A Midsummer Night’s Dream garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Garden

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, Will Shakespeare, include some forty-five different plants, more than any other play you have. The gardeners have chosen to plant almost all white flowers. This makes them easier to be seen at night, and also reflects the magical, moonlight mood that prevails in the forest where most of the play takes place. The forest can amaze with its beauties, and it is also also a place of fickle change, mischance, and danger. I begin several plays in a settled place and then move to a forest: As You Like It, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merry Wives of Windsor.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there are two courts: the human court, and the faery court. The human court represents law and order. This is where Theseus’s marriage to Hippolyta is to take place; he is marrying the Amazon queen to bring her within those bounds. It is inside the forest that we meet the faery court.

Perhaps you have not lived close by an old forest and learned to know it well. I have; and I can tell you: it is not merely trees upon trees and little else. Mingled among all the different kinds of trees are many burrs and briars, many ferns and flowers, and open places, and Faery. The hawthorn planted in the middle of this garden is a tree much valued of the faery folk.

For us the forest was a known place, but that did not mean it was safe; in it dwelt the very essence of wildness. In Midsummer Night’s Dream I created a faery realm where misrule and wantonness are ever just under the next tree, and time dances freely, as if the sun sets at midsummer and it could rise ecstatically on the morning of May Day. The forest’s King of Faery, Oberon, is angry with the Faery Queen, Titania; so he plots to trick her, sending his servant Puck, called also by the name Robin Goodfellow, for a magical flower. Its juice, laid upon the eyes, creates change and chaos.

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower.

The whole play turns upon what this one flower plucked by Puck can do. In one breath Oberon tells Puck that Cupid’s arrow has dyed this white flower “purple with love’s wound”; and in the next he explains: “maidens call it love-in-idleness.” This flower is our common pansy, also known as heart’s-ease. Its juice on the eyes “will make man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees”. Is this magical spell touching but one flower in all the world? Is it the very nature of the forest? or is all that merely the yearly influence of midsummer or the merry month of May? Truly nothing in Faery is plain or simple.

Puck daubs not only the eyes of the Faery Queen, but also the eyes of one of the court lovers, Lysander. He has fallen asleep, deeply wearied by the fleeing through the forest in the company of his heart’s dear love, and wakes, sees, and loves another woman entirely. The court lovers chase each other through the forest, baffled to understand who loves whom.

The amorous turmoil spreads to sow confusion among a band of tradesmen as they rehearse a play that they hope to present at the wedding celebration at court. As a prank, Puck transforms the head of one of them, Bottom, into the head of an ass; and when the Faery Queen wakes in her bower, she is straightway enamored of him, ass’s head and all. She summons some of the faeries who attend her; two of them are named for plants, Peaseblossom and Mustardseed. She tells them to wait upon Bottom, to

Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.

These are the sweet foods of the faery dream. But the kitchen plants are still there too. Come the light of morning, Bottom is once more wearing his own head, and he admonishes his fellow players to ready themselves to address the court:

And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for
we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but
to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy.

 I hope that you too find A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be a sweet comedy.