Hi! I just finished reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and look up some stuff abt it online and got kinda confused. Did the lovers hook up with each other? I keep seeing scenes of the boys wearing minimal clothes in both pictures of a live production and in movie adaptations. Did I miss something or is it a direction choice?
Hi! I hope you enjoyed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I love that play.
And yes, you’re entirely right that the lovers do hook up with each other: Hermia with Lysander, and Helena with Demetrius. Somewhere between the end of Act 4 and the beginning of Act 5, a triple wedding (with Theseus and Hippolyta) takes place, and the final act is their post-wedding celebration.
The minimal clothing thing is entirely a direction choice, and often it’s not just the boys but the girls who lose their clothing too. I say ‘often’ because this has become such a common trope in MND performances that you can almost expect it. The lovers will start off looking respectable and well dressed, then, as they get more and more lost in the forest, they lose their clothes.
The reasoning behind the direction choice, I think, is that the forest is a place where ordinary societal rules don’t apply, and social differences, as well as identities, are practically erased. So whatever their clothing may say about their class, identity, fashion sense, it’s all lost; they are revealed for what they are. On a different level, you see this happening with Bottom and Titania: he loses his human form, but also his social standing, and in the liaison between the faerie queen and the weaver there’s an incredibly radical dissolution of social difference. In fact, it’s the biggest social gap crossed in Shakespeare’s work.
The other reason for the loss of clothing is that the forest is a place of sexual freedom, confusion and revelation. The lovers become reduced, in some ways, to their bodies, acting according to sexual infatuation (with added confusion caused by the potion). In this strange space, all sorts of things become possible, not least the borderline bestiality between Bottom and Titania. Many productions will play with the free play of sexual energy by adding homoerotic dimensions too, possibly taking their cue from the long speech in which Helena talks about her childhood friendship with Hermia. She describes how it was ‘as if our hands, our sides, voice, and minds/ Had been incorporate’ (3.2.206-7), which some critics have described as a kind of pre-pubescent same-sex attraction because of the similarity between the wording and wedding vows. There’s no more textual evidence for this sort of homoerotic attraction, but it does fit with the overall feeling of the play, the libidinous nature of the forest, and the freedom from ordinary identity constraints.
By the end of the play, the strange incident in the forest seems to have sorted out the lovers’ difficulties, much like a real dream can deal with many problems and leave you feeling enlightened in the morning. The dark mood of death threats that opens the play is almost gone, and everything seems to go back to a kind of normality (how far is debatable). So in most of the productions that go the minimal clothing route, the lovers will be back in fancy clothes for the final act, having just been married, signifying that they are no longer physically, sexually or mentally lost.
