The Hiatus of the Ordinary
The midsummer night, the eve preceding May Day.
What did you do with your midsummer’s night last night?
In any case, I’m sure it did not involve falling in love with a donkey’s head, getting waited on by fairies, or switching bodies with your best friend. Shakespeare’s characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream should not count themselves so lucky…
The midsummer night or the night preceding May Day is a time for the reversal of the ordinary […] the hierarchical structure is turned upside down and all is possible.
(Allan Lewis, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Fairy Fantasy or Erotic Nightmare?”, 1969.)
There is perhaps no play that celebrates the hiatus of the ordinary in such a singularly bizarre fashion as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And it all happens on the eve of May…
In Gaelic folklore, the significance of the eve of May and May Day is that they take place midway between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, marking the return of summer and light. Shirley Garner writes that A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to pass between this land of sterility to a land of renewal between the eve and dawn of May Day:
The sterile world that Titania depicts […] is transformed and the play concludes with high celebration, ritual blessing, and the promise of regeneration.
(Shirley Garner, “Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill”, 1996)
Before that, however, a series of outlandish mischief occurs. This is mainly aggravated by Puck, the trouble-making woodland spirit, and Oberon, the haughty and cavalier King of the Fairies.
Together, they manage to wreak so much havoc as to have Bottom, the untalented and rather daft drama enthusiast, wear a donkey’s head and have Titania, Queen of the Fairies, fall madly in love with him.
They then cause even more discord as they muddle the minds of our four lovers, turn a love triangle in on its head, and send everyone running around on what may as well have been a wild goose chase around the woods.
They wake up on the 1st May, confused and befuddled. They think that they dreamt up all the events of the night before and Hermia says, ‘I see these things with a parted eye / where everything seems double’ (I.v.645) They rejoice to be back in the land of reason and end with festivities and celebrations!
I don’t know about you, but my midsummer night in quarantine was strange enough for me… I’m ready for Puck to come out of the shadows and say:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
[…]
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends. (V, i)
Thought of the Day
If the eve of May is a time for ‘the reversal of the ordinary where […] all is possible’, I’m ready for May Day to mark the hiatus of the out-of-ordinary, where Puck emerges from the shadows and says, ‘If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended […] / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream’, and we celebrate May Day together with the return of summer and light.
-Gabriela Milkova
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