A Midsummer Night's Dream
July 17 - August 2, 2009

About William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet, dramatist, and actor. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consists of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems and other poetry.

He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, a small English country town. At the age of 18, Shakespeare married a local girl, Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior. They had three children together. According to legend, he left Stratford for London to avoid a charge of poaching. By 1582 Shakespeare had probably joined and experienced the joys and hardships of working with several companies of players. By 1584 he had emerged as a playwright in London, and soon had became a central figure within London’s leading theater group, the Lord Chamberlain’s Company.

Shakespeare was known in his day as a very rapid writer: "His mind and hand went together," his publishers reported, "…what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot upon his papers." Despite all the praise, some writers were not enthusiastic about his plays. Noted diarist Samuel Pepys called A Midsummer Night's Dream, "the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life."

About 1610 Shakespeare returned to his birthplace, where he had a house, called "New Place." He died on April 23, 1616. Anne Hathaway died seven years later. A number of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime, but none of the original dramatic manuscripts have survived. In 1623 a published edition of Shakespeare's collected works appeared, known as the First Folio.

On Shakespeare's gravestone are four lines of verse: "Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here, Blest be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones." It is not certain that the Bard of Avon wrote the famous epitaph, adding to the mystery about his life and work.

Shakespeare: Did He Really Write It?

The Shakespeare authorship question is a debate dating back to the 18th century, as to whether the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by another writer, or by a group of writers.

Authorship doubters believe there is a lack of concrete evidence proving that the actor and businessman known as William Shakespeare was also responsible for the body of literary works that bear his name. Numerous alternative candidates have been proposed including: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Sir William Stanley (the 6th Earl of Derby) and Sir Edward de Vere (the 17th Earl of Oxford).

There are large gaps in the historical record of Shakespeare’s life and not one surviving letter, written to or by him is known to exist. His detailed will fails to mention the shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres that he owned. It also mentions no books, plays, poems or writings of any kind. Almost nothing is known about his personality, and although much can be inferred about him from his writings, the lack of solid information leaves him an enigmatic figure.

Evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford was merely a front man for another undisclosed playwright arises from several circumstantial sources: perceived ambiguities and missing information in the historical evidence supporting Shakespeare's authorship; the assertion that the plays require a level of education (including knowledge of foreign languages) greater than that which Shakespeare is known to have possessed; circumstantial evidence suggesting the author was deceased while Shakespeare of Stratford was still living; doubts of his authorship expressed by his contemporaries; plays that he appeared to be unavailable or unable to write; coded messages asserted to be hidden in the works that identify another author; and perceived parallels between the characters in Shakespeare's works and the life of favored candidates.

Although mainstream scholars reject all the alternatives, interest in the Shakespeare authorship debate has grown, particularly among independent scholars, theatre professionals and academicians.

Some of the illustrious skeptics have included: Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, and even Charlie Chaplin. The argument continues and the trend has now continued into the 21st century.

Midsummer Sources

It is unknown exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was written or first performed, but on the basis of topical references and an allusion to Spenser's Epithalamion, it is usually dated 1594 or 1596. Some have theorised that the play might have been written for an aristocratic wedding (numerous such weddings took place in 1596), while others suggest that it was written for the Queen to celebrate the feast day of St. John. No concrete evidence exists to support either theory. In any case, it would have been performed at The Theatre and, later, The Globe in London.

Some features of the plot and characters can be traced to elements of earlier mythologically based literature; for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the transformation of Bottom into an ass is descended from Apuleius' The Golden Ass. Lysander was also an ancient Greek warlord while Theseus and Hippolyta were respectively the Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons.

In addition, Shakespeare could have been working on Romeo and Juliet at about the same time that he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it is possible to see Pyramus and Thisbe as a comic reworking of the tragic play. A further, seldom noted source is The Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the few plays in Shakespeare's canon, along with The Tempest, for which there is no known source for the main plot.

The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 8 October 1600 by the bookseller Thomas Fisher, who published the first quarto edition later that year. A second quarto was printed in 1619 by William Jaggard, as part of his so-called False Folio. The play next appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623. The title page of Q1 states that the play was "sundry times publickely acted" prior to 1600. The first performance known with certainty occurred at Court on January 1, 1605.

A Midsummer Feminists Take

Female dominance is one of the thematic elements found in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare's comedies often include a section in which females enjoy more power and freedom than they actually possess.. Disregarding the standards imposed on women of his time, Shakespeare created many female characters that were strong-willed, intelligent, and daring. Hermia in Midsummer is one such character. She disobeys her father, her king, and the Athenian law so that she might marry the love of her life. She discards all the luxuries of her familiar and comfortable existence for the uncertainties of a distant land in exchange for the freedom to love Lysander.

The queen of the fairies, Titania, begins as a strong feminist at the opening of the show. She combats her counterpart, Oberon, with such a rage that diseases run rampant, seasons dangerously alter and all of humanity suffers from their discord. As a powerful and emancipated woman, she commands her own army of fairies and does not succumb to the persistent wishes of Oberon. Unfortunately, even as a deity she is fallible due to her sex. Secretly drugged by Oberon, she falls in lust with a man - donkey and displays her affection so as to publicly ridicule herself. Only when her infatuation of Bottom goes beyond the point of being grotesque does Oberon release her from the spell.

Knowing this array of female characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not begin to answer the question of Shakespeare’s view of women. Queen Elizabeth I certainly influenced many of Shakespeare’s plays and characters and he may have become more feminist due to his desire to please her. The general public may also have preferred strength in female characters as a reflection of pride for their beloved monarch who was one of the few highly competent English rulers in spite of her gender and the sexism of the time in which she lived. Regardless of his reasoning for scripting women the way he did, Shakespeare seems most certainly an advocate for feminism when he wrote Midsummer.

Midsummer In Performance

The Victorian stage: In 1840, Madame Vestris at Covent Garden returned the play to the stage with a relatively full text, but padded it out greatly with musical sequences and balletic dances. Vestris took the role of Oberon, and for the next seventy years, Oberon and Puck would always be played by women. After the success of Vestris' production, nineteenth century theatre continued to treat the Dream as an opportunity for huge spectacle, often with a cast numbering nearly one hundred. The much-loved overture and music by Felix Mendelssohn was always used throughout this period, with the text often being cut to provide greater space for music and dance. Augustin Daly's production opened in 1895 in London and ran for 21 performances. The special effects were constructed by the famous Martinka Magic Company, which was later owned by Houdini. Herbert Beerbohm Tree staged a 1911 production with live animals amok, including rabbits.

Twentieth century: In the early twentieth century, a reaction against this huge spectacle emerged. Innovative director Harley Granville-Barker introduced in 1914 the modern way of staging the Dream: he removed the huge casts and Mendelssohn, using instead Elizabethan folk music. He replaced the huge sets with a simple system of patterned curtains. He used a completely original vision of the fairies, basing them on Cambodian idols. This increased simplicity and emphasis on directorial imagination has dominated subsequent Dreams on the stage.

Max Reinhardt staged A Midsummer Night's Dream thirteen times between 1905 and 1934, introducing a revolving set. After he fled Germany he devised a more spectacular outdoor version at the Hollywood Bowl, CA in September 1934. The cast included William Farnum, Sterling Holloway, Butterfly McQueen, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney, with Mendelssohn's music being used. On the strength of this production, Warner Brothers signed Reinhardt to direct a filmed version, Hollywood's first Shakespeare event since Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s and Mary Pickford's Taming of the Shrew (1929).

Starring James Cagney as Bottom, Rooney (Puck) and De Havilland (Hermia) were the only holdovers from the cast. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was imported from Austria to arrange Mendelssohn's music for the film. He not only used generous helpings of the Midsummer Night's Dream music, but several other pieces by Mendelssohn. (The young Austrian composer would go on to make a Hollywood career, remaining in the U.S. after the Nazis invaded Austria.)

Another landmark production was that of Peter Brook in 1970. Brook staged the play in a blank white box, in which masculine fairies engaged in circus tricks such as trapeze artistry. Brook also introduced the subsequently popular idea of doubling Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania, as if to suggest that the world of the fairies is a mirror version of the world of the mortals.

Since Brook's production, directors have felt free to use their imaginations freely to decide for themselves what the play's story means, and to represent that visually on stage. In particular, there has been an increased amount of sexuality on stage, as many directors see the 'palace' as a symbol of restraint and repression, while the 'wood' can be a symbol of wild, unrestrained sexuality, which is both liberating and terrifying.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has been adapted as a film several times. These two recent adaptations following are the best known...

1968, directed by Peter Hall. The cast included Paul Rogers as Bottom, Ian Holm as Puck, Diana Rigg as Helena, Helen Mirren as Hermia, Ian Richardson as Oberon, and Judy Dench as Titania. This film stars the Royal Shakespeare Company, and received its U.S. premiere on CBS as a television special in early 1969.

1999, adapted and directed by Michael Hoffman. The cast included Kevin Kline as Bottom, Rupert Everett as Oberon, Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Stanley Tucci as Puck, Sophie Marceau as Hippolyta, Christian Bale as Demetrius, Dominic West as Lysander and Calista Flockhart as Helena. This adaptation relocates the play's action to Tuscany in Italy in the late nineteenth century.

GOOD TRIVIA! Disney shorts: A Midsummer Night's Dream was adaptated into a Disney short starring Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, and Daisy Duck as Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena, respectively. The “rude mechanicals” were eliminated from the plot. In the end, the story is revealed to be a dream that Mickey has during a picnic. This short was featured in Disney's House of Mouse.

May 14, 1999
FILM REVIEW; A 'Dream' of Foolish Mortals
By Janet Maslin, © The New York Times

Pot luck Shakespeare is enjoying a special film vogue now, what with the tempting prospect of hearing a "forsooth" or "methinks" from the least likely sources. The strategy of choice is picking a travel agent's dream setting, casting attractive actors no matter what, giving an outrageous costume party and hoping for the best. But even for the Leo-does-Romeo set these productions need more than visual flash if they hope to work. Take away smooth ensemble acting, and you're left with the dramatic equivalent of watching Noah load the ark.

Michael Hoffman's fussy production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is just such a parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what. There’s no magic potion to banish the film's awkwardness or make it more than a string of intermittent acting highlights. Puck's "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" looks like an understatement under the circumstances.

No doubt unwittingly, this Midsummer Night's Dream shows how high the bar has been raised by Shakespeare in Love. The allure and cleverness of that film, not to mention its far more Shakespearean spirit, make it a hard act for a hodgepodge to follow.

But it is in the town that Mr. Kline's Bottom saunters into view, looking natty and faintly woebegone in ways that invoke Marcello Mastroianni's courtly presence. Mr. Kline's very appearance here is a relief, since the role of Bottom is so very right for him.

The play's trajectory is never clearer than in chronicling Bottom's actorly affectations, then watching him come to life in the bewitching presence of Ms. Pfeiffer's Titania. Literally transformed into an ass, as the film uses ingenious donkey makeup and Mr. Kline actually brays in witty fashion, this Bottom carries with him all the story's possibilities of tenderhearted redemption rising out of inspired folly.

The theatrical carryings-on of Bottom and company provide the film's best attempts at comedy. Staging a play about Pyramus and Thisbe with a troupe including Bill Irwin, Roger Rees and Sam Rockwell (as the beauteous heroine), Bottom's acting company delights its late-19th-century audience in ways Mr. Hoffman's film can only occasionally manage.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Dramaturgy © 2009 Ross Harmon