If Faustus dramatizes Calvinist cosmology, my first chapter treats A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a cosmology based on the theology of Richard Hooker. Rather than the tragedy Faustus locates in the paradoxical mixture of voluntarism and...
moreIf Faustus dramatizes Calvinist cosmology, my first chapter treats A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a cosmology based on the theology of Richard Hooker. Rather than the tragedy Faustus locates in the paradoxical mixture of voluntarism and predestination, Midsummer is a comedy grounded in Hooker’s assumption of God’s rationality expressed as love and the enabling of creaturely virtue (Spinks 111-112). For Hooker the universe is structured according to a hierarchy of laws, including the laws of reason, nature, and scripture; crucially, ritual practice is embedded in these general laws and is part of the ordinary functioning of the universe. This universe, therefore, is anything but arbitrary. Following Peter Lake’s analysis of the trends within the Elizabethan church Hooker was responding to, particularly a Calvinist stress on predestination and a quietist approach to ritual practice (Lake 145-6), I begin by locating these trends in the interference of Duke Theseus and Egeus, sovereign and father, with the marriage plans of the young lovers Hermia and Lysander. This reading is possible because the play frames the problems of marriage and love as metonyms for the problems of free will, predestination, and grace in relationship to religious ritual.
This reading of Athenian patriarchy pits a Calvinist political theology against the natural world outside Athens and the play’s enchanted fairies. The “hiccups” Poole alludes to in Hooker’s theorization of natural law generate the metaphysical structure of the play; the most prominent hiccups are fertility’s uncertain relationship to lunar influence and the fairies’ unpredictable magic. The fairies are partly legible as theatrical allegorizations of natural processes, but their chaotic agency and appeal to higher powers makes them more than that. Against the natural or astral determinism that Faustus attacks in his final scene, the natural world of Midsummer is decidedly irregular; yet whereas the arbitrariness of cosmic structure made it meaningless for Faustus, the constrained unpredictability of nature in Midsummer creates its significance. By making love and fertility unpredictable but not completely arbitrary the play suggests they may be read as visible signs of grace, an extension of the traditional definition of the sacraments. Marriage’s reformation from sacrament to institution and the complex echoes of its sacramental origin still present in English custom and law make marriage the ideal test-case for a Hookerian understanding of ritual’s relationship to nature.
Ritual is therefore one way Midsummer’s fairies can be distinguished from Faustus’s metaphysical demons. The fairies are located in space and time and sometimes act through evidently natural means (their love-potions have precise floral origins). But though their internal arguments can ramify into natural disorder, they do not cause this disorder directly. Instead Titania’s speech culminating in the anger of “the moon, governess of floods” (2.1.103) describes natural disorder’s inextricable but obscurely acausal connection to disturbances of both human and fairy rituals. In other words, this particular occasion of natural order is only a large-scale case of a more general ambiguity in the functioning of ritual, which, like nature, only sometimes works as intended. Along with the fairies’ awareness of higher levels of existence – for example in their allusions to Venus and Cupid – their own dependance on unpredictable ritual expresses the limitations of fairy power. Whereas in Faustus ritual, pace the neoplatonist magicians, was meaningless ceremony, in Midsummer meaningful but unreliable ritual is everywhere.
While the fairies may offer something of an explanation for human ritual, their own use of ritual with its own unpredictable results means that their explanatory power is only partial. They cannot therefore be considered as merely theatrical allegories; their one moment of frame-breaking, the metamorphosis of Bottom, is the exception or Hookerian “hiccup” which proves the rule. Though this metamorphosis and other aspects of the fairies are Ovidian, they are in Ovidian in different sense than Faustus’s demons. In other words, the phenomenology Poole describes can apply equally well to both plays, but with quite different metaphysical or theological underpinnings. In particular, Faustus’s tension between predestination and voluntarism can be accommodated by Midsummer’s treatment of ritual. Because fairy ritual in Midsummer is only partly predictable, it can accommodate the tension Nicholas Tyacke has identified between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists over the relationship between predestinatory and sacramental grace. Fairies are agents of both nature and grace, but though they can directly affect the will (like Faustus’s God but unlike Faustus’s demons) with their love-potions they can preserve both apparent human and divine freedom by virtue of their unpredictability.
While the play locates its understanding of natural irregularity primarily in the moon and fertility, and uses natural irregularity to theorize how rituals can be partly efficacious, it also considers how ritual can be used to tame social discord. I argue that the play tempers its Hookerian understanding of ritual efficacy with a Pauline treatment of religious adiaphora (things indifferent to scripture) that associates different attitudes towards ritual practice with different degrees of spiritual maturity. While examples are distributed throughout the play, the most striking are the heterogeneous responses to the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Through a series of allusions to controversies over ritual practice and the myth’s own Christianization in the Ovid moralisé tradition, the play-within-a-play presents theatre as a form of religious ritual which, due to general uncertainty about ritual efficacy, can be at once sacramental or merely edifying to various participants – as long as it avoids giving offense. But the truly spiritual, the play suggests following St. Paul’s elaboration of Christian liberty, are not offended so easily; the can interpret away potentially misleading material signs when necessary.
In an ideologically complex strategy of compensation, the play suggest that its female characters (human women or gendered fairies) are in this sense generally spiritually superior its males, and that this spirituality may help them endure the offenses associated with their social subordination. The play therefore adopts the quietist view of Christian liberty which defines freedom with respect to ritual practice while preserving the subjugation of women and servants. Yet this spirituality also allows women, as they mature, to transcend the narcissistic desire for material likeness evident in the intense, near-identification of Hermia and Helena, and to accept more substantial differences in their older friendships – for example that of Titania and her Indian votaress, a friendship between a fairy queen and her mortal servant. Unlike Faustus’s intense homonormativity, narcissism, and desire for transubstantiation, the superior “spirituality” of the women in Midsummer is not a question of their substance, but, again following St. Paul, a question of their attitude towards ritual and society, manifesting in a superior capacity for friendship.
Again, in the play’s treatment of the social role of ritual, Bottom’s “translation” is the exception that proves the rule. Bottom’s humility and eventual restoration to his human shape contrasts with Faustus’s alignment of transubstantiation and an antisocial desire for uniqueness. Bottom’s theatrical impulse, however inept, is towards charity and social unity. Bottom views the aesthetic constructs of the theatre as socially salutary rituals that even in misfiring are controlled by a theological discourse that allows offense to be interpreted away. This understanding of art is incompatible with Faustus’s view of it as an aesthetic distraction from invisible grace or inevitable damnation; theatre in Midsummer is either easily neutralizable or edifying, if not sacramental. This understanding of theatre is possible because its efficacy (like all ritual, according to Hooker) is metonymically linked with lunar influence through their common effects on the imagination. Puck and Oberon’s verbal juxtapositions of fruitfulness and imagination when discussing the lovers’ dream-like experience in the woods, and again in the epilogue discussing the audience’s experience in the theatre, presents these two domains of experience as fungible. In both cases, these pseudo-dramatists aim to contain the negative feelings produced by bad or offensive ritual by simply interpreting them away as dreams. Rather than Faustus’s polarization of art against excrementality, in Midsummer artistic ritual, when misfiringly infertile, is at worst inoffensively neutral.
Midsummer thus is legible as a local response to Calvinist cosmology, which works by partly reversing the nominalist/voluntarist uncertainties that motivate Faustus; it reconstructs a meaningful cosmology. In a recent historiographical review of Max Weber’s thesis of the Reformation’s “disenchantment of the world,” Alexandra Walsham argues for more local attention to processes of “desacralization and resacralization” (“Reformation”); comparison of these two plays can help make Walsham’s point. In Faustus, in a supposedly strictly Calvinist universe, demons are (equally supposedly) all-powerful and unbound by natural laws; in Midsummer, a much less Calvinist work, fairies are everywhere but identified with a precariously regular nature.
