Characters in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
A Critical Essay by William Hazlitt
An essay by William Hazlitt, on Shakespeare’s characters in
“A Midsummer Night's Dream,” From the book
Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays By William Hazlitt,
Bottom the Weaver is a character that has not had justice done him.
He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions
he has--Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows-
mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again,
what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth,
and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters
are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there is
something in this play which looks very like it. Bottom the Weaver,
who takes the lead of
This crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,
follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as
conceited, serious, and fantastical. He is ready to undertake
anything and everything, as if it was as much a matter of course as
the motion of his loom and shuttle. He is for playing the tyrant,
the lover, the lady, the lion. 'He will roar that it shall do any
man's heart good to hear him'; and this being objected to as
improper, he still has a resource in his good opinion of himself,
and 'will roar you an 'twere any nightingale'. Snug the Joiner is
the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by measurement and
discretion in all things. You see him with his rule and compasses in
his hand. 'Have you the lion's part written? Pray you, if it be,
give it me, for I am slow of study.'--'You may do it extempore,'
says Quince, 'for it is nothing but roaring.' Starveling the Tailor
keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword. 'I
believe we must leave the killing out when all's done.' Starveling,
however, does not start the objections himself, but seconds them
when made by others, as if he had not spirit to express his fears
without encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this
intentional; but it very luckily falls out so. Nature includes all
that is implied in the most subtle analytical distinctions; and the
same distinctions will be found in Shakespeare. Bottom, who is not
only chief actor, but stage-manager for the occasion, has a device
to obviate the danger of frightening the ladies: 'Write me a
prologue, and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with
our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for better
assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the
Weaver; this will put them out of fear.' Bottom seems to have
understood the subject of dramatic illusion at least as well as any
modern essayist. If our holiday mechanic rules the roast among his
fellows, he is no less at home in his new character of an ass, 'with
amiable cheeks, and fair large ears'. He instinctively acquires a
most learned taste, and grows fastidious in the choice of dried peas
and bottled hay. He is quite familiar with his new attendants, and
assigns them their parts with all due gravity. 'Monsieur Cobweb,
good Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a red-hipt
humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good Monsieur, bring me the
honey-bag.' What an exact knowledge is here shown of natural
history!
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band. He is
the Ariel of the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM; and yet as unlike as can
be to the Ariel in THE TEMPEST. No other poet could have made two
such different characters out of the same fanciful materials and
situations. Ariel is a minister of retribution, who is touched with
a sense of pity at the woes he inflicts. Puck is a mad-cap sprite,
full of wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he
misleads--'Lord, what fools these mortals be!' Ariel cleaves the
air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger;
Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and
glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most
Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices and faring in
dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of
moralists; but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once
into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this race of
beings contrasted with the men and women actors in the scene, by a
single epithet which Titania gives to the latter, 'the human
mortals'! It is astonishing that Shakespeare should be considered,
not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy
and heavy writer, who painted nothing but 'gorgons and hydras, and
chimeras dire'. His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic
writers, insomuch that a celebrated person of the present day said
that he regarded him rather as a metaphysician than a poet. His
delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT
DREAM alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty
of description than in the whole range of French poetry put
together. What we mean is this, that we will produce out of that
single play ten passages, to which we do not think any ten passages
in the works of the French poets can be opposed, displaying equal
fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of
Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes
with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and
his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to
pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolita's
description of a chace, or Theseus's answer? The two last are as
heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness.
The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight:
the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of
flowers.
Titania's exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which is
remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the
rhymes, is as follows:
Be kind and courteous to this gentleman.
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes,
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise:
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes;
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.
The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more distinct than
the poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the conversation between
Theseus and Hippolita:
Theseus. Go, one of you, find out the forester,
For now our observation is perform'd;
And since we have the vaward of the day,
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley, go,
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.
We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
Hippolita. I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of
With hounds of
Such gallant chiding. For besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seena'd all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
Theseus. My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee'd and dew-lap'd, like Thessalian bulls,
Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tuneable
Was never halloo'd to, nor cheer'd with hom,
In Crete, in
Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and
lusty, and so near the first ages of the world as this.
It had been suggested to us, that the MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM would
do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter
proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of
his great talents. He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to
play the lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover
or the tyrant like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion
like 'the most fearful wild-fowl living'. The carpenter, the tailor,
and joiner, it was thought, would hit the galleries. The young
ladies in love would interest the side-boxes; and Robin Goodfellow
and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children
from school. There would be two courts, an empire within an empire,
the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants,
and with all their finery. What an opportunity for processions, for
the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears! What a fluttering of
urchins' painted wings; what a delightful profusion of gauze clouds
and airy spirits floating on them!
Alas, the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the
fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of Mr.
Liston, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of
things. The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted from a
delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the
play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the
spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.--Poetry and the stage do
not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this
instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The IDEAL can
have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without
perspective; everything there is in the foreground. That which was
merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately
becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the
imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or
remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells
according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested.
But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual
impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be
got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a
fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage, it is an
ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a
gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a
simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to
personate Wall or Moonshine. Fairies are not incredible, but fairies
six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at
a proper distance. When ghosts appear at midday, when apparitions
stalk along
represented without injury at
boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy
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