A Reality of Romance: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was probably written between the autumn of 1594 and the spring of 1595. It is first mentioned in 1598, but two passages in the play itself refer to events of 1594. The first is Titania’a speech on the foul weather, and the second is Bottom’s remark that mentions a lion among Ladies. There are some incidents that Shakespeare adapted from his own plays such as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, he had made fun of amateur theatricals as presented by the worthies attached to a great house; in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio was given a long speech on the pranks played by fairies; whilst the entanglements caused when the love affairs of two pairs of lovers go awry was the theme of Two Gentlemen of Verona; in that play, too, all the lovers run to the woods (15-16, Penguin).

            A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first published in 1600. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8^th October, 1600, as “A book called a Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and soon after printed with the title A Midsummer nights Drame. The First Quarto was reprinted in 1619 when William Jaggard, the printer, issued a number of Shakespearian Quartos in one volume. When the play was reprinted n its place in the First Folio of 1623, a copy of the 1619 Quarto was used. It had been revised in the playhouse. Some new stage directions were added, and the punctuation of the Quarto, which was peppered with an excess of commas, was, on the whole, very carefully revised, but several new misprints were made (17-18, Penguin).

Performances

Meres mentions A Midsummer-Night’s Dream in Palladis Tamia (1598). The title-page of the quarto of 1600 says that it had been publicly acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s servants. In 1624, a protestant writer, John Gee, mentions in his book, New Shreds of the Old Snare, the comedy of “Piramus and Thisbe, where one comes in with a Lanthorne and Acts Mooneshine.” In his Works, published in 1630, John Taylor, the water-poet, calls the play by its true name, and quotes the prologue to the clowns’ tragedy (Address to Nobody, prefixed to Sir Gregory Nonsence his Newes from No Place). Evidently, the play, or some part of it, held the stage in the reign of James I and Charles I; but the title given to it by Gee might suggest that already the popularity of clowns had led to their being separated from the comedy, as they have been since in a hundred theatres, and in innumerable school speech days. Therefore, they were certainly so separated after the closing of the theatres in 1642 (160, PR 2827).

The droll was popular; the comedy as a whole did not suit the taste of the Restoration. It was one of the Shakespeare plays chosen by Killigrew for the King’s company when he and D’Avenant divided the repertory; but only one performance of it under his management is recorded; that which Pepys saw at the theatre in Verestreet on September 29, 1662: ‘To the King’s Theatre, where we saw “Midsummer’s Night Dream,” which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’ (161, PR 2827).

            Garrick’s Drury Lane was working on A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. During Garrick’s absence abroad, a piece bearing that title was performed on its stage in November, 1763 (printed 1763). Whether Garrick himself, or his deputy, the elder Colman, were responsible for it –and each blamed it on the other- it was a dead failure, and was performed no more than once. It was an opera, of course, with the clowns this time partially restored, though most of their play was left out; and with Yates for Bottom, Baddeley for Flute, and Parsons for Starveling, that part of it at least must have been well acted and sung (163, PR 2827).

            The eighteen century had evidently been puzzled about the unity and proportions of a play composed of three pretty distinct elements: fairies, human lovers and clowns. In January, 1816, John Philip Kemble, nearing the end of his reign at Covent Garden, produced (but did not act in) a version by Frederic Reynolds (printed 1816) – an operatic version still, with music by Henry Bishop, supplemented with songs by Arne and Smith. Thus did Reynolds enter on his evil, successful career of making operas out of Shakespeare. (164, PR 2827).

            The theatre listened to Hazlitt no more than it has listened to any critic. He had been in his grave two years when, forgetting even John Kemble’s attempt to give the play as a whole, Covent Garden squeezed into a musical version of All’s Well That End Well a masque called Oberon and Robin Goodfellow; and a year later, in November, 1833, Alfred Bunn serves up at Drury Lane an after-piece in two acts with music which Professor Odell describes as ‘compiled from all the Midsummer Night’s Dreams that had disgraced the stage from Garrick to Reynolds.’ A decade after Hazlitt’s death, however, some of his, or Coleridge’s, or Lamb’s, ideas about Shakespeare as poet and playwright had penetrated into the theatre; and, to judge from contemporary accounts, Hazlitt himself might have approved the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream given by Mme Vestris and Charles Mathews as a play, not an opera, in Novemver, 1840, during their second season at Covent Garden. J. R. Planche, who made the version for them, kept closely to Shakespeare. He used nothing what was not in Shakespeare’s original: he even say Shakespeare’s own ending to the play made a better final scene for it than any pageant of them all.  Some attempt at archeological accuracy in the dresses seems to have resulted, at any rate, in beauty: the scenery, by the Grieves, aiming also, in its degree, at fidelity to Ancient Athens, was much admired; and the music, composed and selected by T. Cooke, included ‘Mendelssohn’s celebrated overture’ (165, PR 2827).

            Samuel Phelps’s production at Sadler’s Wells in October, 1853, would have come yet nearer than that of the pioneer Mme Vestris to convincing Hazlitt that poetry and the stage might agree together, and that a stage moon might give light. However, in 1914, the twentieth century brought its ideas of the production of Shakespeare to bear on the comedy that had puzzled the eighteen and mainly defeated the nineteenth. Those ideas include the abandonment of elaborate staging and of archeological accuracy. A capital instance of these aims was given by Mr. Granville Barker’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the temporary ‘apron-stage’ of the Savory Theatre. In December, 1920, James Bernard Fagan opened his management of the Court Theatre with this play, Oberon by Mary Gray, and Titania by Elizabeth Irving. From 1933 onwards the comedy has been a regular feature of the summer productions of the Open Air Theatre in the Regent’s Park. On October 7, 1922, the Motion Picture Directors Association of America produced in the Hollywood Bowl a play (not a motion picture) entitled Midsummer’s Night Dream. Twelve years later, in September 1934, another production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a great scale was seen in the same spot. The producer was Max Reinhardt. Between 1905, when he first produced this play in Berlin, and April 1933, when the Nazi rule dispensed with his services, Reinhardt had given four different productions of the play in Germany and one at Salzburg. In May 1933, he gave a performance of it at Florence, and in the following month produced the play for the Oxford University Dramatic Society, which acted in the open air in the grounds of Southbank, Headington. (168, PR 2827). 

Sources

There was probably no comprehensive source of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though Nashe in 1589 mentioned a play about the King of the Fairies. Shakespeare may have owed something to Greene’s portrait of Oberon in James IV, but most of the fairy matter seems to have been derived from folk-lore. The diminutive fairies were apparently invented by Shakespeare himself when he wrote the Queen Mab speech for Mercutio. Shakespeare appears to have taken hints from a number of different sources, but only with the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe can we be certain what the sources actually were. It’s been said the  story of Romeo and Juliet was derived from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakespeare has been said to have read two different versions of the Pyramus story. Of the first kind, there is the knowledge that he had read  Ovid and Golding; that he knew some of Chaucer’s works and, indeed, made use of the Knight’s Tale in the main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and that he had probably read at least one poem in A Handful of Pleasant Delites, on the language of flowers, for he remembered some of it when depicting Ophelia’s madness. Then, of the second kind of evidence, there are verbal parallels with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When there are several echoes from one version of the Pyramus story, it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare had read it and consulted it during the actual composition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (31-32, 2952).

There remains to be considered the version from which Shakespeare appears to have taken most, that contained in Thomas Mouffet’s poem, Of the Silkwormes, and their Flies. Mouffet describes himself as ‘a Countrie Farmer, and an apprentice in Physicke.’ He was, in fact, a distinguished physician, the author of several medical works, whose reputation brought him many aristocratic patients and led to his appointment to the post of physician to the forces under the Earl of Essex in Normandy in 1591. Mouffet’s poem on the silkworms was not published until 1599, four years after the staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though before it was printed. But there is some evidence that the poem had been written some years before this date. It is dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, and opens with an address to the Sidneian Muse which would be more appropriate to 1594 than to 1599. There is a reference to 1589 in the poem and moreover, there is an entry in the Stationers’ Register, dated 15 January 1589, about a lost book of poems by ‘Mr. Morfet’, who may conceivably be our Thomas Mouffet. Therefore, it can be assumed that Mouffet wrote the poem between 1590 and 1595, and that Shakespeare read it in manuscript. (39-40, 2952).

Film Adaptations

In 1934, Max Reinhardt’s celebrated stage conception of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was produced as a film by the Warner Brothers, jointly directed by Reinhardt and William Dieterle. For Dieterle, who had emigrated in 1930 to the United States from Germany, where he had been distinguished both as actor and director, A midsummer Night’s Dream was to be his first film of distinction in Hollywood. The film ran for two hours and failed at the box-office. Nevertheless, it was by far the most spectacular attempt of the decade to present Shakespeare on the screen, rivaled only by M.G.M.’s highly pictorialized version of Romeo and Juliet which was to follow hard upon it. On the other hand, Jack L. Warner ventured into setting up Reinhardt’s production as a film, insuring himself at the box-office by introducing as many stars as he could into the cast, whether they were appropriate or inappropriate. They included James Cagney (Bottom), Joe E. Brown (Flute), Mickey Rooney (aged 11, Puck), Anita Louise (Titania), Victor Jory (Oberon), Dick Powell (Lysander), and Olivia de Havilland (Hermia). The choreography for the fairies was devised by Bronislava Nijinska and by Nini Theilade, who played the principal fairy. Among the team of directors of photography was Byron Haskin, head of the Special Effects department at Warner Brothers, and some twenty years later to be closely associated with George Pal in the production of outstanding science fiction films. (25-26, Roger Manwell).

Another adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was made by Peter Hall for Royal Shakespeare Enterprises and had its premiere on American television in February 1969. In an article, written earlier for the Sunday Times (26 January 1969), Peter Hall emphasized certain points about Shakespeare, he said:

The verbal essence of Shakespeare is inescapably non-cinematic. In spite of this –indeed, in contradiction to it- I have tended to use the advantages of the cinema not to make a film in the accepted sense, but to communicate his words… But the film is not intended as a reproduction of a stage presentation. The emphases and the visual style are completely different. We shot the whole film on location. The place had to look actual, like the actors. Fairy tales must be concrete if they are to be human and not whimsical.

Peter Hall had directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times in nine years for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his cast for the film derived from these productions. The film can only appeal to those ready to accept this entirely different approach to the play. There could not be a greater contrast between this version of the play and that of Reinhardt, made over thirty years earlier and reflecting the romantic, spectacular tradition of nineteenth-century Shakespearean production at its height (119-127, Roger Manvell).

Characters

The protagonist of the play is Puck who is also known as Robin Goodfellow. Puck is Oberon’s jester, a mischievous fairy who delights in playing pranks on mortals. Pluck’s enchanting, mischievous spirit pervades the atmosphere, and his antics are responsible for many of the complications that propel the other main plots. Oberon is the king of the fairies, who is initially at odds with his wife, Titania, because she refuses to relinquish control of a young Indian prince. Titania, on the other hand is the beautiful queen of the fairies, who resists the attempts of her husband, Oberon, to make a knight of the young Indian prince that she has been given. Titania’s brief, potion-induced love for Nick Bottom, whose head Puck has transformed into that of an ass, yields the play’s foremost example of the contrast motif. There is a young man of Athens, Lysander, who is in love with Hermia. Lysander’s relationship with Hermia invokes the theme of love’s difficulty: he cannot marry her openly because Egeus, her father, wishes her to wed Demetrius; when Lysander and Hermia run away into the forest, Lysander becomes the victim of misapplied magic and wakes up in love with Helena. Demetrius is also in love with Hermia and ultimately in love with Helena. Demetrius’s obstinate pursuit of Hermia throws love out of balance among the quartet of Athenian youths and precludes a symmetrical two-couple arrangement.

Hermia is Egeus’s daughter, a young woman of Athens. She is in love with Lysander and is a childhood friend of Helena. As a result of the fairies’ mischief with Oberon’s love potion, both Lysander and Demetrius suddenly fall in love with Helena. Self-conscious about her short stature, Hermia suspects that Helena has wooed the men with her height. By morning, however, Puck has sorted matters out with the love potion, and Lysander’s love for Hermia is restored. Helena, on the other hand, is a young woman of Athens and in love with Demetrius. Demetrius and Helena were once betrothed, but when Demetrius met Helena’s friend Hermia, he fell in love with her and abandoned Helena.

Egeus is Hermia’s father, who brings a complaint against his daughter to Theseus: Egeus has given Demetrius permission to marry Hermia, but Hermia, in love with Lysander, refuses to marry Demetrius. Egeus’s severe insistence that Hermia either respect his wishes or be held accountable to Athenian law places him squarely outside the whimsical dream realm of the forest. Theseus, the heroic duke of Athens, is engaged to Hippolyta. Theseus represents power and order throughout the play. He appears only at the beginning and end of the story, removed from the dreamlike events of the forest. Hippolyta is the legendary queen of the Amazons, engaged to Theseus. Like Theseus, she symbolizes order.

Nick Bottom is the overconfident weaver chosen to play Pyramus in the craftsmen’s play for Theseus’s marriage celebration. Bottom is full of advice and self-confidence but frequently makes silly mistakes and misuses language. His simultaneous nonchalance about the beautiful Titania’s sudden love for him and unawareness of the fact that Puck has transformed his head into that of an ass mark the pinnacle of his foolish arrogance. Peter Quince is a carpenter and the nominal leader of the craftsmen’s attempt to put on a play for Theseus’s marriage celebration. Quince is often shoved aside by the abundantly confident Bottom. During the craftsmen’s play, Quince plays the Prologue.

The other characters are: Francis Flute, the bellows-mender chosen; Robin Starveling, the tailor; Tom Snout, the tinker; Snug, the joiner; Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, Mustardseed, the fairies ordered by Titania to attend to Bottom after she falls in love with him; and Philostrate, Theseus’s Master of the Revels, who is responsible for organizing the entertainment for the duke’s marriage celebration (sparknotes).

Plot

This story takes place in Athens, Greece ‐ where everything is going wrong. The play starts in the court room of Duke Theseus. A man named Egeus is having trouble with his daughter so he brings her to the duke for help. Egeus’s daughter, Hermia doesn’t want to marry Demetrius ‐ the man her father has promised to her. Instead, Hermia wants to marry the Poet Lysander. Duke Theseus reminds Hermia that the law allows fathers to make their daughters do anything. He tells her that her only other choice is to become a nun and never marry anyone.

Because the duke gives them little choice, Lysander and Hermia decide to run away form Athens. They run into the woods to make plans. While they are in the woods, they run into Helena. Helena is Hermia’s best friend. She is sad because she loves Demetrius. Hermia wishes Demetrius would love Helena back ‐ then Hermia could marry Lysander and their problem would be solved!

The fairies that live in the woods are also having problems. Oberon, the king of fairies, is angry at his queen, Titania. She is taking care of a little human boy and Oberon is jealous. He wants to take the boy to be his servant. Titania won’t let him so Oberon decides to play a trick on her. He asks his helper, Puck, to find a magical flower. The flower’s juices are supposed to make someone fall in love with the first thing they see. Oberon wants Puck to use the flower on Titania.

As night begins to fall, the lovers from Athens are all lost in the woods. Lysander and Hermia are still trying to run away. Demetrius chases them while Helena follows, begging him to love her back. Demetrius is mean to Helena and swears he will never love her. Oberon sees this and feels sorry for Helena. He decides to help her by using the magic flower on Demetrius too.

In another part of the woods, a group of workers, or mechanicals, are practicing a play to perform for Duke Theseus on his wedding day. They are very funny and silly characters. Nick Bottom is the loudest and funniest of them all. He is also very bossy and wants to play all the play’s parts. Puck sees Nick Bottom and thinks it would be funny to make Queen Titania fall in love with him. While Titania is sleeping, Puck drops the magic juices into her eyes. Then Puck make the joke even funnier by turning Nick Bottom’s head into a donkey head. All of the mechanicals are scared when they see Nick Bottom with a donkey head. They run away screaming and wake up Titania. She instantly falls in love with Nick Bottom.

On his way back to King Oberon, Puck finds Lysander and Hermia sleeping. Puck thinks that Lysander is the man who needs the love drops. He is wrong! Puck accidentally makes Lysander fall in love with Helena. Helena is very confused, and Hermia is very mad. She thinks her best friend has stolen her boyfriend. Puck tries to fix things by putting the drops into Demetrius’s eyes. Now Demetrius loves Helena too! Helena is angry and thinks the men are teasing her. Hermia tries to fight Helena. Oberon is mad at Puck for making so many mistakes. He makes Puck stay up all night and fix the mess.

When the lovers wake up in the morning, Lysander loves Hermia and Demetrius loves Helena. Everyone is happy and they go back to Athens to tell Egeus and Duke Theseus. Everything is better in the fairy kingdom too. Oberon reverses the spell on Titania and Nick Bottom. Oberon and Titania stop fighting and Puck apologizes for all of his mistakes.

Themes, Motifs and Symbols

Love’s difficulty is one of the most important themes; though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story; it distances the audience from the emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and afflictions that those in love suffer. Another important theme is magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; they are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of course.

The idea of contrast is the basic building block of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The entire play is constructed around groups of opposites and doubles. Nearly every characteristic presented in the play has an opposite: Helena is tall, Hermia is short; Puck plays pranks, Bottom is the victim of pranks; Titania is beautiful, Bottom is grotesque. The juxtaposition of extraordinary differences is the most important characteristic of the play’s surreal atmosphere and is thus perhaps the play’s central motif; there is no scene in which extraordinary contrast is not present.

Theseus and Hippolyta can be counted as the most important symbols in the play. Shakespeare uses Theseus and Hippolyta, the ruler of Athens and his warrior bride, to represent order and stability, to contrast with the uncertainty, instability, and darkness of most of the play. The love potion, on the other hand, is a symbol of the unreasoning, fickle, erratic, and undeniably powerful nature of love, which can lead to inexplicable and bizarre behavior and cannot be resisted (sparknotes).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream As the First Masterpiece of Shakespeare and the Theme of Love’s Difficulty in the Play

H.B Charlton states that “the sixteenth-century dramatist, depicting the dilemma and the triumph of life, was mainly moved to discover man achieving happiness or sorrow through his relationship with woman, through his liability to love” (101). Charlton’s statement is so true in the first part that there was a tendency to praise woman and man’s perfect union with woman in the Renaissance Period, as it is seen in the sonnet tradition and on the stage of the period. Charlton is also right when he says ‘sorrow’ since unanswered love was accepted as the main source of sorrow in the Renaissance period. Another aspect of love can be seen in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It has been said that what is the place of love in life is the question underlying A Midsummer Night’s Dream (108, Charlton).

Charlton describes the plays as “with all its appearance of fairy, with its apparent revelry in the stuff of which dreams are made, with its alluring unreality, and its evident riot of fantasy, is yet the fist play in which Shakespeare reveals his promise as the world’s comic dramatist, the first exhibition of his power to use comedy for its proper function, to show real man encountering the real problem of the world in which he was really living –in other words, for Shakespeare’s day, the first play in which he showed contemporary man buffeted by the power felt then to be the primary factor of his existence, his response to the quality and the might of love” (102-103). One of the outstanding qualities of the plays is that the tone of the play is so lighthearted that the audience never doubts that things will end happily, and it is therefore free to enjoy the comedy without being caught up in the tension of an uncertain outcome. However, Shakespeare also uses the difficulty of love as a theme to accompany to the audience while they are enjoying the comedy.

The theme of love’s difficulty is often explored through the motif of love out of balance—that is, romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a relationship. The prime instance of this imbalance is the asymmetrical love among the four young Athenians: Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius, and Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helena—a simple numeric imbalance in which two men love the same woman, leaving one woman with too many suitors and one with too few. The play has strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is in many ways based on a quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers’ tangle resolves itself into symmetrical pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved. Somewhat similarly, in the relationship between Titania and Oberon, an imbalance arises out of the fact that Oberon’s coveting of Titania’s Indian boy outweighs his love for her. Later, Titania’s passion for the ass-headed Bottom represents an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania is beautiful and graceful, while Bottom is clumsy and grotesque (sparknotes).

Consequently, it must be stated that the play prepares a place for poets and for lovers and it recognizes the reality of romance. “Men must love: and their love is power and charter to break all opposing ancient privileges. And love refuses to go hand in hand with reason. Its moods and whims are exempt from all constraint but destiny” (112). In its technical aspect, it is the work of a master of language and of plot: but its greatest attainment is that embodied in it, the controlling power shaping its form and texture, there is this first considerable apprehension of the enduring attitude of comedy, the spirit which gives to comedy its vital significance for man and endows it with the permanence of a fine art (122). It is also significant that Shakespeare entered the period of his mastership with the ideas that he explored through the writing process of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he enlarged his unique view of the world through his tragedies later on.