THE GREEN WORLD

There is another aspect of Shakespearean comedy that we have not yet discussed. Northrop Frye has identified some of Shakespeare's comedies as "Green World" comedies, and A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of those comedies. As Frye says, "the action of the [Green World] comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the Green World, goes into a metamorphosis there. . . and returns to the normal world" (85). The principal characters converge in this Green World, typically a forest, and all of their conflicts are worked through and resolved. This convergence in a forest is what we have observed in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This Green World is also maternal; that is, there is something about this world that engenders new life, and often there is a character, usually female, who dies and is revived, either physically or spiritually. Thus death is a part of comedy because comedy embraces all of life's experiences, but death in comedy is not tragic because even if the dead character is not revived, the character's spirit lives on in one or more of the other characters. Therefore, death allows the other characters to re-assess their lives and live them more fully.

The Green World is a place of magic, transformation, and discovery. It is also a place of incongruities, where things and people seem to be out of their element. For example, in some of Shakespeare's English forests, we find palm trees and lions. It is a place where time seems to stop because the demands of the real world have been left behind. And because the constraints of the real world have been left behind, the characters are free to explore new ways of seeing and of being in the world. Often characters are placed in these new situations involuntarily, but the adversity and challenge of the new experiences facilities their personal growth and makes commitment to life, marriage, and society possible.

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