THERE WAS probably no comprehensive source of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, although Thomas Nashe mentioned in 1589 a play about the King of the Fairies.1 The Theseus matter came from North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives and The Knight’s Tale of Chaucer. Oberon’s list of Theseus’ conquests –
Perigouna, whom he ravished?
And make him with fair Ægles break his faith,
With Ariadne and Antiopa –
(II. i. 78–80)
appear on nearly adjacent pages of North; and Plutarch, in comparing Theseus with Romulus, deplores the Greek’s faults ‘touching women and ravishements’.2 From The Knight’s Tale Shakespeare took a number of details – the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the observance of May Day – though here there may also be a memory of Wyatt’s sonnet3 – and the name Philostrate, who is Emily’s page, not the Master of the Revels. It may be added that the rivalry between Lysander and Demetrius for Hermia’s love recalls at moments the rivalry of Palamon and Arcite.
Chaucer, too, provides a link between Quince’s play and the Oberon-Titania plot. In The Merchant’s Tale there is a reference to Pyramus and Thisbe:
By Pyramus and Thisbe, may men lere
Though they were kept ful long streit ouer all
They ben accorded, rowning through a wall
Ther nis no wight couth finde such a sleight.
(2128–31)
These lines occur between two references to Pluto and Proserpina as the King and Queen of the fairies:
Ful ofte tyme king Pluto and his quene,
Proserpina, and al hir fayry
Disporten hem, and maken melody.
(2038–40)
In the other passage (2227 ff.) Pluto and Proserpina have a long argument about female treachery, Proserpina defending her own sex. Pluto gives January his sight again at the moment when Damian is making love to May. So in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream we have a quarrel between the King and Queen of the fairies and the recovery of the sight of the enchanted lovers by supernatural agency. As Bullough remarks (I. 370):
The idea of fairy monarchs commenting on human life and taking sides for and against mortals while quarrelling between themselves probably came to Shakespeare from Chaucer.
Oberon himself, however, probably owes most to Huon of Bourdeaux in which a wood is described as ‘full of the Fayryes and strang things’ (like the wood near Athens) and ‘in that wood abideth a King of the Fayryes named Oberon, he is of height but of three foote, and crooked shouldered, but yet he hath an Angell-like visage’. Huon is anxious to meet with Oberon but is terrified when he does.4 Shakespeare also knew Greene’s James IV in the Induction of which Oberon is a character. Titania is mentioned three times in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, once as a name for Diana (III. 173) and twice as a name for Circe (XIV. 382, 438).5 Fairies were thought by some to be survivals of Diana’s train; and that the Indian Boy’s mother was a votaress of Titania’s order does not disprove this identification, for Diana, as Lucina, was the goddess of childbirth. Some information about Robin Goodfellow Shakespeare could have acquired from Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Scot declares that not many people believe in Robin Goodfellow’s existence; he stresses the fact that since Robin is reputedly a spirit he could not have sexual intercourse with women; and he refers in one sentence to spirits, elves, fairies, changelings, Robin Goodfellow, the puckle ‘and such other bugs’. But it seems likely that Shakespeare’s character is derived from folk-lore rather than from books, and that Robin is fused with the puckle. There are fairies in Lyly’s Endymion; but the diminutive fairies had apparently been invented by Shakespeare himself when he wrote the Queen Mab speech for Mercutio. Oberon and Titania are more like the conventional fairies in size, but Cobweb and Mustardseed seem to vary in size from that of Mercutio’s fairies to that of Titania herself.6 The magic juice probably came from Montemayor’s Diana.7 Some dubious parallels have been pointed out with Marlowe’s Dido.8
Scot mentions the case of a man turned into an ass (v. 3), but a more likely source of Bottom’s transformation, in view of Titania’s infatuation, is The Golden Asse as translated by William Adlington (1566) in which a matron consummates her love with the metamorphosed narrator.
Shakespeare, then, appears to have taken hints from a number of different sources – Plutarch, Chaucer, Montemayor, Apuleius, Scot, and possibly Marlowe and Lyly – but only with the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe can we examine in detail the sources he employed. It has been conjectured that the story of Romeo and Juliet, taken by Shakespeare from Brooke’s poem and Painter’s tale, was derived ultimately from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe; for in both tales the lovers, because of their parents’ opposition, meet in secret, in both the hero commits suicide in the mistaken belief that the heroine is dead, and in both the man’s suicide is followed by that of the woman. The resemblance between the two stories had, indeed, been pointed out by George Pettie, who remarked9 at the end of one of his stories (Icilius and Virginia) ‘that sutch presinesse of parentes brought Pyramus and Thisbe to a Wofull end, Romeo and Julietta to untimely death’. Parental opposition is also important in the main plot of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. Shakespeare may have turned to the Pyramus story while he was writing Romeo and Juliet, for in the last scene of the play Juliet calls Romeo a churl, and Golding uses ‘churles’ in his version of Ovid’s story.10 There is no doubt that Shakespeare knew the original Latin as well as the translation, and that he had read Chaucer’s version in The Legend of Good Women. He probably knew Gower’s version in Confessio Amantis.11 There is no evidence that he had read Lydgate’s version in Reson and Sensualyte12 but it can be shown that he had perused several Elizabethan versions.
Even Ovid’s original account is a trifle absurd. The whispering through a hole in the wall, the lovers’ alacrity in suicide, the way Pyramus’ blood spurts out to stain the mulberry leaves, like water from a burst pipe, are more likely to evoke a smile than the admiration for his cleverness Ovid intended to arouse. ‘
Before Golding’s translation appeared, there was a strip-cartoon version of the story, which appeared as a border on the title-page of several books published by Tottel. One of these is More’s Dialogue of comfort against tribulacion (1553). The upper part of the picture shows a lion, with Thisbe keeping a discreet distance. To the left is a crude piece of masonry which may represent Ninus’ tomb, but seems more likely to be the wall that parted the two lovers, for it contains a slit, which Shakespeare was to call a chink or cranny. The lower part of the picture shows Thisbe bending over Pyramus’ body. The picture is very crudely drawn; nor does it seem to have any connection with More’s Dialoge, unless we assume that the lovers might have been less hasty if they had had the benefit of More’s comfort against tribulation.13
Golding is the one pre-Shakespearian version to use the word ‘cranny’:
The wall that parted house from house had riuen therein a crany Which shronke at making of the wall.
(IV. 83–4)
‘Cranny’ was also Bottom’s word for it (III. i. 62) and it was incorporated in Wall’s speech:
And this the cranny is, right and sinister,
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper.
(v. i. 162–3)
Both Golding and Shakespeare say14 that Thisbe left her mantle behind. In other versions the Ovidian ‘velamina’ becomes a ‘wimpel’ (Chaucer and Gower), a ‘kerchief,’15 and a ‘scarf.’16 In Ovid the lovers tell the wall that they are not ungrateful to it for enabling them to converse. In Golding this becomes:
And yet thou shalt not finde vs churles: we thinke our selues in det
For the same piece of courtesie, in vouching safe to let
Our sayings to our friendly eares thus freely come and goe.
(IV. 95–7)
This absurd politeness to the wall becomes in Quince’s version:
Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!
(v. i. 176)
One characteristic of Golding’s translation is the desperate prevalence of the auxiliary did, as in these lines:
This neighbrod bred acquaintance first, this neyghbrod first did
stirre
The secret sparkes, this neighbrod first an entrance in did showe,
For loue to come to that to which it afterward did growe.
(IV. 74–6)
So in Quince’s Prologue we get four dids in three lines:
This grisly beast, which Lion hight by name,
The trusty Thisby, coming first by night,
Did scare away, or rather did affright;
And as she fled, her mantle she did fall;
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.
(v. i. 138–42)
Shakespeare, however, does not make direct use of two of Golding’s most ludicrous passages. One of them describes Thisbe’s discovery of Pyramus’ body:
Alas what chaunce my Pyramus hath parted thee and mee?
Make aunswere O my Pyramus: It is thy Thisb, euen shee17
Whome thou doste loue most heartely that speaketh vnto thee.
Giue eare and rayse thy heauie heade.
(IV. 172–5)
The other describes Thisbe’s suicide:
This said, she tooke the sword yet warme with slaughter of hir
loue –
And setting it beneath hir brest, did to hir heart it shoue.18
(IV. 196–7)
Shakespeare seems to have echoed a poem on the language of flowers in Robinson’s A Handful of Pleasant Delites in Ophelia’s mad-scene; and he uses the stanza form of Thomson’s Pyramus poem in the same anthology in the laments of the lovers:
In Babilon
not long agone,
a noble Prince did dwell:
dimd ech ones sight,
so farre she did excel.
Now am I dead,
Now am I fled;
My soul is in the sky.
Tongue, lose thy light;
Moon, take thy flight.
Now die, die, die, die, die.
(v. i. 293–8)
Like Thomson, Shakespeare refers to Pyramus as a knight (v. i. 269), and the joke is pointed by Flute’s earlier question: ‘What is Thisby? a wand’ring knight?’ (I. ii. 38). Thomson likewise refers to the fatal thread of the Fates:
Oh Gods aboue, my faithfull loue
shal neuer faile this need:
For this my breath by fatall death,
shal weaue Atropos threed.
(ed. Arber, p. 32)
Douglas Bush suggested that these lines ‘may have been in Shakespeare’s mind when, in providing a tragic vehicle for Bottom, he burlesqued the theatrical heroics of an earlier age’.19 Certainly the mixed metaphor – a breath weaving a thread – makes the passage memorable; and both Pyramus and Thisbe refer to the Fates in similar terms:
O Fates! come, come;
Cut thread and thrum;
Quail, crush, conclude, and quell.
(v. i. 277–9)
O Sisters Three,
Come, come to me,
With hands as pale as milk;
Lay them in gore,
Since you have shore
With shears his thread of silk.20
(v. i. 327–32)
Thomson uses an archaic pronunciation for the sake of a rhyme:
For why he thought the Lion had,
faire Thisbie slaine.
And then the beast with his bright blade,
he slew certaine.
Peter Quince does the same thing with the same word:
This beauteous lady Thisby is certain.
(v. i. 129)
Both Thomson and Shakespeare use the expression ‘make moan’.21
Shakespeare owed less to the version of the story given in another miscellany, A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions, for that is merely dull, rather than ridiculous; but his reading of it was not entirely barren. He noticed, we may suppose, the lines describing Thisbe’s first glimpse of the cranny:
And scarcely then her pearcing looke, one blinke therof had got,
But that firme hope of good successe, within her fancy shot.
This seems to have suggested Pyramus’ line:
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne.
(v. i. 175)
The anonymous author uses the elegant variation ‘name’ and ‘hight’ in successive lines; and Quince goes one better when he speaks of ‘Lion hight by name’. Pyramus is described as ‘more fresh than flower in May’; and Shakespeare’s is described as
most lily-white of hue,
Of colour like the red rose on triumphant brier.
(III. i. 83–4)
Pyramus, reviving a moment before he dies, is called ‘The Gentilman’; and Quince assures Bottom that the character is ‘a most lovely gentleman-like man’ (I. ii. 77). The last parallel is to be found in the lines describing Thisbe’s suicide:
Then Thisbie efte, with shrike so shrill as dynned in the skye,
Swaps down in swoone, she eft reuiues, & hents the sword
hereby.
Wherwith beneath her pap (alas) into her brest shee strake,
Saying thus will I die for him, that thus dyed for my sake.
Shakespeare borrows ‘pap’ and makes it funnier by giving it to Pyramus.22
Shakespeare took very little from Chaucer’s version of the story, the only one which was not in some way ludicrous. But we may suppose that the lines, as they were then printed23
Thus wolde they sayne, alas thou wicked wal
Through thyn enuye, thou vs lettest al –
suggested the exclamation:
O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss!24
(v. i. 178)
There remains to be considered the version from which Shakespeare appears to have taken most – that contained in Thomas Mouffet’s poem, Of the Silkewormes, and their Flies. He is best known for his Theatre of Insects, written in Latin and finished in 1589. The poem on silkworms was not published until 1599, four years after A Midsummer-Night’s Dream was first staged, but it is likely to have been written some years earlier, perhaps as early as 1589. Shakespeare, we must suppose, read it in manuscript.25 The poem was written to advocate the cultivation of the silkworm in England, and the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe was relevant because silkworms feed on mulberry leaves and, according to Ovid, the fruit, white before the tragedy, was stained for ever with the blood of the lovers:
For when the frute is throughly ripe, the Berrie is bespect
With colour tending to a blacke.
Mouffet, who was ‘a godly and learned phisitian and skilful mathematician’, a distinguished naturalist, a future M.P., a member of the Countess of Pembroke’s circle, had little talent as a poet. Some of his lapses are caused by his blissful unconsciousness of ambiguities. The word bottom, for example, is the technical term for the silkworm’s cocoon, and Mouffet tells us that the ‘little creepers’ leave ‘their ouall bottoms there behind’ (p. 18). Shakespeare christened the leading actor in Quince’s company Bottom; and as the silkworm was a notable spinner, Bottom was appropriately made a weaver. Two of the fairies were linked with Mouffet’s topic by the names of Moth and Cobweb. The orange-tawny beard that Bottom offers to wear (I. ii. 83) and the orange-tawny bill of the ousel-cock in the song with which he awakens Titania (III. i. 114) recall Mouffet’s lines which describe the white moths by a process of lucus a non lucendo:26
No yellow, where there is no Iealousie …
No orenge colour, where there wants despight,
No tawny sadde, where none forsaken be.
Shakespeare did not confine his attention to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe:27 but casual echoes of other parts of the poem are less significant than the many echoes of the stanzas in which the story is told. Mouffet continually used the words ‘eke’ and ‘whereat’, and Shakespeare seems to parody this in the lines:
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade …
(v. i. 145)
Most brisky juvenal, and eke most lovely Jew.
(III. i. 85)
Mouffet uses ‘chinck’ in a later part of the poem, and ‘chinckt’ in the Pyramus part:
When night approacht, they ech bad ech adew,
Kissing their wal apart where it was chinckt,
Whence louely blasts and breathings mainly flew:
But kisses staide on eithers side fast linckt,
Seal’d to the wal with lips and Louers glue:
For though they were both thick and many eake,
Yet thicker was the wal that did them breake.
(p. II)
Shakespeare uses ‘chink’ several times, as in the line –
I see a voice; now will I to the chink –
(v. i. 190)
and Mouffet’s stanza perhaps suggested the line:
I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.
(v. i. 200)
Mouffet and Shakespeare both speak of the lion as ‘grisly’ and use ‘fell’ in the same context. It may even be suggested that Mouffet’s curious method of stating that the beast was a lioness (‘grisly wife’), together with the fact that the other versions of the story are divided about its sex, led to Snug’s comprehensive denial:
Then know that I as Snug the joiner am
A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam.
(v. i. 220–1)
Mouffet, like Shakespeare, uses the Fates and ‘quell’ in the same context; he, like Shakespeare, refers to Thisbe as ‘poor soul’ and to Pyramus as a paragon; and it may have been his description of the lovers as
Each of their sex the floure and paragon
(p. 9)
which suggested Thisbe’s comparison of Pyramus to flowers and vegetables:
These lily lips,
This cherry nose,
These yellow cowslip cheeks,
Are gone, are gone;
Lovers, make moan;
His eyes were green as leeks.
(v. i. 321–6)
But the lines also echoed Mouffet’s account of Thisbe’s reactions on encountering the body of her lover:
Her lippes grew then more pale than palest Boxe,
Her cheekes resembled Ashwood newly feld,
Graynesse surpriz’d her yellow amber locks,
Not any part their liuely lustre held.
(p. 16)
Shakespeare makes matters worse by transferring ‘yellow’ from hair to cheeks, and he adds the comparison of eyes to leeks.
The words addressed by Thisbe to the dead Pyramus –
Speake loue, O speake, how hapned this to thee?
Part, halfe, yea all of this my soule and mee.
Sweete loue, reply, it is thy Thisbe deare,
She cries, O heare, she speakes, O answere make:
Rowse vp thy sprights: these heavie lookers cheere –
(p. 16)
are parodied by Shakespeare in ‘O Pyramus, arise,/Speak, speak’ (v. i. 317–18) and in Bottom’s words when he wants to play the part of Thisbe:
Ah Pyramus, my lover dear! Thy Thisby dear, and lady dear!
(I. ii. 45–6)
and the absurd Mouffet phrase ‘those heauie lookers cheere’ contributed to Bottom’s lines:
That liv’d, that lov’d, that lik’d, that look’d with cheer.
(v. i. 286)
In Golding’s version of Pyramus’ suicide, the pipe is cracked accidentally:
As when a Conduite pipe is crackt, the water bursting out
Doth shote itself a great way off and pierce the Ayre about.
(IV. 147–9)
But in Mouffet’s account the pipes are deliberately pierced:
Then falling backward from the crimsin floud,
Which spowted forth with such a noyse and straine,
As water doth, when pipes of lead or wood,
Are goog’d with punch, or cheesill slit in twaine,
Whistling in th’ayre, and breaking it with blowes,
Whilst heauie moysture vpward forced flowes.
(p. 14)
This is closer to Quince’s line, with the significant word ‘broached’:
He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast.
(v. i. 146)
Finally it may be suggested that the idea of Bottom’s transformation may have come from Mouffet’s lines:
Transforme thy selfe into a Courser braue,
(What cannot loue transforme it selfe into?)
Feede in her walkes….
(p. 7)
This is distantly echoed in Titania’s instructions to her attendant fairies: ‘Hop in his walks’.28
Even this does not exhaust the probable sources of the Pyramus interlude. It is described as
A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth.
(v. i. 56–7)
It looks as though Shakespeare was referring to Cambises which is described on the title-page as ‘A lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth’; and, sure enough, if we examine Preston’s play, we find that Shakespeare may have delved there too. In the prologue we hear of the fate of Cyrus: ‘But he, when sisters three had wrought, to shere his vitall thred’. A mother laments her son in words that have been compared with Thisbe’s lament; and the boy’s lips, ‘silk soft and pleasant white’ may have suggested the lily lips of Pyramus.29 A study of the tragical mirth of Quince’s interlude throws considerable light on the way many different sources fused in Shakespeare’s mind.
It is possible, of course, that all the versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe story, which Shakespeare had read over the years, coalesced in his mind without his being aware of the contributing factors; but it seems more likely that he consulted them all during the actual composition of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. One purpose, no doubt, of the performance of Quince’s company was to show that lovers cannot rely on the intervention of Oberon or Puck to save them from the consequences of their irrationality. A second purpose was to arouse hearty laughter by exhibiting the absurdities of amateur actors. A third purpose was to show intelligent members of the audience that Romeo and Juliet, written about the same time, was an unsatisfactory tragedy because it depended too much on a series of accidents. A fourth purpose, akin to that of Nashe in his retelling of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in comic style, was to amuse a sophisticated audience by the contrast between the burlesque and the original. A fifth purpose, for which almost any play would have served, was to provide an occasion for various reflections on the relation of life to art, actors being shadows and life a dream.30 Lastly, Shakespeare had compiled a kind of anthology of bad poetry as a vehicle of criticism. Quince’s play serves to satirize not merely the crude mingling of tragedy and comedy still prevalent in 1595 in the lower levels of popular drama – and in Quince’s defence it could be argued that his comedy is unintentional – but also many of the absurd faults of style into which the poetasters of the age were liable to fall. By a beautiful piece of artistic economy, Shakespeare was able to cull his choice blooms of absurdity, not from the vast stores of bad poetry available to him, but from all the best-known versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe story. In this respect, as well as in its celebration of married love, the play must have delighted the private audience of wedding guests before whom it was first performed.31