Art and Performance in A Midsummer Night's Dream

The mechanicals—Bottom, Quince, Flute, and the rest—come to the forest to rehearse a play about Pyramus and Thisbe. These are working men who have never thought much about art. But they approach their task with earnest determination. Bottom worries that the audience will be frightened by the sword and the lion, so they decide to write a prologue explaining that no actual harm will be done. Quince must write out explanations. Snug needs his lion part written down because he is slow to learn. They are not skilled, but they understand that theater requires a kind of honesty—you must tell your audience what they are about to see, must prepare them to accept the fiction as fiction.

The play-within-the-play of Pyramus and Thisbe tells a story that nearly happened to the main lovers. Two young people separated by authority, meeting in secret, ending in death. By turning this dangerous story into badly performed comedy, the mechanicals domesticate it. They make it safe. When Theseus and the court watch the play, they laugh at its incompetence. The wall talks. The prologue rambles. The lion apologizes. But Theseus understands something important: “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.” Theater, even bad theater, gives us permission to look at dangerous truths without being destroyed by them. The incompetence of the mechanicals becomes a strength. It reminds us that we are watching a made thing, a performance, not reality.

Bottom’s experience in the forest complicates this. He receives the most literal transformation in the play—his head becomes an ass’s head. When the spell breaks, he wakes confused. “I have had a most rare vision,” he says, and he wants to make it into art. He plans to commission Quince to write a ballad about it, to turn his experience into a story that can be performed. Bottom understands, without quite saying so, that art is how we make sense of experiences too strange or too painful to understand directly. We cannot explain a vision, but we can make it into a song. We cannot describe enchantment, but we can perform it.

Puck’s final speech to the audience is the play’s deepest statement about performance. He asks us to imagine that we have all been dreaming, that everything we have seen has been a fiction, a shadow. If this offends us, we can dismiss it as illusion. But if we forgive the actors, if we accept the fiction as something real, then we will have been changed by it. The play does not claim that art is more important than life. It claims that art and life operate on the same principle. Both remake us without our permission. Both ask us to suspend our disbelief, to accept things we know are not literally true as if they were. Theater, in this play’s view, is not an escape from reality. It is reality revealed in its truest form—unstable, performed, dependent on the willingness of an audience to believe.