Oberon: “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.”
Titania: “What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
I have forsworn his bed and company.”
The feud in A Midsummer Night’s Dream between the King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, can tell us a lot about the skyrocketing commodity prices we are not facing. The two fairy royals accuse each other of being unfaithful, perhaps a side effect of immortality. Their feud, of course, represents political discord, and Titania in a magnificent speech lays out the cost of the failed governance on the people:
You’ll need a brief glossary, but it’s worth it: mead means meadow; beached margent means shoreline; made so proud means swollen; overborne their continents means flooded the riverbanks;
Titania. These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
Between 1585 and 1631, there were over 40 food riots in England, giving Shakespeare plenty of food for thought. And as I’m writing this, corn is selling for $6.58 a bushel, up from an average of around $4 over the last decade.
Titania has more to say. The fold means the sheep pen; murrion flock means a flock of dead, carrion sheep; nine men’s morris is a field marked for a popular outdoor game; the wanton green means a wild, abandoned field or pasture:
Titania: “The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter here;”
It’s a beautiful description, but of a ruined land. Let’s hope we give no future poet the opportunity to describe our country in this way. She goes on:
“No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.”
When I was younger I enjoyed this speech for its simple beauty. I never thought that it would read as an indictment of our present time.
P.S. I wanted to let you all know that my recasting of Hamlet as the 2020 election is now up for sale as an e-book and paperback through this link.
‘Hamlet’s 2020 Vision; A recasting of Hamlet as the tragedy of the 2020 election,’ reimagines Hamlet as the 2020 election by substituting the main players on our national stage for the play’s original cast of characters. I think the result is highly entertaining, but it also provides surprising insights into our current predicament, and it gives readers a chance to enjoy Shakespeare’s great tragedy from an entirely new angle.
