ISAAC ASIMOV


ASIMOVÕS
GUIDE TO
SHAKESPEARE


VOLUME ONE
The Greek, Roman, and Italian Plays

VOLUME TWO
The English Plays


ILLUSTRATIONS BY
RAFAELPALACIOS


wings books
New York ¥ Avenel, New Jersey

Note:  This file is Volume I only.
The Table of Contents and Introduction for this volume as well as jacket pages are relocated at the end to keep page numbering consistent. Blank pages mark position of the illustrations, none of which have been included. Indexes for Volume I & II are at the end of the Volume II file, the original location.


PART I
Greek








VENUS AND ADONIS
o
f  all  Shakespeare's writings,   Venus and Adonis is the most straightforwardly mythological and traces farthest backward (if only dimly so) in history. For that reason, I will begin with it.
. . . Earl of Southampton . . .
"Venus and Adonis" bears a dedication:
To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Tichfield.
ÑDedication
Southampton was a well-educated youth of considerable wealth, who was presented at the court of Queen Elizabeth I in 1590, while he was still a boy in his teens. He quickly became a generous patron of poets, Shakespeare among them.
It is suggested that one of Shakespeare's early plays, Love's Labor's Lost (see page I-421) was written for a premiere performance at Southampton's house before an assemblage of his friends and guests. If so, the play must have pleased Southampton tremendously; his patronage to Shakespeare extended (so at least one report goes) to the gift of a thousand poundsÑan enormous sum in those daysÑfor the completion of some purchase. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that Shakespeare made his dedication to Venus and Adonis florid, indeed.
Nevertheless, considering that we know Shakespeare as a transcendent genius, and that Southampton was merely a rich young man who was no more than twenty years old when Venus and Adonis was published, there is something unpleasantly sycophantic about the dedication. Shakespeare pretends to worry, for instanceÑ
Ñhow the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen;
ÑDedication
4	GREEK
Can he really doubt his own power so, or overestimate the young man so egregiously? Surely not. Can he be indulging in sarcasm? That would be foolishly risky and nothing in Shakespeare's career would lead us to suppose him a devil-may-care. He was rather the reverse.
Well then, is he merely buttering up a patron with a fat money belt? Perhaps so. It is easy to believe that this is the ordinary language of poets to patrons but it would still hurt us to suppose that Shakespeare would conform to so degrading a custom.
But, to be complete, it is also possible that there was a homosexual attachment and Shakespeare was writing out of love. This is possible. Some think most of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets were written in this period of his life; most of them seem addressed to a young man, possibly (but not certainly) to Southampton.* The twentieth sonnet seems to have the frankest homosexual content. It begins:
A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
Ñlines 1-2
But it denies overt homosexuality, ending:
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.
-lines 9-14
In addition, there are a number of events in Shakespeare's plays that can be interpreted from a homosexual point of view, yet which Shakespeare presents most sympathetically. There are the close male friendships, even to threatened death, as is Antonio's for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (see page I-501). There is Lucius' passion for Fidele in Cymbe-line (see page II-72) and the scene in which Orlando woos Ganymede in As You Like It (see page I-571).
But too little is known of Shakespeare's life to go any further than this. Any speculations as to his homosexual urges and to the extent to which he gave in to them, if they existed, can never be anything more than speculations.
* Shakespeare's sonnets, and a handful of other short poems attributed to him, are not taken up in this book. They are primarily emotional and personal, with little or none of the type of background I am dealing with here.
VENUS    AND    ADONIS	5
. . . the first heir of my invention . . .
Shakespeare goes on to say, in his dedication,
. . . if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather . . .
ÑDedication
Venus and Adonis was published about April 1593, at which time Shakespeare was just twenty-nine. He had already established himself as a competent actor and had probably done considerable patching of old plays; notably Henry VI, Part One (see page II-640). Henry VI, Part Two and Henry VI, Part Three were mostly or entirely his and it is possible he had already written two comedies: The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labor's Lost. It is even possible that two more plays, Titus Andronicus and Richard III were in the process of production.
These works, however, were meant to be played, not read, and it was to be years before they were actually published. Venus and Adonis was the first piece of Shakespeare's writings that actually appeared in print, and it was in that sense only "the first heir of my invention."
Shakespeare seems, by the way, to have turned to narrative poetry only because of a siege of enforced idleness. The London theaters were closed between mid-1592 and mid-1594 as a result of a heightened incidence of plagues, and Shakespeare used the additional time on his hands to write Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Rose-cheek'd Adonis . , .
The poem begins early in the day, with Adonis making ready to hunt:
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase. Hunting he lov'd, but love he laugh'd to scorn.
-lines 1-4
Adonis is the Greek version of a Semitic vegetation god. From the beginnings of agriculture, there must have been a kind of relief each year among the farmers that, after the death of vegetation in the fall, there was a rebirth in the spring. Rituals personifying this death-and-rebirth were invented and they must have been looked upon as a kind of flattering homage to Nature (or even as a hint to a possibly forgetful Nature), inducing her to continue. The feeling would surely arise at last that only a thorough-
6	GREEK
going carrying through of the ritual each year would bring about a fertile growing season and a good harvest, and upon that, life through the barren winter would depend.
In that sense, the type of myth of which the tale of Venus and Adonis is representative (though prettied-up from its straightforward origins by the sophisticated imaginations of the later classical poets), reflects the historic birth of agriculture. It can be tied to the great event, some seven thousand years before the Trojan War, that saw the first deliberate cultivation and harvest of wild grain in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in what is now western Iran.
The Sumerians, about 2000 b.c., represented the agricultural cycle with a god, Dumu-zi, who died and was resurrected; a death-and-resurrection which was celebrated each year by the people of the land. The myth and the ritual were adopted by the later Babylonians and AssyriansÑthe Semitic peoples who succeeded the Sumerians in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the Semitic language of Babylonia, the name of the vegetation god became Tammuz.
In the Tammuz myth, the god descends into the underworld after his death and all vegetation dies with him. A wailing goddess (variously described as his sister, mother, or wife) manages to rescue him. In the most familiar form of the myth, the rescuer is Ishtar, his wife or love.
The passionate rites for Tammuz were exceedingly attractive to women in particular. They found emotional relief in the wailing and utter grief that symbolized Tammuz' death and in the almost orgiastic joy that came when the priests raised the cry that he was reborn.
The stern prophets of Israel had a hard job keeping the Israelite women from joining in this pagan rite. The tale of Jephthah's daughter was possibly an attempt to solve the problem by converting the rite into a patriotic commemoration. The Israelite general Jephthah had beaten the enemy, after making a rash vow to sacrifice the first living thing that came to greet him on his return. It turned out to be his daughter, whom he sacrificed. The Bible goes on to explain: "And it was a custom in Israel, That the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year" (Judges 11:39-40).
If so, this pious wile did not work. Ezekiel, at the time of the Judean exile in Babylon, enumerated the sins of the Jews of the time and said that in the very Temple in Jerusalem "there sat women weeping for Tammuz" (Ezekiel 8:14).
And in one way, Tammuz has remained in Jewish consciousness ever since. The Babylonians named a month in honor of the god and the exiled Jews, in adopting the Babylonian calendar, adopted the month too. Even today, one of the months of the Jewish calendar (falling in the latter half of June and the earlier half of July) is called Tammuz.
The rites of a dead-and-resurrected God occur in the Greek myths too.
VENUS   AND    ADONIS	7
There is the case of Demeter (the grain goddess), whose daughter, Persephone, is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. While Persephone is gone, all grain withers, but finally Demeter manages to rescue her daughter under conditions that allow herself and Hades to share her, each for part of the year. The Eleusinian Mysteries, secret religious rites among the Greeks, seem to have involved the celebration of this death-and-resurrection, expanding it to include the resurrection of the human soul after the death of the human body.
As the Greeks and the Semites of the East gained more and more in the way of cultural interchange, the Tammuz version entered Greek mythology directly. Tammuz became Adonis.
The name shift is no mystery. Names of gods are always a little difficult to handle in any culture that considers the name of an object to be almost the equivalent of the object itself. To touch the name with one's own tongue and breath is a form of blasphemy and so circumlocutions are used. Instead of saying Tammuz, one says Lord (just as, in the Bible, Lord is used in place of Yahveh).
The Semitic term for "Lord" is "Adonai" and it was "Adonai," rather than "Tammuz," that was adopted by the Greeks. They added the final s, which is an almost invariable ending on Greek proper names, making it "Adonis."
Since Ishtar was the lover of Tammuz in the Babylonian myth, the equivalent of Ishtar would have to be the lover of Adonis in the Greek myth. The Greek equivalent of Ishtar was Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.
The Greek myth had Adonis born the son of King Theias of Assyria. No such king existed in actual history, to be sure, but this is a hint of the Babylonian origin of the myth. We might suppose, therefore, that the scene of the poem is Babylonia, though Shakespeare never indicates any particular placeÑand perhaps gave the matter no thought at all.
Adonis' mother was Myrrha, who was herself the daughter of Theias. Myrrha had conceived an incestuous passion for her father and managed to sneak into his bed, with the result that she became pregnant by him. When the shocked father discovered the truth, he would have killed her, but the pitying gods changed her into the myrrh tree.
The myrrh tree yields a bitter resinous sap (myrrh), which oozes out when the bark is split. (The word "myrrh" is from an Arabic word meaning "bitter.") The sap is valued for its uses as incense and in cosmetics and embalming. (It was one of the three gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the wise menÑ"they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh," Matthew 2:11.)
The sap on being exposed to air hardens into resinous drops called "tears," and these are supposed to represent the tears of Myrrha over the terrible thing she had done. (Working backward, we can suppose that this
8	GREEK
part of the myth arose over the attempt to explain why a tree should seem to weep.)
In the Greek myth, the myrrh tree into which Myrrha had been changed split after nine months, and the infant Adonis emerged. Aphrodite (who had inspired Myrrha's fatal love in the first place) felt remorse at the event and rescued Adonis. She placed him in a box and gave him to Persephone, goddess of the underworld, for temporary safekeeping. Persephone, noting the beauty of the child, refused to give him back and there was a quarrel that ended with each having him part of the time.
Here again is the tale of whiter (Adonis with Persephone) and summer (Adonis with Aphrodite), enlivened, in the Greek way, by a story of forbidden love.
This, at least, is the myth as told by Apollodorus, an Athenian poet who lived in the second century b.c. Shakespeare does not follow this. He begins with Adonis as a grown man, says nothing of his origins, and concerns himself only with the final stage of the myth, following a version given by Ovid.
Ovid, who seems to have been Shakespeare's favorite classical author, is the Roman poet whose name in full was Publius Ovidius Naso. About a.d. 1 he was writing his most famous workÑa version, in Latin verse, of those Greek myths that involved the transformation ("metamorphosis") of one living thing into another.
Ovid's book is therefore called Metamorphoses, and the myth of Adonis is included, since his mother had been turned into a myrrh tree.
Sick-tkoughted Venus. . .
In the final couplet of the first stanza, Shakespeare introduces the other member of the mythical duo:
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him And like a bold-fac'd suitor gins to woo him.
Ñlines 5-6
This is not Aphrodite, notice, as it would be if Shakespeare were following the work of the Greek poet Apollodorus. Shakespeare is using the name of a Roman goddess instead, the name used by Ovid.
The Romans in the early centuries of their history had a primitive religion, with numerous gods and goddesses of a rather arid nature who were not to be compared with the sophisticated deities of the much more cultivated Greeks. From the third century b.c. onward, the Romans fell more and more under the spell of Greek culture and were impelled to adopt the beautiful and intricate Greek mythology. They could not very well drop

VENUS   AND   ADONIS               9
their own deities; instead they compromised by identifying their own gods with the roughly corresponding gods of the Greeks and retold the Greek myths using the Roman names.
Here is a list of the chief gods and goddesses in their Roman and Greek versions:
Roman	Greek
Jupiter	Zeus	chief of the gods
Juno	Hera	his wife
Minerva	Athena	goddess of wisdom and practical arts
Diana	Artemis	goddess of the moon and the hunt
Mercury	Hermes	messenger of the gods
Mars	Ares	god of war
Vulcan	Hephaestus	god of fire and the forge
Venus	Aphrodite	goddess of love and beauty
Neptune	Poseidon	god of the sea
Vesta	Hestia	goddess of the hearth and home
Dis	Hades	god of the underworld
Ceres	Demeter	goddess of grain and agriculture
Proserpina	Persephone	goddess of the underworld
One major god had, apparently, no Roman equivalent at all, which is not strange, for he was the most Greek of all the Greek gods. He was Apollo, the god of youth and the fine arts (and in later poetry, of the sun as well). The Romans used the Greek name, therefore. They also used Hades or, its equivalent, Pluto, in preference to their own Dis, since Dis (a fearsome underground deity) was not popular with them and they avoided naming him.
Two of the mortal heroes that people the Greek legends, and who play a prominent part in Shakespearean allusions, have altered names given them by the Romans. Thus, the greatest and strongest of all the Greek heroes was Heracles, but the Romans called him Hercules. Again, the wiliest of the Greeks at the siege of Troy was Odysseus, whom the Romans called Ulysses.
In medieval Europe the Greek myths reached the west only through such Roman filters as Ovid and therefore the names used were all Roman. Shakespeare uses the Roman names of the gods invariably.
I will conform to Shakespearean usage, though it goes against the grain to do so, since it is far more appropriate to use the Greek names in dealing with Greek myths. I will ease my conscience, therefore, by occasionally placing the Greek name in parentheses, just to remind the reader of its existence.
Shakespeare departs from his source material in one important way. He makes Adonis reluctant to respond to Venus. "Hunting he loved, but
10	GREEK
love he laughed to scorn" and Venus, out of sheer necessity, must reverse the role of the sexes and "like a bold-fac'd suitor" be the aggressor.
There is precedent for this in Greek mythology. There was, for instance, Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. He was beloved by a fountain nymph, Salmacis, but he repulsed her coldly. Once, however, when he was bathing in her spring, she was able to unite with bun hi love, and fearing that she might never be able to repeat the act, prayed the gods that she might remain united with him physically forever.
Her prayer was granted and thereafter Hermaphroditus had the genital equipment of both sexes. The word "hermaphrodite" has, in consequence, entered the English language to represent that pathological bisexual condition.
A much better known example is mentioned by Venus herself in this poem. She complains of Adonis' coldness and accuses him of loving only himself. She warns him he runs risks in consequence, saying:
Narcissus so himself himself forsook, And died to kiss his shadow in the brook.
-lines 161-62
The tale of Narcissus begins with a nymph, Echo, who had, at Jupiter's orders, kept Juno busy with prolonged and idle gossip while Jupiter busied himself with various nymphs. When Juno found out, she punished Echo by depriving her of her voiceÑexcept that she was permitted to repeat the last words of anything said to her.
Unhappy Echo fell in love, thereafter, with Narcissus, a handsome youth who would love no one. She tried to woo him, but could only repeat his last words, and he fled from her impatiently, so that Echo pined away until only her voice was left.
And then one day Narcissus came across a clear spring in which he saw his own face. He had never seen his face before and, staring at it now, fell in love with it. He attempted to woo it, but the shadow could not respond and, in effect, rejected him, so that "himself himself forsook." Attempting, finally, to kiss his shadow, Narcissus drowned, and he too added a word to our languageÑ"narcissism," the morbid love of one's self.
This trick of having Adonis cold to Venus gives Shakespeare a chance to turn his poetic powers to a less hackneyed motif than that of a man's praise of womanly beauty. He can turn to the harder and less familiar task of a woman's praise of manly beauty.
Then too, if we go along with the homosexual component of Shakespeare, it may be significant that a poem dedicated to young Southampton features the prolonged praise of manly beauty and a prolonged pleading for a love that is not, and cannot, be given.
VENUS    AND    ADONIS	11
. . . god of war
Venus points out that she is rarely refused when she asks for love:
"I have been wooed, as I entreat thee now, Even by the stern and direful god of war,
-lines 97-98
One of the most famous tales of Venus/Aphrodite is her love affair with Mars/Ares. The tale is told in the Odyssey (Homer's epic poem concerning the voyages of Odysseus), in which Venus is pictured as married to Vulcan/Hephaestus, the ugly and lame smith god. Venus is, under these conditions, quite ready to respond to the wooing of Mars.
Vulcan, suspecting that Venus is being unfaithful, rigged up a device whereby an unbreakable net could fall upon the bed and catch Venus and Mars in the position of love. This was done; Mars and Venus were helplessly bound together while the angry Vulcan called in the other gods to witness his wife's criminal behavior. Unfortunately for himself, the reaction of the gods was not one of sympathy for Vulcan, but rather of envy for Mars.
And Titan...	.                                              '
By now, the sun was high in the sky:
And Titan, tired in the midday heat, With burning eye did hotly overlook them,
Wishing Adonis had his team to guide,
So he were like him, and by Venus' side.
-lines 177-80
In the Greek myths, Jupiter/Zeus and his fellow deities had not always ruled the universe. Before them had been a race of older gods whom they supplanted. (Perhaps this is a reflection in myth of the supercession of the pre-Greeks of the Balkan peninsula by the invading Greek tribes.)
These older gods were called Titans, and their chief was Cronus, whom the Romans called Saturn.
The Titan who served as the god of the sun was Hyperion. One way of saying this, mythologically, was to make him the father of Helios (the Greek word for "sun"). Both "Hyperion" and "Helios" are thus used in classic-minded literature to represent the sun. Since both are considered Titans, the sun can be called, as here, "Titan."
The sun was always pictured as a blazing, golden chariot, driven by a
12	GREEK
team of wild, fiery horses. It is with this in mind that Shakespeare pictures the "Titan" as wishing Adonis held the reins and he himself were lying by Venus.
In later Greek poetry, Apollo was made the god of the sun, and Shakespeare, in the course of his writing, uses "Apollo" to symbolize the sun too. The Titaness Phoebe, a sister of Hyperion, was the goddess of the moon, and the myths make Apollo a grandson (on his mother's side) of Phoebe. He inherits the ancient name in its masculine form, then, and is called Phoebus or Phoebus Apollo, "Phoebus" too is used by Shakespeare to represent the sun.
Thy mermaid's voice...
Adonis is only irritated by Venus' pleadings. While she keeps him back from the hunt with her attempted love-making, his stallion spies a mare and breaks loose. Adonis fails to recapture him and petulantly scolds Venus, blaming her for the loss.
Venus laments that she suffers twice, first because he will not speak to her, and second because when at last he does, it is to scold her. She says:
Thy mermaid's voice hath done me double wrong;
-line 429
The Greeks had, in their myths, tales of beautiful young women, called sirens, who rested on the rocks of a seashore and sang in heavenly voices. Sailors passing by would be attracted by them and, steering their boats nearer, would meet death upon the rocks.
Originally sirens may have been wind spirits carrying off the souls of the dead, and were sometimes pictured with birds' bodies. However, the wind was more deadly on sea than on land, and the sirens became more and more closely associated with the sea until they were pictured as creatures who were women down to the waist and fish below that.
These are the "mermaids" ("sea-maids"), who bewitch sailors to their doom on the rocks, as they sit combing their long hair and singing. The famous German poem "Die Lorelei" is of such a creature.
So when Venus speaks of Adonis' "mermaid voice" she means a beautiful voice that is luring her to doom.
. . . worse than Tantalus'. . .
The day is drawing to a close and Adonis finally manages to get Venus to promise to leave him alone if he kisses her. He proceeds to do so but
VENUS    AND    ADONIS	13
she returns the embrace in such full measure that he has all he can do to disengage himself. He then reveals that the next day he intends to hunt boar.
At this Venus is sent into a paroxysm of fear, lest he be killed in so dangerous a pursuit. She seizes him and they fall to the ground in the very position of love. Yet even so, to Venus' frustration, he will do nothing.
That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy To clip Elysium and to lack her joy.
Ñlines 599-600
Tantalus was a Peloponnesian king who was an intimate friend of Jupiter and the other gods. He was admitted to their feasts and in return he invited them to his house. For some reason, perhaps to test their divine knowledge, he served them the flesh of his own son when they were feasting at his house. The gods were horrified. They restored the son to life, and, for his detestable crime, Tantalus was killed by Jupiter's lightning bolt. What's more, Tantalus was sent to Tartarus, the region beneath Hades where particularly wicked people were specially punished.
Tantalus' punishment was to stand in water up to his neck in eternal frustration. He was consumed by thirst, but every time he stooped to drink, the water swirled downward. Fruit-laden branches hovered temptingly near and he was famished, but every time he reached to snatch a fruit, it whisked away. It is from this that the word "tantalize" is derived.
For Venus, to have Adonis exactly where he ought to be and yet have him make no use of the fact seems a frustration worse than that of Tantalus. She was in Tartarus, even though she was "clipping" (holding) Elysium, which was the Greek version of Paradise.
In the Homeric writings, Elysium or "the Elysian plain" existed in the far west, the dimly explored (and therefore wonder-filled) western regions of the Mediterranean Sea, where heroes were taken after death to live in eternal bliss. By later writers this had to be transported beyond the ocean rim, for explorers reached the westernmost point of the Mediterranean shores without finding Elysium. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing a century after Homer, speaks of "the Islands of the Blest" lying out in the Atlantic.
As geographic knowledge continued to broaden, the Roman poet Vergil, writing six centuries after Hesiod, was forced to move Elysium underground, making it a portion of Hades devoted to delight. It was suffused with an eternal spring. Its flowers, groves, and fountains were lit by soft sunshine during the day and by the familiar constellations at night. Then the righteous, resting on banks of resilient and perfumed flowers, lived in never-ending felicity.
14	GREEK
. . . modest Dian ¥ ¥ ¥
Venus urges Adonis to hunt foxes or hares, anything that is not dangerous, rather than boars. Adonis, having paid his kiss, finds that he still cannot disengage himself from her wild grasp. It is night already and he is annoyed at this, for it will be hard to find his way. Venus turns this too into praise of Adonis' beauty.
So do thy lips
Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn, Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn.
Now of this dark night I perceive the reason: Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shine,
-lines 724-28
The Titaness who served as goddess of the moon was Phoebe. However, Hyperion, the Titan god of the sun, had not only Helios as a son but Selene as a daughter. "Selene" is the Greek word for "moon" and that name was the most common mythological representation of the moon.
The later poets, however, transferred the duty of serving as goddess of the moon to Diana/Artemis, the sister of Apollo. She is also called Cynthia because she was supposed to have been born on a mountain called Cynthus on a small island in the Aegean Sea. Apollo is therefore, but much less frequently, called Cynthius.
Diana is, of all the Greek goddesses, the most insistently virgin. Venus therefore says that Adonis may lose his way or trip because the night is dark; and the night is dark because the moon hides herself, lest while shining on Adonis' beautiful face she be unable to resist kissing him, thus ruining her rigid chastity.
A purple flower . . .
Venus' urgings are all in vain. The next day he hunts the boar and is slain. The horrified Venus finds him:
And in his blood, that on the ground lay spill'd A purple flower sprung up, check'red with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood       ' Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.
-lines 1167-70
The flower that arose out of the blood, according to the myth, was the
VENUS    AND    ADONIS	15
anemone, and its appearance makes a second reason why the tale qualifies for inclusion in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
This is not the only flower that was supposed to have originated out of the blood of a mortal loved by a god.
There was the case, for instance, of a beautiful Spartan prince, Hya-cinthus, with whom Apollo fell in love. (The Greeks had a tolerant and even approving attitude toward male homosexuality, and the Greek gods indulged in it too.) The West Wind was also in love with Hyacinthus and when Apollo and Hyacinthus were exercising by throwing the discus, the West Wind, out of jealousy, blew the discus against the boy's head, killing him. From the blood of Hyacinthus sprang the hyacinth, which carries on its petals markings that look like the first two letters of the name of Hyacinthus (in Greek), two letters which, coincidentally, mean "woe."
. . . to Paphos . . .
Shakespeare's version of the story ends there, with the disastrous climax of Adonis' death. The last, and 199th, stanza, reads:
Thus weary of the world, away she hies
And yokes her silver doves, by whose swift aid
Their mistress, mounted, through the empty skies	<
In her light chariot quickly is convey'd,
Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen Means to immure herself and not be seen.
-lines 1189-94
The doves, for their amorous dispositions, their whiteness and gentleness, are fitting representations of romantic love and are therefore associated with Venus. Shakespeare makes a number of allusions to her doves in the course of his writings.
Paphos is a town on the western shore of the island of Cyprus, a town particularly dedicated to the worship of Venus. She is sometimes called the "Paphian goddess" as a result and sometimes "Cypris."
In the Greek myth, however, the tale of Adonis does not end with his death and Venus' mourning. In the proper fashion of death-and-resurrection, Venus goes to Jupiter and persuades him to make an arrangement whereby Proserpina, queen of the underworld, can have Adonis for half the year and she for the other half. And thus, Adonis, like the vegetation god he is, dies and is resurrected each year.

2
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
he title of this play sets its tone. "Midsummer" refers to the summer solstice, when the noonday sun reaches the most elevated point in the heavens. By our present calendar, this is June 21. (To be sure this is only the beginning of summer by modern convention and by temperature considerations.)
The actual calendar day of the solstice has varied at different times because calendars themselves have. The Midsummer Day in English tradition is June 24, which is celebrated as the birthday of John the Baptist and which therefore has a Christian distinction as well as an earlier pagan one. The preceding night would be "Midsummer Night."
There is a folk belief that extreme heat is a cause of madness (hence the phrase "midsummer madness") and this is not entirely a fable. The higher the sun and the longer it beats down, the more likely one is to get sunstroke, and mild attacks of sunstroke could be conducive to all sorts of hallucinatory experiences. Midsummer, then, is the time when people are most apt to imagine fantastic experiences.
In calling the play A Midsummer Night's Dream, then, Shakespeare is deliberately describing it as a piece of utter fantasy. It does not imply, however, that the play actually takes place on Midsummer Night. Only one reference in the play seems to set a time and that makes it seem considerably earlier; see page I-45.
. . . fair Hippolyta. . .
The play opens in a spirit of high festivity. A marriage is about to take place. The scene is set in the palace of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and it is he who speaks:
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in Another moon;
ÑAct I, scene i, lines 1-3
18	GREEK
Theseus was the great hero of Athens, who (according to Greek legend) was the first to unify the peninsula of Attica under the rule of the city of Athens. He was supposed to have lived in the generation before the Trojan War and we may therefore put the time of the play as about 1230 b.c. (which makes this play the earliest from the standpoint of background chronology, so that I place it immediately after Venus and Adonis.)
As the centuries wore on, the imaginative Athenians invented more and more hero tales with which to adorn the life of their founder until, finally, he was second only to Hercules in the number of adventures he was given.
One tale involving Theseus concerns his expedition to a land of warrior women. The women, the legend tells us, cauterized the left breast in infancy so that it never developed and left that side free for the maneuvering of a shield. They were called "Amazons," from a Greek word meaning "breastless."
Theseus defeated the Amazons and captured their queen, Antiope, keeping her as his love. He married her and by her had a son, Hippoly-tus. The name of Hippolytus was famous in Greek legend because he was the center of a very famous tale involving the hopeless love for him of his stepmother, Phaedra.
A feminine version of Hippolytus' name, Hippolyta, worked its way backward therefore and was given to his mother in place of the older name, Antiope. This was all the easier to do because in the tale of another expedition against the Amazons, that of Hercules, Hippolyta was indeed given as the name of their queen. Shakespeare makes use of Hippolyta as the name of Theseus' Amazon queen, not only here, but also in The Two Noble Kinsmen (see page I-56).
Theseus is listed in the cast of characters as "Duke of Athens." This is an anachronism, for Athens was not a duchy or anything analogous to it in Theseus' time. It was what we would today call a kingdom and Theseus was its king.
The title "Duke of Athens" did not, however, come out of nowhere. In 1204 a party of Crusaders from the West (overthrew the Byzantine Empire, which then ruled Greece, took and sacked its capital, Constantinople, and divided up what they could of the Empire among themselves, fashioning new states, Western style. One of these fragments was the "Duchy of Athens," which included the regions about Athens and Thebes.
The Duchy of Athens continued in existence for ¥ two and a half centuries. Finally, in 1456, it was absorbed into the empires of the Ottoman Turks. Shakespeare's play, probably written about 1595, \was only a century and a half removed from this Duchy of Athens, and the title of "Duke" would seem a natural one to the Elizabethan audience.
Since A Midsummer Night's Dream centers about a wedding, since it is gay and frothy and all about love and lovers, it seems natural to suppose that it was written for, and originally produced as, part of the entertain-
a midsummer night's dream	19
merit at a wedding feast. Scholars have tried to guess which wedding it might have been and six different ones have been suggested, but none is very likely. The marriages of the two men most likely to have the use of Shakespeare's services in this way, the Earl of Southampton (see page I-3) and the Earl of Essex (Elizabeth's favorite and a great friend of Southampton), both took place in 1598, which is too late for the play.
. . . Cupid's strongest bow
The marriage festivities of Theseus and Hippolyta serve as the background plot, or the "frame," of the play. In the foreground are three other sets of events, Involving totally disparate groups of characters whom Shakespeare cleverly weaves together.
The first of these subplots is introduced at once, as a set of well-born Athenians break in upon Theseus. At their head is Egeus, who is vexed and annoyed because his daughter, Hermia, will not agree to marry a young man named Demetrius. Hermia insists stubbornly that she is in love with Lysander, of whom her father does not approve.
Lysander himself points out that Demetrius had previously been in love with Helena, a friend of Hermia's, and that Helena still returned that love.
All will not do. Despite Hermia's emotion and Lysander's reason, Egeus insists on having his way, as is his legal right. Theseus decides that by his own wedding day Hermia must have agreed to obey her father. The alternatives are death or lifelong celibacy. All then leave the stage, but Lysander and Hermia.
No recourse but flight seems left them. Lysander suggests that Hermia meet him in the wood outside Athens and that they flee to a rich aunt of his who lives outside Athenian territory. There they can marry.
Hermia agrees to meet him that very night, swearing to do so in a lyrical outburst of romantic vows:
/ swear to thee, by Cupid's strongest bow,
By his best arrow with the golden head,
By the simplicity of Venus' doves,
By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves,
And by that fire which burned the Carthage queen,
When the false Troyan under sail was seen,
-Act I, scene i, lines 169-74
Cupid is the Latin version of the Greek Eros, both of whom were personifications of sexual passion. Cupid (Eros) is earliest mentioned in the works of the Greek poet Hesiod, who wrote in the eighth century b.c. There he represented the impersonal force of attraction that created all
20	GREEK
things. In later centuries Cupid was personified as a young man, then as a boy, and finally as an infant rather like the cherubs in our own art.
In the Greek myths he was given various sets of parents; Venus and Mars (see page I-11) in the best-known version. He was considered to be mischievous, of course, as anyone could see who witnesses the ridiculous events brought about by love. He was sometimes depicted as blind, since love seemed to afflict the most mismatched couples (mismatched by all standards except those clearly visible to the lovers themselves).
He was supposed to possess a bow and arrows, for the onset of love (which is sometimes sudden, or seems sudden in later reminiscence) resembles a quick arrow in the heart. In later tales, Cupid was given two types of arrows, one with a golden tip to produce love, and another with a leaden tip to produce hate. Sometimes the hate arrows were made the property of a companion deity, Anteros ("opposed to Eros").
Doves were birds sacred to Venus (see page 1-15) and they too served as appropriate vehicles for lovers' oaths.
The "Carthage queen" is a reference to one of Shakespeare's favorite personages in classical legend and one to which he often refers. She is Dido, who in 814 b.c. (according to legend), founded the North African city of Carthage, which in later centuries dominated the western Mediterranean and rivaled Rome itself.
The best-known story in connection with Dido involves the Trojan hero Aeneas. Aeneas is one of the fighters on the Trojan side who survived the destruction of Troy. Indeed, at one point in the Iliad, Aeneas is on the point of being destroyed by the invincible Achilles, and is saved by the intervention of the gods. The excuse is that Jupiter (Zeus) "intends that Aeneas shall rule the surviving Trojan stock, and his children's children after him."
Naturally, numerous tales were later invented that gave Aeneas adventures after the fall of Troy. Of these, the one that is best known today was not told by a Greek at all but by a Roman poet, Publius Vergilius Maro (best known among English-speaking people as Vergil). In the reign of Augustus, first of the Roman emperors, in the last decades of the first century b.c., Vergil wrote a tale, in imitation of Homer, regarding the escape of Aeneas from burning Troy and his wanderings over the Mediterranean Sea. The epic poem he wrote was named Aeneid for its hero.
Eventually, Aeneas lands in Carthage and meets Queen Dido. (To be sure, the Trojan War was in 1200 b.c. and Queen Dido lived in 800 b.c., making four centuries between them, but Vergil didn't care about that and neitherÑif the truth be knownÑdo we, in reading the Aeneid.)
Dido falls desperately in love with the handsome Trojan stranger; their love is consummated and for a moment it seems that all will be happy. But Aeneas is a "false Troyan" who betrays the Queen. The gods warn
a  midsummer night's dream	21
him that his divinely appointed task is to go to Italy, there to found a line which was eventually to give rise to Rome. Quietly, he sneaks away.
Dido, in despair, builds a funeral pyre on the shore, sets it on fire, and throws herself on the flames, dying with her eyes fixed on the disappearing ship. Few readers can feel any sympathy for Vergil's rather pallid hero. Despite Vergil's own attempt to make it all seem very pious of Aeneas to follow the divine dictates, our hearts are all with the injured Carthaginian and not with the scuttling Trojan. Dido has remained ever since an epitome of the betrayed woman.
Of course, it is anachronistic of Hermia to speak of Dido and Aeneas, since that took place after the Trojan War and Theseus lived beforeÑbut, again, that is a matter of little moment.
... when Phoebe doth behold
Helena now enters. She is a bosom friend of Hermia's and the friendship has remained unbroken, apparently, even though Demetrius, whom Helena desperately loves, is as desperately wooing Hermia.
The two lovers softheartedly decide to tell Helena of their own plan of flight, in order to reassure her that the obstacle to her love of Demetrius will be removed. Lysander says their flight will take place:
Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass
-Act I, scene i, lines 209-10
Phoebe is a way of referring to the moon, making use of the oldest moon goddess in classical myth and harking back to the Titaness (see page I-12).
It is odd, though, that Lysander should refer to the moon as lighting up the night, for at the very beginning of the play, Theseus has specifically stated that it is only four nights to the next new moon. This means that the old moon is now a crescent which appears only in the hours immediately preceding the dawn.
Yet it is to be understood that the entire magic night that is soon to follow is moonlit. In a way, it is essential. The soft moonlight will be just enough to make things seem not quite what they are. Who would argue with it? Let there be a full moon throughout the night even if astronomy says it is impossible.
Of course, the kindly motive that led Hermia and Lysander to tell Helena their plans makes trouble at once. Helena, virtually mad with love, promptly tells Demetrius of the plan, hoping thereby to gam his gratitude (and failing).
22	GREEK
. . . all our company . . .
The second scene of the play introduces a third strand of plot, one that does not involve aristocrats, but laboring men. Indeed, the second scene is laid in the house of one of them, a carpenter.
These laborers have none of the aura of Athenian aristocrat about them; indeed, they are in every respect, even down to their names, comic Englishmen. This sort of thing is true in all of Shakespeare's plays. Of whatever nationality and historical period the main characters are represented as being, the lower classes are always portrayed as Englishmen of Shakespeare's own time.
The leader of the group, the one in whose house they are meeting, looks about and asks, portentously,
Is all our company here?
ÑAct I, scene ii, line 1*
This leader is Peter Quince, the carpenter, and it is possible in his case and in all the others to see a connection between the name and the occupation. According to a footnote in the Signet Classic Shakespeare edition, "quines" are blocks of wood used for building and therefore characteristic of carpenters.
The other men of the company are:
Nick Bottom the weaver; one of the numerous meanings of "bottom" is a "skein of thread."
Francis Flute, the bellows-mender, which is apt since the sides of a bellows are fluted.
Tom Snout, the tinker, who deals largely with the repair of kettles, which are characterized by a snout (or spout).
Snug the joiner, an occupation which joins pieces of wood, it is to be hoped snugly.
Finally, there is Starveling the tailor, a name which is evidence that there has long been a tradition that tailors are weak, cowardly, effeminate creatures, perhaps because they work so much on women's clothes and because it is so easy to assume that a manly man would not be interested in such an occupation.
* In numbering the lines for reference there would be no problem if nothing but verse were involved, as in Venus and Adonis and in the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Then the identity and numbering of the lines are fixed. Where we encounter prose, as we do now for the first time, the lines depend on the design of type and the width of the columns. The numbering then varies from edition to edition and can alter the number in passages of verse too, if they follow passages of prose in the same scene. In this book, I am using the numbering system given in "The Signet Classic Shakespeare." If the reader is referring to some other edition, he will often have to look a little to either side of the line number, so to speak, but he will not be far off and his search will not be difficult.
a midsummer night's dream	23
". . . Pyramus and Thisby"
The six laborers have met in order to arrange the production of a play intended to celebrate the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. Quince announces the name of the play:
. . . our play is, "The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby."
ÑAct I, scene ii, lines ll-i;
The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is found in Ovid's Metamorphose: (see page I-8) and has no known source beyond that.
Pyramus and Thisbe were a youth and maiden of Babylon who lived in adjoining houses and who loved each other but were kept separate by the enmity of their parents. They talked through a chink in the wall that separated the estates and arranged to meet outside the city one night.
Thisbe got there first, but was frightened by a lion and fled, leaving he: veil behind. The lion, who had just killed an ox, snapped at the veil, leaving it bloody. Pyramus arrived, found the lion's footprints and the blood; veil. Coming to a natural conclusion, he killed himself. When Thisbe re turned, she found Pyramus' dead body and killed herself as well.
There is a strange similarity between this tale and that of Romeo and Juliet, a play that was written at just about the time A Midsummer Night's Dream was being written. Did Shakespeare's satirical treatment of the Pyramus-Thisbe story get him interested in doing a serious treatment of it Was the serious treatment already written and was he now poking a little good-natured fun at it? We can never tell.
È
. . . play Ercles rarely ...
The workmen are among Shakespeare's most delightful creations: nai'v and yet well-meaning. And of them all, the most naive and the best meaning is Bottom. Bottom no sooner hears the name of the play but he says, pompously:
A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry.
ÑAct I, scene ii, lines 14-1
Since the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe was well known to any Elizabethan with the slightest education, and known to be an utterly tragic one DBF signed for reducing softhearted maidens to floods of tears, Bottom's own characterization of it reveals him at once. He is illuminated as the cock sure know-it-all who knows nothing; the fool who thinks himself CIS,
24	GREEK
and yet who, through the very enormity of his folly, makes himself lovable. The workmen are each assigned a role in the play and Bottom is given the part of Pyramus the hero. Despite Bottom's pretense of knowledge concerning the play, it promptly turns out that he doesn't know what kind of part Pyramus is. He is told that Pyramus is a lover and he is wistful over the possibility of other roles, saying:
. . . my chief humor is for a tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.
ÑAct I, scene ii, lines 29-31
"Ercles" is Bottom's mispronunciation of Hercules (and much of the humor in Shakespeare's plays rests with the mangling of the English language by the uneducatedÑsomething sure to raise patronizing chuckles from the better classes in the audience).
Hercules (Heracles) was the greatest of the legendary heroes of the Greeks. He was a child of Jupiter (Zeus) by an illicit amour with a mortal woman. He thus incurred the vengeful enmity of Juno (Hera). As a result of a crime committed during one of his periodic fits of madness, he was condemned to perform twelve labors for an unworthy relative, Eurystheus, King of Argos.
The tale of his labors (which may originally have been inspired by the progress of the sun through the twelve constellations of the zodiac) were elaborated and interlarded before, between, and afterward by so many additions illustrative of his superhuman strength that Hercules became the most storied individual in Greek legend. He remained popular through all succeeding ages.
Since Hercules' forte was sheer brute strength, mingled with madness, he had to be played broadly with a rolling, bass voice, with rage and threats and much flexing of muscles.
The poorer plays of Elizabethan times were notorious for overacting, something beloved of the lower classes. Certainly Hercules could scarcely be portrayed satisfactorily without overacting, and it was just the sort of role a lovable dimwit like Bottom would yearn for and want to portray.
The "part to tear a cat in, to make all split" is probably a reference to Samson, the Israelite analogue of Hercules. At one time, the young Samson encountered a lion. "And the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand" (Judges 14:6). Samson would clearly have suited Bottom every bit as much as Hercules would have.
The remaining parts are then given out, with the proceedings interrupted at every point by Bottom's yearnings to play each part as it is described, offering to do it in any way that might be desired. It is only when he is told how unimaginably handsome Pyramus is that Bottom recognizes
a  midsummer night's dream	25
that only he can play the young man and reconciles himself to the task.
They then all agree to rehearse the play secretly in the wood outside
Athens so that no outsiders learn their plans and steal their thunder (the
same wood ha which Lysander and Hermia have been scheming to meet).
. . . the moon's sphere
The second act opens in this very wood, but with neither the well-born lovers nor the low-born actors in view. The wood is already occupied and we are now introduced to still another strand of plot, one that involves sheer fantasy, for it concerns fairies (drawn from Celtic legend rather than Greek mythology, but that doesn't bother anybody).
Two spirits meet to open the act. The more grotesque spirit asks the more graceful one (named simply "Fairy") where it is going. The answer is, in part:
I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon's sphere;
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 6-7
Here we have a little Greek astronomy. The Greeks believed that the sun, the moon, and the various planets were each set in a transparent sphere. The various spheres were nested one beyond the other, all centered on the earth, which was the very core and midpoint of the universe.
The spheres moved in various complicated fashions and the end result was to cause the heavenly object attached to it to move against the back-ground of the stars in the fashion observed by human astronomers. The smaller, inner spheres turned more rapidly than the larger, outer ones. The moon was attached to the innermost, smallest sphere and therefore, since that sphere turned most rapidly, it moved against the stars most rapidly. ÑThe Fairy boasts it can move even swifter than the swiftest heavenly body, the moon and its sphere.
The notion that all the spheres turned about the earth as a center was seriously challenged by the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus in 1543. The issue was strongly disputed and was not finally settled in favor of Copernicus till after Shakespeare's death. Indeed, Copernicus' theory was not inconsistent with spheres (centered about the sun, rather than the earth) and it was not till Kepler showed that the planets moved in elliptical orbits (in 1609) that the notion of the celestial spheres began to die.
Shakespeare does not, be it noted, take the advanced position of agreeing with Copernicus. In science he is a thoroughgoing conservative who
26	GREEK
clings tightly to Greek teachings, and the notion of the spheres is a favorite of his. He refers to them in a number of places.
. . . the Fairy Queen The Fairy continues to describe her duties:
And I serve the Fairy Queen To dew her orbs upon the green.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 8-9
Nowadays we think of fairies (when we think of them at all) as tiny little creatures with butterfly wings, suitable characters for children's tales. Tinkerbell, the fairy in Peter Pan, is a prize example.
This is strictly a modern, watered-down version, however; a notion to which, actually, the fairies of this very play, A Midsummer Night's Dream have greatly contributed.
In earlier centuries fairies were taken much more seriously, and well they might be, for they originated in part out of a dim memory of the pagan sprites of the woodlands: the fauns, satyrs, and nymphs of the Greco-Roman mythology, together with the gnomes, elves, and kobolds of the Teutonic imaginings and the sorcerers and "little folk" of Celtic tales. They were the mysterious forces of nature, usually capricious, often malevolent.
The vague old beliefs clung among the country folk and became old wives' tales, while the Church, recognizing their pagan origins, strove against them.
Naturally the fairies would have a king and queen, though their names and powers vary from region to region. (For a mythology to become standard, a sophisticated literature is required, and this could scarcely be found in the case of a set of beliefs driven by the Church into refuge among the rude and unlettered.)
To us, the most familiar name of the Fairy Queen is "Titania," which is the name Shakespeare uses. But it is familiar to us only because Shakespeare uses it in this play. As far as we know, he was the first ever to use that name for the Fairy Queen.
We can only speculate what inspired Shakespeare to use it. The most likely guess points to Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare used so often. At one point Ovid uses the name "Titania" for the moon, referring to Phoebe (see page I-12) by the same line of reasoning that causes one to use "Titan" to refer to the sun (see page I-11).
This, after all, is a moon-drenched play, a tale of fantastic doings in the
a midsummer night's dream	27
dim-lit night. It may have pleased Shakespeare to have the Fairy Queen a version of the moon goddess.
The "orbs upon the green" are circles of darker grass that can be found here and there on lawns. These are the result of a mushroom's activities: a mushroom which sends out threads in all directions and fruits now and then in gradually wider circles, or parts of circles. Those with sufficient imagination see in these circles the existence of tiny ballrooms for fairies (here viewed as miniature creatures). They are called "fairy rings."
... Oberon is passing fell. . .
The grotesque spirit, on hearing that the other is part of the train of the Fairy Queen, says:
The King doth keep his revels here tonight.
Take heed the Queen come not within his sight,
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 18-20
The name "Oberon" is not a creation of Shakespeare's. Indeed, it dates back to ancient Teutonic times. The old Germanic legends told of a variety of earth spirits. The dwarfs (undersized, deformed creatures, usually malevolent) had, as their chief occupation, mining. (This is still so, even in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) We can only wonder whether the legend arose in part out of the first sight by Germanic hunters of miners, caked with soilÑwith most of them children or undersized adults, since a small body was at a premium for writhing through the underground passages.
In any case, the king of the dwarfs in the Teutonic tales was Alberich, who is best known to us today for the part he plays in the Nibelung tale as told in Richard Wagner's four operas that begin with the Rhinemaidens and end with the Twilight of the Gods. Alberich is the fiendish dwarf who steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens. When the gold is taken from him in turn, he lays a curse upon all future holders of the gold and it is the working out of this curse that finally ends the universe.
"Alberich" is softened into "Oberon" in the French. As king of the fairies, rather than of the dwarfs, he plays a part in a popular medieval romance called Huon of Bordeaux. Huon kills the son of Charlemagne in this tale and is sent off on a dangerous quest in punishment. He meets Oberon, who is described as the son of a most curious pair of parents: Julius Caesar of Roman history and Morgan le Fay of Celtic legend. (Yet is that so curious? Medieval French culture represented a mingling of the Celtic peoples of ancient Gaul with the Roman conquerorsÑtogether
28	GREEK
with the later Germanic conquerors, represented by Charlemagne. Huon and Oberon may represent the meeting of Frank with Gallo-Roman.ÑBut never mind, it's Shakespeare I'm talking about in this book.)
Huon of Bordeaux was translated into English about 1540 by an English statesman and author, John Boucheir, 2d Baron Berners. Shakespeare must surely have been aware of it, and he borrowed "Oberon" from it.
Oberon and Titania are both in the heavens now. The German-English astronomer William Herschel, who had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, detected its two outermost satellites (it has five altogether, as far as we know today) in 1787. Departing from the then universal habit of naming bodies of the solar system after Greco-Roman gods and goddesses, he resorted to Shakespeare and named them Titania and Oberon. Oberon is the outermost.
. . . so sweet a changeling
The reason for the quarrel between Titania and Oberon is explained to the audience at once, for the ungainly spirit says that Oberon is angry with Titania:
Because that she as her attendant hath A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king; She never had so sweet a changeling. And jealous Oberon would have the child
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 21-24
It was one of the more fear-provoking legends concerning fairies that it was their habit to steal healthy infants from their cradles, substituting sickly or deformed ones. The substituted infants found by the mothers were "changelings." The true horror of this legend lay not so much in the needless fear it provoked among parents but in the fact that when a deformed, retarded, or sickly child was indeed born, that poor infant was sometimes mistreated in order that the fairies might be induced to take it away again.
In this case, Shakespeare mistakenly refers to the stolen normal child as the changeling.
This speech, by the way, contains one of the numerous indications in the play that the fairies are very small in size, for the spirit says that whenever Oberon and Titania meet, they quarrel vehemently so that:
Ñall their elves for fear Creep into acorn cups and hide them there.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 30-31
A  midsummer night's dream	29
The best that can be done on the stage, of course, is to have the fairies played by children, and that is really quite small enough, for in The Merry Wives of Windsor children pretend to be fairies (see page I-446) and succeed in fooling one of the characters, who is not portrayed as wondering that fairies are so large. Shakespeare may deliberately have reduced the fairies in this play to minuscule size to add to the fantasy.
Oberon and Titania, at least, give the appearance of being full-sized humans, if we consider what Shakespeare says of them.
. . . Robin Goodfellow
By this time the Fairy has recognized the spirit to whom it has been speaking. It says:
Either I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Called Robin Goodfellow.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 32-34
The Fairy recites the mischievous deeds of Robin Goodfellow, but adds:
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 40-41
Puck, a king of the elves in Scottish mythology, was pictured as an evil demon, to begin with. His role diminished with time to that of a mere mischief-maker and it is this role Shakespeare gives him.
To avert the mischief, it was necessary to flatter him, to call him "sweet Puck" or use the euphemism "Goodfellow," with the friendly given name of "Robin" (of which "Hob" is the diminutive).
The Germans had a kind of earthy, mischievous creature in their legends, who behaved much like Shakespeare's Puck, and who were called "kobolds." "Goblin" may be a form of that word, so that "hobgoblin" means "Robin the Kobold." (People were sufficiently fearful of Puck's knavishness to make "hobgoblin" become synonymous with a besetting fear.)
Puck proudly admits his identity and describes himself as Oberon's jester, making the rather dour Fairy King laugh at the practical jokes the tricksy sprite plays on people.
30	GREEK
. . . the shape of Corin ...
Puck is scarcely finished when Oberon enters from one side and Titania from the other, each with their attendant elves. Both are angry at once and in no time at all are shrewishly raking up past infidelities. Titania says:
... I know
When thou hast stolen away from fairy land And in the shape of Corin sat all day, Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love To amorous Phyllida.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 64-68
It is not moderns only who long for a simpler past and who imagine a world of country joy and pastoral pleasures. The city folk of Shakespeare's time, and for that matter, those of ancient times, likewise turned away from what they conceived to be the corrupting influence of city life and longed for a magical land of shepherds and milkmaids ("Arcadia") that never really existed.
Pastoral plays and poetry were a fad in Shakespeare's time and one conventional name for the shepherd-hero was Corin. Indeed, Shakespeare makes use of that name for a shepherd in his own pastoral play As You Like It (see page I-568). As for Phyllida, that is a version of "Phyllis," a traditional name for a pastoral heroine, and a good one too, since it means "leafy" in Greek.
Titania accuses Oberon, further, of having arrived in Athens from India only to be at Theseus' wedding because he himself has been a past lover of Hippolyta.
Accusations like these make us think of Oberon and Titania as full-sized. To be sure, they can take any shape they wish (Oberon made love to Phyllida "in the shape of Corin") but it is difficult to think of them being lovingly interested in coarse humans if they themselves are dainty enough to fit in an acorn cup.
. . . Ariadne and Antiopa
Oberon, furious at Titania's scandalous allegations, accuses her in turn of being in love with Theseus and having caused him to betray earlier loves of whom she had been jealous. Oberon says:
Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night From Perigenia, whom he ravished? And make him with fair Aegles break his faith, With Ariadne and Antiopa?
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 77-80
A    MIDSUMMER    NIGHT'S    DREAM	31
These were women whom Theseus met in the course of his adventures. Thus, Perigenia was the daughter of Sinis, a wicked bandit who lived at the Corinthian Isthmus. Sinis would bend the tops of pine trees to the ground and tie some luckless traveler's right foot to one pine tree, and left-foot to the other. He would then release the trees, which would spring upright, tearing the traveler in two.
Theseus wrestled with him and killed him, then discovered the bandit's daughter hiding in terror. She fell in love with him at once. Theseus had a child by her, but then gave her to one of his companions.
Aegles and Antiopa are two other loves of Theseus. In fact, Antiopa (Antiope) is the name of the Amazonian Queen, for which Shakespeare substituted the name "Hippolyta."
By all odds, the most famous of the forsaken maidens is Ariadne. She was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who, when Theseus was a youth, held Athens under tribute, demanding seven youths and seven maidens each year. These were sacrificed to the Minotaur, a bull-headed monster. (This is a legendary memory of the time, prior to 1400 b.c., when Crete was the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, and when bull worship was an important factor in its religion.)
Theseus had himself selected as one of the seven youths and sailed to Crete to place an end to the tribute once and for all.
The Minotaur was hidden in the center of a labyrinth so intricate that no one entering could expect to find his way out even if he were so fortunate as to kill the monster. (This may well have been a Grecian memory of the great palace at Knossos, the Cretan capital, which had so many rooms that the unsophisticated Greeks of the day must have wondered how anyone could find his way around within it.)
Minos' daughter, Ariadne, having fallen in love with Theseus, gave him a magic ball of twine which would unwind before him, leading him to the Minotaur, and which he could then trace back for the return. Theseus followed the twine, killed the Minotaur, and returned.
The Athenian had promised to make Ariadne his wife in return and when he left Crete, he took her with him. They landed on the Aegean island of Naxos and while she slept, Theseus and his party stole away and made for Athens without her. Why he deserted her the myths don't say, though Mary Renault has a fascinating conjecture concerning it in her novel The King Must Die.
. , angry winter . . .
Titania, womanlike, dismisses the charges scornfully as fantasies born of jealousy. She speaks bitterly of their quarreling as having caused the
32	GREEK
very seasons to have grown confused (a dear reflection of the role of the fairies as nature spirits):
The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which.
-Act II, scene i, lines 111-14
The interest here lies in that some critics see this to be a contemporary reference. The years 1594-96 were horrible, from the standpoint of weather, in England, and if the play had been written in 1595, Shakespeare might have been referring to the weather at this time.
Oberon points out that to end the quarreling, all that need be done is for Titania to give up the Indian changeling, but this Titania flatly refuses to do, and they part.
. . . certain stars shot madly...
The chafed Oberon decides to teach Titania a lesson. He calls Puck to him and reminds him of a time they listened to a mermaid (see page 1-12) sing. Oberon says:
. . . the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea maid's music.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 152-54
This represents the romantic belief that even inanimate nature responds to beautiful music. This is most commonly aired in connection with Orpheus, the musician of Greek legend, and a beautiful song on that subject is to be found in Henry VIII.
The Greeks supposed that the stars possessed a sphere of their own. The stars do not move relative to each other (they are "fixed stars" as opposed to the planets) and all were affixed to a single sphere, therefore. Shakespeare, however, mistakenly supposes each star to have its individual sphere and therefore says the stars shot madly from their "spheres."
The thought that a star could leave its sphere arises from the sight of "shooting stars," which are not stars at all, of course, but fragments of matter, often no larger than a pinhead, which in their travels about the sun collide with the earth and are heated to white brilliance by friction with the air.
A    MIDSUMMER   NIGHT'S   DREAM	33
... a fair vestal. . . Oberon goes on:
That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west,
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 155-58
But Cupid's arrow, for a wonder, missed:
And the imperial vot'ress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 163-64
Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth; that is, of the household fire. The six priestesses in her service had, as their chief duty, the guarding of a sacred flame which must never be allowed to go out. This is perhaps a memory of a time when the art of lighting a fire at will was new and difficult, and when the loss of a household fire meant an uncomfortable period of cold and uncooked food. (It would be something like a breakdown in electric service these days.)
The priestesses were required to be virgins and to maintain an absolute chastity on pain of torture and death, and it is recorded that in eleven hundred years only twenty cases of violation of that rule were recorded.
The Vestal Virgins were venerated and had many privileges, taking precedence even over the Emperor on certain ceremonial occasions. The term "vestal" has come to be synonymous with "virgin" in the English language because of them.
Shakespeare's reference to the "fair vestal throned by the west" can be to none other than to Elizabeth I who, at the time the play was written had been reigning thirty-seven years, was sixty-two years old, and had never married. Non-marriage need not necessarily be equated with virginity, of course, and Elizabeth had had several favorites (including the Earl of Essex at the time the play was written) but her subjects accepted her virginity as fact.
In the early years of her reign, her failure to marry was of great concern to her advisers, for children were required if the succession was to be made sure. As the years passed and she grew too old to have children anyway, the best had to be made of it, and Elizabeth's reputed virginity became a source of pride. She became known as the "Virgin Queen," and when in the 1580s the first English settlers attempted to found colonies on what
34	GREEK
is now the east-central shore of the United States, they named the region "Virginia" in her honor.
Shakespeare's delicate picture of Elizabeth as a "fair vestal" whom not even "Cupid all armed" could defeat and who remained "in maiden meditation, fancy-free" must surely have pleased the aged Queen, who had always been terribly vain of her good looks, and who insisted on being treated as a beauty even after she had long ceased to be one. The terrible anachronism of placing her in the reign of Theseus would bother no one.
... a girdle round about the earth
Cupid's arrow, which misses the fair vestal, hits a flower which Oberon describes as:
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 167-68
The flower referred to is more commonly spoken of nowadays as the pansy. Oberon orders Puck to:
Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 173-74
It is foolish, of course, to try to attach literal meaning to what is obviously poetic hyperbole, butÑjust for funÑ"leviathan" is the whale, which can swim as speedily as twenty miles an hour. To swim a league (three miles) would require nine minutes.
Puck answers:
/'// put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 175-76
It is interesting to note that Puck outdoes even the modern astronaut, who requires ninety minutes to go around the earth. To circumnavigate the planet in forty minutes means moving at the rate of 37,500 miles an hour or a little over 10 miles a second. Puck would be hard put to manage to stay close to the earth's surface at this speed, for he would well exceed the escape velocity.
However,  Shakespeare was  writing a century before Newton had
A   MIDSUMMER   NIGHT'S   DREAM	35
worked out the law of gravity, and, in any case, we can assume that such mundane universal laws of the universe would not apply to Puck.
In the nine minutes allowed him by Oberon, by the way, Puck could, at this speed, flash to a point twenty-seven hundred miles away and back again. In short, he could fly from Athens to England and back with several minutes to spare, and it must have been in England that Oberon saw Cupid aiming at the fair vestal. ÑSo through all the fantasy, Shakespeare manages (without meaning it, I'm sure) to allow Puck enough time.
Oberon plans to use the juice of the plant he has sent Puck for as a love philter. It will serve to make Titania fall in love with something abhorrent, and thus Oberon will have his revenge.
. . . you hardhearted adamant
At this point, Demetrius (warned by Helena of the lovers' flight) comes upon the scene in search of Lysander and Hermia, intent on killing the former and dragging the latter back to Athens. Helena tags after him, although Demetrius, utterly ungrateful for her help, does his best to drive her away. But poor Helena cries out:
You draw me, you hardhearted adamant; But yet you draw not iron, for my heart Is true as steel.
ÑAct II, scene i, lines 195-97
The word "adamant" is from a Greek expression meaning "not tamed." It was applied to a mythical substance that was so hard it could not be cut or broken and in that sense could not be tamed. The word has been applied to the hardest naturally occurring substance; that is, to diamond, and, as a matter of fact, "diamond" is a corruption of "adamant."
In the Middle Ages "adamant" was falsely related to the Lathi expression "adamare," meaning "to attract," so that it came to be applied to the magnet. Helena cleverly uses the word in both senses at once, for Deme-trius attracts her as though he were a magnet and his cruel heart is diamond-hard.
Apollo flies ...
Demetrius desperately tries to escape her importunities, and Helena, still pursuing him, says sadly:
36	GREEK
Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase;
ÑAct II, scene i, line 231
Daphne was a nymph, daughter of the Peneus River (which cuts across Thessaly in northern Greece). Apollo fell in love with her and when she refused him, he tried to rape her. She fled and Apollo ran after. Even as his hands were clutching at her shoulder, she prayed to the earth goddess, who changed her into a laurel tree.
To Helena, it seems that the old myth reverses itself in her case. Oberon, overhearing, pities her. He decides to use the love juice for Demetrius as well as for Titania. In this way do the fairy plot and the lovers plot intertwine.
Oberon does not count, however, on a second pair of Athenians creeping through the fairy-haunted wood. Lysander and Hermia, coming on stage, are overcome by weariness and lie down to sleep. Puck, returning with the love juice, is told by Oberon to anoint the eyes of an Athenian youth in the woods. Puck finds Lysander and Hermia sleeping, assumes Lysander is the youth meant by Oberon, and places the juice on his eyes.
Next comes Demetrius running through, outdistancing the panting Helena. Helena, who can run no more, finds Hermia and Lysander sleeping, wonders if they are dead, and wakes Lysander. He sees Helena through his juice-moistened eyes and falls madly in love with her immediately.
Helena assumes she is being mocked and runs away. Lysander pursues her and Hermia wakes to find herself alone.
, . . a bush of thorns . . .
Meanwhile, in that spot of the woods where Titania lies sleeping (hav-ng earlier been lulled to sleep by a fairy-sung lullaby), the Athenian laborers come blundering in to work out the production problems of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Those problems are many and difficult to their unsophisticated minds. Bottom points out, for instance, that when Pyramus draws a sword to kill himself, he will frighten the ladies in the audience. What's more, introduc-ing a lion will frighten them even more. It will be necessary, Bottom ex-plains, to have a prologue written that will explain that no harm is intended, hat the lion is not a real one, and so on.
There is next the question of moonlight. Will there be a moon that night? Quince checks the almanac and says:
Yes, it doth shine that night.
ÑAct III, scene i, line 55
A   MIDSUMMER   NIGHT'S   DREAM	37
This is odd, since the play is to be given at Theseus' wedding and Theseus himself has said it will take place on the night of the new moon, which means there will be no moon in the sky.
But it really doesn't matter. Even if there is no moon to shine naturally upon the stage, Quince has an alternative.
. . . one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.
ÑAct III, scene i, lines 59-61
A man holding a lantern on high is an obvious representation of the moon. But why a bush of thorns?
The vague shadows on the moon's face, visible to the naked eye, are the marks of the "seas," relatively flat circular areas surrounded by the lighter cratered and mountainous areas. In the days before telescopes, the nature of the markings could not be known and an imaginative peasantry concerted the shadows into figures; most commonly the figure of a man. This was the "man in the moon."
Somehow the feeling arose that the man in the moon had been hurled there as a punishment and the particular crime was thought to have been described in the Bible. The crime took place when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. "And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron" (Numbers 15:32-33).
It is clearly stated that this sabbath breaker was stoned to death. Nevertheless, an alternate non-biblical version of his punishment arose and grew popular. This was that for breaking the sabbath he was exiled to the moon with the sticks he had gathered. The sticks gradually elaborated into a thornbush and a dog was often added too (either as a merciful gesture of company for the man or as an unmerciful representation of the devil, who forever torments him). When in the final act of A Midsummer Night's Dream the little play is actually put on at Theseus' wedding, the dog appears with Starveling the Tailor, who plays Moonshine.
... at Ninny's tomb
Puck enters, having taken care (as he supposes) of Demetrius, and now all ready to place the love juice on Titania's eyes. He finds, to his amazement, the rehearsal in progress. Bottom (as Pyramus) delivers his lines and exits, while Flute (as Thisbe) calls after him:
38	GREEK
I'll meet thee, Pyramus, at Ninny's tomb.
ÑAct III, scene i, line 98
"Ninny's tomb" is Flute's mangling of "Ninus' tomb." Ninus, according to Greek legend, was the founder of the Assyrian Empire and the builder of Nineveh, its capital, which, as was thought, was named after him. Since the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe takes place in Babylon, which was an important part of the Assyrian Empire, a mention of Ninus' tomb is useful local color.
The Greek versions of Assyrian history are, of course, completely distorted. There was no historical character such as Ninus. There was, however, an early Assyrian conqueror, Tukulti-Ninurta I, who reigned about the time of the Trojan War. His fame may have dimly reached across Asia Minor, and his long name could have been shortened to the first half of the second part, with a final s (which ended almost all Greek names) added.
. . . make an ass of me . . .
The mischievous Puck sees his chance to improve on the instructions given him by Oberon. He follows Pyramus offstage and works a charm that places an ass's head on his shoulders. When Bottom returns, unaware of the change, he finds that his frightened companions take one look at him and flee. Their cries to the effect that he is monstrously changed leave him puzzled. Finally, he says:
/ see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me; to fright me, if they could.
ÑAct III, scene i, lines 121-22
Bottom, who, figuratively speaking, has proved himself all through the play to have an ass's head, now owns one literally; and he is as unaware of his literal ass's head now as he had been of his figurative one earlier.
But he remains lovable in his folly even now. Titania, who has had the juice placed on her eyes, wakes at this moment and at once falls in love with Bottom in his grotesque disguise. She places her retinue of tiny fairies at his disposal, and Bottom, taking it all as his due, allows himself, most complacently, to be worshiped and adored.
. . . the gun's report Delighted, Puck races to report the event to Oberon. He describes the
A   MIDSUMMER   NIGHT'S   DREAM	39
scene when Bottom returns with his ass's head and the other workmen scatter and fly:
As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye, Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort, Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
ÑAct III, scene ii, lines 20-22
Either Puck can foresee the future with remarkable clarity or this is a particularly amusing anachronismÑguns in the time of Theseus.
. . . th'Antipodes
Oberon is pleased, but asks about the Athenian lovers, and Puck says he has taken care of that too.
But in comes Demetrius. He has found Hermia, who is berating him bitterly for having killed Lysander. Only Lysander's death could explain his having left her while asleep. She would not for one moment accept the possibility that he had crept away from her willingly:
/'// believe as soon
This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon May through the center creep, and so displease Her brother's noontide with th'Antipodes.
ÑAct III, scene ii, lines 52-55
The ancient Greeks were the first to realize that the earth was spherical in shape. (To be sure, they were not the Greeks of Theseus' time. The first who thought so lived seven and a half centuries after Theseus.) They realized that people who lived on the other side of the globe from themselves would have their feet pointing upward, so to speak, in the direction opposite from that in which their" own feet pointed.
The people on the other side of the globe would therefore be "antipodes" ("opposite-feet"). The name was applied to the other side of the globe itself as a result.
. . . the Tartar's bow
Demetrius desperately denies having killed Lysander, but Hermia scolds him fiercely and leaves. Demetrius, wearied, lies down to sleep. Oberon, seeing Puck's mistake, sends him angrily after Helena so that the mistake can be corrected. Puck, eager to calm his angry king, says:
40	GREEK
/ go, I go; look how 1 go,
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow.
-Act III, scene ii, lines 100-1
Europe, through its ancient and medieval history, has been periodically plagued by nomadic horsemen thundering west from the steppes of central Asia. The Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, and Magyars each in turn terrorized European territories. The nomads won their victories through superior mobility; through the dash of their swift and hardy horses, from whose backs the riders shot arrows that galled their slower-moving European adversaries.
The last and most terrible of the nomadic invaders were the Tatars or Mongols, who in the first half of the thirteenth century conquered both China and Russia. In 1240 the speeding Mongol horsemen darted into central Europe, smashing every clumsy army of armored knights that was raised to stop them, and spreading ruin and desolation almost to the Adriatic.
Far back in central Asia their ruler died and all the Mongol armies (undefeated) swept back to take part in the decision as to the succession. In 1241, therefore, the Mongols left and, as it happened, never returned.
The Europeans, however, were long to remember the dreadful period of 1240-41. They called the horsemen Tartars, rather than Tatars, thinking of them not as men but as demons from Tartarus (see page 1-13). The Tartars' arrows remained in mind and Shakespeare could use them as a metaphor for speed (even though they had entered European consciousness twenty-five centuries after the time of Theseus).
. . . high Taurus' snow
Oberon places the juice on Demetrius' eyes and Puck brings back Helena as ordered. With Helena, however, is Lysander, still under the influence of the juice and still pleading love. Helena persists in thinking Lysander is making cruel fun of her. The noise they make wakes Demetrius, who is now also in love with Helena.
Demetrius addresses her in the most elaborate lover's fashion, saying:
That pure congealed white, high Taurus' snow, Fanned with the eastern wind, turns to a crow When thou hold'st up thy hand: O, let me kiss This princess of pure white . . .
ÑAct III, scene ii, lines 141-44
Helena is obviously a fair-skinned blonde, which in medieval times rep-
A   MIDSUMMER   NIGHT'S   DREAM	41
resented an ideal of beauty. Her skin is whiter than the snows of the Taurus Mountains, a range in southeastern Asia Minor.
When the German tribes tore the western provinces of the Roman Empire apart, they established themselves as an aristocracy over a Celto-Roman peasantry. The Germans were taller than the Celto-Romans on the average, and faker. Over the centuries, therefore, fair skin, blond hah-, blue eyes, and tall stature came to be associated with aristocracy and beauty; the reverse with peasanthood and ugliness.
Helena, completely confused, decides that both men have combined for some insane reason to make fun of her. Then, when Hermia enters and acts astonished, Helena maintains that her old girlfriend has also joined in the joke.
. . . you Ethiope
Poor Hermia can make nothing of what is going on. All she knows is that she has found Lysander again, but that Lysander is acting most peculiarly. She approaches Lysander timidly to find out what it is all about, but the erstwhile tender lover turns on the poor girl savagely and says:
Away, you Ethiope!
ÑAct III, scene ii, line 257
The expression "Ethiopian" is from Greek words meaning "burnt faces"Ñfaces that have been darkened by exposure to the sun. It was applied to the races living south of Egypt and was eventually used for African blacks generally.
Here, then, the same principle that brings about praise for Helena's fair beauty brings contempt for poor Hermia's darker complexion.
Hermia has trouble understanding this, but when she does she leaps at once to the conclusion that Helena has stolen her love. She cries out furiously about Helena:
Now I perceive that she hath made compare Between our statures; she hath urged her height, And with her personage, her tall personage, Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with hint.
-Act III, scene ii, lines 290-93
She advances upon Helena, nails unsheathed, and Helena fearfully shrinks away as both men vie in protecting her.
The exasperated Hermia accepts every remark as a reference to her plebeian shortness and Lysander, sensing her sensitivity, throws the fact of it in her face, saying:
42	GREEK
Get you gone, you dwarf; You minimus, of hind'ring knotgrass made; You bead, you acorn!
-Act III, scene ii, lines 328-30
Knotgrass, a common weed, was supposed to stunt growth if eaten.
Lysander and Demetrius, angered with each other over their common love for Helena, as earlier they had been over their common love for Hermia, stride offstage to fight. At this, Helena, left alone with Hermia, flees, and Hermia follows.
... as black as Acheron
Oberon is terribly irritated and virtually accuses Puck of having done all this deliberately. Puck denies having done it on purpose, though he admits the results have turned out fun.
Oberon orders him to begin mending matters:
. . . Robin, overcast the night. The starry welkin cover thou anon With drooping fog, as black as Acheron; And lead these testy rivals so astray, As one comes not within another's way.
-Act III, scene ii, lines 355-59
Acheron is the name of one of the five rivers which the classical writers described as encircling the underworld. For some reason, the name of this particular river came to be applied to the underworld generally, so that "Acheron" came to be a synonym for "Hades."
Once the night is made dark, Puck is to mislead Lysander and Demetrius, weary them to sleep once more, rearrange their affections, entice them into considering it all a dream, and send all four safely back to Athens.
. . . Aurora's harbinger Puck agrees, but urges haste:
For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;
-Act HI, scene ii, lines 379-80
Aurora (known to the Greeks as Eos) is the goddess of the dawn. She
A   MIDSUMMER   NIGHT'S   DREAM	43
is the third child of the Titan Hyperion (see page I-ll), a sister of Helios, god of the sun, and Selene, goddess of the moon.
Her harbinger is the planet Venus, shining as the morning star and rising only an hour or two before the sun and therefore not long before the dawn.
Oberon agrees and Puck accomplishes the task, sending all four Athenians into a scrambling confusion that wearies them to sleep once more. He then anoints Lysander's eyes in such a way that when all four awake, all shall be straightened out. Or, as Puck says:
Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill; The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.
ÑAct III, scene ii, lines 461-63
"Jack and Jill" is a stock phrase for a man and his sweetheart or wife. Jack is clearly a generic name for a man generally, since it is so common (a diminutive of Jacob, which in one form or anotherÑJames in England, Hamish in Scotland, Jacques in France, lago or Diego in Spam and Portugal, and Giacopo in ItalyÑwas an extremely popular name all over western Europe).
Jill is far less common and is usually considered a short version of Juliana. It was used, probably, because a one-syllabled girl's name starting with the J sound was needed, though it seems to me that Joan would have been more fitting. In any case, we ourselves know Jack and Jill primarily from the nursery rhyme that sends them to the top of a hill to fetch a pail of water.
Nor is this the only complication unraveled. Oberon meets Titania, who, in her entranced adoration of the ass-headed Bottom, freely gives up her Indian boy. She then has Bottom sleep with his long-eared head in her lap, and Oberon finally takes pity on her. He releases her from her spell and orders Puck to remove the ass's head from Bottom and send him back to Athens too.
And so at last are Oberon and Titania reconciled.
. . . with Hercules and Cadmus . . .
Now that the complications of the subplots are solved, Theseus and Hippolyta come on the scene again. They are following the hunt and Hippolyta says, in reminiscence:
/ was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear
With hounds of Sparta.
-Act IV, scene i, lines 115-17
44	GREEK
The world of orthodox Greek myth comes swimming back. Hercules was indeed a contemporary of Theseus and the two are made companions in several myths.
Cadmus, in the legends, was a Phoenician prince. He had come to Greece in search of Europa, his sister. She had been kidnapped by Zeus in the shape of a bull and brought to Crete, where Minos was to reign and the Minotaur was to be found. As a matter of fact, Minos was the son of Europa.
Cadmus never found Europa (so that it isn't quite right to place him in Crete). Wandering in Greece itself, he founded the city of Thebes. The Greek legend has it that it was Cadmus who taught the letters of the alphabet to the Greeks. This is interesting since the alphabet did, in actual fact, originate with the Phoenicians and it is entirely appropriate that the Greeks be taught it by Cadmus, a Phoenician prince.
Sparta is mentioned in this passage too. In Theseus' time it was a city in southern Greece that was not particularly remarkable, though it was soon to become the home of Helen, whose beauty sparked the Trojan War. In later centuries Sparta was to become the most militarized and, for a time, the most militarily successful of the Greek cities.
. . . Thessalian bulls
Theseus says that his own hounds are of the same breed as the "hounds of Sparta" Hippolyta has mentioned:
. . . their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; Crook-kneed, and dew-lapped like Thessalian bulls;
ÑAct IV, scene i, lines 123-25
Thessaly is a fertile plain region in northeastern Greece, much different from the rocky, mountainous area to the south where Greece's most famous cities, including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth, were located. It would be naturally a place where horses would be useful and where cattle would be profitably bred. A Thessalian bull would be larger and better than a bull bred elsewhere in Greece.
The rite of May
In the wood, the hunting party, which includes Egeus, the father of Hermia, comes upon the four young people, still sleeping where Puck had left them.
A    MIDSUMMER    NIGHT'S    DREAM	45
Egeus frowns and begins to ponder on the meaning, but Theseus, depicted throughout the play as courtly and kind, quickly places a harmless interpretation on the matter. He says:
No doubt they rose up early to observe The rite of May;
-Act IV, scene i, lines 135-36
May Day, the first of May, was a day of nature celebration in ancient times. Spring was definitely established by then; the greenery was growing; it was warm enough to spend the evening outdoors. It was a time for revelry and youth, and no doubt a time when the fertility of nature might best be imitated by the celebrants.
The Maypole about which the young people danced may well be what was left of a phallic symbol. Indeed, earlier in the play, Hermia had made use of just such an implication, perhaps. When she was terribly irritated at being scorned for her shortness, she turned on Helena and said,
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak!
ÑAct III, scene ii, line 296
Not only does Hermia in this way refer disparagingly to Helena as tall and skinny (and perhaps with as little figure as a maypole), but she also implies that the men, Lysander and Demetrius, are dancing about her with immoral intent.
Theseus' reference places the play well before Midsummer Day, by the way.
. . . Saint Valentine ...
Perhaps Theseus is not unaware of the coarser ways of celebrating May Day, for as the hunting horns sound and the Athenian lovers rouse themselves, Theseus says, with light mockery:
Good morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is past: Begin these wood birds but to couple now?
-Act IV, scene i, lines 142-43
St. Valentine's Day is certainly past, for, as we all know, it falls on February 14. Valentine's Day commemorates the martyred death of St. Valentine on February 14, 270 (which makes it a terribly anachronistic comment in the mouth of Theseus). ,   The romantic symbolism of the day antedated the good saint. There
46	GREEK
is a folk belief that the birds began to mate on this day (which is what Theseus is referring to) and this may have initiated fertility rites in pagan days. The Church would attempt to transfer the rites to a Christian commemoration and soften them too, and the story arose that St. Valentine made anonymous gifts of money to help poor girls to a dowry that would find them husbands. Thus, he became the patron saint of romantic love.
The ferocious Egeus, hearing Lysander confess he had intended to elope with Hermia, calls for his death and the marriage of Hermia to Demetrius. Demetrius, however, confesses that he now loves Helena. Theseus, listening politely, decides that each loving pair is now to be married, Lysander to Hermia, and Demetrius to Helena.
Meanwhile Bottom also rouses himself, finds his natural head restored, dismisses his vague memories as a dream, and returns to Athens and to his mourning comrades. They are delighted to meet him and continue to prepare their play.
"The battle with the Centaurs. . ."
The time of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta is now at hand. Theseus has heard of the events of the magic night in the woods and dismisses them as fantasy. He turns to the list of entertainments proposed for the wedding feast and reads off the first item:
"The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung By an Athenian eunuch to the harp." We'll none of that. That have I told my love, In glory of my kinsman Hercules.
ÑAct V, scene i, lines 44-47
Centaurs were common monsters of Greek myths, composite creatures with the head and torso of men affixed to the body of a horse. They were supposed to have been natives of Thessaly. Perhaps the notion originated with the first sight of men riding horses. The southern Greeks, in their narrow valleys, having been unused to horses for generations, would find men on horseback in the plains of Thessaly when they marched northward in battle and tales of centaurs would drift back to stay-at-homes.
The centaurs were considered to be barbaric creatures of the senses, given to gross eating, to drunkenness and lechery. The chief tale in which centaurs are prominent involves the marriage of Pirithous, a friend of Theseus (he does not appear in this play but he has a minor role in The Two Noble Kinsmen, see page I-56).
Pirithous, who was of the Thessalian tribe of the Lapiths, invited his kinsmen and friends to the wedding, Theseus among them. He also in-
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vited a party of centaurs. The centaurs, however, drank too much and, in a drunken fury, created a disturbance and tried to carry off the bride. At once a fight broke out and the Lapiths, with Theseus' stanch help, drove off the centaurs, killing many.
It could not be this tale that was to be sung by the eunuch, for Hercules is not involved and Theseus refers to a battle with centaurs that redounded to Hercules' honor. But then, Hercules had several encounters with centaurs and won every battle.
Theseus here and in The Two Noble Kinsmen (see page I-58) refers to "my kinsman Hercules." They were both great-grandchildren, through their mothers, of Tantalus (see page I-13).
. . . the tipsy Bacchanals A second item on the list is:
"The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage."
ÑAct V, scene i, lines 48-49
The Thracian singer was Orpheus, who played the lyre and sang so beautifully that wild beasts were calmed and the very trees and rocks left their place to follow him. He married Eurydice, whom he deeply loved, and when she was bitten by a snake and died, he descended into the underworld to reclaim her. So beautiful was his music that he even touched the cold heart of Hades, who agreed to let him take Eurydice back, provided he didn't turn to look at her till he was out of the underworld.
They were almost out, the light of day was ahead, when Orpheus, suddenly fearful that he was being tricked by a counterfeit, turned to look and Eurydice slipped forever away from him.
He emerged to wander about inconsolably. He met a group of bacchanals, women engaged in the wild and drunken rites that celebrated Bacchus, god of the vine. When Orpheus seemed oblivious to them, they interpreted his sad silence as scorn. They tore him apart and threw his head into the river. It floated down to the sea, still singing as it went.
. . . / from Thebes . . .
Theseus gives his opinion of the Orpheus item curtly:
That is an old device; and it was played When 1 from Thebes came last a conqueror.
ÑAct V, scene i, lines 50-51
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The myths do contain accounts of a victorious war fought against Thebes by Theseus. As a matter of fact, that war plays an important part in The Two Noble Kinsmen (see page I-59) where it is fought immediately before the wedding.
"The thrice three Muses..." A third item is:
"The thrice three Muses mourning for the death Of Learning, late deceased in beggary."
ÑAct V, scene i, lines 52-53
Theseus dismisses that as a satire too sharp to fit a wedding ceremony.
The nine Muses ("thrice three") were daughters of Jupiter (Zeus) who were the goddesses of the various branches of learning.
Some critics have tried to pick out some particular person meant by "Learning" in this passage. It is suggested, for instance, that the reference is to the death of the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, who died in 1595.
However, it seems most likely that Shakespeare is merely poking fun at the chronic complaints in his time (and in ours, for that matter) that everything is going to the devil, that the great feats of the past will never be equaled, and that the public taste is degenerating. To show that this was felt even in Theseus' time would be amusing.
But then Theseus' eye catches the notice of the play about Pyramus and Thisbe, and though the master of the revels snobbishly dismisses it as the pathetic attempt of ignorant workers and Hippolyta expresses her nervousness over their possible failure, Theseus nobly indicates he will hear it and that nothing can be a failure if it is presented with honest good will and out of a sense of duty.
. . . like Limander...
Now Bottom and company present their play, which, in the actual practice, turns out to be lamer and more ridiculous than even the rehearsals had prepared us for. They mangle classical references, as when Bottom (Pyramus) says:
And, like Limander, am I trusty still.
-Act V, scene i, line 197
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Flute (Thisbe) replies to this:
And I like Helen, till the Fates me kill.
ÑAct V, scene i, line 198
There is no "Limander" anywhere in the corpus of Greek legends. If Flute really means "Helen," that must be the famous Helen of Troy, that paragon of beauty who was the cause of the Trojan War (see page I-76). In that case, Limander must mean Alexander, which is one of the alternate names for Paris, who eloped with her.
On the other hand, it is more likely that by Limander, Bottom meant Leander, the well-known hero of the romantic tale of a lover who nightly swam the Hellespont to be with his love and who, one stormy night, drowned in the attempt. In that case the girl would be Hero, not Helen.
. . . Shafalus to Procrus. . . Bottom (Pyramus) also protests:
Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true,
-Act V, scene i, line 199
This is a mangling of Cephalus and Procris, a rather affecting myth about a loving husband and wife. Cephalus, an ardent hunter, had a spear that never missed. He went out hunting early every morning and finally Procris decided to follow him to see if he might not be meeting another woman. Cephalus, heated with hunting, rested and called on the breeze to cool him. Procris, imagining he was calling a woman, sprang from her hiding place and Cephalus, in reflex action, threw his never-missing spear and killed her.
O Sisters Three
The Play of Pyramus and Thisbe ends with a pair of the most terrific death scenes ever seen as first Pyramus and then Thisbe commit elaborate suicide. Thisbe cries out in her turn:
O Sisters Three,
Come, come to me,
With hands as pale as milk;
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Lay them in gore, Since you have shore With shears his thread of silk.
-Act V, scene i, lines 338-43
The "Sisters Three" are the Fates, who govern all events and whose edicts neither gods nor men can defy. There are three of them by the natural division of time into past, present, and future.
Clotho represents the past and she spins the thread of life, causing life to originate and an individual to be born. Lachesis guides the thread, representing the present and its events. Dreadful Atropos is the future, for she carries the shears with which she snips the thread and brings death.
The three Fates play a much more serious part in Macbeth (see page I-160).
. . . the triple Hecate's team
The play within a play ends with a dance and with its audience amused and ready for bed.
Nothing remains but the final bit of entertainment, supplied by the fairy band. Puck comes on the stage alone to say that with the coming of night once more the fairies are back:
. . . 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.
-Act V, scene i, lines 385-89
Hecate was supposed to be one of the Titanesses in Greek mythology, but in the struggle that resulted in their supplanting by Jupiter (Zeus) and the other later gods, Hecate sided with Jupiter and remained in power. She was probably another personification of the moon.
There were three common goddesses of the moon in the later myths: Phoebe, Diana (Artemis), and Hecate. All three might be combined as the "triple Hecate" and Hecate was therefore frequently portrayed with three faces and six arms.
Later mythologists also tried to rationalize the difference in names by saying that Phoebe was the moon goddess in the heavens, Diana on earth, and Hecate in the underworld.
This connection with the underworld tended to debase her and make her a goddess of enchantments and magic spells, so that the fairies in fol-
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lowing "triple Hecate's team" were following not only the pale team of horses that guided the moon's chariot (hence were active at night rather than by day) but also shared her power of enchantment and magic.
Her enchantments and magic made her sink further in Christian times until Hecate finally became a kind of queen of witches, and she appears in this guise in Macbeth (see page II-185).
Now in come Oberon and Titania with the rest of their fairies. They make their concluding pretty speeches, placing a good luck charm on all the couples being married in the play (and perhaps on the couple being married in the audience, if A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed to celebrate a marriage). Puck then delivers the epilogue and the play is over.
Nothing in the play indicates a tragic end to the love tale of Theseus and Hippolyta, and though it seems a shame to mention it after such a happy time, I will.
The Amazons, offended at Theseus' kidnapping of their queen, mounted an attack against him. They were defeated, but Hippolyta, fighting Amazonlike at the side of her husband, and against her own subjects of the past, was killed.

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THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
i