Fairy-Thinking and the Labyrinth: The Forest Palimpsest in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)
Résumés
Dans Le Songe d'une nuit d'été de Shakespeare (1595), la forêt, située à l'extérieur d'Athènes, fonctionne comme un espace alternatif au monde de la cour où règnent l'ordre et la loi. Construite comme un palimpseste, la forêt se révèle plurielle, aux visages et aux fonctions changeants. Miroir de la cour, elle reflète le gouvernement sous une forme différente et, par ses allusions au désordre écologique, elle fait écho au leadership défectueux et à l'échec de l’éducation au sein de la société patriarcale athénienne. Semblable aussi bien à un labyrinthe qu’à un lieu d'émerveillement, la forêt du Songe d'une nuit d'été est à la fois enchanteresse et menaçante, d’autant que le motif du labyrinthe, nourri par l'intertexte de Thésée et du Minotaure, hante la forêt. Celle-ci constitue aussi un espace vierge créatif, où les désirs et les peurs peuvent être projetés et éprouvés, offrant un lieu pour jouer et répéter le potentiel de tragédie et de transformation. Dans la pièce, les fées et la forêt sont étroitement liées, conduisant les mortels à l'égarement et littéralisant le voyage de la psyché dans le labyrinthe. Cet article montre que les fées et la forêt, indissociables, sont la clé de l'imaginaire de la pièce, et que le chevauchement de leurs intertextes mythiques ouvre un espace de réflexion sur les défauts humains et les responsabilités nourricières. À travers la pensée féérique, les humains se confrontent à l'autre, en eux-mêmes en négociant le labyrinthe arboricole et en avançant vers le renouveau.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Shakespeare (William), Songe d'une nuit d'été, forêt, bois, espace arboricole, fée, labyrinthe, Thésée, magie, mythes classiquesKeywords:
Shakespeare (William), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, forest, wood, arboreal space, fairy, labyrinth, Theseus, magic, classical mythPlan
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I would like to sincerely thank Prof. Line Cottegnies, Prof. Alexis Tadié and Dr Anne-Valérie Dulac (Sorbonne Université) for organising the original symposium that this volume arises from. I would also like to sincerely thank the anonymous peer reviewer for their valuable suggestions for revising the original version of this article.
- 1 Starting places for exploring Shakespeare’s engagement with arboreal space include: Ann Barton, The (...)
- 2 The space is referred to as both a wood and a forest in the play. In the early modern period, a for (...)
- 3 The volume of critical discourse on Dream is formidable; a useful starting point is Nicolas Tredell (...)
- 4 In using the term “fairy-thinking”, I draw from the work of Jesse M. Lander (“Thinking with Fairies (...)
1Arboreal spaces were central to Shakespeare’s imagination. Shakespeare engaged with tree imagery from the beginning of his writing career to his last works and across all his genres.1 His engagement ranged from using forested space as key locations, as in As You Like It (1600) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), to using veins of arboreal imagery as metaphors of political and familial ideas. A focus on Shakespeare’s use of trees often takes us to the heart of his thematic explorations. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest outside Athens functions as an alternative space to the courtly world of supposed order and the rule of law.2 Constructed as a palimpsest of various layers, the forest is multi-faceted with shifting guises and roles.3 As a mirror to the court, it reflects government in a different form; and, as part of an ecology in crisis, it resonates with the flawed leadership and failed nurturing of patriarchal Athenian society. Maze-like and a place of wonder, the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is both enchanting and threatening, as the motif of the labyrinth, and the Theseus and Minotaur intertext, haunt the forest. It is also a creative blank space, where desires and fears can be projected and encountered, offering a place to perform and rehearse the potential for tragedy and transformation. In the play, the fairies and the forest are closely aligned, both leading mortals astray and literalising the journey of the psyche through the labyrinth. This article argues that the interlinked fairies and forest are key to the play’s imaginary, and that their overlapping mythic intertexts enable thinking through human flaws and nurturing responsibilities. I conceptualise this as fairy-thinking, the projecting of the human into a magical green space.4 Through fairy-thinking, humans confront the other within themselves in negotiating the arboreal labyrinth and moving towards renewal.
The Protean Forest and Fairy Habitat
- 5 Lisa Hopkins, “The Shared Space of the Wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, A Midsummer Night’s Drea (...)
- 6 J. Theis, “Green Plots and Green Plotters: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sylvan Struggle”, Writing (...)
- 7 Bottom’s transformation, in addition to evoking the Minotaur and Actaeon, has a classical precedent (...)
2The forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Lisa Hopkins has explored, is a shared space between various groups.5 It also creates a crossroads where various discourses intersect. As Jeffrey S. Theis highlights, there is an implicit link between the terrain of the forest and the play’s interwoven narratives, green plots with dramatic plots.6 The forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its myriad intertexts, functions as a literary and cultural repository, a weave of narratives from Ovid to fairy folklore. In the process, it dissolves boundaries: humans interact with fairies, who cross the human-insect divide, while magic in the forest creates human-animal hybridity and the forest itself recalls earlier narratives of transformation.7 The forest also creates porous boundaries between dream states and waking, night and day.
- 8 As Lisa Hopkins explores, the play “abounds in plant life”: Lisa Hopkins, “‘Thou Art Translated’: P (...)
- 9 Since Diana was worshipped at crossroads, “Trivia” was often added to her title (trivium, “place wh (...)
3The natural world dominates A Midsummer Night’s Dream.8 The presence of the forest is invoked from the opening scenes, even before the action shifts to the wood, through the evocation of Diana, goddess of woodland and wild nature, associated with the moon, chastity and hunting, as well as with crossroads, an apt link with the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.9 There is an emphasis on nature’s rhythms as the opening scene references the moon’s cycle; it is the time of the waning moon and the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta is scheduled to take place at the time of the new moon. Theseus, impatient with desire for his upcoming nuptials, constructs the moon as feminine; the old moon, “she”, is likened to an older “step-dame or a dowager”, who is “long withering” (1.1.4-5), in contrast with “a young man”, whose inheritance she wastes. This foreshadows the imminent conflict in the play between the younger and older generations. Hippolyta reassures him and assuages his impatience, initiating the theme of dreaming that will recur throughout the play: “Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (1.1.8). She likens the imminent new moon to “a silver bow / New bent in heaven” (1.1.9), which will oversee the upcoming marriage. The bow invokes Diana as huntress, thus bringing in the presence of the forest. When Lysander discloses to Helena his and Hermia’s plans to steal away, he emphasises that they will do so under moonlight: “when Phoebe doth behold / Her silver visage in the watery glass” (1.1.209-211). Phoebe, as another name for Diana, also invokes the forest, Diana’s haunt, and the references imbue the forest with a mythic aura.
- 10 See the valuable diagram in François Laroque’s Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal En (...)
- 11 F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 141.
- 12 F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 26.
4The play’s title evokes Midsummer’s Eve, 23 June, the longest day and shortest night of the year before the Midsummer Solstice on 24 June.10 As François Laroque outlines, in his seminal study Shakespeare’s Festive World, “Midsummer was a season which became synonymous with confusion and even mental aberration”, and Midsummer’s Eve a “night of mistakes and wandering wits, popularly attributed more to the influence of the moon than to that of the summer solstice”.11 Furthermore, threshold dates, such as Midsummer’s Eve, were thought of as times “when the supernatural erupted and irrational forces were unleashed”.12
- 13 This parallels Romeo and Juliet, the tragic counterpart to Dream, with the famous balcony scene. As (...)
5The idea of magic is invoked in the opening scene, even before we enter fairy space. Egeus attributes his daughter’s rebellion to a type of magic enacted by Lysander: “This man hath bewitched the bosom of my child” (1.1.27), using poetry, love-tokens and singing “by moonlight” at her window (1.1.30).13 Egeus imagines Hermia’s falling in love with Lysander as a type of magical theft (1.1.30- 36). Again, the invocation of the moon, magic and fantasy anticipates the forest space and prefigures its magical qualities.
- 14 J. Theis, Writing the Forest, op. cit., p. 113.
- 15 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700, Oxford, Oxford Univer (...)
- 16 R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, op. cit., p. 28, 30. On May games and the theme of m (...)
6The arboreal space outside Athens has a shifting, protean nature; it has multiple facets and is referred to in different ways.14 Its initial association is with summer, youth and fertility. Theseus’s instruction to Philostrate to “[s]tir up the Athenian youth to merriments”, to awaken the “nimble spirit of mirth” (1.1.13) invokes the English ritual of maying, in which youths resorted to the forests to collect may blossoms. As Ronald Hutton outlines, “a common custom on May Morning was to go into the nearest countryside before sunrise and to return with flowers and greenery to deck streets and houses”.15 May Day, the 1st day of May, marked the beginning of summer and ushered in a season that continued until July, marked with May games, including plays and often the crowning of “mock-kings and (more rarely) mock-queens to preside over them,” often around Midsummer, as a “celebration of summer and of communal life.”16
- 17 Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, Shakespeare's Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary, London, Bloomsbu (...)
- 18 L. Hopkins, “Translated”, in op. cit., p.173.
- 19 F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 27 and 143. Laroque includes a quotation from Reginald Scot (...)
7The preliminary idea of the Athenian wood as a place for maying gives it a benign, appealing quality. Lysander, in directing Hermia to meet in the wood, recalls that this is where the lovers previously went a maying, “to do observance to a morn of May” (1.1.167). The wood is also a place where Hermia and Helena have spent time together. Hermia, in disclosing the escape plan to Helena, refers to the wood as the place: “where often you and I / Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie” (1.1.215). As Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth outline, the primrose was a symbol of the countryside and a sign of spring. Yet it could also be deceptive; a “primrose path” could be appealing yet lead to danger.17 Furthermore, there was the belief that if you ate primroses you would see fairies, as Lisa Hopkins notes, so they could be thought of as “gateway plants” giving access to the “realm of magic.”18 In addition, the pastoral custom of maying had a link with the supernatural, since the purpose of gathering greenery was “to guard against the evil spells that might be cast by witches”, as Laroque observes, which linked it with Hallowe’en, the eve before the Festival of the Dead (Hallowmas) on 1st November.19 So in the initial construction of the benign, summer forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is a hint of magic and potential danger.
- 20 William W. E. Slights, “Nature’s Originals: Value in Shakespearian Pastoral”, Shakespeare Survey: A (...)
- 21 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Chicago, The University of Chicago (...)
- 22 On the concept of wilderness in real and imaginary sixteenth-century gardens, see Jane Avner, “Imag (...)
8The forest is ambiguously located on the spectrum between cultivated green space and wild nature. William Slights articulates the spectrum between “pastoral borderland” and “the barbaric deep-wood” – or “pastorale noire”, in Gisèle Venet’s phrase – and Slights links it to the Freudian paradigm from the “shallow glosses of the super-ego” to the “deep recesses of the id.”20 Similarly, green theorist Robert Pogue Harrison expresses that “[a] garden is nothing if not phenomenon, and the penumbral depths in question belong as much to the garden as to the mind or soul of the beholder.”21 At times in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the green space seems little more than an extension of the palace garden; Renaissance gardens commonly incorporated a section of “wilderness” beyond the ordered gardens, as part of the overall design.22 When the mechanicals plan their rehearsal, Quince refers to it as “the palace wood” (1.2.80), and it appears navigable since it has landmarks such as “the Duke’s oak” (1.2.87). Likewise, Hermia and Lysander are confident of being able to find each other by meeting in the wood itself, even at night (1.1.164-168). When Puck reports that the fairy monarchs “never meet in grove or green, / By fountain clear or spangled starlight sheen” (2.1.28-29) without quarrelling, the reference to “fountain” suggests a formal garden, rather than the wild space of the forest, and links the palace garden with the forest as part of the interconnected habitat of the fairies.
9Sometimes the forest is figured as a wild, untamed place. Puck reports that Oberon would have the stolen Indian prince as part of his train “to trace the forests wild” (2.1.25). It is also dangerous to mortals who are not equipped to nourish themselves in the forest. Lysander notes that Hermia is “faint with wandering in the wood” and they quickly become lost –Lysander admitting “I have forgot our way” (2.2.41-42). At other moments the forest, although still wild, is a locus amoenus, described as having pleasant, nurturing, pockets, as in Oberon’s famous speech on Titania’s favourite sleeping bank:
- 23 On the evocations of the various plants mentioned here see L. Hopkins, “Translated”, in op. cit., p (...)
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamelled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in; (2.1.249-256)23
10The sensuous, incantatory effect of the passage lulls the audience, positioning them with Titania, ready to doze amidst the various plants and flowers, suggesting the forest as a beguiling place where one could safely sleep. Yet there is the potential for menace. The discarded skin of the snake may be perfect as fairy bedding, yet it evokes the potential of the live snake to wrap and strangle an unwary fairy. Furthermore, the invocation of the snake here links with recurrent serpentine imagery throughout the play, evoking Biblical allusions and suggesting a compromised Eden. Hermia’s dream of a “crawling serpent” that “ate my heart away” (2.2.132- 155) reiterates the serpentine threat in the forest.
11There are also pastoral dimensions in the natural spaces of the play. Oberon, according to Titania, takes on a pastoral role in wooing shepherdesses:
- 25 In narratives Fairyland was originally located in the Holy Land, then was located in the Middle Eas (...)
12Although the fields where Oberon personifies a pastoral shepherd are located “away” from Fairyland, yet the fields are part of the landscape the fairies inhabit. In fact, it is not clear where Fairyland is located since the fairies are inherently itinerant. As Diane Purkiss notes, “Fairyland is always just beyond the boundaries of the known”, a characteristic shared with Shakespeare’s multi-layered forests.25
- 26 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 9, 14
- 27 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 127.
- 28 Their itinerant nature is one of their characteristics that links them with the actors. As Lisa Wal (...)
13Fairies as a type of human-insect hybrid represent a projection of imagined human life immersed in nature. They sit in an ambiguous space and speak to human alienation from nature, expressing the fantasy of humans living within, rather than apart from, nature. White magic, or natural magic, was thought to be power harnessed from occult knowledge of the natural properties of plants and minerals.26 Thus the magic that fairies potentially wield is implicitly from their secret knowledge of the natural world. At the same time, the ability of fairies to deceive, cause illusions and cause harm to animals and crops, potentially linked them with the demonic.27 Although the fairies are strongly linked with the forest in the play, and the forest forms part of the fairy habitat, they are not confined there. The forest is only one of many natural habitats that they live in, and there is a strong sense of the fairies as iterant, roving figures that are constantly on the move between different natural spaces.28 The fairies’ wandering nature is evoked when Puck meets a fairy in 2.1:
Puck: How now, spirit; whither wander you?
Fairy: Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire;
I do wander everywhere
Swifter than the moon’s sphere; (2.1.1-7)
14The anaphora of “over” and “thorough” creates an image of repeated actions that together envision a vast coverage of space, reiterated with the fairy’s claim: “I do wander everywhere” (2.1.6). To this is added a sense of speed with “swifter than the moon’s sphere” (2.1.7). Furthermore, the reference to the moon links the fairies with the sphere of night and dreaming.
15There is a sense of the fairy monarchs as having their separate spheres, but meeting together in different natural places. Titania refers to their various natural meeting places in speaking back to Oberon’s accusations:
And never since the middle summer’s spring
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By pav’d fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached marget of the sea
to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind (2.1.82-86)
- 29 R. P. Harrison, Forests, op. cit. p. 69.
16Again, this creates a sense of the vast sphere of fairy habitat and extends from green spaces to the sea. Oberon, during his initial fight with Titania asks her: “How long within this wood intend you stay?” (2.1.138). Titania claims that, if Oberon is not prepared to reconcile then they will go their own ways and that she “will spare your haunts” (2.1.142). As Puck reports, Oberon comes to the forest for his revels: “The King doth keep his revels here tonight” (2.1.18). The Fairy King’s presence in the forest accords with the traditional link between a monarch and forested space.29
- 30 Fairyland was linked with tales of the marvellous east. As Purkiss outlines, portrayals of fairylan (...)
17The fairy habitat also extends to the exotic East. Both Oberon and Titania have been spending time in India: Oberon has “come from the farthest step of India” (2.1.69) and Titania spent time with the Indian prince’s mother “in the spiced Indian air” (2.1.124). This connects their otherness as human hybrid creatures with the perceived otherness of non-Europeans.30 Again, this emphasises the fairies’ ability to move over enormous distances, and thus their ability to fly, conjured through language to compensate for the material reality of the actors’ bodies on stage.
The Arboreal Maze, Violence and the Minotaur
18The multi-faceted forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the majority of the play’s action takes place, constitutes an alternative space to the court of Athens, its shadow and alternative face. The parallel nature of the forest is established through the matching couples at the head of state. Theseus, as Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, formerly Queen of the Amazons and Theseus’s betrothed, at the head of Athenian society, are mirrored in the forest by Oberon and Titania, as king and queen of the fairies. The idea of fairy space had already been established as a way of conceiving Elizabethan political space, through Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), with Elizabeth I imagined as queen of the fairies. This linked the fantasy of monarchy, with its costumes, extravagant display and theatrical performances of power, with folkloric conceptions of quasi-human life and government in the natural world.
19In the play, the lovers move from a society governed by one mythic couple to the forested space governed by another mythic couple. In this way, the forest functions as a mirror, reflecting aspects of Athenian society, yet presenting them in an alternative vision, distorting yet paradoxically revealing. This mirroring effect results in an arboreal space which at first sight may appear as a place of escape for the young lovers, from the strictures of Athenian society and the patriarchal control of fathers and state. However, the threat of violence is not removed by moving into the forest space, but rather appears in different forms, reflecting on the violence of Athenian society.
- 31 As Louis Montrose, among other critics, observes, the resolution of the play is dependent on the co (...)
- 32 Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1991, p. 24- (...)
- 33 See generally, John Black Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, Syracuse N.Y., (...)
- 34 As Ania Loomba notes, the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta is “an explicit continuation of militar (...)
- 35 On intersections between women and monstrous births in the play, see L. Walters, “Monstrous Births” (...)
20Misogynist violence is a dark vein that underpins relationships in the play and which is linked to the forest space.31 As Jeanne Addison Roberts articulates, for Shakespeare, “the Wild is the locale for the male’s necessary, seductive and terrifying confrontation with the female, his braving of the perils of maternal regression and destructive erotic abandon in order to annex a woman into his cultural context”.32 Theseus as a character brings in a network of interrelated mythic intertexts, primarily as the slayer of the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth. Hippolyta, as former queen of the Amazons, was a warrior woman, implicitly transgressing early modern gender norms. The Amazons were often considered part of the monstrous races, and were located on the periphery of the Eurocentric geographical imagination, thought of as opposed to the centre of civilization.33 As a warrior and leader, Hippolyta represents a powerful female force that constitutes an implicit threat to masculine power. Theseus, as a masculine hero, needed to conquer her in order to maintain his own identity.34 In the first scene, Theseus alludes to the violence that marked the beginning of his relationship with Hippolyta: “I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.16-17). There is no response given by Hippolyta. The violence towards her implicitly parallels Theseus’s killing of the Minotaur, suggesting the threat of the monstrous feminine.35 Hippolyta’s potential for female rebellion, although seemingly neutralised by Theseus, is yet reflected in her forest double Titania.
21The reference to Theseus’s initial violence towards his future bride anticipates the entry of Egeus and the violence that the father threatens towards his daughter Hermia. Hermia represents another form of the monstrous feminine in her rebellion against her father’s will. Egeus asserts his right to control over his daughter: “her obedience, which is due to me” (1.1.37). The extent of this assertion of control is life-threatening. Since Egeus sees her as his property: “As she is mine, I may dispose of her”, either she does as he wills, in marrying Demetrius, or Egeus will dispose of her hastily “to her death, according to our law/ Immediately provided in that case” (1.1.44-45). Hermia affirms her status as female rebel by moving to the space of the forest.
22Titania, like Hippolyta and Hermia, is a potent source of feminine power; she constitutes a threat to Oberon’s authority and, from his perspective, must be contained. Oberon’s sexual violence towards Titania, subjecting her to potential sexual intercourse with a hybrid man-ass in a drug-induced state, to contain her rebellion to his will, reflects and plays out, in the dream-like forest, the violence that Theseus enacted against his betrothed Hippolyta. In both political regimes, within and without the forest, female power is contained through violence, actual or implied. For Hermia, Titiania and Hippolyta represent potential female modes of behaviour, and its risks. Both are strong female rebels, like Hermia, but Hippolyta embodies a contained, subdued female power, latent from the prior narrative, and in the forest, Titania undergoes a degrading punishment for her rebellion against Oberon. Both these narratives resonate with Hermia’s fraught journey through the maze of desire.
23Theseus confirms the patriarchal oppression of the state and Egeus’s right, as the person who created Hermia – “One that composed your beauties” (1.1.48), a conception eliding any maternal contribution – to control his daughter: “To you your father should be as a god” (1.1.47). Theseus also emphasises that this power is underpinned with the threat of violence: “To whom you are but as a form in wax/ By him imprinted, and within his power/ To leave the figure, or disfigure it” (1.1.51). Despite Hermia’s entreaties, Theseus confirms Egeus’s position, only slightly altering it by giving her the option of living as a nun: “Either to die the death, or to abjure/ For ever the society of men” (1.1.65-66). Theseus sets up the bleak alternatives for Hermia, telling her to “question your desires” (1.1.67), or else to live a cloistered life “chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (1.1.73). Although the paradigm is Catholic, the link between chastity and the moon again invokes Diana, bringing in again the space of the forest. Theseus explicitly names Diana in emphasising Hermia’s options: “Or on Diana’s altar” (1.1.89).
- 36 Thomas R. Frosch, “The Missing Child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, American Imago: Psychoanalysis (...)
24The forest represents an intermediary path to freedom for Hermia and Lysander. Lysander suggests, as a solution, that they escape to his widow aunt, wealthy and childless; she represents an alternative parent figure and source of patronage, a contrasting feminine power centre, in opposition to that of Theseus and Egeus. Her location is “remote seven leagues” (1.1.171) from Athens and she is beyond the jurisdiction of Athenian law, so, like London’s theatres in the Liberties, presents a space of legal escape. To travel there Lysander suggests that they meet in the wood outside Athens; together the wood and the destination of the dowager’s house constitute a pastoral escape. As Thomas R. Frosch notes, in his psychoanalytic examination of the play, “although the two lovers never literally reach the domain of the dowager, they do so symbolically in the forest”.36 Intriguingly, Lysander’s mention of the dowager aunt echoes Theseus’s earlier conception of the old moon (1.1.4-5), the link creating the subtle idea of the old moon as patron and protector of the young lovers. This will play out, in that the time in the wood, under the old moon, will ultimately result in resolution of the crisis.
25Although the forest is seen by Hermia and Lysander initially as a refuge, it quickly becomes a place of potential entrapment. The forest is not only threatening to mortals; when Titania defies Oberon and leaves, Oberon threatens that “Thou shalt not from this grove / Till I torment thee for this injury” (2.1.146-47). Masculine violence links with the potential of the forest to become a labyrinthine prison. The forest is a space of potential violence in other ways. Demitrius threatens Helena with rape (2.1.214-219); Hermia needs to ensure that Lysander sleeps some way away from her, as she does not completely trust him in the forest (2.2.49-50); moreover, Lysander’s drug-induced infatuation for Helena also creates another source of potential violence against her in the forest.
26As well as being a danger to mortals and fairies, the green world itself is under threat. The forest is imagined as part of an ecology misgoverned by the fairies and described at the beginning of the play as being in crisis, although the specific stricken landscapes described are surrounding, rather than within, the forest space, in line with its function as a dreamscape and palimpsest of the imagination. There is firstly a sense of disturbed dialogue between the fairy monarchs and the natural spaces they rule over. Titania claims that due to Oberon’s “brawl[ing]”, drowning out the noise of the winds – “piping to us in vain” – the winds have taken revenge: “As in revenge have sucked up from the sea / Contagious fogs” (2.1.87-90). The revenge of the winds results in disease-breeding fogs. Given the interlinked aspects of nature, this has further consequences: the fogs falling in the land “Hath every pelting river made so proud / That they have overborne their continents” (2.1.91-92). Oberon labelled Titania proud at the beginning of their encounter (2.1.60), but here implicitly Titania casts the accusation back at Oberon. In personifying the rivers, giving them pride, and linking this pride with Oberon’s actions, Titania seems to be accusing Oberon of the same deadly sin.
- 37 As Craig Wright notes, the maze was both in bono and in malo: Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrio (...)
27The disturbances in nature have a follow-on effect in the world of human labour and agriculture: “The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, / The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard” (2.1.93-95). The imbalances resulting in failed harvests will have deadly consequences in the human world. As well as agriculture, the crisis extends to pastoral labour: “The fold stands empty in the drowned field, / And crows are fatted with the murrion flock” (2.1.96-97); with the pasture ruined due to the floods, and the flock infected with disease, all that prosper are the scavenger crows. Death reigns. The sense of ruin is extended to the traces of rural games and festivity: the space of the game “the nine-men’s-morris,” cut into the turf, is instead filled with mud. Furthermore, the benign version of the labyrinth, the turf maze has disappeared; human art has disappeared into nature: “And the quaint mazes in the wanton green / For lack of tread are undistinguishable” (2.1.99-100).37 This recreational maze, in the human-controlled green space, has disappeared, leaving only the more dangerous forest labyrinth.
28Throughout Titania’s speech, there is a sense of progression of disaster: from sea to land, rivers to crop fields, pasture to village green. Natural disturbance begins in the wilds of nature and extends to human activity. These disturbances, as Titania outlines, have registered with the moon, whose link with the tides makes her “governess of floods” (2.1.103); like the sea she creates contagion: “Pale in her anger, washes all the air, / That rheumatic diseases do abound” (2.1.104-.105). Overall, the impact of the fairy monarchs’ conflict is so significant that “[t]he seasons alter” (2.1.107). The frosts of winter “fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose” (2.1.108), while at the same time a garland of “sweet summer buds” is imagined as crowning “old Hiems”, the personification of winter (2.1.109-110). The seasons change their appearances, making them unreadable by “the mazèd world” (2.1.113). Again, there is the recurring image of the maze, imagining the world as a whole as being in a confused, labyrinthine state.
- 38 Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: from Cultivation to Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press (...)
- 39 See also L. Walters, art. cit., “Monstrous births”.
29Across Shakespeare’s plays there is often a link between misgovernment and disorder in nature. As Charlotte Scott writes, “Disrupted husbandry is a powerful indication of human discord”; and Titania’s narrative of ecological upheaval suggests “the creational responsibility that she and Oberon bear towards the human and its husbandry”.38 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ecological disorder is linked with the conflict between the fairy monarchs, but also reflects on poor Athenian government. In the play, misgovernment is imagined as a threat to the renewal of society through the danger it poses to the next generation, and this manifests in various ideas of monstrosity and miscegenation located in the forest. The crisis in nature outlined by Titania is itself imagined as a monstrous child. Titania concludes her disturbing scenario by figuring it as a type of monstrous offspring, the “progeny of evils”, deriving from their conflict: “We are their parents and original” (2.1.117). This feeds into the vein of imagery of monstrous offspring that links the seasonal chaos with the Minotaur and the spectre of the changeling that haunts the stolen Indian prince.39 The forest registers and conveys the eco-crisis through its mythic links with the labyrinth as a devouring space that threatens society’s future generation.
- 40 As Andoni Cossio and Martin Simonson note, forests commonly act “as symbolic spaces for various tri (...)
- 41 Wright notes that some scholars differentiate between the terms labyrinth and maze on this basis bu (...)
30The forest, like a maze, is a space of confusion.40 As Craig Wright points out in his study of the labyrinth in various cultural forms, including architecture, church ritual, art and music, early conceptions of the labyrinth were unicursal, providing a single path through and functioning in the nature of meditative practice; from the Renaissance, the multicursal labyrinth appeared, which featured various dead ends, creating a sense of entrapment and challenge to escape.41 The forest as a labyrinth literalises the fraught path of love. Lysander’s comment, “The course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.134), which functions as a soundbite for the play as a whole, evokes the meandering paths that the lovers will literally and metaphorically follow before the resolution. Lysander and Hermia outline the various ways that past lovers have faced challenges, (1.1.135-149), Lysander reflecting that “[s]o quick bright things come to confusion” (1.1.149). Hermia wisely suggests that they should treat the trial with patience, since challenges then are a normal part of love (1.1.154-55). That is, there is recognition of the process that the lovers must endure.
- 42 Howatson, op. cit., p. 412.
- 43 On the myth, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, Book VIII; and Virgil, (...)
31The figure of Theseus frames the action of the play and his backstory as the slayer of the Minotaur in the labyrinth is a key intertext central to the construction of the forest and the play. In the classical myth, Pasiphaë – daughter of the Sun, wife of King Minos of Crete, and mother to Ariadne and Phaedra – is caused by the god Poseidon to fall in love with a bull (as Poseidon’s revenge against Minos).42 Pasiphaë instructs Daedalus to make her a cow-suit so she can couple with the bull, which results in the monstrous offspring of the Minotaur as hybrid bull-man. Daedalus then constructs the Cretan labyrinth to contain the Minotaur. The violence imposed by the gods is perpetuated in the need to feed the beast of the Minotaur with regular sacrifices of young Athenian men and women. Theseus, ear-marked for sacrifice, slays the Minotaur and solves the challenge of the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne, whom he will later abandon on Naxos.43
32In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest replays a distorted version of this myth. Oberon, Theseus’s double in the forest, is like a god using his power to force Pasiphaë’s unnatural desire for a beast. Titiania mirrors Pasiphaë, in being forced into a monstrous coupling against her conscious will. Yet Titiania does not couple with an animal but with the transformed Bottom who is akin to the hybrid Minotaur. This adds the further dark shadow of incest in that the Pasiphaë figure, Titiania, is induced to desire a figure that represents her hybrid offspring, the Minotaur. That Oberon imposes this implicitly incestuous hybrid coupling on Titiania as revenge for denying him the Indian boy, Titania’s quasi-foster child, adds a further dark edge. Thus, the forest and fairy space replay Theseus’s mythic backstory, while implicitly linking the misogynist violence of the two patriarchal figures of Theseus and Oberon against their wives and evoking the spectre of monstrous parenting. The implied violence of the Athenian and fairy monarchs is further echoed in the threatened violence of Egeus as father to Hermia.
- 44 Dream, edition cited, note to 1.2.
- 45 Golden Ass, ed. cit., p. 10-11; Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, Cambridge, Cambri (...)
33Another thread to the labyrinth intertext resides with Bottom who, as a hybrid human-ass, is multi-valanced. As R. A. Foakes notes, “Bottom” refers to a “bottom of thread, or the clew or core on which the weaver’s yarn was wound”.44 This association with thread connects him with the labyrinth and Minotaur intertext since it is Ariadne’s thread that enables Theseus to escape the labyrinth. This ironically positions Bottom as a type of Ariadne figure, a parody of the thread that holds the key to the labyrinthine forest. Although commonly associated with stupidity and physicality, the ass was considered sacred in certain pagan contexts, sacred to the Egyptian god Set (equated with the Greek god Typhon), who killed the vegetation god Osirus before the latter was resurrected by his sister Isis, so part of the narrative of spiritual renewal linked with the annual regeneration of the Nile valley. The ass was also associated in European folklore with the midwinter Saturnalia when, as Robert Graves outlines, “the ass-eared god, later the Christmas Fool with his ass-eared cap, was killed by his rival, the Spirit of the New Year.” 45Thus, the ass was connected with transitional states and renewal. Bottom’s position, paradoxically, is with both the devouring monster at the centre of the labyrinth and the thread, the way out. His inept articulation of his vision also links him, however parodically, with the transcendent.
The Green Underworld, Psychomachia and Escape from the Labyrinth
- 46 Angela Schumann, “‘But as a Form in Wax’: An Ecofeminist Reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night (...)
- 47 Ibid., p. 54.
34As foregrounded by the play’s title, the forest represents a dream space, of wonder and nightmare. The recurrent imagery of the moon steeps the play in the realm of night and dreams. If Athens signifies the ordinary world of daylight and waking hours, its shadow, the forest, presents the night world, of sleep and the unconscious, where the human loses control of the narrative. As Angela Schumann observes, in her ecofeminist reading of the play, dreams are often used in Shakespeare “to reveal a subconscious knowledge of a reality that a character would not entertain at a conscious level,” as for example with Hermia’s dream of the serpent.46 Schumann suggests that for Shakespeare, “truth is not accessed exclusively by reason […] but may be reached through what is perceived as the more feminine element of imagination.”47 Accessing the truth through dreaming and imaginative states has a material quality in the play. The lovers literalise their internal turmoil by wandering in the labyrinthine forest. They perform and literalise a type of psychomachia, a war of the mind, enacting their confusion and the conflict, focalised through Hermia, between desire and duty – the forest materialises their lost state.
- 48 Aeneid, ed. cit., p. 115-116, 121.
- 49 A. Grafton et. al, ed. cit, p. 505.
- 50 C. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, op. cit., p. 7, 41,75-76
- 51 C. Wright, op. cit., p. 37, 85.
35The various mythic intertexts figure the forest as an underworld. The lovers’ potentially life-threatening entry into the forest links with the labyrinth narrative. Crete, the site of the sacrifice of Athenian youth, haunts Athens and, through the forest, that locus is brought closer. In Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BCE), Daedalus and his labyrinth are linked with the entrance to the underworld that Aeneas enters, which is via a cave surrounded by “dark woods.”48 Grafton notes that the myth of the Minotaur recalled “initiation rites seen as a journey through the underworld and kingdom of death, ending in rebirth.”49 Theseus was glossed from the early Christian period as a type of Christ, the labyrinth as the fallen world and the Minotaur as Satan. So, to enter the labyrinth and conquer the monster was, like a psychomachia, a process of conquering sin to redeem the soul.50 This journey through the labyrinth was further read as Christ’s descent and harrowing of Hell.51 These intertexts, combined with the idea of dreaming and night, add to the forest a role as a quasi-death space.
- 52 As Lander notes, demonological tracts regularly mentioned fairies and the orthodox position was tha (...)
- 53 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 109.
- 54 Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 25. D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 210; L. Walte (...)
- 55 L. Walters, “Monstrous Births”, art. cit., p. 138.
- 56 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 66, 68, 70, 76, 86.
36Fairy space also intersects with the dead. Fairies were commonly associated with death and the demonic in the early modern period.52 As Purkiss outlines “fairies are particularly associated with those who die before their time”; they could be thought of as “the rising dead” and centred on the child.53 Fairies were often connected with witches, and also intersected with narratives of familiars in witchcraft trials.54 As Walters points out, Titania and Oberon bear similarities to witches and “monstrous motherhood since they are parent figures of stolen children.”55 As Puck relates in the final act, the fairies “[follow] darkness like a dream” (5.1.364). In the same speech, he imagines the opening of graves to let their spirits out (5.1.356-360). As Purkiss outlines, fairies were often linked with ghosts, and the fairy queen with Proserpine as queen of the underworld.56 Puck’s description of Oberon as the “King of Shadows” (3.2.347) underlines the connection between the fairies and the underworld.
- 57 M. C. Howatson, op. cit., p. 187.
37The forest as a repository of mythic narratives, can be read as a type of mythic collective unconscious. It not only replays a version of Theseus’s past, but also invokes the future narrative of Theseus and Hippolyta in that, according to one version of the mythic narrative, their son Hippolytus, after being dragged to his death by horses, is reborn, becoming the god Virbius, linked with the goddess Diana’s shrine in a grove at Aricia.57 Thus the forest space invokes both mythic pasts and future intertexts. There is a circularity to the play in that the references to Diana in the first scene presage her future link with the offspring of Theseus and Hippolyta, and the lovers entering the forest for renewal anticipates the Athenian monarchs’ own son’s future entry into the forest in his new form.
38For Shakespeare and his early modern contemporaries, within the fictive, creative worlds of their work, the pagan classical inheritance was interwoven and co-existed with Christian ideology in an often-paradoxical syncretism. The journey into the forest for the lovers can be read on multiple levels; while at a superficial level the confusion and mismatched desires are part of the comedic passage towards marriage, at the deeper level the forest, through the Theseus, Minotaur and labyrinth intertext, suggests the larger narrative of the human challenge to conquer sin and its fallen, bestial nature. Tellingly in Puck’s epilogue is the hope that the actors will “’scape the serpent’s tongue” (Epilogue 411), a hissing audience, but with the added spectre of the underlying threat to postlapsarian humanity of the serpentine monster in the forest.
39The world of the play begins with the premise of flawed leadership: patriarchal Athenian society, with its strict application of law, rather than mercy, has jeopardised its youth, putting them at risk. Then when the lovers enter the labyrinthine forest, it is akin to a symbolic death and entry to an underworld. The forest is a rehearsal space for the mechanicals, reflecting in a comic vein, through Ovid, the potentially deadly consequences of blocking young love. Likewise, the forest as labyrinth becomes a type of symbolic rehearsal of death for the young lovers, for what potentially awaits them as a result of the oppressive Athenian patriarchy – death or chastity for Hermia, and thwarted desires for the other three young people. Like their mythic counterparts – the Athenian youths who enter the labyrinth as sacrificial food – the lovers enter a type of death zone. The folkloric associations of fairies with missing, sickly, deformed or dead children links with the play’s concerns over dangerous parenting and flawed governance. The failure of the older generation to nurture the young, summer generation, to cultivate nature and thus human society, is the threatening core of the play, and Titiania’s imagery of frost infecting rose buds, of winter contaminating spring, resonates with this theme of flawed governance and failed nurturing.
- 58 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University (...)
40The transitional and transformative nature of the forest has been theorised in various ways. Northrop Frye, in his seminal study Anatomy of Criticism, identified the central importance of “the drama of the green world” in Shakespeare’s work, and of the pattern across the comedies of a “rhythmic movement from normal world to green world and back again”, which “charges the comedies with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter”.58 Majorie Garber has illuminated this “Shakespearean triple pattern” as a structure moving from:
- 59 M. Garber, Shakespeare After All, op. cit., p. 217.
(1) a world of apparent reality and order; with seeds of disorder; to (2) a middle place, an interior world of transformation, in which things become far more evidently disordered (characters wear costumes, masks, or disguises, or acquire asses’ heads; they play unaccustomed roles, higher or lower on the social scale, and are freed by fiction), and then out again into (3) the exterior world, the world of so-called reality – though still onstage – armed with new knowledge, and better prepared to rejoin the ongoing world of social action.59
- 60 Ibid.
- 61 Tom McFaul, Shakespeare and the Natural World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 50.
41This rhythm she identifies, as “court / country / court, or civilization / wilderness / civilization”, is inherent to the pastoral mode, which entails a movement from the urban world to natural space and then a return. This rhythm also interrogates, as Garber points out, the civilisation / wildness boundary.60 Similarly Tom McFaul reflects that “the boundaries between the first and second world are not secure.”61 The aristocratic, courtly nature of the fairy world’s political structure within nature complicates their distinction and separation from the Athenian court.
- 62 Ibid. McFaul engages with the seminal studies of Frye, Anatomy, op. cit., Barber, and Harry Berger, (...)
- 63 Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, op. cit., pp. 141 and 151.
- 64 Laurel Moffatt, “The Woods as Heterotopia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Studia Neophilologica: A J (...)
- 65 L. Moffatt, art. cit., p. 183.
42As Macfaul has highlighted, the idea in Shakespeare of an “escape to a second world – usually a non-urban environment” to “resolve social and emotional tensions” has been a key recognition in critical discourse.62 C. L. Barber, in his Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, aptly described the woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a “region of metamorphosis” and that “the whole night’s action is presented as a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination”.63 Laurel Moffatt, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, argues that the forest functions as a “heterotopia,” a place that functions as a “counter-site” in which “the real site” is simultaneously “represented, contested, and inverted.”64 She also notes that way that the Indian boy “has characteristics of both the mortal and the spirit world” and that like changelings, the woods are “a place of shadows and harsh reality.”65
- 66 L. Hopkins, “Translated”, art. cit., p171.
- 67 J. Theis, Writing the Forest, op. cit., p. 110.
43The role of green space as intermediary further resides in associations with the plants themselves. As Hopkins outlines, many of the plants mentioned in the play “emblematize or were thought to facilitate passage from one state or place to another”.66 Theis has illuminated the way that references to the offstage locales of the fairy court and Lysander’s aunt resituate the forest from a court/country binary to a “middle term in a triadic configuration of space”, which is doubled, with the third point being either Fairyland or the dowager’s house.67
- 68 Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Li (...)
- 69 Harvey L. Hix, “Hybridity Is the New Metamorphosis”, Comparative Critical Studies, 9.3, 2012, p. 27 (...)
- 70 J. Lander, art. cit. p. 46.
44The intermediary nature of the forest has links with the way some theorists have conceptualised myth and metamorphosis. Robert Bringhurst has classified myths as “doorways between realms” and notes that “journey[s] between worlds” are central to mythic themes.68 Harvey L. Hix, in exploring ideas of hybridity and metamorphosis, extends this idea with the argument that transformation itself functions as a doorway, “connecting and yet keeping separate” worlds and as a literary and cultural vehicle for understanding humanity.69 Conceptualising the forest as a mediating, facilitating space also resonates with Lander’s idea of the fairies as “a third kind of spirit, neither angelic nor demonic,” but somewhere in-between, outside of binary paradigms.70
45The wandering nature of the fairies links with the nature of the labyrinth and the experiences that the lovers will undergo in the mazy wood. In 2.1 the Fairy identifies Puck and lists his habitual actions as including “midlead[ing] night-wanderers” (2.1.39); Puck confirms that he is “that merry wanderer of the night” (2.1.43). Just as love leads the young lovers astray, Puck, like the labyrinthine wood, confuses them further, dissolving the pairs like elements to lead to their resolution. Oberon also references Titania as “lead[ing] [Theseus] through the glimmering night” (2.1.77), giving a sense of Titania as also pixie-leading. It also creates a link between Titania and Ariadne, whose help leads Theseus out of the labyrinth through the device of the thread.
- 71 C. Wright, op. cit., p. 107, 113.
46As Wright traces, it was necessary in navigating a labyrinth to undergo retrograde paths, making a beginning of an ending.71 Likewise, there is a sense at the climax of the play of a frenzied unravelling, an episode where Puck misleads the lovers, paradoxically separating them in order to bring them together (3.2.396-463); this recreates, in dramatic form, a type of exit from the arboreal labyrinth. Although Puck will “lead them up and down” (3.2.396), echoing the fairy patterns of movement referred to when we first encounter the fairies in the play, paradoxically Puck’s direction, “Follow me then / To plainer ground” (3.2.403-404), has a deeper significance in suggesting an escape from the labyrinth.
- 72 As Wright outlines, “the West was a land of the dead, for in the word “occident” is the Latin verb (...)
47Wright outlines how medieval labyrinths in cathedrals and churches were often situated near the west portal, where people entered, since the west was associated with sin and death, whereas the altar was positioned in the east.72 The idea was that one had to progress through the labyrinth to move towards the sacred direction of the east. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the labyrinthine forest hosts an analogous progression. The play begins in conflict, shifts to the labyrinthine forest, for a journey of confusion and danger, then moves towards resolution, which coincides with the end of night and the new day dawning, the sun rising in the east.
- 73 See generally A. Loomba, op. cit.
- 74 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 210-214.
- 75 C. Wright, op. cit., p 19, 84.
48That the enigmatic Indian boy that the fairies quarrel over is a prince from the east also brings the idea of the east into the play’s imaginary geography. Postcolonial approaches to the play have outlined the ways in which the exotic Indian boy registers early modern colonialism, trade and Eurocentric conceptions of the exotic east and the new world.73 Purkiss has also traced the links between fairies and the slave trade.74 The depiction of the prince, as a stolen child and exotic possession, is disturbing for contemporary audiences. He is also arguably part of the mythic geography in the play’s imaginary; the movement through the forest for the central characters is akin to a spiritual journey through the labyrinth, a passage from west to east. As Helena expresses, “shine comforts from the east, / That I may back to Athens by daylight” (3.2.432). Again, this suggests the way out from the labyrinth, towards the east.75
- 76 G. K. Hunter, “Northrop Frye’s ‘Green World’: Escapism and Transcendence”, Actes des congrès de la (...)
49The morning after, Lysander expresses the waking, dazed state of the lovers: “My lord, I shall reply amazedly, / Half sleep, half waking” (4.1.143-144). He expresses the crux of the forest, in evoking the maze and the arboreal space as located between waking and dreaming states, between the conscious and the unconscious. As G. K. Hunter articulates, in exploring the interdependent relationship between green worlds and their “real” counterparts, Lysander’s urging the lovers to follow Theseus in returning to Athens reflects that “the desire to escape from the tyranny of law into the freedom of dream is exactly matched by the desire to awake from the vexation of dream into the stability of law.”76 There is also a circularity in framing the forest when Theseus takes a benign interpretation of finding the lovers in the forest, assuming: “No doubt they rose up early to observe / The rite of May, and hearing our intent / Came here in grace of our solemnity” (4.1.129-131). This recalls his invocation of maying at the beginning of the play, returning the forest to its unthreatening summer guise.
Conclusions: Fairy-thinking and the Arboreal Imaginary
- 77 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 209.
- 78 J. Lander, art. cit., p. 46.
50The fairies, as part of the forest ecology in the play, create a complex shadow-mirror to the human world. As Purkiss and Jesse Lander have outlined in different ways, fairies facilitate thinking through the human. For Purkiss, they represent othering: “Fairies become an empty space as oral traditions fade, and hence become a space for thinking about difference”.77 For Lander, the fairies are located amidst discourses of belief and scepticism, and she draws attention to the way that fairies present a challenge to binary categorisations.78 These quasi-yet-non-human figures and their ambiguous habitat create a vessel for experimenting. They reflect human dreams and darkness, a way to approach the other within the self.
- 79 L. Walters, “Monstrous Births”, art. cit., p. 127.
- 80 L. Hopkins, “Shared space”, art. cit., p. 93.
51As Lisa Walters highlights, in exploring the link between early modern conceptions of the imagination and its link with monstrous births, fairies and witches, “the imagination was a mysterious, liminal space where reality changed, where new forms were created and entered into the world whether in the form of textual production or children.”79 Ultimately in the play, as Hopkins observes, “If the wood is a place of anything, it is a place of the imagination.”80 Entering the forest imaginary, I argue, is a mode of fairy-thinking, projecting human chaos, violence and mismatched desires into arboreal space, a journey into the human psyche, in order to move towards resolution. The magical practice of theatre intersects with the folkloric human imaginary that both desires and fears human interactions with nature, a return to origins no longer possible. Hippolyta in the final scene conceives of the possibility of the lovers’ imaginations converging:
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable” (5.1.24-27).
52This chimes with the nature of the forest as a space of crossroads, a trivium and locus to worship the goddess of the wood, Diana.
53As part of the natural habitat of the fairies, the forest is a state into which characters enter in order to undergo a process of confusion, suffering and renewal, one that literalises and materialises what the characters experience psychologically and emotionally. It is a place for the lovers, with a focus on Hermia, to explore and work through the psychomachia, the conflict created by the gap between their desires and the constraints of society. The maze-like forest is presented as multicursal, with false paths that require steps to be retraced and magic undone. The construction of the forest as a labyrinth underlines the dark side of the human. The fairies are a key part of the process of manifesting the human psyche since, together with the forest, they create a space for articulating human nature, its beauty and grace, flaws and violence. The range of fairy behaviour, from playful deception to the potential for violence, reflects human capacities, and, when located in forest space, emphasises raw human nature and its position in relation to nature. The state of the natural world in the play shifts from eco-disorder to harmony, reflecting the shift in fairy and human relationships from disorder to social cohesion.
54The forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a polysemic space, haunted by mythic narratives. It blurs the boundaries between the “real” and “fictional” worlds, in that the nightmare horrors of the Minotaur myth are not confined to myth but reappear in a different guise in the real risks of death to young women who stray from the patriarchal path of control. The forest, in its reflecting, replaying modes, its refraction of the dangers of love and power struggles, mirrors society, aligning with the idea of the theatre, a place for exploring the human condition through the imagination. The mechanicals embody this in their use of the forest as a rehearsal space. Bottom, under fairy magic, re-performs the backstory of Theseus’s myth by unwittingly playing a version of the Minotaur. The mechanicals rehearse the Pyramus and Thisbe narrative that haunts the Athenian lovers and functions as a warning to oppressive Athenian society, the risk of winter killing summer.
- 81 Author’s note: No Gen-AI was used in the writing or research of this article – Victoria Bladen.
55The arboreal labyrinth creates the path and means towards resolution; it literalises the process of learning and change that various characters need to undergo. From all of the confusion, metatheatrical performance, pastoral retreat and return, there is ultimately resolution. The couples are brought together, and Athenian society is renewed. The labyrinthine forest, by rehearsing death for the lovers in the play’s imaginary, thus averts the tragic potential. The fairies, hovering between humans and nature, between reality and dreams, and the living and the dead, facilitate the role of the forest. Thus, through fairy-thinking, projecting the workings of the human psyche onto the forest, the play negotiates a path from west to east, from death to life, from sterility to future fertility. Yet, as with all of Shakespeare’s comedies, there remains the dark potential. We are left with some unsettling aspects of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular Titania’s submission to Oberon, and Demetrius remaining with drug-affected sight. Furthermore, in the future of the mythic narrative of Theseus and Hippolyta, their child Hippolytus will repeat mythic cycles of death and rebirth in the forest. Thus, the forest will continue to haunt and exist as a haunting space. Ultimately what the forest and fairies illuminate is the magic that humanity truly possesses, the power of the imagination.81
Notes
1 Starting places for exploring Shakespeare’s engagement with arboreal space include: Ann Barton, The Shakespearean Forest, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017; Jeffrey S. Theis, Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2009; Victoria Bladen, The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature, Abingdon; New York, Routledge, 2021, chapter 3. On the resonance between Shakespeare’s forests and the wooden theatre of the Globe, see Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare's Theatres and England's Trees, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2013. On Shakespeare and nature generally, see Charlotte Scott (ed.), Shakespeare/Nature: Contemporary Readings in the Human and Nonhuman, London, Bloomsbury, Arden, 2024. On ecocritical engagement with Shakespeare see Todd Andrew Borlik, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023.
2 The space is referred to as both a wood and a forest in the play. In the early modern period, a forest generally referred to an area preserved as a hunting space for the monarch and was subject to forest laws: Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 69. I have mostly used “forest”, given that it is used by Theseus (and Oberon) for hunting, and Theseus employs a “forester” (4.1.100), however the argument for using “wood” is equally valid since Athenians like the lovers and the mechanicals are not excluded from the area. See A. Barton, op. cit., p. 125. All quotations are taken from William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. R. A. Foakes, New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
3 The volume of critical discourse on Dream is formidable; a useful starting point is Nicolas Tredell, “The 2000s: Refiguring the Maze”, Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream, London, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010, p. 125-139.
4 In using the term “fairy-thinking”, I draw from the work of Jesse M. Lander (“Thinking with Fairies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Problem of Belief”, Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, 65, 2013, p. 42-57) and Dianne Purkiss (Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories, London, The Penguin Press, 2000, p. 209).
5 Lisa Hopkins, “The Shared Space of the Wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Nicolas Tredell (ed.), Salem Press; Grey House Publishing, Amenia, N.Y., 2020, p. 87-101.
6 J. Theis, “Green Plots and Green Plotters: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sylvan Struggle”, Writing the Forest, op. cit., p. 91-120.
7 Bottom’s transformation, in addition to evoking the Minotaur and Actaeon, has a classical precedent in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (or Metamorphosis) (c 159 CE), the story of Lucius, who experiments with magic and, despite his aim of being transformed into an owl, is inadvertently transformed into an ass. Subsequently restored, he is initiated into the mystery cults of Isis and Osirus, which finds a parodic echo in Bottom’s sense of having had a “rare vision” (4.1.200) and transcendent experience. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Robert Graves (trans.), West Drayton, Penguin Classics, 1950.
8 As Lisa Hopkins explores, the play “abounds in plant life”: Lisa Hopkins, “‘Thou Art Translated’: Plants of Passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, in Susan C. Staub and Vin Nardizzi (ed.), Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2023, p. 171-90, here p. 171.
9 Since Diana was worshipped at crossroads, “Trivia” was often added to her title (trivium, “place where three roads meet”), like Hecate. M. C. Howatson, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 2nd ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 187-188.
10 See the valuable diagram in François Laroque’s Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, Janet Lloyd (trans.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, appendix 3, p. 309. Also see François Laroque, “Shakespeares’s Festive Comedies”, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. III, Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 23-46.
11 F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 141.
12 F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 26.
13 This parallels Romeo and Juliet, the tragic counterpart to Dream, with the famous balcony scene. As Marjorie Garber notes, Shakespeare wrote both plays around the same time and there are various parallels: “In a way we could say that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Romeo and Juliet turned inside out, Romeo and Juliet turned into a comedy”, Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008, p. 213.
14 J. Theis, Writing the Forest, op. cit., p. 113.
15 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 27. As Laroque observes, “In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare played on the similarity between the festivities of May Day and those of Midsummer, deliberately confusing them as if they were more or less equivalent. He seems to have wanted to synthesize all these popular traditions, turning them into a single major festival, the midsummer one, which marked the transition into the pastoral period of summer” (Festive World, op. cit. p. 217). On May Day, see Laroque, Festive World, pp. 13 and 35. He also links the jigs that were commonly performed at the end of performances with the May Day festivities, which evidences “how much the public theatre in London had inherited form the spirit and traditions of popular provincial festivals” (p. 35). Also see Laroque, “Comedies”, art. cit., p. 24.
16 R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, op. cit., p. 28, 30. On May games and the theme of metamorphosis in Dream, see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. New ed., Princeton University Press, [1959] 2011, chapter six. Also, on Shakespearean comedy and seasonal ritual, see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, New York, Columbia University Press, 1965.
17 Vivian Thomas and Nicki Faircloth, Shakespeare's Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary, London, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 278.
18 L. Hopkins, “Translated”, in op. cit., p.173.
19 F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 27 and 143. Laroque includes a quotation from Reginald Scot that “To be delivered from witches, they hang in their entries hay-thorn, otherwise white-thorn, gathered on May-day”. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), p. 152; Laroque, Festive World, p. 27.
20 William W. E. Slights, “Nature’s Originals: Value in Shakespearian Pastoral”, Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, 37, 1984, p. 69-74, here p.71. Gisèle Venet, “Le monde vert ou la pastorale noire ?”, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 13, Le Monde vert : rites et renouveau, 1995, p. 77-93, DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.1295.
21 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 118.
22 On the concept of wilderness in real and imaginary sixteenth-century gardens, see Jane Avner, “Images of the Wilderness in some Elizabethan Gardens”, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 13, Le Monde vert : rites et renouveau, 1995, p. 9-25. https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.1286.
23 On the evocations of the various plants mentioned here see L. Hopkins, “Translated”, in op. cit., p. 178-181.
24 The names referred to by Titania here are typical of Virgilian pastoral. On the pastoral see Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, and Ken Hiltner, What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2011.
25 In narratives Fairyland was originally located in the Holy Land, then was located in the Middle East generally. D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 204-205.
26 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 9, 14.
27 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 127.
28 Their itinerant nature is one of their characteristics that links them with the actors. As Lisa Walters points out, in the play there is a continuous comparison between fairies, authorship and acting; for example, fairies and actors are both described as “shadows”. See Lisa Walters, “Monstrous Births and Imaginations: Authorship and Folklore in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 39.1, 2016, p. 115-146, here p. 116-117.
29 R. P. Harrison, Forests, op. cit. p. 69.
30 Fairyland was linked with tales of the marvellous east. As Purkiss outlines, portrayals of fairyland in romance often drew on colonial discourses, since the East was associated with jewels, gold and silver (Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 204-205).
31 As Louis Montrose, among other critics, observes, the resolution of the play is dependent on the control and coercion of female characters: Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theater, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 111-12.
32 Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1991, p. 24-25. For a counter argument, see Matthew M. Thiele, who argues that Dream instead presents a feminine wild: Matthew M. Thiele, “Mischief in the Wood: Pastoral, Domestic Abuse, and the Environment in The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, The Journal of the Wooden O, 19, 2019, p. 104-21, here p. 107. Also see Lisa Walters, “Oberon and Masculinity in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 26.3, 2013, p. 157-60.
33 See generally, John Black Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, Syracuse N.Y., Syracuse University Press, 2000.
34 As Ania Loomba notes, the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta is “an explicit continuation of military domination”: Loomba, Ania, “The Great Indian Vanishing Trick – Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, in Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2016, p. 181-205, here p. 182.
35 On intersections between women and monstrous births in the play, see L. Walters, “Monstrous Births”, art. cit.
36 Thomas R. Frosch, “The Missing Child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, 64.4, 2007, p. 485-511, here p. 487.
37 As Craig Wright notes, the maze was both in bono and in malo: Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 24. On the original Cretan labyrinth, Anthony Grafton et al. note that in Homer’s Iliad, the labyrinth at Knossos, in a description of Achilles’ shield, is imagined in a benign form as a maze for dancing, installed by Daedalus for the princess Ariadne: Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis, The Classical Tradition, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 503.
38 Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: from Cultivation to Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 21.
39 See also L. Walters, art. cit., “Monstrous births”.
40 As Andoni Cossio and Martin Simonson note, forests commonly act “as symbolic spaces for various trials” (Andoni Cossio and Martin Simonson, “Arboreal Tradition and Subversion: An Ecocritical Reading of Shakespeare’s Portrayal of Trees, Woods and Forests”, Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 21.36, 2020, p. 85-97, here p. 91).
41 Wright notes that some scholars differentiate between the terms labyrinth and maze on this basis but that the terms can be used interchangeably (The Maze and the Warrior, op. cit., p. 3-4, 74. Grafton et al have reflected that the labyrinth is a “polyvalent symbol” and that “neither the etymology nor the origin of the labyrinth has been fully explained” (p. 505).
42 Howatson, op. cit., p. 412.
43 On the myth, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, Book VIII; and Virgil, The Aeneid, David West [trans.], London, Penguin Classics, 1990, Book 6, p. 115-116.
44 Dream, edition cited, note to 1.2.
45 Golden Ass, ed. cit., p. 10-11; Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 16-17. On the Roman Saturnalia and its “rites of social inversion” informing the Twelfth Night “mimetic ritual of royalty” see F. Laroque, Festive World, op. cit. pp. 148, 153, 158, 171 and 187.
46 Angela Schumann, “‘But as a Form in Wax’: An Ecofeminist Reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, 30, 2015, p. 42-60, here p. 53.
47 Ibid., p. 54.
48 Aeneid, ed. cit., p. 115-116, 121.
49 A. Grafton et. al, ed. cit, p. 505.
50 C. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, op. cit., p. 7, 41,75-76
51 C. Wright, op. cit., p. 37, 85.
52 As Lander notes, demonological tracts regularly mentioned fairies and the orthodox position was that they were considered demons: J. Lander, art. cit. p. 45.
53 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 109.
54 Laroque, Festive World, op. cit., p. 25. D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 210; L. Walters, “Monstrous Births”, art. cit., p. 133-140.
55 L. Walters, “Monstrous Births”, art. cit., p. 138.
56 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 66, 68, 70, 76, 86.
57 M. C. Howatson, op. cit., p. 187.
58 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 182-183.
59 M. Garber, Shakespeare After All, op. cit., p. 217.
60 Ibid.
61 Tom McFaul, Shakespeare and the Natural World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 50.
62 Ibid. McFaul engages with the seminal studies of Frye, Anatomy, op. cit., Barber, and Harry Berger, Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988.
63 Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, op. cit., pp. 141 and 151.
64 Laurel Moffatt, “The Woods as Heterotopia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Studia Neophilologica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature, 76.2, Dec. 2004, p. 182-187, here p. 182; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, 16, 1986, p. 24.
65 L. Moffatt, art. cit., p. 183.
66 L. Hopkins, “Translated”, art. cit., p171.
67 J. Theis, Writing the Forest, op. cit., p. 110.
68 Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 407.
69 Harvey L. Hix, “Hybridity Is the New Metamorphosis”, Comparative Critical Studies, 9.3, 2012, p. 271-283, here p. 271.
70 J. Lander, art. cit. p. 46.
71 C. Wright, op. cit., p. 107, 113.
72 As Wright outlines, “the West was a land of the dead, for in the word “occident” is the Latin verb occidere, to fall or be slain”; East, by contrast, was associated with the rising sun, paradise, and Christ. Ibid., p. 18-19.
73 See generally A. Loomba, op. cit.
74 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 210-214.
75 C. Wright, op. cit., p 19, 84.
76 G. K. Hunter, “Northrop Frye’s ‘Green World’: Escapism and Transcendence”, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 13, Le Monde vert : rites et renouveau, 1995, p. 39-47, here p. 42. https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.1290
77 D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things, op. cit., p. 209.
78 J. Lander, art. cit., p. 46.
79 L. Walters, “Monstrous Births”, art. cit., p. 127.
80 L. Hopkins, “Shared space”, art. cit., p. 93.
81 Author’s note: No Gen-AI was used in the writing or research of this article – Victoria Bladen.
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Victoria Bladen, « Fairy-Thinking and the Labyrinth: The Forest Palimpsest in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 20 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/21838 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160fo
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