Rhetoric, patterning and wordplay of Shakespeare’s heroes in the play

In the Dream Shakespeare makes frequent use of formal rhetorical devices. An extensive list of these with their names is found in the Arden edition (pp. xlv-li). As many of these are over-wrought they are often used as expressions of the young lovers’ exaggerated passion. Hermia’s vow (1.1, 169 and following) has a series of phrases beginning identically: “…by Cupid’s strongest bow,/By his best arrow with the golden head,/By the simplicity of Venus’ doves,/By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves…”

Repetition and inversion abound, and frequently one character picks up a key word from another’s speech: “You both are rivals and love Hermia/And now both rivals to mock Helena” (3.2, 155-6; “I would my father look’d but with my eyes.”…”Rather your eyes must with his judgement look” (1.1, 56-7). We have lines which begin and end with the same word: “Weigh oath with oath, and you will nothing weigh” (3.2, 131), puns “For lying so, Hermia, I do not lie” (2.2, 51) and aphorisms (pithy wise sayings): “Things base and vile, holding no quantity,/Love can transpose to form and dignity” (1.1, 232-3). The most highly-organized section of the play rhetorically may well be the lines following Lysander’s dictum that “the course of true love never did run smooth” (which looks like a wise proverb but is manifestly untrue). Here, Lysander proposes a reason why love does not run smooth (beginning “Or”) and Hermia glosses it (in lines beginning with “O”). The effect of the stichomythia is complex and shows the playwright’s sense of theatre. We are inclined to see how serious the lovers’ plight is, and to extend our sympathy, but the highly formal duet strikes us as slightly artificial: we feel they are making a melodrama out of a crisis. Patterning on a larger scale is to be found in the two speeches of Oberon which attend the giving of love-in-idleness see above). Though widely-separated each uses the same verse form, and an identical number of lines. Patterning in six-line stanzas appear in 2.2, 122 ff. and 3.2, 431 ff. and 442 ff. Each woman uses the word “weary”; Helena rebukes the Night’s; Hermia awaits the day. Some kinds of wordplay have already been considered above (malapropisms; misquotation of St. Paul; Lysander’s punning). One should also note the repeated use of motif words, words which express ideas or things present throughout the play. In her first two lines, Hippolyta refers to “days”, and to “Night’s” which will “dream away the time”. Day and Night’s, time and dreams are all key ideas in the play. The moon will measure the “four days” but there is also “fairy time” to contend with. The idea of the dream recurs with Hermia’s Night’smare of the serpent, but it is in Act 4 that is importance becomes clear, and the word is repeated frequently, as Titania, the young lovers and Bottom all refer to their dreams, while in the next act, Theseus attempts to explain these dreams (with barely more success than Bottom). Puck concludes the play with his excuse that we have “slumbered here/While these visions did appear” and we are enjoined not to “reprehend” what yields no more “but a dream”. We certainly do not reprehend, but we recognize that the modesty is false. If this is “but (only) a dream” it is a dream which “hath no bottom”. Other repeated motif words are those referring to the wood and to the moon. In the latter case, by making the moon the measure of time (according to Hippolyta), the source of light in the wood (but not much, as it has almost waned), a goddess or goddesses (Phoebe, Diana, the triple Hecate) to whom in classical Athens both serious and casual reference would naturally be made and a character in the mechanicals’ play (conceived as the man-in-the-moon with dog and thorn-bush or brush) Shakespeare makes possible a huge number of occasions when these words are used. When Oberon tells Puck to “overcast the Night’s” we may stop imagining the moonlight for a while! Characters in the wood (escaping or hunting or doing observance to a morn of May) may have reason to refer to the place. The audience is thus continually reminded that the bare stage is the Palace Wood. To add hunting hounds (offstage, of course, because in “the western valley”) to our idea of the wood is no problem at all. Also no problem is believing that Puck, with his fairy eloquence, can convincingly mimic the speech of other characters.

Chapter 3. Analysis of the main themes touched in the play