Midsummer Night

1
Midsummer Nights Dream 2

• Ear hath not seen, eye hath not heard

2
Bottoms dream

• Clip from video

3
Bottoms dream

• The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man
  hath not seen, mans hand is not able to taste,
  his tongue to conceive, not his heart to report,
  what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to
  write a ballet ballad of this dream. It shall
  be called Bottoms dream because it hath no
  bottom.

4
Bottom as hero of the imagination

• His enthusiasm (clip from Peter Hall film)
• Hed play all parts
• His acceptance of fairy world, including
  Titanias love.
• He hath simply the best wit of any handicraft
  man in Athens.

5
Bs Solutions to all the dramatic problems, III,
1

• Prologue to explain Pyramus suicide.
• Im not who I say I am,
• The lion problem.
• Moonlight in the chamber.
• Wall
• Bottoms synaesthesia V, 1, 192ff. A mistake
  of course, but one that gets to the heart of
  theater?

6
Context for Bottoms synaesthesia

• In 1580s a pamphlet war over theater
• Puritans attack theater as idolatrous
• Theater is sucked out the devils tits to nourish
  us in heathenry, idolatry and sin (Philip
  Stubbes, 1583).
• Why idolatrous?
• Second commandment make no graven image.
• Theater as graven image.
• Iconoclasm literal of the Reformation

7
Culture war against theater

• Biblical theater of Shakespeares boyhood ended
  in 1570s 1579 last performance of Coventry
  Corpus Christi play.
• But even non-religious theater attacked as
  idolatrous.
• Prynnes Histriomastix of 1633 the scourge of
  the actors
• 1642 all theaters closed for 18 years of Puritan
  regime.

8
Theaters appeal to eye, all the senses

• For the eye, besides the beauty of the
  playhouses and the stages, the playwright
  sendeth in garish apparel, masks, vaulting,
  tumbling, dancing of jigs, galiards, morrises,
  hobbyhorses, showing of juggling tricks,
  nothing forgot that might serve to set out the
  matter with pomp, or rather the beholders with
  variety of pleasure. Stephen Gosson

9
A backhanded compliment to theater

• There commeth much evil in at the ears, but more
  at the eyes by these two open windows, death
  breaketh into the soul. Nothing entereth into
  the memory more effectually than that which
  commeth by seeing. Things heard do lightly pass
  away, but the tokens of that which we have seen .
  . . stick fast in us whether we will or no.
  Anthony Munday, 1580.

10
The phenomenology of theater

• seeing voices, hearing faces.
• The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the
  crowd.
• Presence theater bodies forth its fictions.
• Theater colonizes reality.
• Falstaffs cushion.

11
Bottoms dream and vision of theater

• St. Paul But as it is written, eye hath not
  seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into
  the heart of man, the things that God hath
  prepared for them that love him. (1 Corinthians
  29).
• Shakespeare teasing the Puritans?
• Or expressing a comic, quasi-religious faith in
  theater?

12
Pyramus and Thisbe and the invention of theater

• Yes, a bad play, but a really good bad play?
• A play thats actually inventing theater, as
  children do when they decide to put on a play.
• Contrast the comments of the court party V,
  237ff, 305ff.
• Recall Theseus The best in this kind are but
  shadows, And the worst no worse if imagination
  mend them. Hippolytas answer is the real point
  well duh!

13
The irony of the lovers irony?

• We watch Pyramis and Thisbe through the lovers,
  mediated by their witty commentary . . .
• . . . After weve watched their comedy in the
  forest, Puck their unseen director, playwright.
• Their dream or nightmare had them move
  through the various permutations, the geometry,
  of love relationships.
• From our perspective, were they any less comic
  than Quinces company?

14
Helenas fantasy

• She imagines that shes caught in a play III, 2,
  145ff.
• Hermia too part of this conspiracy ll. 192ff.
• Interrupted sisterhood interrupted childhood
  now plunges her into an unwilling role.
• Persevere, counterfeit sad looks,/ Make mouths
  when I turn my back,/ Wink at each other, hold
  the sweet jest up.
• A general fantasy of adolescence?

15

• Bottom seems the only one who manages a
  transition from reality into the dream world of
  fairies, then emerging back to reality.
• He also manages the various incongruities, a
  classical tragedy that concludes with a
  Bergomask dance, a love affair with the queen of
  the fairies and memories of a donkeys head.
• Bottom the weaver. After all this, can he go
  back to mere weaving?

16
The audiences complicity

• In the epilogue, Puck makes the play our dream.
  Its evanescent, inconsequential, but ours.
• If you pardon this strange, weird play, the
  Lord Chamberlains Men will mend.
• So our applause makes us complicit with Puck,
  friends with his mischievous, mildly malicious
  power.