A Midsummer Night's Dream

"The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon." Painting by Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901), 1847. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

About Shakespeare
William Shakespeare Shakespeare's life Religion • Sexuality Bibliography Collaborations • Attribution Criticism Reputation • Influence World Bibliography Folger Shakespeare Library Books on Shakespeare
Poems
Shakespeare's Sonnets Shakespearean sonnet Petrach vs. Shakespeare "A Lover's Complaint" "Venus and Adonis" "The Rape of Lucrece" "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
Plays
Chronology • Early texts First Folio • Second Folio False Folio • Style
Comedies
The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Merry Wives of Windsor Measure for Measure The Comedy of Errors Much Ado About Nothing Love's Labour's Lost A Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice As You Like It The Taming of the Shrew All's Well That Ends Well Twelfth Night
Histories
King John • Richard II Henry IV, Part 1 • Part 2 Henry V • Henry VI, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 2 • Part 3 Richard III • Henry VIII
Tragedies
Troilus and Cressida Coriolanus • Titus Andronicus Romeo and Juliet'' Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth • Hamlet King Lear • Othello Anthony and Cleopatra
Romances
Pericles, Prince of Tyre Cymbeline • The Winter's Tale The Tempest The Two Noble Kinsmen
Editors
Rowe • Pope • Theobald Johnson • Steevens • Malone Chalmers
Contemporaries
Elizabeth I • James I Richard Barnfield Beaumont and Fletcher Geo. Chapman • Henry Chettle Robert Davenport Tho. Dekker • Michael Drayton Thomas Freeman • John Ford Tho. Heywood • Hugh Holland Ben Jonson • Thomas Kyd John Lyly • Richard Linche Gervase Markham Christopher Marlowe John Marston • Tho. Middleton Anthony Munday • Tho. Nashe George Peele • William Percy Walter Raleigh • William Rowley Cyril Tourneur • John Webster Geo. Whetstone • Mary Wroth Elizabethan miscellanies
In performance
Shakespeare's Globe Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre companies Film and TV adaptations BBC Television Shakespeare
Miscellaneous
Shakespeare Apocrypha Authorship question • History Jubilee • Bardolatry Shakespeare's Birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare garden

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596.

Overview

The play portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta. These include the adventures of 4 young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is among Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.

Characters

The Athenians

• Theseus, Duke of Athens
• Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and betrothed of Theseus
• Egeus, father of Hermia, forces Hermia to marry Demetrius
• Lysander, in love with Hermia and Helena at different times of the play.
• Helena, in love with Demetrius
• Demetrius, in love with Hermia and Helena at different times of the play.
• Hermia, in love with Lysander
• Philostrate, Master of the Revels for Theseus

The supernatural characters

• Oberon, King of the Fairies
• Titania, Queen of the Fairies
• Puck, a.k.a. Robin Goodfellow, servant to Oberon
• Titania's fairy servants (her "train", who wait on Bottom):
  • Peaseblossom, fairy
  • Cobweb, fairy
  • Moth, fairy
  • Mustardseed, fairy

The acting troupe (also known as The Mechanicals):

• Peter Quince, carpenter, who leads the troupe.
• Nick Bottom, weaver; Bottom is turned into a donkey and is loved by Titania, he plays Pyramus in the troupe's production of "Pyramus and Thisbe".
• Francis Flute, the bellows-mender who plays Thisbe.
• Robin Starveling, the tailor who plays Moonshine.
• Tom Snout, the tinker who plays Wall.
• Snug, the joiner who plays a Lion.

Synopsis

The play features 3 interlocking plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazonian queen, Hippolyta, and set simultaneously in the woodland, and in the realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon.

In the opening scene, Hermia refuses to follow her father Egeus's instructions to marry Demetrius, whom he has chosen for her. In response, Egeus quotes before Theseus an ancient Athenian law whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death. Theseus offers her another choice: lifelong chastity worshiping the goddess Diana as a nun.

Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen, Titania, have come to the forest outside Athens. Titania tells Oberon that she plans to stay there until after she has attended Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding. Oberon and Titania are estranged because Titania refuses to give her Indian changeling to Oberon for use as his "knight" or "henchman," since the child's mother was a worshipper of Titania. Oberon seeks to punish Titania's disobedience, so he calls for his mischievous court jester Puck (also called "Hobgoblin" and "Robin Goodfellow") to help him apply a magical juice from a flower called "love-in-idleness," which when applied to a person's eyelids while sleeping makes the victim fall in love with the 1st living thing seen upon awakening (due to the god of love, Cupid, shooting a love arrow at a virgin queen but it, being deflected off a moon beam, flew into a patch of flowers, where the love potion, contained within the arrow, drained into the flowers, giving them their powers). He instructs Puck to retrieve the flower so that he can make Titania fall in love with the 1st thing she sees when waking from sleep, which he is sure will be an animal of the forest. Oberon's intent is to shame Titania into giving up the little Indian boy. He says, "And ere I take this charm from off her sight, / As I can take it with another herb, / I'll make her render up her page to me."

Having seen Demetrius act cruelly toward Helena, Oberon orders Puck to spread some of the magical juice from the flower on the eyelids of the young Athenian man. Instead, Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, not having actually seen either before. Helena, coming across him, wakes him while attempting to determine whether he is dead or asleep. Upon this happening, Lysander immediately falls in love with Helena since he is still under the influence of the flower. Oberon sees Demetrius still following Hermia and is enraged. When Demetrius decides to go to sleep, Oberon sends Puck to get Helena while he charms Demetrius' eyes. Upon waking up, he sees Helena. Now, both men are in pursuit of Helena. However, she is convinced that her 2 suitors are mocking her, as neither loved her originally. Hermia is at a loss to see why her lover has abandoned her, and accuses Helena of stealing Lysander away from her. The 4 quarrel with each other until Lysander and Demetrius become so enraged that they seek a place to duel each other to the death to prove whose love for Helena is the greatest. Oberon orders Puck to keep Lysander and Demetrius from catching up with each other and to remove the charm from Lysander, so that he goes back to being in love with Hermia.

Meanwhile, a band of 6 lower-class workers ("rude mechanicals", as they are described by Puck) have arranged to perform a play about Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus' wedding and venture into the forest, near Titania's bower, for their rehearsal. Nick Bottom, a stage-struck weaver, is spotted by Puck, who (taking his name to be another word for a jackass) transforms his head into that of a donkey. When Bottom returns for his next lines, the other workmen take a look at him and run screaming in terror. Determined to wait for his friends, he begins to sing to himself. Titania is awakened by Bottom's singing and immediately falls in love with him. She lavishes him with attention, and presumably makes love to him. While she is in this state of devotion, Oberon takes the changeling. Having achieved his goals, Oberon releases Titania, orders Puck to remove the donkey's head from Bottom, and arrange everything so that Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena will believe that they have been dreaming when they awaken. The magical enchantment is removed from Lysander, leaving Demetrius under the spell and in love with Helena.

The fairies then disappear, and Theseus and Hippolyta arrive on the scene, during an early morning hunt. They wake the lovers and, since Demetrius does not love Hermia anymore, Theseus overrules Egeus's demands and arranges a group wedding. The lovers decide that the night's events must have been a dream. After they all exit, Bottom awakes, and he too decides that he must have experienced a dream "past the wit of man". In Athens, Theseus, Hippolyta and the lovers watch the 6 workmen perform Pyramus and Thisbe. The play is badly performed to the point where the guests laugh as if it were meant to be a comedy, and afterward everyone retires to bed. Afterward, Oberon, Titania, Puck, and other fairies enter, and bless the house and its occupants with good fortune. After all other characters leave, Puck "restores amends" and reminds the audience that this might be nothing but a dream (hence the name of the play).

Date and text

It is unknown exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was written or originally performed, but on the basis of topical references and an allusion to Edmund Spenser's 'Epithalamion', it is usually dated 1594 or 1596. Some have theorised that the play might have been written for an aristocratic wedding (for example that of Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley), while others suggest that it was written for the Queen to celebrate the feast day of St. John. No concrete evidence exists to support either theory. In any case, it would have been performed at The Theatre and, later, The Globe.

The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 8 October 1600 by bookseller Thomas Fisher, who published the first quarto edition (Q1) later that year. A 2nd (Q2) quarto was printed in 1619 by William Jaggard, as part of his so-called False Folio. The play next appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623. The title page of Q1 states that the play was "sundry times publickely acted" prior to 1600. The earliest performance known with certainty occurred at Court on 1 January 1605.

Analysis and criticism

Themes

Love

Writer David Bevington finds in the play what he refers to as the dark side of love. He writes that the fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titania's eyes, forcing her to fall in love with Bottom as an ass. In the forest, both couples are beset by problems. Hermia and Lysander are both met by Puck, who provides some comic relief in the play by confounding the four lovers in the forest. However, the play also alludes to serious themes. At the end of the play, Hermia and Lysander, happily married, watch the play about the unfortunate lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy and laugh at it. Helena and Lysander are both oblivious to the dark side of their love, totally unaware of what may have come of the events in the forest.

Loss of individual identity

Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, writes of the blurring of the identities of fantasy and reality in the play that make possible "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play". By emphasizing this theme even in the setting of the play, Shakespeare prepares the reader's mind to accept the fantastic reality of the fairy world and its magical happenings. This also seems to be the axis around which the plot conflicts in the play occur. Hunt suggests that it is the breaking down of individual identities that leads to the central conflict in the story. It is the brawl between Oberon and Titania, based on a lack of recognition for the other in the relationship, that drives the rest of the drama in the story and makes it dangerous for any of the other lovers to come together due to the disturbance of Nature caused by a fairy dispute. Similarly, this failure to identify and make distinction is what leads Puck to mistake one set of lovers for another in the forest and place the juice of the flower on Lysander's eyes instead of Demetrius'.

Victor Kiernan, a Marxist scholar and historian, writes that it is for the greater sake of love that this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters are made to suffer accordingly: "It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to have dubious effects on its acolytes". He believes that identities in the play are not so much lost as they are blended together to create a type of haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and more practical ties between characters as a means of coping with the strange world within the forest, even in relationships as diverse and seemingly unrealistic as the brief love between Titania and Bottom the Ass: "It was the tidal force of this social need that lent energy to relationships".

David Marshall, an aesthetics scholar and English Professor at the University of California – Santa Barbara, takes this theme to an even further conclusion, (Citation needed) pointing out that the loss of identity is especially played out in the description of the mechanicals their assumption of other identities. In describing the occupations of the acting troupe, he writes "Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered". In Marshall's opinion, this loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which Marshall points out may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinions on love and marriage. Further, the mechanicals understand this theme as they take on their individual parts for a corporate performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Marshall remarks that "To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part". He claims that the mechanicals understand this and that each character, particularly among the lovers, has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater benefit of the group or pairing. It seems that a desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what quietly moves the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is the primary sense of motivation and is even reflected in the scenery and mood of the story.

Ambiguous sexuality

In his essay "Preposterous Pleasures, Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream", Douglas E. Green explores possible interpretations of alternative sexuality that he finds within the text of the play, in juxtaposition to the proscribed social mores of the culture at the time the play was written. He writes that his essay "does not (seek to) rewrite A Midsummer Night's Dream as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ... moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy". Green states that he does not consider Shakspeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "discontents of civilization", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not resolve so neatly in real life. Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality" in the story must be considered in the context of the "culture of early modern England" as a commentary on the "aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order". Aspects of ambiguous sexuality and gender conflict in the story are also addressed in essays by Shirley Garner and William W.E. Slights.

Feminism

Male dominance is a thematic element found in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare's comedies often include a section in which females enjoy more power and freedom than they actually possess(Citation needed). In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander and Hermia escape into the woods for a night where they do not fall under the laws of Theseus or Egeus. Upon their arrival in Athens, the couples are married. Marriage is seen as the ultimate social achievement for women while men can go on to do many other great things and gain societal recognition. In his article, "The Imperial Votaress", Louis Montrose draws attention to male and female gender roles and norms present in the comedy in connection with Elizabethan culture. In reference to the triple wedding, he says, "The festive conclusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream depends upon the success of a process by which the feminine pride and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and willful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands." He says that the consummation of marriage is how power over a woman changes hands from father to husband. A connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn. The juice employed by Oberon can be seen as symbolizing menstrual blood as well as the sexual blood shed by virgins. While blood as a result of menstruation is representative of a woman's power, blood as a result of a first sexual encounter represents man's power over women.

There are points in the play, however, when there is an absence of patriarchal control. In his book, Power on Display, Leonard Tennenhouse says the problem in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the problem of "authority gone archaic". The Athenian law requiring a daughter to die if she does not do her father's will is outdated. Tennenhouse contrasts the patriarchal rule of Theseus in Athens with that of Oberon in the carnivalistic Faerie world. The disorder in the land of the faeries completely opposes the world of Athens. He states that during times of carnival and festival, male power is broken down. For example, what happens to the four lovers in the woods as well as Bottom's dream represents chaos that contrasts with Theseus' political order. However, Theseus does not punish the lovers for their disobedience. According to Tennenhouse, by forgiving of the lovers, he has made a distinction between the law of the patriarch (Egeus) and that of the monarch (Theseus), creating two different voices of authority. This distinction can be compared to the time of Elizabeth I in which monarchs were seen as having two bodies: the body natural and the body mystical. Elizabeth's succession itself represented both the voice of a patriarch as well as the voice of a monarch: (1) her father's will which stated that the crown should pass to her and (2) the fact that she was the daughter of a king. The challenge to patriarchal rule in A Midsummer Night's Dream mirrors exactly what was occurring in the age of Elizabeth I.

Religious interpretation

John Cena, professor of English at Stanford University and the editor of the New Arden edition of this play, has argued that it contains a religious allegory. It has been well established for 2 centuries that Puck and Robin Goodfellow are both names for the devil from English folklore. Cena argues that the character of 'Wall' acted by Snout represents the partition that exists between Earth and Heaven and that comes down on the day of Apocalypse. Pyramus and Thisbe are a late Renaissance allegory for Jesus and the Church, and that the source of the names Peter (petros, Greek for a stone), and Quince (quoin, a term for a wedge shaped cornerstone) suggests his identity as St Peter. The play-within-the play therefore appears to be a religious satire. The allegorical dimension was extended to the other characters and demonstrated in performance by the Dark Lady Players in a New York production in March 2007

Performance

17th and 18th centuries

During the years of the Puritan Interregnum when the theatres were closed (1642-1660), the comic subplot of Bottom and his compatriots was performed as a "droll". Drolls were comical playlets, often adapted from the subplots of Shakespearean and other plays, that could be attached to the acts of acrobats and jugglers and other allowed performances, thus circumventing the ban against drama.

When the theatres re-opened in 1660, A Midsummer Night's Dream was acted in adapted form, like many other Shakespearean plays. Samuel Pepys saw it on 29 September 1662 and thought it "the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw ..."

After the Jacobean/Caroline era, A Midsummer Night's Dream was never performed in its entirety until the 1840s.

19th century

In 1840, Madame Vestris at Covent Garden returned the play to the stage with a relatively full text, but padded it out greatly with musical sequences and balletic dances. Vestris took the role of Oberon, and for the next 70 years, Oberon and Puck would always be played by women. After the success of Vestris' production, 19th-century theatre continued to treat the Dream as an opportunity for huge spectacle, often with a cast numbering nearly 100. Huge, detailed sets were created for the palace and the forest, and the fairies tended to be envisaged as gossamer-winged ballerinas. The much-loved overture by Felix Mendelssohn was always used throughout this period, with the text often being cut to provide greater space for music and dance. Augustin Daly's production opened in 1895 in London and ran for 21 performances; the special effects were constructed by the famous Martinka Magic Company, which was later owned by Houdini.

20th century

In 1905 Oscar Asche staged a production at the Adelphi Theatre in London with himself as Bottom and Beatrice Ferrar as Puck. Herbert Beerbohm Tree staged a 1911 production which featured "mechanical birds twittering in beech trees, a simulated stream, fairies wearing battery-operated lighting, and live rabbits following trails of food across the stage."

Director Harley Granville-Barker introduced in 1914 a less spectacular way of staging the Dream: he reduced the size of the cast and used Elizabethan folk music instead of Mendelssohn. He replaced large, complex sets with a simple system of patterned curtains. He portrayed the fairies as golden robotic insectoid creatures based on Cambodian idols. His simpler, sparer staging significantly influenced subsequent productions.

Max Reinhardt staged A Midsummer Night's Dream 13 timesin Germany between 1905 and 1934, introducing a revolving set. After he fled Germany he devised a more spectacular outdoor version at the Hollywood Bowl, in September 1934. The shell was removed and replaced by a "forest" planted in tons of dirt hauled in especially for the event, and a trestle was constructed from the hills to the stage. The wedding procession inserted between Acts IV and V crossed a trestle with torches down the hillside. The cast included John Davis Lodge, William Farnum, Sterling Holloway, Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney and a corps of dancers which included Katherine Dunham and Butterfly McQueen with Mendelssohn's music being used.

Another landmark production was the Peter Brook's 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production. Brook staged the play in a blank white box, in which masculine fairies engaged in circus tricks such as trapeze artistry. Brook also introduced the subsequently popular idea of doubling Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania, as if to suggest that the world of the fairies is a mirror version of the world of the mortals.

Since Brook's production, directors have felt free to use their imaginations freely to decide for themselves what the play's story means, and to represent that visually on stage. In particular, there has been an increased amount of sexuality on stage, as many directors see the 'palace' as a symbol of restraint and repression, while the 'wood' can be a symbol of wild, unrestrained sexuality, which is both liberating and terrifying. A number of noted British actors played various roles in Brook's acclaimed production, including Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, and noted stage actors John Kane (Puck) and Jennie Stoller (Helena).

A Midsummer Night's Dream has enjoyed myriad productions in New York, including several by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theatre]in Central Park, and a notable production by the Theatre for a New Audience, produced by Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre. In 1978, the Riverside Shakespeare Company produced a popular tour outdoor tour starring Eric Hoffmann as Puck, with Karen Hurley as Titania and Eric Conger as Oberon, directed by company founder, Gloria Skurski. There have been several variations made since, even some set in the 1980s.

The Maryland Shakespeare Players at University of Maryland staged a queer production in 2015 where the lovers were same-sex couples and the mechanicals were drag queens. The University of Michigan's Nichols Arboretum's programme Shakespeare in the Arb has presented A Midsummer Night's Dream 3 times; these performances take place in a 123-acre (50 ha) natural setting, with lush woods, a flowing river, and steep hills. The performance takes place in several places, with actors and audience moving together to each setting. "As one critic commented, 'The actors used the vastness of its Arb[oretum] stage to full advantage, making entrances from behind trees, appearing over rises and vanishing into the woods.'"

Artistic director Emma Rice's debut production at Shakespeare's Globe in 2016 was a version of the play. While not "a production to please the purists", it received praise. A contemporary reworking, it included gender switched characters and Bollywood influences.

Adaptations

Charles Johnson used the Pyramus and Thisbe material in the finale of Love in a Forest, his 1723 adaptation of As You Like It.

In 1755, David Garrick did the opposite of what had been done a century earlier: he extracted Bottom and his companions and acted the rest, in an adaptation called The Fairies.

Botho Strauss' play Der Park (1983) is based on characters and motifs from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Similarly, motifs and structures from the Dream are used in The Morning After Optimism (1971) by Tom Murphy, and in A Bucket of Eels (1994) by Paul Godfrey. St. John's Eve written in 1853 by Henrik Ibsen also relies heavily on the Shakespearean play.

The Thyme of the Season, written in 2006 by Duncan Pflaster is a sequel to Shakespeare's play, set on Halloween. Jean Betts of New Zealand also adapted the play to make a comedic feminist spoof, "Revenge of the Amazons" (1996) - the gender-roles are reversed (play actors are feminist "thesbians"/ Oberon falls in love with a "bunny girl"). It is set in the 1970s with many social references and satire.

Opera

The Fairy-Queen by Henry Purcell (1692) consisted of a set of masques meant to go between acts of the play, as well as some minimal rewriting of the play to be current to 17th century audiences. It had a successful run at the Dorset Garden Theatre, but was not revived.

Richard Leveridge turned the Pyramus and Thisbe scenes into an Italian opera burlesque, acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1716. John Frederick Lampe elaborated upon Leveridge's version in 1745.

Frederic Reynolds produced an operatic version in 1816.

In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy composed an overture for concert performance, inspired by the play. It was premiered in 1827. In 1842, partly because of the fame of the overture, Mendelssohn was commissioned to write incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to be staged in 1843 in Potsdam. He incorporated the existing Overture into the incidental music, which was used in most stage versions through the 19th century. Among the pieces in the incidental music is his Wedding March, used most often today as a recessional in Western weddings.

Between 1917 and 1939 Carl Orff also wrote incidental music for a German version of the play, Ein Sommernachtstraum (performed in 1939). Since Mendelssohn's parents were Jews who converted to Lutheranism, his music had been banned by the Nazi regime, and the Nazi cultural officials put out a call for new music for the play: Orff was one of the musicians who responded. He later reworked the music for a final version, completed in 1964.

The play was adapted into an opera, with music by Benjamin Britten and libretto by Britten and Peter Pears. The opera was premiered on June 1. 1960, at Aldeburgh.

Theatre company, Moonwork put on a production of Midsummer in 1999. It was conceived by Mason Pettit, Gregory Sherman and Gregory Wolfe (who directed it). The show featured a rock-opera version of the play within a play, Pyramus & Thisbe with music written by Rusty Magee. The music for the rest of the show was written by Andrew Sherman.

In 1949 a 3-act opera by Delannoy entitled Puck was premiered in Strasbourg.

Ballets

• A Midsummer Night's Dream, George Balanchine's 1st original full-length ballet, was premiered by the New York City Ballet on 17 January 17, 1962. It was chosen to open the NYCB's 1st season at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1964. Balanchine interpolated further music by Mendelssohn into his Dream, including the overture from Athalie. A film version of the ballet was released in 1966.(Citation needed)

• Frederick Ashton created his "The Dream", a short (not full-length) ballet set exclusively to the famous music by Félix Mendelssohn, arranged by John Lanchbery, in 1964. It was created on England's Royal Ballet and has since entered the repertoire of other companies, notably The Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.

• John Neumeier created his full-length ballet Ein Sommernachtstraume for his company at the Hamburg State Opera (Hamburgische Staatsoper) in 1977. Longer than Ashton's or Balanchine's earlier versions, Neumeier's version includes other music by Mendelssohn along with the Midsummer Night's Dream music, as well as music from modern composer György Sándor Ligeti, and jaunty barrel organ music. Neumeier devotes the three sharply differing musical styles to the 3 character groups, with the aristocrats and nobles dancing to Mendelssohn, the fairies to Ligeti, and the rustics or mechanicals to the barrel organ. Neumeier set his A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2005.

Recognition

British astronomer William Herschel named the 2 moons of Uranus he discovered in 1787 Oberon and Titania, after characters in the play.

Films

A Midsummer Night's Dream has been adapted as a film several times. The following are the best known.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935 film) – directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, produced by Henry Blanke and adapted by Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall Jr.
  • On the strength of his 1934 Hollywood Bowl production, Warner Brothers signed Reinhardt to direct a filmed version. Mickey Rooney (Puck) and Olivia De Havilland (Hermia) were the only hold-overs from the cast; the cast also included James Cagney as Bottom, Joe E. Brown as Francis Flute, Dick Powell as Lysander and Victor Jory as Oberon. Many of the actors in this version had never performed Shakespeare, and never would do so again, notably Cagney and Brown, who were nevertheless highly acclaimed for their performances in the film.
  • The film won 2 Academy Awards: Best Cinematography – Hal Mohr; and Best Film Editing – Ralph Dawson. It was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Assistant Director; Notably, Hal Mohr was not nominated for his work on the film; he won the Oscar thanks to a grass-roots write-in campaign. The next year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared that it would not accept write-in votes for the awards.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968 film) – directed by Peter Hall. The cast included Paul Rogers as Bottom, Ian Holm as Puck, Diana Rigg as Helena, Helen Mirren as Hermia, Ian Richardson as Oberon, Judi Dench as Titania, and Sebastian Shaw]] as Quince.
  • This film stars the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is directed by Peter Hall. It is sometimes confused with Peter Brook's highly successful 1971 production, but the 2 are different, and Brook's production was never filmed. The fairies in Peter Hall's production wore green body paint. It received its U.S. premiere on CBS as a television special in early 1969.

• A Midsummer Night's dream = Sen noci svatojánské (1969)- Directed by the legendary Czech animator, Jiri Trnka. This was a beautiful stop-motion puppet film, that followed Shakespeare's story simply with a narrator.

• A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982 film) – written and directed by Woody Allen. The plot is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, with some elements from Shakespeare's play.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1996) – directed by Adrian Noble. The cast included Desmond Barrit as Bottom, Barry Lynch as Puck, Alex Jennings as Oberon/Theseus, and Lindsay Duncan as Titania/Hippolyta.
  • This film is based on Noble's hugely popular Royal Shakespeare Company production. Its art design is eccentric, featuring a forest of floating light bulbs and a giant umbrella for Titania's bower.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999 film) – written and directed by Michael Hoffman. The cast included Kevin Kline as Bottom, Rupert Everett as Oberon, Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Stanley Tucci as Puck, Sophie Marceau as Hippolyta, Christian Bale as Demetrius, Dominic West as Lysander, and Calista Flockhart as Helena.
  • This adaptation relocates the play's action to Tuscany in the late 19th century.
• 1999 – written and directed by James Kerwin. The cast included Travis Schuldt as Demetrius.
  • Sets the Dream story against a surreal backdrop of techno clubs and ancient symbols.
• 2002 – A Midsummer Night's Rave, directed by Gil Cates Jr. This adaptation changes the setting to a modern rave. Puck is a drug dealer, the magic flower called "love-in-idleness" is replaced with magic ecstasy, and the King and Queen of Fairies are the host of the rave and the DJ. Other differences include changing the character names such as 'Lysander' becoming 'Xander'.

Disney shorts: A Midsummer Night's Dream was adaptated into a Disney short starring Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, and Daisy Duck as Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena, respectively. In the end, the story is revealed to be a dream that Mickey has during a picnic. This short was featured in Disney's Mickey Mouse Works and House of Mouse.

Web Series: In May 2008 a loose steampunk adaptation called Wormtooth Nation was released.

Television

• The 1981 BBC Television Shakespeare production was produced by Jonathan Miller> It starred Helen Mirren as Titania, Peter McEnery as Oberon, Robert Lindsay as Lysander, Geoffrey Palmer as Quince and Brian Glover as Bottom
• In 2005 ShakespeaRe-Told, the BBC TV series, aired an updated version of the play. It was written by Peter Bowker. The cast includes Johnny Vegas as Bottom, Dean Lennox Kelly as Puck, Bill Paterson as Theo (a conflation of Theseus and Egeus), and Imelda Staunton as his wife Polly (Hippolyta). Lennie James acted Oberon and Sharon Small played Titania. Zoe Tapper and Michelle Bonnard played Hermia and Helena.

Literary

Terry Pratchett's 1992 novel Lords and Ladies features a wedding, an estranged King and Queen of some mythic note and a band of rude mechanicals putting on a play.

In Angela Carter's last novel, Wise Children, the character Genghis Khan directs a film production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hollywood with his 1st wife Daisy Duck as Titania and main characters, Dora and Nora Chance, as Peaseblossom and Mustardseed.

For his series The Sandman, Neil Gaiman included a fantastical retelling of the play's origins in the graphic novel The Sandman: Dream Country. It won several awards, and is distinguished by being the only comic that has ever won a World Fantasy Award.

In 2006–2007, comic-strip artist Brooke McEldowney, creator of 9 Chickweed Lane and the webcomic]] Pibgorn, adapted the story into a 20th century setting in Pibgorn, using characters from both his comic series in the "cast".

Magic Street (2005) by Orson Scott Card revisits the work as a continuation of the play under the premise that the story by Shakespeare was actually derived from true interactions with fairy folk.

Andrew Harman's 1997 novel A Midsummer Night's Gene is a sci-fi parody of Shakespeare's play.

Faerie Tale, a 1988 fantasy novel by Raymond E. Feist, contains many references to the mythical characters represented in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Sisters Grimm novel series, written by Micheal Buckly, features Puck, A.K.A: the Trickster King, as a main character. In the 4th book of the series, "Once Upon a Crime", Titania, Oberon, and other Faerie Folk are introduced.

The teen book, This Must Be Love (2004) by Tui Sutherland is based on the play. The characters have similar or identical names to the original. A sub-plot involves a school play of another Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet, and another sub-plot involves the main characters going to see a play entitled "The Fairies Quarrel" in which a character acts like Puck amongst the main characters.

In Leslie Livingston's series for young adults, Wondrous Strange, A Midsummer Night's Dream is shown as a realm, with similar (if not exact) characters to this realm.

There is a certain allusion to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in "A Bed of Flowers" by Auberon Waugh (1972).

Music

Over Hill, Over Dale, from Act 2, is the 3rd of the Three Shakespeare Songs set to music by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. He wrote the pieces for a cappella SATB choir in 1951 for the British Federation of Music Festivals, and they remain a popular part of British choral repertoire today.

The theatre company, Moonwork put on a production of Midsummer in 1999. It was conceived by Mason Pettit, Gregory Sherman and Gregory Wolfe (who directed it). The show featured a rock-opera version of the play within a play, Pyramus & Thisbe with music written by Rusty Magee. The music for the rest of the show was written by Andrew Sherman.

Progressive Rock guitarist Steve Hackett, best known for his work with Genesis, made a classical adaptation of the play in 1997.

Hans Werner Henze's Eighth Symphony is inspired by sequences from the play.

Elvis Costello composed the music for a full-length ballet Il Sogno, based on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The music was subsequently released as a classical album by Deutsche Grammophon in 2004.

Film and TV references

Rehearsals for a performance of the play by American servicemen stationed in Kent during World War II appear in the 1946 Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death.

Porky's II: The Next Day: The entire high school class presents a Shakespeare festival, which the local redneck religious leaders hypocritically shut down on the grounds of indecency (they are later revealed to have been involved in scandalous behavior themselves). The plays presented in the festival include A Midsummer Night's Dream, which the local preacher frowns on for having such lines as Theseus's " 'Tis almost fairy time".

The tragic protagonist of the movie Dead Poets Society, Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), was cast as Puck in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Only a few frames of his performance are seen, including the ending monologue which could be interpreted as a literary device used by the writer (Tom Schulman) to emphasize his unsuccessful plea to his father.

Disney's animated series Gargoyles featured many characters from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, including Oberon, Titania, and, most prominently, Puck. In this series, Puck actually takes the form of Owen, loyal assistant to the main villain Xanatos. Later, Puck becomes the tutor for Xanatos' quarter-fae son, Alex. He is wily, sprightly, and willing to have fun at the expense of others.

The episode "A Midwinter Night's Dream" of the final season of The Golden Girls is very loosely based on the play.

Get Over It: The 2001 film stars Kirsten Dunst (Kelly Woods/Helena), Ben Foster (Berke Landers/Lysander), Melissa Sagemiller (Allison McAllister/Hermia) and Shane West (Bentley 'Striker' Scrumfeld/Demetrius) in a "teen adaptation" of Shakespeare's play. The characters are set in high school, and in addition to some similarities in plot, there is a sub-plot involving the main characters acting in a musical production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A Midsummer's Nightmare: The episode "A Midsummer's Nightmare" of the Fourth Season of the Science Fiction Series Lexx is loosely based on the play. Oberon, Titania and Puck are the protaginists at a druid feast of Morgath.

Were the World Mine, a 2008 musical independent film, involves a gay student cast in the role of Puck in his high school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The plot revolves around the boy actually making the love-in-idleness potion and turning his crush, classmates and other residents of his town temporarily gay.

Season 2 of the critically acclaimed series, The Spectacular Spider-Man, featured a sub-plot going through the season about the supporting cast preparing to perform the play, which occurs in Opening Night.

In Syfy's series Eureka, a subplot to an episode was a version of A Midsummer Night's Dream reimagined in space, redubbed A Midsummer's Night Invasion.

References

• Bevington, David. "'But We Are Spirits of Another Sort': The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream". A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. Richard Dutton. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. 24–35.
• Buchanan, Judith. 2005. Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-43716-4. Ch. 5, pp. 121–149.
• Croce, Benedetto. "Comedy of Love". A Midsummer Night's Dream. Eds. Judith M. Kennedy and Richard F. Kennedy. London: Athlone Press, 1999. 386–8.
• Garner, Shirley Nelson. "Jack Shall Have Jill;/ Nought Shall Go Ill". A Midsummer Night's Dream Critical Essays. Ed. Dorothea Kehler. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1998. 127–144. ISBN 0-8153-2009-4
• Green, Douglas E. "Preposterous Pleasures: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream". A Midsummer Night's Dream Critical Essays. Ed. Dorothea Kehler. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1998. 369–400. ISBN 0-8153-2009-4
• Howard, Jean E. "Feminist Criticism". Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Eds. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 411–423.
• Huke, Ivan and Perkins, Derek. A Midsummer Night's Dream: Literature Revision Notes and Examples. Celtic Revision Aids. 1981. ISBN 0-17-751305-5.
• Hunt, Maurice. "Individuation in A Midsummer Night's Dream". South Central Review 3.2 (Summer 1986): 1–13.
• Kiernan, Victor. Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen. London: Verso, 1993. ISBN 0-86091-392-9
• Montrose, Louis. "The Imperial Votaress". A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism. Eds. Richard Danson Brown and David Johnson. London: Macmillan Press, Ltd, 2000. 60–71.
• Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 256–283. ISBN 0-395-85822-4
• Slights, William W. E. "The Changeling in A Dream". Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. Rice University Press, 1998. 259–272.
• Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: the Politics of Shakespeare's Genres. New York: Methuen, Inc., 1986. 73–76. ISBN 0-415-35315-7

External links

Text

• A Midsummer Night's Dream at MIT
• A Midsummer Night's Dream Navigator Annotated, searchable HTML text, with line numbers and scene summaries.
• A Midsummer Night's Dream HTML version of the play
• A Midsummer Night's Dream Scene-indexed and searchable version of the play

Books

• A Midsummer Night's Dream at Project Gutenberg
• A Midsummer Night's Dream at Amazon.com

About

• A Midsummer Night's Dream study guide, themes, quotes, multimedia, teacher guide