A Midsummer Night's Dream: Relating Ethics to Mutuality

Abstract

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream shows ethical conflicts to be resolved relationally. Quarreling lovers divide Duke Theseus's Athenian court in advance of his own nuptial celebration, forcing the Duke to decide moral questions based on their ethical consequences. King Oberon's conflicted fairy world meddles in human affairs, adding to the ethical confusion. Athenian workmen vie for roles in a court performance that becomes both a theatrical travesty and a triumph of relational ethics owing to Bottom, the character most within relation itself. Paradoxically, the “dream” elevates relating per se to self-consciousness. Hegel's dialectical, Jean-Luc Nancy's transfiguring, and Martin Buber's relational perspectives take up Shakespeare's premise of treating ontology and ethics as facets of the same movement. Just as the play enacts Hegel's assertion that all (inevitable) alienation must be overcome, so it also shows Nancy's and Buber's symbolic consecration of ethical being as mutuality.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Robert A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.1.98. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.

2. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner's, 1958), 18.

3. Buber, I and Thou, 3.

4. Buber, I and Thou, 8.

5. Buber, I and Thou, 115.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 488.

7. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990), 250.

8. Hegel, Phenomenology, 471.

9. Hegel, Phenomenology, 486.

10. Hegel, Phenomenology, 260.

11. Buber, I and Thou, 112.

12. Martin Buber, The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogue: A New Transcript with Commentary, ed. Rob Anderson and Kenneth N. Cissna (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 55.

13. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural,” in Being Singular Plural, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 51.

14. Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural,” 58.

15. Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural,” 65.

16. Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural,” 80.

17. Hegel, Encyclopedia, 242.

18. Hegel, Phenomenology, 488.

19. Hegel, Phenomenology, 485.

20. Martin Buber, A Believing Humanism: My Testament, 1902–1965, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 55.