midsummer nights dream
by Chesterton · Cluster: Artist and Society · Truth · Regency Georgian England
Abstract
Chesterton’s literary-critical essay on Shakespeare’s comedy, praising its ‘mysticism of happiness’, the dream-atmosphere of the enchanted wood, the greatness of the fool Bottom, and its evocation of Merrie England.
Testo / Text
Parti / Parts
Connections
Topoi: Sleeper Awakes
Archetypes: Fool, Trickster Motifs: Dreams, Supernatural, Fog and Smoke, Night Themes & Concepts: Joy, Imagination, Appearance vs Reality, Greatness, Common Man, Nationalism and Patriotism Forms & Genres: Literary Criticism, Essay, Comedy, Nonfiction Historical References: Elizabethan England, Puritanism Settings: Enchanted Wood (2), Medieval England (2), Rural England Characters: Hamlet, Bottom, Puck, Theseus
Testo integrale / Full text
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