I mentioned before how terrifying the events in the forest were for the four lovers. Lysander, madly in love with Hermia, suddenly finds himself madly in love with Helena. And “madly” is the key term: in contrast to the rational world of the court, the woods is a place of irrationality, of madness and desire and unfathomable urges and experiences.
Among the mechanicals, Bottom is transformed into an ass, and then seduced by Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, who is under the spell of the love potion. Upon awakening in the woods the next day, he declares:
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was…Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Patsy Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it at the latter end of a play.
This is the role of art: it takes the things that are unfathomable, inexplicable, overwhelming, and makes them comprehensible. It puts us in contact with the terror of human existence, what “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,” but it also protects us from those realities by articulating them, giving them a shape and form and meaning.
Theseus says as much in the most famous speech in the play:
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
. . .
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
It seems clear that this description of how poetry works is meant to describe A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself, which has given a local habitation—the fairy woods—and a bringer of joy—the love flower—to a story of incomprehensible desires and fathomless experiences.
So there is something fitting about the play ending with a performance of a play, even a play as incompetent as “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Things that have become confused must be straightened out, recompartmentalized, made safe again, and “Pyramus and Thisbe” accomplishes this, in part because it maps so closely to the lovers’ experiences. Despite the laughs it produces, there is of course nothing funny about “Pyramus and Thisbe”; it is a story of misunderstanding, catastrophe, young lives thrown away, a story of pain and despair and death. A story, indeed, that A Midsummer Night’s Dream has brushed against repeatedly: the story of what didn’t happen in the Athenian woods but could have, in the chaos and misconceptions and panic of the love flower games. The lovers watch a kind of distorted mirror of their own story, but its farcical performance provides enough emotional distance that they can (usually, mostly) maintain their composure in this closing theatrical encounter.