What do you remember from age four and a half? Anything? Most of my memories begin around age five—and even those are few and fleeting. My earliest memory is one that I’ve never written about: it feels too central to my own private mythology. I don’t want to muck it up. But here’s what happened: I was around four years old, and it was late, and I was in bed but not yet asleep. I noticed something next to my pillow—an invitation from my friends, two ducks, to their birthday party. Sounds OK, right? But then a little film projection started playing on the wall just above my bed—a film of chattering teeth. Chattering teeth! My enemy, the ducks’ enemy. The set of teeth wanted to know why it hadn’t been invited to the party. “Because we don’t like you,” I told it.
That’s it; there’s no other context. Zoom forward forty-four years. My skeptical adult self knows this memory was a dream. But I also believe—really believe, and not just as a conceit for this essay—it happened.
For much of the past month, I’ve been thinking about Shakespeare’s fairies. My four-and-a-half-year-old daughter has been playing one of Titania’s attendants in an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in some performances, she also plays the changeling child. We’ve been immersed in all things Midsummer: we’ve read countless adaptations of the comedy; we’ve watched Michael Hoffman’s sparkling 1999 film version; we’ve seen Julie Taymor’s 2014 stage production (filmed in Brooklyn and recently screened across the country). I’ve listened as my daughter tells the story of Lysander and Hermia and Demetrius and Helena to her dolls at night. (“You must marry Demetrius, or die!” she says with great relish.) Sometimes one of us will break a silence by intoning, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” and the other will mock-shiver and crack up.
My daughter believes in fairies, thinks they live in our quiet college town. And why not? You can find fairy houses and fairy doors all over Ann Arbor. Sometimes we go in search of the fanciful constructions, and, when we find one, we speculate as to where the fairies might be. (They’re always conveniently out to dinner or something.) Then we come home, and my daughter colors in her Garden Fairy Alphabet Book, moving from the Azalia Fairy to the Lilac Fairy to, at last, the Zinnia Fairy.
Just as she works through the alphabet fairies, she hopes to someday work through (or play through, really) the Midsummer Night’s Dream fairies. She imagines graduating to Cobweb or Peaseblossom—and then, years later, taking up Titania. By the time she’s old enough to play the Fairy Queen, of course, she probably won’t believe in fairies—or at least not in the same way. And maybe the play’s fairies don’t believe in themselves. As C. L. Barber writes, in “The Saturnalian Pattern in Shakespeare’s Comedy,” “It is part of the aristocratic urbanity of Titania, Oberon and their jester Puck to intimate in their own lines that they do not exist. So perfect an expression and understanding of folk cult was only possible in the moment when it was still in the blood but no longer in the brain.”
What a lovely and haunting phrase, and moment, that is: “still in the blood but no longer in the brain.” It’s a moment that places us on the precipice of experience, that carries us from Oberon’s world into Theseus’s. And while Shakespeare promises us, or at least promises his human characters, full citizenship in that world, he gives all his final lines to his fairies. “Hand in hand, with fairy grace / Will we sing, and bless this place,” Titania vows. Puck offers a more complicated pact: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber’d here / While these visions did appear.” But the play wasn’t a dream: it happened. We were all there in the audience: it happened, it happened, it happened.