The Politics of Vision and Love

                       

The Politics of Vision and Love in Midsummer Night’s dream

In an essay on Shakespeare Frank Kermode acknowledges that “the [Shakespeare] conversation must go on somehow, for when there is nothing more to say about the book the book dies, and the parasitical criticism dies with it”. It is this somewhat artificially sustained academic conversation about an author who has been so deeply and intensely studied that breeds into one a slight fit of doubt whether anything new and exciting could be added to the vast volume of Shakespeare criticism. Bearing it in mind, I have decided to let my own close-reading suggest the textual problems that would require interpretation in an attempt to stray away from simply echoing other people’s work.

Love is a centralling force in Midsummer Night’s Dream - being the power that is requisite for unity and coherence it brings characters and even paralleling realms together. An autonomous presence, it can transform, breed dignity and empower all, without the succor of the senses. In a much quoted remark, the play professes that “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, | And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” ( I, 1, l.234-235) illustrating love as a self-sustaining force free of the visual. But a close-reading of the text reveals a tension of textual inconsistency – the initiation and sustaining of love is closely linked to the idea of vision, of seeing the object of love.  Whether characters are spell-bound or not, they seem to rely on the visual act in order for the love-act to be initiated. Just as the play’s action moves from the human world to the non-human world of the fairies, so do the origins of love fluctuate between the sensual and extra-sensual, initiating a suspension of any definite resolution. 

            The problematics of vision are hinted right from the beginning of the play in Act I when Hermia, in an adamant reprobation of her father’s attempts to marry her to Demetrius, states she would rather have Egeus look at Lysander the way she sees him:

                                    Hermia

                                    I would my father looked but with my eyes

                                    Theseus

                                    Rather your eyes must with his judgement look.

                                                                                                            ( I, 1, l.56-57)

Through her sustained declaration of her love and Theseus’s insistence on adopting her father’s vision there surfaces an importance of seeing which signals an interplay between the sensual and the extra-sensual. This textual interest is pursued throughout the play and sustained in the themes of vision, love, dream and reality.

            A first reading of the play renders a traditional understanding of it as being a comedy in which characters’ love and devotion is put through a series of trials and in the end everything comes to a clear resolution and stability, both personal and social, is again achieved. But one has to allow for a thematic reconsideration upon a second reading. The episodes in the forest, the inhuman world where magic happens, bring forth evidence that the enfolding of the very play hinges upon the physical act of seeing. Oberon, after quarrelling with Titania sends Robin to fetch him the purple flower of “love-in-idleness”. He states that he knows the flower exists because while sitting on a promontory:

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,

Flying between the cold moon and the earth

                                        Cupid, all armed […]

But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft

Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon

And the imperial vot’ress passed on

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet I marked where the bolt of Cupid fell.

(I, 2,  l.155-157; 161-165)

In only ten lines the act of seeing is mentioned three times. While arithmetic on its own is not much of an unquestionable evidence, it still helps to illustrate the  importance the texts attaches to the visual perception. When we also consider that Oberon is the key figure who, in a puppeteer manner, pulls the strings of the play’s action by initiating the spell-bounding of Lysander, Demetrius and Titania’s vision, we can tentatively suggest that ‘seeing’ is, afterall, a structural and thematic centre around which the play is construed.  Moreover, we read of Robin, acting upon the orders of Oberon, pouring the juice from the magic purple flower into the eyes of Lysander and Titania thus making them fall in love with the first person that happens to pass in front of them. This is, in effect, an altering of visual perception, that sends characters into a frenzy of devotion which is no less strong that the love they experienced before being spell-bound. When Lysander answers Helena’s reminders of his love towards Hermia he says :

                                           Lysander

                                           I had no judgment when to her I swore

                                           Helena

               Nor none, in my mind, now you give her o’er.

(III, 2, l.134-135)

We, unlike Lysander and Helena, are aware of the bewitching that has been initiated by Oberon but despite our knowledge the text makes us question the true origins of true love. For it seems that old love could easily give way to a newly perceived one. Furthermore, in Lysander’s confession of loss of judgment lies a tacit questioning of the credibility of this very same judgment for we do not know for sure when did Lysander have a sound judgment. Cupid is blind and love is in the mind but it looks as if the mind can not be trusted wholly. The play seems to gravitate between sensual and extra-sensual origins of love as evidenced by the textual interplay of love-in-vision and love-in-mind.

            The scene in which Titania awakes to find herself in love with Bottom also vividly attests for the inconsistency of love’s origin. Hearing Bottom sing she awakes and declares that her “eye [is] enthralled to thy shape; […] | On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee” (III, 1, l.132-134) Her affection rises from the  perception of the senses, first from hearing than from seeing. Bottom answers that he hardly believes her but “reason and love keep little company” lately. ( III, 1, l.137) He recognizes that love can not be bred, nor understood from the activity of the mind but at the same time denies the possibility of love originating from sight. His insistence on the futility of reasoning is echoed upon his awakening in act IV when he mentions that he has had a “most rare vision” that no man can understand, nor can relate, a dream that is incomprehensible entirely and is out of the reach of man’s consciousness. Bottom with his dream-like experiences epitomizes the problematic of vision, reason and love.

            Lastly, one has to consider the play within Midsummer Night’s Dream. In act V we are presented with another story of Thisbe and Pyramus, separated by the wall between their fathers’ domains and thus not able to meet, to see each other. They communicate through a chink and Pyramus confesses he can only “hear my Thisbe’s face” (V, 1, l.192) We then read of their unfortunate attempt at eloping which ended with both stabbing themselves. In a last swing of the thematic pendulum, the text offers an explanation of love as beyond the sensual – the lovers never actually see one another, Pyramus sees the bloody mantle of Thisbe before stabbing himself and she only sees his dead body. Furthermore, the whole scene in which the play is enacted is full of excuses on behalf of the acting “mechanicals” who constantly address the public by reminding them that what they are seeing is not real – the lion is not a lion, and neither is the wall a true wall. Touching upon this problem of mimesis, the play in act V instead of introducing a conclusion it further accentuates the politics of vision and love in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s text is riddled with themes that fluctuate between each other – a thematic pendulum that never ceases its motion in swinging between love-in-mind an love-in-vision. Stating that one’s love is bred by the activity of the mind, the text goes on to undermine its own initial assumption and show an indecisiveness in the origins of love as sensual or extra-sensual. In the end, the play within the play illustrates the issues of accurate representation and comprehension, either through vision or mind, thus suspending any final resolution on the politics of vision and love.

Quoted works :

Kermode, Frank. Writing about Shakespeare, London Review of Books, Vol.21, No. 24, 1999

Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Vol 2, OUP, 1987