Is there any stranger and lovelier piece of poetry than Oberon’s description of the bower where he plans to seek out his wife, Titania, and poison her vision, in Act I, scene 3 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies.
Oberon holds a flower ??? “Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound” ??? that will cause Titania to lose herself in desperate love for an ass, and, even worse, an actor. But the speech in which he describes the river bank where he will work this dark magic has become a bit of Shakespeare kitsch, a list of herbs and flowers that turns up in British garden centers, cookbooks, and the names of vegetarian caf??s. (“Welcome to the Nodding Violet. Today’s specials are Oxlips with Wild Thyme“”) Only the snake throwing off her enamell’d skin, “weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in,” hints at the dark magic Oberon will perform, turning all this pastoral beauty to something twisted and erotic, the “hateful fantasies” that will drive Titania to make Bottom the Weaver into bit of rough trade, her bestial, working-class piece of ass.
As you might have figured out by now, I went to the theater this weekend, taking my group of Kenyon students to see a strange, dark Midsummer Night’s Dream at the RSC, and a star turn by Derek Jacobi as Malvolio in the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Twelfth Night. (It’s a tough job, I know. But someone’s got to do it.)
There’s a similarly strange and lovely moment in Twelfth Night, when the cross-dressed heroine, Viola, describes the madness that passion inspires, making it impossible for any true lover to take no for an answer:
VIOLA
If I did love you in my master’s flame,
With such a suffering, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense;
I would not understand it.OLIVIA
Why, what would you?VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!OLIVIA
You might do much.
These speeches are the moments when Shakespeare works his own dark magic on us. It’s impossible not to love this image of love, even if it turns lovers into crazed stalkers and makes our “shaping fantasy” of desire a donkey show of self-degradation. The poetry sings so sweetly, even as it lures us toward the cliff-edge of madness, that we can’t help falling hard for this dangerous idea of love, just as Olivia can’t help falling for the messenger, with her breathless confession, “You might do much.”
For me, it all goes back to that strange pair of lines about the snake skin in Oberon’s speech: both speeches are seductive because they are just a bit of gratuitous beauty that the play throws off as it moves the plot forward ??? like the snake’s “enamell’d skin, / Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.” But the speeches are so beautiful that we can’t help wanting to stop the play and savor them, the way that the fairies can’t help wrapping themselves in that snake’s skin. There’s something perverse in both speeches, but the perversity and the beauty are entwined, just as the woodbine winds itself through the overhanging trees to create the canopy over Titania’s fragrant bank.
Is all art a form of perversity? Is poetry simply gratuitous beauty, the glittering snakeskin cast off by language as it goes about shaping the world in our minds? I’m tempted here to pose the question I ask my students when we finish discussing Midsummer in my Shakespeare class: “When does the dream end?” Do we ever awake from it, or, like Demetrius at the play’s end, do we wander through the world wrapped in art’s enamell’d skin, in love with all the false things we see?