THE ALLEGORY IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is only superficially a comic fairy story. it

was written as a religious allegory, a well established Elizabethan literary
device. Part of it was detected by Dr. Patricia Parker, professor of English
at Stanford, who is a leading expert on this play. She has shown that the
character of Puck is an allegory for the devil (the names Puck and Robin
Goodfellow are both English names for the devil). Peter Quince derives his
names from the Greek and Norman French words for Rocky Cornerstone,
and represents Saint Peter. The characters in the Mechanicals’
entertainment, Pyramus and Thisbe, which come out of a story by Ovid,
are a standard and well known allegory for Jesus and the Church. Jesus
dies for love of the Church, so Pyramus dies for the love of Thisbe.

But what about Jesus

returning from heaven on
the Last Day? Supposedly,
the reason why Jesus was
delayed in returning to unite
with the Church was that a
Partition divided heaven
from earth. That Partition,
which comes down on the
Last Day is the “wittiest
partition” played by Wall.
So the Wall finally comes
down, allowing Bottom/
Pyramus/Jesus to come
back to embrace his bride, on the Day of Apocalypse. However it goes
terribly wrong. Both die.
And John Hudson shows
that the way that
Pyramus/Jesus dies is that
he gets crucified again. In
his death scene Pyramus is
stabbed in the side, the
light disappears, and there
is a reference to dice
playing “die,die,die”. The
little scene is sandwiched in
between two mentions of
the word Passion, alluding
very clearly to the Passion
Story, which is the Church
term for the death of Jesus. Then Thisbe enters as the Church, comically
praising Pyramus for having eyes as green as leeks and so on. This is not
a reverential account; it is a satirical parody.

But there is more. If some of

these characters come from first
century Judea, then what about
the others? In another
Shakespearean play Judea was a
synonym for India. So what
about the King, Oberon, who
has come from India? He is an
invisible, jealous, Lord. That
corresponds with G-d in
Exodus, and some of his lines
come from the solar Psalms.
Was the Hebrew G-d fighting a
war in the first century? Indeed
he was, against Titus Caesar. Is that who Titania represents in a pun on
Titus/Titania? And does Titania’s instruction to cut off the waxen thighs
of the bees parallel a strange episode in the writings of Josephus in which
Titus ordered that a Jewish leader, whose family all have Maccabean
names, be “pruned”. Is this another pun, on bee/Maccabee?

And what of the little Judean

boy, whose mother is a virgin
(a votress), and stolen away
from the G-d of the Jews and
turned into a changeling, who
is crowned with (thorny)
flowers. Is this changeling
actually the messiah, and is
this an allegorical reference to
what Titus Caesar actually did
at the end of the Roman-Jewish
War to turn the messiah into
the pro-Roman literary figure
of Jesus in the Gospel? John Hudson argues that the Gospel appears in
the play as the purple colored ‘flower’ (an Elizabethan term meaning a
book), which is associated with idleness (idolatry), which fills people with
“hateful fantasies” and makes Titania fall in love with Bottom/Jesus—in
the guise of an ass. The playwright is comically giving Titus a taste of his
own hateful fantasy, in a wonderful example of Marrano humor.