The subplot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream concerns a group of Athenian citizens—later dubbed “rude mechanicals,” or uncivilized laborers, by a disdainful Puck—who have bizarrely decided to perform a play for the wedding of Duke Theseus: “The Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Their hope is that their play will please the Duke and get them patronage, although they also seem caught up in the idea of theater. They’re all terrible actors—especially Bottom, who will play Pyramus, who suffers from the delusion that he is a magnificent actor—and have had no theatrical training. Their leader and playwright can’t write to save his life. They have only the vaguest idea of how the theater works, in fact: what the conventions of performance are, or how theatrical illusion is created. But they refuse to let any of this stop them.
Why does Shakespeare include the rude mechanicals, who seem so out of place, tonally? Why does A Midsummer Night’s Dream end with the staging of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” which doesn’t advance the plot at all?
One kind of answer is that this (like most of Shakespeare’s plays) is a play about theater. Having these untrained artisan bumblers put on a play allows Shakespeare to reflect on his own craft in both simple and complex ways.
Early in the play, Quince hits upon the perfect location for their rehearsals:
Meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight; there will we rehearse, for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogged with company, and our devices known.
Excellent illustration of how you do things in a theater like Shakespeare’s, where there are few design changes to help the audience shift to a new location. The dialogue cues the audience to imagine, when the craftsmen reappear later in the play, woods and moonlight. Thematically, the idea of rehearsing in the woods brings the theater into the space of the green world, moving it to this location of magical transformation. Away from the workaday world, away from the cares of normal life, a holiday space to play and imagine. It’s not unlike the New Swan, on the margin of the park, letting some of its sylvan magic inflect the performance, infusing it with a kind of festive, almost ritualistic quality. The power of this juxtaposition is one reason for the long tradition of Shakespeare in the Park: all over the world you find outdoor summer Shakespeare festivals, each one using the green world to enhance the plays, and vice versa.
Yet when we return to the mechanicals as they arrive in the forest, Quince strikes a somewhat different note:
Here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring house.
With the first passage we imagined bringing the mechanical business of theater into a space of magic and transformation; here we bring a space of transformation back into the mechanical business of theater. The actor playing Quince is describing the actual stage he stands on as a forest lawn that he will pretend is a stage; the real tiring house is a bush that he will pretend is a tiring house. The audience has already granted the illusion that the stage was a forest in moonlight, but now illusion and reality are reversed; we’re reminded of where we really are—the space of performance not the space of representation—and perhaps we laugh at this breaking of the frame of the play. But one point we could take from this maneuver is that it is the theater that is a true location of transformation, not a magical wood ruled by fairies. The latter is imaginary; the former real.
We’re barely in the town: just 1.2, which is a short scene. But you could say that it is made present by the rude mechanicals, who emblematize it throughout their scenes, due to their way of talking, their costume, and so on. The associations of these characters are fundamentally mercantile, concerned with the making and selling of goods. And in contrast to both the court society and the fairy society, these citizens conduct themselves without hierarchy, as a kind of collective. So instead of a binary opposition between a space of reality and a space of fantasy (as discussed in the earlier post), we get a third space, one associated with making, with exchanges, and with transactions. And we might for that reason associate the town with the theater, as we would the other two spaces. Indeed, in a sense each location of the play suggests a different way of defining what the theater is. Is it a place of aristocratic entertainment, flattering the desires of the elite? Is it a place of magic and enthrallment, where we lose ourselves and submit to an overwhelming experience? Or is it a place of commerce, where well-crafted things are put together by skilled artisans and sold to the public? All three are correct, in some senses, and Shakespeare offers no definitive resolution. But it’s certainly true that the “rude mechanicals” keep the material facts of theater constantly present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.