climate action

These are the Forgeries of Fossil Fuels: Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a Path towards Climate Action

by Dan Harrison

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play inseparable from its climate. The majority of the action occurs when the characters move from the ordered, city setting of Athens to the mystical chaos of the forest. This wilderness environment indicates a disruption of the normal order and an entrance into the supernatural world of the faeries. There is a clear distinction between the two locations, and the Athenians are unable to return to their ordered world until they have dealt with the issues that arise while in the forest. At the heart of this discord is a violently altered climate, caused by a fight between Titania and Oberon. While historically understudied, this crucial aspect of the play can provide contemporary performances and readings with a framework to inspire positive action during our own worsening climate crisis.

The changing climate is established in Act 2, Scene 1 of Midsummer, through Titania’s “Forgeries of jealousy” monologue, which provides several concrete examples of a rapidly changing climate. Reading through her description of the play’s climate, it is difficult to not draw parallels with modern climate change trends. It is well documented that the current rate of climate change will increase the frequency and severity of hazardous weather events, ranging from forest fires and droughts to hurricanes and floods. The impacts of these events will be far-ranging and unpredictable. Compare this to the first portion of Titania’s monologue, which describes severe rains and flooding that decimated the crop harvest, leaving fields flooded and paths overgrown (2.1.91-103). There is a brief allusion to increased illness (2.1.107-108), which echoes recent climate research, coming on the heels of a global pandemic. Finally, Titania directly addresses how “we see / The seasons alter,” (2.1.109-110) and “The spring, the summer, / the chiding autumn, angry winter, change / their wonted liveries,” (114-116). Once again, compare this to our current climate situation, which research indicates is causing noticeable shifts in the seasons. Altogether, is clear to see that Midsummer takes place in a climate eerily similar to our own.

Sophie Chiari suggests that the same was true in the time when the play was first produced, as the years surrounding its initial production were noticeably cold and rainy. As a result, audiences in an outdoor venue may have been subject to the same poor climate depicted in Midsummer, making it a deeply immersive experience (39). According to Chiari, Shakespeare’s decision to set the play in an unsettled climate was directly informed by his own surroundings (31-32), and so reflected them. This helps provide support for a contemporary reading that seeks to do the same, though perhaps less literally so than in Shakespeare’s original outdoor performances. Midsummer provides contemporary audiences with a mirror through which they can consider the implications of a changing climate without the defeatist and often pessimistic undertones that tend to plague current climate conversations.

Whereas most climate discourse today demands immediate solutions, a positive approach using Midsummer has the ability to help us address the root causes. Take, for example, campaigns such as Just Stop Oil, that ask us to go cold-turkey on fossil fuels. This would undoubtedly help solve our climate woes, but is it a feasible solution? Climate action will unquestionably have to be radical, unprecedented, and difficult, but responsible climate action also asks for a conversation addressing the necessary social and cultural shifts. Once again, we return to Shakespeare for a roadmap. A significant hurdle in climate discourse involves our difficulty with understanding the immense scale of this issue. It is difficult to understand how climate affects us even on a local scale, and it is even more difficult to grasp the magnitude of changes that are occurring on a global scale. With its reflection of climate, however, Midsummer provides a way for audiences to do just that. Henry Turner speaks on the play’s ability to “serve Shakespeare as a larger than life personification of natural principles, as vehicles for colossal inhuman forces that only a mythic theater could comprehend” (34). The play has a particular knack for depicting the complex ecological connections between humans and climate, “with a clarity that would astonish a modern ecologist” (Turner, 34). Chiari refers to this phenomenon as “the foreshadowing of a vibrant ecological creed” (40), which feels like an accurate approximation of what current climate discourse asks of us.

The key to this argument, and to understanding climate as a force intrinsically linked with humans in this play, is the discord that initially causes such climactic chaos. Fortunately, Titania readily hands this to us at the end of her monologue, declaring that “this same progeny of evils comes / From our debate, from our dissension; / We are their parents and original” (2.1.117-120). It is clear, then, that the changing Athenian climate is not a random, unpredictable event, but a direct result of Titania and Oberon’s actions. The disarray that occurs throughout the rest of the play, embedded directly into a climate that we know as unstable, cannot be separated from Titania and Oberon’s initial argument. Similarly, climate change, in addition its immense ecological implications, remains a deeply human problem. Around the globe, massive populations will disproportionately face food insecurity, displacement, natural disaster events, and more. Worsening climate change will inevitably place more stress on already fragile social relationships, which is obvious in current conflicts surrounding climate action. Though this is a far cry from the trivial lover’s quarrel in Midsummer, therein lies the beauty of using the play to pave a path towards positive action. Just as its climate can hold a non-threatening mirror up to its audience, so too can it demonstrate how we should address these issues without resorting to antagonistic tactics, as is sometimes evident in climate activism.

So, despite all this, what does the play suggest we do? Upon close reading, it becomes obvious that the path forward is not in what the play suggests we do, but rather in what is missing from the play. Chiari suggests that the Athenian climate woes may not only be the result of Titania and Oberon’s conflict, but that “the direct cause of the disruption of climate in the Athenian woods,” may very well be “the absence of harmonious love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (45). Instead of the conflict between Titania and Oberon acting as the sole cause of this trouble, we can interpret climate in the play as a potential consequence of any antagonistic behaviours. In fact, we see this “absence of harmonious love” as early as Act 1, when Theseus implores Hermia “either to die the death or to abjure / forever the society of men” (67-68) if she does not obey her father. The root of the lover’s quarrel in the woods comes from this verdict, yet both conflicts are also intrinsically linked with the shifting climate of the play.

A contemporary staging of the play should seek to emphasize how the disharmony that is most evident in the woods is ultimately resolved by radical acts of love and community action, rather than individual strong-arming, as Theseus attempts to do at the beginning of the play. In Midsummer, it is clear that conflict only leads to more conflict. The characters only begin to resolve their issues when they act with compassion. In Act 4, scene 1, Oberon lifts the spell that has been placed on Titania. His reasons for doing so, “And now I have the boy, I will undo This hateful imperfection” (4.1.63-64), may be problematic, but a climate conscious reading should lean into the latter part of this scene, where Titania and Oberon “take hands” and “rock the ground whereon these sleepers be” (4.1.89-90). This lack of dancing, representative of Chiari’s “harmonious love,” was an initial cause of the changing climate, as Titania explains that “never, since the middle summer’s spring, / Met we […] to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind” (2.1.85-89). Indeed, though the play never depicts a solution to its climate crisis, we can imagine that by dancing once again, Titania and Oberon begin the work of mending their chaotic world. A climate conscious reading of the play empowers us to lean into this detail, perhaps through clever staging, and present this dance as the turning point, as the first stitch in a long healing process.

Arguably, climate is the greatest threat to the world of Midsummer, but it is one that only exists in the play’s periphery. Once Shakespeare establishes this, the play’s focus shifts rapidly to interpersonal relationships. We should not read this as a dismissal of the climate however, but rather seek to examine those relationships as a representative of how the climate disruption is caused and, more importantly, how it may be resolved. The brilliance of such a reading lies in the play’s remarkable ability to depict Chiari’s “vibrant ecological creed.” Faced with the massive scale of a global climate crisis, “the terrifying unpredictability, the hugeness and impersonality of forces that operate randomly and with no regard for human interests” (Turner, 36), we are so often crippled by hopelessness and pessimism. Instead, we should look to Midsummer to help us position it as “a logical sequence that stems from an identifiable cause” (Turner, 36). By approaching our climate crisis as Midsummer suggests, we can avoid the finger-pointing and antagonism of contemporary climate discourse and choose to emphasize harmony, love, and community action. There is, despite everything, a path forward through our changing world, and we can win this fight. It just takes kindness, patience, and maybe some dancing.