As a linguistic term, the night denotes both the opposite of the day and its supplement. As Gérard Genette notes, we equate the week with seven days, even though it contains seven nights as well. The day excepts the night, even though it also includes it. A conceptual consequence of this uneven distinction between day and night is the fact that, because the day is considered to be the norm, it requires no further specification. The night, by contrast, represents the deviation, distortion, or modification of the norm. Although day is conceived as the more essential part of the binary opposition, the night, which merely enhances the day and is measured in relation to it, is in fact also linguistically valorized. Night is the more remarkable of the two, significant precisely because of its departure from the norm. Regardless whether one fears or adores the night, whether one seeks to praise or to repress its power, the night is that time of day about which we talk.
For Genette, the night therefore represents far more than simply the opposite of the day. It is the other of the day, its nonreciprocal reverse side (
envers). Although one can speak about the day without invoking the night, when one speaks about the night one invariably makes reference to the fact that a new day will follow upon it, which one either eagerly or fearfully awaits throughout the night. Yet even if it is of the night that aesthetic texts prefer to speak while our poetic imagination denigrates the day, this disparagement in fact underscores the day’s actual supremacy. By contrast, our imaginary relationship to the night—regardless of whether we praise or despise it—remains tied to the image of the primordial maternal figure who gave birth not only to the world but also to death. Genette makes use of the linguistic distinction between a masculine day and a feminine night so as to sharpen the semantic inversion between these two time zones. Although the more dominating day with its open radiance stands for life, the feminine night, with its immeasurable depth, signifies both life as well as death. The night gives the day to us and takes it away from us. Therefore, the night should be understood not only as a belated supplement to the day, but also as its origin and final aim.
Although aesthetically reproduced nocturnal scenes offer a commentary on the day by displaying an altered world in which experiences of alterity become possible, they also function as ciphers for fantasy in more general terms. The conceptual space they open up can be expanded and reconfigured incessantly, regardless of the states of mind that unfold there. Our cultural imaginary privileges the night over the day because it serves as a stage for a plethora of contradictory fantasies that can involve danger, anxiety, doom, and self-expenditure as much as they can revolve around states of happiness, freedom, and self-recognition. Literary nights are more tropic than representations of day; they self-consciously speak to the aesthetic process. The poetrically constructed night is not fully severed from the everyday, yet it is conceived as its countersite; it transforms the ordinary into a mediatized chronotopos, the result of poetic reconfiguration. By inversion, although literary nights are linguistically produced, they draw their affective power from our real phenomenological experience of the world between dusk and dawn. They emerge as heterotopias
par excellence, a critical term coined by Michel Foucault to designate real operative spaces that exist as “counter-placements” or “countersites.” Boot camp training or the honeymoon hotel can be seen as an example for a crisis heterotopia; cemeteries, museums, or libraries are examples of what he calls archival heterotopias that conjoin different times. The theater, in turn, can be seen as an example for the way heterotopias have the ability to juxtapose several sites in one actual place. Foucault understands heterotopias to be realized utopias because they serve to represent, contest, and transform places that actually exist in a given culture. They are sites located outside the ordinary social norms even if they can be clearly located. Although they are clearly distinct from spaces of everyday life, heterotopias mirror and reflect these. As that which lies outside the day, the nocturnal, taken as a heterotopia
par excellence, says something about the diurnal; it relates, and indeed constantly refers back to it.
Seminal for the literary nocturnal scenes to be discussed in this chapter is the fact that under the cloak of darkness, places that actually exist serve as scenes for psychic attitudes that transgress what is possible and allowable in the ordinary everyday. For the person who sleepwalks or hallucinates, the fantasmatic experiences they have at night are real as long as they remain in this chronotopos, but they are also completely virtual because they are based on individual or collective fantasies. Conceived as a heterotopic commentary on the restrictions posed by the day and its rational laws, literature discovers the night as a stage, a state of mind, and an ethic attitude. Two plays by Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will serve as my point of departure for a mapping of nocturnal journeys that are to be understood as rites of passage through dreamscapes. Positioned outside the diurnal everyday, yet nevertheless distinctly located, these dreamscapes serve to turn and challenge the knowledge of the ordinary, even while placing themselves in relation to a day they mirror and on which they comment. The following discussion proceeds by drawing lines of connection between Shakespeare’s plays to Freud’s book on dreams as well as to the figuration of insomnia in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The psychic journeys explored in the following readings all pass through a special night or a nocturnally colored world. Conceived as a stage and state of mind, this night is not an actual experience; instead, it offers an imaginary experience of the nocturnal side of existence, of the soul or morality.
Decisive in all cases is the fact that whatever occurs in nocturnal sites will have consequences the next day. Equally seminal is the question of how a journey to the end of the night will find closure. Which experiences have to be forgotten or repressed, so that the night walker can safely wake up again the next morning? What knowledge can be carried back into the day from peregrinations through the night? As a countersite to the day, the night serves as the scene for a transition in more than one sense. Figures decide to enter the night, wander through it, come to psychic crossroads, and finally to exit from this scene. Heroes and heroines who decide to engage the night are able to decipher something and arrive at a decision for themselves, but also for us: We have taken part in their nocturnal peregrinations and transformations vicariously. It is thus fruitful to speak of literature, theater, and cinema as nocturnal media. In general, aesthetic texts give rise to affectively effective sites that, even as they refer to real places, also call forth a chronotopos that is different from the ordinary everyday. When the night, conceived as a countersite to the day, is the thematic concern to boot, we come to experience an enhancement of the imaginary. The night, which has come to be engendered by aesthetic language, bespeaks to its own medium; the power of fantasy it taps into reflects and talks about itself.
STAGING TRANSGRESSION
If, since antiquity, the night has emerged as the site for all experiences, encounters, and insights that fall outside the business of the everyday, it is also the privileged stage for transgressions. Particularly for lovers, seeking to perform clandestine and forbidden amorous rites, it serves as a welcome refuge. The opportunities that open up under the cover of nocturnal darkness support the inflamed imagination and the infection of the eye that Shakespeare ascribes to his youthful romantic couples, encouraging them in their revolt against the symbolic laws of the day. Yet the secret night of love is not simply a lawless chronotopos. Rather, in it a different law comes into its own, namely that of fate. If the night serves as an alternative space of action to the day, in which lovers can successfully contest and resist a strict paternal authority, it is informed by its own law of necessity. Once Shakespeare’s lovers have left the realm of the ordinary everyday, they must obey the compelling voice of romantic desire, regardless of the cost. Having embarked on their nocturnal journey, they must surrender to the course their transgressive desire takes, even as they insist that they could not have acted otherwise. In Shakespeare’s nocturnal world the consequences of desire cannot be avoided, regardless of whether they veer toward self-destruction or marital happiness.
In the last act of
The Merchant of Venice, Jessica and Lorenzo remind each other of famous night scenes in the tragic love stories of antiquity so as to insert their own transgression into this set of mythic texts. Disguised as a page, the daughter of the Jew Shylock had stolen away from her home, fleeing from her father’s protection as well as refuting his religion. To mark the gravity of her betrayal, the night is so dark that although Jessica recognizes the voice of her clandestine lover, she cannot see him, and is thus compelled to ask for further proof of his identity. Yet at the time she is grateful for the complete obscurity of the scene, because the darkness protects her from Lorenzo’s gaze. “I am much ashamed of my exchange,” she explains to him, “but love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit” (2.6.35). The absence of light, however, not only serves to cover up her cross-dressing as a boy; the darkness also allows her to hide her dual betrayal of her father—her willingness to convert to Christianity and the theft of his jewels and his gold. Precisely because she is well aware of her own guilt, she refuses to serve as Lorenzo’s torchbearer. “What, must I hold a candle to my shames?” she demands, “They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light” (2.6.42). By keeping her external appearance unseen, she had hoped to keep the double disownment of her identity—as a woman and a Jew—obscured. To allow the light of the torch to illuminate her person would have been tantamount to an “office of discovery” (2.6.43), disclosing her moral transgression as well.
A second act of concealment is at stake after her arrival in her new home in Belmont. Jessica, in a scene poignantly illuminated by moonlight, seeks to translate the transgression she has committed into pure poetic language. During their lover’s quarrel, Lorenzo and Jessica compare the scene in front of Shylock’s house with other scenes in literature, in which the obscurity of the night sets the tone for the fatal outcome of a clandestine romance. “In such a night as this,” Lorenzo begins, “Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, / And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents / Where Cressid lay that night” (5.1.1–8). Jessica, in turn, recalls the night in which Thisbe, terrified by the appearance of a lion, runs away from the place where she promised to meet her lover, while Lorenzo counters with an image of Dido, standing on the wild sea bank, gazing in despair out to sea because her lover Aeneas has abandoned her. After Jessica reminds them both that in such a night as this, Medea went to gather the enchanted herbs, which successfully rejuvenate the father of her lover Jason, Lorenzo finally invokes their own nocturnal misdemeanor. “In such a night,” he exclaims, “did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew / And with an unthrift love did run from Venice / As far as Belmont” (5.1.14–17).
By competing in their descriptions of the emotional injuries they have inflicted on each other, the two lovers transform themselves into literary characters. In retrospect Jessica recalls how Lorenzo stole her soul with false vows of faith, whereas he reminds her of how she slandered her love and he forgave her. In any rational light of day, these recollections would appear to be intolerable offenses or fanciful delusions. Illuminated by moonlight, however, this verbal celebration of transgressive behavior takes on the form of a jovial boast. “I would outnight you” (5.1.23), Jessica declares, before she is interrupted by the arrival of a friend. Although gothic sensibility in general dictates a correspondence between nocturnal scenes in literature and the work of fantasy, precisely because darkness encourages and sustains any flight into imaginary domains, Jessica and Lorenzo’s dialogue in the moonlit garden in Belmont performs a very specific passage. Because a night like the one they find themselves in is found to be the common denominator in a sequence of images commemorating fatal romantic transgressions, their entrance into the Parthenon of mythic texts is assured. Jessica and Lorenzo give birth to themselves as literary figures, yet do so by transcoding generically the texts they invoke. The outcome of their love nights is not tragic, even though they change their shape, passing from mimetic figures appearing on stage in a particular drama to figures of poetic speech.
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
Jessica and Lorenzo’s quarrel also points to a seminal aspect of Renaissance theater practice, in which the night was primarily performed linguistically. All plays written for a public audience were initially staged in daylight, in the middle of the afternoon. Any nocturnal mood, indeed any all-encompassing darkness, had to either be invoked through poetic language or dramatically indicated with the help of props such as lanterns, candles, or night clothes. As Marjorie Garber contends, the Shakespearean night functions as an interior world, “a middle world of transformation and dream sharply contrasted to the harsh daylight world of law, of civil war and banishment,” which is to say, it is “a state of theater, and a state of mind” (195). Indeed, the theater of the Renaissance itself has come to stand for a particularly resilient heterotopia. On Shakespeare’s stage—in the middle of the ordinary everyday, yet on the margin of London’s jurisdiction—the law of the imagination overrules the symbolic order’s law of rationality and obedience. Theater’s power of contestation, however, continues to resonate beyond its historic moment of emergence, particularly when the nocturnal scenes performed on stage present actions that explicitly break with the harsh laws of the day by privileging the work of dreams and fantasy.
Two plays by Shakespeare, both written around 1595, illustrate this juxtaposition of nocturnal scene and psychic scenario. Both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream enact the rite de passage of disobedient lovers who transgress the strict forbiddances of paternal authority by fleeing into the night, and concomitant with this, into a psychic state of romantic nocturnality. In both plays the lovers privilege their fantasy of love over the symbolic conventions forbidding it. They valorize the night, acquiring knowledge there that will have either a tragic or a comic effect on the day. Both on stage and in the state of mind, the night represents a commentary on, and an alternative to, the day. The violence of the young Montagues and Capulets mirrors the ancient grudge of their parents and turns this hatred into the enactment of a death-marked love, whose consequences none of the survivors can ignore. In turn, the violent peregrinations of the Athenian lovers in the nocturnal wood contest the relentlessly severe paternal law of Athens, which punishes disobedient daughters by sending them to a nunnery or the scaffold. The confusion that entails will ultimately end in an acknowledgment of Hermia’s right to choose her own husband.
Furthermore, the two plays can be read as tragic and comic variations on the same story. Owing to chance, the lovers in both plays suddenly find themselves separated from each other, thus revealing the fickleness of any love based on a magic infection of the eye. The coincidences that change the course of action in both plays, additionally, render visible the speed with which romantic desire can turn into hatred and violence. Precisely because both plays mirror each other, however, one must interrogate the different resolutions Shakespeare finds for these nocturnal passages, dictated by the demands of genre. In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta find the lovers sleeping peacefully next to each other on the morning after their nocturnal adventures. Why can all three couples celebrate their nuptials at the end of the next day, whereas Romeo and Juliet consistently veer toward an eternal night, so that their corpses are discovered by the Prince in the gloomy light of dawn, lying in a deadly embrace in the vault of Juliet’s forefathers? What attitude toward the night must one assume so as to be able to leave this stage and state of mind? Which knowledge, won in the night, can be transported into the day? Which insight must once again be repressed?
Jessica, standing in front of her father’s house, embraces the darkness of the night because it helps her cover up the guilt she feels, and then, in her dialogue with Lorenzo in Belmont, praises the night as a protective mantel for all romantic criminals. Juliet, standing on her balcony after having secretly betrothed herself to Romeo but not yet consummated the marital rites, speaks for all clandestine lovers. Impatiently she appeals to a “love-performing night,” asking her to spread her “close curtain” (3.2.5) over the world. The man for whom she yearns can only come to her arms “untalked of and unseen,” if the nocturnal darkness makes him invisible to the eyes of the other members of her household. Lovers, she declares, do not require daylight, for they “can see to do their amorous rites / By their own beauties” (3.2.8–9). Love, furthermore, “best agrees with night” because both are blinding forces. If Jessica wanted Lorenzo to see neither her masculine attire nor her shame, Juliet calls for the darkness of night to make sure that Romeo can notice neither her lack of sexual knowledge nor her unbridled desire. She bids the “sober-suited matron all in black” to cover her “unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks, / with thy black mantel till strange love grown bold / Think true love acted simple modesty” (3.2.11–16).
Like Jessica, she is grateful for this darkness because she draws courage from it for the wedding night she anticipates. Her apostrophe of the night serves to install the wedding bed as one of the pivotal scenes of transformation in this tragedy. Juliet claims that as a bride she is her own source of light, even while she places her husband on the same level of address as the love-performing night, calling to him “Come night, come Romeo; come, thou day in night” (3.2.17). When Romeo saw her for the first time at her father’s feast, he maintains: “O she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night as a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear” (1.5.41–43). Now Juliet deploys a similar visual contrast to paint a picture of the arrival of her husband: “thou wilt lie upon the wings of night whiter than new snow on a raven’s back” (3.2.18–19). Her poetic language produces a nocturnal scene of love that contests the harsh diurnal world by transforming its civil war into a celebration of her sexual desire. She not only performs the night linguistically as stage and state of mind for her transgression, but Juliet also gives birth to herself as the heroine of this psychic counter scene of her imaginary anticipation. In her apostrophe she produces herself as the queen of a nocturnal world, not only independent of the garish sun, but also surpassing it.
The wedding night, which Juliet and Romeo will consummate a few hours later, unfolds outside the diurnal strife of her parents. But although it serves as a stage for the transformation of hate into love, the two clandestine lovers cannot assert themselves against the “continuance of their parents’ rage” (Prologue 10). They can only take this violence to its logical conclusion by insisting that from this moment on they fully withdraw from the day. After the wedding night, Juliet will recognize that, to sustain a love that can only be enjoyed at night, she can live only by night. She can pit her love against her parents’ ancient grudge by turning their strife into desire, yet in so doing she retains the unrelenting attitude of her parents. The love she lives at night with Romeo is a death-marked love. Indeed, once she has consummated her marriage, there can only be her nocturnal world, consisting in an undivided, eternal love beyond the diurnal. She senses in advance that the price for her all-inclusive, unyielding passion will be death. To the “loving, black-browed night” that will give Romeo to her, she promises her husband as a posthumous gift. As an homage to her nocturnal desire, she imagines a sculpture with Romeo’s body that will immortalize not only their love, but also the night as privileged site for its display: “when I shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun” (3.2.21–25). The night Juliet invokes in her monologue thus epitomizes the emotional state of the star-crossed lovers. They can illuminate their amorous rites with the light of their own beauty, creating an intimate day in night, which they alone share with each other. What they cannot do, however, is introduce this intimacy, which obliterates the distinction between light and dark, hate and love, forbiddance and enjoyment, back into their everyday. The inflexibility of their parents’ grudge engenders their children’s equally absolute flight from their diurnal world.
The world of day is introduced in Act I of
Romeo and Juliet as the site of a relentless civil war. Tybalt declares that he hates the word peace as he hates hell, provoking the two fathers to once again raise their swords against each other. The Prince, in turn, seeks to contain the blind hatred of the two houses, in dignity so alike, by issuing the edict: “If ever you disturb our streets again / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace” (1.1.89–90). It is from this vicious day that Romeo flees, stealing away at the sight of dawn’s light, to hide in the privacy of his chamber. Here he “shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out and makes himself an artificial night” (1.1.134), so as to indulge in his love melancholia. As hopeless as it may be, his unrequited love for Rosaline offers him emotional protection. Although he is cognizant of the painful paradoxes of romantic desire, speaking of a “brawling love” and a “loving hate,” he attributes to it the creativity that the civil war surrounding him lacks, calling it “O anything of nothing first create” (1.1.170). Although the hate-infected eyes of his relatives clearly divide the world into friends and foes, his love-infected eye allows him to partake of the spectacle of “misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,” marked by the blurring of fixed categories: “feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-waking sleep, that is not what it is” (1.1.172–173). Owing to his presence, the nocturnal feast at the Capulets where Juliet is to meet her designated bridegroom Paris for the first time, is transformed into the stage for a different encounter. Romeo suddenly and unexpectedly exchanges the object of his love because Juliet’s appearance creates out of nothing a countersite of love meant to assuage both his melancholia and their strife-ridden everyday. Although old Capulet had promised Paris that in the person of his daughter he would “behold this night / Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light,” the son of his enemy will be the one to claim this nocturnal light as his possession.
Initially Romeo agrees to go to feast merely as “candle-holder and look on” (1.4.38), so as to spy on Rosaline. Yet he prefaces his forbidden entrance into the home of the Capulet’s by recalling the portentous dream he had the night before. Taunting him, Mercutio claims that Queen Mab had been with him, “the fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55), who “gallops night by night / through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love” (1.4.71–72). Romeo’s objection to his friend’s ridicule, “thou talk’st of nothing” (1.4.6), nevertheless implicitly gives voice to the co-dependency of love and dreams. After all, Mercutio’s retort that dreams are “children of an idle brain begot of nothing but vain fantasy which is as thin of substance as the air” (1.4.97–98) adequately describes Romeo’s psychic theater of love melancholia. Indeed, Romeo admits that his love is precisely that which will create anything out of nothing. The emphasis is on the act of creation, not on what is being created. The banquet emerges as the site where the thin substance of a romantic dream will take on corporeal shape in the form of Juliet’s actual appearance. Like Queen Mab’s dreamscapes, the nocturnal festivities at the home of the Capulets are marked by the principle of shape-shifting, making unexpected encounters possible because for a brief period of time, the law of enmity has been suspended. Juliet’s father insists that Tybalt leave Romeo alone, explaining that he will have no fighting among his guests this night, and, so as to underscore his decision, calls to his servants for more light.
Yet even before he lays eyes on Juliet, Romeo senses that to visit the nocturnal festivities of his parents’ enemy will have fatal consequences and “expire the term of a despised life, closed in my breast, by some vile forfeit of untimely death” (1.4.109–111). The law of love, under the auspices of which the two star-crossed lovers meet, proves to be strict in its own way. Once Romeo’s eye falls on Juliet, he immediately recognizes the delusion of his prior romantic fantasies: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight, for I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (1.5.49–50). Suddenly he is no longer the victim of fickle passions; rather, he is overwhelmed by a true love at first sight, whose object is neither random nor exchangeable. Once the hands and then the lips of Romeo and Juliet touch, their mutual dream of love, which initially may have been of a substance thin as air, assumes an unequivocal reality, the consequences of which neither can, nor wishes to, avoid. Both lovers willingly submit themselves to the fate Romeo already found “hanging in the stars” (1.4.107) before his arrival; they will insist on sustaining their nocturnal world of love. Significantly, it offers an alternative to the violence of the day not only because it transforms hate into love, but also because it declares the “still-waking sleep” of their mutual rapture to be a state of emergency, occluding all other laws and codes. Once the Nurse has disclosed Romeo’s identity, Juliet readily acknowledges, “My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!” Like him, she shapes her personal nocturnal world of love out of the chaos of an everyday that has come to be saturated with death: “Prodigious birth of love it is to me that I must love a loathed enemy” (1.5.136–137).
The tragic irony, of course, is that the love Juliet creates together with Romeo out of nothing is as unyielding as the hatred of their parents. It mirrors the very day against which she pits her conviction that they can share a day in night all to themselves. Speaking to him from her balcony after she has retired from her father’s feast, Juliet asks Romeo, hidden by the darkness of the night, “doff thy name, and for thy name—which is no part of thee—take all myself” and he responds, “I take thee at thy word. Call me but love and I’ll be new baptized. Henceforth I never will be Romeo” (2.1.89–92). By giving up their names, and with it their symbolic positions within their respective family lineages, both seek not only to contest the diurnal law of hate that threatens to separate them again, but also to reject the day completely. They want to belong exclusively to the nocturnal world performed by their mutual vows of love. Indeed, Juliet, who confessed her “true love passion” to the “dark night” even before Romeo reveals his presence to her, needs no further exchange of pledges. They would be “too like the lightning which doth cease to be ere one can say it lightens” (2.1.161–162). She repeatedly wishes Romeo good night, only to repeatedly call him back to her, so as to savor the sweetness of deferred departure; by proclaiming that parting is such sweet sorrow she can also prolong this state of infinite possibility.
The days that follow unfold a fatal logic of love. Because Romeo and Juliet can enjoy their transgressive passion only at night, they live only by night. It would be inaccurate to say their days are now inundated by the fatal nocturnal law of love. Rather, the other light Juliet embodies, which Romeo repeatedly calls a “sun of the night,” cannot be imported back into the day. If the night functions as a vibrant and resilient dreamscape in which Queen Mab’s creative imagination reigns, such that fantasies can be realized and love born out of hate, the day serves as a rigid temporal zone in which no one can deviate from the violent quarrel that rules there. Friar Laurence supports Romeo’s marriage, hoping that “this alliance may so happy prove to turn your households’ rancor to pure love” (2.3.90–91). The Nurse successfully carries Juliet’s message to her forbidden lover and thus makes their clandestine marriage possible. Nevertheless, there is no room for their shape-shifting love in the day. Its playful power of transformation cannot coexist with the cruel logic of a civil war. Because the fantasy of love enjoyed at night cannot be sustained in the day, only a radical separation of these two worlds is possible.
Under the hot afternoon sun, love once more turns into hate, transforming the nocturnal dream of reconciliation into the sobering recognition that there can only be strife between these two houses. During the day, Tybalt can act out the revenge his kinsman forbade him at night. Romeo tries to intervene in the fight between Tybalt and Mercutio, explaining to his former enemy that his name is as dear to him now as his own. But his interference merely serves to encourage the violence; indeed, he unwittingly enables Tybalt to successfully thrust his rapier into his friend’s breast. It was Mercutio who spoke about Queen Mab before he and Romeo stole into the nocturnal festivities in the house of the Capulets, thus provoking Tybalt’s murderous anger. It was also he, who, having warned Romeo that Tybalt was going to challenge him to a duel, changed the tone of his speech and began mocking his friend’s romantic delusions. Like Jessica and Lorenzo, he recalled a series of mythic heroines, so as to denigrate them all in comparison to Rosaline. Among them was Thisbe, whose tragic love story (because of a botched tryst in the night) is one of the intertextual references for Shakespeare’s tragedy. As the friend whose verbal wit repeatedly vexes Romeo’s romantic dreams and reveals the thinness of their substance, Mercutio thus embodies the principle of transformation. With his death in Act III of
Romeo and Juliet, any possibility that violence might turn into reconciliation and a tragic family grudge be transformed into a marriage comedy is abandoned.
With his last breath Mercutio declares, “A plague o’ both your houses” (3.1.87), drawing attention to the fact that these two houses aren’t only alike in dignity but also alike in their demise. Romeo, who at night was able to dream about relinquishing his bond to the house of Montague so as to acquit himself of this fatal family grudge, recognizes in “this day’s black fate” that he is “fortune’s fool.” In the garish heat of the afternoon sun he finds himself at an impasse. It is not only the nocturnal light Juliet embodies for him that dictates his actions, but also Mercutio’s curse. Ruefully thinking of his secret wife, he confesses “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate” (3.1.109) before he takes up his weapon and kills the enemy who, for the last hour, has also been his kinsman. Because his marriage to Juliet makes him a member of both of the houses, alike in dignity as in hatred, he finds himself compelled to consummate their unrelenting hatred with his own hands, even before performing the amorous rites with which he had hoped to undo all violence. He is fortune’s fool, because by killing his enemy, he strikes himself. The power of transformation, which was able to create true love out of hate in the nocturnal world that had initially unfolded on the dance floor, only to be resumed before Juliet’s balcony, produces a very different dissolution of the distinction between enemy and friend in the light of day. If there can be nothing but love in the nocturnal world Romeo and Juliet have created with and for each other, then in the lethal economy of “day’s black fate,” there can be nothing but strife.
Once Mercutio leaves the stage, Romeo and Juliet’s nocturnal world of love loses all transformatory promise as well. If the passion they discovered and confessed to each other at night can only exist in a nocturnal world, then it must remain night forever. As dawn puts an end to their wedding night, Romeo perceives the first light of day as a sure threat to their happiness; “more light and light, more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.36). Sunlight is equally lethal to Juliet’s gaze, who now sees her husband “as one dead in the bottom of a tomb / either my eyesight fails, or though look’st pale” (3.5.56–57). Her father’s insistence that she marry Paris further evokes a desire for her own demise whose point of reference is an eternal night of death. She begs Friar Laurence, “hide me nightly in a charnel house . . . hide me with a dead man in his tomb” (4.2.81–85). The Friar himself has a radical exclusion of the everyday in mind when he proposes that she feign death so as to circumvent her father’s marital wishes. In the scenario he depicts to Juliet, she lies dead in her bed when her unwanted bridegroom comes for her on the morning of their wedding day, as though death had beat him to his prize. The following night Romeo will wait for her to awake so that he can use the protection of darkness, as Lorenzo did with Jessica, to lead her to their new home in Mantua.
The tomb emerges as the last of the nocturnal love scenes. Like the banquet, the balcony, and the marital bed, it is a site at which Queen Mab (implicitly a daughter of Nyx) calls forth vain fantasies as thin of substance as the air. In Act III, after the Nurse told Juliet of Tybalt’s death, she already had the foreboding, “I’ll to my wedding bed, and death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead” (3.2136–2137). Accepting the potion from the Friar, Juliet once more shrewdly realizes that her nocturnal love for Romeo can only be sustained in a mutual marriage with death. As though it were the anamorphotic inversion of the wedding night she imagined for herself while waiting for her husband to fly to her arms, Juliet now paints a “dismal scene,” in which she awakes in the vault in which night and death reign together, before Romeo arrives to redeem her. Just before she drinks the potion, she imagines the horrible night spirits that live in the ancient receptacle in which the bones of her ancestors lie. Out of nothing, Juliet creates vain fantasy scenarios, in which she, distraught and gripped by hideous fears, plays madly with her forefathers’ joints, plucking the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, and “with some great kinsman’s bone . . . dash out my desp’rate brains” (4.3.52–53). The force of her imagination, gone awry, is so powerful that she actually believes she already sees Tybalt’s ghost. As antidote to this visitation, she appeals to her husband, “Romeo! Here’s drink. I drink to thee” (4.3.57). She privileges a performance of death over a confrontation with the conflict she cannot resolve. In so doing, she nevertheless embraces its fatal logic. To protect herself from the fantasy that Tybalt (whose death at the hand of her husband has made all reconciliation impossible) has come to haunt her, she chooses a potion that will produce a nocturnal state of deathlike stupor.
Juliet wakes after Romeo has not only killed his rival Paris but also himself. This scene of closure functions as the realization of Romeo’s second prophetic vision at the beginning of Act V, in which he dreams that his lady came and found him dead. If Juliet has recourse to the image of birth-giving when, after the nocturnal feast in her father’s house, she claims her only love is born from her only hate, Romeo invokes a dark inversion of engendering as he approaches the vault of the Capulets. He calls it a “womb of death,” which he penetrates violently, so as to give birth to himself in the arms of his newly wed wife. One last time he remarks, “her beauty makes this vault a feasting presence full of light” (5.3.85–86). As the source of a light in the dark, whose festive radiance surpasses the light of the garish sun, the sleeping Juliet finds her apotheosis. For the rite of death Romeo is about to perform, her beauty suffices as light, as will the light emanating from his body once she follows his suit. For the survivors, however, the morning brings only a “gloomy peace” (5.3.304). The reconciliation following upon the terrible awakening of the parents is without hope. The second wedding night, which Romeo and Juliet (as they had foreseen in their dreams) celebrate with death as the third party, will bring forth no progeny. It engenders instead the golden statue with which the two distraught fathers respond to the judgment of fate the Prince gives voice to by claiming, “all are punished” (5.3.594).
In the cold, gray light of morning all those who have survived must face the consequences of their hate. They must acknowledge that the world of nocturnal festivities and amorous rites, embraced by their children as the site at which hate could turn into love, has irrevocably been abolished. The golden statue standing in for all the corpses (including Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris) annuls the strife of the parents, yet by commemorating its victims it also sustains a memory of the consequences of their fatal grudge. But the golden statue is also the answer of the gloomy morning and its sobering symbolic laws to the body art Juliet imagined for Romeo’s corpse when in gratitude to the love-performing night, she promised to the “sober-suited matron all in black” that she could cut her lover’s body into little stars to illuminate the heaven and outshine the “garish sun.” If this gloomy morning insists that those who remain must wake up from the night—as stage and state of mind—it also celebrates the power of love to create a “misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms.” Called upon by the Prince to “clear these ambiguities,” Friar Laurence summarizes the passage of tragic events at length, despite his claim that he will be brief. This unnecessary reduplication of the play’s action in the form of a testimony given by a witness is justified by virtue of the fact that with his monologue, the Friar ascribes to the dead couple the status of mythic characters, which implicitly aligns them with Pyramus and Thisbe.
He reiterates belatedly the allegorical status with which the Prologue had endowed them, when it declared them to be “a pair of star-crossed lovers” who will be forced to take their life, so that their death may serve to “bury their parents’ strife” (Prologue 6–8). Their story could find no other closure, because “the fearful passage of their death-marked love” (Prologue 9) was the very precondition for their emergence as
dramatis personae. The Prologue introduces them not as Mercutio’s children of an “idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy,” but rather as the poetic progeny of Shakespeare’s mind, which for two hours will be the “traffic” of his stage. The dramatic enactment of their story that follows the Prologue serves to embellish—in the sense of a poetic dream—everything that the rhetorical reduction undertaken by the Prologue could not name. At the end of the five acts the dramatic characters Romeo and Juliet are once more reduced to the formula of the tragic love story, which serves as an inscription to their golden statue: “For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo” (5.3.308–309). However, as we awake from the dream that Shakespeare’s language performed before our eyes, a question still remains. How much of the stuff of fantasy must again be relinquished, as we, the audience, move from the night into a gloomy morning, from a Prologue and a dramatic enactment of the fearful passage of a death-marked love, to a commemorative statue and its didactic subtitle? The staging of Shakespeare’s nocturnal love traffic has also affected our fantasies, leaving traces that resonate beyond the alleged reconciliation that the closure of this tragedy affords.
WAKING UP AFTER A MIDSUMMER NIGHT
Conceivably A Midsummer Night’s Dream could also end with a commemorative statue. Like Juliet, Hermia opposes her strict father Egeus. Because she is his property according to Athenian law, he can order her to marry a man she does not love. Furthermore, if she does not consent to marry Demetrius, she must either die or live the life of a barren nun, “chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (1.1.73). She, too, seeks the protection of the dark night to flee with her lover Lysander to her aunt, who lives outside the jurisdiction of the Athenian court. Chance will also prevent these lovers from carrying out their plan, and because the events of their sojourn in the nocturnal woods turn their love into strife, they could also find a fateful death. In this romantic comedy, however, transgressions do not result in an unyielding nocturnal desire pitted against the harsh laws of the day. Rather, A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates the triumph of the power of transformation that the lovers encounter in the enchanted woods, although this magic countersite also reflects and contests the diurnal law of rationality and obedience.
In Shakespeare’s comedy, love also proves to be an “infection to the eye” that translates its victims into a “still-waking sleep.” Yet as Helena, Hermia’s childhood friend notes, “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” (1.1.234); love operates with the faculty of imagination and fantasy, not with the senses. As in
Romeo and Juliet, the vain fantasy induced by dreams brings forth confusing shapes, of substance as thin as air, which taunt and torment the night wanderers until, just before dawn breaks, they return to the edge of the woods, utterly exhausted from their visions. But the spirits, who in Juliet’s prophetic dream are only terrifying and lead her to fear she will go mad, enact a far more reversible passage of the imagination in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although their play of magic turns love into hate and violence, it also turns strife into desire and reconciliation. Owing to the power of transformation enacted by the fairies, love objects come to be exchangeable in the nocturnal world of the wood, whereas desire remains mobile and is therefore not bound to a predetermined trajectory. Furthermore, the nocturnal forest offers the lovers not only the possibility of contesting the forbiddances of the day and turning these to their advantage; the knowledge they win in this nocturnal world, can—even if only in fragments—be transported into the morning after, and thus into all the days and nights that follow.
Even before Hermia and Lysander decide to flee to the woods, the night served as stage for their forbidden love. In front of the Duke of Athens, the indignant Egeus charges Lysander that he “by moonlight at her window did sing with feigning voices verses of feigning love, and stol’n the impression of her fantasy” (1.1.30–32). According to Hermia’s father, Lysander’s nocturnal courting stole “the impression of her fantasy” and came to turn his daughter’s obedience to him into a stubborn resistance against his authority. Hermia herself admits, “I know not by what power I am made bold” (1.1.59), yet insists on determining for herself who should be her future husband. During the day, and at the Duke’s court to boot, she thus represents precisely the nocturnal desire for which her father is willing to sacrifice her, because it undermines his authority. Like the impetuous young men in Romeo and Juliet, who play out the relentless grudge of their parents by day on the streets of Verona, Hermia responds to her father’s claim to absolute sovereignty with equal obstinacy. However, she pits against his mental rigidity her own acknowledgment of the fateful law of love. Precisely because she knows that she cannot avoid love, she recognizes that in necessity there is the opportunity for change.
Like Jessica and Lorenzo in
The Merchant of Venice, Lysander has recourse to the tragic resolution of mythic love stories when imagining the course his true love for Hermia will take. War, death, or sickness, he explains, renders it “swift as a shadow, short as any dream, brief as the lightning in the collied night” (1.1.144–145), only to be devoured by “the jaws of darkness.” As though she, in turn, had read the Prologue to
Romeo and Juliet, Hermia shrewdly responds, “if then true lovers have been ever crossed, it stands as an edict in destiny. Then let us teach our trial patience” (1.1.150–151). Against Juliet’s impatience, Hermia pits a willingness to persevere, and in so doing shows that she is open to any changes of circumstance encountered on her nocturnal journey. Even before entering the nocturnal woods, she wisely assumes that the course of her love will not run smoothly. The transgressions she will encounter there thus involve not only her father’s forbiddance, but also precisely those imaginations of the inevitability of mishap, by which both she and her lover believe that true love must necessarily be touched. As the place and time “that lovers’ sleights doth still conceal” (1.1.212), the night offers both refuge and illumination. In the nocturnal woods, Hermia’s worst fantasies of love’s woes will take shape and confront her with the transformation of love into violence. Following Hermia into this world of dark inversions is not only Demetrius, the bridegroom she rejected, but also Helena, the woman he spurns in turn.
Even before the fairies begin their magic play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream enacts the dark traffic of these four lovers who, in the scarce illumination that the night offers, suddenly see each other differently than during the day. Helena indulges in her masochistic fantasy of humiliation, asking Demetrius to treat her like his dog. “Neglect me, lose me” she whimpers, “only give me leave / Unworthy as I am, to follow you” (2.2.205–206). The magic woods serve as the stage for two further performances of the cruel and excessive nocturnal side of love. First, a small troop of artisans choose this place to rehearse a play they hope to perform at the wedding festivities of the Duke. Its title, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe, explicitly gives voice to the mutual implication of pleasure and cruelty in any enactment of love’s delusions. Their rehearsal offers a grotesque distortion of a mythic story that, like Romeo and Juliet, illustrates that the nocturnal side of love may result in the fatal loss of happiness. The moonlit woods also function as the stage in which Oberon and his Fairy Queen fight over a little changeling boy, whom he wants as one of his pages of honor, while she seeks to raise him in honor of her friendship with his mother, who used to be a votress of her order.
Akin to Mercutio’s Queen Mab, Robin Goodfellow intervenes in this trifold nocturnal traffic, directing the passage of the diverse lovers. This “merry wanderer of the night” (2.1.43) is master of a night rule that celebrates the terrible contingencies, accidents, and misfortunes that can befall each and every lover. Under his aegis a series of transformations unfolds, leaving no one untouched. He obeys Oberon’s command and fetches the juice of the magic flower, upon which Cupid’s arrow fell, “quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,” having missed the “imperial votress” the god of love had taken aim at (2.1.162–163). Yet Robin subverts Oberon’s command by dropping this magic juice not in the eyes of Demetrius, but rather accidentally—or willfully—on those of Lysander, who has fallen asleep close to his beloved Hermia. Intensifying the infection of the eye, which in Shakespearean discourse always applies to love, this juice compels the sleeper to madly dote on the first creature he sees when he awakes.
The dream of clandestine love transforms into a traumatic enactment of mistaken identities. When Helena finds Lysander sleeping on the ground she, for a moment, wonders whether he is “dead, or asleep? I see no blood, no wound” (2.2.107), as though she expects the change of tone from romantic comedy to gothic love tragedy. Yet the cruelty that unfolds once Lysander awakes will take a difference course. Like Romeo, who upon seeing Juliet at her father’s nocturnal festivities, immediately relinquishes the previous object of his desire, so too Lysander declares his true love to Helena in the language of a tragic hero. His transformed gaze, he explains, has led him “to your eyes, where I o’erlook love’s stories written in love’s richest book” (2.2.127). This revelation lets him chase after his rival Demetrius, so that the latter may perish on his sword. In contrast to Romeo and Juliet, however, the magic of love that unfolds is one-sided and partial. Robin only plays with the love-infected gaze of the two young men, as though they were the more fickle of the lovers, whereas the two women are forced to gaze upon the toxic side-effects of love’s madness with their eyes clear. Helena takes Lysander’s sudden change as an expression of perfidious mockery, and Hermia sees it as an inexplicable experience of abandonment. If she fell asleep thinking her lover was peacefully resting by her side, she wakes up from a terrible dream in which, as she relates to an absent Lysander, she thought “a serpent ate my heart away, and you sat smiling at his cruel prey” (2.2.155–156).
If, in principle, dreams enact wish fulfillments, one might ask whether Hermia’s vision of her lover cruelly enjoying her death dictates to her the perfect image of the way true lovers are ever crossed. Or does she use this dream vision to give voice—as Juliet does on her balcony—to a dangerous fantasy of self-expenditure in love? Realizing that she has been abandoned, Hermia calls out to Lysander, “either death or you I’ll find immediately” (152). In contrast to Juliet, she will not let chance decide her fate, but rather insists on her own agency. If in her dream vision she has acknowledged that Lysander is capable of cruelty toward her, the magical juice will help to enact this disloyalty precisely. Owing to the inexplicable change of circumstances, Lysander, now believing that he hates her, will truly wound her with his words. But the logic of Robin’s night rule also undermines the necessity of any tragic resolution to this nocturnal misunderstanding. Because Lysander’s inexplicable sudden rebuke of Hermia wounds her emotionally, she doesn’t actually have to die physically. The traumatic experience of her lover’s betrayal also makes possible the turn to comedy.
All four Athenians have no choice but to follow Robin’s gothic play, experiencing both the cruel fortuitousness of the choice of love object, as well as the barbaric violence hovering beneath the surface of civility. Hermia believes that she recognizes in Demetrius the murderer of her love, and pleads with him that he kill her as well. He, in turn, accuses her of being a murderer, because it is her stern cruelty that has pierced through his heart. He also acknowledges his own proclivity toward cruelty, claiming that he would rather give the carcass of his rival to his hounds than hand him over to Hermia. Oberon intervenes in Robin’s night rule and personally drops the juice of the magic flower on the eyes of Demetrius. However, under the aegis of the merry wanderer of the night, who relishes precisely in the confusions “that befall prepost’rously,” contingency continues to rule over love in Shakespeare’s nocturnal world. Robin’s jest renders visible the fact that even “true love’s sight” can turn into disdain, undermining the certainty that there is a clear difference between true and false love. Still infected by his new vision of Helena, Lysander explicitly names what Hermia saw in her dream. He commands her to “let loose, or I will shake thee from me like a serpent” (3.2.261–262). The transformation of his gaze, which turns her into an object of hate, forces Hermia to look upon herself with a different eye than she has been during the day. If she can no longer trust his love, she can no longer be certain who she is. Her question, “Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?” (3.2.274) shifts her dream vision of a serpent eating at her heart into an issue of symbolic identity. Although Romeo’s transformed gaze brings Juliet to ask him to relinquish his family name, wishing that they should mutually disavow their symbolic position, Lysander’s emotional alteration calls forth in Hermia a disturbing uncertainty about the name connected to her diurnal identity.
At the acme of their dramatic traffic, all four lovers confront each other in strife. Hermia can only see her former friend Helena as a thief of love, “come by night and stol’n my love’s heart from him” (3.2.284–285). Helena believes the others are all set against her, whereas the two young men continue to chase each other. But although love has turned into hate, accusation, and defamation, the lovers indulge only in an imagined enactment of violence. In contrast to Romeo, who finds himself forced to kill Tybalt even though he has just become his kinsman, Lysander says of Hermia, “what should I hurt her, strike her, kill her dead? Though I hate her, I’ll not harm her” (3.2.270–271). Once more Oberon intervenes in Robin’s contingent night rule, so as to put an end to the nocturnal chaos he has unwittingly created. He needs to assert a clear division between true love and all magical distortions of love, and thus subject love to an order compatible with the symbolic laws of the day. In contrast to those spirits, who, according to Oberon, are doomed to “forever consort with black-browed night” (3.2.388), he is not excluded from the world of daylight. “We are spirits of another sort,” he explains. “I with the morning’s love have oft made sport” (3.2.389–390). He thus commands Robin to conjure up a black fog to cover even the stars, so that in utter darkness the four lovers will go astray, never meeting each other, until—like Juliet—exhausted from the gothic shapes their desire has taken, they fall into a “death-counterfeiting sleep.”
Because Oberon wishes to transport the new order of love engendered by his magic into the day, he clears Lysander’s eyes just before dawn, so that “all this derision” will seem to him “a dream and fruitless vision” (3.2.371–372) once he awakes. Indeed, in contrast to the star-crossed lovers in Romeo and Juliet, the young Athenians yearn for day to break. Because the darkness prevents them from ever catching up with each other, the two young men call for the gray light of day to settle their grudge. Decidedly different from Juliet, Helena calls out at the end of her nocturnal peregrination, “O weary night. O long and tedious night, abate thy hours” (3.2.19–20), as though invoking an end to all magic as well. Darkness doesn’t appear to her as a protective cloak, but rather as an abyss, which has brought forth terrifying distortions of her familiar world. Yet she follows Juliet, who drinks the Friar’s potion, so as to put an end to her prophetic vision. Helena also asks the night to bring her the “sleep that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye, steal me a while from mine own company” (3.2.23–24). The passage from this magical night into day can only occur in a state of utter forgetfulness of all traumatic knowledge the lovers have been confronted with in Shakespeare’s nocturnal world. Only as distortions, as dreams and fruitless visions, can the manifold imaginations of the nocturnal side of love be brought to bear on the day.
By contrast, Titania’s nightmare sets in once she awakes from the enchantment of her eyes, which had nevertheless brought her the sexual enjoyment of a mortal lover. Oberon swore to punish her for her unwillingness to subject herself to his wishes and give up the changeling boy. Functioning as a parody of the love at first sight performed in
Romeo and Juliet, Titania lays eyes upon and immediately falls passionately in love with the transformed weaver Bottom, now a hybrid of human and ass. Only once Oberon lifts what he designates as a “hateful imperfection of her eyes” (4.1.60) does she see the amorous rites of the previous night as an act of debasement. Awakening from her nocturnal confusion, she confesses to Oberon that she had a vision in which she thought she was enamored of an ass. In contrast to the serpent Hermia sees in her dream, which is reiterated in Lysander’s verbal attacks but forgotten the next morning, when Titania awakes she is forced to confront Bottom’s distorted visage in a state of wakefulness. As proof that her lovemaking with a disfigured mortal actually took place, Oberon points to the grotesque figure lying next to her and declares, “there lies your love” (4.1.74). The recuperation of his sovereignty depends not only on the twofold correction of his Fairy Queen’s eyes. It also requires that Titania should be forced to remember her erotic madness once awakened. Any possibility of repression is not granted, because Bottom doesn’t lose his ass’s head until, by the light of dawn, Titania has admitted, “O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now” (4.1.76). Owing to her humiliation, she obediently accepts Oberon’s command, agreeing to bless Theseus’ house the following night. More importantly, she relinquishes to him the interpretation of the occurrences of the previous night. Taking his hand, she flies away with Oberon, begging him to explain, “how it came this night that I sleeping here was found with these mortals on the ground” (4.1.97–99).
In the gray morning light, Theseus and Hippolyta also ask the lovers whom they found sleeping at the edge of the woods to explain how they came to be peacefully lying next to each other. If Titania is forced to remember her nocturnal adventure, the young Athenians are blessed with the forgetfulness that not only negotiates between nocturnal dream events and the conscious knowledge of the day, but also sets a limit to the former. Half sleeping, half waking, Lysander confesses, “I cannot truly say how I came here” (4.1.145), whereas Demetrius feels that an inexplicable power has transformed his love for Hermia into a vain memory. At the end of this night, he is the only one who is still affected by Oberon’s magic juice. This correction of his love-infected eye has brought him back to Helena, with whom he was in love before he met Hermia. The two young women also give voice to the uncanniness that accompanies their awakening. Hermia believes she sees everything “with parted eye. When everything seems double” (4.1.186–187), whereas Helena recognizes in Demetrius “a jewel, mine own and not mine own” (4.1.88–89). The safe passage into the morning allows them to screen out the dangerous aspects of the psychic injury experienced the previous night. Upon awakening, these young lovers have forgotten the most traumatic aspects of their night passage. They retain only memory fragments of the dark side effects of their tempestuous love. On the stage of the nocturnal forest, hate could not only be named as the counterpart to their love, but it can also be experienced without having to end in death. A prevention of tragedy has proved possible because the principle of transformation that the Shakespearean discourse ascribes to the night (as privileged stage for dream visions) was never radically excluded from the Athenian day world, from which the lovers fled into the forest. Therein lies the most decisive difference between this comedy and its tragic mirror,
Romeo and Juliet.
Protected by the cloak of obscurity that forgetting affords, any traumatic knowledge gleaned during their nocturnal adventure will affect the day without turning it tragic. Precisely because Hermia experienced the cruel fickleness of her lover at night, she can endure anything her marriage to Lysander holds in store for her. Having confronted her worst fantasies in the nocturnal woods, she is well equipped for all contingencies. To Theseus, who fully inhabits the rational discourse of the day, the stories told to him by the four young Athenians appear to be the shaping fantasies of the seething brains of lovers, who “apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends” (5.1.5–6). Hippolyta, however, lends her ear patiently to the lovers’ story of the night. The fact that “all their minds transfigured so together,” is proof that something “more than vain fantasy” is at stake, “something of great constancy / But howsoever, strange and admirable” (5.1.26–27).
For the grotesque performance of Bottom and his friends, in turn, she has only impatience, claiming, “this is the silliest stuff that ever I heard of” (5.1.207). Yet precisely in its utter lack of imagination, this performance’s grotesquely distorted rendition of a love tragedy that reduces the nocturnal world to empty signifiers opens up a comic counterpoint in the midst of the Duke’s evening court activities. In the spirit of parody, Bottom, recalling Juliet’s monologue, calls out, “O night with hue so black, O night which ever art when day is not, O night, O night, alack, alack, alack” (5.1.168–170). His performance once more turns to the events of the previous night, bringing back into focus what waking had repressed. The play Bottom and his friends perform mirrors both the strict law of Athens, from which the four lovers sought to flee, as well as the violence that inhabits all passionate love. The tragic love story of Thisbe and Pyramus serves as point of reference to both Jessica and Mercutio; in
The Merchant of Venice as homage and in Romeo and Juliet as parody. In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, negotiating the transformation of the tragedy
Romeo and Juliet into a comedy, the curious performance of this story serves merely as a corrective. To the lovers, who can only imperfectly remember their own nocturnal passage, the sudden transformation of a dream of love into a traumatic loss of life renders visible the consequences of tragic fate that they were successfully able to circumvent. Hermia could have killed herself after Lysander abandoned her. As a result of their tampered vision, the two male rivals could have killed each other.
This silly performance of a famous tragic love story also points to the resilient correspondence between night and theatricality. The end of this spectacle brings with it the “iron tongue of midnight,” calling all three couples to a different stage in which shapes are engendered, namely, the marital bed. Yet what the artisans’ performance also heralds is the Epilogue, which the wanderer of the night, Robin, is allowed to speak, because Theseus refused to let Bottom have the last word. With this Epilogue all theatricality is brought to an end. All the actors prove to be shadows and the entire traffic on the stage the vision of a collectively shared dream. If the artisans, like Shakespeare’s players themselves, invoked the night with the help of props, Robin’s final monologue declares that it is not only the dreamscape of the nocturnal world, but also the day that framed it (which is to say the entire play), that belongs to Queen Mab’s realm of spirits, whose substance is as thin as air. Theseus compared the lovers with both madmen and poets because the imagination of all three gives shape to “things unknown.” According to the Duke, who has little sympathy for nocturnal imaginations, the poet, however, undertakes a further transformation, bringing the shapes of fantasy closer to the sensibility of the day. The poet’s pen, he admits, “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.15–16). It is precisely this gesture of consistency and emplacement that Robin, true to his night rule, undermines with his Epilogue, reintroducing a playful dark moment into the romantic comedy of marriage. Because he declares all visions to have been “but a dream” and all the actors to be but shadows, he brings the airy nothing, from which imagination calls forth shapes, back into play. In contrast to the Prince’s final words in
Romeo and Juliet, where the audience is dismissed into a gloomy morning “to have more talk of these sad things” (5.3. 306), Robin bids us a good night as well.
If, as Robin claims, everything was only our dream of the dream of four lovers, or Hippolyta’s dream of the lovers, we are left in the position of Bottom, who is forced to recognize that he can only remember fragments of the night he spent with a Fairy Queen. “I have had a most rare vision,” he explains upon waking up. “I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (4.1.199–201). His attempt to describe what he believes to have seen in his dream exceeds the language of the day. “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” (4.1.204–207). He decides to ask his friend Peter Quince to write a ballad about this dream, which is to be called “‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom” (4.1.208–211). Bottom’s bottomless dream serves as a trope for the passage that, leading from dream to waking, necessarily requires forgetting. Erotic bliss like traumatic knowledge, won at night, can only be remembered with the help of distortions. It is the trace of nocturnal knowledge, which tarries as the dreamer wakes up, that gives him ears to see, hands to taste, and above all a heart to report. Yet the passage from nocturnal dream visions to sober awakening also turns all traumatic knowledge into nothing more than memory fragments that, in this mitigated form, are compatible with the ordinary everyday. The affective force of what is remembered has been significantly reduced by virtue of this refiguration. The line of demarcation between dream and waking can be transgressed, but only at a price. The dream can only be remembered and reported as a story, much as the poet shapes dark, unknown things by ascribing to them a name and a place.
Awakening corresponds to Theseus’s claim that the power of poetry consists in rendering nocturnal visions concrete, when, in the process of shaping “things unknown,” the poet names the scenes of these dreams and, by transforming them into words, assigns them an actual place on the piece of paper he is inscribing with his pen. In a similar manner—and this is the subject of the next chapter as well—the dream that is recounted the day after must remain fragmentary. Located as it is in the realm of signs, it nevertheless recalls affects and states of mind that cannot be grasped in words. Determined and indeterminate in one and the same gesture, the dream—along with each subsequent aesthetic performance—contains a point that is unfathomable. Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
Romeo and Juliet both enact on a public stage a more intimate, psychic traffic, which their players share in the realm of a collective dream. In both plays the night as stage and state of mind can only be made accessible as a theatrical enactment, which is to say in the process of transference.
Although giving voice to dangerous nocturnal enjoyment—be it the night of love or the mutual implication of love and hate—both plays protect us from the traumatic knowledge they also invoke, by cloaking it in the mantle of poetic form. Only in retrospect can we surmise the actual content of the dream. The nocturnal obscurity reveals and hides, endangers and protects. Yet the actual event, from which all transgressions of love take their shape, is like those “things unknown” that the “poet’s pen turns … to shapes” (Romeo and Juliet, 5.1.15–16), and like love, which obtains its power from a “vain fantasy as thin of substance as the air” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.4.105–106). If we only come belatedly to possess this nocturnal knowledge and own up to its power, my cross-mapping of these two Shakespeare plays has made clear that although Romeo and Juliet can live only in the night, their lesson is carried forth into a somber day. The lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in turn, can bring their love forward out of the night into the light of day. Paradoxically this comic turn enables Robin to wish us all good night, because to be in love is to be nocturnal, even in the daytime. Shakespeare’s night is an inside, a state of mind and heart, that is capable (in nocturnal circumstances) of becoming an outside, a social context that supports love and hitherto forbidden alliances. At issue in the distinction between Shakespearean comedy and tragedy is whether or not this nocturnal knowledge is sustainable.
