A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies is also, from a certain point
of view, the greatest of his plays. No one would maintain that it
occupied this position in the matter of psychological study if by
psychological study we mean the study of individual characters in a play.
No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the sense
that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before
the psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play
is perhaps a greater triumph of psychology than
A study of the play from a literary or philosophical point of view
must therefore be founded upon some serious realisation of what this
atmosphere is. In a lecture upon
Now in the reason for this modern and pedantic error lies the whole
secret and difficulty of such plays as <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>.
The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all,
can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness.
That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon
a borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural
atmosphere, not only through being profoundly sad or meditative,
but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt
out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy;
but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter.
Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare,
can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown.
And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school,
of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this
purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply ‘that their
logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible the very
experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realise
In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night’s dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the’ elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. “Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows.” If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.
It is a trite matter, of course, though in a general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon another point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate manner in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and frustration of the incidents and personalities are well known to every one who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative of the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more -worth remarking that there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an utter discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the stars fall. <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> has in a most singular degree effected this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck,
Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream. The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of art than the creation of the character of Othello.
It is difficult to approach critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom consists of a rich subconsciousness, and that of Hamlet in the comparatively superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in the present age which has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the victims of a curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have something to do with being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool. Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver, men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for -ten days to explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as large and simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own circle, men whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but whose presence in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing everything, lights and shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in some strange fashion events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and persuades the mind and almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings to the fancy like the beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted like the legends of a paladin. These ate great men, there are millions of them in the world, though very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not in the cold halls of cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that we should look for the great. An intellectual salon is merely a training-ground for one faculty, and is akin to a fencing class or a rifle corps. It is in our own homes and environments, from Croydon to St. John’s Wood, in old nurses, and gentlemen with hobbies, and talkative spinisters and vast incomparable butlers, that we may feel the presence of that blood of the gods. And this creature so hard to describe, so easy to remember, the august and memorable fool, has never been so sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>.
Bottom has the supreme mark of this real greatness in that like
the true saint or the true hero he only differs from humanity
in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not true,
as the idle materialists of today suggest, that compared to the majority
of men the hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is the majority
who appear cold and dehumanised in the presence of greatness.
Bottom, like Don Quixote and Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller
and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and unfathomable weakness,
his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows his own trumpet
it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. The other rustics in
the play accept his leadership not merely naturally but exuberantly;
they have to the full that primary and savage unselfishness,
that uproarious abnegation which makes simple men take pleasure
in falling short of a hero, that unquestionable element of basic
human nature which has never been expressed, outside this play,
so perfectly as in the incomparable chapter at the beginning
of
And it is this natural play between the rich simplicity of Bottom and the simple simplicity of his comrades which constitutes the unapproachable excellence of the farcical scenes in this play. Bottom’s sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of literature - “the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus’ car shall shine from far, and make and mar the foolish fates”, is exceedingly good poetical diction with a real throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy between him and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally base and foolish sings “The Honeysuckle and the Bee”; he does not rant about “raging rocks” and “the car of Phibbus”. Dickens, who more perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and the thoughtless wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the same truth. He perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have very often a real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved eloquence and poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary pictures kept him alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have kept a saint fasting in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable quotations from Moore and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them because he loved a great school of poetry. The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism.
There is another aspect of this great play which ought to be
kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade
of the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic harmony down to such
<coup-de-maître> as the name of Bottom, or the flower called
Love in Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there
is one accidental discord; that is in the name of Theseus,
and the whole city of Athens in which the events take place.
Shakespeare’s description of Athens in <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>
is the best description of England that he or any one else ever wrote.
Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of hunting,
kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity.
The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with
the queer formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English;
to compare them with the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend,
for instance, is suddenly to discover that we have, after all,
a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at least in Shakespeare’s day.
Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women’s ale, or pulling
the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant
Celtic beauty; his is the horse-play of the invisible world.
Perhaps it is some debased inheritance of English life which makes
American ghosts so fond of quite undignified practical jokes.
But this union of mystery with farce is a note of the medieval English.
The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that distant
but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult
indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase
“merrie England”, though some conception of it is quite necessary
to the comprehension of <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>. In some
cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English
of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England
of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism.
Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment
of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the fables
of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was
the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome
superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous.
In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good
and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved
the Dragon, And this seventeenth-century tradition of dealing
with the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England
and America, so that if we glance at a novel about occultism we
may be perfectly certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny.
Whatever else we expect we certainly should never expect to find
in it spirits such as those in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies is also, from a certain point
of view, the greatest of his plays. No one would maintain that it
occupied this position in the matter of psychological study if by
psychological study we mean the study of individual characters in a play.
No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the sense
that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before
the psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play
is perhaps a greater triumph of psychology than
A study of the play from a literary or philosophical point of view
must therefore be founded upon some serious realisation of what this
atmosphere is. In a lecture upon
Now in the reason for this modern and pedantic error lies the whole
secret and difficulty of such plays as <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>.
The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all,
can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness.
That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon
a borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural
atmosphere, not only through being profoundly sad or meditative,
but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt
out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy;
but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter.
Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare,
can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown.
And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school,
of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this
purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply ‘that their
logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible the very
experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realise
Sogno di una notte di mezza estate
La più grande delle commedie di Shakespeare è anche, da un certo punto di vista, la più grande delle sue opere. Nessuno sosterrebbe che essa occupi tale posizione in fatto di studio psicologico, se per studio psicologico intendiamo lo studio dei singoli personaggi di un dramma. Nessuno sosterrebbe che Puck sia un personaggio nel senso in cui lo è Falstaff, o che il critico si arresti reverente dinanzi alla psicologia di Fiordipisello. Ma vi è un senso in cui l’opera è forse un trionfo psicologico più grande dello stesso
Uno studio dell’opera da un punto di vista letterario o filosofico deve dunque fondarsi su una seria comprensione di che cosa sia questa atmosfera. In una conferenza su
Ora, nella ragione di questo errore moderno e pedante risiede tutto il segreto e la difficoltà di opere come <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>. Il sentimento di un simile dramma, per quel poco che lo si possa riassumere, si può riassumere in una sola frase. È il misticismo della felicità. Vale a dire, è la concezione secondo cui l’uomo, vivendo su una terra di confine, può ritrovarsi nell’atmosfera spirituale o soprannaturale non solo per l’essere profondamente triste o meditativo, ma per l’essere smisuratamente felice. L’anima può essere rapita fuori dal corpo in un’agonia di dolore o in una trance di estasi; ma può anche essere rapita fuori dal corpo in un parossismo di riso. Il dolore, lo sappiamo, può oltrepassare sé stesso; così, secondo Shakespeare, anche il piacere può oltrepassare sé stesso e divenire qualcosa di pericoloso e ignoto. E la ragione per cui la scuola moderna, logica e distruttrice, di cui il signor Bernard Shaw è un esempio, non coglie questa natura puramente esuberante delle commedie è semplicemente che il suo atteggiamento logico e distruttore ha reso impossibile l’esperienza stessa di questa esuberanza prodigiosa. Non possiamo cogliere
In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night’s dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the’ elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. “Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows.” If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.
It is a trite matter, of course, though in a general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon another point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate manner in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and frustration of the incidents and personalities are well known to every one who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative of the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more -worth remarking that there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an utter discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the stars fall. <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> has in a most singular degree effected this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck,
Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream. The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of art than the creation of the character of Othello.
It is difficult to approach critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom consists of a rich subconsciousness, and that of Hamlet in the comparatively superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in the present age which has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the victims of a curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have something to do with being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool. Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver, men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for -ten days to explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as large and simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own circle, men whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but whose presence in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing everything, lights and shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in some strange fashion events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and persuades the mind and almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings to the fancy like the beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted like the legends of a paladin. These ate great men, there are millions of them in the world, though very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not in the cold halls of cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that we should look for the great. An intellectual salon is merely a training-ground for one faculty, and is akin to a fencing class or a rifle corps. It is in our own homes and environments, from Croydon to St. John’s Wood, in old nurses, and gentlemen with hobbies, and talkative spinisters and vast incomparable butlers, that we may feel the presence of that blood of the gods. And this creature so hard to describe, so easy to remember, the august and memorable fool, has never been so sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>.
Nella pura poesia e nell’ebbrezza delle parole, Shakespeare non si levò mai più in alto di quanto si elevi in questo dramma. Ma, a dispetto di ciò, il supremo merito letterario di <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> è un merito di disegno. La stupefacente simmetria, la stupefacente bellezza artistica e morale di quel disegno può essere enunciata in poche parole. La vicenda si apre nel mondo sano e comune con la piacevole serietà di giovanissimi innamorati e giovanissimi amici. Poi, man mano che le figure avanzano nell’intricato bosco dei giovani affanni e delle felicità rubate, un mutamento e uno smarrimento cominciano a scendere su di loro. Perdono la via e il senno, poiché sono nel cuore del regno delle fate. Le loro parole, le loro brame, le loro stesse figure si fanno sempre più fioche e fantastiche, come sogni dentro sogni, nella soprannaturale nebbia di Puck. Poi i fumi del sogno cominciano a diradarsi, e personaggi e spettatori cominciano a destarsi insieme al suono dei corni e dei cani e al mattino terso e corroborante. Theseus, l’incarnazione di un razionalismo felice e generoso, espone in versi triti e superbi la sana veduta di simili esperienze psichiche, additando con uno scetticismo reverente e comprensivo che tutte queste fate e questi incantesimi non sono a loro volta che le emanazioni, i capolavori inconsci, dell’uomo stesso. L’intera compagnia ricade in una splendida risata umana. C’è una corsa al banchetto e alle recite private, e su tutte queste cose si increspa una di quelle conversazioni frivole e ispirate in cui ogni buon motto sembra morire nel dar vita a un altro. Se mai il figlio dell’uomo, nei suoi errabondaggi, fu a casa e in ozio bevve accanto al focolare, egli è a casa nella dimora di Theseus. Tutti i sogni sono stati dimenticati, come un sogno malinconico ricordato per tutto il mattino potrebbe essere dimenticato nella certezza umana di qualsiasi altra trionfante festa serale; e così il dramma pare naturalmente concluso. Cominciò sulla terra e sulla terra finisce. Chiudere così l’intero sogno di una notte di mezza estate in un’eclissi di luce diurna è un effetto di genio. Ma di questa commedia, come ho detto, il segno è che il genio va oltre se stesso; e si aggiunge un tocco che rende il dramma colossale. Theseus e il suo seguito si ritirano con un finale fragoroso, colmo di arguzia e saggezza e cose rimesse a posto, e il silenzio cala sulla casa. Poi giunge un debole suono di piccoli piedi, e per un istante, per così dire, gli elfi si affacciano nella casa, chiedendosi quale sia la realtà. «Supponiamo che i reali siamo noi e le ombre loro.» Se quel finale fosse recitato a dovere, ogni uomo moderno si sentirebbe scosso fino al midollo se dovesse tornare a casa dal teatro attraverso una viuzza di campagna.
È cosa trita, certo, benché in una critica generale più o meno indispensabile, soffermarsi su un altro punto di perfezione artistica: il modo straordinariamente umano ed esatto in cui il dramma coglie l’atmosfera di un sogno. L’inseguimento e il groviglio e la frustrazione degli episodi e delle personalità sono ben noti a chiunque abbia sognato di cadere perpetuamente da precipizi o di perdere perpetuamente treni. Pur svolgendo con chiarezza e legalità la necessaria narrazione del dramma, l’autore riesce a includere ognuna delle principali peculiarità dell’esasperante sogno. Ecco l’inseguimento dell’uomo che non possiamo afferrare, la fuga dall’uomo che non possiamo vedere; ecco il perpetuo ritornare allo stesso luogo, ecco la folle alterazione degli oggetti stessi del nostro desiderio, la sostituzione di un volto con un altro volto, il collocamento delle anime sbagliate nei corpi sbagliati, le fantastiche slealtà della notte: tutto ciò è tanto ovvio quanto importante. Forse val la pena di notare ancor più che intorno a questa confusione della commedia vi è un’altra caratteristica essenziale dei sogni. Un sogno può comunemente descriversi come dotato di un’assoluta discordanza di episodi congiunta a una curiosa unità d’umore; tutto muta tranne il sognatore. Può cominciare con qualsiasi cosa e finire con qualsiasi cosa, ma se il sognatore è triste alla fine, sarà triste come per prescienza fin dal principio; se è allegro al principio, sarà allegro anche se le stelle cadono. <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> ha realizzato in grado singolarissimo questa difficile, questa quasi disperata sottigliezza. Gli eventi nel bosco errante sono in se stessi, e considerati alla piena luce del giorno, non solo malinconici ma amaramente crudeli e ignominiosi. Eppure, stendendovi sopra un’atmosfera magica come la nebbia di Puck,
Shakespeare riesce a rendere l’intera faccenda misteriosamente ilare pur essendo palpabilmente tragica, e misteriosamente caritatevole pur essendo in sé cinica. Riesce in qualche modo a spogliare la tragedia e il tradimento della loro piena acutezza, proprio come un mal di denti o un pericolo mortale — una tigre, o un precipizio — è spogliato della sua acutezza in un sogno piacevole. La creazione di un sentimento aleggiante come questo, un sentimento non solo indipendente dagli eventi ma anzi ad essi opposto, è un trionfo dell’arte assai più grande della creazione del carattere di Othello.
È difficile accostarsi criticamente a una figura tanto grande quanto quella di Bottom il Tessitore. Egli è più grande e più misterioso di Hamlet, perché l’interesse di uomini come Bottom consiste in una ricca subcoscienza, e quello di Hamlet nella materia comparativamente superficiale di una ricca coscienza. E ciò è particolarmente difficile nell’età presente, che è divenuta ossessionata dal mero intelletto. Siamo vittime di una curiosa confusione per cui l’esser grandi si suppone abbia qualcosa a che fare con l’esser intelligenti, come se vi fosse la minima ragione di supporre che Achilles fosse intelligente, come se non vi fosse anzi una gran quantità di prove interne a indicare che era a un passo dall’essere uno sciocco. La grandezza è una certa indescrivibile ma perfettamente familiare e palpabile qualità di ampiezza nella personalità, di fermezza, di sapore forte, di facile e naturale espressione di sé. Un uomo simile è saldo come un albero e unico come un rinoceronte, e potrebbe benissimo essere stupido quanto l’uno o l’altro. Tanto quanto il grande poeta torreggia sul piccolo poeta, il grande sciocco torreggia sul piccolo sciocco. Tutti noi abbiamo conosciuto rustici come Bottom il Tessitore, uomini il cui volto sarebbe vacuo d’idiozia se cercassimo per dieci giorni di spiegar loro il significato del Debito Nazionale, ma che sono nondimeno grandi uomini, affini a Sigurd e a Ercole, eroi del mattino della terra, perché le loro parole erano parole loro, i loro ricordi ricordi loro, e la loro vanità ampia e semplice come una grande collina. Tutti noi abbiamo conosciuto amici nella nostra cerchia, uomini che gli intellettuali potrebbero giustamente dire senza cervello, ma la cui presenza in una stanza era come un fuoco ruggente nel focolare che muta ogni cosa, luci e ombre e l’aria, le cui entrate e uscite erano in qualche strana foggia degli eventi, il cui punto di vista, una volta espresso, ossessiona e persuade la mente e quasi la intimidisce, la cui manifesta assurdità s’aggrappa alla fantasia come la bellezza del primo amore, e le cui follie si narrano come le leggende di un paladino. Questi sono grandi uomini, ce ne sono milioni al mondo, benché forse ben pochi nella Camera dei Comuni. Non è nelle fredde sale dell’intelligenza, dove le celebrità paiono importanti, che dovremmo cercare i grandi. Un salotto intellettuale è soltanto un campo d’addestramento per una sola facoltà, ed è affine a una classe di scherma o a un corpo di tiratori. È nelle nostre stesse case e nei nostri ambienti, da Croydon a St. John’s Wood, in vecchie balie e signori con hobby, e zitelle chiacchierone e sterminati impareggiabili maggiordomi, che possiamo sentire la presenza di quel sangue degli dèi. E questa creatura tanto difficile da descrivere, tanto facile da ricordare, l’augusto e memorabile sciocco, non è mai stata dipinta tanto sontuosamente quanto nel Bottom di <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>.
Bottom has the supreme mark of this real greatness in that like
the true saint or the true hero he only differs from humanity
in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not true,
as the idle materialists of today suggest, that compared to the majority
of men the hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is the majority
who appear cold and dehumanised in the presence of greatness.
Bottom, like Don Quixote and Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller
and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and unfathomable weakness,
his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows his own trumpet
it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. The other rustics in
the play accept his leadership not merely naturally but exuberantly;
they have to the full that primary and savage unselfishness,
that uproarious abnegation which makes simple men take pleasure
in falling short of a hero, that unquestionable element of basic
human nature which has never been expressed, outside this play,
so perfectly as in the incomparable chapter at the beginning
of
And it is this natural play between the rich simplicity of Bottom and the simple simplicity of his comrades which constitutes the unapproachable excellence of the farcical scenes in this play. Bottom’s sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of literature - “the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus’ car shall shine from far, and make and mar the foolish fates”, is exceedingly good poetical diction with a real throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy between him and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally base and foolish sings “The Honeysuckle and the Bee”; he does not rant about “raging rocks” and “the car of Phibbus”. Dickens, who more perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and the thoughtless wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the same truth. He perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have very often a real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved eloquence and poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary pictures kept him alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have kept a saint fasting in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable quotations from Moore and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them because he loved a great school of poetry. The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism.
There is another aspect of this great play which ought to be
kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade
of the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic harmony down to such
<coup-de-maître> as the name of Bottom, or the flower called
Love in Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there
is one accidental discord; that is in the name of Theseus,
and the whole city of Athens in which the events take place.
Shakespeare’s description of Athens in <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>
is the best description of England that he or any one else ever wrote.
Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of hunting,
kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity.
The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with
the queer formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English;
to compare them with the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend,
for instance, is suddenly to discover that we have, after all,
a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at least in Shakespeare’s day.
Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women’s ale, or pulling
the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant
Celtic beauty; his is the horse-play of the invisible world.
Perhaps it is some debased inheritance of English life which makes
American ghosts so fond of quite undignified practical jokes.
But this union of mystery with farce is a note of the medieval English.
The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that distant
but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult
indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase
“merrie England”, though some conception of it is quite necessary
to the comprehension of <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>. In some
cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English
of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England
of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism.
Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment
of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the fables
of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was
the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome
superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous.
In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good
and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved
the Dragon, And this seventeenth-century tradition of dealing
with the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England
and America, so that if we glance at a novel about occultism we
may be perfectly certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny.
Whatever else we expect we certainly should never expect to find
in it spirits such as those in
Bottom possiede il segno supremo di questa vera grandezza in ciò che, come il vero santo o il vero eroe, egli differisce dall’umanità solo per essere, per così dire, più umano dell’umanità stessa. Non è vero, come suggeriscono gli oziosi materialisti d’oggi, che, paragonato alla maggioranza degli uomini, l’eroe appaia freddo e disumanizzato; è la maggioranza che appare fredda e disumanizzata al cospetto della grandezza. Bottom, come Don Quixote e lo Zio Toby e il signor Richard Swiveller e il resto dei Titani, ha una debolezza enorme e insondabile, la sua scempiaggine è su vasta scala, e quando suona la propria tromba è come la tromba della Resurrezione. Gli altri rustici del dramma accettano la sua guida non soltanto con naturalezza ma con esuberanza; posseggono in pieno quel primario e selvaggio disinteresse, quella clamorosa abnegazione che fa sì che gli uomini semplici provino piacere nel restare al di sotto di un eroe, quell’indubitabile elemento della natura umana fondamentale che non è mai stato espresso, fuori di questo dramma, così perfettamente come nell’impareggiabile capitolo all’inizio di
Ed è questo naturale gioco tra la ricca semplicità di Bottom e la semplice semplicità dei suoi compagni a costituire l’inavvicinabile eccellenza delle scene farsesche di questo dramma. La sensibilità di Bottom alla letteratura è perfettamente ardente e genuina, assai più genuina di quella di moltissimi critici colti della letteratura — «the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus’ car shall shine from far, and make and mar the foolish fates» è una dizione poetica straordinariamente buona, con un vero palpito e un vero rigonfiarsi, e se è lievemente e quasi impercettibilmente deficiente in fatto di senso, è di certo altrettanto sensata di parecchi altri discorsi retorici che in Shakespeare sono messi in bocca a re e innamorati e persino agli spiriti dei morti. Se Bottom amava la cantilena retorica per se stessa, il fatto non fa che costituire un altro punto di simpatia tra lui e il suo creatore letterario. Ma lo stile della cosa, per quanto deliberatamente ampolloso e ridicolo, è del tutto letterario, l’allitterazione cade come onda su onda, e l’intero verso, come un cavallone, monta sempre più alto prima di infrangersi. Non v’è nulla di meschino in questa follia; né v’è in tutto il regno della letteratura una figura tanto libera da volgarità. L’uomo vitalmente vile e sciocco canta «The Honeysuckle and the Bee»; non declama di «raging rocks» e del «car of Phibbus». Dickens, che più forse di ogni altro uomo moderno ebbe l’ospitalità mentale e l’irriflessa saggezza di Shakespeare, percepì ed espresse mirabilmente la stessa verità. Percepì, vale a dire, che idioti del tutto indifendibili hanno molto spesso un reale senso, e un reale entusiasmo, per le lettere. Il signor Micawber amava l’eloquenza e la poesia con tutta la sua immortale anima; parole e immagini visionarie lo tenevano in vita in assenza di cibo e denaro, come avrebbero potuto tenere in vita un santo digiunante in un deserto. Dick Swiveller non traeva le sue inimitabili citazioni da Moore e Byron come semplici frivole digressioni. Le faceva perché amava una grande scuola di poesia. Il sincero amore dei libri non ha nulla a che fare con l’intelligenza o la stupidità, più di qualsiasi altro sincero amore. È una qualità del carattere, una freschezza, una potenza di piacere, una potenza di fede. Una persona sciocca può dilettarsi a leggere capolavori proprio come una persona sciocca può dilettarsi a cogliere fiori. Uno sciocco può essere innamorato di un poeta come può essere innamorato di una donna. E il trionfo di Bottom è che egli ama la retorica e il proprio gusto nelle arti, e questo è tutto ciò che possono conseguire Theseus, o se è per questo Cosimo de’ Medici. Val la pena di notare, come tocco estremamente fine nel ritratto di Bottom, che il suo gusto letterario è quasi ovunque interessato al suono piuttosto che al senso. Egli comincia la prova con una chiassosa prontezza: «Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete». «Odours, odours», dice Quince, in tono di rimprovero, e la parola è accettata in conformità alle fredde e pesanti regole che esigono un elemento di significato in un passo poetico. Ma «Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete», la versione di Bottom, è un verso incommensurabilmente più fine e più risonante. La «i» che egli inserisce è un’ispirazione di metrica.
C’è un altro aspetto di questo grande dramma che dovrebbe tenersi familiarmente a mente. Per quanto stravagante sia la mascherata della vicenda, essa è un’armonia estetica perfettissima fin nei minimi <coup-de-maître>, come il nome di Bottom, o il fiore chiamato Amore in Idleness. In tutta la faccenda si può dire che vi sia una sola discordanza accidentale; ed è nel nome di Theseus, e nell’intera città di Atene in cui gli eventi hanno luogo. La descrizione che Shakespeare fa di Atene in <A Midsummer Night’s Dream> è la migliore descrizione dell’Inghilterra che egli o chiunque altro abbia mai scritto. Theseus è del tutto evidentemente soltanto uno squire inglese, appassionato di caccia, benevolo verso i suoi fittavoli, ospitale con una certa fiammeggiante vanità. Gli artigiani sono artigiani inglesi, che si parlano con la bizzarra formalità dei poveri. Soprattutto, le fate sono inglesi; paragonarle, per esempio, ai bellissimi spiriti patrizi della leggenda irlandese equivale a scoprire d’improvviso che possediamo, dopotutto, un folclore e una mitologia, o almeno li possedevamo ai tempi di Shakespeare. Robin Goodfellow, che rovescia la birra delle vecchiette o tira via lo sgabello da sotto di loro, non ha nulla della struggente bellezza celtica; il suo è il gioco da cavalli del mondo invisibile. Forse è qualche degenerata eredità della vita inglese a rendere i fantasmi americani tanto ghiotti di scherzi pratici del tutto indegni. Ma questa unione del mistero con la farsa è una nota degli inglesi medievali. Il dramma è l’ultimo barlume della Merrie England, quel paese lontano ma splendente e affatto indubitabile. Sarebbe invero difficile definire in che cosa risiedesse la peculiare verità della frase «merrie England», benché una qualche concezione di essa sia del tutto necessaria alla comprensione di <A Midsummer Night’s Dream>. In alcuni casi almeno, si può dire che risieda in questo: che gli inglesi del Medioevo e del Rinascimento, diversamente dall’Inghilterra d’oggi, sapevano concepire l’idea di un allegro soprannaturalismo. In mezzo a tutta la grande opera del Puritanesimo, l’atto d’accusa che lo condanna consiste in un fatto: che vi fu una sola, fra le favole della cristianità, che esso conservò e rinnovò, e fu la credenza nella stregoneria. Gettò via la superstizione generosa e salubre, approvò soltanto ciò che era morboso e pericoloso. Nel loro trattamento della grande fiaba nazionale del bene e del male, i Puritani uccisero San Giorgio ma conservarono accuratamente il Drago. E questa tradizione secentesca di trattare la vita psichica giace ancora come una grande ombra sull’Inghilterra e sull’America, sicché, se gettiamo uno sguardo a un romanzo sull’occultismo, possiamo esser perfettamente certi che tratti di un destino triste o malvagio. Qualunque altra cosa ci aspettiamo, di certo non dovremmo mai aspettarci di trovarvi spiriti come quelli di