The sport of asses: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, […] also widely considered a founding text in queer theory, Epistemology doesn’t use the word queer.
So what is queer about it?1
To what extent is it correct, appropriate or fair to call English antitheatrical writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries homophobic? I ask this question not in the spirit of further widening the gulf between the pre-modern sodomite and the modern homosexual, or to further engage the well-worn and ‘by-now ritualized statements that “of course, there was no homosexuality back then” and “it is wrong to speak of sexual identity back then.”’2 Instead, I am interested in the extent to which this body of writing insists on conflating gender presentation with sexual conduct, and how this conflation creates the context in which the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream present their version of Pyramus and Thisbe to a homophobic audience. The ventriloquized antitheatrical homophobia expressed by Theseus and the court turns on the play’s linguistic insistence that the inset play is a ‘sport,’ a piece of bad theatre available for mockery. Whether or not Pyramus and Thisbe really is a bad play is, in this essay, something of an open question; I am suggesting that the entertainment’s stylistic badness is a metatheatrically antihomophobic strategy for exposing antitheatrical homophobia. The mockery itself fuses together antitheatrical concerns about homosocial groups of theatermakers, who cannot be comfortably integrated into the community because of their perceived otherness, with Midsummer’s larger concerns about marriage and reproduction, ultimately positioning theatre as a site of deferred heterosexuality.
In pursuing these claims, however, I am largely avoiding the word ‘queer’. The word ‘queer’ in much scholarship on the queer renaissance, and in recent queer readings of Midsummer, primarily refers to one of two things – the homoerotic (non-normative or otherwise non-heterosexual sexual activity)3 or the homosexual (a psychologized sexual identity)4 – and both present challenges to the kind of reading that I will be doing in this essay, and to the question of what it means to perform a queer reading of an early modern text.5 As David Orvis phrases it, the term ‘queer’, when used in the context of early modern studies, is a ‘deliberate anachronism whose strategic application to premodernity always runs the risk of obfuscating rather than elucidating precisely those discursive formations that most interest lesbian and gay and queer critics’.6 Among other possible obfuscations that the term produces is that there is a largely uncrossable chasm between homoeroticism and homosexuality, despite both conceptions of queerness being fundamentally rooted in bodily experience.7
I share Elizabeth Freeman’s concern about the word’s potential to become divorced from embodied eroticism. Freeman writes, ‘To me, “queer” cannot signal a purely deconstructive move or position of pure negativity. In enjoining queers to operate as agents of dis- or de-figuration, critics […] risk evacuating the messiest thing about being queer: the actual meeting of bodies with other bodies and with objects’.8 If queerness is dissociated from either sexual practices or identitarian sexualities, it can be expanded to include virtually anything that seems non-normative, regardless of the term’s original connection with embodied sexuality. And some critics take the tack of radically expanding the categories that queer theory can be made to analyze. Carla Freccero explicitly identifies her work as having been ‘mostly about advocating for queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability, so theoretically anything can queer something, and anything, given a certain odd twist, can become queer’, but still insists that the term should be applied in connection with sexuality, ultimately defining it as ‘the name of a certain unsettling in relation to heteronormativity.’9 Madhavi Menon goes further in expanding the category to include language, ahistorical identities and temporality. Despite her insistence that queerness cannot ‘mean anything at any time and in any place’, the reason is that ‘queerness cannot “mean” in any final sense of that word. If queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer – it strays away from its anti-normative stance to become the institutionalized norm. Queerness is not a category but the confusion engendered by and despite categorization’.10 To which I would ask: if ‘queer’ simply refers to confusion and cannot be defined, why use the term at all? One might simply adopt ‘non-normative’ or ‘confusing’ as theoretical terms, since they do not have specific connections to a category of inquiry like sexuality and are therefore likely to produce less uncertainty or instability concerning the subject of what a critic using queer theory is inquiring into. With this glomming on of subjects possibly unrelated to sexuality, ‘queer’ appears to become so expansive a category that it ends up a self-negating term: queerness is predicated on difference in that to be or to act queer is to be different from, or outside of, normativity. If queerness exists everywhere, or if all things can be read as queer or can be queered, then queerness becomes a de facto normative position and thereby ceases to function as a position of difference.
As a means of navigating these fraught splits, in this essay I am largely not engaging with the terms of the seemingly polar opposite positions of the homoerotic and the homosexual, or even with the term ‘queer’ itself. What I am interested here isn’t sexual activity or identity, but rather the perception of its possibility. It is this potential – rising nearly to the level of gay panic – about the prospect that male theatregoers will become sodomites that fuels the notion that antitheatrical writing is homophobic.11 I am arguing that Shakespeare positions the Mechanicals as outsiders but not as sexual others, in the sense that they neither display queer erotic behaviour nor possess solidified sexual identities. I am also distinguishing between how Shakespeare positions the Mechanicals and how Theseus’s court and antitheatrical writing positions them: Shakespeare’s deployment of the strategically antihomophobic inset play points out the extent to which Theseus and the antitheatricals fundamentally misunderstand the Mechanicals and their play.
While the term ‘queer’ often means homoerotic or homosexual, it is not limited to these meanings exclusively, as a different thread within queer theory reminds us. As articulated by Lee Edelman, ‘[Q]ueerness could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a structural position determined by the imperative of figuration.’12 Edelman’s larger point is that the queer-affirmative investment in queerness as an identity is not all that different from the logic that animates homophobia; the only option is for queerness ‘to oppose itself to the logic of opposition’ and refuse to participate in ‘every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined.’13 As a structural position rather than an identity, the queer thus stands not in opposition to the heteronormative, but outside of it, refusing to be integrated while also pointing out the extent to which the construction of the heteronormative relies on the homophobic rejection of the queer subject.
And it is in this space that I am locating the Mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe (and indeed Midsummer itself). But rather than identifying it as a queer play, I am instead, following Sedgwick, discussing it as being antihomophobic. To name the Mechanicals as hetero or homo, queer or not queer, is to invest in a binary – can a person or a thing be partly queer?14 – that Sedgwick’s notion of antihomophobic theory can undo through its emphasis on the indeterminacy of the thing in question: one need not be a homo to be on the receiving end of homophobia. This reading does not, in the manner of antitheatrical writing, insist that the Mechanicals are either homoerotic or homosexual figures. Instead, I am focused on the reaction to the play, the court’s homophobic perception of the possibility of queer sexuality within it and the rejection of the performance on the basis of this perception of possibility. Whether or not that embodied sexuality or activity is actually there is entirely beside the point; all that matters is that the court believes that it could be. Sedgwick describes this antihomophobic theory, and its relationship with indeterminacy, as being
deconstructive, in a fairly specific sense. The analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that the categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions—heterosexual/homosexual, in this case—actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A.15
Antihomophobic theory thus functions as an attempt to understand, respond to and potentially reconfigure the asymmetrical relationship between hetero and homo, not by elevating the homo to the position of term A in the dyad, but instead by drawing attention to the way in which the hetero, legibly or not, relies on the rejection of the homo in order to construct itself. Shakespeare follows this deconstructive mode through the metacritical presence of the Mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe within Midsummer: Pyramus being constituted as being both inside and outside of Midsummer, and the meaning that it contributes to Midsummer – calling into question Midsummer’s resolution on marriage and reproduction – requires Pyramus to be repudiated by its on-stage audience.16 Theseus and the court, in other words, think that rejecting Pyramus affirms their heterosexual pursuits, but Shakespeare uses the rejection of Pyramus to show the homophobic logic that drives it and animates antitheatrical sentiment.
Antitheatrical writing consistently befogs the distinction between gender presentation and sexual practices in a way that may indicate that this body of work thinks about sexuality as identity as opposed to being merely a set of practices. The primary ground on which antitheatrical writers attacked the theatre was that plays presented morally dissolute actions that would so infect and inflame spectators that individuals would be unable to resist imitating them. Some of this anxiety gets attached to the prospect of sodomy.17 In A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615), for example, I. G.18 argues that theatergoers see ‘such wanton gestures, such dishonest speeches, such laughing and fleering, such lipping and kissing, such clipping and culling, such lustful passions […] as is wonderful and exceeding shamefull to behold’. These actions being observed, then, cause theatregoers ‘to repeat the lasciuious acts and speeches they haue heard, and thereby infect their mindes with wicked passions, so that in their secret conclaues they play the Sodomite, or worse’.19 Seeing the signs of sodomy on stage – if perhaps not the thing itself – are in Greene’s mind enough to provoke men to commit acts of sodomy, and whatever Greene’s rather breathless ‘or worse’ might entail. Or perhaps Greene’s meaning is that watching theatre inspires spectators to go and be theatrical in their own lives, privately playing sodomites in imitation of the sodomites on stage, and in some cases taking their Method training a little too seriously and actually becoming sodomites.
Even more striking than Greene’s fever dreams about what men might do in private is the extent to which antitheatrical literature conflates sodomy with cross-dressing,20 and the way in which this conflation sets up sodomy as more than a bodily practice. William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix (1633) is particularly vociferous on this point:
And is this a laudable, as many; a trivial, venial, harmless thing, as most repute it? Is this a light, a despicable effeminacy, for men, for Christians, thus to adulterate, emasculate, metamorphose, and debase their noble sex? Thus purposely, yea, affectedly, to unman, unchristian, uncreate themselves, if I may so speak, and to make themselves, as it were, neither men nor women, but monsters (a sin as bad, nay worse than any adultery, offering a kind of violence to God’s own work) and all to no other end but this: to exhilarate a confluence of unchaste, effeminate, vain companions, or to become competent actors on a stage, the greatest infamy that could befall an ancient pagan Roman, or a Christian?21
Prynne sets up a nexus of gender stability, chastity, religion and ontology itself: to be an effeminate man is to be a sodomite is to be unChristian is to no longer be at all. Short-circuiting the causal logic leads to the somewhat hysterical claim that cross-dressing will destroy the world, yet Prynne’s larger point is that all of these sinful actions are interconnected and inextricable. Collectively they contravene God’s laws, and for doing so, theatre poses a legitimate existential threat. While Prynne follows a logical chain of events to this conclusion, John Rainolds’ earlier The Overthrow of Stage-Plays (1599) supplies an epistemological (if less logical) route to the same end. Rainolds writes, ‘How much greater outrage of wickedness and iniquity are the actors and plays themselves likely to fall into? Seeing that diseases of the mind are gotten far sooner by counterfeiting than diseases of the body, and bodily diseases may be gotten so, as appeareth by him, who, feigning for a purpose that he was sign of the gout, became (through care of counterfeiting it) gouty in deed’.22 If Rainolds is to be believed, it is possible to contract a medical condition simply by feigning that one has said condition. And if even this is possible, Rainolds goes on to argue, the ‘disease’ of sodomy is even easier to catch: ‘And do you grant that you and your youth have unclean affections, to the intent you may blame my speech? […] Besides, can you accuse yourself, or any other, of any wanton thought stirred up in you by looking on a beautiful woman? If you can, then ought you be aware of beautiful boys transformed into women by putting on their raiment, their features, looks and fashions’.23 Boys dressed as women provoke men to feel the same lust toward boys as they have toward women, Rainolds argues, positioning sodomy as an externally provoked cancer rather than as an inherent vice. And yet, as Rainolds’ etiological logic would have it, one becomes what one does: the boys who wear women’s clothing are ‘transformed into women’, and one who engages in sodomy, or even who thinks about practicing it – the mere fantasy of one of Greene’s secret conclaves – becomes a sodomite. For Rainolds, it seems, there is little distinction between the homoerotic and the homosexual, and the distinction matters very little. What matters for Rainolds is that sodomy exists, and that its mere presence on stage can infect others and pull them into the sodomitical fold.
The homophobic logic of the rejection of the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe turns on this notion that one is what one does. The court’s rejection begins with the insistence on positioning the Mechanicals as outsiders. Philostrate frames the play as one in which ‘There is not one word apt, one player fitted’ (5.1.65).24 Responding to Theseus’ evident enthusiasm to see a play introduced as ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth’ (5.1.56–7), Philostrate objects that the play was written by ‘Hard-headed men that work in Athens here, / Which never labored in their minds till now’ (5.1.72–3) and can provide no measure of entertainment ‘unless you can find sport in their intents’ (5.1.79). Theseus responds with some measure of magnanimity: ‘I will hear that play; / For never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it’ (5.1.81–3). When Hippolyta objects that the play cannot possibly be good and the players liable to embarrass themselves, Theseus responds, ‘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’ (5.1.89–92). Theseus sets up the conditions under which the on-stage audience should receive and understand the play: even as the product of simpler minds than their own, Pyramus and Thisbe should be regarded as a sincere attempt at an intellectual craft, and is all the more admirable for the bettering effect that it will have on the ‘hard-headed men’ who created it. As Theseus sees it, the Mechanicals will become better through imitating their betters. More implicitly, they will become better through presenting heterosexual discourse in a culturally approved way: the play, on its face, might fail at completing heterosexuality – Pyramus and Thisbe die, after all, but at least they get to be in straight love for a while first – but Theseus seems to regard the play as something which will allow the outsiders to enter the cultural world and practices of the court. But of course they are not actually allowed access to this space, except as theatrical interlopers.25 The perpetual outsiderness of the Mechanicals highlights the logic behind their rejection, and it is this perpetual outsiderness that allows the play to occupy the structural role of negation and anti-normatvity. As a result, Midsummer rejects the very logic on which people like Theseus construct otherness and the idea of the structural role of the ‘queer’: it reveals that Theseus and the others, like the antitheatricals, insist on the co-incidence of being and seeming, while Shakespeare makes it clear that the two do not coincide. Instead, the Mechanical’s play functions to lay bare the homophobic logic that excludes based on perceptions of difference.
This exchange between Theseus and Philostrate repeats the word ‘sport’ in referring to the entertainment. ‘Sport’ occurs eleven times in the play, typically to connote trickery, cruelty or mean-spirited mockery.26 Helena uses the word frequently, in all three instances referring to herself as the victim of the ‘sport’ of the other three lovers. To Lysander she declares, ‘None of noble sort / Would so offend a virgin, and extort / A poor soul’s patience, all to make you sport’ (3.2.159–61), and upon Hermia joining the fray, she complains, ‘Now I perceive they have conjoin’d all three / To fashion this false sport in spite of me’ (3.1.193–4). Refusing to believe Lysander’s and Demetrius’s declarations of love, she assumes that they ‘counterfeit sad looks, / Make mouths upon me when I turn my back, / Wink at each other; hold the sweet jest up; / This sport, well carried, shall be chronicled’ (3.2.237–40). Puck picks up the word and uses it to explain his lack of regret at having made a mistake in carrying out Oberon’s instructions: ‘And so far am I glad I do did sort, / As this their jangling I esteem a sport’ (3.2.352–3). This concentrated use of the word, four times in under a hundred lines, and its connotations of taking delight in the suffering of others, sets up its use in the context of Pyramus, especially after Snug uses it in calling the play ‘our sport’ (4.2.17). For Philostrate, the only value in the piece is the sport that it will provide the on-stage audience in mocking it; even for Theseus, the ‘sport’ is to rescue the play from itself through his own superior powers of cognition, finding in it the good qualities that the actor-creators were unable to make themselves.
Shakespeare grants his on-stage audience control over interpreting the proceedings: it is they who can determine the value of the dramatic entertainment presented to them, which in turn allows them to reject the Mechanicals as outsiders. Yet Shakespeare, signalling his awareness of and engagement with antitheatrical writing, also makes it clear that the staged audience goes too far in turning Pyramus into grounds for sport. As soon as Quince concludes the prologue, the mockery begins: Lysander declares, ‘He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop’; Hippolyta likens the prologue to ‘a child on a recorder; a sound but not in government’; and Theseus draws an analogy to ‘a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered’ (5.1.119–25). Yet none of them seem to have actually listened to Quince’s words:
If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end.
Consider then, we come but in despite.
We do not come, as minding to content you,
Our true intent is. All for your delight,
We are not here. That you should here repent you,
The actors are at hand; and by their show,
You shall know all, that you are like to know.
(5.1.108–17)
Theseus’ initial response, that ‘This fellow doth not stand upon points’, indicates his belief that Quince has mispunctuated his speech.27 Presumably the speech should have run as follows, and this seems to be the meaning that Theseus and the rest of the on-stage audience takes from the prologue:
We do not come as minding to, content you;
Our true intent is all for your delight.
We are not here that you should repent you.
The actors are at hand, and by their show,
You shall know all that you are like to know.
Repunctuated, the speech indicates that the play is available as an object of sport: the actors do not come to instruct, but only to delight – and if that delight happens to include the derision and interruption to which the play is subjected, then the play has served its purpose. Yet it is in the ‘incorrect’ punctuation that we can see Shakespeare’s engagement with antitheatrical theory: the actors are explicitly not putting on the play exclusively for the delight of its audience. Instead, their purpose is ‘that you should here repent’ – the motivation is explicitly corrective. The audience should, the prologue argues with Quince’s punctuation, look to the play for moral correction delivered by the actors. Bottom reveals the outcome of the events presented in Pyramus, namely that ‘the wall is down that parted their fathers’ (5.1.337–8), indicating that putting up artificial barriers to love will inevitably end badly. Shakespeare has Theseus determinedly miss the point: in responding to Bottom’s inquiry as to whether or not the players should present their epilogue, he says, ‘No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed. Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus, and hanged himself in Thisbe’s garters, it would have been a fine tragedy—and so it is, truly, and very notably discharged’ (5.1.341–7). Theseus cannot resist sneaking in a final dig at the quality of the play, wishing that it would have been a good play had its author killed himself, before catching himself and once again offering a condescending compliment to the players.
The staged audience uses a broad linguistic arsenal to insult and override the play. Taking aim at the players themselves, when Theseus wonders if even the lion will speak, Demetrius responds, ‘No wonder, my lord; one lion may when many asses do’ (5.1.153). Theseus returns to the ass insult in an exchange following Pyramus’ death:
demetrius |
No die, but an ace for him; for he is but one. |
lysander |
Less than an ace, man; for he is dead, he is nothing. |
theseus |
With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover, and prove an ass. |
(5.1.296–9)
The play provides the characters with the opportunity to display their own wit and wordplay, beginning with a quibble on ‘die’ as ‘dice’ and ending with Theseus intentionally puncturing the theatrical illusion with the obvious and wholly unnecessary note that Pyramus isn’t really dead. The longest sustained rhetorical display occurs around Moonshine, who is not allowed to finish his speech owing to the number of jokes about cuckolding and puns concerning the Man in the Moon, the moon’s light and its phases. Finally Moonshine simply gives up trying to deliver Pyramus’s poetry and says, ‘All that I have to say is, to tell you that the lantern is the moon; I the Man i’th’Moon; this thorn-bush my thorn-bush; and this dog my dog’ (5.1.247–9). Most of the jokes in this scene focus on the unfitness of the players, positioning them as outsiders, asses and cuckolds, and culminate in Moonshine’s refusal to continue playing along. Moonshine’s plainspoken rebellion against the rejection highlights just how different the everyday speech of the Mechanicals is from the stylized mien of the court’s ‘sport’.
So what makes this rejection homophobic? As Theseus and the court see them, the ‘hard- headed men’ putting on Pyramus and Thisbe belong to a homosocial community of their own, and their community cannot be comfortably integrated into the play’s motivating questions concerning marriage and procreation. The absence of any mention of the men in the company being married stands in stark contrast to the rampant coupling of the other characters, fairy and human alike. They are also not all full-grown men: Flute’s request that Quince ‘let not me play a woman: I have a beard coming’ (1.2.43–4) indicates his position as not-yet a man, one who has yet to achieve masculinity, and his effeminacy sets him up, within Prynne’s logic, as a potential sodomite. A critical reader could, upon this point, take me to task for reproducing, maybe even endorsing, this homophobic logic: after all, Pyramus does present homoerotic language and behaviour. As Thisbe (Flute) describes ‘her’ relationship with Pyramus (Bottom), ‘My cherry lips have often kiss’d thy stones, / Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee’ (5.1.188–9),28 and soon thereafter Pyramus invites Thisbe to kiss him through a hole in Wall (Snout), and Thisbe complains, ‘I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all’ (5.1.199). The homoerotic implications of kissing stones and holes are unmistakable, and it is tempting to take these references as indicating the lack of control the Mechanicals have over their material and their linguistic expression. And following this line of reasoning would indeed endorse the homophobically antitheatrical rejection of the play: it allows us to recognize the Mechanicals as homoerotic and/or homosexual figures, and then mock them for not knowing what they do. But within my argument in this essay, in which Pyramus functions as a rejection of antitheatrical homophobia, the lines take on a different valence. They have to be available for homophobic interpretation and mockery in order to function as critique. In other words, Midsummer can itself perform homophobia in order to reject homophobia. This provides no simple yes or no answer to the question of whether I am signing on to Prynne’s logic, but only a hearty ‘it’s complicated.’
As a group of presumptive bachelors, possible sodomites and linguistic outsiders, the Mechanicals exist in opposition to the play’s marriage complications and its teleological orientation toward marriage and procreation.29 The entire reason that the court watches Pyramus and Thisbe is that Theseus needs to fill a few hours between the end of dinner and the point where all of the newly married couples can retire to their bedrooms for some procreative sporting. As Theseus phrases it, ‘Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have, / To wear away this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time’, going on to ask Philostrate, ‘Is there no play / To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?’ (5.1.32–7). Once the play is concluded, Theseus rather insists upon heterosexual intercourse taking place: ‘Sweet friends, to bed. / A fortnight hold we this solemnity / In nightly revels and new jollity’ (5.1.354–6). If this exhortation were not enough, Oberon and Titania appear to offer blessings for the fruit of the unions ostensibly taking place immediately off-stage:
Now, until the break of day, |
|
|
Through this house each fairy stray. |
|
To the best bride-bed will we, |
|
Which by us blessed shall be; |
|
And the issue there create |
|
Ever shall be fortunate. |
|
So shall all the couples three |
|
Ever true in loving be. |
(5.1.387–94)
Oberon’s blessing, of course, elides the fact that Demetrius is still under the spell at the end of the play, which means that his marriage to Helena is rather not one that could be fairly described as ‘ever true in loving’. His blessing then goes on to emphasize that the fairies have the power to ensure that the children being conceived as he speaks will not be deformed – ‘Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, / Nor mark prodigious, such as are / Despised in nativity, / Shall upon their children be’ (5.1.397–400) – which in turn emphasizes the ways in which procreation can go wrong. Nature cannot be left to her own devices; she requires a magical shove in order to produce stable relationships and non-deformed babies. By ending Midsummer with such an emphasis on the improbability of heterosexuality, and ostentatiously delaying heterosexual intercourse in favour of drama, Shakespeare ends up establishing theatre as a site of deferred heterosexuality. No one from Theseus’s court is in reality, at least presumably, fucking off stage; those sitting or standing in the theatre watching Midsummer are ostensibly not fucking either. Theatre is non-generative, in a fairly specific sense: as Shakespeare points out, it alone does not bring about reproduction, or marriage or heterosexuality. Instead, it interrupts while reminding its audiences that social constructions of heterosexuality rely on a repudiation of what heterosexuality constructs as its other.
In short, the court relies on rejecting the Mechanicals and their play as a means of constructing its own heterosexuality and its own aesthetic superiority. In an essay on Midsummer’s engagement with aesthetics, Hugh Grady argues that the inset play lets us see ‘all the artifice of the theater, its rehearsals, its props and costumes, its calculations of audience reaction, on display before us’ to the end of using the ‘travesty that is the rude mechanicals’ play [to] present us with the final truth of his own masterpiece—its madeness, its materiality, its resistance to the artist’s shaping fantasies’.30 The inset play is, in other words, a foil that through its awfulness highlights the brilliance of the play that contains it.31 The trouble with this conclusion is that it assumes that Pyramus has no aesthetic value or purpose of its own, and Grady’s focus on the aesthetics of the piece denies it any practical value beyond highlighting Midsummer’s beauty and brilliance.
And indeed it does seem to serve a practical purpose: Shakespeare deploys Pyramus as a metatheatrical antihomophobic tool for exposing the lapses and gaps in the notions of heterosexuality and aesthetics that Midsummer presents,32 and therefore it works as a means of critiquing the audience’s homophobic rejection of the entertainment. Such a reading requires reading the court’s reaction to Pyramus as something more than humorous.33 The court’s reaction to the play is one of distancing: they insistently shove it aside as if to say that nothing so terrible could have anything to do with them. Yet it is only because the play is bad – showily, attention-grabbingly bad – that it can function as an object of ridicule that the court needs in order to construct and demonstrate its heterocentric superiority. Precisely because it functions as the butt of the joke, Pyramus becomes more than galumphing poetry when we read it to see Shakespeare as siding with the Mechanicals against the homophobic court. In this event, the inset play asks for a complicated kind of double-consciousness from Midsummer’s audience. We may laugh at Pyramus (and at Midsummer), but cannot reject it as thoroughly as Theseus and the others do, for to do so means rejecting Midsummer, and all other plays, as well. This complicated interplay sets up a ‘bad’ play not merely as a foil to the ‘good’ play that contains it; it insists that the bad play is an integral part of the good play at least to the extent that it emphasizes Midsummer’s anxiety about marriage and reproduction. What Shakespeare reveals through Pyramus is theatre’s capacity to disrupt and defer heterosexuality, quite literally, but more importantly in the sense that Pyramus’s badness exposes heterosexuality’s dependence on homophobia in order to reassert and reassure itself of its own dominance.