Comedy and Cruelty in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Undercurrent of Injustice and Violence in Shakespeare's Fairy World

Oct 20, 2008

The prevalence of the fairies in human society in A Midsummer Night's Dream create comedy but also a real feeling of cruelty and injustice. How should we react to this?

Shakespeare goes out of his way to show that the comic fairy-folk society in the play can be just as cruel and unjust as the hierarchical anti-comic society, and this very often involves some kind of emotional cruelty culminating in a threat of physical violence.

The safe comedy is left behind upon entering the woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We now encounter threats of suicide, duels and similar activities due to emotional confusion. The controlling forces her are the amoral fairies who find mortals foolish.

Interference of the Fairies

Oberon was not meant to interfere with the mortals but does when he happens to overhear Demetrius and Helena quarrelling. Although Oberon has good intentions when he sends Puck to anoint Demetrius’ eyes with the love juice, the lovers all suffer due to Oberon’s ambiguous directions to Puck.

The human world remains out of control emotionally because Oberon is preoccupied with his revenge on Titania. This allows for emotional cruelty which is inflicted on, for example, Helena, who believes Lysander is mocking her when he tells her that he loves her. The pain she suffers is intensified when Demetrius also says the same.

None of them realise they are the victims of a fairy mistake which succeeds in creating chaos. For Helena the emotional injustice is all the greater as Demetrius now seems to be cruelly mocking her, although he loved her once and she still loves him.

Revenge – Psychological Brutality in the Romantic Comedy

Revenge in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedy can be pushed too far to make it fully enjoyable for an audience. The comic situation becomes reductive and dehumanising as people lose their control and are unaware of themselves. This kind of disturbance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is caused through the trouble in the top ranks of the fairies and filters down to the very bottom of the human world. Shakespeare demonstrates here, as in his tragedies, how abusing authority can have a widespread effect.

Arguments between Oberon and Titania over the servant boy set in motion a chain of events which are malicious and inflicted on both Titania and Bottom by Oberon. This is a different view of the fairies from the one we, as a modern audience, expect but popular superstitions in Elizabethan times had given to the fairies both goodwill and evil. Therefore, cruely by them is not altogether unexpected.

The revenge Oberon exacts on Titania is brutal. It appears that he is in the wrong from the start, as Titania charges him with various problems in the natural world which were a result of his constant arguments. Because of Titania’s refusal to hand over the boy, Oberon says:

This seems rather petty but nevertheless, Oberon causes Titania’s infatuation with Bottom wearing his ass’s head, thereby taking advantage of Bottom own unawareness of his situation.

The Amoral Nature of the Fairy

The fairy outsider, Puck, is involved in the cruelty and injustice prevalent in this play. Puck is an amoral fairy and has the least reason to cause chaos and pain, taking it upon himself, instead, to make mischief. Indeed, the woodland fairy lists the problems he has caused due to his other mischievous interferences. However, he is not an avenger. As Linda Anderson states, Puck is no able to be wronged as he cannot, as an amoral fairy, feel pain.

Nevertheless, Puck makes mistakes. His aggravation to the lives of four lovers and to poor Bottom cannot be forgotten because they are the incidents from which the action stems. Puck’s amoral cruelty is emphasised wholeheartedly when he appears to the audience to be enjoying his mistakes, calling them a sport.

The fairy world, therefore, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been created by Shakespeare to mirror the chaos caused over love in the human world. This chaos, of course, is blamed on the fairies, which allows Shakespeare to justify it through comedy. But the undercurrent of cruelty within the magical world is far from comic and leaves an audience with an unsettling view of the comic world. And how a modern or an Elizabethan audience reacts to the cruelty would affect its enjoyment of the comic element. How do you react?

Footnote

All quotations taken from: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare – Complete Works, OUP, 1986

Bibliography

Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice, Associated University Presses Inc, 1987

G Bevier, Shakespeare’s Antagonistic Comedy, Associated University Presses Inc, 1993

Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies, Macmillan, 1986.

The copyright of the article Comedy and Cruelty in A Midsummer Night's Dream in British/UK Fiction is owned by Claire Cowling. Permission to republish Comedy and Cruelty in A Midsummer Night's Dream in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.