"Vowing, Swearing, and Superpraising of Parts":
       Petrarch and Pyramus in the Woods of Athens
 
                    Kenneth B. Steele
                  University of Toronto
                          1989
 
     The performance of "Pyramus and Thisby" staged by
Quince and company is an essential ingredient in Shakespeare's
_A Midsummer Night's Dream,[1] and it echoes implicitly and
explicitly, visually and verbally, throughout the woods of Athens.
The Athenian lovers are repeatedly placed in situations which
structurally correspond to the legend, producing tableaux which
invoke the story even before Quince announces the
performance.  The Petrarchan idiom of the lovers, which is later
amplified into an anti-Petrarchan one by the mechanicals,
emphasizes the artificiality of the fairy enchantment, creates
aesthetic distance for comic purposes, and heightens the
affinities between their sylvan adventures and the tragic
performance.  The Petrarchan idiom and its associated
techniques, especially antithesis, synaesthesia, and
"renaturalized" metaphors, are a significant but previously
neglected legacy which _A Midsummer Night's Dream may have
inherited from _Romeo and Juliet.[2]
 
 
     Pyramus and Thisby were well-known in Elizabethan
England, much as their mythic cognates, Romeo and Juliet, are
in the reign of the second Elizabeth.  The story, in Ovid's
_Metamorphoses, was a standard part of the educational
curriculum.  Shakespeare's original audience would have known
"Pyramus and Thisby" not as a lofty tragedy, however, but as a
clich, "a theme for schoolboy exercises and for pretentious
poetasters" (Doran 160).  As Shakespeare composed _Romeo and
Juliet, he was conscious of Pyramus and Thisby to an extent
unparalleled elsewhere in his career.[3]  Apparently the legend
was intimately associated with moonlight in his mind, and its
appearance in _A Midsummer Night's Dream may be either a
cause or an effect of the moonlit atmosphere of the entire play.
The capacity of "Pyramus and Thisby" to burlesque his own
recently-staged love tragedy doubtless also appealed to
Shakespeare.[4]
 
     Specifically, the mechanicals' production of "Pyramus and
Thisby" functions in _A Midsummer Night's Dream much as
Mercutio's "Queene Mab" speech does in _Romeo and Juliet
(1.4.53-103).[5]  Mercutio's speech represents a momentary
eruption of a comic, fairy-saturated Athenian wood into the
tragic world of _Romeo and Juliet's Verona, just as, inversely,
the mechanicals' production of "Pyramus and Thisby" is a sudden
tear in the comic fabric of _A Midsummer Night's Dream,
through which the dangerous world of star-crossed lovers is
clearly discernible.  Significantly, both comedy and tragedy in
the alternate context become comic: both episodes burlesque
material which is generically irreconcilable in a distinctly bawdy
fashion, and both are dismissed in their new environment as
trivial, as "nothing."[6]  Romeo's dismissal of Mercutio's raillery
is to some extent justified: Queen Mab is irrelevant to his world,
and seems disconnected from the play as a whole, and was
probably a later authorial insertion (Hemingway 80).[7]  Quince's
production, however, is a highly integrated element in the play
as a whole, and is quite literally central to concentric rings of
court, fairies, and audience, at the comedy's resolution.
 
     From the moment of Quince's announcement of the playlet
in the second scene until its presentation in the final scene,
"Pyramus and Thisby" is maintained in the consciousness of the
audience.  The entire cast of the playlet is brought on stage
three times before the playlet proper -- for the assignment of
roles (1.2), the rehearsal of lines (3.1), and the curtain call
(4.2) -- all designed to heighten the audience's anticipation of the
final performance.  Even before the explicit announcement,
however, structural and verbal allusions have begun to unite the
main plot of the Athenian lovers with the legend of Pyramus and
Thisby.
 
     In the first scene, Hermia and Lysander are presented as
young lovers thwarted by paternal will, forced to contrive a
nocturnal rendezvous in the woods outside town.  If the audience
failed to perceive the legendary allusion, they are hit over the
head with it in the ensuing scene, as Quince announces "the
most lamentable comedy, and most cruell death of _Pyramus and
_Thisby" (1.2.11-12).  Moonlight, the primary association of the
legend for Shakespeare, soaks the play from its initial lines, and
sets the scene for a reenactment of the tragic tale.  When
Egeus describes Lysander's serenade at Hermia's window (1.1.30),
the reference to moonlight, and the verbal image of two lovers
communicating through an opening in a wall, echoes popular
illustrations of the Pyramus and Thisby legend.[8]
 
     Hermia and Lysander are repeatedly placed in situations
which structurally reproduce tableaux from the Pyramus and
Thisby legend.  Hermia swears a prolix oath that she will meet
Lysander in the woods of Athens (1.1.168-78), much as Thisby
swears, "Tide life, tyde death, I come without delay" (5.1.201).
Lysander replies, "Keepe promise loue" (1.1.179), echoing the
sentiment and the words of Pyramus, who will later say, "I fear
my _Thisbyes promise is forgot" (5.1.171).[9]  In the forest,
Hermia is terrified by her nightmare of a crawling serpent
(2.2.145), just as Thisby flees from the famous lion (5.1.253).[10]
Later, Hermia accuses Demetrius of the murder of Lysander,
likening him to a "dog", "curre", "worme," "Adder", and "serpent",
though not to a lion (3.2.45-9).  In this context, Hermia's
"mispris'd mood" is comic, whereas Pyramus' error is tragic in its
finality (5.1.280-1).  The comedy of these structural allusions is
outweighed, however, by their gravity: there remain serious
obstacles facing the love of Hermia and Lysander, and the
legend of Pyramus and Thisby represents the tragic potentiality
of their story.
 
     Helena and Demetrius, on the contrary, perpetually find
themselves in predicaments which invert the Pyramus and Thisby
legend, subtly parodying it in anticipation of the burlesque of
the mechanicals' production.  In sharp contrast to the legendary
pair of passionate lovers, Demetrius' first words to Helena are "I
loue thee not: therefore pursue me not" (2.1.188).  Demetrius
and Helena hasten to the woods to *prevent* a marriage, rather
than to facilitate one.  Demetrius threatens to leave Helena "to
the mercy of wilde beastes" (2.1.228), himself discharging the
role of the lion, much as Hermia later implies.  Rather than
being frightened by wild beasts, as are Thisby and Hermia,
Helena asserts "I am as vgly as a Beare: / For beastes that
meete mee runne away for feare" (2.2.93-4).  Moments later,
Helena stumbles over Lysander, and asks herself "Dead, or a
sleep?  I see no blood, no wound..." (2.2.100), anticipating
Thisby's question over the lifeless corpse of Pyramus: "A sleep
my loue?  What, dead my doue?" (5.1.311-2).  The legendary
parallel is undercut as Lysander immediately awakes, destroying
the tragic moment more completely than the conventional
mummers' play resurrection of Bottom and Flute at the
conclusion of their performance (5.1.336).
 
     The structural allusions to the Pyramus and Thisby legend
establish Hermia and Lysander as star-crossed lovers, facing
genuine obstacles with potentially tragic consequences.  In
contrast, the inversion of the legendary structure removes any
latent tragedy from the relationship of Helena and Demetrius,
making them primarily a catalyst for merriment.[11]  Helena
encounters the motionless body of Lysander, and also faces a
very real threat of physical harm in the woods, but her fear is
immediately undercut by the Petrarchan extravagance of
Lysander and Demetrius, as they "baite" her.[12]  Although
Hermia faces fewer physical dangers, she undergoes a trial of
her relationships in situations which are psychologically
indistinguishable from those faced by Thisby, which have genuine
potential for tragedy, and which remain fundamentally serious.
 
     Like the "Pyramus and Thisby" playlet, the experiences of
the Athenian lovers are deliberately fictionalized.  The legend is
a "story," Quince assures us (3.1.59), but so is the lovers'
experience: Hippolyta refers to "all the story of the night told
ouer" (5.1.23).  Snug and Puck both refer to the playlet as
"sport" (4.2.17; 3.2.14), but Puck twice calls the lovers' confusion
the same (3.2.119; 3.2.353), as Helena thrice decries their "sport"
of mocking her (3.2.161; 3.2.194; 3.2.240).  Puck delights in
heckling the mortals' "fond pageant" (3.2.114), just as, later, the
Athenian court enjoys interrupting the mechanicals' performance.
This methodical fictionalization of the main plot minimizes the
distinction between the play and the play within it.
 
     Remarkably, the Athenian lovers remain oblivious to their
kinship with Pyramus and Thisby until the mechanicals'
performance in the final scene.[13]  For the audience, however,
the similarities are too overwhelming to overlook, and both
parallel and parody generate laughter primarily by evoking
anxiety that a tragic turn may annihilate the comic world.  The
parallels make the audience uncomfortable, and prompt nervous
laughter, while the inversions relieve the tension, in broader
comedy.  Likewise, much of the laughter and merriment onstage
during the playlet is a release of the anxiety generated by the
sense of _dj vu which haunts the lovers.  Shakespeare
recreates this sensation for the audience through numerous
verbal echoes of the preceding four acts, subtly but distinctly
connecting the amateur performance with the events which
preceded it.
                     ______________
 
     It is a critical commonplace that the lovers share much of
the diction of the "Pyramus and Thisby" playlet; what has not
been previously observed is that most of these echoes are
emphatically Petrarchan in nature.[14]  At the height of the
sonnet and madrigal vogue of the 1590's (Forster 146), at
roughly the same time that Shakespeare was composing his
sonnets, he was toying with Petrarchan conventions on stage, in
_A Midsummer Night's Dream, as in _Love's Labour's Lost and
_Romeo and Juliet.[15]  Quince's "Pyramus and Thisby," in
particular, is saturated with Petrarchanisms, emphasizing the
idiom until it becomes conversely anti-Petrarchan in effect.[16]
The Athenian lovers share, particularly while enchanted, the
Petrarchan idiom of the "Pyramus and Thisby" playlet.
 
     The love-in-idleness potion seems primarily to convert
normal discourse to Petrarchan hyperbole and metaphorical
superlatives.  The victims of Oberon's enchantment awake in
parallel scenes of "love at first sight."  Lysander awakes from
Puck's spell, and is instantly enraptured by the sight of Helena:
 
 
           And runne through fire, I will for thy sweete sake.
           Transparent _Helena, nature shewes arte,
           That through thy bosome, makes me see thy heart.
 
                                              (2.2.102-4)
 
The words are empty, artificially generated by the fairy magic,
and so conventional that Helena can ignore them as merely
"social small talk" (Forster 62), until twelve lines of elaboration
follow.  The obsolescence of the Petrarchan idiom and
knowledge of Lysander's true affections leads Helena to exclaim,
"Wherefore was I to this keene mockery borne? / When, at your
hands, did I deserue this scorne?" (2.2.122-3).[17]
 
     In the subsequent scene, the mechanicals rehearse lines
which they apparently later cut from their playlet in offstage
revision (perhaps in superstitious fear that the fatal words will
once again cause Bottom to be "translated" in the Duke's court).
The lines produce a calculated effect at this point in the play,
however, by emphasizing the artificiality of the Petrarchan
idiom, and drawing attention to the language used by the
enchanted lovers in the scenes immediately before and after.
Pyramus echoes one of the notions of Sonnet 130 when he
speaks of "the flowers of odious sauours sweete" in Thisby's
breath, and Thisby combines conventional and bizarre metaphors
in oxymoronic praise of her beloved:
 
 
     Most radiant _Pyramus, most lillie white of hewe,
     Of colour like the red rose, on triumphant bryer,
     Most brisky Iuuenall, and eeke most louely Iewe,
     As true as truest horse, that yet would neuer tyre[.]
 
                                              (3.1.88-91)
 
A few lines later, Titania awakes to see the ass-headed Bottom,
and exclaims, "What Angell wakes me from my flowry bed?"
(3.1.124).  The Petrarchan idiom, though not superficial, has
been utterly devalued.[18]
 
     Demetrius is enchanted in the following scene, and in
typically comic rhythm the third iteration of the scenario is the
climactic one.  Demetrius is finally enamoured of Helena, in
fulfillment of the comic pattern and the expectations of the
audience, but his language is exaggerated beyond all reasonable
bounds:
 
 
           O _Helen, goddesse, nymph, perfect diuine,
           To what, my loue, shall I compare thine eyne!
           Christall is muddy. O, how ripe, in showe,
           Thy lippes, those kissing cherries, tempting growe!
           That pure coniealed white, high _Taurus snow,
           Fand with the Easterne winde, turnes to a crowe,
           When thou holdst vp thy hand. O, let me kisse
           This Princesse of pure white, this seale of blisse.
 
                                             (3.2.137-44)
 
In particular, the image of "those kissing cherries" explicitly
echoes in Thisby's description of her own lips, which is
immediately undercut by the bawdy innuendo in "kist thy stones"
(5.1.188),[19] and her confused catalogue of Pyramus' virtues,
which includes "This cherry nose" (5.1.318).[20]  "[T]his seale of
blisse" echoes Pyramus' dismay at the wall, "through whome I
see no blisse" (5.1.178).[21]
 
     Once again, the Petrarchan conventions undergo a
process of "comic dislocation" (Leggatt 5).  The response of the
"goddesse" and "Princesse" to Demetrius' encomium is shattering
to the Petrarchan idiom, and very comic: "O spight! O hell!" she
cries (3.2.145), and chastises both men for mocking her.  Rather
like the courtiers of Navarre in _Love's Labour's Lost, Lysander
and Demetrius are attempting to express genuine emotion in an
obsolescent, artificial idiom, which communicates only mockery
and insincerity to their listeners.  Helena merely hears them
"vowe, and sweare, and superpraise [her] parts" (3.2.153).
Likewise, Demetrius' witty wordplay on "murtherer" (3.2.56 ff)
goes unnoticed by Hermia, who simply demands, "Whats this to
my _Lysander? Where is hee?" (3.2.62).  Just as Petrarchan
conventions could be used in a sincere or a non-committal
manner (Forster 8), the great Petrarchan poets were often also
great anti-Petrarchan poets (Forster 66).  In _A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Shakespeare capitalizes on the ambiguity of the
idiom: semiotic friction is generated by the interaction of lover's
intention and beloved's interpretation, and this interplay of
earnest and game produces comic irony.
 
     The diction of the Athenian lovers while enchanted
contrasts sharply with their normal discourse, which is anything
but Petrarchan.  Demetrius initially appears as a suitor
concerned only with the "title to my certaine right" to Hermia
(1.1.92), and even in the enchantment of the forest he strains
the confines of comedy in his brutality to Helena.  Lysander and
Hermia are passionately in love from the first, but despite their
impetuous elopement, their language remains serene and
moderate. Lysander's speeches to Hermia are notably free of
oxymoron, hyperbole, or empty metaphor: his first words to her
in the play are, "How now my loue?" (1.1.128).  Even while he is
enchanted, Lysander's genuine love has *not* melted as the
snow: "Although I hate her, Ile not harme her so" (3.2.270).  In
Athens, Lysander's retort to Demetrius is cool and deliberate:
"You haue her fathers loue, _Demetrius: / Let me haue
_Hermias: doe you marry him" (1.1.93-4).  In contrast, his
response to rivalry for Helena is "Where is _Demetrius?  Oh how
fit a word / Is that vile name, to perish on my sworde!" (2.2.105-
6).  Demetrius is equally volatile once influenced by the fairy
magic, declaring repeatedly, "Thou shalt aby it[!]" (3.2.334).  It
is perhaps an appropriate punishment for the faithless lover to
be left permanently enchanted, permanently trapped within the
Petrarchan idiom.[22]
                     ______________
 
     In _A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare questions
the Petrarchan idiom, but he also uses Petrarchan techniques as
broader structural devices for the play as a whole.[23]  The
conventional Petrarchan antithesis of day and night structures
the opposition of the worlds of Theseus and Oberon, much as it
did the worlds of Juliet and Romeo in their play.  The confusion
of the senses is fundamental to the theme of perception in the
play, and the synaesthesia which had become a regular part of
the Elizabethan stage clown's repertoire, was an essential
Petrarchan technique:
 
           The hovering balance of opposites appears as
           a total loss of self-possession; the senses are
           confused, the lover quite literally does not
           know whether he is coming or going, even
           the sense of individuality is lost.
                                             (Forster 14)
 
Bottom's "the eye of man hath not heard" speech (4.1.209-12) is
the _locus classicus in _A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the
motif recurs elsewhere.  In rehearsal, Quince explains that
Pyramus "goes but to see a noyse, that he heard" (3.1.86).  In
performance, Pyramus declares:
 
 
     I see a voice: now will I to the chinke,
     To spy and I can heare my _Thisbyes face. _Thysby?
 
                                              (5.1.190-1)
 
Although the sensory confusion focuses on Bottom, particularly
in his role as Pyramus, it also extends to characters in the main
plot.  Hermia's senses have been disturbed by the darkness of
the night in the forest, and she seeks Lysander's voice:
 
 
           Darke night, that from the eye, his function takes,
           The eare more quicke of apprehension makes.
           Wherein it doth impaire the seeing sense,
           It payes the hearing double recompence.
           Thou art not, by myne eye, _Lysander, found:
           Mine eare, I thanke it, brought me to thy sound.
 
                                             (3.2.177-82)
 
Puck brings still more sensory confusion to the mechanicals as
he counterfeits Bottom's voice (3.1.101 ff), and to the main plot
as he imitates the voices of Demetrius and Lysander to lead
them away from confrontation and towards enchanted sleep
(3.2.400 ff.).
 
     As in the Petrarchan examples Forster describes, sensory
confusion leads to loss of "the sense of individuality."  Demetrius
and Lysander are left unsure of their opponent's whereabouts,
and are charmed into somnolescence.  In the same scene,
Hermia likewise questions her own identity: "Am not I _Hermia?
Are not you _Lysander?" (3.2.273).  In _A Midsummer Night's
Dream, Shakespeare has achieved the conventional comic loss of
identity through the Petrarchan technique of synaesthesia.  In
the "Pyramus and Thisby" playlet, too, several characters
experience distinct crises of identity.  Not only do the actors
continually lapse out of character, but Wall must perpetually
assert his identity, Moonshine abandons his role to paraphrase
his part, and Lion and Pyramus are concerned to emphasize
their paradoxical identity as simultaneously Snug and Bottom.
The lovers of the main plot and the characters of the playlet
once again share a Petrarchan convention.
 
     The thematic cornerstone of _A Midsummer Night's Dream
is unquestionably the dream.[24]  Leonard Forster explains that
the dream, too, is a fundamental Petrarchan device (Forster 12),
and offers a prose translation of an early poem by Thodore de
B
ze (1548):
 
     ...Hardly had I said it when suddenly the hateful
     light destroyed my dream and took my maiden from
     me.
           But thou, whoever thou beest, o most
     gracious lord of nocturnal thoughts, whether I
     should call you Morpheus or Somnus, grant that I
     may see waking what I was enabled to see when in
     the power of sleep, or, if there is no other way for
     you to heal my desire, give me an eternal dream!
 
                                             (Forster 43)
 
This Petrarchan device illuminates Oberon's insistence that the
lovers will remember the night "[b]ut as the fearce vexation of
a dreame" (4.1.68), and in particular sheds new light on
Demetrius' confusion:
 
                            Are you sure
           That we are awake? It seemes to me,
           That yet we sleepe, we dreame.
                                              (4.1.191-3)
 
Demetrius has been granted the wish of the Petrarchan lover,
remaining perpetually under the dream-like spell of Oberon, and
forever seeing the world through the filter of Petrarchanism.[25]
                     ______________
 
     Quince's "Pyramus and Thisby" is central to Shakespeare's
_A Midsummer Night's Dream, resonating throughout in visual
tableaux, verbal allusions, and Petrarchan techniques.  The
situation of Hermia and Lysander parallels the legend, and the
allusions elicit nervous laughter from an audience made
uncomfortable by potential tragedy.  Helena and Demetrius
structurally parody the legend, relieving the tension and
producing unrestrained mirth.  The deliberate artificiality of the
Petrarchan idiom creates much of the aesthetic distancing which
makes comedy possible, but simultaneously, it suggests the
sincerity of the enchanted lovers, and the amateur players, in a
self-consciously literary mode.  Much of the humour of the
lovers' hyperbolic praise of Helena, and of the mechanicals'
playlet (the comic crescendo of the play as a whole), is
generated by the ambiguity of hollow Petrarchan conventions
which are naively intended to have meaning.  For Quince the
carpenter-playwright, the Petrarchan idiom serves as an
established framework to which he can nail his cardboard
characters.  Simultaneously, however, Shakespeare the
sonneteer-playwright saturates Quince's playlet with so many
Petrarchan conventions that the idiom and technique turn on
themselves, amplifying themselves into anti-Petrarchanism.
 
     Shakespeare's use of the "Pyramus and Thisby" legend
parallels his use of Petrarchan conventions: serious and parodic
perspectives are enigmatically fused.  The humour of structural
parody in the main plot relies on the interaction of the tragic
legend and its comic context.  In the mechanicals' playlet, the
friction of the actors' sincerity and Shakespeare's irony
generates the linguistic comedy.  The ambiguity is more than a
comic technique, however.  The Petrarchan idiom is paradoxical-
ly serious and frivolous, and likewise the "Pyramus and Thisby"
legend is both the source of much merriment and a reminder of
latent tragedy.
 
     Shakespeare's paradoxical, oxymoronic treatment of the
Petrarchan idiom and the Pyramus legend is one of the
fundamental structuring mechanisms of _A Midsummer Night's
Dream, and produces much of the high comedy.  Just as
Shakespeare appears to have developed "unmetaphoring" from
the Petrarchan device of "renaturalizing the metaphor," it would
appear that the later Shakespearean "complementarity" (Rabkin
22) owes something to Petrarchan antithesis, paradox, and
oxymoron.  _A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the other lyric
plays of the 1590's, was the proving ground in which
Shakespeare learned to bring the sonneteer's magic onto the
stage.
              ____________________________
                     E N D N O T E S
 
 
[1]  All quotations from _A Midsummer Night's Dream are
     taken from the facsimile of the 1600 first quarto in Allen
     & Muir.  Lineation is keyed to that of the Arden edition
     by Harold F. Brooks, in arabic form.  Long 's' and macron
     have been silently normalized.
          Shakespeare's comedy, more than his other genres, is
     dependent upon timing, intonation, and audience
     response -- features which his published texts cannot
     preserve.  Nonetheless, in the lyrical plays of the 1590's,
     more than at any other point in his career, Shakespeare
     was more a dramatic poet than a poetic dramatist.
     Studying the relation of the plays to the sonnets justifies
     the adherence to Q1, which was quite probably printed
     from authorial holograph.  See Randall McLeod, "Unediting
     Shak-speare," for a more detailed argument than can be
     given here.
 
[2]  The chronological sequence of the two plays remains
     unclear.  If it is accepted that the two are "companion
     pieces" (Barber 159), or that one of the two developed
     from the other, it seems infinitely more likely that
     _Romeo and Juliet, the play with a long history of
     sources, was composed first, and that _A Midsummer
     Night's Dream evolved in response to it.  This assumption
     is unnecessary for many of the following observations, but
     it permits consistent interpretation of the data.
 
[3]  Pyramus and Thisby are mentioned in only three plays,
     aside from _A Midsummer Night's Dream, and all belong
     to the mid-1590's:  the pale moonlight which shone on
     Pyramus is described at _Titus Andronicus 2.3.231;
     Thisbe's beauty is dismissed sarcastically by Mercutio at
     _Romeo and Juliet 2.4.42; and the moonlight is again
     depicted shining on Thisbe at _The Merchant of Venice
     5.1.8.
 
[4]  When Shakespearean critics discuss "Pyramus and Thisby"
     at all, it is usually in relation to _Romeo and Juliet.  This
     paper will maintain a tight focus on the function of the
     playlet within the main plot of _A Midsummer Night's
     Dream, but the arguments of previous critics necessarily
     underlie this discussion.
 
[5]  "Pyramus and Thisby" is, of course, a mythological
     ancestor of the Romeo and Juliet legend, and in some
     sense *is* _Romeo and Juliet.  Likewise, C.L. Barber
     contends that Mercutio's Queen Mab speech "is an attempt
     to do in a single speech what the whole action does in _A
     Midsummer Night's Dream" (Barber 158).
          All quotations from _Romeo and Juliet are taken
     from the Allen & Muir facsimile of the 1599 quarto (Q2),
     with lineation of the Riverside Shakespeare (see Evans).
 
[6]  Romeo exclaims, "Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! / Thou
     talkst of nothing" (1.4.95), just as Philostrate assures Duke
     Theseus that "Pyramus and Thisbe" is "nothing, nothing in
     the world" (5.1.78).   The importance of "ayery nothing"
     (5.1.16) reverberates throughout _A Midsummer Night's
     Dream, and throughout the work of Shakespeare: 32
     references occur in _The Winter's Tale, 31 in _Hamlet, 28
     in _King Lear, 26 in _Othello and in _Cymbeline, and 18
     in the Sonnets.  There are 14 occurrences in _Romeo and
     Juliet, and 12 in _A Midsummer Night's Dream,
     concentrated particularly in the lovers' confusion of 3.2 (3
     occurrences) and the mechanicals' confusion of 5.1 (6
     occurrences).
 
[7]  This interpretation is, of course, highly convenient for the
     chronological arrangement postulated here, that _Romeo
     and Juliet preceded _A Midsummer Night's Dream.
     Authorial revision is quite likely in Shakespeare's plays,
     but convenience cannot be the sole criterion for
     identifying it.
 
[8]  Kenneth Muir describes "a strip-cartoon version of the
     story which appeared as a border on the title-page of
     several books published by Tottel," which evidences the
     visual imagination's use of the Pyramus and Thisby legend
     (Muir 142).
 
[9]  Pyramus and Thisby are likewise structurally invoked in
     _Mucedorus sc. IX, in which Amadine and Mucedorus
     agree to meet in the valley where he slew the bear, only
     to have their plans confounded by Bremo.
 
[10] The BBC _Midsummer Night's Dream, though scarcely the
     finest production of the play, increases the parallelism at
     this point.  Hermia has been using her own mantle as a
     pillow, and leaves it on the ground when she starts up
     from her nightmare.  Although lacking textual support,
     this interpretation visually emphasizes a structural parallel
     which is nonetheless present.
 
[11] Like the treatment of Kate in _The Taming of the Shrew,
     however, the comedy of Helena's self-debasement is often
     filtered by a twentieth-century awareness of sexual
     equality.  *Criticism* can be coloured by modern
     concerns, but *scholarship* cannot.  The object of this
     investigation is, despite the "intentional fallacy," to
     examine Shakespeare's artistry and the effect it was
     designed to create.
 
[12] Helena's assertion that they "bait mee, with this foule
     derision" (3.2.197) carries new undertones in the light of
     her claim to be "vgly as a Beare."  Hippolyta clearly
     approves of the sport: she watched as Hercules and
     Cadmus "bayed the Beare" (4.1.111-2).
 
[13] Although it sounds almost as though Lysander has been
     reading about Pyramus and Thisby (or Romeo and Juliet,
     as S.B. Hemingway suggests), when he laments,
 
           Eigh me: for aught that I could euer reade,
           Could euer here by tale or history,
           The course of true loue neuer did runne smoothe[.]
 
                                              (1.1.132-4)
 
     Likewise, Helena demonstrates some awareness of her
     resemblance to a literary artefact when she declares "the
     story shall be chaung'd" (2.1.230).
 
[14] David Young notes that the lovers are mere puppets in
     the woods of Athens, whose movements and speech are
     artificial (68-9), but does not attribute this to Petrarchan
     conventions.  Robert F. Willson, Jr., seems to totally
     misunderstand the significance of these echoes, when he
     argues that "in both the forest world and the artistic
     world of '_Pyramus and Thisby' bad acting prevails" (116).
 
[15] Alexander Leggatt discusses the formal style of _Love's
     Labour's Lost and mentions its affinities with the sonnets.
     F.E. Halliday discusses its wordplay and rhyme in a
     chapter on the Sonnets and the Lyrical Plays, and G.R.
     Hibbard explores the ways in which the play makes "a
     virtue of virtuosity" (105).
          Jill Levenson observes that, in _Romeo and Juliet,
     "all of the dramatis personae express themselves in some
     variation of the Petrarchan idiom" [typescript page 7].
     Petrarchan conventions are devalued in the mouths of the
     Nurse, the Capulets, and particularly in reference to
     Rosaline, an abstraction "notable primarily for her
     absence" [13].  It is only when vehicle separates from
     tenor, and the sonnet idiom is "unmetaphored," that
     Romeo and Juliet can give the conventions new
     significance.
 
[16] This is precisely the reverse of the effect of Sonnet 130,
     in which Shakespeare dismisses the conventional
     Petrarchan similes involving the sun, coral, snow, wires,
     roses, perfumes, music, and goddesses as hollow, artificial,
     and finally limiting.  Despite this anti-Petrarchanism, the
     final effect, as Forster points out, is Petrarchan:
 
           [Sonnet 130] derives its strength and
           effectiveness precisely from the tradition it
           affects to deride, and its aim is the basic
           petrarchistic one, ingenious praise of the
           lady (who is so excellent that there is no
           need of hyperbolic imagery to praise her).
                                          (Forster 56-7).
 
[17] Helena's response is anticipated by the ladies of France
     in _Love's Labour's Lost, who silently accept criticism but
     reject all compliment.  Compare also Zantippa's response
     to Huanebango's extravagant Petrarchan praises in Peele's
     _Old Wive's Tale.
 
[18] Both Titania and Oberon invest literary convention with
     vitality and meaning, despite its apparent emptiness in the
     mortal world.  Titania's description of Oberon, in the
     shape of Corin, wooing Phillida (2.1.65-8), is conventional
     pastoral, but it is energetic and exotic in a way that
     Petrarchisms are not in the Athenian court.  Likewise,
     Oberon's description of "young Cupids fiery shaft /
     Quencht in the chast beames of the watry Moone"
     (2.1.161-2) seems less hollow in the mouth of a Fairy King
     than it might seem coming from Demetrius or Lysander --
     the boundary between court masque and fairy reality is
     blurred.
 
[19] This innuendo is suggested by Willson (118).  Eric
     Partridge notes several other examples, in _The Merchant
     of Venice and _The Merry Wives of Windsor (Partridge
     192), but does not cite Thisby's lines.
 
[20] Thisbe's blazon of Pyramus' physical features sounds
     startlingly like Leonard Forster's summation of a standard
     anti-petrarchan parody:
 
           [The Petrarchan idiom] was also parodied
           and inverted (as when poets praise an old
           hag for her silver hair, golden cheeks, ebony
           teeth and ruby nose)[.]
                                             (Forster 56)
 
     Forster reports a number of such specimens, contained in
     Albert-Marie Schmidt's anthology, _L'amour noir (1939).
 
[21] Likewise, in _Romeo and Juliet, the sole use of "blisse" is
     to describe Rosaline.  Jill Levenson has observed that
     Romeo consistently makes use of empty Petrarchan
     language to describe his love for Rosaline, which vanishes
     instantly in the face of his true passion for Juliet
     (Levenson, _passim).
 
[22] A number of other Petrarchan images explicitly connect
     the main plot lovers and the "Pyramus and Thisby"
     playlet.  The image of the dove unites the two plots:
     Helena remarks that "the Doue pursues the Griffon"
     (2.1.232), Lysander asks, "Who will not change a Rauen for
     a doue?" (2.2.113), and the image culminates in Thisby's
     "What, dead my doue?" (5.1.312), where a shortened line
     and simplified rhyme scheme renders the word hollow and
     ludicrous.  Likewise, the self-aggrandizement of Lysander,
     while enchanted, who proclaims himself Helena's knight
     (2.2.143), is matched by Pyramus, who uses the same word
     (5.1.266).  As Puck enchants the Athenians one by one,
     Helena enters, lamenting "O weary night, o long and
     tedious night..." (3.2.431).  This anticipates Pyramus' first
     lines on stage:
 
           O grim lookt night, o night, with hue so blacke,
           O night, which euer art, when day is not:
           O night, O night, alacke, alacke, alacke[.]
 
                                             (5.1.168-70)
 
     Helena describes Demetrius' unmotivated change in
     affection, which occurred prior to the action of the play:
 
           For, ere _Demetrius lookt on _Hermias eyen,
           Hee hayld downe othes, that he was onely mine.
           And when this haile some heate, from Hermia, felt,
           So he dissolued, and showrs of oathes did melt.
 
                                              (1.1.242-5)
 
     Demetrius later speaks of "my love, / To _Hermia (melted
     as the snowe)" (4.1.164-5), describing his second, magical
     change of affection in identical terms to the first, self-
     motivated one.  The changes in his affection are likened
     to a spring thaw, a perfectly natural and desirable
     metamorphosis.  The Petrarchan "icy fire" imagery
     culminates in the Duke's amazement at the mechanicals'
     play: "That is hot Ise, / And wo[n]drous strange snow!"
     (5.1.59).
 
[23] Likewise, in _Romeo and Juliet, a fundamental Petrarchan
     technique is used as a structural organizing principle: the
     Petrarchan convention that Leonard Forster calls
     "renaturalisation of metaphor" (Forster 167), becomes what
     Rosalie Colie calls Shakespeare's "unmetaphoring" (Colie,
     _passim).  Leonard Forster observes that, in _Romeo and
     Juliet, "[t]he enmity of the Montague and Capulet makes
     the cliche of the 'dear enemy' into a concrete predica-
     ment, and others are similarly enacted.... 'Thus with a kiss
     I die'" (Forster 51).
          Similarly, Alexander Leggatt points out the relation
     of the malapropism to the theme of linguistic unreliability
     in _Love's Labour's Lost (Leggatt 71).  The clear link
     between rhetorical technique and theme in these early
     plays emphasizes the need to respect them as carefully
     crafted poems for the stage.  (Evidence for false starts
     and multiple drafts of passages is primarily confined to
     the early plays also, suggesting a hesitance which
     disappears by the later tragedies.)
 
[24] Of 1150 references to "sleep-," "wake-," or "dream-" in the
     authoritative texts of Shakespeare, 66 occur in _A
     Midsummer Night's Dream Q1, 64 in _Richard III F1 (in a
     distinctly non-Petrarchan context) and 48 in _Romeo and
     Juliet Q2 (where fully one-third of the references surround
     Mercutio's Queen Mab speech).  No other text of a
     Shakespearean play has more than 19 such references.
     Again, the Petrarchan "companion pieces" share a
     distinctive characteristic.
 
[25] Demetrius' perpetual enchantment makes the conclusion of
     the play as problemmatic for some critics as
     Shakespeare's problem plays.  Oberon's manipulation,
     which makes the comic resolution possible, is inconsequen-
     tial when compared with, for example, Venus' solution to
     the final problem in Lyly's _Gallathea.
 
 
 
                      Bibliography
 
 
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Barber, C[esar] L[ombardi].  _Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A
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Brooks, Harold F., ed.  _The Arden Shakespeare: A Midsummer
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Colie, Rosalie.  _Shakespeare's "Living Art".  Princeton:
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