Quince and the Mechanicals
The Play-Within-a-Play in A Midsummer Night's Dream
The “mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are a group of Athenian craftsmen who have been chosen to perform a play at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Their rehearsals provide continual comedy, as they lose an actor, much of the plot, and all sense of proportion.
Peter Quince, their leader, proclaims the mechanicals to be the men “thought fit through all Athens to play in our interlude”, but as he reads out their names, it becomes obvious that this is hardly a crack acting troupe: “”Nick Bottom the weaver”, “Francis Flute, the bellows-mender”, “Robin Starveling the tailor”, “Tom snout, the tinker” and “Snug the joiner” (I.2). There is something of the professional’s condescension to amateur bunglers in the way Shakespeare depicts their attempts to produce high drama, and Snug’s request that the lion’s part be written out for him so he can learn it properly.
Their ambition continually makes them trip over their words, as Bottom promises to “aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove” (I.2), and they offer a “tedious brief scene” full of “very tragical mirth” (V.1) to the Duke and his household. Typically with Shakespeare, these malapropisms are ironically apt: Bottom may well “aggravate” his voice with his attempts, and their scene could be tedious despite its brevity.
Egeus dismisses their dramatic attempts as “nothing, nothing at all” by “hard-handed men”, but Theseus welcomes their “tongue-tied simplicity” as proof of their honest duty to him (V.1). He later defends them with terms which he seems to apply to all actors: “The best in this kind are no more than shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.” (V.1) The mechanicals, though clearly a terrible acting troupe, have somehow become emblematic of the dramatic arts.
The play-within-a-play motif appears frequently in Renaissance drama, notably in Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy. Of course Hamlet also contains some shoddy actors, who deliver an old-fashioned dumb-show and some ranting out-of-date tragedy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it isn’t clear what the play represents or symbolizes, though their word-mangling attempt at presenting a great story seems to have some link to Bottom’s vision which “the eye of man hath not heard”.
The 1999 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (starring Kevin Kline as Bottom) suggested that the mechanicals, amidst all of their mistakes and idiocy, touched true drama, if only briefly. Thisbe’s death scene was produced as a moment when the play-within-a-play transcended its shoddy staging conditions and awkward actors to make the “hard-handed men” who “never laboured in their minds” an embodiment of the power of drama. Whether or not one agrees with this reading of the text, it’s an intriguing moment.
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