Shakespeare After All?

The first thing to call my attention in these two essays by Marjorie Garber regarding the Shakesperian plays Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Nights Dream was the title: Shakespeare after all. My first thought was that the words were in a strange position, that they should be After all, [it is] Shakespeare. But as I was reading the texts I realized that, actually, there was something missing, that the real sentence should be [But it is] Shakespeare, after all, as if it was saying it is not something we inquire, after all, it is Shakespeare. As the reading went on, a point that has been discussed in the classes was starting to develop a shape and I finally understood that the great problem regarding Shakespeares work is the gap between what his work represents (and mostly how it was represented) and what it really was.

A Midsummer Nights Dream is Romeo and Juliet turned inside out

This is the sentence that has called my attention in the essay by Marjorie Garber. When we first look at the two plays, it is hard to identify any similarity between Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Nights Dream. The reason is quite obvious: the first one is a tragedy and the second one, a comedy. But the structure in Romeo and Juliet is not so rigid as it seems to be; in the same sense, A Midsummer Nights Dream is not an innocent comedy (if there is such thing) as it is often read. At the very beginning of the essay on Romeo and Juliet, Garber draws attention to the use of a Petrarchan sonnet and states that the poetry is pretending that it can control contradiction and disorder. This is proved when the sonnet is followed by a scene of war in which servants come up offending and teasing each other.

An artificial night for an artificial love

Romeo and Juliet is known as the worlds saddest love story and their love is seen as something pure and innocent. However, it is funny to realize that the beautiful Petrarchan love Romeo felt was not for Juliet, but for Rosaline, who is completely forgotten as soon as he

places eyes on Juliet. So the love he felt was not so pure and innocent, it had already been preceded by another love experience, even though his feelings are described as mere doting instead of real love. It is also curious to see that Juliet, who I have always seen as an innocent and even nave girl, is actually smartest and more down-to-earth than Romeo. This is very obvious on the balcony scene, when he is there saying all those beautiful and dramatic lines while she is actually worried that the guards will see him there. In A Midsummer nights dream we see more developed female figures. If Juliet was the embryo of a more independent woman, Titania was the development of a character like Juliet, a woman who is capable of fighting over power against men and does it equally. A Midsummer nights dream is the representation of an England that was changing and changing with it the idea of what a woman should be and how scared men were that women would take over power. The importance of night and oppositions

Night is a constant image on the play and is where the feelings are born and developed: the ball, the balcony scene, the aubade scene after Romeo and Juliet have spent their first night together, Romeos fight with County Paris and his death. Here we go back to what was mentioned before about the artificial night Romeo creates when he is in pain because of his love for Rosaline. It was an artificial love, so it requires an artificial night. Real love happens when Romeo meets Juliet and when they were together, what was always at night. According to Garber, night is not only the scenario or the place in time where the events take place, it is a state of mind. The opposition between light/darkness is crucial to the play and is extended to other oppositions, such as realistic prose and formal verse, youth and age. The threat of the world of experience

Garber says that if Juliet refused to marry County Paris, then her father would banish her to the world of experience, the world of fall and redemption. The same happens to Hermia, who has got only two options to choose from if she decides not to marry: to die or to become a nun.

Such punishments are symptomatic of a world that still had not learned that love breaks old rules and create new ones. Hermia and Juliet represent those women who were no longer willing to accept the imposition of men and refused to see death or celibacy as the only option for their hearts. Romeo and Juliet are constantly fighting against traditional values and are defeated by them; Hermia, on the other hand, wins. Figures of authority are present throughout the play, as in the role of Tybalt, for example, who represents: and old order of heroism and revenge on the one hand, heroic, but on the other, unable to function in a modern world of politics and compromise, the world of The Prince, the world of law and language. Such characters never survive in Shakesperares plays. They all die, as did their historical models, usually , before their time. They are like dinosaurs, heroic beasts unfit for a smaller world of accommodation and grace. (Page 203)

This is also present in the authority of the Friar and the experience of the Nurse, both related to old values and laws that do not fit the world of the youth.