"Nothing in the play is quite what it seems."

This was my mock essay question written under timed conditions and it received full marks.

“Nothing in the play is quite what it seems.”

Explore the presentation of deception and disguise in the light of this view.

William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has been defined as a romantic comedy while dipping into themes of tragedy within its main narrative. It transitions from the city of Athens, a place of nobility torn by conflict, to what literary critic Northrop Frye referred to as the “Green World”, a setting of chaos and disorder, where the borders between appearance and reality become blurred. In this play, the Green World becomes the forest of the fairies, who while maintaining their supernatural distinctions and other-worldliness from the mortal Athenians, adopt guises, Puck in particular, to push the plot forward towards the reconciliation of conflict within a reformed “New World”. The Athenians are deceived into momentarily believing that their experiences within the “dreamlike scape” of the forest, as critic Nicole Smith has called it, are real, as imagination transcends reason’s limits. But in observing the events of the play, the audience are also lulled into a dreamlike state of immersion through Shakespeare’s stagecraft, a fact Shakespeare only makes explicit to the audience in Puck’s ending soliloquy. So while “Nothing in the play is quite what it seems” to the characters of the play, the same can be said for the audience, who are deceived by the playwright himself into shortly believing that what they see on stage is real.

The conflict of unrequited love amongst the Athenian lovers is resolved via the supernatural tool of the love potion, which deceives its recipient into falling in love with, not just the first human they see, but as Oberon relishingly says, “the first creature”. The notion of “love is blind” runs throughout the play, but is emphasised most dramatically, and to a certain degree, to comic effect, through the effects of the love potion. Helena laments this aspect of the nature of love in her soliloquy:

                “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind

                And therefore is winged cupid painted blind.”

The power of love prevents its victim from being able to see things for what they are, highlighted through the linking of love being in the “mind” of the beholder, rendering them “blind”, through the use of heroic rhyming couplet. The imagery of “Cupid painted blind” has been cited by critic Panovsky as “a metaphor from Elizabethan literature”. The “full-sighted cupid” represented “true love”, while “blind or blindfolded cupid” symbolised the “moral dangers of false love and illicit sensuality”. Shakespeare thereby utilises this symbol of contemporary literature to highlight the dangers of how deceptive love can be, which is certainly elucidated in Helena’s own plotline. Although Helena does chastise Demetrius for his behaviour in stating:

                “Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex.”

The notion of her disregard by his actions being emphasises by the hissing sound from the sibilance of “wrongs” “set” “scandal” and “sex” which are also all stressed through iambic pentameter, shows she remains willing to play a subservient role towards him, and sibilance is also used to highlight this when she states:

                “Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me.”

The violent nature of this statement is symbolised by sibilance, and modern adaptations of the play, including a recent 2016 RSC production in Stratford, have adopted the implied violent and masochistic eros of Helena’s behaviour to demonstrate how far one is willing to go for love because of how things appear to them, when the reality is somewhat different.

Therefore, while love is already deceptive by nature, the supernatural influence of the fairies via love potion and disguise further deceives both the mortal Athenians and the Fairy Queen Titania to see something that is different from reality, but the distinction is that this love is artificial. This is showcased as Lysander awakens under the influence of the love potion as Helena passes him:

                LYSANDER (waking)

                “And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake!”

Shakespeare includes the stage direction of “waking” to emphasise the immediacy of Lysander’s dialogue, which is typical of a passionate lover, symbolised by “fire” as a metaphor for passion and love, indicating the total artificiality of his love for Helena that is spurned on by the deceptive intervention of the fairies. Another example of the false nature of the love created by the love potion is the brief relationship between Bottom and Titania. When they first meet, Bottom is typically portrayed on stage to sing out of tune, for example in the RSC’s “A Play for the Nation” production, where the fairies sing a soft lullaby for Titania in the preceding scene. This cements the contrast between both Titania and Bottom, and Titania’s perception of Bottom, as opposed to actual Bottom, as she says with conviction how her “ear” is “enthralled to thy note”, and how her “eye” is “enthralled to thy shape”, before concluding her rhyming couplet:

                “To say to thee, to swear; I do love thee.”

By linking the contrasts between appearance and reality with her love confession of conviction, love’s deceptive nature is shown, and that her vision of her lover is “not quite what it seems.” An Elizabethan audience would have been shocked to see a figure of nobility, maintained in her dialogue in both blank verse, and verse to indicate her higher distinction as an ethereal entity, lie with a man of working-class, concretised in his use of prose. Even nowadays this would be considered impossible, but even more so in Shakespeare’s contemporary society when class systems were more prominent. Bottom himself acknowledges this through his perceptive comment:

                “And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”

Which despite being spoken in prose compared to formal blank verse, perfectly summarises both the conflict of the play, and the means to its resolution. Despite things in the fairy world not being as they seem, this, as critic Wittgenstein notes, “allows the lovers’ experiences to be, like a dream, entirely realistic in themselves without the need to question them.”

But while deception and imagination resolve the conflict of the play, in his soliloquy of Act V, Theseus refuses to accept this.

                “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

                Are all of imagination compact.”

He associates “imagination” with madness because it transcends reason, without realising that it was the reason of Athenian law that caused the conflict of the main narrative, while “imagination” resolved it. Shakespeare, in possibly referring to himself through “the poet”, informs his audience that things not being as they seem is not something to condemn, but to accept and praise. But it is only until Puck’s final soliloquy that the audience realises that they themselves have been deceived into believing that the play is real:

                “If we shadows have offended,

                Think but this and all is mended

                That you all have slumbered here

                While these visions did appear.”

Puck alternates between full and catalectic trochaic tetrameter to mimic a sleeping spell, symbolising the magic effect of Shakespeare’s stagecraft to immerse his audience into believing that such “visions” are real, causing them to be “offended”. Therefore, the play itself is “not what it seems”, in that it seems real, but is in fact skilful acting taking place on stage.