Language and Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

When I started researching the background and time period that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in, I found a lot of interesting material that actually fit well within the context of the play itself. It was written around the year 1594, during the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Restoration periods. And Shakespeare himself was a huge part of that as far as language was concerned. The play itself centers on magic and the collective human experience or memory, which was a huge question of both the Renaissance and the Restoration, and also plays in quite nicely with language as well. The stage itself is a collective human experience, and this was especially the case in Shakespeare’s day. He presented his masterpieces to not only the general public but to royalty as well and even gained high favor from Queen Elizabeth herself. His position, although playwright was at the bottom of the social totem pole in his day, created a lot of power for him when it came to making a vast impact over a large group of people. Shakespeare actually points this out in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by using the world of magic to signify the stage. And what is behind the magic of the stage? Language.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare by himself contributed a full 256 new words or forms of words to the English lexicon, five of which are found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Since he lived near the beginning of the Early Modern English period, when the language was still open to fairly rapid change, he was also in the position to have the new words that he introduced stick. The fact that Shakespeare has become an even bigger icon to this day makes his works even more prominent in the history of the English language. Not only do we have the Early Modern English format and its early progression preserved within his texts, but they are words that all of our society is familiar with. This is another testament of the power of language on bringing people together. The history of the English language is more than just grammar and semantics. It’s the people being the words and the need for language itself. That need is there because of the need for human interaction and our want to have that collective subconscious as a society. It’s a connector. And that’s a major part of what makes Shakespeare’s works, especially in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so powerful.

Shakespeare’s background gave him an interesting advantage when writing his characters as well. Since he grew up in a small, more rural town, and since he himself was very much a commoner, he is able to cast the common people in his play with real authenticity. This was actually necessary for success considering the vast majority of the people in the audience were common. But, at the same time, after having interacted or seen royalty at many occasions because of his trade, he could also cast them. Although, his portrayal did put these figures on an unrealistic pedestal to appease them. For example, Shakespeare only uses the poetic, iambic lines for the upper class characters, leaving prose for the common people. This goes back to the Indo-European idea of the language of the Gods, and how poetry was their means of expressing that language. So in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare uses that higher language not only for Theseus and Hippolyta and the lovers from that upper class, but also for the fairy royalty. This also reflects the mystic elements of the Indo-European tradition. The unknown of deity that is beautiful but just out of reach, trying to be portrayed through words. A lot of that tradition has carried over to our day. Our hymns are in the same higher form of verse and poetry. Our scripture is still in that older, more melodic English as well. We recognize the power of language when it comes to placing things higher in our society even now.

On the other side, Shakespeare uses Bottom and his band of common folk to show the use of prose and bring people back down to earth. He also uses them to show how language can be easily misused, making Bottom and the others utter many a malapropism in their quest for eloquence. As funny as this might be in the context of the play, it’s also significant in the fact that these very malapropisms were actually contributing factors to semantic changes in the past. Especially when English was being bombarded by other languages, it was easy for people to misunderstand certain terms that were shifted over. So the very thing that Shakespeare uses as comedy is actually insightful into the past and evolution of the English language. Even though it’s harder today for this to happen, it still does. For example, I know many people who still think the phrase “wives’ tale” is actually “wise tale.” I myself actually didn’t discover the true phrase until I was well into high school or maybe even a little beyond that. It’s still possible for language to shift in this way even in our modern world, even though it may be much harder to do so in this day and age with our access to the internet and libraries, etc.

Another thing that is fascinating about the way Shakespeare wrote his plays is that they are all layered with pun after pun after pun. If I didn’t have the aid of the Norton Anthology footnotes, I would not have caught half of them. This is partly because I’m just not paying close enough attention, but it’s also because meanings have changed. Occupational puns for occupations that no longer exist due to technological advances are the most common. And then of course are the multitude of sexual puns that are so graphic that I wish I didn’t have footnotes to understand them. But that’s changed societal norms and acceptances for you. That’s another interesting thing about language. It shows a lot about what’s acceptable in a society as a whole, and the stark contrast between the street talk and media talk through different times shows how society changes its roles and values depending on sources of power among other things. Language itself is a history book of people and culture.

The reason that Shakespeare made his plays so laden with puns is because those puns were a means of intellectual layering within the work to appeal to all levels of intellect in his audience. And since his audiences were always so varied, he had to use puns in order to keep the more intellectual entertained while making sure that the rest of the audience would still understand the plot if they missed certain puns. It’s akin to the Biblical tradition in that the more that his viewers were prepared with their language to pick up on subtle cues, the more they would get out of the performance and the text itself. The existence of this vast array of puns within his work allows modern readers to be able to see different aspects of the culture that were lost and also shows how complex and beautiful the English language really is. Wit is a large part of our language, how we interact with each other, and is also a key point as to how rhetoric works. We value people who have a mastery of the language, and Shakespeare is a perfect example of how that has been the case throughout English’s history.

Shakespeare had a massive impact on the English language. Not only that, but he also shows through his work an important chunk of human history as it relates to language itself. And A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a perfect example of his work because of the content itself that gestures toward the effects of language on the human collective subconscious and also shows a variety of characters and the difference between the different social classes and their language.



Work Cited
Shakespeare, W. (2008). A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The Norton Shakespeare). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.