wort does not number the power of inducing love among its virtues according to Frazer, II, 45-71, and Gerarde, John, The Herball (London, 1597), I, 433 Google Scholar.

14 Cutts, p. 184, and Young, pp. 27, 142, identify love-in-idleness with heart's ease, or the wild pansy. The three names are synonyms for the flower used as a love charm, although neither Cutts nor Young mentions this virtue of the plant.

15 Cutts, p. 185; The Variorum, p. 181, n. 81.

16 Gerarde, II, 1202; and An Herbal (1525), ed. and trans. Sanford V. Larkey and Thomas Pyles (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941), p. 3.

17 The OED identification of mugwort is: 1. “The plant Artemisia vulgaris, formerly also called motherwort. Also applied to other species of Artemisia, as wormwood, A. Absinthium.’ The High Dutch name for mugwort is Sant Johanus Wurtell, in Gerarde, II, 946. The synonyms Saint John's Plant and Cingulum Sanctijohannis are listed in Grieve, P. 556.

18 The compilation of the mugwort's virtues is a process complicated by the fact that some herbals, such as Gerarde, II, 936-946, An Herbal, pp. 5, 6, and Grieve, II, 556, 557, 858, distinguish, not always accurately, between species of wormwoods. Gerarde and Grieve list motherwort, or matherwort, as an entirely different plant. I have followed the OED definition and compiled virtues for the modierwort and mugwort, when classified as species of Artemisia, and for wormwood, when classified as Artemisia Absinthium. The herbals in Latin, such as The Herbal of Rufinus, ed. Lynn Thorndike (Chicago, 1945), pp. 42-43, deal with the wormwood family of Compositae under one listing, Artemisia, as does Agnes Arber's historical treatise, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution, 2nd ed. rev. (Cambridge, 1938), p. 39. For further evidence of the wormwood's power over the eyes, see Nicholas Culpeper, A Physicall Directory (1649), quoted in Arber, p. 262.

19 Grieve, II, 858; Arber, p. 39; and Macer, quoted in The Herbal of Rufinus, p. 43.

20 Grieve, II, 556, 557.

21 In The Moon and the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (1955), 234-246, Ernest Schanzer refutes criticism which dismisses the seriousness of Titania's claims in language similar to mine. However, he sees the disruption of which she speaks as referring to the state of fairydom, not of the universe at large (p. 236).