“What Angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) In Bard Words (19) Oberon, King of the Fairies instructed his henchman Robin Goodfellow (Puck) to obtain a the juice of a rare flower and with it to anoint the eyes of Titania, the Fairy Queen. The effect of this juice is to make the receipient fall in love with the first creature on which they lay their eyes. At the same time Bottom the Weaver, one of the rude mechanicals, has been turned by Puck into a donkey and having scared off his fellows with appearence now finds himself close by the bower in which Titania sleeps. She wakes upon hearing his singing and thence follows one of Shakespeare’s great visual jokes.
Like any religious society of the past, life in Elizabethan England was ordered based on the Great Chain of Being. This hierarchy, with God and royalty at the top, man in the middle above women, and animals near the bottom, was the basis of status. Deviation from the established order was considered absurd and created chaos. In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Shakespeare uses the juxtaposition of contrasting people and settings to explore the effects of disorder in Elizabethan society while revealing character flaws for comic effect.
Titania, Queen of the fairies and analogous to Mother Nature, sits near the top of the hierarchy of life. Bottom, a weaver, resides much lower on the spectrum within the lowest class of men. The schemes of Oberon and Puck lead to a comical and wholly unnatural relationship between the fairy queen and the fool with an ass’ head.
The plot has often been satirised, in particular recently in the series ‘Upstart Crow’. and even in an advert for Levi’s 501’s.
