Shakespeare of course needs no introduction. He wrote, acted and produced plays in London during the reign of England's greatest monarch -- Elizabeth -- at the turn of the 17th Century (1600). Two recent movies provide a very painless and enjoyable way to familiarize yourself with this colorful period of English history: Elizabeth starring Kate Blachard and Shakespeare in Love starring Gwynth Paltrow. Both pictures won Oscars and both are still widely available in Video stores.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is among Shakespeare's most popular plays and has been widely adapted into musicals, opera, Christmas shows, Rock Concerts, etc. The wedding march ("Here comes the bride") is from Mendelssohn's symphony also titled A Midsummer Night's Dream. A Las Vegas hotel once advertized it as a musical "revue."
The reason for the play's popularity is simple: it's one of the most delightful comedies ever written with dazzling poetry, catchy tunes, practical jokes and lots of slapstick. Officially the setting is a "forest outside Athens" (the Elizabethans loved romantic, neo-classical locales), but directors have staged the play in many places: Victorian Gardens, museums, amusement parks, etc. One production in New York's Central Park took the lovers and the "mechanicals" to the Moon -- quite fitting since the moon in the play is the moon of "lunacy" where love reveals, as always, its inexplicable form of dementia.
The summer solstice --- or the "longest day of the year" --- isn't very significance for modern cultures like our own, but for most of human history both the winter (Dec. 21 - the "shortest day") and summer soltice called for days of celebration. In winter it meant the return of the sun from the dead of winter. In summer it was a time to celebrate love, romance and fertility. Most scholars believe Stonehenge was a hugh astrological laboratory which charted the movement of the sun from summer ttrough winter and back again.
"What fools these mortals be," remarks Puck, chief prankster among the Fairies.
The locale of the the Video version with Kevin Kline is the Italian countryside at the turn of the century, but the real location of the play is perhaps most aptly described as the realm of the imagination where dreams and reality intersect.
The play derives from the Elizabethan MASQUE -- a special entertainment for the aristocracy with song, dance, elaborate costumes, great spectacle and, yes --- masks! Midsummer was most likely written to celebrate a royal wedding. While most masques were concerned primarily with entertainment value, Shakespeare uses the form to write one of the finest and funniest comedies in the language.h
The play inhabits both the real world and the fantasy world. Like many romances and Fairy Tales, the drama begins in the real world but quickly moves into a fantasy land of dreams and supernatural creatures. For a moment the dream world seems threatening, but true to the comic mode, audience and actors alike are transported back to the real world -- but a real world changed and improved by its brush with the supernatureal.
The characters in the play comprise 4 distinct groups. Note how the plot inter-connects them:
- The Athenian Aristocrats: Theseus, Hippolyta, Egeus, all from the real world though their names are derived from Greek mythology. They "frame" the play.
- The Lovers: Demetrius, Lysander, Helena and Hermia. They enter the fairy world but maintain their human qualities.
- The Fairies - from the spirit world -- unseen by the humans: Oberon and Titania (King an Queen of the spirit world), Puck, main prankster and chief attendant to Oberson, numerous other spirit creatures.
- The "rude mechanicals" (uneducated laborers) or "hempen homespuns" as Puck calls them -- from the working class to contrast with the aristocrats. For the first time ever they are going to work with their minds instead of their hands. They decide to write a play -- Pyramus and Thisbe -- to help celebrate the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. They all have names which match their occupations or personalities: Quince (a carpenter), Snug (a joiner), Flute (a bellows-mender), Snout (a tinker), Starveling (a tailor) and of course BOTTOM so named because he is an Ass and becomes one in the play. Pay close attention to Bottom's dream-speech right after he regains "his wits." He is the only human to have direct contact with the spirit world. To the least deserving miracles sometimes happen.
Finally, the last act contains the "play within the play," the one the mechanicals have been working on since the second scene. Shakespeare keeps reminding his audience that it is seeing a play --- an illusion -- but it is an illusion that can tell us a great deal about the real world and ourselves. Shakespeare uses the illusion/reality theme in many of his plays. The play within the play -- both here and in Hamlet -- sharpens this metaphor. The mechanicals in their production of Pyramus and Thisbee have no idea of how to create an illusion or even conceive of the difference between illusion and reality. This is the source of the humor in their "farce;" unfortunatrely, the mechanicals intended their play to be quite "sober." Puck sums up the illusion/reality theme in the epilogue which deserves a second look.
As for comic devices, never has a play used the ruse of mistaken identity so well. The play is a text- book for the enumeration of all the basic comic complications in drama.
Enjoy the show!