Individuation in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Abstract

For many playgoers, Demetrius's groggy judgment upon the Athenian lovers' nightmare in the dark wood-These things seem small and undistinguishable, /Like far-off mountains turned into cloudshas captured the metamorphic quality of the most popular of Shakespeare's early comedies.1 In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the effect of repeated transformations, whether of a western into a magical pansy, or of a weaver into an ass, is a certain haziness not only in the characters' minds but in those of viewers as well. Such metamorphoses and resulting uncertainty of mind work against one meaning of individuation-the unique, clearly delineated thisness or thatness of a given object or idea. By all accounts, Romantic and Victorian audiences valued this blurring of identities, for, in their minds, it made possible that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play. And yet many details of A Midsummer Night's Dream confirm the importance of individuation for Shakespeare's design. When Oberon, for example, tells Puck that he shall know the youth disdaining Helena the Athenian garments he hath on (II. i. 264), a lapse in individuation plunges the four lovers into their erotic Walpurgisnacht. Lysander's Grecian garb qualifies him, in Robin Goodfellow's eyes, for the juice of the magical flower meant for Demetrius; evidently fairies, at least Elizabethan fairies, do not fully grasp the need for differentiating social dress and appearance.2 The comic blunder, however, implies that such differences are important in this early comedy. After all, Lysander's original love for Hermia is greater than that of Demetrius, even as his fortunes have the vantage over those of the latter youth (I. i. 99-102). Significantly, a breakdown of individuation lies at the heart of the play's central conflict. Until Oberon and Titania's brawl is settled, the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta-or of any of the Athenian loverswould be ill-advised, simply because the Nature disturbed by the fairies' quarrel remains hostile to happiness. Thus possession of the Indian boy who sparks Oberon and Titania's feud becomes the key to overall comic