yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere

Literary landscapes stretch away from us in all directions, constantly connecting with others and twining away into the fabric of your universe. Emerging from within us, these landscapes can be generally geographical or even distinctly locative, but literary terrain also lies at the confluence of our collective mythologies, our fancies, our dreams, and sometimes our fears. Charged with thought and passion, literature reflects the heaving sea of our human experience, showing us both storms and placid surfaces of hidden pools, offering glimpses of otherwheres which are greater than ourselves. For all manner of ground lies within us, ranging from the deep woods with their confined sightlines, the storybook metaphor for possibilty, to deserts, oceans, and the contours of whole unknown worlds as well.

Our title line for this post comes to us from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it marks what seems to be one of only instances when Shakespeare uses the word “glimmering”, all of which are in this particular play.* In the love chase, the elaborate mating dance that occupies so much of the central portion of the play, a doting Demetrius pursues Hermia through the nighttime forest. When he catches up to her, she half suspects that he may have murdered her true love, Lysander, whom she cannot find. Smitten with her as he is, Demetrius cannot understand why she continues to reject his advances, and why she would think that he would do anything cruel to her. When she accuses him of wearing the grim countenance of a murderer, he responds, using the word “glimmering” for the second time in the play:

So should the murdered look, and so should I,
Pierced through the heart with your stern cruelty.
Yet you, the murderer, look as bright, as clear,
As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.58-61)

He has been murdered by her refusal to accept his love even while she shines like the goddess, Venus, in her ‘glimmering’ sphere.

Demetrius’ use of the word “glimmering” is bracketed between the two times in the play that the word is used by the fairy king, Oberon. At the beginning of the second act, the immortal king chides his queen, Titania, about her supposed love for Theseus, saying, “Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night/ From Perigenia, whom he ravished?” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.77). The third time the word “glimmering” appears in Dream is when Oberon uses it again near the very end of the play:

Through the house give glimmering light,
By the dead and drowsy fire.
Every elf and fairy sprite,
Hop as light as bird from brier,
And this ditty after me,
Sing and dance it trippingly. (5.1.377-82)

This last usage occurs at just the point where the play pointedly adopts the language of incantation. Puck has swept the dust behind the door in ritual preparation, and Oberon directs the faries to “give glimmering light” through the house, as an apparent blessing. The next sets of lines, in softly cadenced rhyme and meter, draw the audience into a play that has suddenly become a ritual of blessing, transformation, and renewal.

Clearly, ‘glimmering’ things are out of the ordinary. They are special. Venus’ glimmering sphere is not an ordinary sphere, else it would not require the additional descriptive. Similarly, the glimmering night through which Titania may have led Theseus is suggestive of something beyond an ordinary night, as is the glimmering light that Oberon directs the fairies to take through the house. Suggesting both a ‘gleam’ as a kind of innate lighted quality, and a fairy ‘glamour’, the word may take us in several directions at once. The night/sphere/light may each contain a fluxuating luminescence, which variously pulses or ripples. As a ‘glamour’, Katherine Briggs says:

It generally signified a mesmerism or enchantment cast over the senses, so that things were perceived or not perceived as the enchanter wished.**

In terms of an illusion, a glamour can be either helpful or harmful, depending on the dictates of the original enchanter. Many fairy tales contain characters who are not as they appear, and a glamour may make an elder appear more youthful and attractive, or may make a more youthful character appear older or more monstrous. In such cases, the glamour often takes the form of a curse, shifting a character’s physical form. These curses may endure for a specific period of time, or they may be released by a catalyst, often involving evidence of ‘true love’–sometimes in the form of genuine lover’s tears:

Or sometimes in the form of “true love’s kiss”, even if the transformation is not exactly as everyone expects in some cases:

Sometimes, both lovers may be cursed, as in the 1985 film Ladyhawke, where each lover is transformed–the man, Navarre, into a wolf at night, and his lover, Isabeau, into a hawk by day:

The point is that when a person, thing, or situation is ‘glimmering’ or under a glamour, it alters our perception of it.

Etymological searches reveal that the word “glimmering” may come from the “Middle English glim, glimme (“radiance; shining brightness”), but online etymological sources also indicate that the word is “of uncertain further origin. Perhaps from Old English gleomu (“splendor”) and/or Old Norse *glim, *glima, both apparently from Proto-Germanic *glimō, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰley- (“to gleam, shimmer, glow”). Compare Norwegian glim, dialectal Old Swedish glim, glimma.” It also seems related to the word “glamour”, which Brigg discusses in terms of fairy magic as derived “[f]rom Scots glamer, from earlier Scots gramarye (‘magic, enchantment, spell’).”***

One of the complaints often lodged against A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that once everyone else has been released from the spell, Demetrius remains enchanted by the love flower even at the end of the play. Yet, Demetrius’ early use of the term glimmering associates him, however subtly, with the idea of an enchantment before the love juice from ‘love in idleness’ changes his sight. As Lysander reminds us at the very beginning of the play:

Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,
And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
Upon this spotted and inconstant man. (1.1106-10)

Theseus confirms having heard this same thing in his very next line, and the episode suggests that Demetrius has already fallen under a glamour somehow, before the play began. In this case, the love flower merely corrects his perception by restoring his former sight to him. Near the end of the play, he compares his crush on Hermia to snow or to an illness, like an impermanent seasonal change that had only temporarily obscured his true love for Helena:

But, my good lord, I wot not by what power
(But by some power it is) my love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud
Which in my childhood I did dote upon,
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia.
But like a sickness did I loathe this food.
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will forevermore be true to it. (4.1.163-75)

Note that he ‘saw’ Hermia, but was ‘betrothed’ to Helena, who is ‘all the faith’ and the ‘virtue of his heart’. The passionate vocabulary in Demetrius’ language discovers the truth of his underlying emotion versus the surface attraction of perception in his temporary pursuit of Hermia.

Shakespeare uses the word “glimmer” (or “glimmers”) in three other plays. In Dream, however, the word is used as a gerund, signifying an activity in process. In contrast, the glimmer in Comedy of Errors is a noun, a “fading glimmer left” in old Aegeon’s eye. The verb form in Henry VI part 1 remains part of a descriptive phrase about a characteristic. In a comparison, the Duke of Somerset describes truth as something that “will glimmer through a blind man’s eye”, describing a characteristic rather than an immanent process. In Macbeth, “the west” as described by Murderer 1, “yet glimmers with some streaks of day”, which suggests not only light, but also blood, in keeping with the violent imagery and prophetic language particular to the rest of the text.

No matter what one may or may not believe about fairies or magic, the glamour of sudden enchantment or infatuation seems impossible to deny. Almost every one of us could cite examples from real life, which is why the glimmering glamour remains an irradicable part of our mythological landscapes, appearing repeatedly in our literature and culture. From the examples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it appears that Shakespeare knew this too, and knew it well. As long as we muster enough belief to keep Tinker Bell alive, then we also know how the fairy tale will end:

The word “glimmering” seems to be used nowhere else in Shakespeare’s plays, and the play of sense between glimmer and glamour appears to be unique to the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.**** For although magic appears in other places in Shakespeare’s plays, the fairy magic in dream seems special too, a glimmering example of the promise and possibility of renewal in what may be a dangerous world. Perhaps Shakespeare felt that it was enough to touch on fairy magic wholesale in just a single play, or, more probably, he just had so much more to explore. Let’s hope that, in all our cases, our present dangers will diminish as well, and leave us with much more to discuss next time.

*Although the Shakespeare Concordance tells us that Shakespeare only uses the term twice (not, in any way to diminish the achievment of that invaluable resource), the word is actually spoken three times, as noted. It is uttered once by Demetrius, and twice by Oberon. Should anyone find another example of the word “glimmering” in Shakespeare, besides those listed in this post, please do email me and let me know. The word “glimmer” appears in A Comedy of Errors, in Henry VI part 1, and in Macbeth, but I find no case of “glimmering” except in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

**Briggs, Katharine Mary. An Encyclopedia of Fairies Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 191.

***Numerous examples may be found in etymology online and as cited in Briggs above.

****With a special note of thanks to the wonderful actor, Pete Smith, who initially pointed out to me the uniqueness of “glimmering” in this particular text when he played Oberon for me some years ago.