A Midsummer Night

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A Midsummer Nights DreamArts Illusory
Sacrifice

• James L. Calderwood
• Presented by Marc

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Introduction (1)

• Like Romeo and Juliet and Loves Labours Lost,
  the placement of temporary disorder within a
  protective envelope of art and social order that
  seals all issues at the end occurs also in A
  Midsummer Nights Dream.
• The disparate world of nobles, workmen, and
  fairies are united in festivity, and dissention
  and alienation fade into wisps of half-remembered
  dreams. Maritally, socially, artistically, the
  knot is tied.
• The Theseus principle of rational order seems at
  the end to be fully confirmed everybody gets
  home free, and a spirit of complacency is in the
  ascendant.

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Introduction (2)

• Concord / discord reconciliation b/w reason and
  imagination, art reality
• Man / woman Theseus / Oberon rights an imbalance
  in nature, compelling Hippolyta / Titania to be
  true to her sex
• Final Union b/w reason and imagination
• The imaginative transformation that Oberon
  wrought in the forest Theseus confirms in the
  palace and temple

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Thesis Statement

• Calderwood is concerned about metadrama, which
  specializes in its own forms of dissolution and
  transformation. In the epilogue, Puck tells the
  audience that if they like they can reverse the
  creative movement from dream to art. Pucks
  suggestion confirms an interchangeability of
  dream and drama.

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Metadrama

• Analogy
• 1. actual play (Bottoms) / metaphoric play
  
• (Oberons)
• 2. Theseus (patronizing remark) / Oberon
• (interior dramatist) (Shakespeare)
• 3. breakdown of sexual relationships
• ? dissolving past identity (Helena /
  Hermia)
• 4. Pyramus and Thisbe (reality destroys the
  
• dramatic fiction) / forest drama (digests
  reality)

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Audience

• Audiences contribution Theseus having said that
  the workmens play can be amended by imagination.
  Hippolyta replies, It must be your imagination
  then, and not theirs.
• Dramatic beauty and value are born of the
  intercourse b/w the various imaginations of
  dramatist, actors, and audience.
• The journey into the forest is a journey both
  outward to external nature and inward to human
  nature, both of which coalesce benevolently in
  the final concord of this discord.

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Language

• Bottoms lacking the midwife of speech dies
  aborning and dream remains merely dream ?
  Shakespeare has translated the incommunicable
  subjective dimension of human experience into
  external dramatic form where it becomes publicly
  available.
• The poets proper task is to wed the audience to
  itself through the ceremony of dramatic art, not
  to stand himself before the alter.

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Communion

• Oberons invisibility to Theseus, though what
  Oberon has performed in the forest Theseus
  accepts in Athens. (the experience of destruction
  and irrationality and creativity and imagination)
• Theseus denial of fairy toys and lovers
  dismissal of their forest drama as mere dream
  allow themselves the gratification of feeling
  that the will of man is by his reason swayed
  (2.2.115) ? truths exposure from the dramatic
  dream passes out of drama and dream into the real
  world of Athens that denies its relevance

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Conclusion

• Shakespeare regards lingering memory as very
  shadowy indeed, a memory that perhaps works most
  when least we know it. Though the aesthetic
  experience may exercise royal authority in the
  ordinary world, his whole play suggests that it
  does not enter that world with pageantry but
  rather with the gamesomeness of Oberons tripping
  fairies, for the final image of the assimilation
  of art to reality and of imagination into reason
  while Puck offers to the audience the play
  itself, to dissolve, as the lovers did their
  experience, into a vision no more yielding but a
  dream.