Tag Archives: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

What inspired the works of Shakespeare? 

Academics who haven’t examined the authorship question blindly accept the idea that Shakespeare was a professional, writing for money.  That everything defies this interpretation, from the nature of the plays themselves to the obvious fact that the author paid very little attention, if any, to getting them published, doesn’t bother the “experts” because they don’t really care who wrote the plays.  They can’t state it openly, but all but a few of these belong to the camp of: “We have the plays, what does it matter who wrote them?”

If they really cared they’d object to the terrible job that the pop historians do with his biography.  If all the Directors of all their PhD committees were agreed that the author was Mickey Mouse, that were sufficient to have them equally convinced that Mickey was the Man, and any other suggestion “preposterous.”

But to those who’ve paid some attention to the matter, those who know that the idea that the plays were written by a theater professional is absurd because when the first versions of these plays were being written, there was no professional theater in England.  You can’t call the earliest of the Early Modern playwrights professionals any more than you can call the Wright brothers professional aviation engineers. 

It’s easy enough to understand what inspired the designs of the first airplanes, but, if not to make money, what was the purpose behind these early plays?  Were they all written simply to entertain, as the orthodox would have it, was there a different purpose for each play?  Or were there, perhaps, categories of purpose?

Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s by Henry VIII, a piece of royal presumption that emptied, almost at a stroke, the oldest and most beautiful buildings in England of their religious art and social functions, the Reformation ushered in by his son’s Protestant ministers removed whatever was left of all that was dramatic or entertaining in the Church Service. 

Is it any surprise that some of these buildings, or the lands on which they stood, metamorphosed into the theaters that took the place of the Church and its Service in the lives of their former parishoners?  Both of the first two commercial stages in London, built in 1576, were in Liberties, areas more or less under the jurisdiction of the Crown, not the City, areas that for centuries had been administered by the Church.  Blackfriars theater was in a section of the old Dominican monastery in the Liberty of Blackfriars, while Burbage’s public theater took the place of what was formerly the priory of Holywell in the Liberty of Norton Folgate. 

Just as the land and the buildings that were once religious in nature turned into theaters, so the plays performed in them took the place of what had been religious observances.  The winter holiday plays took place on Christmas, Innocent’s Day, Twelfth Night (Epiphany), February 2nd (Candlemas). The last taking place on or around February 6, “Fat Tuesday” (Shrovetide), the last big party before Ash Wednesday and the start of the 40-day period of Lenten abstinence.  The series of spring holidays associated in the Church calendar with Easter, banned by the Reformation, slipped back into the ancient May Day festivities, which ended with the summer solstice on June 24th, the day after Midsummer’s Eve (the Feast of St. John the Baptist).

The Reformation sweeps clean

As Oxford turned from boy to man, the great country festivals that formerly “brought in the May” with garlands of flowers, Maypoles, Church Ales, and lovers trysts in the woods were vanishing.  Gone were the solemn processionals that followed the priest bearing the cross through the newly ploughed fields and around the boundaries of the town, the clergy in their gold and white vestments tossing incense on the breeze and intoning prayers in the beautiful language that the Lord chose for His Word.  Gone were the pranksters, the minstrels, the Morris dancers, the St. George and the Dragons, the Robin Hood and Maid Marions, the Green Man and the Hobby Horse, the drinking, the feasting, and the noisy chivarees.

But luckily for literature, Oxford had spent the early years of his childhood in the upper Thames valley , one of the last areas where there is evidence that some of these ancient “merrymaking” rituals still held sway (Hutton 98-9).  Though condemned by Edward VI, during de Vere’s years in the Smith household at Ankerwyke, it seems the old ways had one final fling under Catholic Mary. 

As new green life began breaking through the dead wood of the old winter, Edward would have experienced the gradual buildup of excitement among the estate workers at Smith’s and in the rural community beyond as folk prepared for their own annual outpouring of Spring energies against the backdrop of the still great Forest of Windsor.  In the rush of events, most of the community that surrounded the town of Old Windsor taking part, the crowds that filled the streets moved in a single mind towards those peak moments, frightening or hilarious, that would serve for entertainment  at kitchen supper tables for months to come. 

For the boy it would have been the equivalent of what a kid from a small American town in the 19th century experienced when the circus came through in the spring, only in Edward’s case the circus was created by the townsfolk themselves, with maybe a few professional entertainers in to take advantage of the crowds and excitement.  If he did get to participate it would probably have been through the offices of one of the estate workers, since Smith was not one to enjoy such proceedings, at least so he claimed, nor would he have have approved  of anything that might threaten the health or morals of his young charge. If we’re right in our belief that Friar Lawrence was to Romeo as Smith was to Oxford, he may simply (remembering his own childhood) have looked the other way.

No more cakes and ale 

With Elizabeth on the throne and the Reformers again in control, these rituals began to dissappear. What had originally been an effort to insure the propagation of the species back in the days of the hunter-gatherers, many centuries later transformed by the Middle Ages into a Courtly Love ritual honoring the creational forces of Desire, was now seen by the Reformation as a licentious return to pagan demon worship. 

Other factors were involved as well.  During a period of financial stresses, funds must be spent on more immediate needs.  Anything that smacked of Catholic ritual came to be seen in an increasingly dark light.  The local patrons: merchants, squires and lords, who had formerly sponsored entertainments, withdrew their support.  As the Church calendar, the framework for the social lives of the people for centuries, shrank to a few half-hearted observances, a great vacuum developed in the lives of the English people. 

It was this vacuum that Oxford was born to fill.  Out of his childhood memories of these festivities came the grand chivaree that was Taming of the Shrew, came the antics of Autolycus inThe Winter’s Tale, the Spanish maze of The Tempest, the final “merry” act of Much Ado.  Out of time spent in the great forest of Windsor came Falstaff transformed into Herne the Hunter, the ponderings of Jaques on the sorrows of the wounded deer, the love poems tacked on trees by Orlando and Rosalind, and most beloved of all, the magical adventures of the lovers, the rude mechanicals, and the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Most of Oxford’s early plays were “comedies” (early versions of today’s English pantomime) or wedding plays (most of the cast gets married at the end) written for the Court or for members of the Court.  Though less assiduously, following his banishment in 1581, and even less after his loss of status c.1589, still Oxford would continue to write for his community throughout his life, his last big production being the nine plays he rewrote for the festivities surrounding the marriage of his youngest daughter, Susan Vere, to the King’s favorite, the Earl of Montgomery, over the winter holidsays of 1604/05. (Yes, I know he was supposed to be dead, but I believe he was only taking one final retreat into the privacy that, as a writer, he had fought so hard to maintain all his life.)

All but a few of these Court plays were written for the winter holidays and for weddings of those members of the Court community that were his particular friends or patrons.  Taming of the Shrewwas written for the 1579 wedding of Lord Strange (Petruchio) to Alice Spencer (Kate).  A version ofThe Tempest was produced for the wedding of his daughter, Elizabeth Vere (Miranda), to the Earl of Derby (Ferdinand).  And A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written (or rewritten) for the wedding of his first love, Mary Browne, now the Countess of Southampton (Hippolyta) to the aging courtier, Sir Thomas Heneage (Theseus), May 2, 1594 (See Roger Stritmatter’s Dreame).    

Although the title of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would seem to place it on the 23rd or 24th of June, that title may come from a later production, for the text itself places it on May Day.  Either date works for the play, since both of these moments (plus Valentine’s Day) grew out of prehistoric fertility rituals that were bound to the seasonal turning points of the year.  May Day saw the first thrust of summer flowers woven into wreaths, hair dressings, and garlands, worn by youths as well as girls.  Girls, older boys, and unmarried women dressed all in white and festooned their garments with colorful ribbons (as in the costumes still worn today by Morris dancers).  Churches and graves were decorated with bouquets and wreaths. 

The ritual of circling the Maypole brought the young men and women of the village together, arbitrarily separating them into couples as in a modern circle dance mixer.  The King and Queen of the May, the prettiest village girl and most admired young man were festooned with flower garlands, carted around the village, and followed by all the village youth while their elders feasted, drank deep, and laughed long.  And if some of the couples slipped off into the woods, à la the lovers in Dreame, most looked the other way.  Everyone that is but their own particular Egeus andMalvolio whose Reformation principles would eventually overwhelm the natural human need for such outlets, at least on this community level.

“For O the Hobby Horse is forgot”

Whether Oxford had seen all of these lost elements of English medieval merrymaking is not the point.  Surely he saw some of them.  Shakespeare’s lament strongly suggests that this was something he knew from personal experience, for a description alone would not have called forth this heartfelt cry, not once, but twice, once in Love’s Labours Lost (Act III) and again in Hamlet (Act III Scene 2).

The role of the Hobby Horse, a man in the costume of a horse ––clearly a replacement for a real animal from an earlier ritual––was to lead the procession of costumed revelers, the mummers’ parade, and as he went, charging individuals in the crowd to send the watching herd of women and children shrieking.  

But beyond raising the excitement level, he was not interested in these innocents. For Hobby’s purpose was to single out and make a spectacle of persons who were in bad with their neighbors.  When he charged the local usurious money-lender, the drunken father, or the unfaithful wife, everyone who knew why he was attacking them (or their closed door), reacted with roars of approval, the worse the reputation, the louder the roars.  Shame is a powerful adjudicator.   His was a the kind of rough community justice that obviated the need for the expensive and time-consuming passion for Dickensian litigation that would come to replace it.  It may also have prevented arson, bloody street fights, and murders.

El Cinco de Mayo

Although the May games and the Hobby Horses of the centuries before the Reformation are lost in the mists of Time, the moment itself is not, for the early days of May are still the particular moment of the year when people will rise as one to protest the offenses of authority, though unhappily often not until aggravation has built to the point of rage, and rage to violence.  Even in Oxford’s time we see that this was often the moment when the authorities closed the theaters out of fear of riots by the apprentices. 

We have no way of knowing which of the many merry-making elements Oxford might have seen as a child, but details are less important than the atmosphere that they generated.  Lively, joyous, intense, rising from a dangerously shifting border between entertainment and riot, it was this energy that he sought to recapture in some small measure for his Court audience––by then so thoroughly tamed by the Reformation and therefore so desperately in need of fun––when he wrote his “golden”  holiday comedies.