Theatre within Shakespeare (II): A Midsummer Night's Dream

[Trivia: Which 2 chemical elements have names that end in “-orine”?]

Continued:

If Hamlet shows us what the Bard thinks formalistic and shallow drama looks like—compared to the genuine article that he has unfold for us—then A Midsummer Night’s Dream showcases a chimerical hybrid, as befits the play where one day-laborer’s head gets transformed into that of a donkey.

In Act 5, the city’s community theater (the actors are not professional thespians, and in fact we learn all of their day jobs) puts on Pyramus and Thisbe, a Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy set in Babylon. That choice alone is intriguing, and every commentator I’ve seen has noted how we don’t know whether Shakespeare had just wrapped up Romeo and Juliet or if that was a project he was about to tackle. Either sequence, funny enough, is plausible.

Again, if Hamlet showed off bad drama, this comedy shows off comically bad drama. The content is supposed to be serious. But Shakespeare dials up the bad writing techniques and cliches, and we hear dialogue like this:

PYRAMUS

O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night! alack, alack, alack,
I fear my Thisby's promise is forgot!
And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,
That stand'st between her father's ground and mine!
Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!

The repetition and belaboring of the points is similar to what’s displayed in Hamlet’s Mousetrap, except any touch of subtlety is gone. Besides, we the audience aren’t on tenterhooks about Danish palace intrigue just now—all 4 couples are matched or reunited, and the comedy is as good as over. The audience is free to watch some truly bad theatre.

This also applies to the Prologue given to Pyramus and Thisbe, where a narrator tells the audience the basic plot:

By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn
To meet at Ninus' tomb, there, there to woo.
This grisly beast, which Lion hight by name,
The trusty Thisby, coming first by night,
Did scare away, or rather did affright;
And, as she fled, her mantle she did fall,
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.
Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth and tall,
And finds his trusty Thisby's mantle slain:
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach'd is boiling bloody breast;
And Thisby, tarrying in mulberry shade,
His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,
Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain
At large discourse, while here they do remain.

Now, alliteration is powerful. There’s a discussion on Shakespeare’s use of it in mathematician Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to be Wrong; there’s also numerous references in the New American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, where they credit alliteration for some form of an idiom surviving while its variants faded out. (They cite that regarding “fit as a fiddle” and “lose one’s lunch,” e.g.) But Shakespeare also understood how thin the line was, between effective and distractingly artificial. He belabors an alliteration, and an especially silly one, right where the drama is supposed to take its irrevocable turn into tragedy.

It’s fun that Shakespeare didn’t miss an opportunity to contrast his sincere theatrical efforts with caricatured misfires, and it’s interesting how his choices give us clues as to what he thought were the most vital and easy-to-fumble points of staged dialogue.

~

Answer: Fluorine (#9) and Chlorine (#17).

Ironically, Chlorine was named for the Greek word for “green” by Sir Humphry Davy, even though it had been discovered by Carl Scheele—who was the inventor and namesake of a green pigment, “Scheele’s green.” This is the arsenic-based pigment once popular in wallpapers that lead some to theorize that Napoleon died of poisoning.