A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In my line of work, one often witnesses the might of the Indian state. Yet its most comical manifestation is often found in the servile obsequiousness of the personal staff attending to government babus. When summoned, they stutter, stammer and words often fail them.

The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing.
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake.

And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit. Where I have come,
Great clerks have purposèd
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears,
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome;
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity,
In least speak most, to my capacity.

Written four centuries earlier by the Bard.

Rene Girard in his ‘A Theatre of Envy’ does an extensive analysis of the play to build his arguments around mimesis. In his words:

Shakespeare turns his play into an immensely powerful interpretation of its own dramatic trickery as mythical morphogenesis. As the hysteria of the night increases, it produces monstrous hallucinations that ultimately trigger the apparition of the fairies, both among the craftsmen rehearsing their mimetic play and among the lovers rehearsing their mimetic grievances against one another.

All four lovers worship the same erotic absolute, the same ideal image of seduction that each girl and boy in turn appears to embody in the eyes of the others. This absolute has nothing to do with real qualities; it is properly metaphysical. The four lovers are like birds on the same telephone wire, always fighting and yet inseparable. From time to time, for no apparent reason, they all fly to another wire and start fighting again. Their desire is obsessed with the flesh, yet totally divorced from it. It is never instinctive and spontaneous, cannot rely on such things as the pleasure of the eyes and the other senses. It perpetually runs to desire just as money runs to money in a speculative economy. We may say, of course, that the four characters are “in love with love.”

 An earlier piece with some background on Girard’s Mimetic Desire can be accessed here.

I found the 1999 movie adaptation of the play quite boring. I also picked up Volume 3 of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’ to re-read how the play was interpreted in the comic. (Shakespeare makes a pact with Morpheus in exchange for immortal fame and stages the play for an audience of the same fairies and supernatural beings who also appear in the play. In the end, the price he pays is the life of his eleven-year old son – Hamnet)

The Shakespeare Project so far: Macbeth | The Tempest | The Merchant of Venice | Twelfth Night | As You Like It | Much Ado About Nothing | King Lear | Hamlet | Julius Caesar | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus