Transcript A Midsummer Night`s Dream

‘This Palpable Gross Play’
Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream
What does a fairy look like?
‘Puck and a Fairy’ by Arthur Rackham
(1908).
From Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranckes
and Merry Jests (1639).
Silly Shakespeare?
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Samuel Pepys:
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‘…to the King’s Theatre, where we saw Midsummer
Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor
ever shall again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous
play that I ever saw in my life.’ (29 September 1662)
[N.B.: Pepys would have seen a heavily adapted version of the play.]
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Echo of Hippolyta?
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‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.’ (5.1.209)
Pictorial realism
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, His Majesty’s Theatre, 1900
Pictorial realism
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Victorian tendency to cut text and replace with flying fairies,
spectacular scenery, music, dance, crowd scenes, etc.
Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, His Majesty’s Theatre, 1900
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seen by 220,000 people
28 actors, a further 80 supernumeraries
classical Greek costumes
stream of real water
fairies on wires
first production to include Felix Mendelssohn’s complete score (1842)
introduced live rabbits in 1911
Tree: ‘the entire business of the stage is – Illusion. … all that aids
illusion is good, all that destroys illusion is bad’ (1913: 57).
Dream as metatheatre
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Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm
with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and, for the more
better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the
weaver: this will put them out of fear. (Bottom, 3.1.16-20)
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You, ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,
May now perchance both quake and tremble here
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know that I one Snug the joiner am
A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam.
For, if I should as Lion come in strife
Into this place, ’twere pity on my life. (Snug, 5.1.217-24)
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Why are these utterances comical?
Metatheatrical jokes
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Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company;
For you in my respect are all the world.
Then how can it be said I am alone,
When all the world is here to look on me? (Helena, 2.1.223-6)
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…here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This
green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiringhouse… (Quince, 3.1.2-4)
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Conversation about difficulty of staging moonlight (3.1.43-56)
A play about audiences
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Unruly audience in 5.1
Oberon and Puck as audience:
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Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be! (3.2.114-15)
Several plays within the play?
Artifice of lovers’ discourse?
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Are there echoes of 1.1 in the mechanicals’ play?
Anxiety about theatre?
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Puck’s epilogue: a genuine anxiety about offence? Or merely conventional?
Plato’s Republic:
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‘he [the poet] wakens and encourages and strengthens the lower elements in the
mind to the detriment of reason, which is like giving power and control to the
worst elements in a state and ruining the better elements’.
Theseus on the simultaneous romance and danger of fantasy:
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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-17)
Theatre as conjuring
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Puck is a self-described ‘actor’ (3.1.74) and shapeshifter (2.1.44-57 and 3.1.103-6).
Titania accuses Oberon of similar deception (2.1.64-8).
Love potion tricks the senses: does the enchantment
and disenchantment of Titania and Lysander mimic the
theatrical effect of the play?
What about Demetrius? (‘I have found Demetrius like a
jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.’ 4.1.190-1)
Fantasy and shadows
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‘Whatsoever we present we wish it may be thought the
dancing of Agrippa his shadows, who in the moment
they were seen were of any shape one could conceive’
(Court Prologue to Campaspe, John Lyly, 1583)
‘Shadows’ in Dream:
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Oberon as ‘king of shadows’ (3.2.348)
Fiction as shadows: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows,
and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’
(5.1.210-11)
Players as shadows: ‘If we shadows have offended…’
(Epilogue 1)
Dream as a dream
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Metaphor explicit in both title and epilogue
‘Bottom’s Dream’:
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I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it
was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream.
Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought
I was, and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if
he will offer to say what methought I had. (4.1.202-8)
Presentations of dreams upon waking in 4.1: ‘like faroff mountains turned into clouds’ (4.1.187).
What does a fairy look like?
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Costume of fairies?
Fairies’ shifting shapes and sizes
‘Robin Goodfellow’ in Grim, the Collier of Croydon (c.
1600) wears
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‘a suit of leather close to his body; his face and hands russetcolour, with a flail’ [club for threshing corn]
Oberon’s costume:
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But who comes here? I am invisible
And I will overhear their conference. (2.1.186-7)
Henslowe’s 1598 inventory of the Admiral’s Men’s properties
lists ‘a robe for to goo invisibell’ (Foakes 2002: 325).
Locus and platea in performance
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The tension between the
‘abstract and symbolic’
register of the locus and the
‘immediate and concrete’
register of the platea is one
which the performance critic
Colin Counsell has found
‘useful for conceptualising
modern theatre’ (1996: 19).
Peter Brook’s Dream (1970)
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Metaphorical staging:
 white box,
 Slinkies,
 giant feather.
Circus skills:
 trapezes,
 stilts,
 spinning plates,
 clown nose
‘Give me your hands,
if we be friends.’
Counsell’s adaptation of locus and platea
The platea equates to the
‘Concrete’ register of
performance:
 the actor
 the ‘spinning plate’
The locus equates to the
‘Abstract’ register of
performance:
 the character
 the ‘flower’
Locus and platea in modern
performance
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But because of the skill involved in spinning the plate,
Counsell argues, the locus’ dependence upon
successfully-executed platea is openly displayed:
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‘The spectator must therefore acknowledge Concrete object
and performer, and cooperate with him or her to build of the
performance an other-place.’ (1996: 164)
Other productions taking a similar approach: Robert
Lepage (NT, 1992), Edward Hall (Propeller, 2003), Tim
Supple (Dash Arts/RSC, 2006).
Representing the forest
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Forest as ‘green world’
Transition from forest to Athens (and back
again)
Closure or not?
Representing the forest: Supple 2006
Representing the forest: Supple 2006
Representing the forest: Lepage 1992
Representing the forest: Lepage 1992
Casting the fairies
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Doubling
Oberon/Theseus and
Titania/Hippolyta:
implications?
Cross-gender casting:
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Original practices
Victorian tradition of
female Oberon and Puck
Hall/Propeller 2003
Bottom’s transformation
Gregory Doran, RSC, 2008
Mike Alfreds, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2002
Bottom’s transformation: Brook 1970
Bottom’s transformation: Lepage
1992
Bottom’s transformation: Supple
2006
Dream as celebration of theatre
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Presentations of Flute as Thisbe (Supple 2006,
Hoffman 1999)
Dancing: bergomask, then fairy dance
Dance as symbol of unity throughout play:
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If you will patiently dance in our round,
And see our moonlight revels, go with us.
If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts. (2.1.140-2)
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Sound music. Come, my queen, take hands with me,
And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be. (3.3.84-5)
Dream as celebration of theatre
Puck’s Epilogue
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‘Give me your hands’ in
Brook 1970
Celebration in Supple 2006
Sadness/liminality in Hall
2003
Effect of multiple endings?
Puck’s speech in 5.2
Resolution or irresolution?
References
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Counsell, C. (1996) Signs of Performance, London:
Routledge.
Foakes, R. A. (2002) Henslowe’s Diary: Second
Edition, Cambridge: C.U.P.
Tree, H. B. (1913) Thoughts and After-Thoughts,
New York & London: Funk & Wagnalls
(available at archive.org).