A Midsummer Night's Dream

Martin White

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781403945372
• eBook ISBN: 9781350316751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This introductory guide to one Shakespeare's most read and performed plays offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, and a wide sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.

1 The Text and Early Performances

Date

We cannot know for certain when Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was well-enough known by 1598 for Francis Meres to include it in his commonplace book, Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, as an example of the playwright’s ‘excellence’ in writing comedies. The play was not published until 1600, so Meres’ comments not only reflect its success on stage, but also set the latest possible date for its composition. It is generally agreed that the maturity of style in the writing and control of the dramatic and theatrical structure suggest the play should be placed at the end of the sequence of comedies Shakespeare wrote in the 1590s: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost (which themselves cannot be firmly dated). Opinions differ on whether Romeo and Juliet (which was published in 1597) preceded or followed the comedy, but I have taken the view that the tragedy is the earlier play.

A reference to an entertainment at the Scottish court in 1594, when a plan for a chariot to be pulled in by a lion was changed at the last minute ‘because his presence might have brought some fear to the nearest, or that the lights and torches might have commoved his tameness’, has been used to set the earliest date.

Titania’s speech (II.i.81–117) is often seen as referring to the unusually and disastrously wet summers between 1594 and 1597, and her comments about uncommonly fine winters to the mild and sunny conditions in February 1596. Others have suggested that the play also makes reference, through the presence of its group of artisans, to social upheaval, including disturbances (one led by a weaver) in the Midsummer period of 1595 (Patterson 1989, pp. 52–72; Williams 1995) and the clear signs of severe economic distress being felt by working people.

Taking all this into account, it seems reasonable to set the date of composition around 1595–6.

Publication

A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents fewer textual problems than probably any other Shakespeare play, and there is general consensus over the solutions to what problems there are (see Holland’s edition, 1994, pp. 112–17 for a good summary). The play was first published, in quarto (Q1), in 1600, with a title page announcing that it had been ‘sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants’ – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as the company is more commonly known. (The company became the King’s Men on 19 May 1603 when King James took them under his own patronage, so securing their survival and success.) The printer probably worked from a manuscript in Shakespeare’s own handwriting, containing the changes and corrections he made while composing the play. Q1 occasionally has different speech headings for the same character – Theseus and Hippolyta become ‘Duke’ and ‘Dutch’ midway through Act V, for example – and a number of stage directions are incomplete and at times inconsistent or unclear, such as the inclusion of Helena in the entry at I.i.19, although she does not speak (and may well not enter) until line 179. A second quarto (Q2) followed in 1619 (with a false date of 1600 on the title page), which is basically a reprinting of Q1, with only minor differences. The play was included in the First Folio (F1), the collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays compiled after his death by his former colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, and published in 1623. The Folio text (which, unlike either quarto, is divided into five acts) appears to have been printed from Q2, but in some instances provides answers to misprints in Q1. Other changes in F1, which may derive from the compositor referring to a prompt copy – such as the assigning of Philostrate’s speeches in Act V to Egeus – are more significant in terms of the play in performance and so may be of particular interest to actors and directors, and will be raised at relevant points in the Commentary. F1 also contains examples of what Gurr and Ichikawa call ‘duplicated stage directions’ (2000, p. 117). In III.i, for example, F1 adds Enter Puck at III.i.49, but also retains Q2’s Enter Robin at line 70 in the scene. (Modern editions vary in how they handle this apparent discrepancy: the 2005 Penguin edition text that I have used throughout this book selects just the later entry, the Oxford the earlier one.) In IV.i, F1 retains Q2’s entry for Oberon at the start of the scene, but also gives the character a later entry at line 44. These may simply be errors on the printer’s part, but Gurr and Ichikawa raise the possibility that in each case ‘the two entries may work differently, the first indicating the arrival and the second the action of coming forward’ to intervene in the scene (2000, p. 118).

First performances

Dating the first performances of an early modern play (which usually followed soon after its completion by the author and a short – by our standards – rehearsal period: see White 1998, pp. 28–33) is often more difficult than establishing the date of composition. Although both quartos refer to public performances, the only specific references to early performances are in private venues: before King James at Hampton Court on 1 January 1604 (if it is indeed the same as the ‘play of Robin good-fellowe’ in the records), in 1630, again at Hampton Court for Charles I, and in 1631, probably in Buckden Palace near Huntingdon, the residence of John Williams, the Lord Bishop of Lincoln. Some critics, however, have argued strongly that the company first staged the play privately at (even that it was specifically commissioned for) an aristocratic wedding. Some 11 weddings have been put forward, of which the most likely is the marriage of Elizabeth Carey – named after her godmother, Queen Elizabeth, and known to have had an interest in dreams – to Thomas Berkeley, celebrated in London on the nineteenth of that unusually sunny February of 1596. Both families had interests in plays and playing: the Berkeleys had their own troupe of players while, more significantly, the bride’s grandfather and, later, her father, were patrons of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and her father possibly commissioned The Merry Wives of Windsor (another play that features fairies). The Careys’ London home was in Blackfriars, and, as the local church records make no mention of their daughter’s marriage, it probably took place in the family’s private chapel at their home.

The play’s reference to a ‘fair vestal thronèd by the west’ (II.i.158) in a speech that appears to recall directly an entertainment presented to the queen (see Chapter 3, pp. 92–4), and redolent (as is the play) with the moon imagery associated with Elizabeth, may well be a compliment to the Virgin Queen. Harold Bloom calls the speech ‘Shakespeare’s largest and most direct tribute to his monarch during her lifetime’ (1999, p. 159), though ‘the precise nature of the compliment is so elusive that it took nearly 20 closely printed pages in the Variorum edition to elucidate all the possible interpretations of it that were put forward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone’ (Bate 1997, p. 218). The Carey family were the Queen’s closest living relatives: the mother of the bride’s grandfather, Henry Carey, was Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, which made him Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin or even possibly her half-brother, as Mary had been Henry VIII’s mistress before Anne. However, the suggestion that the Queen – who was in residence at her palace in Richmond on that day – was herself a guest at the wedding, without her presence being recorded, is less likely to be true.

On 4 February 1596, James Burbage (like Peter Quince, a carpenter turned theatre impresario) had acquired a substantial property in Blackfriars and promptly converted it to a playhouse. Having made all his alterations, however, Burbage was prevented from actually using the new theatre following a petition to the Privy Council in November 1596 from neighbours complaining of the noise and other inconvenience that would be caused by the influx of playgoers, and the playhouse stood empty until 1600, when it was leased to a company of boy actors. Interestingly, one of the signatories to the 1596 petition was the company’s own patron, George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, whose London home, Carey House, stood adjacent to the playhouse, and it has been argued that, if the play was designed for the wedding, Burbage’s building, though not yet ready for performance, may have provided somewhere nearby for the company to prepare.

Wedding celebrations at this time often included performances, most commonly masque-like in nature (something of this kind is illustrated in the contemporary painting of the life and death of Sir Henry Unton that can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery in London), and usually mounted by friends and relatives rather than professional performers. However, in 1574 the Common Council of London had specifically excluded from its responsibilities licensing ‘plays, interludes, tragedies, comedies’ performed to guests ‘for the festivity of any marriage’, and a year or two before A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed a group of players were paid £10 to perform at the wedding of the Earl of Northumberland. And, of course, though performed by an amateur group, A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself includes a dramatic performance as a wedding entertainment.

David Wiles has been the strongest advocate of the play’s original purpose being to celebrate an aristocratic wedding on 19 February 1596, when the new moon was conjunct with Pisces in Venus, which according to Elizabethan astrological interpretation was a particularly auspicious moment for weddings. This, he observes, would place the opening of the play some four days earlier (hence the stress on four days in the opening dialogue), on St Valentine’s Day (14 February). When Theseus comes upon the lovers in the wood (IV.i.138–9), he comments that St Valentine’s Day ‘is past’. Wiles believes that because ‘within the closed system of the text’ Theseus’ reference ‘seems inconsequential’ (1998, p. 68), the significance of the St Valentine’s Day rituals in the play’s structure have been overlooked, and he draws attention to the striking analogy between the game played on St Valentine’s Day in which ‘boy A chases girl B who chases boy C who chases girl D’ and the plot structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and to the custom whereby one’s ‘Valentine’ is the first person one sees on waking (1998, p. 72). Wiles argues that Shakespeare has drawn together the rites of May and Valentine’s days and merged them with the festival of Midsummer; together they ‘reflect symbolically’ the stages of ‘mate selection, courtship and marriage’ (1998, p. 77; also see Chapter 3, pp. 89–91).

Wiles’s argument is thorough, but other critics (most comprehensively Gary Jay Williams, 1997, pp. 5–18) have strongly opposed this ‘occasional performance’ theory. They argue that it is based on no hard evidence, is counter to contemporary professional practices, and relies mainly on the play’s culmination in three weddings and the reconciliation of the partners in an existing marriage, pointing out that many comedies end in weddings. Indeed, many critics observe that the play appears to problematise rather than celebrate both marriage and child–parent relationships by staging the conflicts inherent in them, so hardly making it a suitable wedding present either to give or to receive.

There can be no doubt, however, that, even if the play was first performed at Carey House, Shakespeare and his fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men would from the outset have anticipated staging it publicly and commercially in the coming season in the summer of 1596, probably at the Theatre (an open air playhouse built by James Burbage and his brother-in-law, John Brayne in Shoreditch, in 1576). The Theatre stood a little west of where Shoreditch High Street is now, and was sited, like the other playhouses then operating (the Curtain – which stood near to the Theatre – the Rose and the recently opened Swan), just outside the city’s boundaries and its jurisdiction. Although the excavations of the Rose playhouse in 1989 revealed considerable differences between that playhouse and what had been imagined as the generic shape and structure of Elizabethan open-air playhouses, it appears they shared a number of common features: a polygonal ground-plan, with tiered galleries for spectators (seated and possibly standing) surrounding a yard where audience members paid less to stand with no protection from the weather; a stage (which may have faced north at the Globe and definitely faced south at the Rose), probably around head-high and perhaps with a stage-trap, thrust out into the yard; a rear wall to the stage, with entrances on to the stage (two doors and, possibly, a larger central opening), behind which was the tiring house where the actors prepared themselves and waited for their cues. The stage of the Theatre was possibly (as stages were certainly in later playhouses) protected from the worst of the weather by a roof, supported by pillars, and perhaps had signs of the zodiac or other planetary images painted on its underside. The roof may also have contained some form of winching gear to lower a throne, for example, to the stage and (though more difficult) raise it up again. The printed text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests Shakespeare was thinking of such an outdoor physical structure rather than a hall in a private house: an entrance at the start of II.i refers to a Fairy entering at ‘one door, and Robin Goodfellow at another door’; the central recess in the rear wall (if there was one; none is shown on the De Witt sketch of the Swan), covered with a hanging, might have been employed for Titania’s bower (so removing the need for her actually to remain visible onstage between II.ii and III.i); while the frequent references to the moon might have involved acknowledgement of the decorated roof above the players’ heads.

The play makes few technical demands. Its props list includes nothing that the company would not probably already possess or could not easily make. For example, the list of stage and other items listed in 1598 by Philip Henslowe, owner of the rival Rose playhouse, includes a lion skin and two lion heads, a cloth decorated with the sun and moon (possibly to be hung on the stage wall), two moss banks, and a robe ‘for to go invisible’. These, or similar items, would be useful in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and presumably other companies possessed much the same kind of stock. The play’s cast list, however, makes particular demands on the company’s acting resources. As a general rule, plays performed by Shakespeare’s company require around 12 adult actors with, in addition, no more than four youths to play the female roles which, in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would account for Hippolyta, Titania, Hermia and Helena. However, while we know that companies regularly assigned two or more parts to an actor, in only a few instances do the surviving character lists indicate how the doubling was to be organised. It has become common in modern productions to double the roles of Theseus and Oberon, and Hippolyta and Titania, but there is no evidence for this practice, thematically or practically, within the text itself (though see the Commentary for IV.i.102–10). A number of critics have assumed that the fairies in the play were intended by Shakespeare to be played by youths (Bloom, 1999, p. 163, even asserts they were performed by children, as indeed they often have been, but there’s no evidence for this), and have used this as further support for the play’s having been originally conceived for a private occasion, where the company’s usual complement of performers could be supplemented, perhaps by child (as opposed to youthful) actors. However, contemporary views on fairies indicate that they were thought to be of human size, and the play’s clear statements that they had sexual relationships with adult humans suggest that Shakespeare imagined the parts to be played by adult actors, relying as usual on his words and the audience’s imaginations to create the sense where necessary of the fairies’ diminutive stature.

For the most part, we can at best only speculate about how the play was originally staged. Ronald Watkins and Jeremy Lemmon (In Shakespeare’s Playhouse: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1974) bravely make a number of confident assumptions – that at the start of Act I scene ii, for example, the ‘Chamber-curtains open to reveal the familiar members of the company’s comedy gang’ (p. 45) or as the following scene begins the First Fairy ‘comes from one of the main Doors and busily attaches a leafy bough to a Stage-Post, converting it immediately into a tree’ (p. 53). I am not saying their guesses are wrong, but they are guesses (and based on a model of the playhouse that has, inevitably, been revised since they wrote). Similarly, C. Walter Hodges has produced sketches of how Titania’s bower might have been staged (reproduced in Foakes 2003, p. 34), but these involve the use of an ‘inner stage’ which is challenged by other theatre historians.

However, what we know of the open-air playhouse does fit securely with the fundamental needs of the staging indicated by the text. If there was a larger central entrance (such as there was at the Globe) it would have presumably been used for the imposing procession that opens the play, while the doors each side of the rear wall (specifically referred to in the stage direction at the start of II.i) would have been effective in bringing opposed forces face to face, such as the entry of Titania and Oberon at line 59 in that scene. Until their arrival, there are only two characters on stage. This rises to at least ten (assuming three fairy attendants for each monarch) until line 145 when only Puck and Oberon remain. From line 176, Oberon is alone on stage for 12 lines before the arrival of Demetrius and Helena, before Oberon is left alone briefly for two lines and the scene ends, as it began, with two spirits on stage. Interestingly, as this scene indicates, and experiences on the stage at the Globe reconstruction have confirmed, the large platform stage accommodates large and small, formal and intimate groupings of actors, and ‘naturalness’ works as well as spectacle.

At III.ii.357, Oberon instructs Puck to create a fog ‘as black as Acheron’ to confuse Lysander and Demetrius. Although we know that smoke was used (if rarely) to create effects on the Elizabethan stage, it seems more likely that mists or fogs on stage were fictional, created by the actors’ behaviour. The posts that supported the roof above the stage might also have been directly employed in the staging: they were used to represent trees to sit under, pin things to, or climb, and so might have represented the Duke’s oak beneath which the Mechanicals meet to rehearse (White 1998, pp. 120–3). There was also a balcony at the rear of the stage, which could be used as part of the action (as in Romeo and Juliet) or, more often, for one or more characters to observe the onstage action.

Elizabethan playing companies laid out considerable sums of money on costuming their productions when something more than conventional dress was required. In The Merry Wives of Windsor it appears the fairies were dressed in usual male or female clothes in green and white, with their faces (or masks) painted black, grey, green or white. Although intended for performances of masques at court, Inigo Jones’ designs for costumes for an unspecified winged figure and for a fiery spirit (in The Lord’s Masque, 1612), and for an armoured Oberon, without wings (in his 1611 masque of that name), may suggest how these figures were presented on stage. The mortals probably wore costumes reflecting a mix of Greco-Roman and romance elements, with the mechanicals dressed as Elizabethan artisans.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps more than any other of his plays, Shakespeare explores the specific relationship between image and imagination, language and object, illusio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• 1 The Text and Early Performances
• 2 Commentary
• 3 The Play’s Sources and Cultural Context
• 4 Key Productions and Performances
• 5 The Play on Screen
• 6 Critical Assessments
• Further Reading
• Index