Compare the Role of Magic and the Supernatural in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream

Compare the Role of Magic and the Supernatural in the Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

'The Tempest', one of William Shakespeare's final plays, has a combination of characters, interesting settings, and interesting plots and subplots all held together by the running theme of magic, and its ever-present importance. A closer examination of the magic in 'The Tempest', and the public's view of magic at the time, will give insight as to Shakespeare's choice of magic as a theme, and why it has made this play, as well as his others, so successful and timeless. 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream', believed to be written between 1594 and 1596, is potentially less tragic than 'The Tempest', the magic which Shakespeare incorporates into this production seems much less vengeful and dark but more childish and playful, yet remains to be of the utmost importance to the play. 'The Tempest's' magic is much darker, perhaps reflecting a change in attitudes from Elizabethan to Jacobean audiences, as well as suggesting a possible shift in Shakespeare's own pre-occupations.

Both plays are highly magical and romantic. Throughout both plays Shakespeare exhibits love and romance in front of the audience, but with magic, he is able to question the stereotypical views that the audience of the time had on such themes. This refusal to conform to the views and opinions of the time can be seen in the upbringing of Miranda and supposedly Hermia. Prospero has raised Miranda similarly to how a boy would have been brought up at the time, noticeable when she says “had I been any god of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth or ere”. Miranda here is challenging Prospero’s actions in causing the tempest. No Jacobean daughter would dare to disrespect her father in this way. On the other hand, one of the anagnorises of the play, we discover what a more traditional upbringing at the time would seem like in the way in which Hermia was brought: “know of your youth, examine well your blood, whether if you yield not to your father’s choice, you can endure the livery of a nun”. Shakespeare’s language is strict, offering no compromise between parent and child as we might see today, but an order from the father with the certainty of his daughter’s instantaneous obedience. Shakespeare is able to challenge these 15th century stereotypes with his characters, portraying the behaviour of what is now seen as the modern woman. However, it is perhaps only the supernatural setting that permits Prospero the circumstances to raise his daughter away from European convention.

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In both plays, magic and the supernatural plays a triggering role as it causes love to take place: Prospero causes the tempest and then has Ferdinand meet his daughter Miranda. They characterise love at first sight, though it is difficult to ignore Prospero's presence, overseeing the entire courtship: "the fringed curtains of thine eye advance…no, wench, it eats and sleeps and hath such sense as we have-such. This gallant thou seest…” This makes us question just how natural the love between Ferdinand and Miranda is – are they in love at all? Or is it simply Prospero’s manipulation, staging the encounter between the two and then letting love do the rest? We see a similar effect in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck’s mistake, when applying the potion into the correct lover’s eye, is what causes the confusion which gives A Midsummer Night’s Dream its comic effect, and by the end of the play, its happy ending. "Tis strange, my Theseus, what these lovers speak of… more strange than true. I never may believe these antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains…"

Magic presented itself to Shakespeare as a controversial topic, due to the persecution of those believed to perform black magic – witches – who had been fascinating and horrifying society since 1050. However, after 500 years of witch-hunting, a turning point occurred in 1584, at the publication of Reginald Scot's 'The Discouerie of Witchcrafte'. This book was the first piece of literature to denounce witch-hunts, and the first tome in English to actually hypothesise about the methods of these so-called witches. We often hear Caliban mentioning Prospero’s books and how they are the source of his power and that to overthrow him they must be destroyed: "his books from where he draws his power". Here Shakespeare affords Caliban a tone of desperation when pleading with Trinculo and Stephano to kill Prospero. Interestingly, Caliban ignores the more obvious magic symbols of the cloak and the staff.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, magic is the thread that runs through the play. The most magical creatures in this play are obviously the fairies. In The World of Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (author unknown), it states that fairies, "Fairies in Elizabethan England were of the same basic size and shape as humans. People were often mistaken for fairies because the size of a fairy was thought to be that of a short human, so there would be no noticeable difference in physical size "People were often mistaken for fairies because the size of a fairy was thought to be that of a short human, so there would be no noticeable difference in physical size”. Shakespeare has to have people play the fairies and this seemed normal then as according to this essay, fairies were believed to be of human size anyway. They were also meant to be creatures that worked their magic mainly on farmland. Shakespeare changes the perception for the purpose of his play, though crucially magic is about the supernatural elements of the mythic world and each character has his or her own perspective, so experiences the magic differently. The lovers, the most impacted by magic, are totally oblivious to it. “Half sleep, half waking; but as yet, I swear, I cannot truly say how I came here”. Bottom finds his wondrous dreams to be privately bewitching: “I have had a most rare vision…man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream," while Bottom understands that he shall be seen as crazy if he tells the others what he thinks happened to him last night, and so Shakespeare makes a comic moment out of it by incorporating a pun. These types of joke are found throughout the play.

Stagecraft was much more limited in the time of Shakespeare – people went to hear a play rather than to watch it, though the importance of spectacle was, by the time of The Tempest's first performance, becoming much more recognised as a valuable feature. Masques were enjoying, during the Jacobean period, a surge of popularity. Stage mechanisms were available (trap doors and winches) but the options for creative stagecraft were much more limited. Oftentimes the spells cast in both productions are recorded in iambic pentameter, affording them a rhythmic and chant-like quality; the rhyming couplets further enhance the songlike nature of the lines: "now my charms are all o’erthrown, and what strength I have’s mine own… or sent to Naples. Let me not, since I have my dukedom got…". The music in the spells – Oberon's "I know a bank where the wild thyme grows" in particular, fits with the Elizabethan view that music was a form of magic from the heavens and that it was of the utmost importance to all people. Theresa Coletti, author of The Tempest-Music and Masque believes that magic is “a structural principle that suggests the thematic struggle between harmony and disorder and the difficulty of achieving the former over the latter”. Clearly, Shakespeare incorporates so much music not only into the spells, but also the speeches of many of the supernatural characters (Caliban's "This isle is full of noises" speech springs to mind) in both plays to suggest that order can still be drawn from a potentially mysterious and chaotic force. Without the magic potion at the dénouement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even after all of the mayhem of the production, the magic potion is able to create harmony among the couples. The potion makes Demetrius show his true feelings to Helena and restores Lysander’s original feelings to Hermia.

Another genre these two plays share is comedy – The Tempest is a tragicomedy which looks at the abusive power but melts into a harmony of forgiveness, reconciliation and marriage, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an unadulterated comedy concerned with love. Often Shakespeare utilised caricatures to inject comedy into his plays. In The Tempest, these caricatures are Stephano and Trinculo – a jester and a butler who spend the entire production drunk, bedraggled, bemoaning their lot in life and scheming towards a level of power that they could not possibly comprehend. Their key scene involves them dressing in Prospero's finery and drunkenly cavorting before being hounded off stage by the spirits of the island. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the caricatures are the mechanicals: Puck’s tricks are central to the comedic element of the play, though it is the malapropisms of Bottom that often generate the most amusement:"… The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was". Shakespeare's wordplay of divorcing words from their original meaning and swapping them directly mirrors the main action of the play which is all about switching and confusion. There is something wonderfully ridiculous when Titania seduces an ass-headed Bottom, though Oberon's willingness to see his wife humiliated could easily be seen as callous. In "What Fools they be-an analysis of Puck and Bottom" (author unknown) the author explains their purposes of the play in more detail: “Puck’s desire to entertain both himself and his king as well as follow Oberon’s orders is what causes the main complications of the play…Because of Bottom’s foolishness in this scene; Puck cannot resist playing a trick on him”. Perhaps Bottom's mangled language drives Puck to single him out for a type of punishment, but whatever the reason we see for a moment how powerless humans are at the hands of supernatural beings wielding unimaginable magic. Prospero's "pinches" and "cramps" are similar to this in that Caliban has no defence against the whims of a much more powerful and mysterious force.

Out of all the motifs in the plays A Midsummer Nights Dream and the Tempest, magic is the most important of them all as it complements all of the other motifs in the play. Love and relationships can also be seen to be a key part of the play, however, I believe that magic helps orchestrate the course of the love and romance in both plays “the course of true love never did run smooth” says Lysander in A Midsummer Nights Dream and as we see in the play thanks to magic, at first it does not. Nonetheless, by the end of the play, magic has fulfilled its purpose by bringing everything into a perfect harmony as we see in the joint weddings of Theseus and Hippolyta, Demetrius and Helena, and Hermia and Lysander. In The Tempest, once again we see a misbalance of the power dynamics caused by the banishing of Prospero. Prospero then uses magic in order to at first, make things worse by causing a Tempest, and for many years having maltreated Caliban, but by the end of the play, we see Prospero relinquish his magic in order to return to the real world. The abandoning of magic is what avoids catastrophe in the play as had Prospero continued to toy with the other characters, we would never have reached the simple denouement that we do. Once again, magic has seen that order has been restored, and then it leaves the world once its purpose has been fulfilled and will return once again in another Shakespearean play. Without magic, neither play would have been able to end joyfully as they did.

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