“Dream can be seen as a cathartic and illuminative experience, for both characters in the play and the audience outside watching it."

This has been my favourite essay so far to attempt because of its difficulty, but mainly because your points can be as unconventional as you want/need. But also because I got full marks for it…just saying.

“Dream can be seen as a cathartic and illuminative experience, for both characters in the play and the audience outside watching it."

By exploring Shakespeare’s treatment of dreams and dreaming, evaluate this view.

                As the title of the play suggests, the literary device of dreams plays a significant role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both thematically and structurally. To the mortal Athenians, their entire experiences within the forest, which has been likened to critic Northrop Frye’s literary concept of the Green World, are reduced down to dreams as a product of the overactive imagination. But as unrealistic and implausible as such “dreams” may seem, they are illuminating in exploring the themes of love and contemporary theatre, and allow the characters to undergo personal catharsis, accumulating to the entire reconciliation of the play. But this is not limited to the characters of the play; the play itself becomes a dream of the audience watching it, highlighted explicitly through the meta-theatrical structure of the play-within-a-play. Through this, Shakespeare hopes to illuminate contemporary social issues, so like the characters in the play, the audience can also learn from experiences that aren’t necessarily real.

                Following the discourse of reason in the City World of Athens, particularly of Egeus as he explains to Theseus:

                “And what is mine, my love shall render him.

                And she is mine, and all my right of her

                I do estate unto Demetrius.”

The possessive anaphora and formal blank verse explicitly emphasising the notion of patriarchal rationality behind his wishes, the play then transfers to the Green World of social disorder and chaos, serving as the antithesis to the City World. To the Athenians who move into the world, their visions within the forest become dreams, due to their implausibility and irrationality. Critic Nicole Smith draws a comparison between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night for their “dream-like scapes” that serve “to bring about the concluding resolution” of each play. Even if the mortals cannot accept the events from the forest to be real, as Bottom says:

                “I have had a dream – past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”

Even if a “dream” transcends the “wit of man”, the lovers are still illuminated by the experiences they have undergone with this “most rare vision”, the quantifier of “most” with “rare” extending the implausibility of this dream, and it is this epiphany provoked by their dreams that brings about a resolution. In Theseus’ soliloquy of Act V, he mocks imagination, thereby dreams, even suggesting that such visions can be dangerous:

                “The lunatic, the lover and the poet

                Are of imagination all compact”

By bringing lunacy, love and literature together through imagination, Theseus attempts to discredit their authenticity by claiming that they are nothing more than fabrications. But in stressing “poet”, Shakespeare may be referencing himself, thus contributing to the irony of Theseus’ statement. By opposing dreams and imagination because they transcend reason, he fails to recognise that it was reason that caused the conflict of the main narrative, and the lovers’ dreams that resolved this conflict, which Hippolyta is not afraid to say as their dreams, she claims:

                “And grows to something of great constancy;

                But, howsoever, strange and admirable.”

Despite also speaking in blank verse which would suggest the formal rationality of the City World, Hippolyta, who acknowledges that however “strange” dreams maybe, they “admirable” in how they are illuminative beyond “fancy’s images”. As critic Garber notes, “Reason is impoverished without imagination and that we must accept the dimension of dreams in our lives, without this knowledge”, there can be no self-knowledge. The symbiosis between reason and imagination is demonstrated in how Hippolyta can accept and praise imagination while still using the discourse of reason in “And” and “But”. Dreams therefore serve as an illuminative experience, despite being dismissed by those entrenched within the limits of reason.

                When it comes to dreaming becoming catharsis, this is most prevalent in Hermia’s dream during her time in the forest, or rather, her nightmare.

                “Ay me for pity! What a dream was here.

                Lysander, look how I do quake with fear.

                Methought a serpent ate my heart away,

                And you sat smiling at his cruel prey.”

The structure of heroic couplet cements the contrast between what Hermia believes to be a dream and her reality, but the catalectic iambic pentameter of the final line retains an element of ambiguity, representing the anxieties of the dream. Many modern adaptations, including a Regent’s Park adaptation from 2012, have picked upon the undercurrent of male violence that may not have been acceptable to Shakespeare’s contemporary audience. This has led critics, particularly feminist, to suggest that Hermia’s dream act as a catharsis for her anxieties of Lysander’s potential sexual predatory actions from the preceding scene, before he accedes to her request to “lie further off. In human modesty”. These anxieties are only confirmed when Hermia sees that, under the influence of the love potion, Lysander’s fancies have been diverted to a woman who is prepared to be “a spaniel”, to “spurn” and “strike”, the sibilance of this creating a harsh hissing sound that draws on the violent nature of this line. Violent eros is also communicated through the sibilance of “serpent”, which in Elizabethan literature symbolised sexual corruption for its phallic imagery and biblical implications. Therefore, while Hermia’s dream acts as a catharsis for anxieties she believes to be irrational, it is also illuminative in that it bears some resemblance to her circumstances in the forest.

                However, Shakespeare’s treatment of dreams doesn’t only affect his characters, but his audience as well. Through the play-within-a-play structure of “Pyramus and Thisbe”, the experience of the characters watching that play parallels the audiences’, although Shakespeare doesn’t intend for his actual audience to recognise this. Theseus comments how:

                “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.”

Although this is rude discourse during the mechanicals’ performance, encompassed by the form of prose, this line of prose reiterates the role of imagination in theatre, transforming the stage into the dream of a spectator. Even the best actors are only “shadows”, it takes the imagination of the audience to see whay they represent. Through imagination, the deficiencies of acting and stagecraft can be amended, but because the men are constricted by their loyalty to reason, the faults of the mechanical’s play cannot be amended, including their grammatical errors and malapropisms such as confusing “Ninus” for “Ninny’s Tomb”. But despite its mistakes, the “Lamentable Comedy” of Pyramus and Thisbe is also cathartic, as critic Arden has referred to it as an “exorcism” of the tragic elements of the play, leading to blessed consummation of marriage at the end. But it is after this reconciliation that Robin directly addresses the audience for their own resolution, as he says:

                “If we shadows have offended

                Think but this, and all is mended

                That you all have slumbered here

                While these visions did appear.”

His alternation between catalectic and complete trochaic tetrameter shows his supernatural and otherworldly nature, creating the tone of a lullaby or sleeping spell, perhaps as the audience’s own cathartic exorcism. But within these lines, the events on stage are reduced to the state of a dream, drawing the parallels of theatre and dreams together as critic Jung suggests, “a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the producer and the critic.”