Art and Theatre
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: The play’s thinking about its own art: a company of workmen who cannot trust an audience to tell a lion from a man, a duke who explains that actors are shadows and poets give airy nothing a name, and a fairy who ends by asking the real audience to call the whole thing a dream.
- Key Characters: Bottom, Theseus, Hippolyta, Puck, Lysander, Demetrius, Oberon.
- The Core Tension: The workmen believe theatre only works if the audience is told what is real; the fairies make illusions nobody questions; and the play containing both is itself an illusion, performed on a bare stage by men playing fairies and women.
- Key Manifestations: The casting of Pyramus and Thisbe (A1S2); the rehearsal, the prologue, the lion, the wall and the moon (A3S1); Puck as "an auditor; an actor too" (A3S1); Philostrate’s report and Theseus’s choice (A5S1); the performance, the heckling, "the best in this kind are but shadows" and Hippolyta’s reply (A5S1); the poet’s eye and the local habitation (A5S1); Puck’s epilogue (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them."
(Act 5, Scene 1) - The Outcome: The workmen’s play is performed, mocked and praised; the court goes to bed; and Puck asks the audience in the theatre to forgive the shadows and give them their hands.
The Most Lamentable Comedy
The play’s theatre begins in a carpenter’s house with a list of names and a title. Quince has written a play for the duke’s wedding, and Bottom wants to know what it is about before the parts are read.
Original
Marry, our play is, The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.
(Quince, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Well, our play is called, ‘The tragic comedy and cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe’.
A lamentable comedy about a cruel death: the title is a contradiction, and Theseus will enjoy the same contradiction in Act 5 when Philostrate offers him "very tragical mirth". The workmen do not see the joke. They see a play with a lover, a lady, a lion and a wall in it, and set about casting it, with Bottom volunteering for every part and Quince holding him to one by flattery.
Shakespeare’s own company had been, within living memory, exactly this: a group of tradesmen putting on plays for their betters. The affection in the casting scene is real, and so is the mockery. The theme of order and chaos has three levels in the play, court, fairies and workmen, and the workmen are the only level that makes anything.
Write Me a Prologue
At the rehearsal in the wood the company discovers its problems. Pyramus must kill himself, and the ladies cannot abide it; a lion among ladies is a dreadful thing; the lovers meet by moonlight in a room without a moon; and there must be a wall. Bottom has the answer to all of them.
Original
Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and, for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver: this will put them out of fear.
(Bottom, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Write a prologue that explains we will not harm ourselves with our swords, and that Pyramus is not actually killed; and to better reassure them, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not actually Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will stop them from worrying.
Tell them the swords are harmless; tell them Pyramus is really Bottom; tell them the lion is really Snug. Every solution is the same: replace the illusion with an announcement. The workmen do not believe an audience can hold two things in its head, a lion and a joiner, and so they give it only one, and the play they finally perform is a series of explanations interrupted by verse.
It is funny, and it is also a theory of theatre argued by men who have never seen a play. The audience laughing at it has just accepted a bare stage as a wood and a man in a headpiece as a transformed weaver, without a word of explanation. The theme of magic and illusion in this play is illusion that needs no prologue, and the workmen are its opposite.
Hard-Handed Men
On the wedding night Theseus asks for entertainment, and Philostrate tries to spare him the workmen’s play. It is nothing, he says, nothing in the world, unless the duke can find sport in men stretching themselves painfully to serve him. Theseus insists, and explains to Hippolyta what the court will get from it.
Original
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake:
And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We’ll get enjoyment watching them mess up.
And though they are unskilled, out of respect,
We’ll value them on effort, not on merit.
The sport is the mistakes, and the court takes them: the prologue, the wall, the lion, the moon, the death. Hippolyta objects that she does not like to see wretchedness overcharged and duty perishing in its service, and Theseus answers with a gracious speech about reading a welcome in a frightened speaker’s silence. Then the play begins and he heckles every line.
The scene is the play’s picture of an audience, and it is not flattering. The duke who explained an hour earlier that imagination shows nothing true now sits down to enjoy an evening of failed illusion, and the lovers who spent the night mistaking everything laugh at a lover who mistakes a cloak for a corpse. The theme of love and folly is being performed for them, badly, and they do not recognise it.
If We Shadows Have Offended
The last voice in the play is an actor’s. The mortals have gone to bed, the fairies have blessed the house, and Puck steps forward alone to speak to the people in the seats.
Original
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream.
(Puck, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If we ghosts have caused offence,
Think of this as recompense:
You’ve been merely sleeping here
While these visions did appear.
And this poor and silly tale
Was merely just a dreamy veil.
"Shadows" is what Oberon called his fairies and what Theseus called actors, and Puck is both. If the play offended, he says, pretend you slept and dreamed it. The offer folds the fairy world and the theatre into one illusion and hands it to the audience, who are asked, in the last line, for their hands.
It is the play’s final statement about its own art. Everything the audience has seen was made by shadows, on a stage, out of nothing; and the audience, unlike the workmen’s court, was never told what was real and never needed to be. The theme of dreams and reality is the play’s name for the agreement between a theatre and its audience, and Puck asks them to keep it.
"The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.—Poetry and the stage do not agree well together."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817
Key Quotes on Art and Theatre
Quote 1
If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end.
(Quince as Prologue, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If we offend you, it’s not our intention.
Please don’t think that we’re here to cause offence,
For we mean well, though we lack comprehension;
That’s how the play begins, in our defence.
Quote Analysis: Quince’s prologue, punctuated by a nervous man who has learned his lines but not his stops. Read with the commas in the right places it is a polite apology: if we offend, it is against our will; we come with good will to show our skill. Read as Quince delivers it, it says the opposite of everything it means. Theseus’s verdict, that this fellow does not stand upon points, is a pun on punctuation and manners, and the joke is on every actor who ever lost his place.
Hard-handed men that work in Athens here,
Which never laboured in their minds till now,
And now have toiled their unbreathed memories
With this same play, against your nuptial.
(Philostrate, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
They’re labourers that all work here in Athens,
And they have never used their minds before,
And now have worked their unused memories
To learn this play to act out at your wedding.
Quote Analysis: Philostrate describing the workmen. They have never laboured in their minds till now and have toiled their unbreathed memories with this play for the duke’s wedding: it is meant as a reason not to watch them, and Theseus takes it as a reason to. The lines are the play’s clearest statement of the gap between the court and the company, and of what crossing it costs. The workmen have learned a play the way they would build a wall, by labour, and the court will laugh at the joins.
In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall;
And such a wall, as I would have you think,
That had in it a crannied hole or chink...
(Snout as Wall, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
In this part of the play, it does befall
On me – I’m Snout! – to act out as a wall;
And this specific wall, I’ll have you think,
Had in it a small hole or narrow chink...
Quote Analysis: Snout as Wall, explaining himself. Everything the workmen decided in the wood is here: the actor’s name, the plaster and the loam, the chink through which the lovers whisper. Wall is the play’s purest example of theatre that refuses to be believed, a man announcing that he is a wall in order to be sure nobody thinks he is one. And the joke has a floor under it: Snout is right. A man saying he is a wall is a wall if the audience agrees, and the play we are watching is built on the same bargain.
This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled
The heavy gait of night.
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This tragedy has kept us entertained
And kept the sleepy night at bay.
Quote Analysis: Theseus’s farewell to the workmen’s play. "Palpable-gross" is a critic’s verdict and "well beguiled" is an audience’s, and the duke gives both in one line. The play was terrible and it passed the evening, which is what he asked of it. The phrase is also Shakespeare’s quiet joke about his own play, which has beguiled the night for its audience by exactly the same means, a wood, a queen and an ass, made of nothing, and is about to send them home.
Key Takeaways
- Theatre by Explanation: The workmen solve every problem by telling the audience what is not real, and produce a play made of announcements.
- Shadows and Imagination: Theseus says actors are shadows and imagination must amend them; Hippolyta answers that the imagination is then his, not theirs.
- The Audience on Stage: The court heckles a play about lovers in a wood who mistake everything, having just done the same, and never notices.
- Puck's Bargain: The epilogue offers the real audience the choice the workmen never trusted theirs with: believe the shadows, or call it a dream.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why does the play include a play within the play?
Because it lets Shakespeare show his own art from the outside. The workmen’s rehearsal in the wood is the first thing Puck sees when he arrives, and his reaction is the play’s:
What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor;
An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause.
(Puck, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
They’re putting on a play! I will review it;
And maybe act in it, perhaps, if needs be.
He watches, then joins in, and his contribution, the ass’s head, is the best piece of theatre of the night. The fairies are the play’s real actors, making illusions nobody questions, and the workmen are its anti-actors, explaining every illusion until it fails.
David P. Young, in Something of Great Constancy (1966), read Pyramus and Thisbe as a distorted mirror held up to the court: a story of lovers who defy their parents, meet in the dark and mistake a bloody cloak for a death, performed for four young people who have just lived through a version of it, and who laugh without recognising themselves. C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), placed the workmen’s play among the amateur interludes and pageants that English towns and guilds had put on for centuries, the popular tradition out of which Shakespeare’s own theatre grew, and read the play as gathering that tradition up for a wedding. Both readings agree that the play within the play is not a digression. It is the play looking at itself, and the joke is that the court cannot see the resemblance.
What is wrong with the workmen’s idea of theatre?
They do not trust illusion, and so they replace it. Afraid that a lion will frighten the ladies, they have Snug explain, in rhyme, that he is not one:
Then know that I, one Snug the joiner, am
A lion-fell, nor else no lion's dam...
(Snug as Lion, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But know that it’s just Snug the joiner here,
Who’s not a lion nor a lioness...
The wall names the tinker inside it; the moon tells the court what its lantern, its dog and its bush are for; and Bottom breaks character to correct the duke. Every device is designed to stop the audience believing anything, and the audience laughs, because belief was the point.
David P. Young (1966) put the problem exactly: "The mechanicals are far too ambitious in their dramatic metaphors: men changed into walls and moons, a Thisby with a ‘monstrous little voice,’ a lion that roars like (here simile enters) a sucking dove or a nightingale." They want to present things rather than represent them, and when they cannot, they explain. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), took the other view and meant it: "Bottom seems to have understood the subject of dramatic illusion at least as well as any modern essayist." Hazlitt’s point was that Bottom is right about the gap between a thing and the image of it, and only wrong about how to close it. The audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has accepted a bare stage as a wood and boys as women for three acts without a prologue; the workmen’s play shows them what theatre looks like when nobody is trusted to do that. The theme of magic and illusion is the fairies’ theatre, and the workmen are its mirror image.
What does Theseus mean by "the best in this kind are but shadows"?
That actors are only shadows of what they play, and that the audience’s imagination supplies the rest. Hippolyta has called the workmen’s play the silliest stuff she ever heard, and Theseus defends it with a theory: the best actors are shadows, the worst no worse if imagination amends them. He goes on:
If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. Here...
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If we imagine these actors are as good as they think they are, we’ll consider them excellent. Here...
Hippolyta’s reply is the sharper line: in that case the imagination must be his and not theirs. He does not answer. The exchange is the play’s clearest account of how theatre works, and the woman has the better of it.
"Shadows" is the play’s word for actors, fairies and, in Puck’s epilogue, the whole company, and the theory Theseus states is one the play has been demonstrating all along. Catherine Belsey, in her 1993 essay for the Folger edition, noted that the audience, having watched the fairies, is "in no position to share his entirely rational dismissal of lovers, along with lunatics and poets", and the same applies here: Theseus recommends imagination as the way to enjoy a play an hour after denying that it shows anything true. R. W. Dent, in Shakespeare Quarterly (1964), argued that the play’s subject is the right use of imagination, and that neither the lovers who surrender to it nor the duke who dismisses it has found the balance; Hippolyta, who watches, wonders and judges, comes closest. The theme of dreams and reality and the theme of theatre meet in this exchange, because a play is a dream the audience agrees to have.
Is Pyramus and Thisbe a parody of Romeo and Juliet?
Possibly, and if so Shakespeare was parodying himself. The two plays are usually dated within a year of each other, and the workmen’s tragedy has the same shape as the Verona one: lovers kept apart by their families, a secret meeting at night, a false sign of death, a double suicide. Thisbe’s lament for the dead Pyramus is the play’s last speech before the dance:
These lilly lips,
This cherry nose,
These yellow cowslip cheeks,
Are gone, are gone:
Lovers, make moan:
His eyes were green as leeks.
(Flute as Thisbe, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
These lily-white lips,
This cherry-red nose,
These yellow marigold cheeks,
Are gone, they’re gone.
Lovers will moan:
His eyes were green as leeks.
Lily lips, a cherry nose, cowslip cheeks and eyes as green as leeks: Quince’s catalogue of Pyramus’s beauty gets every colour wrong, and Flute delivers it as a dirge. The source is Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Arthur Golding’s translation of 1567, where the lovers of Babylon whisper through a wall and die under a mulberry tree, and Shakespeare follows it closely.
Whether the parody is aimed at his own tragedy or at the cruder tragedies of the 1560s and 1570s, whose alliteration and short rhymed lines Quince imitates, is a question editors still argue, and both may be true. What is certain is that the play within the play repeats the play containing it. David P. Young (1966) made the mirror his central reading; Anne Barton, in an essay for Shakespeare Survey (1971), observed how oddly the court’s confident commentary is qualified by what it comments on. The lovers laugh at Pyramus because they can afford to. The theme of love and folly in its tragic form is what the comedy is laughing at, and the laughter is the comedy’s way of saying it knows.
Why is Quince’s prologue mispunctuated?
Because he is nervous, and because Shakespeare wanted a joke that only works aloud. The prologue is fourteen lines of polite apology, and Quince delivers it with every stop in the wrong place, so that "we come not to offend, but with good will" becomes its own opposite. The court’s three jokes about it are all about control:
He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop. A good moral, my lord: it is not enough to speak, but to speak true.
(Lysander, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He read his prologue like he was riding a wild horse; he doesn’t know to stop it, nor where the stops are. The moral is, my lord, you can’t just speak, but must speak accurately.
Lysander’s moral, that it is not enough to speak but to speak true, comes from a man who swore eternal love to two women the night before and meant it both times. Theseus says Quince does not stand upon points, and Hippolyta that he played it like a child on a recorder, "a sound, but not in government".
The prologue is a small essay on how much meaning depends on delivery, in a play that is entirely about how much love depends on seeing. Quince’s words are right and his pauses are wrong, and the result is nonsense; the lovers’ words are right and their eyes are wrong, and the result is the plot. Samuel Johnson (1765), who knew the theatre of his day well, drew Bottom as the eternal amateur who "is for engrossing every part, and would exclude his inferiors from all possibility of distinction"; Quince, the author who cannot read his own lines, is the eternal playwright. The workmen’s failures are the failures of every company, and Shakespeare, who ran one, knew them from the inside. The theme of order and chaos at its smallest scale is a sentence with its stops in the right place, and the play lets a carpenter get it wrong.
Is A Midsummer Night’s Dream a play about theatre itself?
More than any other comedy Shakespeare wrote. It contains a rehearsal, a performance, a stage audience, a theory of acting, a theory of poetry and an epilogue, and its most famous speech is a description of what a playwright does:
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And as they see things with imagination
That are not real, the poet starts to write
And gives to fancies that are made of nothing,
A name and somewhere that they might exist.
Theseus means it as a diagnosis, the poet as a kind of madman, but the description is so exact that it has been read as Shakespeare’s own account of his art ever since. The play has just given airy nothing, a fairy king and queen, a wood, an ass, a local habitation and a name, and the duke is a character in it.
William Hazlitt (1817) thought the play too imaginative to stage at all: "The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime", because "the boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing". He was reviewing a Covent Garden spectacle, and the modern theatre has proved him wrong by going the other way. Peter Brook’s 1970 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company played the fairies’ magic in a white box with trapezes and spinning plates, the tricks done in plain sight, and the illusion was the actors’ skill; Brook’s own credo, in The Empty Space (1968), was that "A play is play." Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), read Puck’s epilogue as the moment the play hands its own reality to the audience, who are obliged to treat it as a benevolent dream. The workmen tell their audience what is real; the fairies show theirs and are believed; and Shakespeare, in the last lines, asks his to decide. The theme of dreams and reality is the play’s word for the bargain, and theatre is the place it is made.
How has the play’s own stage history reflected its ideas about theatre?
Unkindly at first. Samuel Pepys saw it in 1662 and wrote that it was "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life", though he had enjoyed "some good dancing and some handsome women". The Restoration and eighteenth-century stage took the hint and turned the play into spectacle: Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy-Queen (1692) replaced most of the text with masques, and David Garrick’s The Fairies (1755) was an opera with the workmen cut out entirely. Mendelssohn’s overture (1826) and incidental music (1842) gave the Victorian theatre its Dream, with gauze wings, child fairies and a Wedding March, and Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film, with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, was the last great version in that tradition.
Hazlitt, in 1817, had already said why it did not work: the play’s fairies are creatures of the reader’s fancy, and "fairies six feet high" are incredible. The answer came in 1970. Peter Brook’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company stripped the play to a white box, gave the fairies trapezes and circus skills instead of wings, doubled Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania, and put a clown’s red nose on Bottom in place of the ass’s head. The magic was visibly made by actors, and audiences believed it as they had not believed the gauze.
That is the play’s own argument, staged. The workmen thought theatre needed explaining and were laughed at; the fairies made illusions out of nothing and were believed; and Brook showed that a bare stage and a company that trusts its audience can do what a century of spectacle could not. The theme of magic and illusion and the theme of theatre turn out to be the same theme, and the play has been proving it for four hundred years, whenever a director takes Puck’s epilogue at its word.
