A Midsummer Night's Dream
| "How Shall we beguile
The lazy time if not with some delight?"
| Some scholars believe that A Midsummer Night's Dream was originally composed for performance at a private manor house, to be presented at the end of a wedding ceremony. However, like all of Shakespeare's plays, Dream would also have been performed at the more raucous public playhouses that stood on the south side of the Thames in Southwark. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London was a noisy affair; spectators would happily uncork bottles and crack nuts while actors performed Shakespeare's works on stage. Aware that his plays would have to compete for audience attention, Shakespeare shaped his plays in such a way that they were certain to engage spectators. As in Dream, he often presented a diverse range of characters (from kings to clowns) to entertain the crowds. Likewise he varied the tone of his scenes, contrasting the bold hilarity of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' with the gentle beauty of the closing speeches.
| THE STAGE
"This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house" |
Shakespeare crafted his plays to fit the theatres in which they were performed, and we can imagine how different parts of the stage might have been used for A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Although we have little evidence of the exact design of the theatre various features would have inevitably affected the way that plays were presented.
1. The stage
The close proximity between actor and audience in Shakespeare's theatre allowed for moments of great intimacy. Bathed in sunlight, actors could speak directly to individual spectators or to the audience as a whole. Helena confides her inner thoughts to the audience in 1.1, and Bottom shares his "most rare vision" with the audience in 4.1. At the end of the play, Puck practically reaches out to the audience for applause as he asks "Give me your hands if we be friends./ And Robin shall restore amends."
2. The two doors at the back of the stage
Exits and entrances are crucial to the design and success of this play on stage. Much of the comedy in 3.2 (when Puck puts the lovers to sleep) revolves around the two doors at the back of the stage, with characters entering and exiting at speed.
3. The trap door, front middle of main stage
It is possible that Puck made some of his entrances onto stage through the trap door. His sudden appearance would surprise spectators stood close to the stage, and it could also help give the impression that he came from another world. It is thought that the ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth would also have entered through the trap door.
4. The balcony, above the main stage.
Musicians were often placed above the stage during performances of Shakespeare's plays. It is also likely that some scenes were played 'aloft' from this position, and some believe that Titania's bower was positioned above the stage so that she could look down upon Bottom as he sings. Others believe that Titania's bower would have been located in the tiring-house at the back of the stage.
| ACTING STYLES
"Name what part I am for and proceed"
| It is probable that Shakespeare's players approached his plays in terms of 'parts' rather than 'roles'. Shakespeare's players would not have received complete copies of the script for Dream, as actors would in rehearsal today. Instead, Shakespeare's actors only received their own parts along with their cue lines indicating when they should speak.
Shakespeare's players did not have the luxury of long rehearsal periods to learn and explore their roles. Actors would often learn a number of parts simultaneously because audiences were hungry for new plays. We should not assume then that actors always spoke all of the lines that Shakespeare had written; it is probable that some of the comedic actors playing roles such as Bottom and Puck would have added lines of their own, and would have improvised around Shakespeare's conception of a scene.
| "Let me not play a woman"
| Boys would have played Shakespeare's women. At school they learned to recite poetry, and would have been tutored in the art of acting. The boys were differentiated from the adult performers by the pitch of their voice, and their costumes. Though Shakespeare encourages us to laugh at Flute's protestations against playing the woman's part, we should not conclude that boy players acted badly, or against their will. Shakespeare wrote some of his most sophisticated and challenging roles, such as Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth for boys, so we must assume that they were capable of giving strong performances.
| "Let Thisbe have clean linen" | Shakespeare's players would have been costumed in rich and elegant clothes, mixing classical dress with contemporary Elizabethan fashions. We know from Philip Henslowe's inventory of the costumes owned by his company in 1598, that costumes available for use included:
* "a scarlet cloke Layd downe wth silver Lace and silver buttens"
* "a short velvet cap cloth embroidered wth gould and gould spangle"
* "a yellow silk gowne"
* "ii blew calico gowns"
Shakespeare's players could also make use of a wide variety of props, including among other things:
* "a baye tree"
* "a lyone skin"
* "iii Imperial crownes"
* "i bedsteade"
* "i black dogge"
It is easy to imagine the lovers dressed in some of these fine robes and gowns, or the actor playing Starveling bringing "i black dogge" onto stage for the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe.
| AFTER SHAKESPEARE
"There is not one word apt, one player fitted"
| A Midsummer Night's Dream disappeared from the stage after Shakespeare's death. The play soon came to be viewed as old-fashioned and when Samuel Pepys saw it some 40 years after Shakespeare's death he thought that it was the "most insipid" and "ridiculous" play that he had seen in his life. Essentially, with its four plots, and fantastical story line, Shakespeare's play proved simply too complicated for late seventeenth-century audiences.
Those who admired Shakespeare's play adapted it to suit the tastes of the times; it was often the case that individual characters, or individual plotlines, became the focus for these spin-offs. For example, as the titles suggest, Bottom was the focus of a play written in 1661 titled: The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottome the Weaver while the fairy-world was the focus of Thomas Betterton's The Fairy Queen, written in 1692.
In other adaptations such as David Garrick's The Fairies (1755), the Mechanicals do not appear at all, and it is Theseus and Hippolyta's story that takes centre stage. Garrick's play included 28 songs, and only used 560 of the 2134 lines to be found in Shakespeare's drama.
| "Your play needs no excuse"
| While filling Shakespeare's play with songs, and altering the structure of his work may have delighted some audiences, there were some critics who disapproved of what was being done to Shakespeare's play. The Romantic essayist William Hazlitt wrote of one adaptation that, "All that is fine in the play, was lost in the representation. The spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled". Similarly, writing of David Garrick's adaptation, Theophilus Cibber complained that Shakespeare's play had been "minc'd and fricasseed into an indigested and unconnected thing called The Fairies".
It was not until 1840 that Shakespeare's play, much as we know it today, reappeared on the British Stage, in a production mounted by Madame Vestris, who also played the role of Oberon. Madame Vestris's production inspired other performers to stage increasingly spectacular versions of the play.
Nineteenth-century productions were characterised by their elaborate scenic design and display. The set for Charles Kean's production in 1856 included a non-functioning waterfall, and a distant view of the Acropolis. Ninety fairies danced a ballet in the closing scene, and at other points fairies were airborne above the stage. Elaborate, naturalistic stage design reached its pinnacle at the turn of the twentieth century when Herbert Beerbohm Tree brought real rabbits onto stage for his production in 1900. Text by Nick Walton |
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