Three Flowers, Two Cures
Three people in this play get hit with a love potion, and only two of them ever get cured.
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has four young lovers, a quarrelling fairy king and queen, and six workmen rehearsing a play. I’ll take them in order and stop four times to write down who loves whom. The four snapshots show exactly where the mix-up happens, and which person is never fixed.
Fair warning: this summary spoils the whole play, ending included. I’m reading the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one thousand five hundred fourteen, in five acts.
Snapshot One: Athens
The play opens in Athens, four days before the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Egeus storms in with a complaint about his daughter Hermia. He has promised her to Demetrius, but she loves Lysander. Egeus asks for the ancient privilege of Athens: if she refuses, she may be put to death.
Theseus, who says he won his own bride with his sword, says the law of Athens cannot be softened. He gives her three options. Marry Demetrius, die, or live as a nun, chanting hymns to the cold moon. She has until the next new moon.
So here is snapshot one. Lysander loves Hermia, and Hermia loves Lysander. Demetrius loves Hermia too. And Helena, Hermia’s old friend, loves Demetrius, who once courted her, according to Lysander. Two of the four loves are returned. The other two are not.
Lysander has a plan. They will slip out of Athens tomorrow night and meet in the wood, then go to his widowed aunt, seven leagues away, where Athenian law can’t reach. Hermia swears to be there. Helena, hurt and hopeful, decides to tell Demetrius, so that he will follow, and she will at least see him.
Meanwhile, six workmen meet to cast a play for the wedding. Peter Quince hands out parts. Bottom the weaver, Pyramus. Flute, Thisbe. Snug, the lion. Bottom wants every part, including the lion, and promises to roar as gently as a nightingale.
The Fairy Quarrel
In the wood, we meet the other couple. Oberon, king of the fairies, and Titania, his queen, are not speaking. The reason is a boy. Titania has the child of a mortal friend, who died, and she won’t give him up. Oberon wants him as his page.
Titania blames their quarrel for the strange weather: fogs, flooded fields, rotting corn, and seasons that no longer know which is which. She says the mother was a votaress of her order, and she raises the boy for her sake.
The two accuse each other of loving Theseus and Hippolyta on the side, which tells you how long they have been fighting. Oberon decides to get the boy by trickery. He sends his servant Puck, also called Robin Goodfellow, to fetch a little flower, called love-in-idleness. Its juice on sleeping eyelids will make the sleeper madly dote on the next living creature they see. Puck says he can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.
While he waits, Oberon overhears Demetrius brush off Helena in the wood. She says she is his spaniel. Oberon feels sorry for her and tells Puck to anoint the eyes of an Athenian man in Athenian clothes, but only when the next thing he sees is the lady.
Snapshot Two: Puck’s Mistake
Oberon drips the juice into sleeping Titania’s eyes. Nearby, Lysander and Hermia lie down to rest, a little apart, because Hermia insists on it. Puck finds them, sees Athenian clothes, and takes the lone man on the dirt for the cruel one Oberon described. He anoints Lysander.
Helena stumbles on him, wakes him, and Lysander falls for her on the spot. He insults Hermia, and runs after Helena. Hermia wakes alone from a dream of a serpent eating her heart.
Snapshot two: Lysander loves Helena. Hermia loves Lysander, who doesn’t love her. Demetrius still loves Hermia. Helena loves Demetrius. Nobody’s feelings have lined up, and Helena thinks Lysander is mocking her.
The Ass’s Head
Elsewhere in the wood, the workmen rehearse. Bottom worries the ladies will be frightened by the sword and the lion, so he suggests a prologue explaining that he is not really Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. Puck is watching.
When Bottom steps out of sight, Puck gives him an ass’s head. His friends flee. Quince says, Bless thee, Bottom, thou art translated. Bottom decides they’re playing a trick, and says he will walk up and down and sing so they hear he is not afraid. The singing wakes Titania, and the first thing she sees is a weaver with the head of an ass.
She falls in love at once and calls four fairies, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed, to wait on him. Bottom greets each one with polite questions about their families. Later, when she asks what he wants to eat, he says a peck of provender, and some good dry oats.
Snapshot Three: Everyone Loves Helena
Puck reports the joke to Oberon, who is delighted, until he learns that Puck anointed the wrong man. Oberon sends Puck to fetch Helena, and charms Demetrius’s eyes himself.
When Demetrius wakes, he sees Helena, and loves her, with Lysander already begging for her too. Helena is certain they’re mocking her together. She reminds Hermia of their school days, two girls sewing one flower on one sampler, like a double cherry. Hermia arrives and can’t understand why Lysander is saying he hates her. He says the hate he bore her made him leave her.
Snapshot three: both men love Helena, Helena loves Demetrius but believes it’s a joke, and Hermia, who has done nothing, is loved by no one. The two friends who once shared a sampler and one song end up trading insults. Helena calls her a vixen, and Lysander calls Hermia a dwarf.
The men go off to fight. Oberon tells Puck to cover the night with fog and lead them astray, imitating each man’s voice, until they fall asleep. Puck herds all four lovers into one spot. Then he squeezes a second herb into Lysander’s eye, and promises that Jack shall have Jill.
Snapshot Four: The Cure That Isn’t
Morning. Oberon has gotten his boy, so he takes the spell off Titania. She wakes, remembers an ass, and says how her eyes loathe him. Puck removes the head, and Bottom is left asleep.
Theseus finds the four sleeping lovers while out hunting. Hippolyta has just praised the sound of his hounds as such sweet thunder. Lysander explains that they ran away. Egeus demands the law. Then Demetrius speaks. He says his love for Hermia has melted like snow, and that his whole heart now belongs to Helena, to whom he was betrothed before he ever saw Hermia. Theseus overrules Egeus, and the couples will be married in the temple with him.
Now snapshot four. Lysander loves Hermia again, because Puck lifted it. Hermia loves Lysander. Helena loves Demetrius. And Demetrius loves Helena, but nobody ever lifts the flower from his eyes. Count the flowers: Titania, Lysander, Demetrius, three. Count the cures: Titania, Lysander, two.
In my reading, that’s the play’s quiet joke. The love that fixes everything is the one the magic never removes. Demetrius himself says, by some power it is.
Bottom wakes up and declares he has had a most rare vision. He says man is but an ass if he goes about to explain this dream, and decides to have a ballad written, called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom. He races back to Quince and his friends, who had given him up for lost, and tells them the Duke has dined and their play is preferred. His only orders: clean linen for Thisbe, no onions or garlic, and no trimming the lion’s nails.
The Play Within the Play
In the last act, Theseus is told the lovers’ story and doesn’t believe it. Lovers and madmen, he says, have seething brains, and the lunatic, the lover and the poet are all made of imagination. Then he asks how to fill the long hours before bed. His master of revels lists four, and Theseus picks the one called a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe, very tragical mirth.
The workmen perform. The Prologue gets his punctuation backwards, and Lysander says he rode it like a rough colt. Snout plays Wall, holding up his fingers for the chink. Another man is Moonshine, with a lantern, a thorn bush and a dog. Snug, as the lion, announces that he is only Snug the joiner. Bottom dies as Pyramus, and the noble audience heckles every line. Hippolyta says it is the silliest stuff she has ever heard. Theseus says the best of this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.
After the play, the couples go to bed. Oberon and Titania bless the house. And Puck speaks to us: if we shadows have offended, think but this, that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.
So which was the dream? I counted the word dream and its plural across the five acts, and I get sixteen. The characters keep reaching for it as the only word that fits. My question for you: should Demetrius have been cured too? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and tap like if the ledger helped.
