At the end of William Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s soliloquy “If we shadows have offended, think but this, – and all is mended”(5.2.408-409) breaks the fourth wall, calling upon the audience to review their stance on the play they have just witnessed. Puck’s character acts as a dichotomous ploy of character and the author consolidated where Shakespeare himself calls through Puck’s character to the audience. In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus’ both the 1604 A text and later 1616 B text end with a choral ode breaking the fourth wall asking the audience to beware the errors that have befallen Doctor Faustus in the play. The B text is less ambiguous in which Faustus’ fate is more apparent as his dismembered remains are left on stage to be discovered by his fellow scholars. Although these two works by Shakespeare and Marlowe do not encompass the mass of theatrical art written and performed in the Renaissance Period, they are particularly exemplary of a common trait in Renaissance plays’ conclusions. Most are conclusive in terms of plot and the general storytelling of the play but left open in the sense that the audience may draw their philosophical conclusions on the plays meaning or perhaps more concretely, decide whether to adhere to the message of the play. This essay will discuss how most Renaissance plays resolute through plot but leave the audience with the decision to learn from the stories they tell.
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy and the play ties up its’ conflicts at its conclusion in line with this genre. Puck remove’s the magic drops from Lysander’s eyes leaving them in Demetrius’s so that both are in love with their desired woman. King Oberon’s wife Titania whom would not give up her changeling child and pay attention to him is tricked by Oberon as a ploy of manipulation and Puck is ordered by Oberon to put the potion in Titania’s eyes making her fall in love with Bottom, an actor, whom Puck changes his head into that of a donkey’s. This is resolved by the potion being removed from Titania and with Bottom being changed back. Titania eventually gives up the child and Oberon is happy once more. The conflicts are resolved easily including even larger matters of the state when Hermia refuses to marry the man that her Father, Egeus has chosen. She runs away with her true love interest Lysander to marry outside of the state’s laws. M.E Comtois writes in his article The Hardiness of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ , ‘When the fourth act finishes, all obstacles have been removed and private entanglements resolved. What remains is to see the public actions fulfilled. Thus, the artisans perform their play, completing their public act; the royal couple and the lovers consummate their marriages; and the fairies bless the marriages, fulfilling on stage (“publicly”) the offstage resolutions’. If Comtois’s analysis is to be correct then the resolution is fulfilled by the public acts of marriage which is typical of the comedic genre, but arguably the issues raised in the play still do not meet a worthy conclusion. King Oberon’s manipulation of his wife to force her to give up the child is not put into question and Theseus simply overrules Egeus’ law over who Hermia can marry leaving Hermia still disobeying her Father which for a play set in Ancient Athens and performed in the Renaissance is still widely unsettling. This is where Puck’s soliloquy comes into play. As he is the main vehicle for the manipulation and trickery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream his soliloquy acts as a pardon to the audience. He speaks in tetrameter couplets acknowledging playfully that they may not be pleased with the open questions that are still not solved, giving the audience the suggestion that the play was a dream and to forget their unsettlement. The play acknowledges itself exhibiting metatheatre making it clear that A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes through plot but does not completely resolve its issues as there are open-ended questions presented to the audience about women’s place in society and their obedience to their men as shown through Titania and Hermia.
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a tragedy, the difference in genre leaving no room for the happy endings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It too concludes through plot but not through its philosophical questions which are left to the audience to make up their minds. Both versions of the text conclude with a choral ode, which is much in the style of the predecessors of morality and miracle plays. This ending is very apparent in the message it leaves the audience, the lines spoken by the chorus in the epilogue of the A text ‘Faustus is gone; regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise only to wonder at unlawful things, Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits to practice more than heavenly power permits’(5.2.4-8) are a warning to the audience to not participate in the black arts and to be wiser than to go against the will of God. The A text however, does not cover exactly what happens to Faustus physically. We know he is gone but the audience still wonders of the terrors of hell and what faced Faustus. The B text published around 1616-1631 makes this more clear by adding in the entrance of the scholars who discover him, where they exclaim through the apostrophe , ‘ O, help us, heaven! See, here are Faustus’ limbs, All torn asunder by the hand of death.’(5.3.6-7) The apostrophe and violent imagery of the line leaves less to the imagination and show that Faustus’ is physically dead rather than simply exiting with the devils offstage as in the A text. This ending gives the audience the reaction they pre-emptively should have. In Anderson and Ostovich’s Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England : Tragedy, Religion and Violence on Stage it states, ‘In Doctor Faustus Marlowe is never preaching predestination nor preaching against it but rather manipulating a population of theatre-goers who are already wrestling with its doctrines in order to intensify their response to his protagonist, the most thoroughgoing of sinners who nevertheless manages to provoke enormous pity. The last scene of the play includes a group of scholars to whom Faustus confesses his bond and whose shocked sympathy models the response of the audience.’ With this analysis, it could be stated then that the ending of the B text is more concerned with a cathartic audience response than the open-ended question posed by the A text, but both achieve the same ambiguity of openness in their conclusions. While A leaves the question open as to what happens to Faustus physically, the B text covers this with the addition of the scholars telling the audience how to respond and to respond with pity, but both the choral odes that the texts share ask these open questions at the end. The choral ode that says we must only ‘wonder at unlawful things’ suggests that the things that cause us to wonder make us commit those unlawful things or sins. The question of the conclusion isn’t of the plot but of the message as it is unclear if this means Doctor Faustus’ fate was predetermined or if his fate was due to his own choices and free will.
Both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus being written in the Renaissance period act as the vehicles of social and cultural control in the way that plays of their time particularly did. They reflect and challenge the societies of their time. Titania defies Oberon and Hermia defies Egeus which challenges their society as both men periodically owned them, but ultimately Titania soon obeys Oberon and Egeus is overruled by another powerful male who allows Hermia to marry Lysander who her father did not wish her to marry. In Doctor Faustus, Faustus is a scholar who disobeys and denounces God by selling his soul to the devil and in a heavily Christian England, this would be something the audience of the time would be terrified of. The ending restores the order with Faustus’s terrible fate and damnation of eternal torture. This rectifying and reset of the order to peace in the societies they are in mirror expectations of the society periods they were written in. Dudley Nicholls writes in his article Theatre, Society, Education that, ‘The theatre has always a social function, whether it’s apparent purpose be religious, artistic, educational or merely commercial.’ If theatre indeed has this social function as it has throughout history, it makes sense for Shakespeare and Marlowe to write plays that might encourage change in a society that they see fault in. The ending of these plays especially reflect this idea as the open moral questions are put towards the audience within the façade of a wrapped-up storyline.
The Renaissance period was also a hub of a new philosophy. The Renaissance period marked a new age of beliefs moving away from medieval scholasticism and moving forwards towards the idea of humanism. Life became not completely concerned with the pathway to a Christian afterlife but with personal experience and secular matters. Shakespeare and Marlowe’s works followed Medieval theatre and the content that the works deal with differs slightly, The Medieval theatre had moral and religious plays such as Everyman or Miracle plays where the miracles of the bible would be re-enacted to teach an illiterate public about Christianity. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus break into the more personal ideas of the human spirit. The fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream constantly manipulate one another and are caught within the complicated web of misguided and misdirected love, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus showcases a scholar who rejects the typical studies to study a forbidden knowledge due to greed and pride and a very clarified rejection of the Church and afterlife in heaven at the end of the play. The new philosophies of Niccolò Machiavelli inspired both Shakespeare and Marlowe. Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream being Machiavellian in the way he will harm and manipulate his wife to get back the power he wants, and Doctor Faustus says in Act 1 Scene 1 ‘try thy brains to gain a deity’(1.1.65) showing his Machiavellian lust for power through forbidden knowledge, the words ‘gain a diety’ insinuating wishing to be equivalent to a god, an almost blasphemous statement. The endings of the plays seem to highlight why new philosophical ideas may be wrong and refuted by Shakespeare and Marlowe as although Oberon gets what he wants, Puck’s final soliloquy puts the audience into question if we should accept his happy ending or as the audience, question our feelings at discomfort at what we have seen. Doctor Faustus is inevitably condemned to hell and tortured for eternity with the B text highlighting that his human remains also dismembered at punishment and payment for his deal with Lucifer. The new philosophies of the Renaissance allow Renaissance plays to leave the open moral questions of the human spirit and heart and justice, as there was no longer one way to believe or think and the audiences of the Renaissance began to digest this more philosophically rich material as a movement after the focus of religion and religious morality of the Medieval period. The endings of both texts deal with larger issues that don’t have a straightforward answer and therefore are left open for philosophical debate.
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