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    Allegory in Midsummer NIght's Dream

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    JOHN HUDSON
    PHOTO ESSAY on production in 2007 of A Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish satire, which illustrates the allegorical meanings of the play. Photos not for publication without permission. For further information contact www.darkladyplayers.com

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    Allegory in Midsummer NIght's Dream

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    JOHN HUDSON
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    PHOTO ESSAY on production in 2007 of A Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish satire, which illustrates the allegorical meanings of the play. Photos not for publication without permission. For further information contact www.darkladyplayers.com

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    PHOTO ESSAY on production in 2007 of A Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish satire, which illustrates the allegorical meanings of the play. Photos not for publication without permission. For further information contact www.darkladyplayers.com

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    2K views2 pages

    Allegory in Midsummer NIght's Dream

    Uploaded by

    JOHN HUDSON
    PHOTO ESSAY on production in 2007 of A Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish satire, which illustrates the allegorical meanings of the play. Photos not for publication without permission. For further information contact www.darkladyplayers.com

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    THE ALLEGORY IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

    A Midsummer Night’s Dream is only superficially a comic fairy story. it


    was written as a religious allegory, a well established Elizabethan literary
    device. Part of it was detected by Dr. Patricia Parker, professor of English
    at Stanford, who is a leading expert on this play. She has shown that the
    character of Puck is an allegory for the devil (the names Puck and Robin
    Goodfellow are both English names for the devil). Peter Quince derives his
    names from the Greek and Norman French words for Rocky Cornerstone,
    and represents Saint Peter. The characters in the Mechanicals’
    entertainment, Pyramus and Thisbe, which come out of a story by Ovid,
    are a standard and well known allegory for Jesus and the Church. Jesus
    dies for love of the Church, so Pyramus dies for the love of Thisbe.

    But what about Jesus


    returning from heaven on
    the Last Day? Supposedly,
    the reason why Jesus was
    delayed in returning to unite
    with the Church was that a
    Partition divided heaven
    from earth. That Partition,
    which comes down on the
    Last Day is the “wittiest
    partition” played by Wall.
    So the Wall finally comes
    down, allowing Bottom/
    Pyramus/Jesus to come
    back to embrace his bride, on the Day of Apocalypse. However it goes
    terribly wrong. Both die.
    And John Hudson shows
    that the way that
    Pyramus/Jesus dies is that
    he gets crucified again. In
    his death scene Pyramus is
    stabbed in the side, the
    light disappears, and there
    is a reference to dice
    playing “die,die,die”. The
    little scene is sandwiched in
    between two mentions of
    the word Passion, alluding
    very clearly to the Passion
    Story, which is the Church
    term for the death of Jesus. Then Thisbe enters as the Church, comically
    praising Pyramus for having eyes as green as leeks and so on. This is not
    a reverential account; it is a satirical parody.

    But there is more. If some of


    these characters come from first
    century Judea, then what about
    the others? In another
    Shakespearean play Judea was a
    synonym for India. So what
    about the King, Oberon, who
    has come from India? He is an
    invisible, jealous, Lord. That
    corresponds with G-d in
    Exodus, and some of his lines
    come from the solar Psalms.
    Was the Hebrew G-d fighting a
    war in the first century? Indeed
    he was, against Titus Caesar. Is that who Titania represents in a pun on
    Titus/Titania? And does Titania’s instruction to cut off the waxen thighs
    of the bees parallel a strange episode in the writings of Josephus in which
    Titus ordered that a Jewish leader, whose family all have Maccabean
    names, be “pruned”. Is this another pun, on bee/Maccabee?

    And what of the little Judean


    boy, whose mother is a virgin
    (a votress), and stolen away
    from the G-d of the Jews and
    turned into a changeling, who
    is crowned with (thorny)
    flowers. Is this changeling
    actually the messiah, and is
    this an allegorical reference to
    what Titus Caesar actually did
    at the end of the Roman-Jewish
    War to turn the messiah into
    the pro-Roman literary figure
    of Jesus in the Gospel? John Hudson argues that the Gospel appears in
    the play as the purple colored ‘flower’ (an Elizabethan term meaning a
    book), which is associated with idleness (idolatry), which fills people with
    “hateful fantasies” and makes Titania fall in love with Bottom/Jesus—in
    the guise of an ass. The playwright is comically giving Titus a taste of his
    own hateful fantasy, in a wonderful example of Marrano humor.

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