『한 여름 밤의 꿈』: 꿈과 신화의 미궁

Abstract

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the framing story presents a noble Theseus and Hippolyta. They celebrate their wedding with pomp and ceremony, while the midnight action in an enchanted Athenian forest hints at the darker tragic aspects of their myth. The dream form, which characterizes most medieval allegory and symbolism provides a ready-made mold for Shakespeare's various myth mixtures. They blend and fuse, separate and come together as the midnight moonlight glimmers and fades. The threads connecting the dream fragments to mythic reality are extremely fine and tracing out the interconnections is a labyrinthine task. But Shakespeare has left a clue in his play to help us find our way through the dreams within dreams. This clue is Bottom. As “Bottom’s Dream” is so deep that it literally has no bottom, so packed with compressed allusion that it is almost impossible to fathom, it contains within itself most of the clues we need to work out the main strands that make up the fabric of Shakespeare’s Dream. Bottom’s transformation into a monster, half man, half beast, with his "head" taken off by Oberon, recalls the Minotaur, half man, half bull, who was slain by Theseus, the hero of Shakespeare’s play. It reminds us of Ariadne’s clew, the ball of thread, by which Theseus escaped from the labyrinth. It also reminds us of one of the meanings of Bottom’s name, the ball of winding thread. The episode in “Bottom’s Dream” of a lady passionately in love with a monster recalls Pasiphae and the bull. The fact Bottom in his metamorphosed state, transported to fairyland and doted on by Titania, has taken the place of Titania’s changeling, leads us to Phaedra’s monstrous love for her step-son Hippolytus. Since Phaedra became Theseus’s wife after the death of Hippolyta, whose wedding the play celebrates, this introduces a threat of evil hanging over the about-to-be-married couple. Bottom’s vision is not merely an anticipation of nuptial joys but a prophecy of post-nuptial catastrophe. When we remember the dark parts of the story hinted at by the play, all the lovely dreamy enchantment is overcast with a dark irony.