January Meme: A Midsummer Night's Dream
watervole asked me to talk about A Midsummer Night's Dream, a performance of which, starring the late Gareth Thomas, we both watched together. (In tandem with James Barrie's play Dear Brutus which it partly inspired and with it shares some themes.) Now because I attended an entire class about this play in my university days, I saw a lot of live and filmed performances as well as some movie versions, and I can easily ramble on about it. In Sandman, Neil Gaiman uses the idea that A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest are the sole two Shakespeare plays whose plot doesn't have an obvious source (be it another play or prose) to let these plays be written by Shakespeare for Morpheus, the King of Dreams, in payment for getting his poetical gifts unlocked. He's not the first or the last writer to bring these two plays into context; both have magic, play-within-a-play structure, characters who double as directors putting on a show in more than one sense, and comments on the theatre itself in the text.
The Dream is the more popular of the two (though it also has its haters, like Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote in his journal that it was the most insipid thing he ever saw). I saw it first when I was still in school and my hometown's theatre put it on. I only remember a few details: the actors playing Oberon & Titania als played Theseus & Hippolyta (something that happens a lot and only is tricky at one point where the fairies come on stage directly after Theseus and Hippolyta leave, and it spares a provincial ensemble two extra actors), there was a lot of overt homoerotic subtext between Oberon and Puck (when I later saw productions where Puck was either made up to look like a youth/child or like a hobgoblin, I was startled because of that first impression - the actor from my hometown was just dressed in green and very much an adult when fondling and rubbing himself against Oberon's legs), and the most prominent actor of our ensemble played Nick Bottom (go figure). In contrast to the majority of more recent productions, Oberon, who is the successful director in this play as opposed to Peter Quince who tried to direct but finds his star taking over, was definitely presented as the play's winner, getting all he wanted by the end, with the overall production implying this was how harmony gets restored. That was in the 1970s; Oberon as the clear winner is also what Max Reinhardt's 1930s film version presents. (A Midsummer Night's Dream was one of Max Reinhardt's most famous theatre productions in both pre and post WWI German theatre, and he toured the world with it; alas, by the time of the Hollywood film, he was old, film wasn't his medium of choice anyway, and what so many attendants of the stage productions had described as the most perfect theatre magic they ever watched comes across as very stagey and creaky glitter on film.)
In the early 1990s, when I was at college and attending that Dream-devoted class, that was changing. The stage Oberons in the productions we were studying tended to, via some pantomime or redistributed lines, at the very least share their win, and more often it was Titania who took them back. Meanwhile, Theseus, whether or not he was played by the same actor as Oberon, went from standard (and not interesting) gracious Duke - this play's Athens being the most Elizabethan place imaginable - to taking on more villainous colors, as people started to examine the implication of him having defeated Hippolyta in war before marrying her. I don't think I ever saw Fascist!Theseus before the most recent RTD tv film, but I did see several Colonialist!Theseus versions.
The young lovers were probably the characters where the interpretations least vary through the many productions I saw. Well, except in quite how harshly Demetrius treats Helena when she chases after him, but other than that. (Again, the RTD film was the first production I saw where Lysander and Demetrius came across as two distinct personalities to me, and which had Lysander fall for Demetrius instead of Helena first when the magical love drop business starts.) In more recent productions, the lines that near the end of play make the lot of them sound like the type of aristocratic snobs Shakespeare must have known a lot of as they make fun of the mechanicals get either removed or redistributed to Theseus (if it's Villain!Theseus time, though he in the play is the only not to not make fun of the actors). Given that the lovers earlier sounded almost exactly like Pyramus and Thisbe, overwroughtness included, I always thought that them mocking the actors both was a comment on how we never recognize our reflection and Shakespeare making fun of himself to boot, since Romeo and Juliet preceded this play, and when he has the mechanicals declare that while Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, their parents are now reconciled, he's definitely spoofing himself rather than the Ovidian tale (which says nothing about the parents reconciling).
But there's a reason why our leading actor back in the day didn't go for Oberon and certainly not for one of the young lovers, but for Nick Bottom. "Let me play the lion, too" Bottom is both a great reflection on a star actor and a perfect part for one, and here I've seen the most variations, from Dream to Dream. I've seen Bottoms who are good natured and Bottoms who are bullies towards their fellow mechanicals, especially Peter Quince, Bottoms who turn out to have genuine talent when they play Pyramus, and Bottoms who are hamming it up to the nth degree. The encounter with Titania maintains its charm through most productions because while Titania might be ensorcerelled, Bottom, his good opinion of himself as an actor not withstanding, does respond to her compliments with the matter of fact statement that he doesn't quite see why she has this opinion, but okay, and responds to the high flown poetry with good natured prose instead of pouncing on her. (Whether Titania does more than kiss and stroke him varies from production to production, but in the ones I've seen, the initiative is always with her.)
There's quite a lot of magical roofying going on, and the play isn't particularly bothered by consent questions regarding this. (See: Demetrius still under the spell when everyone wakes up.) That Oberon does this to Titania in order to get the better of her in an argument - and not by using the magical flower to make her hopelessly in love with himself, but with a creature he sees as grotesque, to humiliate her - is a disturbing quality of many the play has, and one that's hardly remedied by him feeling sorry for her and lifting the enchantment - after she handed over the "Indian boy", the symbol of their quarrel. The boy is another element that increasingly doesn't seem to make the cut in modern productions. Why does Oberon want him? Why is Titania first so insistent on keeping him as the child of her dead friend and then, once the magic is lifted, no longer waste a thought on him? There's the association of fairies stealing children, of course - which btw Gaiman also uses in Sandman - and it all contributes to making the woods, and the fairies, so powerful and disturbing a storytelling element. Victorian depictions not withstanding, they're never, in any sense, safe.
There are all kind of theories as to whether the play was written for or premiered at an aristocratic wedding, and I've seen productions using this idea, too, with yet a third framing. There is a passage - when Oberon tells Puck about the story of the magical flower - that's assumed to be a compliment to Elizabeth the Queen, the "fair vestal throned in the west":
A certain aim he [i.e., Cupid] took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west
And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,
And the imperial votress passèd on
In maiden meditation, fancy-free. (II.i.)
If you believe many a historical novelist, it's also an allusion to the spectacular masques and plays Leicester, Robert Dudley, Elizabeth's most enduring favourite, put on for her visit at Kenilworth, and which a child William Shakespeare may or may not have seen if he with some other Stratfordians walked from Stratford at Kenilworth. (It's doable.) You even have people theorizing that if this passage is a compliment to Elizabeth, the Titania/Nick Bottom affair is a critique, since Elizabeth-as-the-Fairy-Queen certainly was an established trope by the time Shakespeare was an adult, and none of her favourites, with the exception of Essex, was ever popular with the people. Personally, I don't quite see it, mostly because Bottom is not aiming for his fairy queen's favor and is generally a figure of sympathy throughout the play, and if you want to critisize supposed bad favourites, you don't make the audience love them. (Shakespeare was far too much of a pro not to know any audience will love Nick Bottom.) But it's certainly easy to imagine Elizabeth's court watching this play, laugh, and ever so slightly remain disturbed, not quite sure what exactly they have seen, any more than the characters in it are.
The other days This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1479919.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.