A Midsummer Night's Dream

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1110873.html

Of Shakespeare's really famous plays, this is probably the one I knew least well before starting this project. It is brilliant. Somehow it all comes together, in terms of plot and language. The human side of the plot - conflicting love interests resolved by supernatural means, entertained by a local am dram group - is straightforward enough; the special bit is the fairy world. And somehow here Shakespeare manages to construct an alien culture, beings which have super powers yet whose motivations remain mostly familiar. Not knowing the play, I tended to assume the fairies would be more or less of the Andrew Lang variety, but these are much more serious beings.

It seemed comparatively short, and the show more text seems more approachable; certainly the humorous and farcical aspects of the plot are pretty timeless (none of the incomprehensible wordplay scenes of, say, Love's Labour's Lost). In particular, to my surprise, Bottom stands out as a vivid character - the guy in the club who thinks the whole thing revolves around him, and because he thinks so it has largely become true; and even having his head turned into a donkey's while the fairy queen makes love to him doesn't seriously faze him.

The Arkangel production has veteran comedian Roy Hudd doing a superb Bottom (climaxing with a glorious Pyramus death scene), and two other particularly good performances: David Harewood as Oberon and Adjoah Andoh (Martha's mother in Doctor Who) as Titania, playing the fairy couple with Caribbean accents, which of course adds to their exotic characterisations (as does the effective soundscape). Amanda Root and Saskia Wickham are good also as the human girls, Hermia and Helena. The most enjoyable so far. show less

"The course of true love never did run smooth"; but oh my friends and neighbours, when was love ever "true"? This is the jolly cynic's Romeo and Juliet, with English country faire elements displaced to Theseus's Athens (itself a place that hardly did exist) and the mythological, metaphysical backdrop, the ridiculous-but-still-great-and-terrible Olympians, disinvited from the party in favour of the fairies, magnificent and dreadful but still ridiculous (it sounds like the same thing as the gods but it's actually the opposite): Oberon, equal parts virile intensity and cat-chasing-his-tail; Titania, majestic and intoxicating and yet you also just want to pat her on the head; Puck, with all the mystique of a trickster spirit and all the show more bathos of a cigar-smoking baby. Lord, what fools these immortals be!

They elevate the humans as the humans drag them into the mundane, to the benefit of the action in both cases. Just a quartet of pretty young goofballs bouncing through the sacred groves on a wave of hormonal exuberance, as the rules get mixed up and upside-downed and love-potion-number-nined till it's all reduced to the lowest common denominator. Bucolic rumpus--pratfalls and sex. They seem too quick and alive for the law to catch up with them, and indeed Theseus and Hippolyta do present a fairly mellow or enlightened face on disciplining authority, as the king reassures us that EVEN IF things fall over the precipice and go all two-households-both-alike-in-dignity on us, Hermia can choose forcible cloisterment over death--but is this really such a comfort? We see Demetrius and Lysander play fistfights for laughs and never think about how close either of them is to braining himself on a rock, the other being strung up. Skulking around somewhere in the background is always the deeply unfunny Egeus, the patriarch with filicide in his fist.

The estimable Bottom and his bunch of goony players (special shout out to Wall--I see you, Wall!) bring it all home by staging the tragic romance of Pyramus and Thisbe farcically for a bunch of complacent chuckleheads who don't know that they're in a play themselves, and that comedy and tragedy are a mere knife-edge apart. And ever if we manage to keep it light and nobody falls on a dagger, love fades and everyone you know will one day still certainly die. The comic dignity of the man with the donkey's head sums up the message quite nicely: The play's an ass, and it is a matter of life and death that we keep it that way. Laugh at that! No, I mean it! show less

Rackham turns his pen and paintbrush to Shakespeare's most whimsical and fantastic play to wonderful results. Instead of focusing on the humans in the story, Rackaham's paintings and illustrations are filled with the forest dwellers and fairy court of Titania and Oberon. This subject matter is well within Rackham's oeuvre, and each illustration can stand on its own outside of the context of Midsummer Night's Dream since his fairies and mystical creatures are timeless. He also captures the idea that this story takes place at night in a forest with dark colour pallettes and tangles of foliage that force viewers to look harder for the details and personages, which is a rare choice for illustrators.

2019 review:

I've read quite a few show more different version of a Midsummer Night's Dream, and even though many are wonderfully illustrated I think that Arthur Rackham's version has to be awarded the top spot. Charles Vess' version is a close second place, but in comparison Rackham's illustrations contain a depth and darkness that Vess' more pastelle palette seems to be missing to fully convey the setting and characters. The woods and the beings who dwell in them may ake on a lighter tone at times, but Rackham's dark colour scheme accurately portrays the twilight setting and hints at the potential danger that these mortals may be in. The Puck may be honest in his words, but the trickery plied on the couples and Bottom could have gone very much awry and the trauma of self-discovery that they wach inadvertantly face is not a theme to be taken lightly. The fairies themselves are often portrayed with gossamer wings and airy garments, but the smaller fey creatures betray their otherworldly origins by looking slightly imp-like and taking on the attributes of the natural world - a realm with no sympathy for human kind due to its wild and untamed nature. Yet this dark beauty portrayed by Rackham is subtly glamorous in that we can't help but be curious about what is in the woods, and we are drawn to examine the fairy world even though it presents a potential danger to us. Into the woods we are all drawn, to see how our heroes will fare, but we all emerge with the dawn safely having returned from an undoubtedly wonderous experience and journey. show less

One of the plays by Shakespeare that remains in the first rank of choices for theatre performance today, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595/1596) is always hard to categorise. At one level it is a conventional comedy of love thwarted and then reconciled but it is clearly more than that.

Shakespeare weaves the world of faery with a peculiar Elizabethan reinterpretation of antiquity, with a satirical and thoughtful commentary on theatre and the imagination and with that periodic interest of early modern drama, the very nature of reality (vide Calderon's 'Life is a Dream' (1630)).

The misimagining of antiquity is in itself intriguing. The law of Athens would have Hermia sent to her death or a nunnery for her defiance of her father - a very show more Catholic Ancient Greece! The faeries are folklorically English but might equally be a debased and whimsical version of the Gods.

The attraction of the play (which is one of the more accessible linguistically in performance) lies in the way Shakespeare transports the audience through the magic of words into an alternative reality which contains romantic aspiration and learned nostalgia in equal proportion.

It is the quintessential play about the business of play and the conversion of the suspension of disbelief into a reality very different from the reality of the materiality of stage, actors and costumes. What it does is done today by Netflix but Shakespeare reveals the magic and yet it stays magical.

This is a remarkable psychological achievement even if it may say just as much about the suggestability of our species and our yearning to believe in something different from our mundane world. The moon is positioned early as presiding over the play. The dark is key to the plot.

The play often speaks direct to the audience. To cap it all, we have a very mundane play within the play in the comical drama placed before Theseus and the 'gentles' of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' (not forgetting the wall and the lion) which dominates the final Act.

This play within the play is often neglected in contemporary analyses in their obsession with imposing gender politics on the work but it is important, if only in highlighting the class-conscious snobbery of the author towards working men.

The message is that the world of dreams and true imagination is only for the educated elite (despite the rather weird version of classical lore exhibited here) and that the clod-hopping working classes are there to be laughed at (by gentles) or (if Theseus) patronised. It seems convenient to forget this.

Those who can ignore this unjustified elitism and even satiric cruelty can nevertheless appreciate the manipulative genius of Shakespeare. The English faery subsequently became a safe semi-erotic aspiration towards freedom, to the spirit of paganism, in English culture in good part thanks to Will.

The play is an exercise in the uneasy balance between duty and pleasure, the law and the imagination, the State and the wild, obedience and freedom. The tension is indirect but it underpins the 'frisson' the play causes in audiences even today. If only, if only, if only ... and yet, it says. show less

"I know not by what power I am made bold." (pg. 34)

Shakespeare's exuberant meditation on the joy of life. Rather than a simple 'fairy story' in which a character called Bottom is turned into an ass (the schoolchildren snigger), A Midsummer Night's Dream is a surprisingly adept metaphysical representation of the complexities of joyful feeling. It also gives the reader a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see the finest English-language wordsmith in history ponder a mortal creator's existential crisis about where his inspiration comes from – and, just as importantly, where it leads.

It can, I admit, sometimes be a bit wearing to follow the 'fairy story' element of the play, with content that seems unbearably twee to a modern audience. Like show more Much Ado About Nothing, the 'comedy' here relies on a strong and discerning performance by those who act it out, rather than any straight reading of the written play.

But once you recognize the repeated motif of the Moon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with the fact that the word 'lunacy' comes from the old superstition that to sleep in moonlight might induce madness (note the root word 'lunar' – and thanks to my Wordsworth Classics edition for pointing this out), you begin to recognize Shakespeare's extraordinary craft here. There are some fine passages on imagination, a multi-layered plot cycling around the strange and contradictory powers of love and lust, and the sort of wordplay and imagery that makes the best of Shakespeare so rich. "I am to discourse wonders; but ask me not what," Bottom declares on page 81. Such light complexity, such intricacy. show less

This is a tough play to gauge. It revels in innuendo and balances the potentially boundless fantasy of feverish dreams of love with the essential other coin side of it, namely, the damning power of lust, ambivalence of forces beyond man's control, and overall absurdity of the divide between literary and personal narrative.

But what I enjoyed most about this play was its fascination with dreams and the act of dreaming. The whole play in this manner seems to be a front, with the real clue given towards the end (Bottom's dialogue upon waking from Puck's spell).

Interestingly, it's as if Shakespeare is inviting the readers (and viewers) into something indefinable, something that pretends to adhere to classical structure but in actuality is show more pretending to it for a higher purpose of narrative. That dreams are considered the stuff of potentially great works is something cliche, yet in this context and presentation, profound. show less

Oh, I loved this so much. It's charming and fun and hilarious and silly but it has a lot of heart- it's not just an empty comedy. There's wit and some really great observations on flights of fancy and the ridiculous things humans will do (with or without the help of forest nymphs) in the name of love. Also, an enchanted forest has got to be one of my favourite settings of all time, the heady summer air and a sense of magic really seeped through the pages.

Two of my favourite quotes, both by Robin Goodfellow a.k.a. Puck (and I'm reciting from memory here, so bear with me):

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended.
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear,
And this weak and idle theme;
No more show more yielding but a dream..."

"Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand
And the youth, mistook by me
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!" show less