Teaching the Dream, sweet and bitter

Do you remember your first Shakespeare? Might it have been A Midsummer Night’s Dream? It is for many. But as scholar Gail Kern Paster writes the comedy isn’t just about fairies and young love. For today’s students and their teachers—audiences, too—the 400-year-old play speaks to a wide range of contemporary issues. Those connections can lead to Midsummer’s greatest gift: “to affirm the necessary work of imagination and illusion not only in our loves but also in our lives.”

Paster’s essay appears in The Folger Guide to Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which published today along with a guide to Othello. It joins earlier guides for Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare offer educators fresh insights and innovative tools for teaching some of Shakespeare’s most frequently taught plays.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often the Shakespeare play first taught to students because it is thought to be a light-hearted confection, a romantic comedy about fairies, lovers, and amateur actors who lose themselves temporarily in the woods overnight. A closer look at the play’s language and action, however, reveals a significant amount of cruelty, violence, bullying, and even hints of sexual perversion that threaten to derail any joyful response to its lyricism, physical comedy, and the multiple weddings at its conclusion. As we will see in this essay, the challenge and the delight in thinking about Midsummer Night’s Dream is to find its comic beauty precisely in the harmonious union of opposites—between high and low, dark and light, violent and tender, painful and pleasurable, serious and trivial, realistic and fanciful. All these qualities Shakespeare renders symbolically in the iconic central image of fairy queen Titania enfolding the ass-headed Bottom the weaver in her arms.

Every generation of teachers and students finds its own way into Shakespeare’s plays. His greatest gift to us may be that each play offers a story-world highly particularized in time, place, characters, and actions, inviting us to lose and find ourselves within its rich environs. For students, the setting and characters of Midsummer Night’s Dream may be obscure. How can teachers help them find pathways into the heart of this 400-year-old play, set in ancient Athens, filled with unfamiliar legendary figures (Theseus and Hippolyta); fairy royalty (Titania and Oberon) quarreling over custody of a foster child whom we never see; four lovers who bully and insult each other as they chase around the woods; and unsophisticated working men whose livelihoods as bellows-mender, tinker, and joiner our students can know little about and whose intentions to act in a tragedy seem absurd—if not irrelevant? How, in short, should we think about—and teach—Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 21st century?

The task for the teacher—in this as in so many other complex texts—is to find the big ideas in the telling details. The most obvious connection may be a generational link to the young lovers Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius, allowing students to track their romantic misunderstandings and their deep disconnect from the world of their elders. But students also care a lot about issues such as the environment, gender equality, and social justice. Is there a pathway into Midsummer Night’s Dream through those concerns, too? I believe the answer is yes, as long as we make sure not to look at the action and language of Midsummer Night’s Dream through a protective lens denying the play’s cruelty—Oberon’s desire to humiliate his wife by making her foolishly fall in love and the abusive, even racist language with which the lovers taunt each other as they fall suddenly in and out of love. We need to emphasize the woods as a powerful and fickle environment; remember the human and animal suffering caused by the fairies’ quarrel; think about the Indian boy as the absent center of a gender struggle; and figure out the thematic relevance of bumbling amateur theatricals to the rest of the play.

Theseus weds Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, after (and presumably because) he has defeated her in battle. “I wooed thee with my sword / And won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.17-18), he tells her in a paradoxical statement that raises questions about Hippolyta’s consent to her marriage and her onstage demeanor. Many Elizabethans would have read about the self-governing society of warrior women in Greek mythology in Plutarch’s “Life of Theseus.” They might have believed that a society of warrior women existed in the New World because Spanish conquistadors reported fighting battles where indigenous women fought alongside men. (This is why the region was named Amazonia!)

In Theseus’ brief mention of his victory, Shakespeare quickly moves past Hippolyta’s status as POW fiancée. (Productions rarely highlight it.) But in the play’s opening predicament, the threat to another marriageable woman is presented in significant detail. A formal complaint is brought to Theseus by Egeus, whose daughter Hermia has refused to marry the father’s choice, Demetrius. A son or daughter’s rebellion is a familiar opening gambit in comedy (and sometimes in tragedy, if we think about Romeo and Juliet, composed close in time to Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Othello). But Hermia is faced with dire consequences for disobedience—a choice between cloistered life in a convent “as a barren sister” (74) or state execution. (No wonder her lover Lysander proposes that they leave Athens instead.)

It is important to take the father’s appeal to law seriously rather than as a conventional device for moving the play’s action from Athens to the fairy-haunted woods. Doing so has the advantage of linking Hermia’s plight to that of young women in traditional societies today who may face jail, corporal punishment, or death at the hands of their families or governments for refusing to accept their parents’ choice in an arranged marriage. Theseus takes a tough line on paternal power, telling Hermia, “To you your father should be as a god” (1.1.48). He says he is unable to “extenuate” (122) the law of Athens. Hermia’s stubborn choice of Lysander, then, asserts her right as an individual to self-determination and subjective preference: “I would my father looked but with my eyes” (1.1.58). Significantly, this threat against Hermia echoes the terms of Hippolyta’s defeat and anticipates the quarrel of Oberon and Titania. So, it is telling—perhaps even Shakespeare’s buried stage direction to the actress—that Theseus asks Hippolyta about her mood as they exit the stage, “What cheer, my love?” (124). No less astonishing, Lysander asks Hermia, “Why is your cheek so pale?” (130). These questions may be the first sign that we should pay attention not only to gender difference and the alignment of state power with fathers, but to a certain obtuseness in these men about how the women they love might react to societal constraints in freely choosing whom to love and how to live. It is as if these men do not acknowledge the power differential so decidedly in their favor.

About the author

Gail Kern Paster was Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, from 2002 until 2011. Until January 2018, she also served as editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the leading scholarly journal devoted to Shakespeare. She earned a BA, magna cum laude, at Smith College and a PhD in English Renaissance Literature at Yale University. From 1974 to 2002, she was a Professor of English at George Washington University. She has won many national fellowships and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She was named to the Queen’s Honours List as a Commander of the British Empire in May 2011. The author of numerous scholarly articles and three books on Shakespeare and the drama of his time, she also lectures nationally and internationally. Dr. Paster has been a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and served as its president in 2003. She is a member of the governing board of the Newberry Library in Chicago and served on the Folger board from 2012–2022.