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A funny thing happened to me on the way to the lectern, but, given the 10-minute rule,1 I don’t have time to tell you about it. Indeed, I can’t ordinarily get my throat clear in 10 minutes. And I got nowhere when I tried to write a 10-minute paper. So this is a summary of the long, lazy-pacing essay I might have written.

That non-existent paper starts out by saying that, as regular patrons of academic celebrations more usual and much less festive than this one now, I have spent most of my professional life on two spectacularly unsuccessful projects. The first is a campaign for a criticism that looks hard at the aesthetic nuts and bolts of great works, recognizes them as significant (in the metaphoric sense of that word) without feeling obliged to make a case for such minutiae as significant in the literal sense, the sense in which the word “significant” marks what it attaches to as signifying something, carrying meaning—meaning that, in the case of elements fastened upon by interpreters, obviously goes undelivered. Instead, as I have long said to deaf ears everywhere, we should try thinking about what the New Critics made vague, mysterious, and dignified with the usually inaccurate label “imagery” as non-signifying unifiers—structural elements that function in their dimension as rhythm, alliteration, and rhyme do—and do so as humbly as those three do.

Having got that said with economy, grace, and total inoffensiveness, the paper moves on to what was to be today’s test case: repeated references to the moon, to dogs, and to parts in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the substantively gratuitous unifying threads they provide.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly good play for me to preach from because it flirts so boldly with incoherence—which is to say because it presents four essentially separate focuses:

(1) (the first and least prominent of the four) Theseus and Hippolyta, a royal couple who were formerly adversaries and are now to be married;

(2) Oberon and Titania, an already married royal couple who are currently adversaries;

(3) The four lovers and their permutating pairings; and

(4) Peter Quince’s troop of amateur actors and his play of Pyramus and Thisby.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also ideally suited to my purpose because one of the patterning elements in it—its recurrent, incidental references to the moon—is a familiar friend: was one of the earliest observed and earliest observed to function as a linking element—but also among the earliest to be mis-called an image pattern—and among the earliest to be further dignified by determined, wantonly creative interpretation by people who justified noticing it by telling us that it told us something—signified. Some time-consuming examples of critical comment would follow here: Carolyn Spurgeon, Wolfgang Clemen, Harold Brooks.

Fortunately, even in a full-scale essay, there would be no need at this point in the history of Shakespeare criticism to demonstrate that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is infused throughout with references to the moon. The moon stuff is so thick upon the surface of the play that it took only 350 years for it to be noticed and pointed out to a surprised and grateful academic public.

Dogs are another matter. I didn’t notice their profusion until I got to worrying about the lengthy and unexpected arias on Theseus’s hounds and hounds of Sparta that we hear when Theseus and Hippolyta reenter the play at the beginning of Act 4. The idea of musical discord (Hippolyta says that she “never heard / So musical a discord” [4.1.117–18] as that of the baying hounds)—is a splendidly accurate definition of literary art in general and of verse in particular. But the twenty lines of impassioned dog-talk feel strenuously impertinent when we hear them in the play. That is true and is made no less so by the pointer I eventually recognized it to be to the general proliferation of dogs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

What I care about about the dogs that precede the big dog speeches in 4.1—and that, in the person of Moonshine’s dog, follow them—is that, although the dog references are so many, they do not invite even the scant notice that the moon references do. I don’t know that the dogs have ever even been caught and penned up in Notes and Queries. I care about that because, where I have more time than I do here, I contend that experience of virtually muffled word play and of patterning that does not obtrude upon one’s consciousness is more valuable and more highly valued than experience of witty connections that invite notice—notice of their wit and therefore of their arbitrary origin. Incidental organizations undemanding of notice vouch for a sort of organic truth in the work as a whole—make it feel as if it is as it is as things in nature are.

Needless to say, a full-scale paper would demonstrate the high canine quotient of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.

Use me but as your spaniel; spurn me, strike me,

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

What worser place can I beg in your love

(And yet a place of high respect with me)

Than to be used as you use your dog? (2.1.203–10)2

Such an exercise would also include the doggy exchange Hermia initiates at 3.2.62 with “my Lysander? Where is he? / Ah, good Demetrius, wilt thou give him me?” Demetrius’s answer is “I had rather give his carcass to my hounds”—and Hermia snaps back with “Out, dog, out, cur!”

And so on. But there isn’t time.

Unlike the dogs, whose presence in the play at large might have been long ago betrayed by the hound-dog speeches of Theseus and Hippolyta in Act 4, nothing flags—or can be said to flag—the union in partition A Midsummer Night’s Dream is by virtue of the sound “part” and the ideas it can convey. And, again unlike the dogs, the play on “part” is elaborate; where most of the incidental references to dogs are—with the exception of some play on “curs” and “curses” and, perhaps, “the collied night” (1.1.145)—simple references, the “part” and “part”-related references in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are almost as various as the available senses of that syllable—are references to partings and departures;

—to portions (fractions of wholes) and to fragmentation;

—to shares; to “parts” meaning “personal qualities,” “natural endowments,” “gifts”;

—to “part” meaning “side” (as in “to take someone’s part”);

—to surrendering possession (in the idiom “to part with” in Titania’s “And for her sake do I rear up her boy; / And for her sake I will not part with him” [2.1.136–37]);

—to “roles in a play” (the first instance of the syllable “part” is Bottom’s “Ready. Name what part I am for, and proceed” [1.2.17]);

—and, in the line in which Demetrius praises Snout as “the wittiest partition that ever [he] heard discourse” (5.1.166), to a separator, the wall, the partition that parted Pyramus and Thisby (as in the play’s last instance of the syllable “part”: “the wall”—the partition—“is down that parted their fathers” [5.1.351–52]).

That last brings me to the further intensity that the play’s play on “part” generates in incidental verbal by-play accompanying it. And it brings me too to the other of the two projects I have been so unsuccessfully promoting for so long: namely (1) getting critics to pay attention as critics to things they would not reasonably pay attention to as consumers and could not reasonably recommend that consumers pay attention to—to getting critics to pay attention to the ideational static generated in Shakespeare plays (and in most of the best loved other literary works), by substantively insignificant, substantively inadmissible, substantively accidental linguistic configurations—configurations in which lurk topics foreign to the sentences in which we hear them and (2) getting critics to see that such static is probably exciting to the minds it plays across and that such static probably brings those listening minds a sense of possessing and casually, effortlessly exercising an athleticism beyond what is imaginable in human beings—a sense of being mentally and spiritually sufficient to comprehend “More than cool reason ever comprehends” (5.1.6)—or ever could.

The incessant hum of “part” references in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is elaborate not only in its range but in the intricacy with which words and ideas relative to one kind of part or parting interweave with—entwine themselves with—words and ideas relative to other kinds of part or parting.

Here—quickly, of course—are samples.

First, of “part” as “role in a play”:

—in company with the idea of disintegration, splitting apart, tearing apart in “I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split” (1.2.29–30);

—in company with the idea complementary to the idea of disintegration: the idea of joining in “Snug the joiner, you the lion’s part” (1.2.64);

—and in company with reference to all of something (that is, not part), when Quince tells Flute he speaks “all [his] part at once, cues and all” (3.1.100).

Then consider “part of” meaning “a fraction of.” Shakespeare shoehorns the term in gratuitously in the first lines of 2.2 where he has Titania address her attendants and say “Come, now a roundel and a fairy song; / Then, for the third part of a minute, hence,” and where “part” cohabits with the idea of departure in “hence.” The same sort of thing happens again at 3.2.243 where the syllable “part” follows upon the idea of departure: Helena says “But fare ye well; ‘tis partly my own fault.”

And listen to the company the word “part” meaning “depart” keeps when Helena responds to a question about possible reward. When Demetrius says “what should I get therefore?” Helena says “A privilege never to see me more [that is, leave never to see me more] / And from thy hated presence part I [so]” (3.2.78–80).

We hear “part” meaning “side” (that is, “part” as in political party) in 3.2.333—“Take not her part”—immediately after we have heard a syllable—“half” in “behalf”—capable in another context, a context receptive to it, of reference to a portion of a whole. This is 3.2.330–33, Demetrius to Lysander:

You are too officious

In her behalf that scorns your services.

Let her alone; speak not of Helena,

Take not her part.

The concentration of play on “part” is densest in Act 3, scene 2. There, at lines 153–54, Helena says that, were Demetrius and Lysander gentlemen, they would not “vow, and swear, and superpraise my parts, / When I am sure you hate me with your hearts.” A few lines later, in line 165, Lysander uses “part” to say “share”: “In Hermia’s love I yield you up my part.” Then comes a quietly baroque sequence in which lines 183 and 190 (“But why unkindly didst thou leave me so?” and “The hate I bare thee made me leave thee so?”)—paired lines on leaving—departing—flank play in line 186 on the sense “to leave” has as a synonym for “to allow” and for “to give permission for”: “Lysander’s love that would not let him bide”—that would not give him leave not to depart. And then comes Helena’s “double cherry” speech (3.2.192–216)—a speech in which the syllable “part” occurs only three times but occurs in company with “one of” (that is, “part of”) in line 192; the idea of sharing in line 198; possible play on “part” singing in “both warbling of one song” (206), and perhaps even on “division” as a musical term in the reference to “partition” (210); and reference to various kinds of joining: “confederacy” (192), “conjoin’d” (193), and in line 216, where the idea of joining into an alliance with men follows immediately upon “rent . . . asunder” in line 215.

Lo! she is one of this confederacy.

Now I perceive, they have conjoin’d all three

To fashion this false sport, in spite of me.

Injurious Hermia, most ungrateful maid!

Have you conspir’d, have you with these contriv’d

To bait me with this foul derision?

Is all the counsel that we two have shar’d,

The sisters’ vows, the hours that we have spent,

When we have chid the hasty-footed time

For parting us—O, is all forgot?

All school-days friendship, childhood innocence?

We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,

Have with our needles created both one flower,

Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

Both warbling of one song, both in one key,

As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds

Had been incorporate. So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

But yet an union in partition,

Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;

So with two seeming bodies, but one heart,

Two of the first, [like] coats in heraldry,

Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.

And will you rent our ancient love asunder,

To join with men in scorning your poor friend?

It is not friendly, ‘tis not maidenly.

Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it,

Though I alone do feel the injury. (3.2.192–219)

The electricity built up in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by interplay of ideas relative to the word “part” is so strong that I am tempted to suggest—although, ultimately, I am just prudent enough not to suggest—that “wall” as partition and the syllable “whole” (as opposed to a part) flickers behind Thisby’s winsomely obscene “I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all” (5.1.201).

Thus have I—like the animate partition in the play—my part dischargèd so. And, being done, away do go (do depart)—without chiding or being chidden by the hasty-footed time.

Notes

This paper was presented at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Conference, Staunton, Virginia, October 2001.

1. There is a 10-minute limit on papers at the Blackfriars Conference: after eight minutes, there is a backstage rumble from a tin thunder sheet; at 10, a blast from an airhorn.

2. Quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).