Verse forms and prose dialogues of the play

Where dialogue is not in the form of narrative, description or comment (that is, most of the time) it carries the action of the play. Thus, in the first scene Egeus and Demetrius demand a favourable judgement, Hermia asks what her options are but shows her seriousness, Theseus plays for time, the lovers resolve to flee from Athens and inform Helena who decides to betray them. The action of the next scene, as the mechanicals prepare their play, is far less schematic: all are on stage for the whole scene, and each tries to help the common purpose, although Quince at first and subsequently Bottom have more to say.

To clarify what can be a confusing play, Shakespeare has used more variety in the form of the dialogue than in most plays. Indeed, the amount of dialogue which is in rhyme is only exceeded by the earlier comedy Love’s Labours Lost. In the Dream blank verse frequently gives way to rhymed couplets or more elaborate stanza forms, but is used for moments of high seriousness, where the use of rhyme gives a lighter effect. Good examples of this use of blank verse would be in the middle part of 1.1, where Theseus tests the seriousness of Hermia’s love for Lysander, 4.1, before Bottom wakes, and Theseus’s “lunatic…lover…poet” speech in 5.1. But the best example comes in 2.1. Puck and the fairy have been speaking in couplets; their talk is of the homely pranks which Puck plays, and this comes after the brief account of Oberon’s and Titania’s quarrel. Thus, the change of mood from the light-hearted couplets about Puck’s practical jokes to the angry opposition of the fairy king and queen is perfectly tritium by the opening outburst: “Ill met by moonlight”. We will find similar transitions elsewhere, often switching from blank verse to the couplet to accelerate the action. At the end of 3.2, the two young women speak in matching six-line stanzas, while Oberon uses the same tetrameter line (twice the rhyme goes beyond a couplet) for giving love-in-idleness and later its antidote (2.2, 26-33; 3.2, 102-109 and 4.1, 70-73). The pentameter couplet is well-suited to the low comedy of Puck’s pranks (2.1, 42 ff.) as it is to his account at the start of 3.2, of how his mistress “with a monster is in love”. The same line used earnestly with no trace of irony shows how ridiculous are the protestations of love for Helena made variously by Lysander (“Transparent Helena! Nature shows art,/That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart”) and Demetrius (“O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!/To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?”). Here the line is used mechanically but it can be used more fluently, as in Oberon’s pastoral lyric (“I know a bank etc.”), by Titania (“Out of this wood do not desire to go”) and by Hermia (“Now I but chide, but I should use thee worse,/For thou, I fear, hast given me cause to curse”). We note, however, that as the young lovers’ dissension moves to passion and the threat of violence, the playwright returns to blank verse. After Puck has safely separated the antagonists, the impending resolution is shown by the return to rhymed verse: the two men speak in couplets, though Puck supplies whole or half lines; the two women speak in a six line stanza form (which, interestingly is used in successive speeches by Lysander and Helena, in 3.2, just after Puck’s “Lord, what fools these mortals be”) and Puck concludes the scene with a song: “On the ground/Sleep sound etc.” What is striking is how the same formal line, such as the couplet, is used to such varied dramatic effect: Puck’s homely account of mischief, the exaggerated passion of the young men or the beautiful lyricism of Oberon’s description of Titania’s bower. The tetrameter, always rhymed, usually in couplets, is used with less variety and only by the fairies: in the theatre it quickly comes to suggest to the audience a sense of magical activity, and it is the dominant verse form at the end of the play’s last two acts. This line is used as Oberon and Titania “rock the ground whereon these sleepers be” and as they “sing and bless this place”, and it is the line used by Puck as he addresses the audience at the play’s conclusion.[8]

It is a mistake to think that prose, in Shakespeare’s plays is simply the limited speech of uneducated or “low” characters. (Apart from Theseus, Hamlet, Prince Hal [in Henry IV, part i] and Romeo all speak sometimes in prose). The idea that prose is a homogeneous indicator of class is not supported by this play, where a great variety of prose forms is used. Interestingly, even the great Theseus, addressing the mechanicals at the end of their performance puts them at ease by speaking in sober but witty well-balanced prose: “Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed”. As the nobles watch Pyramus and Thisbe they engage in bewildering word games: “Not so, my lord, for his valour cannot carry his discretion; and the fox carries the goose”…”His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his valour; for the goose carries not the fox”, as well as plain comment: “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.” Humorous errors arise out of misuse of language: “He goes but to see a voice…”, especially the malapropism: “there we may rehearse most obscenely” or “he comes to disfigure…the person of Moonshine”. But the theatrical possibilities of prose are best shown in Bottom’s soliloquy at the end of 4.1. In the confusion of Bottom’s attempt to explain his “vision” and his garbled allusion to St. Paul, as in his perfectly inappropriate idea that his “dream” will be written by Quince as a ballad, called “Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom”, even more inappropriately to be sung at Thisbe’s death – here Bottom achieves a fantastical lyricism which matches anything that has gone before, and, because he is attempting to describe what is deeply puzzling, the confusion of his account perfectly corresponds to the confusion of what he has experienced: “…man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had”.[9]