Allegory In Midsummer Night's Dream

THE ALLEGORY IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is only superficially a comic fairy story. it was written as a religious allegory, a well established Elizabethan literary device. Part of it was detected by Dr. Patricia Parker, professor of English at Stanford, who is a leading expert on this play. She has shown that the character of Puck is an allegory for the devil (the names Puck and Robin Goodfellow are both English names for the devil). Peter Quince derives his names from the Greek and Norman French words for Rocky Cornerstone, and represents Saint Peter. The characters in the Mechanicals’ entertainment, Pyramus and Thisbe, which come out of a story by Ovid, are a standard and well known allegory for Jesus and the Church. Jesus dies for love of the Church, so Pyramus dies for the love of Thisbe. But what about Jesus returning from heaven on the Last Day? Supposedly, the reason why Jesus was delayed in returning to unite with the Church was that a Partition divided heaven from earth. That Partition, which comes down on the Last Day is the “wittiest partition” played by Wall. So the Wall finally comes down, allowing Bottom/ Pyramus/Jesus to come back to embrace his bride, on the Day of Apocalypse. However it goes terribly wrong. Both die. And John Hudson shows that the way that Pyramus/Jesus dies is that he gets crucified again. In his death scene Pyramus is stabbed in the side, the light disappears, and there is a reference to dice playing “die,die,die”. The little scene is sandwiched in between two mentions of the word Passion, alluding very clearly to the Passion Story, which is the Church term for the death of Jesus. Then Thisbe enters as the Church, comically

praising Pyramus for having eyes as green as leeks and so on. This is not a reverential account; it is a satirical parody. But there is more. If some of these characters come from first century Judea, then what about the others? In another Shakespearean play Judea was a synonym for India. So what about the King, Oberon, who has come from India? He is an invisible, jealous, Lord. That corresponds with G-d in Exodus, and some of his lines come from the solar Psalms. Was the Hebrew G-d fighting a war in the first century? Indeed he was, against Titus Caesar. Is that who Titania represents in a pun on Titus/Titania? And does Titania’s instruction to cut off the waxen thighs of the bees parallel a strange episode in the writings of Josephus in which Titus ordered that a Jewish leader, whose family all have Maccabean names, be “pruned”. Is this another pun, on bee/Maccabee? And what of the little Judean boy, whose mother is a virgin (a votress), and stolen away from the G-d of the Jews and turned into a changeling, who is crowned with (thorny) flowers. Is this changeling actually the messiah, and is this an allegorical reference to what Titus Caesar actually did at the end of the Roman-Jewish War to turn the messiah into the pro-Roman literary figure of Jesus in the Gospel? John Hudson argues that the Gospel appears in the play as the purple colored ‘flower’ (an Elizabethan term meaning a book), which is associated with idleness (idolatry), which fills people with “hateful fantasies” and makes Titania fall in love with Bottom/Jesus—in the guise of an ass. The playwright is comically giving Titus a taste of his own hateful fantasy, in a wonderful example of Marrano humor.