A Midsummer Night's Dream: Language and Writing

R.S. White, Dympna Callaghan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350103870
• eBook ISBN: 9781350103894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This lively and informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips you with the critical skills to analyse its language, structure and themes and to expand and enrich your own response to the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare's diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal iambics and rhyming couplets of courtiers and lovers, and 'warbling' notes' and nursery rhythms of fairies, to stocky prose by the artisan players including Bottom's comic malapropisms. An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal. It then moves to a detailed examination and analysis of the play, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies; an account of the play's performance history and its critical reception completes the volume. Each chapter offers a 'Writing matters' section, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations.

CHAPTER ONE

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in Shakespeare’s Time

From stage to page: reading Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s plays were originally written for transient occasions, namely performances on stage. His role as playwright, at least early in his career, was known only to the company which kept tight control of the written script. There was no cult of the author, except in rare cases such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, who were more notorious for their lives than famous for their works. Shakespeare’s public, bread-and-butter jobs were as an actor and shareholder in the theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Only later were the plays adapted into a reading-culture based on the existence of the works published in written form with the author’s name attached. This raises an apparently simple question, though the answers are not so obvious or self-evident as they may seem. How did language, written initially anonymously and created primarily to be performed and heard on stage, at most in a season of live performances with occasional later revivals, come to be recorded in written form and made available forever under the now internationally revered name William Shakespeare?

There is some evidence that increasingly during his lifetime it was primarily the uniqueness of the language of Shakespeare’s plays that made them memorable and ‘worth’ publishing, rather than necessarily their theatrical qualities and appositeness for staging which had attracted initial attention. In a pre-copyright age, the posthumously published ‘complete works’, known as the First Folio (1623), was no doubt an attempt to give Shakespeare’s words some authorial protection now that he was dead, to preclude unauthorized and unacknowledged plagiarism. His friends Heminge and Condell, as compilers of the First Folio collection of the (almost) complete works, claimed that their aim was ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare’ and to attribute to the plays their rightful paternity: ‘We have but collected [his plays] and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans, guardian’. They are here using the kind of metaphor which Shakespeare himself would have appreciated – now that the author is dead his works, like offspring, are orphans, and need legal guardians. It does seem that the publication of the First Folio in 1623, seven years after his death, was considered a literary rather than theatrical event. Among other things, the sheer size and weight of this volume (950 pages) made it completely impracticable as a text to be used in the theatre, and it looks and feels more like the kind of giant Bibles used by preachers in church, which in itself conferred symbolic prestige on the volume. It was also priced beyond the reach of most, probably about 15 shillings for an unbound copy and £1 bound (twenty days’ wages for a skilled tradesman). It was made to sit in libraries of readers who were used to reading lengthy works of poetry, such as Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene and courtly prose romances such as Sidney’s Arcadia. This purpose is clearly signalled at the beginning of the Folio where we see an address, ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, and is emphasized by the first editors: ‘Read him therefore; and againe, and againe.’ It marks a decisive historical shift towards Shakespeare’s plays as existing in print culture, and away from their prior purpose as performance on stage. Referring to the engraved image of Shakespeare’s face on the facing page, the short poem regrets that the artist could not have drawn the ‘wit’ as accurately as the face, so that the ‘print’ will have to suffice: ‘But, since he cannot, Reader, looke / Not on his picture, but his Booke.’ This emphasis on ‘print’, ‘book’ and ‘reader’ in turn led to the eighteenth-century fashion for editing and even ‘revising’ plays to conform with ancient literary rules derived from Aristotle, and also to the vast, ever-increasing industry of books and articles on Shakespeare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

However, the movement towards Shakespeare’s fame as a writer, whose works were destined to be read in books, began before the First Folio appeared. While he was alive, some of his plays were published as ‘Quartos’ (one play per volume in small format, comparable in some ways to the modern paperback), offered to the public as performance scripts. These may not have been personally authorized for publication by Shakespeare, since the ‘prompt copies’ (the ‘master’ written playscripts used by the prompter in preparing for performance) belonged to the theatre companies he worked for rather than the writer. The company could sell rights to publication to a publisher who could gain some legal protection by paying a fee and recording the transaction in the Stationer’s Register (Smith, 2015, 140). Words were precious commodities with commercial value, and no doubt the companies did not want their words to be stolen by other companies before their stage popularity was waning. We do not know much about whether plays in Quartos were printed from the author’s manuscripts, from prompt books used in the theatres, or from individual ‘parts’ used by the actors. All sorts of theories have been advanced, and answers may have been different in each case, but the area remains largely a matter for speculation. Some plays, such as King Lear and Hamlet, were published in different textual versions, deepening the mystery further. The most likely explanation is that the ‘first’ version of a play, which was lodged for licensing by the Master of the Revels, was in some cases too lengthy for performance, and shorter versions had been cut down for the stage. It had not been until 1598 that Shakespeare was first named on quarto title pages of plays (Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost), and by 1600 he was becoming known by name as one whose works could be read with profit. He had been named in 1593 on the title page of his long poem Venus and Adonis, a work which became a bestseller (of which more anon, when we come to look at where the Dream fits in his ouevre). At the end of this book, ‘Appendix 1’ lists Shakespeare’s works in a (possible) chronological order of first performance.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime as a Quarto in 1600 (and reprinted in 1619 after his death), some five years after it had been first performed in about 1595. It has only minor differences from the Folio version, and most editors these days base their texts on the Quarto, since it seems to have been printed from an author’s manuscript. The title page provides some theatrical information confirming the play’s popularity, and was perhaps intended as an acknowledgement to the Company, whether or not it had given permission to publish:

A

Midsommer nights

dreame.

As it hath beene sundry times pub-

lickely acted, by the Right honoura-

ble, the Lord Chamberlaine his

seruants.

Written by William Shakespeare.

Imprinted at London, for Thomas Fisher, and are to

be soulde at his shoppe, at the Signe of the White Hart,

in Fleetestreete. 1600.

This gives some valuable information, telling us that the play was evidently popular on stage (‘sundry times publickely acted’), that the playing group had a patron and was known after him as ‘the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants’, and most importantly, we have the announcement on a play text of the writer’s name, ‘William Shakespeare’. This alone is significant, since many plays – possibly most – were written collaboratively by various hands, and authors’ names were not always given on the title pages. Writers were considered mere journeymen, necessary in the process of making plays but requiring no special acknowledgement. The fact that the Quarto was printed some years after the play had first been performed on stage suggests that the ‘sundry times’ it had been acted included revivals, proof of its continuing popularity on stage. But in terms of Shakespeare’s playwriting career, the appearance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on bookstalls is evidence that by 1600 he was becoming known also as a writer whose plays repay reading.

Exercise 1

List as many differences as you can think of between texts intended to be read (e.g. novels) and works intended to be performed (scripts, play texts). Consider why Shakespeare’s works can be successful either way.

Exercise 2

You will find images of the quarto texts with Shakespeare’s name on the following website. See what information they might offer us about Shakespeare’s fame during his lifetime, and what they tell us about Elizabethan printing practices: https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/highlights/shakespeares-name-printed-title-page-or-dedicatory-leaf-his-work-his-lifetime.

Shakespeare’s own language

The transcription above of the Quarto’s title page throws us into some of the differences between language in Shakespeare’s day and ours, with spellings like ‘Midsommer’, ‘dreame’, ‘hath’ and so on. If you are studying or reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or preparing to watch a performance of the play, you will certainly be using a ‘modern spelling’ edition. However, this version is by no means what Shakespeare wrote. We have texts of his plays from his own era which are in ‘old spelling’ and in what often strikes us as ‘old language’, which looks like this:

NOw faire Hippolita, our nuptiall hower

Draws on apase: fower happy daies bring in

An other Moone: but oh, me thinks, how slow

This old Moone waues! She lingers my desires,

Like to a Stepdame, or a dowager,

Long withering out a yong mans reuenewe.

Hip. Fower daies will quickly steepe themselues in night:

Fower nights will quickly dreame away the time:

And then the Moone, like to a siluer bowe,

Now bent in heauen, shall beholde the night

Of our solemnities.

The spelling differences are easily assimilated, such as ‘daies’ for ‘days’, ‘yong’ for ‘young’, ‘reuenewe’ for ‘revenue’, and ‘Moone’ for ‘moon’. There is an obvious misprint, ‘waues’ for ‘wanes’, reminding us that compositors in printing shops were fallible, and without the benefits of spellchecks. Others may reveal something about Elizabethan pronunciation – the respective spellings of ‘hower’ and ‘fower’ might suggest that ‘hour’ and ‘four’ may have rhymed in those days (more likely with ‘hower’ dominant since if ‘four’ were pronounced ‘for’ then there would be an unfortunate and surely unlikely pun on ‘hour’ and ‘whore’). This gains some credibility when we reflect that the word was derived from the Old English fior, and from Middle English where it was variously spelt feouwer, fowuer and fower (Oxford English Dictionary). Shakespeare’s spoken language is generally believed to have sounded more like West Country English than modern ‘received pronunciation’, and even today ‘hour’ and ‘four’ could in dialect both be pronounced with two syllables and nearly rhyme. Such details might seem pedantic and not matter much to our appreciation of the meaning, but the more accustomed we become to details of Shakespeare’s language, the more fascinating a study it becomes.

Other differences, or difficulties, arise when Shakespeare is using language to express ideas which have little currency ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s Time
• 2 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time
• 3 Unfolding the Play Through Language
• 4 Hearing Shakespeare’s Language
• 5 Languages of Love
• 6 Language of Dreaming
• 7 Languages of Nature: ‘Purple Passages’ in the Green World
• 8 Language of Change: Myth, Race and Gender
• 9 From Page to Screen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cinematic Language
• 10 Writing Matters
• Appendix: Shakespeare’s Works in Approximate Chronological Order
• Bibliography
• Copyright