The Ecology of Self in Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Professor Robert N. Watson, UCLA
• “ Scientist catalog zoo of bacteria inside our guts” by Seth …AP science writer
o Bacteria rules this planet and our bodies
o We are a walking colony of bacteria
• Journal of American scientists 2008
o Prof Robert Dorit
• “ each of us harbors approximately 10 bacterial cells for every one of our eukaryotic cells…”
o – Fairies are the microbes….
• “All images of nature were still present …
• Stephen Greenblat
• Demetrius “ come to his natural taste” still in the spell of the juice of the magic flower…
• Is love an idleness? A magic spell? Or just a common fact of adolescence?
• Erotic love is a possession, buries itself in the human heart
• Being loved = being drugged
o Actual physical difference
• Love involves a merchant phenomena
o “we might as well turn the names of compounds into the names of fairies”
• he noticed that human actions were not always applicable by human choice…
• “ the world we do not know but couldn’t live without”
• “all flesh is grass” becomes more then a metaphor in the play
o “woo’d by this wood” (2.1.249)
• Hermia’s father Egeus (goat -man)
o Theseus fathered by combined sperm of aegeus and Poseidon
• Theseus was famous for battling the minotaur and centaurs
• Theseus: Now, fair Hippolyta our nuptial hour draws on apace…”
o “ the next thing then…” (2.1.176-82)
• snakes molting their skin as a measure of instability
• it is an “orgy of life”
• for plants and humans a like can…
o what is shared may be stolen
• they are like parasites→ steal and consume the heart but may not be of their essence
• there is a crescendo of the ecosystem, a sweet thunder of all the scaled of nature, each under each.
• Pasiphae and Minatour
• Pride may be the deadliest of the suns→ an immune disorder, attacking all the parts of the human body
