Whispers from the Realm of the Fey¹
The painting A Midsummer Night’s Rim draws us into a nocturnal, fairy-haunted scene bathed in soft lunar light. At the center, Oberon, king of the fairies, gently embraces Aniruddha, a mysterious young man — once an Indian child, now grown to manhood in this imagined extension of Shakespeare’s dream. The atmosphere recalls the enchanted universe of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where fairies, nobles, and artisans yield to a world of mutable desires and endless metamorphosis. Here, the magic becomes a language of freedom: it dissolves the boundaries between genders, ranks, and identities, turning the dream itself into a field of sensual and spiritual emancipation.
(To discover an excerpt from the play A Midsummer Night’s Rim, where desire steps out of the painted moonlight and takes the stage, see further on in this publication.)
To the left of the image, the fairy world unfolds as an enchanted landscape teeming with fantastic beings, dominated by Puck, who watches over the unfolding events.
To the right, in a forest still veiled in mystery, human figures emerge in a more tangible realm. Bottom, the artisan transformed into an ass, is surrounded by Demetrius and Flute, in an unmistakably homoerotic closeness that opens a reflection on the play of power and desire.
Vertigo of the Marvelous
This anonymous work belongs squarely to the mid-nineteenth-century Victorian genre of fairy painting, that hybrid of literary imagination, symbolic narrative, and meticulous naturalism. One senses the influence of Joseph Noel Paton, whose vast and intricate canvases such as The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849) defined a visual grammar for Shakespearean wonder: moonlit glades, choirs of miniature sprites, and the tension between desire and moral order, all staged with theatrical precision.
Yet inspiration may also have come from others within the fairy circle — Richard Dadd, for his feverish visions where the fantastic shimmers beneath the real; and John Anster Fitzgerald, for his nocturnal scenes of hallucinatory strangeness. Within this lineage, the unknown artist extends the spirit of the tradition: not seeking to record nature, but to open a space of metamorphosis where the borders of the visible, of gender, and of desire dissolve into the very texture of light.
Victorian Enchantments
Victorian fairy painting, emerging in the 1830s and flourishing through the 1860s, was defined by its literary imagination, intimately bound to Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantic poets. It wove narrative fantasy and moral allegory, finding in the marvellous a mirror of the age’s spiritual and social tensions. Its minute precision and botanical detail — heirs to both scientific observation and the Pre-Raphaelite eye — granted these visions of elves and glades a startling verisimilitude.
Yet within that accuracy lurks psychological ambiguity: these dreamworlds hover between childhood purity and sensual unease, between mystical rapture and carnal longing. Their tender sentiment, so typical of Victorian morality, is fissured from within; beneath the storybook innocence, one glimpses a society torn between repression and fascination with the body, between discipline and surrender.² ³
A Midsummer Night’s Rim
Attributed to an anonymous painter of the Victorian fairy circle, in the lineage of Joseph Noel Paton, Richard Dadd, and John Anster Fitzgerald
Oil on canvas, c. 1855
Probably conceived for a collector fascinated by the mystical interlacing of desire and the supernatural, drawn to those invisible realms where the human world and the otherworld entwine.
The Fairy Epicentre of the Central Section
At the heart of the composition, Oberon, king of the fairies, stands nude beneath the milky glow of the full moon. His translucent wings — both fragile and expansive — carry the tremor of desire to their quivering tips. The butterfly crown upon his brow speaks of a poetic sovereignty, poised between mortal and faery realms. Facing him, Aniruddha, darker of complexion and adorned with a peacock feather slipped into his hair — a token of distant origins — meets his gaze in a calm, almost ceremonial embrace.
Their bodies press close, charged with restrained tension that promises stronger entanglements to come. The moon above them sheds a light that acts as both veil and silence — a space open at once to contemplation and to transgression: one where desire may speak without domination, where magic is no longer power but shared intimacy. Here, Oberon is no longer the manipulator of others’ passions; he becomes actor of his own, laying down authority in favour of an unexpected tenderness.
The Quivering Kingdom on the Left
To the left, the composition stirs with a throng of male fairies — all belonging to Oberon’s court. Within this realm, the masculine fairy escapes all bounds of gender: the fluidity of desire abolishes roles, each one free to gaze, to long, or to be desired in turn. Some, proud and playful, bring their sovereign a fruit of pleasure — a gift more than a trophy — as though participating in a rite where sensuality becomes a shared language. Around them rises a vast tree with a face of bark, an ancient and magical being. Its gaze, turned toward Oberon, seems to quicken; its sap rises beneath the influence of the central couple, until the living heart of the forest itself begins to pulse.
All around, the male spirits of the fey world quiver, drawn by this vital force. In the foreground, Puck, amused and watchful, stares outward: his gaze pierces the picture plane, linking the world of fairies to that of mortals. He becomes the conscious bridge between the two spheres, inviting the viewer to cross the threshold of dream and step into the realm of desire.
The Earthly Counterpoint on the Right
To the right, the human world asserts itself in a tranquil light, where the softened glow seems to guard the intimacy of the scene. Here we recognize Flute, Demetrius, and Bottom, their emotions — now freed from enchantment — revealed in their naked truth. Flute, slightly leaning toward Bottom, is suffused with a serene desire, as if the fever of dream had ripened into calm delight. Demetrius, protective, completes the circle and savours the quiet of their peculiar bond, while Bottom, lying on the ground, touches himself, his sex made visible — awaiting a continuation in which the roles of each remain to be defined. Nothing here belongs to charm or spell: we stand before a more carnal resolution of the Dream. In this version, the three men have discovered and loved one another without the help of any enchantment, following instead the natural logic of shared attraction.
“Bottom,” a Name of Double Meaning
In traditional interpretation, the character of Bottom has often been perceived as a figure of comic virility: his transformed body, his bestial traits, his sheer presence dominating the stage. Yet nothing in Shakespeare’s text suggests that this physical monumentality implies sexual mastery or power. On the contrary, the episode with Titania inverts the code: it is he who becomes the object of a spell, the one possessed, to whom love is imposed. His metamorphosis, far from strengthening him, renders him vulnerable — offered to gaze, to tenderness, to play. The apparent “strength” of the body becomes the place of surrender, and animality, instead of marking domination, reveals another form of the masculine — one grounded in receptiveness, attention, and the mutual sharing of pleasure. In this reading, Bottom embodies not triumphant virility but the very instability of desire’s hierarchies.
This tension between body, role, and the position of pleasure, at the heart of any reflection on male homosexuality, will be developed in a forthcoming essay in the Chronicles, devoted to the often-phantasmatic link imagined between anatomy and sexual position.
The Dream’s New Order
A Midsummer Night’s Rim shifts the perspective on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Where Shakespeare employed magic as a moral confusion and a comic device, the artist turns it into a field for the exploration of male desire. The fairy world is no longer a stage for illusion but the very mechanism of longing — a world where nature mirrors the body, where thought becomes vision, and where distinctions between command and surrender, between the natural and the supernatural, fade away.
The work stands as a meditation on homosexual freedom: on a world where pleasure between men is no longer veiled in allegory or hinted at in metaphor, but embraced as vital force — a language of the flesh and a bond among beings. The omnipresent light reveals not merely the beauty of form but the legitimacy of a long-denied gaze — that of male desire itself, made visible at the heart of a Victorian aesthetic that once buried it beneath moral varnish.
Britten and Pears — The Dream Reimagined
A century after the Victorian fairy painters, Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) and Peter Pears (1910–1986) breathed new life into A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an operatic form where the realm of fairies became a field for exploring homosexual desire.¹ Premiered in 1960 at Aldeburgh, their Dream transposes Shakespeare’s confusions into a climate of diaphanous sensuality, erotic ambiguity, and shifting identity.(Read more about the play Tiger at the Gates at the very end of this publication.)
A Duo of Love and Creation
Partners in life as on stage, Britten and Pears shared an artistic bond inseparable from their affection. Britten wrote for Pears’s voice — its range, its crystalline tone, its fragile expressiveness — roles in which intimacy and art, distance and revelation, are fused. In this opera, Pears sings Flute, the artisan turned Thisbe: a role both comic and moving, transformed by Britten into a symbol of gender fluidity and of the gentle acceptance of the feminine within man.²
The Music of Metamorphosis
The sonic forest they conjured — woven from children’s voices, sultry strings, and suspended harmonies — extends the mist of the Victorian glades while charging it with a new sensual energy. This Dream no longer moralizes confusion; it embraces its vertigo. The fairy realm becomes the mirror of a once-forbidden love, where male desire at last finds a symbolic and poetic language worthy of its depth.³
Notes
¹ Philip Brett, Britten and Sexuality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
² Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, London: Allen Lane, 2013.
³ Heather Wiebe, “Britten’s Musical Bodies: Desire and Metamorphosis in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 21, no. 3, 2009.
Curiosity Piqued?
¹ Fey derives from the archaic fae or faée, from the Latin fata — plural of fatum, meaning “destiny.” It evokes the fate-spirits and supernatural beings of Celtic and Romance lore. Revived in the nineteenth century by Romantic and Symbolist writers, the term restored to “fairy” its ancient ambiguity and enchanted gravity.
² Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters, London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1969; Christopher Wood, Fairy Painting: Victorian Art of Enchantment, London, Academy Editions, 1997.
³ Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Alison Smith (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude, Tate Britain, 2001.
A Midsummer Night’s Rim
ACT IV, SCENE I — The Forest, near Bottom’s Bower
Enter FLUTE and DEMETRIUS from several ways. The moonlight silvers the trees.
FLUTE
Yon moon, half-veiled in clouds, doth blush and hide,
As if she saw within these haunted groves
Some mortal mischief born of dream and desire.
I came to breathe the night’s cool breath, to still my heart
From city’s clamour and the forge’s din,
Yet here, methinks, my soul is wilder stirred—
Some spirit calls me forth to secret laws.
DEMETRIUS
I fled fair Helen’s sighs and sugared vows,
Her silken words that tired a soldier’s blood.
My heart now thirsts for harsher wine than love,
The smell of sweat, of soil, of honest hands—
Perchance in man’s rough gaze a truer fire
Than ever woman’s glance could kindle me.
They espy BOTTOM seated upon a stump, his ass’s head bowed, moonlight glancing on his hide.
BOTTOM (aside)
What creature am I grown? Man? Beast? Or both?
My breath comes like a forge, my limbs are flame,
And though I bear the face of some dull brute,
A freedom, new and dread, hath enter’d me.
FLUTE
(awed)
Sweet saints preserve us! What sight is this?
No man entire, nor wholly beast he seems,
But some wild mingling Nature never meant.
His very shadow shakes me—yet I gaze still.
Behold, my lord, what apparition there!
DEMETRIUS
Peace, craftsman. Gaze but mark—he seems compos’d
Of oak and sinew, breathing sap and fire.
He sits as some rude idol of the earth,
A god that labour wrought, not priests adorn’d.
FLUTE
(low, trembling)
I know not if it be dread or yearning moves me.
His breath smells of the barn and of the forge,
And I, poor peigner, know those honest scents.
(pausing)
My lord—when we did play our interlude,
And I, poor Flute, was made to speak as Thisbe,
At first I mock’d the part, the voice, the gown;
Yet in that feignèd grief there came a truth,
A woman’s softness stirring in my breast,
That was not wholly play. Since that hour,
I know not where the mask doth end—or I begin.
DEMETRIUS
(stepping near)
Call me not lord, good Flute; that word offends the air.
Say Demetrius—for as I look on thee,
I know not if thou art a youth or spirit.
Thy face doth keep a relic of thy Thisbe still—
That tender doubt where both do mix, and beauty
Takes no single shape. ’Tis that which charms me most.
FLUTE
Then, Demetrius—(softly)—call me Flute again.
For names of rank are heavy in this wood.
Here breath and heart are equals in their burning.
Let us be nameless save in what we seek—
Since thou and I now burn for one same soul,
Whose form—beast-born—makes mock of all our usage.
BOTTOM
(rising slowly)
Who trespasseth my sleep with trembling words?
Approach, fair strayers—fear no mortal wrath.
This night doth shelter all who seek its truth.
I am no longer man, nor beast, but both—
A heart that beats ’twixt hoof and hand alike.
DEMETRIUS
We fear not night, but what in night we find.
Thou art the dream the earth herself hath dream’d:
Where strength is grace, and ugliness divine.
FLUTE
(bowing a little)
I have no lordly speech, nor noble mien,
Yet These hands know gentleness in craft and touch,
And Thisbe taught me tears in woman’s tongue.
If thou permit, strange wonder of the wood,
I’ll lay my hand upon thy living hide,
To know if thou art vision—or art true.
BOTTOM
(laughing deep)
Touch then, sweet youth. ’Tis flesh, not sorcery.
Thy fingers smell of wool, thy heart of fire.
Spin now the thread of longing thou hast learn’d,
And let it bind us three in one strange loom.
FLUTE (touching him)
O heavens! He burns as though the sun did breathe.
Beneath his skin the world itself doth move.
No monster now, but shrine of all that lives.
I think I know what Thisbe whisper’d through her wall—
She spoke not to her lover, but to me.
DEMETRIUS
Look, Flute: the beast grows holy in our sight,
And we, poor penitents, unlearn our shame.
All gentler loves are lies beside this truth.
BOTTOM
Come then. Here lies no blame, nor priestly fear.
The wood keeps counsel better than the world.
What matter who doth rule, who doth obey?
The earth beneath, the sky above—
And we between, revolving like the moon.
Come, let the hay be bed, the breath be oath,
The sweat our incense, and desire our creed.
They draw close, their shadows mingling with the ass’s form. The air thickens with sighs and murmurs. A pause—then silence.
Enter PUCK, peering from behind a tree.
PUCK
Now ho! What sight was this that stirr’d mine eye?
I’ve seen men love through spells and fairy guile,
But never such as this—born of themselves!
Without enchantment, they have found the dream.
Methinks this truth would make Lord Oberon blush.
I’ll to my king, and tell what mortals prove:
That love, once freed from shape and show, is god enough.
He vanishes into the air. The moonlight wanes.
Exeunt.