Abstract
This chapter locates the site of Protestant conversion in the English countryside. It explains how Shakespeare, again building on ideas conveyed in Book Three of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, wittily uses the concept of fairies, mediators between the divine and the ordinary, as the instigators of erotic attraction between men and women. In the Renaissance and earlier, fairies were traditionally associated with such matters as procreation and birth, and they fulfill this function not only at the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but throughout the play as well. This chapter also introduces the concept of sexual betrayal, analogous to the loss of religious faith, and a frequent occurrence, according to some Protestant theologians, even in the lives of elect.
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Notes
- 1.
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 14.
- 2.
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7; Richard Helgerson , “Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England,” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Stuart Literature and Culture, eds. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 278. Helgerson’s book, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) explores many of these topics.
- 3.
See Gordon Braden, “Plutarch, Shakespeare, and the Alpha Males,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, eds. Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 189.
- 4.
Thomas North, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579). 10 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1895), 1:29.
- 5.
For examples of Elizabeth I depicted as Diana , see Helen Hackett , Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), esp. 174. As Caroline Bicks has shown, Protestants especially valued Diana in her role as Lucina , the goddess of midwifery and childbirth; in this guise, Diana could enhance the sanctity of motherhood (a key Protestant priority) by imbuing it with the aura of virginity. Caroline Bicks , Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 164–5. As Bicks says, the reformers were happy to give “the pagan goddess of childbirth free range in their new church,” 165.
- 6.
Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64.
- 7.
Matthew Woodcock, “Spirits of Another Sort: Constructing Shakespeare’s Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Critical Guide, ed. Regina Buccola (Continuum, 2010), 114.
- 8.
As Jesse M. Lander points out, in the post-Reformation period in England , “the standard position adopted is that fairies are demons.” “Thinking with Fairies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Problem of Unbelief,” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012), 45.
- 9.
Holly Tucker, Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 56.
- 10.
Tucker, Pregnant Fictions, 82. Also see Louis Montrose , The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 139–42. Montrose usefully modifies the sense of phrases such as “propitious mix” when he writes (referring to the work of Angus McLaren ) that such phrases “may give the wrong impression of an egalitarian sex/gender system. It would be more accurate to say that, in Galenic theory, males and females contribute to conception according to their homologous but inherently unequal abilities,” 140. Montrose suggests that A Midsummer Night’s Dream supports the Aristotelian view, represented by Oberon, over the Galenic view of Titania, 139.
- 11.
Wendy Wall, “Why does Puck Sweep? Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 76.
- 12.
“The Mad Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow ” in The Roxburghe Ballads, eds. William Chappell and Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth. 9 vols. (Hertford: Stephen Austin & Sons, 1869–1901), 2:84. The ballad was first published in the 1620s.
- 13.
Sid Ray , Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press; Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004), 30. As Ray notes, the phrase “‘wedlock’ begins to signify containment of the woman rather than connectedness between husband and wife,” 30.
- 14.
Mary Ellen Lamb , “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000), 292, 286.
- 15.
Jan Kott , Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) (New York and London: Norton, 1974), 227. This sort of reading is, in my view, plausible, although I would not go so far as to suggest, with Kott , that Titania’s court consists of “old men and women, toothless and shaking … who sniggering produce a monster for their mistress,” 227. Nonetheless, when Bottom stops short as he recounts his dream and says, “Methought I was – and methought I had” (4.1.207) he may not be, as in James Cagney’s portrayal of Bottom in the 1935 Max Reinhardt film, feeling for his invisible ears.
- 16.
Wendy Wall, “Why does Puck Sweep?,” 89.
- 17.
See Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 174.
- 18.
The influence of Spenser’s epic upon Shakespeare is continuing to be explored. James Bednarz does not detect any specific linguistic debts in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Spenser. “Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Renaissance Drama 14 (1983), 90.
- 19.
Theresa M. Krier suggests that this depiction, which is part of a longer passage, is “non-voyeuriestic for the reader.” Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 120. Yet while this may be Diana’s desire, the passage itself, and particularly the canto in which it appears, suggests that a person’s erotic identity cannot be suppressed.
- 20.
Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights, 125.
- 21.
See Ernst Robert Curtius , European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 195–202.
- 22.
See Michael Bayback, Paul Delany, and A. Kent Hieatt , “Placement in the Middest in The Faerie Queene.” Papers on Language and Literature 5 (1969), 227–34.
- 23.
A. Kent Hieatt , “Three Fearful Symmetries and the meaning of Faerie Queene II,” in A Theatre for Spenserians: Papers of the International Spenser Colloquium, ed. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 20. Spenser’s focus on genital sexuality as the primary locus of eros is somewhat at odds with Debora Kuller Shuger’s argument that “the identification of the erotic with [genital] sexuality … emerged sometime after 1650.” The Renaissance Bible, 178.
- 24.
David Lee Miller , The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 263.
- 25.
Lauren Silberman , Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), 47. See also James Broaddus, “‘Gums of Glutinous Heat’ in Milton’s Mask and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” Milton Quarterly 37.4 (2003), 205–14; and Debora Shuger, “‘Gums of Glutinous Heat’ and the Stream of Consciousness: The Theology of Milton’s Maske.” Representations 60 (1997), 1–21.
- 26.
For comments on the forest setting, see my essay, “I know a Bank…”: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Fairies, and the Erotic History of England.” Shakespeare 10.1 (2014), 23–45.
- 27.
Katherine Briggs discusses the associations of fairies and flowers in The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 101–4. For an eloquent description of Titania’s bower and its fragile nature, see Laura Levine, “Rape, Repetition, and the Politics of Closure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, eds. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213–4. Levine argues, generally, that the erotic relationships in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are oppressive and violent, 211.
- 28.
As Louis Montrose explains, the use of the pansy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the “little western flower,/Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” [2.1.166–7]) could signify “not only … defloration but also … menstruation.” The Purpose of Playing, 173–4. As Monica H. Green notes, “‘the flowers’ was a common vernacular term to designate the menses in most of the medieval western European languages,” “Introduction,” in The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 21.
- 29.
Minor White Latham , The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 178–90. As Latham points out, however, there were some instances of very small fairies that preceded Shakespeare’s play, 79.
- 30.
Thanks to my colleague, Julian Lamb , for this point.
- 31.
Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660, 87.
- 32.
Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Bullough, 1:284–5.
- 33.
See Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Bullough 1:336–7 (lines 1937–1990).
- 34.
Catherine Belsey, “Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.3 (1995), 264.
- 35.
Catherine Belsey, “Love as Trompe-l’oeil,” 265.
- 36.
Thomas Clayton , “‘Fie What a Question’s That If Thou Wert Near a Lewd Interpreter’: The Wall Scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974), 101.
- 37.
Lander, “Thinking with Fairies,” 54.
- 38.
Lander, “Thinking with Fairies,” 54.
- 39.
Samuel Pepys , Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys. 6 vols. (London: Bickers, 1875–9), 2:51.
- 40.
For suggestions about a possible wedding at which A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed as well as the possibility of Queen Elizabeth’s I’s attendance, see David Wilks, Shakespeare’s Almanac: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993). The play’s reference to the “hempen homespuns” “so near the cradle of the Fairy Queen” (3.1.72–3) suggests a reference to Elizabeth.
- 41.
Adriana’s speech is actually delivered not to her husband but to his identical twin brother, Antipholus of Syracuse.
- 42.
Bryon Lee Grigsby argues that in the Middle Ages leprosy was associated with spiritual rather than carnal sins. But following the spread of syphilis in Europe in the early sixteenth century, leprosy too became increasingly affiliated with lechery; Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 40, 67. For the association of syphilis and leprosy in the figure of the Ghost in Hamlet , see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992), 254–5.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). English Protestant Conversion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_10
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