Tonight’s diary grew out of musings about the summer solstice (this Friday) and Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is, in addition to being perfectly delightful, one of our first enduring English fantasies. Tonight, though, I don’t really want to think about A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a work of fantasy, or as literature even. I want to do something different, and that is to look over some of the traditions, the folk teachings and cultural touchstones that Shakespeare and his contemporary audience knew but we have since forgotten. Shining through A Midsummer Night’s Dream in bits and pieces are remnants of an older world, one we’ve in part suppressed and in part diminished.
First, some background. Shakespeare didn’t know that he lived during the Renaissance, which marks the end of the Medieval period and the start of the Modern world. No one at the time knew they were at the start of anything; if you were to ask any of them, they would tell you they were just people living their lives; yes, they knew that historic shifts were underway and dangerous political and social upheavals had shaken civilization and they suspected more upheavals were coming. Just like every generation that has ever lived.
Shakespeare was born in the first generation after the power of the Catholic Church had been broken in England. He knew the fragile stability of the early Anglican church under Elizabeth I, lived among Puritans learning to flex their political muscles (to, in time, disastrous consequence), witnessed the transition to James I and lived in the cultural hangover of the War of the Roses, not unlike Americans today who live in the cultural hangover of the Civil War. What I’m about to write is overbroad and general, but my main point is this: we tend to see Shakespeare as a man of modern sensibilities; we relish his delicious command of language and stand in awe of his deep humanity and understanding of human nature—we see him in many ways as the First Modern Writer.
And he is. No doubt of it. But he is also a man of his time, and his time is the end of the Middle Ages. Much of what Shakespeare regarded as common knowledge is lost to us (and for that we can thank our Puritan ancestors who suppressed all knowledge of the “bad old ways” in setting up America’s educational agenda).
So, tonight — a little of what went into the making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, namely, Midsummer Night itself. Much of what I’m about to write came from the best college class I ever took, an improbable Literature class called “Paganism and the Occult,” taught by the best teacher I ever had, a scholar who was a world authority on Robert Browning, Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce (that’s enough bread crumbs). Anyway, much of the course was based on original sourcing like Herodotus, supplemented by anthropologists, archaeologists and mythographers including Frazier, Campbell, and a few whose names I forgot to inscribe and whose works have not been translated into English. Added to that is some bits I’ve gleaned on my own. If I’m light on sourcing tonight, and I will be light on sourcing, it’s because all the information comes from a place I trust, most of it delivered in lectures some thirty years ago and living still in my memory.
The Day
Midsummer, or as we call it, the first day of summer. The identification of the solstice as Midsummer dates from the time when there were only two seasons: winter and summer, as celebrated in the Middle English lyric, “Sumer is icumen in”
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now
The song celebrates the beginning of summer, the earliest part of spring, the greening of grass and blossoming of flowers.
If summer lasts from vernal to autumnal equinoxes, then of course the solstice makes the midpoint: Midsummer Day. Midsummer is a potent day in the pre-Christian calendar, and the night before is similarly invested.
Much of the ancient European religious calendar centered on keeping the sun within its bounds. If you’re a Druid priest (and the religion spread wide across Europe, although on the continent the British Isles was considered Ground Zero for Druidism, and in Britain in general, Eire was considered the place where the faith was purest)** much of the business of your ritual is bound up in observing the motion of the sun in relation to the fixed and wandering stars the sun travels among. You stand at a particular spot and watch the sun rise and set every day, observing along the eastern and western ridges particular fixed points that mark certain days. Through the spring, the sun travels farther and farther along the horizon until it reaches a point, historically marked by a standing stone. When the sun rises along that point, casting a shadow that reaches another marked point, you know it’s time for the ritual that will turn the sun around because if it continues on its course, it’ll disappear forever. Your actions, as a priest, together with all the other priests of your faith, keep the sun on course, and keep the cycle renewing itself.
In ancient times these days were marked by sacrifices, human and otherwise, bonfires, and the casting of magic herbs. The bonfire and herbal traditions survived contact with the Romans, who took a dim view of human sacrifice and ended it, primarily by executing the priests. Those few priests who survived the Romans did not survive Christianity (although this, like everything else I’m writing tonight, is a disgraceful overgeneralization). Our own Jaxdem gives a good accounting of the ways that pagan rituals survived as part of her excellent and informative “A Year of Moons” series, “The Day the (Summer) Sun Stood Still.”
About the herbs, Jaxdem gives a fine explanation. Herbs of healing, and herbs good for making potions, including love potions. Oberon’s command to Puck: “Fetch me that flower, that herb I showed thee once” the one invested with Cupid’s arrow, would have had a certain resonance to Shakespeare’s audience, given that gathering herbs is a serious business on Midsummer Night, when in the pagan tradition it was believed that herbs were at their most powerful and potent.
**There is evidence of conflated beliefs between the worship of Baal, spread through the ancient world (yes, that Baal, the golden calf of the Abrahamic tradition) expressed in the worship of fire, and Druidism, which taught that there is one supreme deity, but it’s expressed in many forms: the spirit of the oak god, for instance, or the spirit of the holy well, or the rowan, or…..the list goes on and one. One god, manifest in many forms. The multiform manifestations serve to localize worship, as in, yes we all worship the same god, but our god, here, the god of our grove, has always taken care of us, and we like her form best. The two traditions apparently met and complemented each other. This conflation makes for the bonfire tradition that marks Midsummer Night, and persists today. It both mirrors the sun and calls to the sun to come back to us.
The Night Before
In the pagan tradition, the night before a holy day was invested with its own rites. The night before Midsummer was given to fertility rituals, all meant to increase both the community and the harvest. The belief that human fecundity mirrors the fertility of the land is a powerful one, one which led to all sorts of rites practiced in the fields and in the open, all sanctified by worship of the gods. When Christianity came along, it planted its churches on the sites where the old gods were worshiped across the classical world, even to Rome itself, and extending into Britain. This not only deprived believers of their sacred groves and temples, it substituted Christianity as the patron religion. Likewise, the behaviors surrounding the worship of old gods was somewhat taken under the cloak of Christianity, wherever it was possible.
It makes sense, really, and it proved the wisdom of Pope Gregory the Great’s mission to Augustine to Christianize the pagans of Britain. Central to Augustine’s mission was Gregory’s plan that the evangelizing priests should live among the people and learn as much about their faith as possible, then to draw parallels between the old beliefs and the new, as in, “You thought you were worshiping the god X, but all this time you were really worshiping the true God. And it gets better—if you change just this little thing here, you’ll go to heaven and enjoy yourself instead of going to some dull gray place for eternity.” This is how we got flowers and candles sacrificed on church altars, why you can’t have a cathedral without having a relic of the first degree (a piece of a saint), Easter bunnies, lilies and eggs, Christmas trees, and Satan — but those are all for other diaries.
Now, some beliefs are easier to “baptize” than others. Eggs, symbolic of new life and the Resurrection, okay. Hookups on Midsummer Night, not so much. So the Church “baptized” the day as the Feast Day of Saint John, and the fertility traditions of Saint John’s Eve….well, they pretty much turned a blind eye to them.
Before sunset on Saint John’s Eve, the night before the solstice, Midsummer Night, unmarried women would go into the wood and prepare “bowers of bliss” as Spenser called them in his sanitized vision in The Faerie Queene. These bowers were sheltered places secluded from everyone, stocked with food and drink, often decorated with flowers and supplied with whatever else the young woman in question might need or want. At dark, she would go out walking. The first (unmarried, I should think) man she met would accompany her back to her bower in the woods, and there they would pass the night.
The next morning was the feast day of Saint John (the Baptist). Our young couple would go directly from the bower of bliss to Mass. Do not pass Go, do not stop at confession. In other words, whatever happened the night before was not considered sinful. This is what I meant by the Church, moralistic and celibate on every other day of the year, turning a blind eye. Faced with behaviors and traditions that proved to be too powerful to suppress, the Church decided to practice a certain strategic accommodation, much like priests in the Eastern Orthodox Church in Romania lead naked teenagers on horses to identify vampires. Some things can’t be dislodged easily, and the fertility rites of Midsummer Night were too much for the bishops to stamp out.
Something of the tradition survived into Shakespeare’s time. Think of it this way: two sets of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, found in the woods after spending the night together and with no explanation of the mixups and enchantments of the night before — and Theseus has the couples celebrate their marriages straightaway. No shriving, no penance, not even a scolding for running off into the woods on Midsummer Night. It’s not that Shakespeare was insensible to moralizing characters (witness Measure for Measure), it’s that whatever happened in those woods was just fine, nothing even to raise an eyebrow over.
It’s worth noting that, even though the Church preached celibacy as the highest state of being, and valued virginity as a concept, the practice of expecting all women to be virgins upon marriage is really a product of Victorian sensibilities. Before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1850, women had no legal standing: they could no more own property in their own names than they could vote, or testify in legal proceedings. Women of property were considered property, and they conferred property. Among the landed classes, a woman was expected to be a virgin.
For poorer women, things were different. It was actually quite common for a lower-class woman not to marry until after she had borne a child, thereby demonstrating that she was fertile. If Jane Austin chronicled the pitfalls of the upscale marriage market, Thomas Hardy explored the tragedy of women who sought to escape their low-class origins in novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In Shakespeare’s time, the concept of sequestering a young woman and keeping her “pure” was definitely an upper-class construct. In Act I, Egeus asserts his “rights” as a father and Theseus backs him up, declaring that Hermia must either marry as her father says or become a nun, which is a definitive establishment of the patriarchy. After the night in the woods, it’s clear that Theseus sees Egeus’ whining about losing “his consent” as just that: whining. He dismisses the father’s outrage with a single sentence:
Egeus, I will overbear your will;
For in the temple by and by with us
These couples shall eternally be knit
--V: 1737-1739
You have to admit, that’s a quick dispensation of the status quo. And at this point in the play, Theseus et al don’t even know about all the nocturnal shenanigans. Still, there’s nothing to forgive, because nothing bad happened.
The Fairies
Ah, the fairies. The heart and soul of the play. And more fun than the rest of the play lumped together (as long as we can exclude Bottom and the Rustics and “Pyramus and Thisbe” — the classic tragedy that gets such a comic treatment here Shakespeare will recycle as Romeo and Juliet).
This is a long read already, and there’s not much I have to say about the fairies that you don’t already know, with only two possible exceptions.
To the Medieval (and Shakespeare is a man of his time) the earth literally teemed with spirits. Ghosts, demons, harbingers, fairies — they were all Things Not To Be Messed With. Especially fairies. They’re dangerous. Tricky. They operate according to their own rules; their power comes from outside of God’s creation, and if you’re not careful, they’ll take you away, not only from your family and your home, but also from God’s creation itself. Faerie is other; it exists outside of the heaven/earth/hell paradigm, and if you’re lost to the Fae, you’re lost forever.
One way to deal with a terror you really can’t fight is to diminish it, to miniaturize it. Faeries were once, according to folklore, human-sized or even a little bigger, and possessed superhuman powers. The Church had trouble explaining all the phookas, boggarts, banshees, elves, and other beings, so like most things it couldn’t accommodate, it ignored them. The Puritans, however, were not so minded, and the supernatural proved too alluring and dangerous to abide. The process of diminuation was beginning in Shakespeare’s day, but even in Shakespeare’s time, only a fool crossed a fairy ring, withheld milk and bread, or went out into the dusk without a pinch of salt in his pocket. The fairies of the Sixteenth Century might be mostly uninterested in human beings, but it was never wise to tempt fate.
The process of diminuation continued over time. That’s why today the Keebler elves live in trees and we automatically think of fairies as beings that can ride My Little Ponies. It’s why the Sidhe were absent from consciousness for so long (until Dunsany and his buddies brought them back); because the Puritans knew that if you can’t kill a belief, you can infantalize it, disarm it, make it tiny, and then it’s less likely to hurt you.
That’s one bit you might not know well. The last one is a concept I advance tentatively, because it’s pretty much conjecture. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is all about love and marriage. The occasion is the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta; the two pairs of lovers, after a certain fumbling around, end up married; Oberon wants to reconcile with Titania, but he also wants the Indian page boy. Endangering, complicating and generally frustrating the course of “true love” is one figure, the hobgoblin. Puck.
If you remember your linguistics, you’ll recall that “p” is fricative, and can be interchangeable with “ph” or “f.” A friend with a background in theatre history suggested to me that in Shakespeare’s time the two consonants were often swapped out, one for the other. At least, this person asserts, the audience would have been able to put two and two together, coming up with a delicious pun.
If it’s not true, it feels like it might be so. What messes up love and marriage as thoroughly as puck?
Sex is not the goal of marriage. Neither is love. For the real goal of marriage, we must look at Oberon and Titania’s final blessing of all the newlyweds:
Now, until the break of day,
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be;
And the blots of Nature's hand
Shall not in their issue stand;
Never mole, hare lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be. (V: 2252-2265)
This scene demonstrates explicitly the purpose of marriage: children. Oberon vows that the offspring of all three couples will always be “fortunate” and beautiful, unmarked by any disfigurement that would normally have been considered “fairy marks.” Procreation is the whole point of marriage, which is why Spenser in his masterwork Epithalamion (as close to a perfect poem as we’re ever going to get) the bridegroom closes the wedding night with a prayer that his first child has been conceived in the bridal bed. Love in Elizabethan culture isn’t exactly what we expect it would be, or it could be said: That word does not mean what you think it means. Love was more a state of harmony; sex might be fun, but it was for the purpose of making babies.
Oberon’s lovely vow is presaged by Puck’s speech about the nature of his people, their menace and their danger:
Now it is the time of night
That the graves all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide:
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate's team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic: not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallow'd house:
I am sent with broom before,
To sweep the dust behind the door. (V: 2228-2239)
Creatures of the night, fleeing the light and keeping company with the restless dead; as the play ends returns from the world of the dream, we pull back and put the fairies in context. They are creatures to fear, to shun, to appease. The happy conclusion of Oberon’s marital woes and the restoration of his court leads the fairy king to bless the wedding of his real-world counterpart and the four lovers that his servant had so confounded. The fairies are returned to their traditional roles, marriage assumes its traditional purpose, and the dangerous night has passed.
On Friday night, be sure to light a fire, as people have done for time out of mind to celebrate/entreat the sun to continue in its timeless cycle. At least, light a candle if you can; when we talk about symbols, symbolism is important. About the play that is set on Midsummer Night, yes, its connections to fantasy have been well-explored and I’ve taken them for granted in favor of some of the more esoteric shadows of the past. Speaking of ephemera,
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…. (V, 2275-2280)