What a joy to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. The theatre itself plays a role here: it is not Shakespeare’s original Elizabethan building, burnt down in 1613, but a rigorous reconstruction, built on plans inspired by the Globe of 1599.
We are therefore not “at home” with Shakespeare in an archaeological sense, but in a space that assumes itself to be at once an homage, a historical fiction, and a machine for dreaming and laughing.
It is an open amphitheatre, with no roof over the yard, bathed in a light that never quite goes out; night does not fall abruptly as in modern theatre, but slides in gently, somewhere between waking and dreaming. Is this not exactly what the play stages: the passage from the city of Athens to the enchanted forest, from the discourse of Law to the space of dream, the place where “the course of true love never did run smooth”?
This architecture evokes the scene of the dream: a place where fragments of daytime reality (Egeus’s law, Theseus’s marriage, Helena’s jealousy) are rearranged, condensed, displaced as dream-images — Oberon, Puck, the fairies, the confusion of the lovers lost in the wood. Freud describes the dream as “the fulfilment of an unconscious wish,” and insists that most dreams are only “the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.” Dramatisation stages desire, condensation superimposes several meanings on a single figure, displacement shifts the accent from one element to another, and this is precisely what we see unfolding on the Globe’s stage: the conflicts of Athens metamorphose into nocturnal fairy-tale, as if theatre were materialising this “dream scene” where unreasonable desires find a way to take shape in a sufficiently travestied and absurd form for us to be able to laugh at them.
Dream or reality? At the end of the play, Shakespeare gives Bottom a line that condenses this doubt upon waking: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. (…) Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.” What happened to him with Titania — being loved as a sublime object with the head of an ass — did he dream it, or did it “really take place”? For Freud, the question is anything but childish: the dream is a genuine psychic experience, but an experience of disguised desire. Saying that “the dream is the satisfaction of a wish” does not mean that it is pure fantasy without reality; it means that what is satisfied there remains unrecognisable to the subject, precisely because it is repressed. The doubt “dreamt or lived?” points to this difficulty in acknowledging that what is at stake in the dream — this disguised satisfaction — belongs fully to psychic reality.
With Lacan, the point is not to decide between dream and reality, but to grasp how the dream, like theatre, is a fiction that writes something of the truth of desire. The dream scene is not the copy of an event; it is its staging, its montage. Bottom can be heard as an analysand just after a dream: he knows that “something” has happened, but he recoils from interpretation — “man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.”
Midsummer Night’s Dream stages, with comic cruelty, what Freud and Lacan take to be characteristic of love: it makes the subject strange to themselves. Lysander says it clearly: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” The couples break apart and reform at the whim of a mere change of gaze: a drop of juice on the eyelids, in sleep, is enough to displace the object of love. It offers a limpid figuration of the fact that desire is neither “natural” nor transparent; it depends on a staging, on signifiers, on a gaze that come from the Other. Lacan gives this a famous formula: “Desire is the desire of the Other.”
Lacan also insists that love does not come to fill this lack, it exposes it. Hence his paradoxical definition: “Love is to give someone who does not want it something one does not have.” In the forest, each lover offers the other absolute vows, gives what they take to be their all, while this gift shifts from one partner to another at the whim of an external intervention: a spell, a gaze, a whim of Oberon. Love thus appears doubly comic: because it takes itself terribly seriously against a backdrop of sheer contingency (a misplaced drop of juice is enough to overturn everything), and because it puts into play, as Lacan notes, a lack addressed to an Other who is never quite the one we think. In the forest, this structure is pushed to the point of burlesque — reversible vows, instantaneous passions, the queen of the fairies in love with an ass — but is it not precisely this burlesque that makes readable, almost pedagogically, the mechanism Lacan detects in our most “serious” love stories?
Shakespeare drives this displacement all the way to the grotesque with Titania enamoured of Bottom-as-ass. Freud might willingly see in this a point of truth about the fetishistic or “undignified” dimension of certain object-choices: the object of love always bears something disappointing or bizarre with respect to the Ideal, a detail that opens a hole in narcissism. Lacan, for his part, could show how the desire of the Other (Titania, the queen) can invest almost any support, as long as it occupies a structural place within the scene. Bottom’s absurdity — this mixture of triviality and glorification — crystallises the point at which the logic of desire proves independent of the “value” of the object.
At the beginning of the play, the question of Law is stated crudely: Theseus reminds Hermia of the alternative — marry Demetrius, die, or “on Diana’s altar to protest / For aye austerity and single life.” This assigns a destiny to the young woman’s desire. Hermia replies: “So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord, / Ere I will yield my virgin patent up / Unto his lordship, whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty.” She refuses to give up on this desire that does not “consent” to the imposed sovereignty. Freud showed how desire is formed under the pressure of Law — familial, social, cultural — without ever being reducible to it; it persists obstinately in symptom, dream, fantasy. Hermia embodies this point of conflict: obey the Law and renounce her desire, or take the risk (death, convent, flight) in order to remain faithful to what is being experienced in her. When Lacan will later formulate that “the only thing one can be guilty of is having given up on one’s desire,” we can hear, in echo, this Hermia who refuses the “unwished yoke.” The play shows at what cost this fidelity must pass through the detour of dream and transgression: it takes night, the forest, confusion, for Law, in the morning, to finally ratify what at first resisted it.
The night in the forest, like a dream, becomes the place where these conflicts can be replayed differently, before returning, transformed, into the social day.
The title A Midsummer Night’s Dream might lead us to expect a romantic, soft and vaporous story. Instead we witness an unleashed comedy, a great farce of love. The imaginary overflows — metamorphoses, enchantments, asses’ heads — but this imaginary is framed by the symbolic: the Law of Athens, marriage contracts, assigned places, and this constant address to the audience which, at the Globe, is accentuated by physical proximity, shared light, direct asides. Lacan distinguishes the Imaginary (images, identifications), the Symbolic (Law, language, places) and the Real (what resists, what cannot be symbolised). Here, the imaginary unfolds in the forest, the symbolic speaks from Athens, and the real of desire surfaces in those mishaps, those absurd passions, those sufferings which, for the characters, are anything but comic even as we laugh.
When we hear Puck’s mocking “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” we could almost recognise, in the sprite’s voice, the most tender of critiques of our ways of loving.