Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Against Chaucer's “The Knight's Tale”

Abstract

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s most Chaucerian play. Despite disagreement about degree, there can be no doubt that Shakespeare was drawing on the Knight’s Tale for structure, characters, dream-vision and so on. However, Shakespeare cannot be simply regarded as a debtor of Chaucer’s literary legacy. He was an critical interpretor of Chaucer’s tale through his own point of view and style. Shakespeare in his play heightens the irony implicit in Chaucer’s tale to produce the lightest and gayest satire on the storyteller, the Knight, and his ideal role-model, Theseus. Taking the cue from Theseus’s rationalism, Shakespeare emphasizes the importance and the role of imagination, which appears to drive the play into the state of disorder and chaos. Shakespeare shows that the imagination functions to break though the intractable categories and beliefs posited by reason into a new way of seeing and appreciating the world. Discarding the rational dichotomy whereby an adherence to reason is the only way of overcoming disorder and chaos, Shakespeare points out the imagination as a force which is able to free people from the tyranny of reason and from a single-minded vision of the world. In addition, it eventually plays the role of transforming disorder and chaos into universal concord and harmony in the play. Another way to heighten the satire against the Knight’s Tale, Shakespeare humanized his deities, brought them down to earth to sport with and even fall in love with the mortals. Shakespeare was at pains to emphasize the testy relationship of Titania and Oberon and their marital infidelity. Moreover, the lovers in Shakespeare’s play are portrayed as more lively, noisy, articulate, and even passionate, compared with those, including Emily who looks like an inert flower-maiden. Above all, unlike the Knight in Chaucer’s tale, Shakespeare deliberately explored Theseus’s darker side. Shakespeare assigned Theseus an erotic activity far more specific and damaging. His reputation surrounding sexual betrayal and death disturbs the calm surface of the dream, in spite of his ideal vision of rationalism. Ironically, a feeling of reconciliation and a spiritual order are not imposed by Theseus, but by supernatural agents and even Bottom whose power of imagination superficially seems to cause sorrow and disorder in the play.