"A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM": SHAKESPEARE, PLAY AND METAPLAY

Author(s): Stephen L. Smith

Source: The Centennial Review , SPRING 1977, Vol. 21, No. 2 (SPRING 1977), pp. 194-209
Published by: Michigan State University Press

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 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM:
SHAKESPEARE, PLAY AND METAPLAY

Stephen L. Smith

a curious problem in writing about play and recreation is that

the medium is so rarely the message. A study in mathematics can
be rigorous and quantitative; a philosophical treatise can be logi
cal and thoughtful; a scientific paper can be written in a scientific,
disinterested style. But play, whether studied by a scholar or a
recreation professional, is not easily written about in a playful
manner. It is difficult to treat the subject in a style which both
communicates the experience of play and is fair to a sophisticated
student. Surprisingly, perhaps, such a study has long been avail
able. This playful study of play which has been long overlooked as
an epistemological statement is A Midsummer Night's Dream.1
The thesis thatd Midsummer Night's Dream can be read as a study
of Shakespeare's ideas about play, of which a play is one form,
gives the critic and scholar an advantage in his work. It is unwise
to take literary work as evidence of a poet's or playwright's real
beliefs on most topics. For a critic or student to suggest that he
knows what the author really means and really believes is just one
tedious form of the game such writers about writers play; and
they are not usually conscious that they are playing a game just as
much as the poet is.
This justifies, in a rather oblique fashion, the subject of this

'Recent works which have explored the intellectual depths of the play include: C.L.
Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation To Social Custom
(Princeton University Press, 1959, pp. 119-162); Frank Kermode, "Early Shakespeare",
Volume 13 of Stratford-upon-Avon Studies (New York: St. Martin's Press, ig6i, pp.
314-320); R. W. Dent, "Imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream"; Shakespeare Quarterly,
(Volume 15, 1964, pp. 115-129); James Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (University
of Minnesota Press, 1971, pp. 120-148); Ronald Miller, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: The
Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of Things", Shakespeare Quarterly, (Volume 26, 1975, pp.
254-268.

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

particular essay. A poet (or any other creative writer)

primary, and usually only, allegiance the play and bea
words. A poet can transform, reverse, deny or do anythi
wishes to his beliefs about God, god, man, society, gove
love or whatever. But he cannot hide, deny or disguise h
about play because they are embodied in the substanc
tern of his expression. While a student can only guess a
late about a poet's real beliefs on almost anything, he ca
read his real beliefs about play everytime he picks up a
watches a play.
To make this point in a more readable way, let me
imaginary exchange between a poet and a Hybrid who is
make poetry respectable. This dialogue comes from Joh
essay, "Adam and Eve and the Third Son".2 The poet is s

You find what you like in the poem. I wrote it in play.

But do you deny there is a world in it? (the Hybrid asks)
Don't you know the world must be played for? Were I to become a
you are, or as moral as you like to make me, I'd never have any f
never stumble on a graceful error. What do you take me for, a p
(the Hybrid doesn't budge) I take you, he says, for rather more t
playing with jingles.
Take me for anything you like, says the poet, but unless you pu
first, you are not only literal but silly. Poetry is play. It is mortal pl

John Huizinga in Homo Ludens,3 the opus classicus for h

studies of play in western culture, defines play as a
activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limi
and place according to rules freely accepted but absol
ing, having its end in itself and accompanied by feeli
sion, joy and the consciousness that is different from ord
This definition, while so broad that it permits Huizinga
almost every aspect of culture sub specie ludi, will help to
this paper's perspective on play.
A quality inherent in most play is agon or competition
Huizinga, is a metaphor for the hidden roots of human

2John Ciardi, "Adam and Eve and the Third Son", Saturday Review (Augus
143)
3Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements of Culture, (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

the world; and the world to the mind of thos

the savage, the child and the poet4 (a phra
lunatic, the lover, and the poet", A Midsumm
i.7]) is an agonistic structure in which the pro
cosmos are seen as the eternal conflict of oppo
made manifest through the qualities of uncer
humor and irony. And it is through play t
comprehend and participate in the mystery o
world. Shakespeare uses these elements of
and all the rest to explore a world characteriz
ity, the quality of a world perceived in ter
tradictory modes of being.5
Conflict, contradiction, agonistic uncertai
tarity are themes dancing in and out of A
Dream. Two men compete for the same woma
themselves at odds over men; a fairy king an
of the play in a quarrel; a mortal king claims
the spoils of war; a group of mechanicals ent
present entertainment in the royal court.
plane we find law and love competing, literal
competing, and dream and reality competin
This latter conflict—and mystery—reality ve
essence of the play. The questioning of reality
in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is an integral
to a much lesser degree, reading it. The challe
to enter the mysterious world of play and to
the ordinary world ebbs and flows in the play
the audience like a giant wave when Puck sug
have just witnessed in the theater may itse
dream:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear. [V.i.430-437]

The indefiniteness and irony of life, and this includes life in

Hbid., p. 116.
5Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, (New York: Free Press,
1967).

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 PLAY AND MET APLAY

the play, are made manifest by the evanescent pres

fairies. We see them appearing and disappearing on the
the question: "Are we to really believe in them?", Shak
no heavy-handed allegorical or metaphysical answer. Th
lighthearted fancy and we are free to leave them o
And yet there are times when an audience may ha
wonder. Consider, for example, Titania's speech about t
of her feud with Oberon from the viewpoint of th
ences:

... with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds... have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overdone their continents.
... and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And the crows are fatted with murion flock...
The human mortals want their winter cheer;...
Rheumatic disease do abound ...
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.
[II.Í.87-H5]

These crop failures were going on at the time the play wa

written and first performed. Between 1594 and 1597 Britain was
suffering from a Great European Famine brought on by pr
longed cold and rainy summers. This had spurred food rioting in
many counties, most seriously in Oxfordshire. London imported
grain from the Continent but was unable to distribute it to t
interior regions because of the extensive flooding. The colds
floods and lack of food killed many farm animals, adding disease
and pestilence to problems of starvation.6 It is quite conceivab
that many in the audiences had been discussing these same m
ters on their way to the performance.
The intriguing image of nature dependent on fairy play is not
limited to Shakespeare's imagination. As Huizinga noted,
animus behind play is the striving for order. Weather, along wit

6E. LeRoy Ladrurie, translated by Barbara Bray, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, (Gard
City, New York: Doubleday and Company, p. 67).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

love, is one of the most disorderly forces in the l

theater-goer, especially if the theater was open-
Marcel Granet7 observes that, according to C
purpose of music and dance was to insure nat
towards man. Sacred contests, music, song, danc
a necessary part of seasonal celebrations. If th
keep the ritual the crops would not ripen. Chine
have developed more moody and somber ritu
nature's bounty, but they did not. They cho
mirthful, light-hearted play—-just as Shakespea
Leo Frobenius8 explains this play dependency
cesses as a cultural continuation of the very earl
tions. Early man was first aware, according to F
life-forms such as game animals. His conscious
slowly expanded to include more subtle per
time, location and the forces of nature, includin
ing of the seasons. Attempting to cope with
change, man played out natural events throu
type of playing is still seen in, for example, a lit
visit to the family physician by giving her paren
pet "vaccinations" such as she received earlier.
Eventually the archaic human mind began to b
play imitations were more than just mimesis;
causal forces behind the events they original
Titania and Oberon are personifications of such
an explanation for the age-old capriciousness of
least as understandable as, and much more ap
perturbations of sunspots, jet-streams and energ
systems.
It is, at least, more appealing to the mythopoeic mind which
sees life as synthetic, not analytic as in scientific thought. Life is
not divided into classes and subclasses. It is felt as an unbroken
continuous whole which does not admit of any clear-cut and tren
chant distinctions. "Nothing has a definite, invariable static shape.
By a sudden metamorphosis everything may be turned into every
thing. If there is any characteristic and outstanding feature of the

'Marcel Granet, Festivals and Songs of Ancient China (New York: E.P. Dutton Press, 1932);
Dances and Legends of Ancient China, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959).
8Leo Frobenius, Kulturgeschichte Afrikas, Prolegomena Zu Einer Historischen Gestaltehre,
(Zurich, Phaidon, cig54).

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

mythical world, a law by which it is governed—it is

metamorphosis".9 This is not only an excellent descripti
fairy-forest,10 it is an excellent description of the enti
perience.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, of course, is not a complete
functioning mythology, but it does suggest possible mythologies.
Mythology must perform four functions in society:11 (1) inspire a
feeling of awe for the powers and order beyond social control,
(2) help man perceive a hidden, natural order, (3) give man a
paradigm which makes society orderly and coherent and (4) open
a window for man into the mysteries and intricacies of his own
psyche. Critics of A Midsummer Night's Dream have frequently and
unintentionally noted the various ways in which the play contrib
utes to the fulfillment of the social needs which mythology
satisfies.

Of the many parts of the play, the fairies come closest to being a
mythology of the supernatural, both for the audience and for the
characters in the play. When confronted by the supernatural,
humans tend to approach it as (1) magic—which seeks to control
the supernatural, (2) the profane—which denies its existence and
(3) the religious—which just accepts and lets be.12
Bottom, that simple ass, is the magician using a supernatural
reality for his quotidian purposes. In a more current metaphor,
he is an agricultural scientist:

Bottom: You name, I beseech you, sir?

Mustardseed: Mustardseed.

Bottom: Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well. That same
cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house.
I promise you your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire your
more acquaintance, good Master Mustardseed. [IILii.200-208]

Bottom, as magician or scientist, does not represent a philoso

phy as much as a position. He sees the ineffable and accepts it as
commonplace, without philosophical inquiry. He denies himself
"Ernst Cassirer, An Essay On Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1956, p. 108).
'"James Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (University of Minnesota Press, 197t, p.
tag).
"Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 3 of Occidental Mythology (New York:
Viking Press, 1964, pp. 518-523).
'"Robert Neale, "Religion and Play", Crossroads (July-September, 1967, p. 84).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

the aesthetics and superbenefits of the supernat

so he denies others the benefit of their own im
most readily seen in the mechanicals' Pyramus a
To Bottom, a suicide or a lion on stage must be
audience as real or as a specific person shallo
There can be no willing suspension of disbeli
must know and must know that it knows:

Bottom: Masters, you ought to consider with yourselves. To bring in—God

shield us—a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more
fearful wildfowl than your lion living, and we ought to look to it.
Snout: Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion.
Bottom: Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through
the lion's neck, saying thus, or to the same defect—"Ladies" or "Fair Ladies—I
would wish you"—or "I would entreat you—not to fear, not to tremble. My
life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I
am no such thing; I am a man as other men are." And there indeed let him
name his name and tell them plainly that he is Snug the Joiner. [III.i.30-48]

Bottom takes the play literally, representing those in the audi

ence who would take any drama as an ideological statement. As
Quince would put it:

Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show;

But wonder on, till truth make all things plain. [V.i. 129-130]

Theseus, on the other hand, analyzes reports of the fairies as a

psychologist might. He never directly encounters the fairies; he is
too wise and modern to believe in fables and fairy toys, or to
spend the night running around in the wood. When he does enter
that traditional playground, the wood, it is in the daylight sur
rounded by courtiers out on a hunt. His knowledge of the experi
ence of the lovers is knowledge gained from testimony and evi
dence, not an understanding which is the fruition of experience.
Theseus is profane; he does not deny the existence of imagina
tion, but he denies its revelations:

Hippolyta: 'Tis strange, my Theseus, what these lovers speak of.

Theseus: More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. [V.i. 1.-2]

13Anne Righter discusses this production at some length as part of an essay on the art of
destroying a play in Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 196a,
p. 108).

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

In Bottom and Theseus Shakespeare has thus provide

two models in our confrontation with the mythical
play-world. We may bend it to our own control and
dismiss it as nothing more than the product of "sha
tasies."

Or we can accept the play religiously by acknowledging what we

see and feel and letting be. We can accept in the sense of viewing a
world created by a god at play, not unlike Nietzsche's Zarathustra
who (as opposed to King Lear) was born laughing, or in the Ve
dantic spirit of a god making the world in fun. We can accept in the
spirit of the Oracle of Delphi and of Christ who never gave
straight answers. If you ever apprehended truth, it would be
through riddles, parables and ambiguities, not cool reason. A Mid
summer Night's Dream might well exemplify Edward Albee's obser
vation, "A Play is fiction—and fiction is fact distorted into truth."14

II

I have just written about some hidden truth which is alluded to

throughout the whole play and observed that Bottom was put in
touch with it. Indeed, he was put in its very lap. Yet such an
observation is trite. Even more than having the mysteries of the
universe revealed to him, Bottom was offered a chance for self
understanding:

Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and

methought I had—but man is a patched fool, if he will offer to say what
methought I had. [IV.i.212-215]

Unfortunately for Bottom the seed of experience does not take

root and blossom into understanding. It dries up in an irretrieva
ble mirage because Bottom does not have the power of words or
illusion to nurture the seed. What Bottom is totally incapable of,
and what Puck and Oberon can do with illusion only, Shakespeare
does with illusion and words on the stage. He extends the play
outward, draws the audience in, and teases them to find their way
either further in or out. The play becomes play, the audience and
actors find themselves united in fun and, for the sentient ones,

"Edward Albee is quoted in David Miller, Gods and Games: Towards A Theology Of Play
(New York: Harper Colophon, 1973, p. 145).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

understanding. The art is Shakespeare's; his are t

the mouths of the actors. But the scenes, the de
the set belong to the director and the acting com
dream is shared with the audience to become a
ous experience.
We can sense from the use of illusions whic
actuality, that the play does more than explo
boundary between fantasy and reality. Shakespe
against drama, drama against reality and reali
Puck, as one example, is a real actor on a real sta
himself variously in the play as a fantastic explan
mishaps:

And sometimes lurk I in a gossip's bowl

In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her wither'd dewlap pour the ale.
[II.i.47-50]

And as both an actor and audience:

What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor—

An actor too perhaps, if I see cause.
[III.i.84-85]

And as a dream to Theseus:

Theseus: Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
[V.i. 18-20]

Oberon joins Puck as an auditor to the drama of the lovers in

the wood, and at the same time directs the production by guiding
and prompting Puck through various tricks. Over all, of course, is
the emperor of shadows and their ultimate director, Shakespeare.
It is he who has set up lives, lines, scenes, relationships, and even
precious bits of irony such as Theseus' dismissal of poets along
with lovers and lunatics, while Theseus himself remains nothing
more than a bit of a poet's imagination.
In this context, the self-effacing epilogue spoken through Puck
is a cunning, playful game ploy to add a further twist to the

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

elaborate dream-play-workl created. For if we acc

suggestion that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a dream
find ourselves listening to the Cretan who assures us th
tans are liars. We reject one game only to find ourselves
bly in another.
Much earlier I suggested that Titania's speech a
weather helped to expand the play to include the first a
This line of inquiry can be extended. The usual speculati
A Midsummer Night's Dream was written for a real wedd
bly that of the Earl of Derby to Elizabeth de Vere on Ja
1595- Paul Siegel,15 for example, notes several paralle
likely this play too was a play of three hours between af
and bedtime, [a reference to V.i.33-34] a presentation
summer night which was the final part of the wedding
we accept Siegel's hypothesis, and one is certainly tem
least pretend it is true, then the original audience must
growing delight and amusement at seeing their situat
out on stage.
At the opening of the play the two play-worlds, that of the
drama and that of the wedding festivities, were set apart by four
days and some major plot differences. Slowly the two converge
until the first audience see themselves on stage watching a play, set
in the identical situation of a wedding feast, drawing to a close
while the stage marriage and the church marriage are also syn
chronously drawing to consummation.
As the stage play closes, Oberon calls to the fairies to perform a
ritual dance:

Through the house give glimmering light,

By the dead and drowsy fire,
Every elf and fairy sprite
Hop as light as bird from brier;
And this ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it trippingly. [V.i.403-408]

Enid Welsford16 has argued that this probably involved the au

dience in the traditional masque as a part of the wedding cere

15Paul Siegel "A Midsummer Night's Dream arid the Wedding Guests," Shakespeare Quarterly
(Volume 4, 1953, 139-144).
16Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study In The Relationships Between Poetry and The
Revels (Cambridge, 1927, pp. 331-332).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

monies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centurie

a popular form of amateur entertainment. This in
as part of a play, in which the audience joined.
how Shakespeare as playwright assumed an attitud
work half-in and half-out of dramatic illusion. After the audience
and players completed the masque we find a passage which
suggests another breach in the wall separating audience and ac
tors:

With this field-dew consecrate,

Every fairy take his gait;
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace,
And the owner of it blest,
Ever shall in safety rest. [V.i.427-432)

Here the fairies might have left the stage, passing through t
chambers of the house bestowing a benediction with the field-d
of play. Play has, as illustrated here, a tendency to expand
draw in the audience of the play world in a playful and seri
union. Commenting on this fairy benediction of the play audie
in the script, Calderwood seems to pick up a little paidia17 fair
dust himself and is absorbed by the play's expansive and assimi
tive powers: "Beneath the neatly differentiated Appollonian
ages of literary form in the theatre—the rational sharpness
outline that separates not only bears from bushes in These
well-ordered world (5.1.22) but art's fantasies from life's facts
well—runs the unindividuated flow of Dionysian dream."
Calderwood suddenly stops, realizes his academic error, b
also senses the emotional correctness and the grace of his allite
tion, and asks his reader to accept him, letting be: "I know t
Nietzsche associates dream with Apollo and ritual integration w
Dionysis, but Shakespeare's prophetic imagination is capaci
enough in this play to accommodate Freud as well as Nietzsche.
Now that Calderwood has conjured up the spirit of Freud,

17"Paidia" is one end of a continuum of play quality developed by Roger Callois in M

Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: The Free Press, 1961). The paidia s
of play is the spirit of freedom, spontaneity, unpredictability. The opposite qualit
"ludus"—controlled, ordered, regulated play.
18James Calderwood, pp. 128-129.

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

eral sexual images involved in the tense development

tempt us. Theseus, more than the others, has all but arri
proper sexual identity. At the opening of the play Th
putting war and heroic actions behind him to find joy a
with a woman. Hippolyta is his and is in her rightful pla
not the warring queen of the Amazons (it should be poin
however, that Hippolyta's lines can be read with a sar
suggesting that she has not yet accepted the new rol
course of the drama, Titania is reconciled with her kind after
ending a relationship with suggestions of incest. Helena and
Hermia break free of the school-day friendship with its homosex
ual overtones and settle into adult heterosexuality. Hermia no
longer chastens Lysander for wanting to sleep beside her, but
looks forward to their sleeping together. At the end of the play
some of the players go on to another game—the wedding night—
in which reality and dream are no longer blurred while identities
and emotions are:

Lovers, to bed: 'tis almost fairy time. [V.i.376]

The lovers are invited to retire from play-acting to engage in

foreplay or more aptly (in Sanskrit) kridati which describes erotic
involvement but literally translates as play, and kridarotnam
(loosely sexual intercourse, literally "the jewel of games").
Whatever the truths of the illusions of the night, as they dissolve
we find that old discords and jealousies likewise dissolve. The
lovers, having been threatened by Egeus and Puck, are finally
together through the efforts of Oberon and Theseus:

Fair lovers, you are fortunately met.

Of this discourse we will hear more anon.
Egeus, I will overbear your will, [IV.i. 183-185]

This resolution of disorder is a major aspect of the plot and a

driving force in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The movements of
the lovers which finally yield a satisfactory conclusion are bril
liantly laid out by Shakespeare in a pattern which might describe

laPaul Olson, "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of the Court Marriage," ELM:
A Journal of English Literary History (Volume 24, 1957, 95-119)

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

another play-in-the-play or, better still, a ballet

dreams and the other play nested in the larger

The plot is a pattern, a figure, rather than a series of hum

by character and passion, and this pattern, especially in th
the play, is the pattern of a dance.
"Enter a Fairie at one doore, and Robin Goodfellow at another.
... Enter the King of Fairies, at one doore, with his traine; and the Queene, at
another with hers."

The appearance and disappearance of the various lovers, the will-o'-the wisp
movement of the elusive Puck, form a kind of figured ballet. The lovers
quarrel in a dance pattern: first there are two men to one woman and the
other woman alone, then a brief space of circular movement, each one pursu
ing and pursued, then a return to the first figure with the position of the
women reversed, then a cross-movement, man quarreling with man and
woman with woman, and then, as a finale, a general setting to the partners,
including not only the lovers but fairies and royal personages as well.20

The dance is a kinetic statement of the plot, and is summarized

by Lysander's well-known phrase: "The course of true love never
did run smooth." [I.i.134] This is essentially the plot of "Pyramus
and Thisbe" too. A major difference, in addition to the endings, is
the relative execution of the dramas and their power to stir imagi
nation. The mechanicals' play is so thoroughly botched that, when
Theseus suggests that imagination can mend the play, Hippolyta
retorts, "It must be your imagination then, and not theirs."
[V.i.220] This is a surprising contrast to her acceptance of the
lover's dream in the woods as a vision which "grows to something
of great constancy—/But, howsoever, strange and admirable."
[V.i.26-27]

III

Some early audiences of A Midsummer Night's Dream would echo

Hippolyta's critique of Pyramus and Thisbe, "This is the sillies
stuff that ever I heard." Samuel Pepys described it as "the mos
insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." Samue
Johnson, one hundred years later, probably felt he was bein

20Enid Welsford, pp. 331-332.

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

more gracious by excusing the play on the ground t

were much in fashion in Shakespeare's time.
Despite these early criticisms Shakespeare does not hav
on his audience's imagination to salvage a wrecked cre
possible that Shakespeare was appealing through Th
later Puck, to his audience to accept his work and not s
hands, but that seems to be a gamesome convention. Un
he is challenging the audience to question the reality of
tion and its works, while with utmost confidence he te
audience to use the play as a lens through which to a
hidden truth and beauty.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare's work will be seen by s
Theseuses who see silly, fickle lovers bewitched by "rin
conceits,/Knacks trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats" [I.i.3
coolly reason Puck's pansy juice to be no more than a
them drama is always mimesis. It can never be poesis.
like an ass, a truth conveyed through a simile. Never ca
be translated into Calderwood's genuine "apple-crun
twitching article." This attitude misses much of the ric
Midsummer Night's Dream as it explores the nature o
illusion as the focus of converging drama and audie
speare slowly works to dissolve the boundaries of the
world. While change, irony and instability are the e
prehended constancies of life, and they are mirrored in
Shakespeare hints at and points the way to somethin
some ultimately benevolent, game-playing spirit or m
hind it all.
The order, this teleology is not apparent to a casual observer of
life. The idea and insight that there may be something behind the
mystery of reality was first in the playwright's mind. He projects
the hidden pattern onto reality to save external appearances, not
to conform to them. They are only artifacts and must somehow be
tied to deeper origins if they are to continue to exist. In this poesis
of drama the playwright and the poet are very much like the scien
tist who tells me my glass of wine is mostly nothing and a tiny bit of
subatomic matter which seems to be more mathematical than
physical. Scientific order, like poetic order, is a projection of an
understanding onto artifacts and external appearances to save
them.

207

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

IV

Play and drama are limited:

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. [V.i. 14-17]

The fairies live "where the wild thyme blows./Where oxlips and
the nodding violet grows." [Il.i.249-250] Most action of A Mid
summer Night's Dream is confined to the wood between sunset and
sunrise. The play-world and its illusions are dissipated with the
rising sun and the arriving hunting party. Looking back as they
depart the play-world, Demetrius notices:

These things seem small and undistinguishable

Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.
[IV.i. 191-192]

Clouds or mountains, play has a local habitation for all players

and it is now far behind for the lovers. Helena and Hermia recall
the pervasive quality of agon and competition of opposites which
has, at least in their own love, been resolved:

Hermia: Methinks I see things with parted eye,

When everything seems double.
Helena: So methinks,
And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own and not mine own. [IV.i. 195-197]

And our play itself has been confined—to a stage and

ence and perhaps the "three hours/Between our after-
bedtime." [V.i.33-34] Shakespeare must release us fro
just as Oberon releases the lovers from the wood:

When they next awake, all this derision

Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision:
And back to Athens shall the lovers wend
With league whose date till death shall never end.
[III.ii.37-373]

Only for us it has not been a fruitless vision if we are open and

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 PLAY AND METAPLAY

receptive to play and a play about the mystery of thin

power in play to give grace and benediction is released
ending, like communion wine that must be drunk to recei
god. But the drinking and the companionship that go with
and good times and sharing a vision come first. To descr
takes more than words on a page, it takes action. It takes
ment and life. The world and knowledge have to be play
and whatever else we hope to gain from life—love, mar
scholarship—the play comes first.

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