With its woodland setting, its noble protagonists, and its fairies, it can be deemed wholly Shakespearian; this is the “sweet Shakespeare” of contemporaneous discourse, the Shakespeare of burlesque humour and lyricism and dream. All of his reading, of Chaucer and of Ovid, of Seneca and of Marlowe, of Lyly and of Spenser, combines to create an enchanted landscape — where the mythical Theseus and Hippolyta celebrate their marriage, where Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, squabble over the possession of a changeling child, where Bottom and his country players put on an entertainment, and where star-crossed lovers are allowed at the close to fall into one another’s arms. The moon is the mistress of these proceedings, and all within her silver empire are touched by mystery. It is a play of patterns and of symmetries, of music and of harmony restored. One of its great delights lies within the formality and fluency of its design.
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.
The collocation of gravity and gravy amply testifies to the mood of the play and, more importantly, the sensibility of Shakespeare. On an earlier occasion he was reading Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, in preparation for Titus Andronicus, and read the line “desyrde his presence too thentent”; the last word became transmogrified into “the Thracian Tyrant in his Tent” (138). A particular word seems to elicit from him a cluster of words, in this case alliterative; the connection is often one of sound rather than of sense. Geese are constantly associated with disease, the eagle with the weasel. There are other strange synaptic leaps. Turkeys and pistols are often associated, no doubt because of the common linkage with cock. For some reason he connects peacocks with fish and with lice in the same compound of images. On twelve occasions the word “hum” is intimately connected with death, as in Othello (2936-7):
DESDEMONA: If you say so, I hope you will not kill me.
OTHELLO: Hum.
And in Cymbeline (1760-1):
CLOTEN: Humh.
PISANIO: He write to my Lord she’s dead.
It is as if language was muttering to itself.
Yet words flew so freely from him that he distrusted them; on many occasions he revealed suspicions about their duplicity and inauthenticity. There were times, even, when fluency disgusted him. The finest poetry may be feigning; the oaths pledged on stage may be hypocritical. “Alas, I tooke greate paines to studie it,” Viola says in Twelfth Night (471—3), “and ’tis Poeticall.” “It is the more like to be feigned,” Olivia replies, “I pray you keep it in.” That is perhaps why there are many plays in which Shakespeare emphasised the artificiality and unreality of his drama; his narratives were meant to be improbable, even impossible.
It seems likely, also, that he did not know what he was writing until he had written it. He discovered his meaning only after he had conceived it in words. There is a wonderful remark of Coleridge’s in Table Talk of 7 April, 1833, that “in Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.” He explored the consequences of his words by seeing how a metaphor or an image might emerge from them and take on its own life; how one word would by assonance or alliteration suggest another; how the cadence of a sentence or a verse would curve in one direction rather than another. The most perceptive account of Shakespeare’s method occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in a late eighteenth-century treatise. In A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, published in 1794, Walter Whiter remarks on the power of association that leads Shakespeare to link words and ideas “by a principle of union unperceived by himself, and independent of the subject to which they are applied.” He does not know what guides his hand, in other words, or what force impels him. The meaning is somehow innate within the words themselves.