A Midsummer Night's Dream - Love, Sex, and Fairies

 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Folger Theater, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sex, Love

 

We were in Washington, DC, on a work/mini-vacation trip, and we went to see one of the less visited museums – the museum of buildings.  It is in the judicial district and a very large brick structure.  When it was built, it was the largest brick building in the world.  It was built as a pension building for civil war veterans and it has an incredible open atrium – five stories tall – in the middle of it.  It is a particularly fitting building to be the museum of buildings because the columns that support the brick walls surrounding the atrium are in all three classical styles – with Ionic columns holding up Doric columns, and massive Corinthian columns dominating the space – as if to teach us about the development of classic architecture.  On the day we visited, this space was filled with – a pop-up stage.

Apparently, the Folger Shakespeare Library is closed for renovations, and their stage is, too, so they are using various other stages around town to mount their productions.  The last time we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was on an outdoor stage in Door County, Wisconsin, and the stage at the Museum of Buildings (we were able to get tickets to come back to see the performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream) felt – because of the space above us – almost like we were outside again.  And, of course, even if it is a bit past the solstice, it doesn’t hurt to see this play in the middle of summer.

The play is, as this Playbill pointed out, a comedy; not because the two (or three, depending on how you count it) couples are able to successfully get together at the end of it, but because the ragtag players who are in it are able to mount a successful production at the end of it.  The dream is, as it were, the creation of a play – the mounting of it – and successfully inviting the audience to engage in it, to feel it, to experience it, as they would a dream.  And so, the measure of success of the play is the measure of the experience of the audience member – the ability of the audience member to experience the play as a dream, as their own dream.

This production was quite conscious and public about their intention to engage the audience – to ensnare them or collaborate with them in the dream production.  They encouraged audience participation at the beginning of it, made frequent allusions to pop music, encouraged clapping along to much of the singing and dancing that they did.  They more successfully captured the Reluctant Wife, because she is more familiar with the pop vernacular, but I think they missed the mark with deeply enthralling each of us – ironically because of the strength of the individual actors.

The play involves three largely unrelated sets of people who are functioning in parallel but apparently without any actual overlap – much the way that our dream life functions in parallel to our lived life with overlap that is only apparent on inspection or, dare I say it, analysis…  The first characters we are introduced to are the Members of the Court of Athens.  Hippolyta is the Queen of the Amazons and she is betrothed to Theseus, the Duke of Athens.  Was Theseus a Duke?  Did the Amazons have a Queen?  Does it matter when they are played by African Americans as contemporary African Americans?  Hermia, a young girl who is in love with Lysander, has been promised by her father, Egeus a member of the Athenian court, to Demetrius, who is desperately in love with her.  Meanwhile Demetrius is spurning Helena who is in love with him.  Just so there is some balance somewhere, Lysander, at least initially, is in love with Hermia.

Meanwhile, Theseus has commissioned Peter Quince to produce a play on the day of his wedding.  Quince has an inept band of players, led by Bottom, to do this.  Meanwhile, in a shadow world, The King and Queen of the Fairies are fighting with each other and Titania, the Queen, uses an assistant Fairy, Puck, to transform Bottom into an Ass and then, in a reversal of Shakespeare’s writing, casts a spell so that Oberon, the King, foolishly falls in love with the Ass, which will allow the Queen, she hopes, the ability to take from the King the changeling – a young human that the fairies have stolen.

In my own reading of this comedy, unlike in tragedy, which focuses on the character and travails of a hero, here we are confronted with a group of people.  All of them are flawed in obvious and ordinary ways.  And the loves that they experience here are fickle and complicated.  Unlike the single minded lovers of tragedy – and here we could take Romeo and Juliet – lovers who may be star crossed by virtue of the social boundaries they dare not cross, but who are true and constant with each other.  Ironically – certainly intentionally, Shakespeare does take the star-crossed lovers and makes fun of them.  The play that the troupe performs on the triple wedding day at the end of the play is a vastly shortened caricatured and funny version of Romeo and Juliet.  It is absurd and awful, it is poorly acted, and it allows the couples who are getting married – who are entering into a sacred covenant, making sacred vows, laugh.  And we laugh, too, exiting the theater with a light-hearted step.

What does that say about us?  Are we fickle, too?  Of course we are.  What are we to do, then, with Romeo and Juliet?  Weren’t we deeply moved by that?  Where do we stand on the comic and fickle to tragic and serious continuum?

I, for one, was raised to be serious.  Love – and the necessary compliment – marriage – was serious business.  When I fell in love, it was to be forever.  And it was to be a deep and lasting opening up of an intimate relationship across a shared lifetime.  And I took it upon myself to mold my character to be worthy of such an undertaking.  (I know this sounds pretentious and crazy, but it is true…)

At the same time, I was driven to be interested in a variety of people – to be drawn to them, to flirt with them and, especially as I grew older, to explore being close to not just one, but a series of people.  Ultimately, when I married the first time, that marriage did not last.  Was my wife fickle? Was I fickle?  Did the fairies interfere in our loving relationship?  Did we not understand each other enough – though we were older and, as my brother-in-law who performed the marriage ceremony pointed out to us when he opted not to offer pre-marital counseling – we were both psychologists.   Shouldn’t we have known what we were getting into?

I was struck, in thinking about the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the book Hamnet, which portrays a version of Shakespeare as married in Stratford and a man about town in London, captures something of the tension between Shakespeare’s vision of love in Romeo and Juliet (a deep and abiding love for a wife in Stratford), and the temptations, perhaps especially as imagined by that wife, of a man who spent much of his life away from her (The man about town in London).

Love is both serious business and light-hearted play.  Peter Fonagy, a psychoanalyst in London who is very interested in how we develop from children into adults, proposed that one of the reasons sexual intimacy is so delightful is that our sexual selves have not been supported and nurtured throughout our lives – they have mostly been ignored.  This means that they are relatively immature – meaning that we can more easily engage in spontaneous play from our sexual selves than perhaps from any other part of ourselves.  I believe this can also get us into trouble.  We can play – and be drawn into a relationship – and not realize – not have the wherewithal to realize that we are in over our heads and that the other person is, perhaps, not the right person for us.  Shakespeare nicely sends this idea up by having Egeus not understand that his daughter Hermia’s love for Lysander is true and constant, though he also has the fairies demonstrate that Lysander could become directed to love someone else.  Fortunately for Lysander, and the play, Hermia hangs onto her attachment – she knows what love is – and she wins Lysander back.

If Shakespeare did, as Harold Bloom proposed, invent The Human, he did so in all of the splendid variety that we as a group – but also that we as individuals are.  Not only are the characters different from each other, they are different from themselves based on the vagaries of fairies and of chance, and we are able to be made a fool of by love – even falling in love with an ass…  Even if I did not resonate with the beat of this performance – even if the strength of individual performances was so great that the play did not coalesce into a deep and strong dream, but felt rather like one of those dreams that barely holds together and barely keeps us asleep, there is something about the structure of this play and its tension with the other plays in the oeuvre that, like the columns in the building where it was performed, can teach us something about the structure of the human experience – its variety and constancy – and all the while we just think that we are being entertained. 

 

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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COVID Chronicles XXVIII: Monuments and monumental failures; How will we move on from our Empire of Pain?

 COVID; Empire of Pain; Patrick Radden Keefe; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Denial

COVID Chronicles XXVIII: How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? 

As a sort of prelude to vacation, the reluctant wife and I spent a week in Washington DC.  She is working at the job she commutes to there and I was teleworking in a reversal of our usual roles.  I was seeing my patients virtually and working on various projects in our hotel room between sight seeing jaunts.  It was the week of the final (for now) January sixth hearings, and I had been cognizant of them as I wandered across town.

I flew in on Friday so that the reluctant wife, who had been there all week, could stay the weekend and we could have that time together in the city where neither of us had to work before she returned to work on Monday.  On that Friday, after her work, we went out to dinner and then went for a walk around the tidal basin.  We walked past the Vietnam War Memorial – that slash in the ground that depicts the dark underbelly of the wars that are celebrated for what they have accomplished with the gleaming marble structures that are reflected in it – Washington’s victory over the British and Lincoln’s war to unite the country.  This monument, like many others in the town, is inscribed with the names of those who were killed in war.

We went from there to the Lincoln Memorial.  I was as stirred by it, and the words of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s second inaugural address, as I was by being able to stand on the spot from which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech.  So, it was fitting to be able to walk, for the first time, from there to the Martin Luther King Memorial.  And there King is standing, looking across the tidal basin at the Jefferson Memorial as if to say, “Here I am, working on the next step of the process that you began (and Lincoln, the man behind me, continued to work on).”

MKL on Vietnam

A collection of King’s actual words are cut into stone behind him.  One of his turns of phrase I read, initially, as a poor grammatical construction.  In fact, as the reluctant wife pointed out, it was an intentional reworking of our usual manner of speaking.  Instead of urging us to be a moral example “to the world”, he urged us to be a moral example “of the world”; urging us to demonstrate not our exceptionalism, but our ordinary human capacity to do the right thing.

We walked quickly through the FDR memorial, one that is sprawling and a bit of a jumble – part of it intentional as it is depicting the disorder of the world war, and it, like the Lincoln and King Memorials, was liberally sprinkled with the words of the one remembered (e.g. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”).  We were walking through it to get back in time - to get to the Jefferson Memorial, another memorial that I have not visited before.

The White House and Jefferson

What was most striking about the Jefferson Memorial, besides Jefferson’s words, which clarified that King was, indeed, working to create the kind of country that Jefferson was envisioning, even if Jefferson himself could not live up to those aspirations, was its location.  It was apparent as we approached it that the sight lines put it directly in the center of the view from the living quarters of the White House.  How would it be to be President and wake up in the morning and see, just to the left of the Washington Monument, Jefferson’s dome?  It would, for most people, be a bit humbling to think of the legacy that one would be called to uphold.

But in wandering the streets of the capitol this week, what is impressive is that it is not just the monuments, not just the museums, but the buildings themselves that are big piles of stone and steel and concrete and on these buildings there are numerous inscriptions – statements about the values that would define our culture. They are etched in that stone or rock or concrete.  These values have to do with what we are called to be.  They are aspirational statements.  Especially as a psychoanalyst, I am aware of how difficult it is to achieve those aspirations.  We need to build a version of ourselves that manages and re-channels our immature but powerful impulses into possibilities imagined by our visionaries and made real, in so far as they are, by the lives and deaths of the many others who are memorialized.  Of course, we fail at this – in small and in big ways (Jefferson and King both failed in their own ways), but having the aspirations can allow us, at crucial moments, to be guided by them; if we construct ourselves to be open to that.

So, it was with interest that we watched the January Sixth hearings – where Liz Cheney and the rest of the panel reminded us, as they have from the beginning, of the oaths of office that our executives took when they were sworn in.  She was clarifying that we should etch into our hearts what has been written in stone throughout this town.  And she was clarifying that an individual inhabited the highest office in the land, and, rather than using the monuments as a calling to become a better version of himself, used the power of his position to deceive people into supporting his attempts to subvert the system that we have relied on.  He attempted a coup d’état.  This is, of course, difficult to prove.  Perhaps he believed that he had won an election that was being stolen from him.  So, the committee focused on his inaction when the Capitol was under attack. 

We are a flawed nation.  We have failed in so many ways.  Half of the Washington Monument and all of the White House were built by slaves.  The brutality of the slave system and its visible legacy is comparable only to the near extinction of our indigenous people and the theft of their lands.  More recently, we have frequently failed to live up to King’s admonition to be a moral example “of the world”, with the Vietnam war being one of many examples of that and our torturing of captives a more recent example.  Presidents have deceived us, occasionally for their own purposes, but on a consistent basis to enforce actions – including torture – that we find abhorrent.  But failing to intervene in an attack on the Capitol?

Would that this was simply an aberrant leader who was indulging his own wildly narcissistic fantasy that was shared by a few loyal nuts, but I think it is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise.  We have forgotten how far we have come in a very few hundred years and what discipline is required to have done that.  We seem to have forgotten that it is ideas that have propelled us forward.  Ideas that have been argued and discussed and tried out – some of them used, most of them discarded.  But when we have come to a conclusion, we have acted – decisively and with common cause and purpose.

This summer, COVID has surged again, but we seem to be largely blithely oblivious to it.  My students who have been sickened by it do not report that it has been a mild disruption, but a significant one – one that lays them up for a week or more and has lingering after effects.  Do we know what the long-term effects are?  Not yet.  And they may prove to be nominal. But we could have nipped this in the bud through collective action.  Once we knew that this was spread through the air, universal masking would have been an effective deterrent to the creation of variants, which now have open season to spread and evolve into the best, most effective versions of themselves, to figure out what is the best way to use our bodies to keep themselves alive, regardless of the cost to us.

Of course, this may turn out to simply another chronic issue that we need to manage, and there may be little annual cost to it.  Like the flu, it may help us cull the herd, taking out the weak and the elderly.  That last sentence was intended to clarify that we, along with our ideals, have also espoused such things as Social Darwinism, and this would be the latest, medical, iteration of that.  It felt to me to be a callous statement.  We have been given a precious gift: life, but more than that, we have been given the gift and the responsibility to exert influence and, indeed, dominion over creation.  Have we used that responsibility well?  Are we prepared to make sacrifices – hopefully not the kinds that those who have fought in wars have done, but much more reasonable ones – to wear masks, to change energy policies, to build a world that is sustainable? 

After the week in Washington, we travelled far south and east – to the Virgin Islands.  I successfully snorkeled for the first time and discovered a world that was fantastical – the world of tropical fish, swimming in a paradise that was previously unknown to me – except in the movie Nemo and on nature shows.  My appreciation (and criticism) of My Octopus Teacher would now have a completely different feel.   

While on vacation, I read a book by Patrick Badden Keefe that the reluctant son recommended, Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family.  The three generations of the Sacklers, who fueled the Oxycontin debacle, underscored my pessimism about our current condition.  Their first fortune was made from the pushing of Milltown and then Valium in the 1960s.  In addition to the crippling addiction these medications brought on people, the marketing also cemented into the public consciousness the idea that psychological problems are caused by “chemical imbalances”.  Then, from the 1990s to the early 2020s they used the playbook from the 60s to influence the FDA and sell physicians on prescribing medications with essentially no scientific evidence to back up the claims they were making.

The psychoanalytically intriguing thing about this is that I think the family was as convinced that they were providing a useful analgesic to the public as Donald Trump was that he had won the election.  That is to say: I think that both Trump and Sacklers knew that what they wanted to believe was not true and they simultaneously did not know that.  Neither Trump nor the Sacklers allowed themselves to believe what was apparent to rational people around them because to believe that would threaten the cornerstone that their self-worth was built on.  To protect that cornerstone, they engaged in massive denial of obvious and clear facts, and became isolated in their fantasy world with devastating consequences.  This, by the way, was not caused by a "Chemical Imbalance".  The fault lies in the character structure of individuals whose addiction to greed and self aggrandizement appears to be as powerful as the pull of Oxycontin to mask physical and, as in the case of  Trump and the Sacklers, psychological pain.

Keefe offered two central metaphors to describe the current and future state of the Sackler family, who have avoided taking any responsibility, have not been significantly financially impacted, and have not been found guilty of crimes that led to almost a million deaths and a 2 trillion-dollar impact on the economy.  The Sacklers used their money for many things – but what seemed important to them was being perceived to be philanthropists by, for instance, bringing the Temple of Dendur from Egypt to the Metropolitan Museum and to install it in the Sackler wing.  That temple includes graffiti from an early traveler.  It also does NOT include graffiti from a later traveler – graffiti that was apparent in early photographs, but that has since washed off.  The removal of the Sackler name from the wing and from many other institutions around the world was offered as a penalty – their fame will be fleeting and they will not achieve the immortality they craved - for the failure of the family to appreciate that they lived in a community.

The other metaphor was the Hearst Mansion, as it is represented in the movie Citizen Kane.  Richard Sackler, the scion who was personally responsible for the aggressive and deceptive selling of Oxycontin, was pictured as living alone in his father’s mansion in Connecticut, perhaps as isolated as Kane/Hearst at the end of their shared life…  This was clearly Keefe offering us solace for the massive failure of justice that he chronicled.

This, in turn, caused me to reflect on the ways in which we discovered who the essential workers are during COVID.  Those who were remanded to do the most dangerous work were not those who were most highly compensated, but those who are least compensated.  And yet the work they do is of the greatest value when push comes to shove.  We literally cannot live without the grocery store clerk, and the trucker who delivers the groceries, and the workers who harvest and package and prepare the food.

I think, in fact, that we are all essential.  We do need a system that protects those workers, and all of us, so the government is something that we need.  But we need it to recognize what its role is.  And in a democracy that means we ourselves need to recognize its role and to support it as it does its own (and therefore our own) essential functions.

We all need to inscribe on our hearts both our own value, but also the realization that this value is realized in the context of a community that we depend on to support us.  We need to value and care not just for ourselves, but for each other, even if only out of self-interest.  So, it is with some relief that the Senate has decided that the value of the planet is as important as the income of big oil companies and their stockholders (including me).  That the fish living in the ocean are as essential as the plutocrats who ply the surface of those fish’s home in their yachts is something that I am coming to believe.

Will we value our own lives and mask up to get over the surge that will surely happen when school starts though?  I doubt it.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.