An Ecological Reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Quarrel of Titania and Oberon by Sir Joseph Noel Paton

These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
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.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine-men’s-morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter cheer:
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
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; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

-Act 2, Scene 1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Contagious fogs. Crows fat on carrion. Seasonal disruption. Rotting crops. Rheumatic plagues and pandemics. This could easily read as a contemporary early morning doomscroll. The Gulf Stream shows signs of collapse. Record temperature highs. Pollinators facing massive extinction. Massive crop failure predicted due to erratic weather patterns. Above normal hurricane season anticipated. “From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original,” is a finely turned phrase for what is an increasingly common sentiment among the ecologically sober: massive industrialization and ecocide have destabilized the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere, provoking unpredictable and emergent climatological events that are this system’s attempt to restore some sort of balance. Put more simply, the current escalating environmental catastrophe is our fault. We are its parents: it stems from our debates, our abstractions and self-importance and unquenchable appetites.

But this doomscroll monologue is not contemporary. It comes to us from the mouth of the Fairy Queen Titania in Shakespeare’s famous comedy A Midsummer’s Night Dream. She is addressing her estranged fairy husband Oberon, whose “bed and company” she has foresworn after a disagreement about “a changeling Indian boy” whose mother used to be one of Titania’s devotees. The boy seems a classic version of Anne Carson’s idea of the “ruse” in a romance: a necessary third term introduced to triangulate erotic distance and tension between the two lovers who would become dull and collapse any potential for narrative if they consummated their love too soon.

But unlike human lovers, this couple’s disagreement is not a private affair. No, it is an ecological event. When the royal fairies feud, the environment feels their disagreement intimately, responding with seasonal asynchrony: 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….” Titania tells Oberon that “this same progeny of evils come from our debate”. Beyond the grand ecological ramifications of their romantic conflict, the human world is also disordered with Demetrius and Helen and Lysander and Hermia, the play’s human lovers, incorrectly matched in their romantic orientation. Helena loves Demetrius who loves Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander although her father insists that she entertain Demetrius’s suit.

The romantic rift between the fairy couple is represented holographically throughout the play in “unequal matches” between lovers and between the civilized world of human beings and the wilderness of the forest, between day and night. Puck, Oberon’s “shrewd and knavish sprite”, acts in a traditional trickster role, amplifying the disorder to paradoxically, bring about ultimate rebalancing and resolution.