As you begin to read the opening scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you may notice occasional unfamiliar words. Some are unfamiliar simply because we no longer use them. In the first scenes, for example, you will find the words mewed (i.e., caged), an (i.e., if), beteem (i.e., grant, give), momentany (i.e., momentary) and collied (i.e., coal black). Words of this kind are explained in notes to the text in the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of the play. They will also become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read.
More problematic are other words that we still use but that we use with a different meaning. In the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the word conceit has the meaning of “a fancy trinket,” the word solemnity is used where we would say “festive ceremony,” blood where we would say “passions, feelings,” fantasy where we would say “imagination,” and well possessed where we would say “wealthy.” Such words are explained in the Folger edition, but they, too, will become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s language.
Some words are strange because Shakespeare is using them to build a dramatic world that has its own space, time, history, and background mythology. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly interesting example of this practice in that, in this play, Shakespeare creates three such worlds, each of which thinly veils other, very different worlds.
In the play’s first scene he builds a world that purports to be the city of Athens, home to the legendary characters Theseus and Hippolyta. That world exists in references to “Athenian youth,” to “the law of Athens,” and to “Athens’ gates.” But the language used in this Athens creates not a recognizable Greek city (in contrast to the opening scenes of, say, Julius Caesar, where the language creates a Rome of the classic past) but rather a placeless, almost timeless world of romantic love, of ritual, of mythology. This world is created through references to May Day “observances,” to “Diana’s altar,” to “Venus’ doves,” to “winged Cupid,” to “Cupid’s strongest bow,” and to “his best arrow with the golden head.”
In the play’s second scene, Shakespeare builds a world of supposedly Athenian workingmen (a world created primarily through the names of the men’s occupations—joiner, bellows-mender, tinker) but here again language displaces this world and creates a world of theater, with its “scrolls,” “scrips,” “parts,” “cues,” and “bills of properties.” References to mythological figures appear here, as they do in the world of Theseus’s Athens, but now transformed through the language of the uneducated workers into comic references to “Phibbus’ car” (i.e., the chariot of the sun god, Phoebus) and to “Ercles” (i.e., Hercules).
Finally, in the play’s third scene, he creates the world of Fairyland, ruled over by Oberon, king of the fairies, and Titania, his queen. This world is made through references to “changelings,” to “fairy ringlets” (i.e., circle dances), to “orbs” (i.e., the dancing ground of fairies) and to such magic flowers as “love-in-idleness.”
Still more interesting are the other worlds created through the language of the fairies. First is the world of English country villagers affected by the doings of fairies, especially by that “lob of spirits,” Robin Goodfellow, a world that is never shown onstage but that is created through references to the “villagery,” the “quern,” the “gossips’ bowl,” the old “aunt” with her “withered dewlap,” the “quaint mazes in the wanton green,” the “murrain flock” and “nine-men’s-morris.” Second is the world of Titania’s past, with its mortal “vot’ress” who sat with her in the “spicèd Indian air” on “Neptune’s yellow sands, “watching “embarkèd traders on the flood.” Third is the world of Oberon’s past, with its “mermaid on a dolphin’s back,” its “bolt of Cupid,” its “vestal thronèd by the West.” This pattern of displacement, this creation of worlds that thinly veil quite different worlds, may well help to explain this play’s magic, otherworldly quality.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. © 1993 Folger Shakespeare Library
