Read A Midsummer Night's Dream Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
it's an ambiguous one, with something akin to two fingers sprouting from the patriotically outstretched armâ
â¦â
the doubling of real and fairy king and queen, with the suggestion that Oberon's revenge on Titania reflects and resolves Theseus's subconscious hostilities toward Hippolyta, his bride-to-be. In other words, Chuck might feel better about Di if he imagined her having sex with a prole with a donkey's head.
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In Gregory Doran's entertaining 2005 production, the mortal world was “a chilly, soulless place, with a suggestion of the totalitarian state about it.”
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More nightmarish and unforgiving than the fairy world, Theseus' military uniform made him resemble “a fascist
leader.”
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With a death threat hanging over her head, Hermia's escape into the forest with Lysander takes her from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Jonathan Slinger's refreshingly lugubrious and mischievous Robin plays with the lovers as if they are puppets for his amusement. In the hands of this curmudgeonly skeptic, who has no qualms about his treatment of mortals, one would fear for their fate if he were not tempered by his master, Oberon, who feels for the lovers' plight.
The
Spectator's
reviewer, Patrick Carnegy, remarked that
The fairy band is a motley crew of ragamuffins who have one important accomplishmentâtheir magic is that of puppeteersâ
â¦â
Doran gives us the changeling boy as an exquisitely animated puppetâ
â¦â
Bottom's attendants materialise as a macabre collection of doll-puppets manipulated by their fairy alter egosâ
â¦â
whenever Mustardseed opens his mouth to speak, his head pops up and away off his body.
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The themes of manipulation and entrapment in the forest scenes culminated when Robin led the lovers “Up and down, up and down.” Working together, the fairies physically manipulated the lovers' movements like their “doll-puppets,” holding onto their limbs and guiding them to the appointed place for Robin to send them to sleep.
Nightmares, as other dreams, offer the possibility for self-exploration and understanding. The lovers, Titania, and Bottom all learn through a period of transformation, akin to a waking dream, that the exploration of the worst parts of themselves can free them from nightmare. Scholar Stanley Wells commented in the program note that
As the lovers go off to marriage, we are likely to feel that they have been through a necessary but profoundly disturbing experience, and that now they are safely on the other side of it. The experience has grown “to something of great constancy,” enriching their lives just as Bottom's “rare vision” enriches his. They bring back into the ordinary world something that they
learned in the world of imagination. The illusory has its part in the total experience of reality.
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In avoiding the baggage of treating the
Dream
as a light fairy-piece for children, many directors have chosen to focus on the darker elements of the play, with varying success. The difficulty for them arises in trying to strike a balance between the comedy and the darkness.
The doubling of the fairy and mortal characters in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
may appear now as the normal directorial choice. However, this development in staging has only been prevalent in the last fifty years. Through this device directors have explored the relationship between the mortals and the fairies in terms of the conscious and the unconscious.
In 1970 this was a relatively new innovation which radically altered the reading of the play, and extended the psychological journey of Bottom and the four lovers to all the mortals. Brook's
Dream
depicted the unconscious enactment of unresolved tensions which needed to be explored before the royal couple could come together in happy marriage at the end of the play. The director himself explained:
The play unfolds like a dream before [Theseus and Hippolyta's] wedding in which an almost identical couple appearâOberon and Titania. Yet this other couple are in an opposition so great that, as Titania announces in a language of great strength, it brings about a complete schism in the natural orderâ
â¦â
Thus on the one hand we have a man and woman in total dispute and, on the other, a man and woman coming together through a concord found out of a discord. The couples are so closely related that we felt that Oberon and Titania could easily be sitting inside the minds of Theseus and Hippolyta.
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In Bill Alexander's 1986 production only Hippolyta and Titania were doubled, while Theseus and Oberon were played by separate actors:
The key to Mr. Alexander's interpretation lies in the moment when, as the rude mechanicals come on stage to rehearse, Janet McTeer's elegant, disdainful Hippolyta passes them on her way off. She and Bottom exchange a long appraising look across a social chasm. What follows is, in effect, Hippolyta's dream.
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This Hippolyta, described as “glacial and contemptuous”
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in the Athenian scenes, obviously did not relish the prospect of marriage to the boring Theseus. She “has the opportunity to express an inner lifeâa slinkily clad ice-maiden whose fantasies are realized by transformation into a fairy queen of bewitchingly tender sexual desire.”
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Her Oberon (Gerard Murphy) became the ideal partner, equal to her in physical strength and passion. The wordless coda at the start of the play also put a different spin on Titania's relationship with Bottom:
In the wood, the affection between [Bottom] and [Titania] is played almost completely “straight,” emphasizing both its realness and its impossibility. Love that crosses barriers in the night's most hopeless “dream,” sprinkling regret over the ubiquitous frolics.
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This Bottom was gentler and more sympathetic, a true alternative to the chauvinism of Theseus and Oberon; consequently, he drew from Titania a warm and tender response, which, if it did not entirely eliminate the element of lustful sensuality, de-emphasised it considerably.
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At the end of the play, Hippolyta stepped into the fairy ring andâas Titaniaâsang the blessing with Oberon to the newlyweds, harmonizing the worlds of the play, and emphasizing the connection between reality and dreams.
In Michael Boyd's 1999 production, the fairies were played as doppelgängers of the mortals, releasing their inner selves from their daytime personae. According to
Times
critic Benedict Nightingale,
Theseus and Hippolyta become their subconscious selves, Oberon and Titania. They dream out their conflicts and marry happily. But Boyd takes the approach furtherâ
â¦â
Athens itself sheds its superego and lets its id rampage, until Theseus, Hippolyta, lovers, mechanicals, everyone, are clattering together in a dance that Zorba himself would have found too anarchic.
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Aidan McArdle, who doubled as Robin and Philostrate, explains that Act 3 Scene 2, in which Oberon comforts Robin's fear at the coming dawn, was given an added significance by the whole concept of the production:
We had it in our heads as we played thisâ
â¦â
that they were afraid of turning back into their daylight selves. As it gets light Puck must be transformed into that monster Philostrateâand Philostrate is as much a monster for Puck as Puck is for Philostrate.
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The opening scenes in the Athenian court contained virtually no color; the characters were wrapped up in large dark overcoats. The fairy world emerged from the mortal world via a simple device:
The repressed, regimented, grey court, reminiscent of Cold-War Russia, would move to the forest by way of the transformation scene, which would begin with artificial flowers (the first color in the play) sprouting through the stage floor.
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The transformation from Athens to fairyland was enacted by two characters from the Athenian court who stripped off each other's clothes to reveal the “fairy” beneath. This also signaled how the sexual war, and sexual frustrations of the fairy world, were impinging on the real world:
Sirine Saba, Philostrate's side-kick in the court scenes, came on in her white gloves, fur hat, and spectacles. Philostrate appeared in the doorway behind her as she bent downâostensibly to pick
a flower, but somehow in a rather suggestive manner. Philostrate would then stalk her down the stageâ
â¦â
he would catch her up andâ
â¦â
be right behind her the next time she bent down. Philostrate had had an idiosyncratic little gesture, in the court scene, of stepping forward and rocking on his heels. This movement behind a girl bending down was, obviously, very sexualâ
â¦â
She would then turn, and slap me across the face. I wouldâ
â¦â
then remove her hat, pull off its ear-flaps and throw it away. She wouldâ
â¦â
then remove my glasses and break the arms offâ
â¦â
take off my bowler hat, spit in it, and throw them all into the wings. Things would then escalateâ
â¦â
until we would be ripping the clothes off each other with frenzied energy. This was followed by energetic kissing, the fierceness of the love/hate relationship descending rapidly into pure sexuality. She would then run away in a very coy, teasing manner, which was the cue for the first line of the scene: “How now, spirit, whither wander you?”â
â¦â
the scene became directly about desire and passionâeverything they had both been repressing at court.
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Puritan writers such as Philip Stubbes were shocked by the degree of sexual license taken at May Day and Midsummer Night festivals. His work
Anatomy of Abuses
published in 1583, then reprinted in 1585 and 1595 (very probably the same year in which Shakespeare wrote the
Dream
), spoke out against the pagan rituals still abundant in England at the time:
All the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, woods, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimesâ
â¦â
I have heard it credibly reported (and that
viva voce
) by men of great gravity and reputation, that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled. These be the fruits which these cursed pastimes bring forth.
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In 1642 the Puritans closed the theaters. In 1644 the May festival was banned. From their representation in his plays, we can imagine that these were not Shakespeare's favorite people.
Most modern productions have the lovers go through various states of undress as they make their journey through the hostile forest. However, it is a mistake to think of this as just a sexual undressing. As the program to Sheila Hancock's 1984 touring production suggested, it is also a process of self-discovery:
In sleep we have a reversion to a more primitive type of experienceâ
â¦â
The dream becomes a revelation. It strips the ego of its artificial wrappings and exposes it in its native nudity. It brings up from the dim depths of our sub-conscious life the primal, instinctive impulses, and discloses to us a side of ourselves which connects us with the great sentient world.
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In a world where magic and the supernatural are no longer a part of everyday life, “once we are out of childhood the closest we come to magic is through our dreams; in this extra-terrestrial world we meet the part of ourselves which we bury under social convention.”
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In modern productions of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, that buried part of the self has invariably been depicted as the sexual selfâin keeping with the aspect of the May which so appalled Stubbes in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare critic Mary Maher explains:
If the visual image of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
in the nineteenth century was the gauzy-winged fairy, the immediate icon of the late twentieth century was the up-thrust arm between Bottom's legs, the oversized ass's penis created by two actors positioned to show arousal in Peter Brook's 1970 staging of the playâ
â¦â
What Brook did was corrective; he was reinserting and reissuing the seminal strand of sexuality into the mainstream of the play's production history.
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Despite being in a recognizable tradition of modern productions of the
Dream
, Michael Boyd's 1999 production was criticized for its
overtly sexual reading of the play. He warned the public before it opened:
It won't be a decorative, picturesque dream world, or about public-school lovers with no sexual organsâ
â¦â
[Oberon's fairies were all male and Titania's all female]â
â¦â
Just as Titania has refused Oberon her bed, so that diktat runs all through the fairy world. The wood will be full of sexual tensionâ
â¦â
It won't remind you of a mythical Athens, but of fundamentalist society in the vice-grip of Puritanism and arranged marriage. That's the world Shakespeare was exploring.
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When Titania begins her amour with furry-eared Bottom, the effect is usually a little less erotic than the teddy bears' picnic. Not in Michael Boyd's bold and brilliant revivalâ
â¦â
Multiple orgasms are clearly occurring in the bed hovering above the stageâ
â¦â
When Josette Simon's squirming, leggy fairy queen tells Daniel Ryan's post-coital Bottom that one of her ogling attendants will “fetch thee new nuts,” her hand is on a part of his body that suggests she does not just mean tasty acorns.
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A party from a local Catholic school walked out of this production at the interval. Their teacher felt it was unsuitable for children, declaring that “The production has driven a horse and carriage through our school's religious and sex education policies.” The tabloids headlined: “Sir Leads Walkout as Bard Sex Shocks Kids”
(Mirror)
and “Children Shocked by Shakespeare in Lust” (
Daily Mail
).