A Midsummer Night's Dream (17 page)

Lines 409–480:
Pretending to be first Demetrius, then Lysander, Robin leads both characters around the wood, making sure that they never meet, until they are both so tired that they lie down and sleep. Helena and Hermia arrive separately and, not seeing the others, decide to sleep until daylight. Robin squeezes the herb's juice onto Lysander's eyelids so that he will love Hermia again, but Demetrius is left in love with Helena, so, as Robin says, “all shall be well.”

Lines 1–101:
Titania dotes upon Bottom, caressing his “fair large ears.” Bottom gives orders to Titania's attendants to scratch him,
until he grows sleepy. Titania twists herself around him as “doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle” and they sleep. Oberon, who has been watching them unseen, says to Robin that he begins to feel sorry for Titania, who has given him the changeling boy. He instructs Robin to change Bottom back so that he may return to Athens believing it all to have been “the fierce vexation of a dream” and releases a confused Titania from the spell. Oberon and Titania dance, then leave as the morning approaches, emphasizing their place in the shadowy world, away from the light and the human order that it represents.

Lines 102–218:
Theseus and his party stumble upon the sleeping lovers, and assume that, like them, they are all there to “observe / The rite of May.” Remembering that Hermia must “give answer of her choice,” Theseus commands that the huntsmen wake them with their horns. Lysander admits to running away with Hermia and Egeus calls for “the law, upon his head,” saying that Lysander would have “defeated” Demetrius of a wife. Demetrius, however, says that although he pursued them “in fury,” he now “by some power” finds his “love to Hermia, / Melted” and the only “pleasure” of his “eye” is Helena. Theseus says that they will hear more “anon,” but for now he overrules Egeus' will and decrees that Hermia shall marry Lysander and Demetrius shall marry Helena, sharing in the ceremony with himself and Hippolyta. The lovers discuss the dreamlike quality of events, but agree that they are now awake and must follow Theseus. Bottom wakes alone and confused, talking of the dream he has had. He leaves to get Quince to record his dream as a ballad.

The other artisans look for Bottom, as the play is “marred” without him. Snug reports that the marriages have taken place, and that if they could have performed before the duke they would have been “made men” (beneficiaries of preferment). Bottom appears and they set off for the palace.

Lines 1–109:
Theseus and Hippolyta discuss the lovers' stories, and Theseus comments on how “The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact,” thus highlighting the confused realities within the play, but also its metatheatrical element. They greet the lovers and discuss the possibility of some entertainment “Between our after-supper and bedtime.” Egeus gives Theseus a list of possible “sports” and he selects the artisans' play.

Lines 110–362:
The play-within-the-play provides both linguistic and visual comedy and theatrical self-awareness is present in both the contrast with the wider performance and the presence of the two “audiences.” Both comedy and self-awareness are heightened by the interjections of the onstage audience. The performance concludes and Theseus orders everyone to bed, as “ 'tis almost fairy time.”

Lines 363–430:
The fairies return and their final verses, a blessing on the three couples' marriages, evoke their world and their place in mortal lives and imaginations. Robin's metatheatrical epilogue to the audience suggests that if the play has offended, they think of it as “a dream,” a final confusion of reality and illusion in the audience's mind.

The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

We begin with a brief overview of the play's theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

Finally, we go to the horse's mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He, or sometimes she (like musical conducting, theater directing remains a male-dominated profession), must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director's viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare's plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

Interpretations and ideas about the play have altered radically over the four centuries since its first performance around 1595–96. Theories suggesting that it was written to celebrate an aristocratic wedding have fallen into disfavor. The Quarto edition of 1600 claims that it had “beene sundry times publickly acted” by the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men) and it may be the play referred to in a letter which records a court performance of the “play of Robin goode-fellow” on 1 January 1604.
¹
There is no further evidence of performance before the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Will Kempe, the company's chief comic actor at this period, may originally have played Bottom and Richard Burbage Oberon, possibly doubling the role with Theseus. The text suggests Titania's fairies were small-sized and may have been played by boys, although recent research based on the pattern of appearances of fairies and mechanicals suggests that the same actors may well have doubled these parts,
²
a theory perhaps corroborated by the cast list of the 1661 droll
The Merry conceited Humours of Bottome the Weaver
, which suggests that Snout, Snug, and Starveling as Wall, Lion, and Moonshine “likewise may present three Faries.”
³

The play's combination of realism and fantasy was not to the taste of Restoration audiences. Samuel Pepys judged it “the most insipid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.”
⁴
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taste preferred romanticized, sanitized versions of Shakespeare's plays. The drama was heavily influenced by French neoclassicism's strict adherence to the unities of time, place, and action: decorum was observed and bawdy language eliminated. Theatrical productions emphasized spectacle and there were a number of operatic adaptations which featured the play's courtly aspects, with music and dancing. William Hazlitt, writing in 1817, argued against all performance on the grounds that theatrical representation is, by its very nature, gross and material, unlike Shakespeare's airy conception: “The
Midsummer Night's Dream
, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. Poetry and
the stage do not agree well together.”
⁵
In fact the version that Hazlitt saw was most likely Frederick Reynolds' 1816 adaptation, as much a musical as a play.

From the Restoration onward, thanks to technical innovation, increasingly sophisticated theatrical machinery, and movable stage sets, spectacular operatic versions of the play predominated, culminating in the extravaganzas of the great Georgian and Victorian actor-managers such as John Philip Kemble, Charles Kean, Henry Irving, and Beerbohm Tree. Ballet-style productions featured choruses of fairies, processions with spears and trumpets, and acres of gauze. Mid- and late-nineteenth-century productions focused on pictorial realism and attempted to “illustrate” the plays. Great emphasis was placed on the recreation of historical accuracy in costume and sets to create a complete theatrical illusion. For example, James Grieve, the designer for Kean's 1858 production, aimed at historical accuracy—the playbill boasted that “The Acropolis, on its rocky eminence, surrounded by marble Temples, has been restored, together with the Theater of Bacchus, wherein multitudes once thronged to listen to the majestic poetry of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.”
⁶
Realism was taken to the extreme, reproducing Quince's workshop and stage properties supposedly made by him, which used descriptions of objects found in the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum for the tools. Tree's production actually recreated the “bank where the wild thyme blows” and imported live rabbits to scamper across it in his 1911 revival.
⁷

Adaptations of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
separated out the different elements of the play. The anonymous droll published in 1661 under the title
Bottom the Weaver
was chiefly concerned with the “rude mechanicals,” though it provided abbreviated roles for Oberon, Titania, and Robin. “Duke,” “Duchess,” and two “Lords” represented the courtly audience. In 1692 Thomas Betterton produced
The Fairy Queen, An Opera
with music by Henry Purcell. This included court characters, “The Fairies,” “The Comedians,” and a masque at the end of each act, including “Juno,” “Chinese Men and Women,” “A Chorus of Chineses” (
sic
),
“A
Dance of 6 Monkeys,” “An Entry of a Chinese Man and Woman,” “A Grand Dance of 24 Chineses.” Richard Leveridge's
The Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe
(1716) contained
the mechanicals plus “Mr Semibreve the Composer,” “Crochet,” “Gamut,” as well as “Prologue,” “Pyramus,” “Wall,” “Lyon,” “Moonshine,” “Thisbe,” and “Epilogue.” And the 1763 adaptation
A Fairy Tale in Two Acts
featured “Men” (the mechanicals) and “Fairies.”

In 1775 David Garrick staged
The Fairies: An Opera taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream
, which featured courtiers and fairies but no mechanicals. It included twenty-eight songs and was moderately successful, certainly in comparison with his later five-act, thirty-three song version—that lasted only one performance. In 1816 Frederick Reynolds presented his version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. The title page describes it as “Written by Shakespeare: with Alterations, Additions, and New Songs; as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden.” In his “Advertisement” for the play, Reynolds denigrated Garrick's earlier version. Nevertheless, he used quite a lot of the material from it, notably the songs, and his text was almost as abbreviated, although he did reinstate the mechanicals. Lucia Elizabeth Vestris' 1840 production, in which she played Oberon, although still lavish and incorporating elements of opera and ballet, restored much of Shakespeare's text. Felix Mendelssohn had originally written the overture to his “Incidental Music to
A Midsummer Night's Dream
” in 1826 (opus 21), composing the rest of the score sixteen years later (opus 61) for Ludwig Tieck's 1843 revival at the Potsdam Court Theatre.

In 1853 Samuel Phelps staged a highly successful production at Sadler's Wells, in which he played Bottom. Three years later, Charles Kean's revival at the Princess's was equally successful—the nine-year-old Ellen Terry played Robin, an experience recalled in her autobiography.
⁸
Augustin Daly's three American productions (1873, 1888, 1895–96) were lavish and spectacularly staged, with a ballet of fifty children in Act 3. Beerbohm Tree's productions were even more extravagant, but no less popular with audiences and critics alike: “No scene has ever been put upon the stage more beautiful than the wood near Athens in which the fairies revel and the lovers play their game of hide-and-seek.”
⁹

The self-reflexive quality of Shakespearean drama was eliminated in all these adaptations and the conventions of Elizabethan staging regarded as limitations to be overcome. The end of the Victorian period saw the beginnings of a contemporary reaction against theatrical realism and the spectacular in favor of simpler, faster-paced productions which used all or most of Shakespeare's text on recreated Elizabethan-style stages. The most influential directors in this move were William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker. Gordon Craig also offered simplified staging of the play and a full text. Barker's production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
at the Savoy Theatre in 1914 created a critical sensation which was not wholly favorable. In his
Preface
to
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, Barker argued that the non-realism of the play, like the “greatness” of
King Lear
and the “scope of the action” of
Antony and Cleopatra
, were problematic for the scenic productions of the modern theater. He suggested producing the play on Shakespeare's own terms, with an appeal to the ear and the imagination of the audience. The structure of the play should be kept flexible. He also advocated the use of folk music and dances as opposed to the by then customary Mendelssohn score. Barker made it clear, though, that his emphasis was Shakespeare's own theme: