Shakespeare

There are three plays of Shakespeare that seem to be without a primary “source”: Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All of them are highly patterned, in a manner that seems intrinsic to the English imagination;² they are all carefully and symmetrically structured, all touched by mystery or enchantment – two of them have elements of the supernatural – and all include dramatic entertainments within their overall structure as if in parody of the somewhat artificial plots. They are a window into Shakespeare’s art and thus, perhaps, into the English imagination itself. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is his first great contemplation of drama itself, so fresh and novel an art that it could elicit extremes of wonder and surprise. Anything might be achieved within it.

Like all Shakespeare’s plays of this period A Midsummer Night’s Dream is composed in a highly wrought and polished English, where lyrical grace is not incompatible with a hundred different rhetorical “schemes.” The play is suffused with the atmosphere of dream, as its title suggests, and yet it is a magnificent piece of theatre. The characters sleep upon the stage, and when they awake they find themselves transformed. What is the connection between the theatre and the dream? In dreams nothing is real, nothing is burdened with responsibility, nothing has meaning. This mimics Shakespeare’s attitude towards the drama itself. In plays, and in dreams, problems are expressed and resolved by means other than rational intelligence. It has often been said that a sense of the mystery of life is intrinsic to tragedy. But it is also part of Shakespearian comedy, where the irrational and the penumbral are of more consequence than that which is known or understood. The motives and impulses of his creations are not governed by the laws of reason or of conscience but by shape-shifting fancy and intuition.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the occasion, too, for Theseus’s remarks upon the imagination itself when he suggests (1707-8) that:

The lunatick, the louer, and the Poet

Are of imagination all compact.

It is all the more interesting on the assumption that Shakespeare himself played the part of Theseus. It is doubly interesting when an examination of the text reveals that the lines upon the imagination were added later, in the margins of his papers, as a kind of after-thought. We might, then, fruitfully speculate upon the nature of Shakespeare’s imagination.

CHAPTER 44 What Zale, What furie, Hath Inspirde Thee Now?

His was in part a bookish imagination. There are times when he had the sources open beside him, and transcribed passages almost line for line; yet somehow, in the alchemy of his imagination, all seems changed. Words and cadences, when they pass through the medium of Shakespeare, are charged with superabundant life. To work on existing material – to pull out its associations and implications – was profoundly congenial to him. That is why he was prepared to revise his own work, as well as that of other dramatists, in the course of his professional career.

On occasions he read several books on the same topic, and their texts combined somewhere within him to create a new reality. There are times when he relied upon books rather than upon his own immediate experience. In his creation of the trickster in The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus, he borrowed from one of Robert Greene’s urban pamphlets, Second Cony-Catching, rather than employing his own observations of city life. He had learnt in his schooldays that one of the first characteristics of invention was imitation, and he was an imitator of genius. He possessed a most retentive memory as well, and could summon up phrases and quotations from his childhood reading; he could effortlessly revert to outworn dramatic or rhetorical styles.

He worked on words, not necessarily on thoughts or images. Words elicited more words from him in an act of sympathetic magic. But then one word called forth another word of quite opposite intent. In the second part of Henry IV there is just such a transition (412-14):

JUSTICE: There is not a white haire in your face, but should haue his effect of grauity.

FALSTAFF: His effect of grauy, grauie, grauie.