Fairie Lore and Roman Catholicism in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Part Four. Shakespeare as Priest.

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Fairie Lore and Roman Catholicism in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Part Four. Shakespeare as Priest.

December 13, 2014 by Stewart Trotter

(It’s best to read Parts ONE, TWO and THREE first)

William Shakespeare couldn’t have Saints and Angels in A Midsummer Night’s Dream interfering in the destinies of men…….

…….so he had fairies and goblins do the job instead.

And he establishes from the start that Puck – like the old Roman Catholic Church – is powerful, magical AND ambivalent…..

As the First Fairy says to him…

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,

Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite

Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are not you he

That frights the maidens of the villagery;

Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern

And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;

And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;

Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?

But the First Fairy then goes on to reveal there are different names for Robin Goodfellow…

……and different natures…..

Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,

You do their work, and they shall have good luck…..

If you are good to Puck, Puck will be good to you…

It was just like praying to a Catholic Saint…..

Puck replies….

Thou speak’st aright;

I am that merry wanderer of the night.

I jest to Oberon and make him smile

When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,

Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:

And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,

In very likeness of a roasted crab,

And when she drinks, against her lips I bob

And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.

The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;

Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,

And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough;

And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh,

And waxen in their mirth and sneeze and swear

A merrier hour was never wasted there.

This is close to the joy, celebration and anarchy of the old Catholic holidays……..

….which Elizabeth killed at a stroke.

She cut the number of Holy Days from over a hundred a year to a mere twenty-seven….

But Shakespeare goes out of his way to show that the Fairies in the play…..

……are NOT……

…..as the Protestants taught……

…..sent from the Devil.

Puck warns Oberon that daylight is approaching……

……a time when the ghosts of men and women who have done evil in their lives return to their graves….

Night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,

And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger;

At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,

Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,

That in crossways and floods have burial,

Already to their wormy beds are gone;

For fear lest day should look their shames upon,

They willfully themselves exile from light

And must for aye consort with black-brow’d night.

But Oberon then explains to Puck how he and his entourage are a quite different order of beings….

…..spirits of light who relish the golden dawn…

But we are spirits of another sort:

I with the morning’s love have oft made sport,

And, like a forester, the groves may tread,

Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,

Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,

Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.

Shakespeare shows how the world of fairies resonates with the world of mortals…..

Puck says of Oberon…

The king doth keep his revels here to-night:

Take heed the queen come not within his sight;

For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

Because that she as her attendant hath

A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;

She never had so sweet a changeling…..

Anita Louise as Titania.

And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild….

But she perforce withholds the loved boy,

Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy:

And now they never meet in grove or green,

By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,

But, they do square, that all their elves for fear

Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.

This fight between Oberon and Titania over the changeling boy EXACTLY mirrors the fight between Countess Mary…….

……and the Second Earl of Southampton……..

…… over their son Harry……

The phrase Puck uses about the changeling……

…..lovely boy……

…..is EXACTLY the phrase Shakespeare uses to describe Harry in Sonnet 126….

O thou my lovely boy who in thy power

Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour….

When Oberon and Titania meet for the first time in the play, they accuse each other of sexual infidelities…

…..just as the Second Earl and Mary had done….

Oberon, confronting Titania for the first time in the play, says:

I’ll met by moonlight, proud Titania.

And she replies with…

What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:

I have forsworn his bed and company….

Oberon:

Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?

Titania:

Then I must be thy lady: but I know

When thou hast stolen away from fairy land,

And in the shape of Corin sat all day,

Playing on pipes of corn and versing love

To amorous Phillida…..

They even accuse each other of affairs with Theseus and Hippolyta themselves…

Titania:

Why art thou here,

Come from the farthest Steppe of India?

But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,

Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love…..

To Theseus must be wedded, and you come

To give their bed joy and prosperity.

Oberon:

How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,

Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,

Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night

From Perigenia, whom he ravished?

And make him with fair Aegle break his faith, With Ariadne and Antiopa?

Their quarrel is so charged it affects the weather itself…

As Titania says:

……the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents:

The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable….

The human mortals want their winter here;

No night is now with hymn or carol blest:

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,

Pale in her anger, washes all the air,

That rheumatic diseases do abound:

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original….

This is a blow by blow description of the weather in 1594 – the year of the play’s premiere…..

Simon Forman, the astrologer, wrote:

June and July were very wet and wonderful cold like winter, that the 10^th day of July many did sit by the fire it was so cold and so it was in May and June. There were many great floods this summer….

Heneage and Mary had had their official wedding ceremony in London on 2^nd May – but wanted a Midsummer wedding celebration at Copped Hall round what had become St. John’s Day – 24^th June….

Parts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were clearly written to be played in the grounds and woods: there are mentions of oaks and hawthorn brakes and at one point Puck has to……..

……overcast the starry welkin with drooping fog as black as Acheron…….

…..an effect more easily achieved outdoors than indoors.

So the weather would have had a devastating effect on the plans for the Wedding Feast….

According to the historian and antiquarian, John Stow……….

……..it wasn’t till August that the weather improved.

Now even in these Godless times, people take the weather at a wedding as a sign of things to come….

So what did the Roman Catholic friends of the Southamptons make of the weather of 1594? Catholics then – and indeed Protestants – saw omens in everything!

They would have believed that the soul of the Second Earl, cheated of his tomb, was unquiet. And that the row between himself and Mary was echoing through the cosmos…..

Just as Oberon’s and Titania’s was…..

This row would HAVE to be resolved before Mary’s second marriage had a chance of succeeding….

So Shakespeare resolves it in the play itself….

Oberon punishes his wife for the theft of the changeling boy.

He enchants her eyes and she falls madly in love with Bottom the Weaver…..

…..whom Puck has transformed into an ass…..

….just as Countess Mary had fallen madly in love with a…….

……common person.

It’s the Feast of Fools all over again…..

Titania, though, expresses her infatuation with Bottom in language of great naturalness and beauty…..

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!

Oberon’s heart fills with pity for Titania’s dotage……

…… for her humiliation as a woman……..

…….which even the dew on the flowers she has picked for Bottom feels as its own….

Oberon forgives her and takes the spell from her eyes….

Be as thou wast wont to be;

See as thou wast wont to see:

Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower

Hath such force and blessed power.

Now, my Titania; wake you, my sweet queen…

It is as though the spirit of the Second Earl has returned to forgive his wife….

Titania restores the changeling boy to Oberon’s bower in fairy land……..