Genre

Indisputably Dreamis a comedy. The problem is defining what sort of comedy it is – light or black? Is it mere froth and frolic, a mad mixture of courtly love, clownish buffoonery, charming fairies and the humorous mistakes and mischief Puck causes with his magic? Or is it all those things with a much darker edge always niggling at our consciousness? It can be played both ways. Traditionally it has been seen as the most delightful of Shakespeare's comedies, full of fun, nonsense, no more serious than a pantomime or farce – or a dream. It is commonly the first Shakespeare play schoolchildren study and is a popular choice for school productions. But, it is also a serious piece, grouped with Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night as mature comedies because they were written in a period when Shakespeare's artistry had matured both as to thought and stagecraft. It is one of the romantic comedies, what Dover Wilson called happy comedies, for, despite all the obstacles to love that make the plots fascinating and convoluted, the endings are happy and they largely exude a happy mood. To William Hazlitt it was an ‘ideal’ play, and its realm was ‘the regions of fancy’. To him, Bottom was ‘the most romantic of mechanics’. To a limited degree, Bottom's aspirations and dreams (not the one he has in the woods) are not what are to be expected of a simple weaver. There is something of the artist in him, creative, imaginative, with visions above his station (or out of it at least). He knows something of the drama, of ‘Ercles’ vein’, imagines himself an actor, but has a bluffly realistic approach to stage effects that expose his limitations. Dream has elements of pastoral fancy, almost masque- like, with courtly characters with Greek names, a multiplicity of pastoral references, a woodland setting and love as its central theme and narrative impulse. Yet, despite the woodland setting, it is a strangely unpastoral play. The mechanicals supply the part of rustic clowns, but come from the city, and the fairies are a grotesque, sometimes conceivably threatening, version of the gods and goddesses who disport themselves in pastoral romances, whether in prose or dramatic form.