Identity Dis-Figured: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream¹ has been much better served by the critics than any of Shakespeare’s other early comedies, so I want to acknowledge the indebtedness of my own sense of the play to, among others, C. L. Barber, David Young, James Calderwood and, most recently, Louis Montrose’s brilliant exploration of the comedy’s sexual politics in Representations (I, No. 2 [Spring 1983]: 61-94). Nevertheless, there are certain elements in its construction which still seem to invite further discussion, and some of them form part of Shakespeare’s ongoing meditation on the specifically dramatic character of his own art. While consideration of Shakespeare’s sources (even for a play which, like this one, has no single evident source) has been exhaustive and frequently illuminating, such scholarly inquiries seldom take sufficient account of the ways in which dramatic representation both requires and implies a different relation to what is to be represented than that of a narrative or discursive text.

The most obvious of Shakespeare’s sources for this play is Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which tells the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the most obvious change which Shakespeare (or the inept Athenians who usurp his role of playwright within the play) makes in it is that no metamorphosis occurs in the “lamentable comedy.” (Perhaps one should add at once that Shakespeare had two sources known to the Elizabethans as the Metamorphoses: in addition to Ovid they had the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, which modern readers generally call The Golden Ass.) Why does no metamorphosis occur? The absence of transformation might be in part a comment on the earthbound character of the performance; nothing here is capable of transformation—not even the actors into their roles. Bottom never disappears into Pyramus, nor Flute into Thisbe, although, ironically, what keeps them so resolutely leaden is a conviction of the potency of their art, a potency which they ward off by constantly announcing and disarming their fiction: Bottom advises Snug to say, “If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing; I am a man, as other men are” (III, 1,40-43). It is also possible to say that Shakespeare did not need or want the element of metamorphosis in the Ovidian tale, but only the tragic love story which in a comically distorted version, the performance by Bottom and his friends, exorcises the threat of love’s destructive consequences with which the play begins. Still, that would be a strange choice in a play which is haunted by the possibility of metamorphosis and in which one character is, at least briefly and apparently, transformed from a man into a compound being, both man and ass. A more complex approach, which can only be sketched here, would trace its route through a series of issues involving not only metamorphosis, but also metaphor, the physicality of theater, and the way in which A Midsummer Night’s Dream conceives and represents identity.