Obscene beasts: the stage behind the scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Mimesis, the art of imitating the real world on the stage, is all the more difficult if this real world consists of a beast—a wild, dangerous, supposedly “obscene” animal in the Latin sense: literally off-stage. Such is the challenge faced by the amateur company of mechanicals who are producing the love tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s play within the play featuring a fearful lion. For all the efforts the mechanicals have engaged in the project, their rendition of the lion is such a failure that it has the on-stage spectators roar with laughter. This is a fairly convincing anticipation of Gaston Bachelard’s statement in Water and Dreams, “a ghost [a beast in this particular instance] complacently described loses its effect.” Thus, through the mechanicals’ theatrical misadventure, Shakespeare ironically includes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a “how-not-to” guide for mimesis, a reversed mise en abyme of his own challenging conception of a play teeming with an unstageable and infinite variety of creatures great and small, wild and tame, familiar and fantastical, its presence all the more haunting as it is never staged strictly speaking. Neither staged nor completely off-scene, the bestiary of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, emblematized by the “enamel skin” shed “there” by the elusive “snake” (2.1.254), is featured on a subliminal and simultaneous scene, a sub-stage as it were, an Other Scene, involving humankind in a liminal confrontation with its own animality. This paper aims to explore the strategies—whether rooted in the Elizabethan worldview, or amazingly modern—through which Shakespeare stages this inward confrontation, while involving us in vertiginous reflexions on the theatre