ENG 4140 BMWA                                                                              Berggren

Echoes and Allusions in Shakespearean Texts

            Shakespeare’s plays are full of “quotes” not only because his own writing has proved so quotable, but also because his plays contain so many references to writing that was popular in his own day.  If he rarely quotes directly, using quotation marks in the style that we use when we write research papers, he constantly echoes or alludes to phrases and situations that he assumes his audience will understand.  In the twenty-first century, audiences no longer share the common educational and cultural background that gave Elizabethan and Jacobean writers the confidence to point indirectly to sources that they could expect their audiences to know.  Thus we require footnotes.  There are at least two points in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that deserve more information than the Signet edition footnotes provide, if we are to grasp their full significance.  The materials discussed below give a good idea of the range of Shakespeare’s reading.

A.  Classical knowledge

The ancient myth of Pyramus and Thisbe is told by the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17) in his 15-book poem, Metamorphoses, a never-quite serious retelling of Greek and Roman mythology dedicated to the idea that all life is in a constant state of change.  One of the famous stories in the poem describes the transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree as she runs from the lustful reach of the god Apollo (see MND 2.1.231).  In Book IV, Ovid devotes several verse paragraphs to the sad story of Pyramus and Thisbe (which is, in typical Ovidian style, also a description of the metamorphosis of the mulberry tree).  Here is a brief synopsis of what happens:

Pyramus and Thisbe lived next door to each other in Babylonia, among whose rulers were Semiramis and Ninus.  Despite parental opposition, they fell in love, and spoke (although they could not see each other) through a hole in the common wall between their two houses.  They agreed to meet in the woods next to the mulberry tree, which bore white fruit.  Thisbe gets to the woods first, but a lioness who’d just finished eating frightens her away.  In her haste, Thisbe drops her veil, which the lioness absent-mindedly picks up in her mouth and bloodies with the residue of her recent meal.  Pyramus then arrives, finds Thisbe’s bloody veil, and draws the worst conclusion.  On the spot, he stabs himself under the mulberry tree, and his blood turns the mulberries red.  When Thisbe comes back to keep their appointment, she discovers the dying Pyramus, and stabs herself with his knife.

B. Allusions to the work of contemporary writers

Shakespeare not only knew Ovid’s Latin well; he also was very familiar with one of the most popular books of his time, a verse translation of the Metamorphoses into English by Arthur Golding, published in 1567.  A quotation from Golding’s version suggests how poetry had matured between 1567 and 1595 and indicates the literary tradition that lies behind the kind of verse used in the play that Bottom and the others perform.

And when he had bewept and kissed the garment which                                                                                             he knew,                           ‘Receive thou my blood too,’ quoth he, and therewithal                                                                                              he drew

His sword, the which among his guts he thrust, and                                                                                                    by and by

Did draw it from the bleeding wound beginning                                                                                                         for to die,

And cast himself upon his back.  The blood did spin                                                                                                  on high

As when a conduit pipe is cracked, the water bursting                                                                                               out,

Doth shoot itself a great way off and pierce the                                                                                                        air about.

C. Biblical sources

Along with the classical background that only the literate members of the Renaissance world enjoyed was an almost total immersion in the Bible that the illiterate shared, since biblical texts were read aloud and used as the basis for sermons at the church services that virtually everyone attended several times a month.  When Bottom muses on his “dream” (4.1.207-23), he alludes to a passage in the New Testament, in which St. Paul explains to the people of Corinth the vision of the divine that is available to blind love, which is superior to the judgment of reason.

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have

entered into the heart of man, the things which God

hath prepared for them that love him.  But God hath

revealed them unto us by his Spirit [the Holy Ghost].

I Corinthians 2:9-10