A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of Things

Abstract

HE complex and subtle intellectuality of Shakespeare's comic art was never better illustrated than by A Midsummer Night's Dream and, in particular, by Shakespeare's employment of the fairies in that play. Not only are they obviously the most striking feature of the comedy; intellectually they are the most provocative, too. By intruding the fictive worlds of Ovid and English folklore into the doings of the nobles and the workmen of Athens, they pose open-ended questions about illusion and reality, existence and art to, those willing to press beyond the older interpretation of the play as a charming theatrical fantasy or a comic medley or a burlesque. Such puzzles have occupied so much recent critical attention that this comedy, once rather generally dismissed as a piece of fluff, is now more likely to 'be read as a study in the epistemology of the imagination.1 And this tendency seems justified. The fairies are a continual and unavoidable reminder of a certain indefiniteness in the world of the play-an indefiniteness culminating in the suggestion by the fairy prankster Puck that the play itself may have only been a dream: If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumb'red here / While these visions did appear (V. i. 430-33) 2 With that final insinuation, the frame