A Midsummer Night's Dream: A User's Guide

Michael Pennington

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781854598103
• eBook ISBN: 9781780017631
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

An intensely practical account of how A Midsummer Night's Dream actually works on stage.

A scene-by-scene guide to Shakespeare's best loved comedy, from the well-know actor Michael Pennington, drawing on his own experience of directing A Midsummer Night's Dream at the famous Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, London, in 2003 - described by London critics as 'a captivating Shakespearian experience' ( Guardian ) and 'riotously funny and genuinely touching' ( Telegraph ).

Praise for Michael Pennington's User's Guides:

'An insider's guide par excellence' Simon Callow ' He is sharply intelligent, scrupulously careful, hugely knowledgeable and, above all, wonderfully readable ' Peter Holland, The Shakespeare Institute 'It is his range of knowledge - along with a gift for writing clearly and memorably - that makes him such a fine guide' TLS

SIX

Act 3 Scene 2

For all the speculation, little recorded fact and much wish-fulfilment, there are still many things about Elizabethan theatre practice that are mysterious to us. How odd it seems that Shakespeare’s plays were generally performed in the noisy afternoon in the middle of London, in the open air – one step away in unpredictability, it might strike us, from street theatre. Then there is the time taken. The Chorus introduces Romeo and Juliet, one of Shakespeare’s longest texts, by referring to ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’, making present-day directors feel inadequate – how can that have been the playing time without the most extensive cutting? So, what really is the relationship between the published texts we now use as gospel and the actual words spoken at the time in the public theatres? There are certainly plenty of occasions when Shakespeare seems to be providing us with two or three similes in a speech when in the theatre one will do, as if, as far as he is concerned, we should choose between them. Best perhaps to remember that the Chorus’s phrase sits pleasantly in a blank verse line and from an alliterative point of view is better than ‘three hours’ traffic’. We also don’t know whether in their race against sunset the Elizabethans took an interval, aside from any improvised ones which the audience might be inclined to help themselves to when they got bored, needed a change or had somewhere else to go – not to mention the attractive distractions at the Globe itself dreamed up by the more imaginative scholars.¹

There are scenes in some of the plays, however, sitting at their halfway point or a little after, whose gentle recapitulations very much suggest the start of a second session. In Twelfth Night, Violaas-Cesario and Feste have a little rally of wit, nothing to do with the plot, as if they were a stand-up act in front of the cloth, waiting for the audience to re-settle –

VIOLA: Save thee friend, and thy music. Dost thou live by thy tabor?

FESTE: No, sir, I live by the church

– before pulling themselves together and getting on with the story:

My lady is within, sir. I will conster to them whence you come . . .

As Oberon and Puck meet at the start of Act Three Scene Two of A Midsummer Night’s Dream there is something of the same feeling, as if the play’s engine needed revving up again.

It must be said that there is much to be gained in an ideal world from not having any breaks in Shakespeare, not for music, even Mendelssohn, nor to change the set. For one thing, it honours his brilliant use of counterpoint. The first line of a new scene invariably comments on the last of the dying one; and Oberon’s speculation about Titania here, coming directly on her abduction of Bottom, could make for a fine laugh. However, this encounter between Puck and him sits just where in modern practice we are likely to have taken a break – there isn’t another opportunity for about twenty minutes.² And there is something unusual in the dialogue: it is very rare for Shakespeare to repeat his information without embellishment as he does here, and it suggests there is some need for it. Oberon bluntly reminds us of the plot –

I wonder if Titania be awaked.

Then what it was that next came in her eye

Which she must dote on in extremity

– whereupon Puck describes to him at some length what we have already seen for ourselves.

As a result, the actors need to work specially hard to find something new to express. Here are the data. What has happened over the ass’s head is a surprise, an unusual case of the servant taking over from the master and getting away with it. Oberon’s division of labour was clear: Puck was to do the secondary thing, reunite the vaguely described Athenian youth with Helena. Oberon would take care of the main business, medicating Titania so that she would be ready to want anything she set her eyes on – which in Shakespeare’s charming view of the forest, was as likely to be lynx, leopard, boar or bear as squirrel or rabbit.³. So his reactions to the news that Puck has exceeded his brief can be various and colourful – astonishment at his initiative, a desire to interrupt, momentary offence and unexpected delight. Finally, even though he might have preferred Titania to fall for some hateful and aggressive beast rather than an amiable amateur actor, ass’s head or not, he pays an unprecedented tribute to his servant’s virtuosity:

This falls out better than I could devise.

Puck’s big speech, whether a break precedes it or not, is quite daunting: the actor knows that there are few theatrical dividends in an audience watching a character creased up with mirth over something they have already enjoyed and moved on from. Not only that, but we have seen him pleased with his practical jokes before, on his very first appearance. The wittiness of his account of disrupting the rehearsal is no more than average; much will depend on his pleasure at it, including ecstatic physical demonstrations. Suiting an ass’s bray to his words is almost inevitable; for Bottom to be parodied in other ways, especially if he has an accent, is likely too; his colleagues’ flight through the undergrowth may be mocked because of its working-class clumsiness. It certainly is interesting that Puck continues so patronising as well as mischievous. He now knows – somehow – that the preparations were for

Great Theseus’ nuptial day

and that these ‘Mechanicals’⁴ normally

. . . work for bread upon Athenian stalls . . .

He sounds like an unabashed little Tory grandee.

All in all, he has been, as he knows, extremely lucky. Coming upon a perfectly serious gathering in the forest, he decided partly to turn Bottom into the animal he reminded him of, much as he might snatch a stool from beneath a country gossip. In the way of the practical joker he probably wasn’t looking beyond the trick’s immediate impact; although the point could be argued, it seems unlikely that he was imagining that Titania’s eye would be caught, near her ‘cradle’ though he and Bottom were. For him too, things fell out better than he could have devised.

In the middle of his speech sits something easily overlooked but indispensable to the actor. Describing the fright and flight of Quince and his friends, Puck finds idiosyncratic images:

When they him spy –

As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,

Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,

Rising and cawing at the gun’s report,

Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,

So at his sight away his fellows fly . . .

The picture of these birds⁵ escaping the hunter and scattering heavenwards is as vivid as a piece of film – you can feel the weather and hear the sounds, and Puck, breathing the Warwickshire air, loses himself in it for the moment. He was traditionally believed to stamp his feet if he was upset with a house he had visited, and now he tells how, like a pagan dancer, he did the same in Oberon’s magic grove:

And at our stamp here o’er and o’er one falls . . .

All this places him exactly where he belongs. Oberon would never use such images; but Puck is the hobgoblin of stable and kitchen who will end the play sweeping the floor.

The human element in Oberon’s plan is again treated as an afterthought:

OBERON: But hast thou yet latchd the Athenian’s eyes

With the love-juice, as I did bid thee do?

PUCK: I took him sleeping (that is finish’d too).

For the audience, knowing the result, this is too casual: the plotters’ interest is in inverse proportion to the disaster they are causing. They close on a suspended chord which there is no time to resolve:

OBERON: Stand close; this is the same Athenian.

PUCK: This is the woman, but not this the man.

As the lovers start to assemble, it is as if they are engaged in a continuous argument whose sound, for us, is occasionally turned off. Snapped on again, its intensity has not dimmed; but how many variations can be rung on pursuer and pursued? One last combination: Demetrius and Hermia, the most ill-assorted pairing of all, except that this was the proposition that started all the trouble. Demetrius’s delusion that he loved Hermia was a mistake committed in broad daylight without the help of purple flowers; it is becoming clear that it was as wild an aberration as anything caused by Puck.

Not only has the play not seen them alone together before, but they haven’t even addressed each other apart from in Demetrius’s limp couplet in the first scene. It is immediately clear that, as far as possible within the rhythmic limits, they deal in quite different languages and attitudes to love. Her defiance dappled by the anxiety of searching for Lysander, Hermia eloquently works the possibilities of prescribed verse, even, at the outset, letting it break down altogether. She has reached the point of assuming that Demetrius must have literally annihilated her lover:

If thou hast slain Lysander in his sleep,

Being o’er shoes in blood, plunge in the deep,

And kill me too.

It takes her half a line of silence to recover herself. From here on she will find it easy to over-run the ends of her lines, touching in their rhymes as she passes on to some powerful new point. She starts with a statement of simple devotion very like Helena’s earlier claim that Demetrius turned night into day for her:

The sun was not so true unto the day

As he to me. Would he have stolen away

From sleeping Hermia?

What she is doing exemplifies one of the difficulties of playing strong emotion in rhyming verse – it is at least as demanding as Titania’s passionate iambics earlier. Expressed negatively, it goes like this. If you start a couplet too strongly, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Interval Music
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Conclusion
• About the Author
• Copyright