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SINCE 1949!
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By William Shakespeare
“O, What fools these mortals be” – Puck Prepare yourself for Shakespeare’s enchanting comedy of unrequited love, mistaken identities and fairy antics. A charmed flower makes for an unforgettable midsummer night in this much-loved adventure.
1. A NOTE 2. SYNOPSIS
A note on A Midsummer Night’s Dream The world of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is filled with giddy wonders, youthful passions, and unbridled playfulness. As if conjured by spirits, the play reveals the compactness of lunatics, lovers, and poets. The text is a wonder in its fantastical plots and the interweaving of its dream-like world of royalty, ardent young lovers, rustics and fairies. The webbing of these lives leads to a kind of midsummer madness: fun and frolic by the light of a very bright and powerful full moon.
The production creates a magical out-of-this-world environment for what Puck calls "these visions" of mortals engaged in extraordinary but very human affairs. The world is born of the light, with touches of a child's gymnasium and a circus-like arena to frame the antics of its inhabitants. Emphasis is given to the special powers of the sun and moon to lend their lights of seeming truth and incredible illusion. Place and time itself is a fluid jumble that begins as a waking dream, leads into the chaos of the woods, and ends where it began, but with a sense of new harmony. Life begins as the life-giving dream vanishes.
The marriage of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, is to take place soon, and the Duke requests his master of ceremonies, Philostrate, to urge the Athenian youths to participate in a fortnight's revels.
A group of simple craftsmen, anxious to entertain the royal company, meet to select parts in a play and plan to rehearse in the woods at the Duke's oak. Just at this time, a prominent citizen, Egeus, to evoke the old Athenian law, which will force his daughter Hermia to marry the man of her father’s choice, Demetrius, or accept the alternative of death or life in a convent, calls upon the Duke. The Duke upholds the law. Hermia and Lysander, the man she loves, arrange to meet in the wood the following night and escape to be married. They make the mistake, however, of confiding in Hermia's friend, Helena, who is in love with Demetrius and so warns him of the elopement.
The wood, the destination of both the lovers and the craftsmen, is filled with fairy world creatures that are seriously disturbed by a quarrel between Oberon, the King and his Queen Titania. The dispute is centered on a little changeling boy whom the Queen insists upon rearing, while the King wants him for his henchman. Oberon sends his hobgoblin Puck in search of a flower, the juice of which when dropped on the eyelids of any sleeper will make the victim dote foolishly on the first creature he sees upon awakening. It is Oberon's plan to embarrass Titania by causing her to fall in love with some monstrosity while he gains possession of the changeling boy.
Oberon observes the scorn of Demetrius for Helena, and when Puck returns, orders him to squeeze the fatal juice into Demetrius' eyes. Puck mistakenly performs the trick on Lysander, subsequently on Demetrius, and the ensuing complication leads to the brink of a duel. Puck sets things straight by intercepting the duelists, causing the four lovers to fall asleep, and removing the spell from Lysander's eyes with the juice of another flower.
Meanwhile, the craftsmen meet in the wood near the fairy queen's abode, and Puck gleefully transforms the head of the foolish Nick Bottom to an ass’s head. The other craftsmen flee in terror; Titania wakes up, falls violently in love with the absurd monster, and falls asleep in his arms. Oberon, having achieved his purpose in carrying off the changeling boy, cures her enchantment and orders Puck to remove the ass's head as Bottom wakes up.
At break of day Theseus, Hippolyta and their train come to the wood to hunt and awaken the lovers with their horns. When the Duke finds that Demetrius, being in love with Helena, willingly gives up Hermia to Lysander, he is so pleased that he invites the lovers to be married at the same time he is to marry Hippolyta.
Festivities hold sway in Athens and the craftsmen's play, their own ludicrous version of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, is finally presented. At midnight, Oberon and Titania with their fairy train sweep through the palace, and when they have blessed the sleepers, they vanish.
Critical interpretation of Shakespeare is a busy industry that spans the globe and nearly all written languages. According to D. Allen Carroll in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Annotated Bibliography (1986), since 1940, Dream has been produced at least once every five weeks and has generated a piece of published criticism (excluding reviews of productions) every ten days. Although many critics in the past have dismissed Dream as nothing more than “so much gossamer and moonlight,” recent critical opinion has taken a far more serious view of Shakespeare’s early comedy. Harold Brooks, for example, finds that Dream is multilayered comedy which is one of a group of lyrical plays completed before 1598 (Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and Love’s Labor’s Lost). The lyricism of these plays, he argues, not only groups them thematically but also artistically. He notes that Shakespeare signaled the characteristics of each group of characters in Dream by the language they speak. Those of the court, Theseus and Hippolyta, speak in blank verse, a language of high estate, royalty, and tragedy. The world of the fairies is colored by rhymed couplets to which even the mortals succumb when under the influence of the wood. The young lovers speak in pentameter while the mechanicals speak primarily in prose. Each of these groups adopts other verse forms to suit the dramatic moment, especially the blending of all four in the final act.
Harley Granville-Barker describes the lyrical language in Dream as helping “to express [the fairies] as beings other than mortal, treading air” and colors their supernatural world by “its lightness, its strange simplicity.” Barker finds that this play is especially fecund with passages designed for artistry in their delivery. The distance between dialogue and song is not far, and many of the dramatic devices within the plot depend upon music in order to be achieved: the lullaby for Titania and the numerous dances, for example.
We can find more than music, dance, and lyrical poetry in Dream. For some critics the fairy world represents a power beyond folklore, one that represents a surface of a vaster unseen world, namely the traditional Christian Vision. Bottom’s awakening reflects a Pauline vision of God’s love. This reading suggests that the play is a “fleeting recollection of heaven we lost when we surrendered our innocence” (Bryant, 1964). Although most critics do not adopt a Christian position, there is much within the play that alludes to Christian values, especially the theme of higher love—the soul searching for union with the divine.
The other side of love is equally well represented. Some interpretations of Dream have found the vision presented to be a dark, low, erotic love which is dominated by madness. The Dream is close to Macbeth with its “nightmare” atmosphere and a “troubled” fairyland. G.K. Chesterton believed that we, if we had seen a true production of Dream, “would feel shaken to [our] marrow if [we] had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.” Most recent interpretations of the play, however, tend to emphasize the benevolent emotions within the text.
Shakespeare incorporated many diverse elements into a nearly seamless text that still commands respect for its artistry. He skillfully intertwined two concepts of history with the Dream. The Athenian plot which progresses towards the intended union of Theseus and Hippolyta demonstrates St. Augustine’s linear march towards an eventual City of God. The Greek vision of history as cycles is suggested by the movement from Athens to the wood and back to Athens. Within this complex structure Shakespeare displays how the three castes of English society (court, city, and country side) are each influenced by and pant of an infinite comic order. Titania’s speech at (II,i,81-117), for example, reflects how nature and humankind are affected by the actions of the supernatural. Within this play we find references to Ovid, the Greeks, Plutarch, Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, English folklore, other English playwrights who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and Spencer’s Faerie Queene. There is much to choose from if we seek something more than simply “fancy’s images” (V, i, 25). The widely varied interpretations finally suggest that no one point of view can be exclusively authoritative. Each new production or criticism of Dream will yield a slightly different vision of Shakespeare’s original play. The myriad themes within the play, reconciliation, love and marriage, metamorphosis, love subverted, irrational vs. rational, imagination vs. reason, nature vs. man, allows many fruitful interpretations of what the Dream means.
On Theatrical productions of Dream Although many critics convincingly argue that the play was written for the occasion of a royal wedding, there is no evidence to confirm this. Today the play must stand on its own. Although Dream is one of the most often produced plays of the Shakespearean canon, it was not always so. For nearly two hundred years it was never produced in its original form. The play was merely an opportunity for lush romantic scenery or operatic adaptations of various characteristics of the original. Not until 1840 was the Dream produced as it might have been while Shakespeare was alive. The play was continually adapted. For example, during most of the nineteenth century Oberon was played by a woman, and recent productions have put the fairies in clown’s costumes and sent them flying on trapezes.
Dream has also seen some memorable film productions, most notably Max Reinhardt’s 1935 version which is in many ways a reminder of the nineteenth century’s emphasis on spectacle. A number of notable young American stars appeared in the film, among them Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, Mickey Rooney as Puck, and James Cagney as a blustering Bottom.
Dream most recently was realized in film with the Fox Searchlight 1999 release, which included such stars as Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart, and Stanley Tucci. |
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(T/A National Players)
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A Midsummer Night's
Dream