Content area
Full Text
Witches make stories for other people.
- Terry Pratchett, "Imaginary"
IN DEATH, DESIRE, AND LOSS IN WESTERN CULTURE, JONATHAN DOLLIMORE suggests that the very concept of desire - or passionate (not necessarily erotic) love - is a paradox: it is, he claims, "shrouded in contradiction" (65), since it is at once sought after and impossible to fully achieve, a practice of fantasizing and idealizing the desired object that may stand in direct contradiction to reality. In this way, desire always encapsulates a sense of despair, death, or impossibility; as Dollimore concludes, desire is always about fantasy, about the unreal. By invoking the fantastic and supernatural world in plays such as Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, then, William Shakespeare seems to suggest the impossibility of desire, the conception that desire truly is super-natural, unable to be successfully or happily achieved in the natural, or human, world. Dollimore goes on to claim that in this vision of desire, "the early modern seems to anticipate the modern" (116). That anticipation is borne out in Terry Pratchett's late twentieth-century Shakespearean fantasy novels,1 which ask the question: what becomes of the supernatural language of desire when the setting itself is a world of fantasy?
In her discussion of Shakespeare's fairy worlds, Laura Shamas suggests that Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream are unique plays, because they evoke a parallel continuous world of magic and magical creatures that exists alongside and interferes with the human world, but remains for the most part separate from the human protagonists, despite occasional collisions. These worlds are unlike, for example, the island of The Tempest, where Prospero brings together the magician and the human in a single figure, but ultimately rejects his magic and thereby definitely rejects any continued importance for a magical world alongside the human one. It is this unique conception of the fairy Other world that, perhaps, makes Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream the most attractive to fantasists like Pratchett. In Rhetorics of Fantasy, the theorist Farah Mendlesohn places Pratchett's novels dealing with the witches of Lancre, significantly, in the category she calls "intrusion fantasy," in which the fantastic enters, or intrudes into, the narrative world (90) . The intrusion fantasy "is tied up in a dance of intimacy and...