How does geography relate to A Midsummer Night’s Dream? (Geography, Oxford)

Of course, the very title of this, Shakespeare’s most fantastical and otherworldly play, is geographic. The play is not set on just any night, but Midsummer Night. Midsummer Night had mystical significance, dating back to ancient times. It reveals that Shakespeare’s England, superficially Christian, had pagan roots that run far, far deeper, and this whole play is a wonderful celebration of this night when magic is in the air, and faeries and sprites are abroad.

Midsummer Night is the summer solstice, and the very special alignment of the sun at this point is celebrated and noted in countless stone circles and ancient monuments in Britain and beyond. Stonehenge is a monument entirely arranged, most experts believe, to honour the solstice, which is why even today thousands of people go there at dawn on Midsummer’s Day to witness the sun striking through the gap in the ancient stones.

Geographically, of course, the summer solstice is the longest day of the year, the day when the sun rises earlier, climbs higher at noon and sets later than on any other day of the year. But what those people at Stonehenge are noting is its most northerly sunrise of the year, the furthest extent of its annual journey.

So the summer solstice is the turning point of the year, the sol stice – Latin for ‘sun stand’. Throughout the first half of the year in the northern hemisphere, the sun rises and sets further and further north each day. Then on Midsummer’s Day, its northward journey seems to come momentarily to a standstill before reversing and moving south again day by day until the winter solstice, the summer solstice’s dark opposite, the shortest day of the year, six months later.

Of course, it’s not the sun moving at all, but the Earth, whirling past on its epic annual elliptical journey. Because it’s tilted over, the angle at which we see the sun from anywhere on Earth constantly shifts. And so it seems as if the path the sun traces through the sky each day shifts, whereas it is just the Earth moving on its orbit and revealing the sun at a slightly different angle.

You can tell you are facing the sun directly, and that its rays are striking perpendicularly when you can see it at its highest point in the sky, its zenith, directly overhead at noon. As the Earth swings around the sun, so the line around the Earth at which this happens travels north and south across the equator. The summer solstice in the northern hemisphere is when it reaches the Tropic of Cancer, its furthest point north. The summer solstice in the southern hemisphere is when it reaches the Tropic of Capricorn six months later, the time of the winter solstice in the north.

Of course, these shifts of the sun are not just astronomical features. They bring us the seasons. Throughout the year until the summer solstice, the sun climbs higher, making the days longer and the weather generally warmer, and moving us from winter through spring and into summer. But after the solstice, the sun begins to drop again and the days get shorter and cooler into autumn and then winter. It’s the sense of this life’s cycle reaching its climax that made Midsummer’s Night so special and magical, and the feeling that anything might happen.

Shakespeare, of course, plays loose with his geography. That’s always the case. Although he sets his plays in Verona and Venice, Ephesus and Elsinore, one never really gets much sense of these places as they really were, and that’s hardly surprising, since there is no evidence that Shakespeare travelled much outside England, if at all. These places are just exotic settings to create a sense of distance and wonder. But in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he throws all pretence at geographical accuracy to the winds.

The play starts in Athens, and the magical wood is supposedly set just beyond the city. But Athens never seems like that sun-baked city on the Aegean with its temple ruins. And the magic wood where the lovers spend the night is as far from Athens as magic could transport you. It is a very English wood, like the Forest of Arden Shakespeare knew so well. And it is described with a vivacity and love for its nature that only someone who has walked those woods since childhood and was intimate with its changing moods could achieve. The wildflowers Oberon tells of are those of an English wood, described by someone who had observed their habits closely:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

Shakespeare was intimately acquainted with English weather, too, as you might expect from someone who grew up in the country and whose plays were performed in the open air. But his weather observation is accurate.

Titania, when she describes the chaos in the weather caused by her upset with Oberon, describes it in terms that anyone who knew the English weather would recognise.¹ She talks about winds sucking fogs from the sea, for instance. Maybe she’s talking of a haar or sea fret, one of those mists that rolls in from the sea on summer days on the east coast of England. They form when a parcel of warm air blows over the cool North Sea, making moisture in the lower layers condense to form a mist; and the warmth of the land compared to the sea draws this haze inland, just as Titania describes. It’s these frets and haars that can make summers here as miserable as she laments.

Shakespeare’s play is set in a topsy-turvy, magical world, but it is a world that has its roots in a deep acquaintance with the world of nature, an English landscape in which the seasons turn, weather blows harsh and mild, and the flowers, in their own ecosystem, have each their place. It’s this that makes Shakespeare’s play so much more resonant and memorable than any mere fantasy.

Footnote

1 For example:

‘Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents’.     (Act II, Scene 1)