Transcript Stuff I forgot to mention on the first day of class

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Day One Slide Show
ENGL 305
Dr. Fike
Syllabus, Assignments, etc.
• Do you have any questions about the
course?
Pre-proposal
• Please turn in your list of term paper
topics.
• Please put your e-mail address on your
paper. I may e-mail you.
• I will, in any case, return your pre-preprosal at our next class.
• A list of topic assignments will be online by
day’s end tomorrow.
Paper Proposal
• For the proposal, see the following link:
http://faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL%20305/
305%20Term%20Paper%20Assignment.htm
• See next slide for a description of the assignment.
Proposal Assignment
•
The first step is a proposal (2 full pages) in which you indicate what topic you have
selected and propose a focus and an angle of approach. The section called
"Suggested Paper Topics" has a number of workable term paper topics, but please
feel free to construct your own in collaboration with me. You do not have much time
to work on the proposal, so do not worry about making flawless statements at this
stage (besides, your grade for the proposal is for process only: as long as it is long
enough, reflects a genuine attempt to fulfill the assignment, and is written correctly, it
will receive full credit). Although the proposal is very preliminary, you should try to
come up with a title and a tentative thesis and as much supporting detail as you can.
The goal of the assignment is to begin a dialogue with me on how your project might
develop. It will be tempting to select a topic on one of the first plays; however, I
strongly urge you to look ahead and consider the possibility that your preferred topic
may be related, for example, to one of the tragedies. Two final points are
necessary: you must actually read your play before you write your proposal,
and you should not do research at this stage. Finally, I want you to include a list
of works cited (it will most likely include only your play at this point, but you should do
the entry MLA-style; see the model for a selection in an anthology if you are using
Bevington's text or some other anthology). For further information, see the slideshow
on paper proposals.
Focused Listing
• On your own, write down 7 things that
struck you about Shakespeare’s life when
you read about it in The Bedford
Companion.
• With a partner, identify a few things that
seem most important about
Shakespeare’s life.
• Share these with the class.
Did Shakespeare write
Shakespeare?
• Autobiographical parallels suggest that he
did.
Connections between
Shakespeare’s life and MSND
• Classical myth (Ovid’s Metamorphoses).
• Sexuality (premarital, 2.2.49-50, 151-62).
• Milton: “sweetest Shakespear fancies
childe, / Warble[d] his native wood-notes
wild” (“L’Allegro,” Bedford 19).
• Greenblatt, Will in the World (next slide).
Greenblatt, Will in the World
• Page 40: “Folk culture is everywhere in his
work, in the web of allusions and in the
underlying structures. The lovers who meet in
the Athenian woods in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream are reminiscent of May Day lovers; the
deposed Duke Senior in the Forest of Arden in
As You Like It is likened to Robin Hood; the
drunken Sir Toby and, still more, Falstaff are
Lords of Misrule who turn the order of things
topsy-turvy,” etc.
Holidays
• The play conflates Midsummer Night and
May Day (“The rite of May,” 4.1.131-32;
“maypole,” 3.2.296).
• This is what makes the play a “festive
comedy” (C. L. Barber).
Franz Riklin’s Article
•
Re. 4.1.131-32: “No doubt they rose up early to observe / The rite of May”: “it is called A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, although the action takes place during the days immediately
preceding May Day” (279).
•
Page 281: “That the Dream treats of an event which affords insight into the world of the
unconscious is confirmed by the time-span of the play which is limited to the days and nights
before May 1st, May Day. . . . This should be understood in the sense of a condensation, if we
use Freud’s terminology, for the eve of May Day is a night of innovation, of joy, festivities and
irrational irruptions, as is Midsummer Night, but with a slightly different nuance, because the Night
of May is more associated with upsurging life forces, with vegetation and its gods and spirits,
whereas Midsummer Night, when the year passes its zenith and once more draws toward its dark
half, is a time of good harvest, fruitfulness and maturity. The connection between the two
nights in popular sentiment is also evident in the burning of the maypole during Midsummer Night
(St. John’s Night) when St. John finds a new wife, the abundance of Summer. In this connection
the new couple are equivalent to the May-time couple or else originate out of them. Love-magic
and love oracles belong to both nights and it is noteworthy that, in conformity with popular
tradition, dreams on Midsummer Night should always come true” (emphases added).
•
Source: “Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: A Contribution to the Process of Individuation,” in Joseph A. Wheelwright’s edited
book, The Reality of the Psyche: The Proceedings of the Third International Congress for Analytical Psychology (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1968), pages 278-92.
Notes
• Freud’s term “condensation” refers to the conflation of
two distinct things into one in a dream. Shakespeare
conflates May Day and Midsummer Night in the same
way. Cf. Bottom as part man, part donkey and the
Minotaur in the Theseus myth.
• Midsummer is celebrated on June 23rd, so it is clearly not
the time of the fall harvest. Riklin is probably referring to
seasonal crops.
• www.usatoday.com: “Also known as St John’s Eve,
Midsummer Night was a time when spiritual forces could
pass through the thin veil between this world and the
next.” That is it exactly.
Bedford 14
• “We may also conclude that, at least in
some small way, Shakespeare helped his
father in his business and developed an
acquaintance with the agricultural and
mercantile practices of the region in which
he spent his first twenty years.”
So the point is…
• The rural and folk references in the plays are
consistent with authorship by a guy who grew up
in Stratford, a rural town.
• A courtier like Edward de Vere, the Earl of
Oxford, would probably not be capable of or
much interested in such references.
• Plus, he died in 1604. Shakespeare died in
1616. Some of his plays post-date de Vere’s
death.
• The conspiracy theory about the plays’
authorship is a minority opinion.
Corporate Authorship
• What if “William Shakespeare” is a pseudonym
for corporate authorship?
• What if the historical William Shakespeare was
part of a group of writers, including Oxford, who
contributed to the plays?
• Example from The Merchant of Venice.
• This way, “Shakespeare” could keep writing
even after Oxford’s death.
Bedford Companion
• Page 12: “we have been reminded that works of art are
the products not merely of an individual writer’s genius
but also of the culture that produced that writer.”
• Pages 27-28: See passages in top par., end of the full
par., and bottom of the page. See especially “the
collaborative nature of the theatrical enterprise” (28). 
• Other relevant information appears on page 93, middle
par. This material will figure prominently when we get to
King Lear.
Shifting Gears: Footnote on Queen
Elizabeth: Bedford 27-28
• “Montrose…sees A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
a play celebrating within its fiction the royal
marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta and perhaps
performed as part of the celebration of an
aristocratic wedding, as shaped to a large
degree by the cultural presence of Elizabeth I.
… This reciprocity between the cultural field and
the literary artifact is one of the primary tenets of
what has been come to be called new historicist
analysis of early modern literature. … Thus,
Queen Elizabeth, in one sense, participates in
the authorship of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The Point
• There may be a contradiction between
New Historicists’ emphasis on the link
between culture and art and their
insistence on William Shakespeare of
Stratford as the sole author of the plays
we attribute to him today.
• In other words, the NH thesis is inclusive,
but the idea that Shakespeare wrote
Shakespeare is exclusive.
Footnote: Historical Caveat
A connection between Shakespeare and
his times:
• Spenser’s Faerie Queene = Elizabeth.
• Shakespeare’s Titania = the Fairy Queen
(MSND 2.1.8).
• But Titania is not = Elizabeth. Here is why:
MSND 2.1.155-74.
Shifting Gears Again:
The Globe Theater
• See Bedford 134.
• Exterior:
https://www.google.com/search?q=globe+theate
r&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=0OY
UUoK5MYeU2QXh7oGABg&ved=0CFQQsAQ&
biw=995&bih=422
• Virtual tour:
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/aboutus/virtual-tour
Location of the Globe Theater
• The Liberties (Bedford 115 and 127)
– Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (see Bedford 225,
next slide).
– Moral, ideological, and geographical liberty.
– Both license and law.
– Margins of society where comment and debate can occur.
– 115: “The outdoor playhouses were designed as theaters and
located outside the City walls because they were thus beyond
the reach of the London authorities, who tended to have Puritan
sympathies and were therefore opposed to theatrical
performances.”
From The Place of the Stage
• Mullaney, qtd. in Bedford 225: “Whatever could not be contained
within the strict bounds of the community found its place here,
making the Liberties the preserve of the anomalous, the unclean,
the polluted, and the sacred. Like the French banlieux [suburbs,
outskirts of town], London’s Liberties were places of exile, yet the
banishment enacted in them was of a more ambivalent order. What
was lodged outside the city was excluded, yet retained; denied a
place within the community, yet not merely exiled. The licentious,
dangerous, unclean, or polluted was cast out of the city, but was
then maintained as such and even placed on public display.”
• Bedford 225: “It is worth emphasizing that the theaters that
produced some of the greatest works of the English stage, the Rose
and the Globe, were identified geographically (and, by some,
morally) with prostitution, criminality, and excessive ‘liberty.’”
Things You Would Find in the
Liberties
• Lack of Restraint/Authority
– Gaming houses
– Taverns
– Bear-baiting arenas:
http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/glossary/glossary20
8.html
– Marketplaces
– Brothels
• Restraint/Authority:
–
–
–
–
Monasteries
Lazar houses
Madhouses
Scaffolds of executions
The Carnivalesque
•
For the carnivalesque, see:
http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=160
•
Harmon and Holman: “A term introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe a spirit of
carnival in literature, marked by fun, attention to the body, defiance of authority,
variety, heteroglossia, and play.” (Heteroglossia means that there is more than one
voice in a literary work.)
•
Bedford 93-94: “Greenblatt and other new historicists hold that the histories served
the Crown as an outlet for subversive doctrine, as a container of rebellious impulses
that might have erupted in the streets had they not been released and defused within
the confines of the public theaters.”
•
Bedford 125: “…by permitting a small degree of opposition to be expressed or
enacted in the controlled space of the public playhouses, the government employed
the theater as a kind of safety valve, an outlet for releasing political pressure before it
increased to an explosion.”
•
Bedford 324: “In other words, the theater functioned as a safety valve: it created and
released a performed version of political dissidence while reinforcing the very powers
that it challenged.”
Question
• What is “comedy”?
Genre
•
What are comedy and tragedy?
•
Comedy:
– From Latin comedian
– From Greek revel + sing
– Structural principle, Bedford 81: “Comedy refers to a literary
structure, be it drama or novel or film, that moves toward a happy
ending and implies a positive understanding of human experience….
Comedy moves from confusion to order, from ignorance to
understanding, from law to liberty, from unhappiness to satisfaction,
from separation to union, from barrenness to fertility, from singleness to
marriage, from two to one.”
– The Divine Comedy enacts this structural principle. What little humor
exists in the poem is base (e.g., the final line of Inferno XXI).
•
Hybrids, Bedford 83: “All his comedies are hybrids, complicated mixtures of
farce and romance, sunshine and shadow, absurdity and profundity.”
Bedford 81
• “Comedy moves from confusion to order,
from ignorance to understanding, from law
to liberty, from unhappiness to satisfaction,
from separation to union, from barrenness
to fertility, from singleness to marriage,
from two to one.”
• In other words, the characters in a comedy
overcome a problem.
Outline for MSND
• Day One:
– Theseus’s opening speech
– Hermia’s situation and options
– Statement by Hermia
• Day Two
– Group exercise: MSND Chart Exercise; Handout of Passages
• The setting: Athens, woods, Athens
• The handout of MSND passages
• BRING HANDOUTS ON DAY 2
– Groups of characters
– The two courts
– The Indian boy—discussion
• Day Three
– Theseus
– Theseus on the imagination
– Video of “Pyramus and Thisbe” and discussion
Theseus’s Opening Speech
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon; but, O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Like to a stepdame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
See Bedford 23: A widow “would have
automatically inherited one-third of her
husband’s estate, the ‘widow’s portion.’”
Lines 22-45:
What does Egeus say?
• What does he believe that Lysander has done to
Hermia?
• Why does he want Hermia to be killed?
• Why does he favor Demetrius over Lysander?
• Connection to contemporary marriage manuals.
• What are Hermia’s options at lines 65-78?
• Are there connections to Theseus’s opening
speech? (See next slide.)
Bedford 83-84
• Page 83: “…the society of early modern England was patriarchal
and authoritarian, inhospitable to disruption or disorder.
Shakespeare’s comedies, then, can be seen as instruments of
social stability in their representation of the unshakable power of
husbands, aristocrats, and other dominant cultural views.”
• See comment on Egeus’s statement at 1.1.97-98 on page 267-68:
“the verb estate, indicates the importance of property and his
conception of his daughter as a possession.”
• Page 84: “…the last scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents
the exchange of one male authority figure for another. Although the
other women, particularly Titania and Hippolyta, seek to assert their
independence from their husbands, the play ends with their
submission…[the play] becomes a story of female independence
thwarted by male power, a depiction of a society in which women
either fail to fulfill their desires or, if they do, are able to look no
further for that satisfaction than another man.”
And Yet . . .
• See comments on “companionate marriage” in
Bedford 261-62 (end of middle par., start of 3rd
par.): “Throughout commentary on the relations
of husbands and wives and the proper ordering
of rights and responsibilities between them, the
‘natural’ authority of the husband in the
household is modified by an increasingly
important Protestant religious doctrine: the
principle of companionate marriage. The basis
for conjugal mutuality was the doctrine of
spiritual equality among men and women. . . .”
POINT: A Liminal Moment
• Bedford 84: MSND “reflect[s] the cultural
anxiety pervading early modern England,
when notions of romantic love were
beginning to challenge the norms of
patriarchal authority in the matter of
marriage.”
• Liminal: Having to do with a threshold; a
liminal moment = a transitional moment.
A Note on Demetrius
LYSANDER:
Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,
And won her soul; and she, sweet lady,
dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry
Upon this spotted and inconstant man.
Compare 2.1.219
DEMETRIUS (to Helena):
You do impeach your modesty too much
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity.
What does Hermia say at 1.1.173?
HERMIA:
My good Lysander!
I swear to thee, by Cupid’s strongest bow,
By his best arrow with the golden head,
By the simplicity of Venus’ doves,
By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves,
And by that fire which burned the Carthage queen
When the false Trojan under sail was seen,
By all the vows that ever men have broke,
In number more than ever women spoke,
In that same place thou hast appointed me
Tomorrow truly will I meet with thee.
More Dark Stuff at 1.1.148-49
LYSANDER:
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion.
Point: Mixed Modes
• Bedford 83: “All his comedies are hybrids,
complicated mixtures of farce and
romance, sunshine and shadow, absurdity
and profundity.”
For Next Time
• Everyone:
– Think about the settings: what nouns and adjectives
describe them?
– Think about the handout of passages. The FQ
passage is for day 3.
• Next time is our group activity day, so spend
some time preparing to talk with each other.
END