Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

188
William Shakespeare
introduCtory remarks
‘The Winter’s Tale,’ forms, as it were, the point of transition to a couple
of purely fantastic comedies, ‘The Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream;’ both are internally and externally of the fairy-tale character,
both also, as regards subject, are, as it seems, the poet’s own invention. 1
As they are the only two purely fantastic comedies, and Shakspeare, so
to say, first invented the whole species, they have attracted more attention
than any others of his comedies, and, accordingly, must here also
be submitted to a somewhat closer examination.
Every person of an imaginative or poetical turn of mind, probably
knows from his own experience that peculiar state of mind, in which
everything appears so strange, so mysterious and mystic that we can
become wholly absorbed in the contemplation of a wild flower, of a
murmuring brook, or of the hurrying clouds; a mood in which we
feel as if, at every moment, something unheard-of must happen, or in
which, at least, we long from the depths of our heart for some kind
of wonderful occurrence, although in our immediate neighbourhood
everything moves on in its usual course, nay although we ourselves
feel perfectly content and happy in the everyday relations of our life
and in our ordinary activity. There are, in fact, hours in which—illuminated
only by single scattered stars—the deep darkness of the
Mysterious and the Mystic struggles with the bright daylight of the
well-known, for the possession of our soul,—hours, in which the dark,
wonder-seeing eye of the imagination confronts the clear, sober look
of reason, and man, as it were, beholds himself and the world around
him from two entirely opposite points of view, as if he himself were
two entirely different individuals. This state of mind forms, we may
say, the psychological foundation of that fantastic, poetical picture
which—as in the case of Shakspeare’s ‘Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream’—blends into one, two perfectly heterogeneous and
contradictory forms of existence, in order to shape them into a new,
strange, half-known, half-unknown world. On the one side we are
met by figures with which we are perfectly well acquainted—human
faults and failings, feelings, passions and thoughts—all in the usual
form of actual reality; we fancy we see ourselves and our surroundings
but reflected in the mirror of poetry. On the other side, however,
the magic power of the marvellous reveals its whole force, the laws
of nature are set aside, the figures represented are at most but the