Matlab / Simulink y sus bibliotecas

The journey is the logic of the play, but this is not the only form of movement: dancing is a style of movement that is repeatedly referenced. It is the conventional testing of partners allowing a brief interchange with each person before legitimately moving on to the next. Yet it is less the sociology of dance and more its aesthetics that are useful in considering MSND and its ordering of bodies. Dancing is a

patterning of movement with a formalised symmetry: the partners imitate each other in their steps.61 If they dance in a pair they mirror each other face to face. Trying a different partner is done in front of the previous partner as people move around the room, circulating through the space. Circles are crucial in considering the form of movement and the ordering of bodies in dancing in the play.62 As Titania says, they ‘dance in our round’, the round being a set of cyclical movements that make up a dance, but alternatively the group as a whole as they dance in a circle (II.1.140).63 In doing so, the movement fashions the space or plot into a circle—both visibly in the circular movements and invisibly because the ring of dancers creates a dividing line beyond which observers cannot step. This control of space and ritualised

partnering—testing while moving—occurs with the dance of exchange as the lovers move through the wood. They take formalised steps, partner, break and re-partner at different places within the wood.64 They are defined, to a large extent, by who they

61 _{For a study of the status of early modern dance and its popularity, discourses on dance and court}

and countryside dancing, see Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008).

62 _{Dancing in the round especially in a pastoral setting relates to the maypole. Pieter Brueghel the}

Elder, ‘Peasants Dancing Around a Maypole’ presents a dynamic village scene with a large group of people forming a circle by holding hands around a large pole. See McGowan, Dance in the

Renaissance, p. 203.

63 _{In the next scene Titania enters with her train to dance a ‘roundel’, a dance in a circle (II.2.1).} 64 _{Not just between Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius, but also with Oberon, Hippolyta,}

Theseus, Bottom and Titania. Theseus and Hippolyta open the play discussing their imminent marriage (I.1.19). Oberon and Titania make their first appearance disagreeing about marriage. Oberon

are with and the physical journey through the wood that makes or breaks those relations.

The movement of the dance or ‘round’ reflects or responds to the movement of language, the ways in which it develops, digresses and repeats.65 Just as we follow the characters’ speech on its winding journey so they speak in metaphors of

movement, ones that refer explicitly to the circular dance. Puck says to Bottom ‘I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round’ (III.1.106). Puck will both follow and lead at once, suggesting that he will follow his physical path but lead him down an abstract path of comedy in nonsense that follows the never-ending path of the circle. In

Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio also uses a figure of movement to symbolise the method

of linguistic understanding: ‘follow me this jest now till thou hast worn out thy pump, that when the single sole of it is worn, the jest may remain after the wearing sole singular’ (II.4.60-4). The ‘sole’ of the ‘pump’ or shoe identifies the

understanding of the ‘jest’ with the physical act of walking or wandering.

Specifically Mercutio’s jest or extended metaphor is so lengthy and, like Puck’s, round and about that it will wear away the shoe with the amount of walking required to ‘keep up’.

Dancing is also an important metaphor of harmony, happiness and concord with the surroundings. Titania describes how: ‘Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, | By paved fountain or by rushy brook, | Or in the beached margent of the sea, | To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind’ (II.1.83-6). Dancing mingles the body and nature, hair with wind, as hair ‘dances’ to the music of the wind. A sense of

alludes to the various swapping and switching of partners from the beginning: ‘How canst thou thus for shame, Titania, | Glance at my credit with Hippolyta, | Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?’ (II.1.74-6).

65

Metaphor has been interpreted in terms of movement, as bringing together distant things, making them more ‘compact’, yet also achieving far and wide-reaching meaning. As Jean Ricardou points out, metaphor is the shortest distance between two points. ‘Like’ or ‘as’ have been removed, shrinking the distance between the subjects conceptually as well as on the page. See Jean Ricardou, Nouveau Problèmes du Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 106.

harmony is developed in dancing by two elements joining without struggle.66 Laurel Moffatt has argued that dancing is a symbol of concord in the play: ‘The idea of the dance is of great significance for both current and Renaissance audiences, although for different reasons. While current critics have for some decades shunned the “Tillyardized” idea of order and harmony, in favor of discussions of “the diverse and semiotically complex practices of dancing,” it was nonetheless an accepted notion in the sixteenth century that the act of dancing represented order and harmony.’67

Yet dancing, as the method that achieves harmony, can be semiotically complex;

harmony is the desired end or ideal but its route is not necessarily straightforward or achievable.

Titania’s speech is only a reminiscence of past congruity before Oberon caused upset: ‘with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport’—other forces disperse harmony in much the way that Puck’s mistaken drops and the volubility of desire prevent harmony from flourishing with the four lovers. Moffatt claims that ‘dancing operated as an ordering principle, locating all its participants in their rightful ranks and places.’68

Dancing orders through pattern and symmetry. In the combination of parts or details in accord with each other it produces an aesthetically pleasing effect.69 But these positions are contingent; harmony is perhaps the ideal end but in

66 _{Yet this is described in the past tense, before Oberon caused upset: ‘with thy brawls thou hast}

disturb'd our sport. | Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, | As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea | Contagious fogs’ (II.1.87-90). The wind that provided a melody now makes noises that are no use for dancing, only a sucking that threatens a diseasing fog. The sense of disharmony is much greater than harmony, and this is the setting for the play—not the dancing to the whistling of the wind but that of societal destruction, of disaster, famine and disorder. The ‘contagious fog which falling in the land | Have every pelting river made so proud | That they have overborne their continents: | The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, | The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn | Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard; | The fold stands empty in the drowned field, | And crows are fatted with the murrion flock’ (II.1.90-7).

67 _{Laurel Moffatt, ‘The Woods as Heterotopia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Studia} Neophilologica, Vol. 76, Issue 2, (2004), 182-187, p. 183.

68 _{Moffatt, ‘The Woods as Heterotopia’, p. 183.}

69 _{The harmony of music and dance relates to the pleasing combination or arrangement of sounds, as}

in poetry or in speaking; Titania’s speech is lyrical, ordered into iambic pentameter, and its meaning is coherent: ‘Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, | By paved fountain or by rushy brook, | Or in the

practice in MSND it remains an aspiration. Symmetry and patterning are used

between the lovers but without needing to be what Moffat calls ‘Tillyardized’, that is, emphasising unity in the play and more broadly its fit within the ‘World Order’.

The pattern of the dance may well be elegant but on closer inspection it is not symmetrical. The male characters exchange partners but the women do not change partners at all: Hermia is in love with Lysander from the beginning as Helena is in love with Demetrius, which remains unchanged. Discussion of the symmetry of exchange where equal property is swapped becomes gendered and unequal. The signification of the dance, then, is not a simplification of social relations, represented as easily symmetrical and pleasingly patterned. It may be connected to ideal social relations but it does not insist on idealising those relations into Tillyard’s ‘world order’, as demonstrated by Titania’s description of a fallen world.70

It is, however, able to offer an understanding of other puzzling social relations in the play, such as desire or love. The heuristic of the dance accommodates the deferral of desire, that once one lover is pursued and won desire shifts onto another. The dance also allows for the word ‘love’ to gain a clearer meaning, as when Demetrius begins the play pursuing Hermia but then ends the play in love with Helena. Declarations of love are to be understood through the experimenting exchange of partners rather than reliable, eternal feelings.

beached margent of the sea, | To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind’. The three places provide three images of distinct meeting places where dancing took place. This is even more strongly emphasised at the end of the play when Oberon calls for a dance. Titania responds: First, rehearse your song by rote | To each word a warbling note: | Hand in hand, with fairy grace, | Will we sing, and bless this place.’ (V.1.396-400) Rehearsing by rote is a form of learning that uses repetition to convey information to the memory. Rote here ensures that the words of the song are attached to the correct note in an ordered way, a bond that is reflected in the joining of hands of the dance.

70 _{E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Penguin, 1990, first pub. 1943).}

Tillyard perceives the Elizabethan world as rigorously hierarchically structured in a ‘great chain of being’ which would lead to a divinely appointed destiny. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, p. 23.