How is the fairy plot linked to the celebratory marital theme of the play?
What will be an ideal response?
- The language, action, characterization, and imagery of the fairy world combine to create a festival atmosphere in the play. In Elizabethan times the festival was a special period when normal social customs were relaxed or reversed—like modern Mardi Gras in New Orleans. C. L. Barber, in “May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night,” chapter 6 of his Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959), links the play’s action to social customs, festivals, and pageantry familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. The May game, for example, mirrors the play’s central social action. A May game would begin in town then move into a grove before returning to town:
The Maying is completed when Oberon and Titania with their trains come into the great chamber to bring the blessings of fertility. They are at once special, a May king and queen making their good luck visit to the manor house, and a pair of country gods, half-English and half-Ovid, come to bring their powers in tribute to great lords and ladies. (119–120)
The spring festival, like the ancient saturnalia, releases energies and transformative powers that are necessary for procreation and social renewal, but are ultimately controlled within the formal bonds of marriage. Shakespeare’s dramatic art, in similar fashion, conjures up and gives civilizing shape to the passions, in a pattern of release and transformation:
Shakespeare, in developing a May-game action at length to express the will in nature that is consummated in marriage, brings out underlying magical meanings of the ritual while keeping always a sense of what it is humanly, as an experience. The woods are a region of passionate excitement [realized in the poetry]. Poetry conveys the experience of amorous tendency diffused in nature; and poetry, dance, gesture, dramatic fiction, combine to create, in the fairies, creatures who embody the passionate mind’s elated sense of its own omnipotence. The woods are established as a region of metamorphosis, where in liquid moonlight or glimmering starlight, things can change, merge and melt into each other. Metamorphosis expresses what love sees and what it seeks to do. (132–133)
Language Arts & World Languages
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