Borrowed Dreams and the Artifice of Genius in Neil Gaiman’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
“To write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire,” writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. What Woolf identifies in this passage is the “anxiety of influence,” the cultural and literary constraints of the past that contemporary artists attempt to escape, termed by Harold Bloom. One of these such artists is Neil Gaiman, and the burden he tries to discard is the Bard himself: William Shakespeare. But can he?
Neil Gaiman works to overcome the burden of Shakespeare’s influence over the course of several volumes in The Sandman. In his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” issue in Dream Country, Gaiman appropriates Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an attempt to characterize him as a lackluster simpleton. Although he scrutinizes the playwright’s character, Gaiman does not circumvent Shakespeare’s influence. Gaiman relies upon Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to unfold the depth of his Sandman universe, arguing that dreams — and story by extension — have the power to supersede reality at the expense of the storyteller.
To escape the anxiety of Shakespeare’s influence, Gaiman belittles the renowned playwright and his work using his protagonist Dream. He usurps Shakespeare’s so-called “genius” by making his own character Dream, not Shakespeare, the sponsor, commissioner, and primary source of the A Midsummer Night’s Dream story. In “Men of Good Fortune,” Shakespeare pleads with Dream, saying: “I would give anything to have your gift. Or more than anything to give man dreams that would live on long after I am dead” (Gaiman, “Men of Good Fortune,” 12). Dream offers him that very gift — the ability to write stories that resonate even after his death — at a personal price. Dream demands two plays, the first of which is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a performance to honor and celebrate the Faerie kingdom as they depart from the human world.
While he fashions Dream’s authoritative genius, Gaiman also undercuts Shakespeare’s character and humanity. The Sandman author fashions a depressing family background for the Shakespeare family. Shakespeare is a poor excuse for a father to his only son, Hamnet. Ignored and made a mere child actor for his father to use in his plays, the youthful Hamnet remarks that “All that matters to him [his father] is the stories” (Gaiman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 14). Hauntingly, the child remarks “I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays” (Gaiman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 14). Shakespeare has become burdened by his trade, his borrowed genius. His work takes him away from home and away from relationships he could have cultivated. The price Shakespeare paid was the price of isolation. Dream admits to Titania, who look on at the mortal playwright, that Shakespeare “did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream”(Gaiman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 19). Depicting Shakespeare as separated from the world as he strives after his artistic aspirations, Gaiman warns that dreams have the power to consume one’s humanity.
Although Gaiman belittles a constructed caricature of Shakespeare in The Sandman, he does not belittle Shakespeare’s genius play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gaiman releases the play’s full mystified potential to serve his own purpose, arguing that dreams —and story by extension — have the power to supplant reality. Originally, Shakespeare used the structure of a dream to suspend reality in this play; it toys with the boundary between illusion and reality. Venturing into the faerie world, the thematic home of deception and illusion, and using a a meta-play, this layered production invites the audience to choose the ending that best suits their own purposes. The clever Puck closes the play with a mystifying phrase:
“If we shadows have offended,/Think but this and all is mended:/That you have but slumbered here/ While these visions did appear” (5.1.393–396).
This palatable set of lines neutralizes the effect of the dream, allowing audience members to choose whether they would like the play onstage to have been a dream.
On the other hand, Gaiman inverts Shakespeare’s neutralizing view of dreams as a pallatable catch-all that can help comfortably conclude a story. Instead, he releases the potential energy of dreams, arguing that dreams can — at times — invade and replace the reality of the world we live in. Puck genius statement about the truth within the artifice of the play (“It never happened, but it’s true!”) drives home this Gaiman’s central point that fiction can demonstrate and create truth from nothing, giving storytelling and dreams a undeniable power even in the waking world (Gaiman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 14).
Gaiman also uses this power to create a new twist on the ending of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While watching the meta-play in Gaiman’s retelling, the real Puck laughs, claiming that he does “Robin Goodfellow better than anyone,” and assumes his place onstage (Gaiman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 15). This usurpation of the actor’s role makes Puck’s final line (“if we shadows have offended”) — directly borrowed from Shakespeare — more intriguing; the audience in Gaiman’s narrative — as well as us, the external audience—cannot know and cannot tell if these lines were ever Shakespeare’s or if they were inserted by Puck. After this play, the actors wake up from a Puck-induced slumber, and the hob-goblin himself is rumored to have escaped back into the human realm, as he refused to return to his faerie land. And yet, the audience isn’t left with a comfortable ending — the dream is not a place of rest but one of an imaginative awakening.
James Baldwin once wrote: “Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy.” Gaiman seems to fall into the trap that Baldwin describes. Gaiman attempts to discredit Shakespeare in the Sandman, but, in doing so, Gaiman he relies dearly on one of Shakespeare’s plays in order to accomplish his personal message.
It is only because of Shakespeare that Gaiman can voice the entire purpose and intent of Dream Country in this one issue. The larger Dream Country volume shows us the power of dreams — and demonstrates that dreams have power not just over ourselves in our own lives, but in the way that they can shape the world, and influence other people even after the dreamer dies, departs, or moves on to another world. Through “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Gaiman argues that the best stories are siphoned from dreams, and those dreams can grant their experiencers, listeners and followers a new interpretation and understanding of truth.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James, and Randall Kenan. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Pantheon Books, 2010.
Gaiman, Neil, et al. The Sandman. The Doll’s House. “Men of Good Fortune.” Vol. 2, DC Comics/Vertigo, 2018.
Gaiman, Neil, et al. The Sandman. Dream Country. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Vol. 3, DC Comics/Vertigo, 2018.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Martino Publishing, 2012.
