nostr:npub1vdd75n9nzj09xp4z95xcw6gq7fjqr2m666tqkkphhf5cmpw6e8wscjtkfq Reply for ACT V:

How nasty of Theseus to say those nice words about duty and then make fun of their play the whole time. But then, it was truly a terrible play. Alack, alack, alack! It would be a better world if everyone said “die die die die die” at the moment of their death.

I found it poignant how Robin ends the play. It parallels the humorous “disclaimers” of the play-within-a-play, but it’s serious. Not “forgive me for roaring too loud” but “forgive me if I’ve wasted your time.” The parallel makes you wonder if we, too, are just a make-believe audience in another play.

It reminds me of Zhuangzi’s parable of hunting a beautiful bird in a forest and then feeling like, even as he is aiming at the bird, something else might be aiming at him. And the way in which House of Leaves and other books like that try to evoke “textual horror” by portraying a monster which breaks out of a narrative-within-a-narrative.

With this play, I feel like the comedic torturing of the characters (at the hands of the fairies or their own incompetence) also tortures us because it shows us the arbitrariness of our own fates. Like, say you fell in love tomorrow. Who’s to say it’s not more arbitrary than when Robin fucked up with his love potion? Say you want to hang out with your friends but they’re avoiding you. How can you be sure you’ve not been arbitrarily changed (into an ass)?

In Pyramus and Thisbe, the comical Moonshine and Wall meddle in the lovers' lives, showing or hiding them from each other. In the play itself, Diana and Cupid and all the fairies meddle in the lives of ancient Greek nobility. The play is a comedy to us only because we are granted the ability to see what lurks in the characters' dreams. So, too, is Pyramus and Thisbe a comedy because the audience's discernment so exceeds the players' own. Being trapped in the waking light of my own life, the light of consciousness, must make it seem more tragic than it really is. And I wonder who meddles in it.

nostr:npub1pt6l3a97fvywrxdlr7j0q8j2klwntng35c40cuhj2xmsxmz696uqfr6mf6 ACT III opens with some funny moments as the performers think of disclaimers to put before their play, like saying the lion isn't really a lion or that the person playing the role of pyramus doesn't actually die, to avoid scaring the ladies. they settle on the lion speaking and politely introducing himself as the man playing him before making a million other changes. lions actually used to live in greece even after the classical period ended... anyway i have a feeling the play they're writing is going to suck

>The moon, methinks, looks with a wat’ry eye,

And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,

Lamenting some enforced chastity.

what a beautiful characterization and association, once again.

>We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,

Have with our needles created both one flower,

Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

Both warbling of one song, both in one key,

As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds

Had been incorporate. So we grew together

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

But yet an union in partition,

so hermia and helena were very close, now drifted apart by circumstances of love

>And made your other love, Demetrius,

Who even but now did spurn me with his foot,

To call me goddess, nymph, divine and rare,

Precious, celestial? Wherefore speaks he this

To her he hates?

"i love you!"

"who put you up to this?"

>Away, you Ethiop!

>Be certain, nothing truer, ’tis no jest

That I do hate thee and love Helena.

in this play hate is presented as the opposite of love; if you don't actively love someone you must hate them. in reality the opposite of love is indifference, and in fact love necessarily carries much hate within itself, and the two are inextricable.

>“Little” again? Nothing but “low” and “little”?

Why will you suffer her to flout me thus?

Let me come to her.

not often you see some teasing on physical attributes like height, at least not conducted like it is here among the two women.

>And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,

At whose approach, ghosts wand’ring here and

there

Troop home to churchyards. Damnèd spirits all,

That in crossways and floods have burial,

night is a magical time. it came to mind here that reading a play has an advantage over seeing one performed. when you go to see one the set-designers are responsible for creating the places where the play takes place, but reading it you can imagine it detached from any physical stage, any hall, any audience. the actors aren't actors, they simply are the characters, and portray themselves; grassy fields and castles and towns, you can imagine these places that could never perfectly be recreated on a stage in your own head.

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nostr:npub1pt6l3a97fvywrxdlr7j0q8j2klwntng35c40cuhj2xmsxmz696uqfr6mf6 on act II as well:

>But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents

here it's actually love being interrupted that causes bad things to happen instead of love itself causing them to happen like mentioned earlier, i get the feeling this might come up later

>And even for that do I love you the more.

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:

Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

this is relatable, though not to anything at the moment

>Your virtue is my privilege: for that

It is not night when I do see your face

again the lunar/solar motif in connection with love and the lack of it. very interesting

>Worm nor snail, do no offence.

it's so over 🐌

>I mean that my heart unto yours is knit,

So that but one heart we can make of it;

Two bosoms interchained with an oath—

So then two bosoms and a single troth.

reminds me of the idea in the symposium that men and women used to be one creature that was later separated. also the use of the word troth which is where betrothed comes from

funnily enough, as the first act mentioned men breaking their promises we have it happening right in the next act when lysander stops wanting to elope with hermia. it wasn't his fault but still

>Either death or you I’ll find immediately.

nice dramatic end.

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nostr:npub1vdd75n9nzj09xp4z95xcw6gq7fjqr2m666tqkkphhf5cmpw6e8wscjtkfq Act II cont'd:

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Helena is such a fucking yandere

> I am your spaniel, and, Demetrius,

> The more you beat me I will fawn on you.

> Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me,

> Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave

> (Unworthy as I am) to follow you.

The fairies' lullaby for their queen is adorable. The idea that bugs and snakes could be threats to them really underscores how small they are. It looks like Titania uses discarded snake skins as sleeping bags?

> And there the snake throws her enameled skin,

> Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

The part where Lysander says "One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth." feels like classic Shakespearean wordplay. It seems like three meanings of "lie" are at play: to lie down and sleep with someone, to lie by not telling the truth, and to lie in death (which meaning reappears later when Hermia wakes up Lysander *because* she worries that he might be dead).

My absolute *favorite* part of Act 2 comes at the end, where Lysander, under the influence of the love potion, falls in love with Helena and attributes it to his now-fully-matured *reason*. It is an obvious truism that reason is more often used to 'rationalize' an irrational opinion than to 'be rational' in the first place, and nowhere else is this more clear than when someone tries to 'rationally' explain why they are in love. It is the logical conclusion of all the 'comparing between Hermia and Helena' which has gone on in this play. What an amazingly fitting end to an act which is all about the capricious spirits of the unreasonable and unreasoned.

I haven't read ahead or read any spoilers. I want to lock in a prediction: the 'foul beast' which Titania falls in love with will be Snug the joiner, "slow of study", whose only part in the play is to roar like a lion.

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nostr:npub1vdd75n9nzj09xp4z95xcw6gq7fjqr2m666tqkkphhf5cmpw6e8wscjtkfq Now for Act II:

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The fairies occupy an interesting place in this semi-mythological world: they do not decide fate (as Cupid and Diana do), but they meddle in it. Their magic is the magic of small coincidences, mistakes, misplaced things.

I read that this is a reference to fairy circles - caused by fungi growing in rings in wet grass:

> To dew her orbs upon the green.

This is hilarious. Also, the way the fairies and hobgoblins subtly 'become' parts of the environment reminds me of what I found unique about The Last Unicorn. But the fairies 'become' things in a more 'negative' way - through humans' folly and not through their perceptiveness.

> The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

> Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;

> Then slip I from her bum, down topples she

> And “Tailor!” cries and falls into a cough,

And they are also responsible for the moods of the seasons, though not the seasons themselves which are the domain of the real gods:

> The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

> Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

> And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

> An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

> Is, as in mockery, set.

I like that the fairies, who are trickster spirits, are identified with the weather, which is 'chaotic' in a scientific sense. Systems become chaotic through the exponential magnification of tiny errors. It's fitting that the fairies are the "gods of the gaps" even in this ancient world which is populated with the great gods of old.

I find it poignant that a mortal human could form such a friendship with the queen of the fairies and that - despite winning the queen's favor - she could suffer so mundane and tragic a thing as dying during childbirth.

> Would imitate and sail upon the land

> To fetch me trifles and return again,

> As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.

> But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,

> And for her sake do I rear up her boy,

> And for her sake I will not part with him.

It highlights our desire to be worthy of the little spirits we see in the world, and those spirits' powerlessness against the mortal realities of life and death. Was the queen of the fairies unable to save her human friend, or - true to fairies' nature - did she capriciously decide not to?

I have to admit that, when I read about bulging sails being likened to pregnant bellies, in my mind flashed the infamous meme pic of pregnant clippy.

I liked this part:

> But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft

> Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,

> And the imperial vot’ress passèd on

> In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

> Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.

> It fell upon a little western flower,

> Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,

> And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”

Again the moon is the suppressor of love. I read that the goddess of the moon, Diana, also symbolizes virginity. In Act I, Theseus's wedding to Hippolyta must wiat for the moon to change, and Hermia (if she renounces Demetrius) will be doomed to become a nun at Diana's altar. The wedge between Titania and Oberon's love causes the rivers to flood, and the moon is the "governess of floods" because it controls the tides.

I also read that the description of the flower, "now purple with love's wound", is a reference to the loss of virginity (de-flowering) and the breaking of the hymen. Obvious in hindsight, yes. I see no shame in admitting that, for Act 2, I found some of the notes here helpful: https://myshakespeare.com/midsummer-nights-dream/act-2-scene-1

In any case, this part also supports the idea that the domain of the fairies consists of the gods' mistakes and what they have forgotten. Cupid only misses because of Diana's influence. The fairies' love potion relies on Cupid's original power.