Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

LAYERS OF MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE; THE EXAMPLE OF

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by
John Hudson

The Shakespearean author used a technique of writing on many different layers

so that she could communicate what she wanted to say to anyone who took the
trouble to study carefully what she had written. Using Jewish styles of reading it
would not be hard to understand the true meaning, but the Christians who just
read the two top layers would understand nothing of what they were about.

Each play is written as if it were a building, like a house, with multiple floors.
Different sets of events take place in each different ‘floor’ and each uses
different terms and language. The audience or reader is supposed to go
vertically up and down between the different floors and to put it all together
in order to work out what the whole ‘house’ actually means.

Surface Level; In the top story of the house that is A Midsummer Night’s Dream
there is the peculiar tale about the actor who plays Bottom who falls asleep in a
wood and finds himself among a world of fairies. He is transformed into an ass
and the fairy Queen, who has the odd name Titania, has sex with him. She
orders people to pluck the wings off butterfies, and to amputate legs off the
bees.

There is also a fight between Queen Titania and King Oberon, which is never
properly explained but is about a little Indian boy who Titania has captured and
crowned with prickly flowers—this being the main sort there are in the forest.
Oberon wants him back but we never are told why. Then Bottom acts a part in a
play in which he stabs himself to death. This is a most peculiar plot, but there
is a reason why it is like this. To understand it you have to look at all the layers.

Contemporary allegory; The next level down in the house is contemporary

allegory. It tells us that the Fairy Queen represents Queen Elizabeth, who was
described in Spenser’s famous poem as the Fairie Queen. She is described in the
play as imperial, like an Emperor. Her motto was ‘always the same’, which could
be seen as obstinacy.That is why the Fairy Queen caresses the Ass on her lap
and strokes his ears. It follows a standard emblem for obstinacy. Bottom
meanwhile represents King James. He eats oats and the Scots love their
porridge. He thinks a thistle is a flower—and it was the national flower of
Scotland. He itches and scratches, like King James who suffered from a skin
condition.

Medieval allegory; The next level in the house is the medieval level, the time of
Chaucer. Here we find the plot that involves the girls, it has been based on a girl
called Emily --another of the ways that Amelia wrote herself into the plays. We
also find that Bottom has been based on Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, a comic
idiot knight who wore Jewish armour. This is the first indication that the Bottom
character might be a comic Jew.
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Little
Hermia Indian
King boy Theseus
Oberon TOP STORY
LEVEL
Titania

Bottom

Queen
Elizabeth
CONTEMPORARY
ALLEGORY

King James

Sir Thopas
Emily MEDIEVAL
ALLEGORY

Daughter of Minotaur
A Titan CLASSICAL
ALLEGORY

Titus/
Domitian Yahweh
St Paul/Jesus
GROUND FLOOR
LEVEL; THE
BIBLICAL SATIRE
& INTERTEXT
Three crosses & Bottom/Jesus dies with
Pierced side, and should have hung
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Classical allegory; Down to the next level, which is that of classical mythology,
Bottom is identified as a monster like the minotaur in the labyrinth—who got
killed by Theseus, who is also in this play. There are references to thread, which
Theseus used to get out of the labyrinth. It is also at this classical level that we
suspect that Titania might be one of the names of Diana—Queen Elizabeth liked
to pretend she was Diana—and refers to her being the daughter of a Titan. This
is however not the whole story.

Biblical Allegory; If we peel off these other layers then we reach the final layer
which is set in the time of the New Testament.. Bottom acts a part in a play in
which he is “a most lovely Jew” (3,1,90). He quotes the letters of St Paul
thinking he had been translated into heaven. He tries to quote 1 Corinthians but
gets the body parts wrong. Bottom kills himself by stabbing himself in the
side—like Jesus was stabbed in the side. We are told the play ends with a
passion. There is a suggestion he should have been hung . The light disappears
and people play dice at his feet---all like in the Gospel crucifixion story. Then
he is resurrected (5,1,336). It also turns out that Pyramus and Thisbe are a
traditional allegory for Jesus and the Church (Jesus dies for the love of the
Church, Pyramus dies for the love of Thisbe).

To further alert us, in the symmetrical structure of the play, the crosses in the
Hermia and Helena dialogue are paralleled by the implicit crosses in the
performance of the Mechanicals’ play—the account of a rehearsal in which
someone is stretched with cruel pain, the death Bottom as a rewriting of the
passion narrative, and Thisbe who has been hiding like a silkworm under the
mulberry tree, a traditional metaphor for the crucifixion.)

At this deepest layer—which is Biblical allegory mixed up with the events of

the Roman-Jewish war fought by Titus Caesar – we find the name Titania was
one of the names of the Flavian family, such as Titus’s sister. Here in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream the author is depicting Titus/Titania as destroying
the bees, by amputating or pruning off their limbs -- which is indeed how Titus
treated Eleazar the true Jewish messiah during the Jewish War. The bee imagery
is a pun which refers to the traditional messianic dynasty of Israel, namely the
lineage of the Maccabees. The playwright has created a graphically accurate
portrait of how Titus treated Eleazar the Macca-bee.

The reason that Theseus says that Bottom may recover at the hands of the
surgeon and prove an ass is that this echoes the crucifixions that Titus ordered
and are described in the autobiography of Josephus, which invites the reader to
interrogate the relationship of these 2 crucifixion stories---one supposedly that
took place in the year 33, the other in 73, but which have remarkable and
strange relationships;
- in both 3 men are crucified,
-in both one man survives (and in one of these cases it is at the hands of the
surgeon),
-in both the person taking down the bodies is a Josephus,
-in one case his surname is bar Matthias, in the other ariMatthea,
-in one case taking place at the hill of the empty skull, in the other at the village
of the inquiring mind.
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

This invites us to be astonished. How can there be 2 such similar accounts? If

the one in the Jewish war is historical fact, then could the account in the Gospel
simply be a literary copy?

By putting these multi-layered readings together we get the complete story.

The character Titania, represents the Roman Emperor Titus and perhaps
elements of his brother Domitian whose favorite hobby was killing flies—hence
she has wings pulled off the butterflies (3,1,165). Bottom dies a death like the
Jew Jesus-- and Titania loves him so much because radical NT scholarship
shows that Titus created the literary character Jesus as his literary alter ego to
persuade the Jews to worship him as Caesar. Titus/ Titania has captured a little
‘Indian’ or rather Judean boy—as in Othello the words are synonyms—whose
mother is a virgin nun, crowned him with thorny flowers and made him a
changling. Now the King, and Yahweh the God of the Jews was always imagined
as a king, wants him back. That is why Oberon and Titania are fighting.

But the end is Apocalypse. Bottom/Pyramus/Jesus tries to unite with Thisbe/the

Church, when the Partition/Wall between heaven and earth, the wittiest
partition, comes down. But both die and Oberon, as the invisible, jealous Lord,
the Hebrew god, distributes dew—as is found only in Jewish apocalypses, to
signal the first day of a new Jewish world.

Like Renaissance polyphonic music, where there are multiple notes sounded
simultaneously, we have to read all the allegorical lines together in harmony, in
order to understand their meaning,