A Midsummer Night's Dream: the Sequel

By Pico Iyer

^ There has been so much talk of late of the cold war ending and the arms race receding, the whole geopolitical world shifting on its very foundations, that we have had little time to notice how quickly the battle of the sexes has been heating up. These, in fact, are hard times for lovers; in the age of AIDS and the palimony suit, an affair of the heart seems less a matter of chemistry than of medicine and law and politics. The pattern now, it appears, is boy meets girl (or sometimes boy), quizzes on sexual history, comes clean with an update on his own antisocial diseases and puts it all down in writing, for the lawyers. Precoital tristesse, in short. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? O.K. But remember that in 1989, summer days are apt to be murky with smog, uncomfortably hot thanks to the greenhouse effect and filled with lo-cal sequels.

What, then, one wonders on an idle summer evening, would the Shakespeare of Midsummer Night's Dream make of us, and what can we make of him? The first thing we notice when we see his play today is how little love has changed, with all its harsh geometry of triangles and unrequited passions; nor do we have any difficulty recognizing its evergreen cast of characters: the impatient suitor trying to persuade his girl to let him share her bed, the fair-weather swain shifting in an instant from rhapsody to rancor, the lovers plotting to escape a tyrannical father (only to find that they cannot so easily escape themselves). Puck, we realize, would make a dream host on The Love Connection, and the rude mechanicals, rehearsing "most obscenely and courageously," would surely be an instant hit on prime time. We recognize, too, that the malaprop artists' confusion of "paragon" and "paramour" is not an idle joke; the idealizing of love is as old as broken hearts.

In some respects, the comedy of musical beds and drugs and knockabout buffoonery seems almost made for MTV. The scene of two young men playing mixed doubles with their interchangeable girlfriends would not seem strange to the kids in Bret Easton Ellis novels, who fall into bed with anyone at all, scarcely stopping to ascertain identity, or even sex. Titania's sudden passion for ass-headed Bottom seems almost natural in the age of Ecstasy, when someone who takes a tab of MDMA is liable to open her heart to the first person she sees. And Pyramus and Thisbe, wooing each other through a chink in a wall, might almost be model paramours -- paragons, in fact -- for the "safe sex" generation.

Besides, "the course of true love never did run smooth," as Lysander observes, and in seeing the muddle of our own times we are apt to overlook the fact that it was ever so. Faithlessness was hardly patented by Cressida, and even in Shakespeare's day, the theaters were full of Roman numerals. Sequels follow sequels. Romeo, let us not forget, was a heartstrong adolescent unable to imagine any girl save Rosaline -- until he set eyes on Juliet; and Juliet was a 13-year-old upstart who roundly abused both her murdering Romeo and her devoted nurse. Shakespeare himself addresses some of his most heartfelt statements of love to a beautiful young man, and to a mysterious "dark lady" who was not his wife.

Yet even though the heart may not have changed, the pressures and restrictions brought to bear on it have surely done so. The whole thrust of Shakespeare's play, after all, is that "lovers and madmen have such seething brains," that lovers, in short, are too full of folly, too much aflame, too rich in their imaginations. Nowadays, often, our problem seems just the opposite. Prudence makes us measure out our hearts with coffee spoons, and discretion is the better part of Valium. Love has always been a messy affair, and that is precisely why it cannot be easily legislated. Make romance a thing for lawyers, and callousness and shame turn into crime and punishment. Yet today we have girls suing their dates for standing them up, and star-crossed ex-lovers -- the former partners of William Hurt, Mike Tyson and Rock Hudson, to name but three -- counting the emotional cost in millions. Litigation means never having to say you're sorry.

Technology, too, serves to make our liaisons more dangerous. Rob Lowe was apparently uncovered by a videotape, common-law suitors are often betrayed by photographs, and, in response to all this, more and more people choose to interface, date or even make love over the phone. If a modern Juliet were to try to reach her lover before feigning her own death, she might well hear, "Hi! This is Romeo! Nobody's here right now . . ."

All this is not to suggest that caution is a bad thing: Romeo and Juliet died prematurely, after all. Romance has always included some degree of calculation. Indeed, the very notion of true love, according to many scholars, is a relatively recent invention; in most places, in most times, marriage has been a practical arrangement. Those who scoff at matrimonial ads in Indian papers may have few qualms about placing SWM notices in their local tabloids; a blind date is only an arranged marriage in potentia. If disease and collision liability have put a crimp in promiscuity, that may be all to the good. But just because love cannot be free, does it have to be so costly?

Perhaps in the end, then, the thing that separates us most from Shakespeare is simply his belief in fairies who can solve all our confusions by going above the heads of lawmakers. The classic premise of comedy, and the ritual revelry from which it springs, is of a story that concludes with a vision of unity, of natural harmony. So, after all the lunacies and bumps of Shakespeare's starlit night are over, the spirits come down to put everything to right, and the lovers awaken with the morning lark only to suspect that it was all a dream. Love is blind, and its victims are mad, the poet suggests, but only for a night, a brief, forgetful spell. Perhaps even in 1600 that might have seemed an escapist thought; in 1989, however, a midsummer night's dream may be our best hope of a happy ending.