Dream does not. Bottom and co. That does not mean that it is therefore to be taken as straightforwardly real, that Shakespeare and his audiences believed in it as literal. It is also that their interventions create the very different logics of the play, not only realist and rational but also dreamlike.
If we shadows have offended Think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear.
But, if that suggests something trivial, that would underestimate the power of the dream world to work by its own systems in dealing with the tensions of the daylight world. However we consider the events of the forest, they act as a kid of wish fulfilment that we can envy, as the problems of the four lovers and of the obstruction posed by Egeus, as well as the fantasies of anger and revenge that Titania and Oberon work through, can reach conclusion.
Hovering around such dream patterns is always the way in which dream pivots uncontrollably from comedy to tragedy or, here, from tragedy to comedy. No one is less fit for such a part. That will put them out of fear. The presence of such a benign spirit at its center must have played some part in making A Midsummer's Night Dream the gentlest of Shakespeare's works.
Bottom's tact, courteousness and courage have a soothing effect on the entire proceeding. Aside from the threats made against Hermia by her own father in the opening scene, there is little violence or hint of violence in the piece, even on the order of the verbal ferocity and nihilism of Much Ado About Nothing or Love's Labour Lost , or the off-stage tyranny of a usurping duke suggested in As You Like It.
Thou rememb'rest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea maid's music? I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and eglantine.
Puck plays his pranks, and Oberon takes his relatively harmless revenge on Titania, but this is not a nightmare, it is a dream born of a warm summer night. The cruelest exchanges in the play take place between the foolish lovers, but their sentiments are precisely not to be taken entirely seriously, as each of the four is capable of making an emotional about-face at any given moment. The extraordinary spirit of the piece and the astonishing light touch of the author must be bound up with what one perceives as, if not a utopian vision, at least the suggestion of a world of infinite possibility.
After all, this is the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which a man on the Bottom sleeps with or by a Queen, at her instigation no less. In the forest in the middle of the night in a dream all things pass into one another and are transformed, love and hate, man and animal, spirit and matter. Of course, only in a dream. Shakespeare provides his own criticism of this fantastical vision. Duke Theseus, the voice of rationality and authority, comments disapprovingly about the goings-on that the four lovers report:.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman.
The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 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. I take as a given that every significant artist possesses within him or herself the vision of men and women freely living, and loving, even if that should only emerge, out of despair, in the form of its opposite.
On the eve of the modern era he still felt the gravitational pull of a golden age, real or imaginary, that existed prior to legal obligation, property, money, castes and classes, a time when humankind and nature lived in perfect harmony.
The presence of such a primordial condition is palpably strong in this play. Blake, of course, made his presence felt nearly two centuries later by which time something quite new had developed within the social organism.
In what way does Shakespeare look forward? Great artists are possessed of great intuition, which appears to many as a magical power. I do not know for certain, but I think a simple accident is the least likely explanation. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Self, like sleep, May well be bottomless. New moon tonight. Another dream To act. They laugh at our dismay.
Only play. And so the story ends. Our catalogue store includes many more recordings which you can download to your device. Username or Email Address. Remember Me. Lost your password? I trusted I had mastery, Until one night, being left alone, I snorted at the wandering moon In terror of the mystery, Which seemed quite bottomless, And out of that she spoke, who had No voice, although she stirred my sense, Who touched me, though she had no hands, And led me where you cannot lead, Since it is bottomless.
Clive Wilmer in the Poetry Store. Visit poetry store. Clive Wilmer. View poet page. Themes Dreams Games Love. Glossary Cinquains Dramatic Monologue. Report from Nowhere. The old men at the swimming pool. The Goldsmith.
The Kitchen Table.
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