Shakespeare plays with language so often and so variously that entire books are written on the topic. His wordplay in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is particularly interesting in the way it varies his usual use of puns and figurative language. A pun is a play on words that sound the same but that have different meanings. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, puns are found only occasionally, but, as with much of the language of this play, where they are used, they are used complexly. When, for example, Helena says,
For, ere Demetrius looked on Hermia’s eyne,
He hailed down oaths that he was only mine;
And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolved, and show’rs of oaths did melt—
the first use of the word hail means “to shower down, to pour,” but, since it sounds exactly like the verb hale, it also carries the sense of “pull down,” as if the oaths were being tugged down from the sky. The second use of the word hail, in the following line, is as a noun, and Demetrius’s oaths are given the characteristics of hail: they feel heat, dissolve, and melt. This shift from hail/hale as a verb to hail as a noun is an interestingly complex pun.
More often, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we find instead a variation on Shakespeare’s usual puns. In a complex variant on the pun, he has characters confuse words with other words that sound (more or less) the same but have very different meanings. (Such verbal confusions are now called “malapropisms.”) Bottom is particularly inclined to this kind of speech. When he says, for example, “But I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove,” he seems to be confusing aggravate with moderate or mitigate (soften, tone down). (In a different kind of confusion, his reference to the “sucking dove” mixes up the sucking [i.e., unweaned] lamb and the sitting [i.e., hatching] dove.) When he says, “there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously,” he is confusing “obscenely” with some other word (probably seemly) and confusing courageously either with a word that sounds a bit like it (perhaps, correctly) or perhaps with the word bravely, which had the meaning both of “courageously” and of “splendidly, in a fine fashion.”
Not only are puns and related wordplay used unusually and complexly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but figurative language is also shifted away from Shakespeare’s usual patterns. Instead of finding straightforward metaphors (i.e., plays on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which it shares common features), one is more likely to find extended similes, buried similes, and elaborate personifications. In a simile, one thing is said to be like or as another, as when Theseus charges that the moon “lingers my desires / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue.” Here the moon is compared to a stepmother or a widow with rights in her husband’s property, and Theseus’s desires are compared to the young man who has to wait to claim his inheritance.
Many of the similes in this play begin as simple similes and then extend themselves into elaborate comparisons that take on some of the qualities of what we sometimes call “epic similes.” In some of Lysander’s words to Hermia, for example, he first compares the briefness of love to a series of things thought of as transient: sounds, shadows, dreams. Then, with the comparison of love to “lightning in the collied [coal-black] night,” the simile takes on a life of its own, as the lightning “unfolds both heaven and earth” and then is devoured by the darkness:
The course of true love never did run smooth. . . .
[Since,] if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And, ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion.
(Note the powerful puns in the final line of this speech, where “So quick bright things” means, simultaneously, “So quickly do bright things” and “Thus quick [living, intense] bright things,” and where confusion means both “destruction, ruin” and “disorder.”)
One finds a much simpler example of an extended simile in Helena’s charge to Hermia:
Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue’s sweet air
More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear—
where the third line elaborates the figure of the lark, to which Hermia’s tongue has been compared.
Another kind of extended simile in this play is reminiscent of emblem books, where an idea is shown in the form of a picture under which is printed a name for the picture and an elaborate explanation. One finds the verbal equivalent of such an emblem in Helena’s speech about Love. Here the “picture” we are supposedly looking at is that of the boy Cupid, wearing a blindfold and bearing wings; Helena’s words provide the standard “explanation” of the picture and its title, “Love.”
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste.
Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste.
And therefore is Love said to be a child
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
As waggish boys in game themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjured everywhere.
The entire speech could be transcribed as an extended simile: “Love is like a boy who is winged and blind, because love is blind, without judgment, hasty, etc.”
Often in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the simile, rather than being extended, is “buried” within the language. (Some readers might prefer to see these buried similes as metaphors.) For example, when Theseus says to Hermia:
Thrice blessèd they that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage,
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness—
under the surface of the language is a comparison of the unmarried woman to an unplucked rose and of the married woman to the rose that is plucked and its fragrance distilled into perfume. When Lysander says to Hermia: “How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? / How chance the roses there do fade so fast?” the buried simile likens red cheeks to roses. Hermia continues that simile when she responds: “Belike [probably] for want [lack] of rain, which I could well / Beteem [give] them from the tempest of my eyes,” expanding the buried simile to include a comparison of weeping eyes to pouring rain. Hermia’s “Keep word, Lysander. We must starve our sight / From lovers’ food till morrow deep midnight” includes a buried simile: the sight of the beloved is like food to the lover.
Figurative language in A Midsummer Night’s Dream also often includes personification (i.e., abstract qualities are given human characteristics). To take a single example: when Theseus says to his master of the revels: “Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth. / Turn melancholy forth to funerals; / The pale companion is not for our pomp,” he personifies both mirth and melancholy, expanding the personification of melancholy by describing it as pale and using the condescending term companion (which here means “fellow”).
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
