Midsummer Night's Dream - Performance Log (May 2008)

Shakespeare Watchers,

This year I have been fortunate to see Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie Theater with my ninth-grade classes, so without further ado, here's a performance log.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Guthrie Theater

directed by Joe Dowling

Minneapolis, MN

May 9, 2008

Joe Dowling is the Guthrie's artistic director. He's also the guy who usually takes on directing duties when it comes to Shakespeare. Last year I saw his Merchant of Venice (and I can't believe I didn't take the time to post a review of it because we were discussing it at the time). We saw his Hamlet the year before that. And a few years ago, I caught his Othello at the Guthrie Lab. The current production perfectly exemplifies what we can call the Dowling Rules.

Dowling Rule 1: Joe Dowling doesn't trust Shakespeare

There are dramatic reinterpretations of Shakespeare; there are liberties taken with Shakespeare; and there is what Joe Dowling does with Midsummer Night's Dream. You would be forgiven if you walked into the first act, then motioned the usher over to ask how you accidentally ended up in a Cirque du Soleil show. Punk fairies in ripped leather and day-glo accessories descend from the heavens on wires. Puck (Namir Smallwood) looks like he stole his costume from the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz … and added a cod-piece. Titania (Emily Swallow) rises from the depths of the mossy forest floor in a giant geode. And throughout the production, Dowling has incorporated dancing and a high energy, high volume variety of songs that mine contemporary pop music forms.

So when Oberon (Nic Few) says, in Act 4, "Sound music! Come, my queen, take hands with me,/ And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be," Dowling takes him literally. Music sounds, and the fairies rock out with a heapin' helpin' of boy band choreography! And yes, the lyrics for the songs come from the dialogue and soliloquies of the play. And for me, therein lies the rub. I don't have a problem with turning Midsummer Night's Dream into a musical per se, but some of the better passages of the play end up rendered as Vegas show tunes. Watching it, it feels like Dowling thinks Shakespeare needs a little something extra. It's not the first time.

In his production of Othello, for example, at the Guthrie Lab in 2003, Dowling put on a fairly reserved production. A stately interior set put us in Othello's palace on Cyprus, with a pair of double doors leading to a balcony that overlooked the shimmering blue Mediterranean beyond. In the crucial scene where Iago is seducing Othello by insinuating Desdemona's unfaithfulness, the moment was punctuated by a sudden roll of thunder and flash of lightning. At no other time in the play did Dowling incorporate any atmospheric symbolism or pathetic fallacy stuff. And because we could see the outside through the doors, we knew no storm was actually in evidence. So what we got was this creepy Dr. Frankenstein moment, and I half expected Igor (Iago's long lost brother?) to lumber in. So, what? Iago's insidious evil in lines like "With her, on her; what you will," corrupting language, Desdemona's reputation, and Othello's faith and peace of mind all at once isn't chilling enough? We need a monster movie effect to remind us that Iago is … a monster? That's cartoonish.

Cartoon would be a good word for this Midsummer too. There's so much going on, it's easy to forget there's Shakespeare under it all. In his review in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Dominic Papatola wrote: "this new Midsummer has you casting your eyes about the stage for a kitchen sink. Because, honestly, everything else is in there. You want tatted-up, spike-haired fairies flying in from the ceiling? Minnesota-inspired rube mechanicals traipsing through the auditorium? Choreography that references everything from 'Riverdance' to the Macarena? Got it. How about a Barack Obama reference? Technicolor codpieces the size of a Mini Cooper? Musical interpretations of Shakespeare's soliloquies set to doo-wop and hip-hop and funk? Yep. Interested in comely young lovers who would be at home on the Disney channel (except for the clothing flying off their bodies)? Maybe product placements for the Minnesota Gophers and Grain Belt Premium? Or actor Randy Reyes, workin' three of the most hilarious drag outfits ever seen on the Guthrie stage inside of 10 minutes? Check, check and double check."

You get the idea. How much is too much? When does Shakespeare get lost in production value? I've seen some great set pieces that have little to do with Shakespeare completely illuminate a play. But there is a line. And Dowling crosses it here. And the audience lets him. And that brings us to:

Dowling Rule 2: Joe Dowling doesn't trust you

This is a tough time for theaters. Competition for the entertainment dollar. Aging audiences. Sagging economy and expensive tickets. I guess you really have to wow your audience. What happens if the audience who bought tickets to see Midsummer Night's Dream gets, like, bored; starts, like, checking Twins scores on their Blackberries? Well never fear, Dowling's here. And he knows that you think a soliloquy is just a long, rambly speech. And that you'll like it more if it sounds like Mariah Carey is singing it. He knows that youth is in. And that Hamlet will be more accessible if he's played by a really young guy. He knows that evil is often accompanied by a "mooh-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-haaaa!" He knows that Shylock dude is a real downer, so he's got a fifth act planned for you that will make you forget you even saw Act 4. (For the curtain call, Robert Dorfman, who played Shylock, was not the last to emerge for the audience's recognizing applause. That honor went to Michelle O'Neill and Ron Menzel, who played Portia and Bassanio. This arrangement acknowledged Dowling's focus in the play on the lovers more than on Shylock, a focus that flattened out much of the emotional depth of the play in favor of its more light-hearted moments.)

Ernst suggested at the beginning of our Midsummer odyssey that embedded in a magical world of "unforgettable characters," of songs and "pure poetry," of archetypal plot, we find a play that comments on "the uses of Imagination," "rulers and forms of government," "love," "marriage," "parents and children," "different classes and their relationships with one another," etc. Dowling's Midsummer Night's Dream reduces imagination to pop cultural reference and costuming, love to four kids in their underwear chasing around a forest, and, well, that's about it. Thinking is hard work, and Dowling seems to worry that if the audience feels it has to think, it might not come back next time. This Midsummer is so full of sound and comedic fury, it's hard to get a thought in edgewise. Thinking back, over the tragedies even, few Dowling Shakespeare productions have asked me to think. Instead they ask us to simply sit back and enjoy. Which brings us to:

Dowling Rule #3: No one structures a comic moment in Shakespeare better than Joe Dowling

I have often found the rude mechanicals of Midsummer Night's Dream tedious. Dowling's are hilarious. And just as his Act 5 tour-de-force in Merchant of Venice stole the show last year, the Pyramus and Thisby portion of this Midsummer is unforgettable. For one, the laborers are a parody of both Minnesotans and bad community theater, enhanced by some fantastic character acting by the likes of Stephen Pelinski (Bottom), Randy Reyes (Francis Flute), and Sally Wingert (Robin Starveling). Wingert's character, Starveling, is the company's stage manager, has a thing for the company's director Peter Quince (Jim Lichtscheidel), and plays moon in the Pyramus thing. So, amid some undercurrent of company tensions (think Michael Frayn's Noises Off), on she comes with her lantern and her (stuffed) dog on a stiff leash, a stuffed dog that is subsequently stomped on and flattened by another cast member. The actors had to wait a significant time before the audience stopped laughing.

But Reyes's Flute rocked. Depressed at having to play the girl, again, he sulks through rehearsals, tries to hide in a sleeping bag, and generally avoids any real contribution to the company's work. Then, in a beautiful bait and switch, Dowling and Reyes's Flute/Thisby takes over "Pyramus and Thisby," moving from reticent foot-dragger to cross-dressing ham in the blink of an eye. He goes through three costume changes, each more outrageous (including the Frederick's of Hollywood mainstay, the French Maid) than the last. But think about that for a moment; when have you ever seen a production in which the Thisby dominates the "Pyramus and Thisby" piece? Probably never. And it works here because we've moved into the realm of seeming ad-lib and farce, more circus than Shakespeare. At this point, no complaints are allowed. The audience is entertained. They've gotten their money's worth. Purists, like me, can lump it.

Because that's entertainment! And Dowling rules.

Logged by Randall

Midsummer Night's Dream - Helena

Patient friends,

When I argued for Hippolyta as the character who “spoke” to me, I selected Helena and Puck as my second and third choices. I’m not sure that any of us have quite addressed Ernst’s original idea of personally connecting with A Midsummer Night’s Dream characters, but I focused on Hippolyta as the most haunting, a nearly silent commentator on attitudes and action. Meanwhile, I cited Puck because I, Gilbert Powell Findlay, once won the part through open audition in competition with Richard (“Thornbirds”) Chamberlain (I didn’t mention that the director was so discouraged by this that she cancelled the production and substituted a Noel Coward play), and I cited Helena because I remember a wonderful B. Iden Payne production at Ashland in which the tall, blond Helena lisped. Well, I admit that is pretty glib.

However, I would still make cases for Helena and Puck. Writing in Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster divides characters into flat and round. Flat characters are called “humorous” in the 17th century, and Ben Jonson’s plays are categorized as Comedy of Humours. In their purest form, flat characters are constructed around a single idea or quality. Really flat character can be expressed in one sentence; they say or do their characteristic thing each time they appear. Comedy is susceptible to “flat” characters, whose characteristic illustrates some folly, foible or self-deception, easily recognized by the audience’s emotional eye. (Forster, Aspects 67-8) though Shakespeare was probably incapable of writing such a limited character. Well, Dogberry, Holofernes, Leontes or maybe Paroles. In Midsummer Night's Dream, maybe Demetrius and Bottom, despite Bottom’s bottomless dream appear, do their predictable turn, and exit unchanged, as one expects of flat characters.

Helena certainly enters as a stock character: a maiden obsessively in love with a young man who scorns her. She “dotes, devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,” the heartsick cast-off mistress of Demetrius, “this spotted and inconstant man.” There is testimony that she has more than a schoolgirl crush: “Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head,/ Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,/ And won her soul;” (I.i,106-110), though “made love” is certainly less carnal than our current usage. Thus, she is set up to be “flat,” the fourth factor in the Hermia/ Lysander/ Demetrius triangle, a object of pity or derision. It is rather sad that Shakespeare’s culture and ours are tempted to find such a vulnerable young woman, emotionally obsessed, yet unrequited, an easy target for comic derision—there but for the grace of God…?

Her school friend, the bold and rebellious Hermia, confides in her about plans to elope with Lysander in order to escape Athens’s draconian law of death or cloistered imprisonment if she rejects her father’s demand that she marry Demetrius, and predictably, though imprudently, the emotionally addled Helena tries to sow chaos by ratting to Demetrius, so that he might know of Hermia’s “betrayal” and return to the lovelorn Helena. This doesn’t work, of course, as Demetrius pursues the lovers into the wood, followed by the now-distraught Helena, upon whom Demetrius heaps abuse: “I love thee not; therefore pursue me not…. Hence get thee gone, and follow me no more.” Helena is true to her obsession: “You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,/ But yet you draw not iron, for my heart/ Is true as steel.” (II.i.188, 194, 195-97) But this devotion goes beyond the silly weakness of a self-pitying young woman:

“I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love
(And yet a place of high respect with me)
Than to be used as you use your dog?” (II.i.203-210)

Helena proposes, notes Hugh Richmond, an Ovidian transformation, equating a pathological state of mind with subhuman forms of existence (not unlike Bottom transformed into an ass). Helena so accepts her “flat’ characteristics, this extension is intolerable, absolutely perverse in her impulse to debase herself. Helena is beyond smitten; she proposes sadomasochism. Demetrius answers in kind (or “unkind”)”:

“For I am sick when I do look on you…
You do impeach your modesty too much,
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not;
To trust the opportunity of night,
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity….
If you follow me, do not believe
But I shall do thee mischief in the wood.”
(II.i.212; 214-219;236-237)

Shakespeare again extends comedy to an edge fraught with danger. The potential “reward” for Helena’s emotional folly is rape. What fools these mortals be, indeed. And that seems farther than a comic flat character can be allowed to go.

But all four lovers have penetrated into the green wood, into Nature, into the fairy world, and all are soon caught up in Oberon and Puck’s love-in-idleness magic potion as they sleep [a little voice in me wants to offer an aside that this is less magic and more adolescent shallowness of affection, but I’ll get on with what I’m doing, for now.] On waking, first Lysander, then Demetrius finds his passion turned toward Helena, and they make extravagant love to her: “O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!/ To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?” [oh, for a rhyme!] or “Helena…whom I do love, and will do till my death.”

But here is the moment I find Helena transcends “flat” comic business. Despite suddenly having the two most eligible bachelors in hot pursuit, her common sense tells her that this can’t be sincere, and thus it must be a conspiracy to mock her own vulnerability to love [do you remember a despicable Neil La Bute film, In the Company of Men, in which two businessmen, in misogynistic vengeance, decide to seduce and destroy a lonely deaf secretary?]. Reasonably, she blames Hermia for conspiring in this plot, and she makes a touching appeal in the name of friendship and even female solidarity—“sisters’ vows.” This confrontation devolves into a delicious cat fight—“though she be but little, she is fierce,” yet Helena is much more rational, more deeply feeling, than one might expect of an unrequited lovesick maiden. Thus, after undergoing this painful recognition of herself disconnected from the “passions” expressed by the interchangeable Athenian young men, she achieves self-awareness at last.

At the “nuptial hour,” she is rewarded with Demetrius after all (though I believe she deserves better), and it is interesting that Demetrius is the only Athenian who is left “juiced” by Puck’s potion (I am indebted to my ex-student Karley Stoltz for this verb). My take on that is Demetrius is too self-centered to know his own heart, and so nature conspires to let him do the right thing. Thus, Helena grows, asserts, and acquiesces to assure a harmonious world. Helena, in growing from love-sick folly, through reasoned clear-sightedness, has transcended her definition of love itself:

“Love can transpose to form and dignity,
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind,
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste." (I.i.233-236)

And so, soon, to Puck.

Best,
Gilbert

RE3: Midsummer Night's Dream - A Puck By Any Other Name

Wow, Wikipedia!

So, because my dad was here for the last week, I was all, like, check out how smart I am with my question about Puck, and my digital version of Johnson's dictionary, and my online facsimilies of Shakespeare's Quartos and Folios, and my ancient Shakespeare Classics edition of Sources and Analogues of 'Midsummer Night's Dream' edited by Frank Sidgwick, and my cross-checking and attempted dating. Normally, I would have started with Wikipedia; oh, what a tangled web we compose, when we practice to bulldoze … others with our intelligence.

My students are nervous about using the online encyclopedia. So many teachers tell them that it is fallible and untrustworthy (like Encyclopedia Britannica didn't have errors?) and that they can't cite it in their papers so it's better not to use it. I take the opposite tack; it's a reasonable starting point from which one can go on to look at primary sources and corroborate Wikipedia information.

One of the questions I ask them is: how many of you use Wikipedia more than once a week? About 75% of the hands tend to go up. That's a lot of encyclopedia usage. I wonder if as many hands would have risen if a teacher asked the same question 25 years ago, about bound encyclopedias? Occasional errors in Wikipedia aside, I think we are raising a very informed generation. I'll try to get with the program.

Oh, and I love the word "wanderwort," John. Wikipedia has an entry on that, too.

Randall

RE2: Midsummer Night's Dream - A Puck By Any Other Name

OK, if we're being lazy, I'm going to comment on a part of the Wikipassage just based on my ambient knowledge of linguistic history. The line I am going to critique follows:

"A logical inference would surmise that the Proto-Indo-European origin for both is earlier than the linguistic split."

A couple problems with this: Both branches, Germanic and Celtic, went through significant linguistic changes developing from Proto-Indo-European. A *p- in that distant reconstructed language would have developed into an f- in Germanice (think of "father" versus words like "paternal"), and PIE *p disappeared altogether from insular Celtic(the Irish word for father is "aithir").

So "puck" looks like a "wanderwort," a word that has made its way into a number of languages in NW Europe, but probably later than say 500 BC, when many of these changes were taking place. Or, as the article cryptically suggests, the word was closely associated with place names, which tend not to change in the same way as other items of vocabulary.

Perhaps the word itself is puck-like, leading us down forest paths only to disappear without trace, leaving us bewitched and bewildered?

John

RE: Midsummer Night's Dream - A Puck By Any Other Name

Well, being lazy, I start off with Wikipedia.

Puck (Mythology)
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Puck is often thought of as a mischievous nature spirit. However Puck is also a generalised personification of land spirits. Whilst being an aspect of Robin Goodfellow, he is also 'hob' and Will-o-the-Wisp. Puck is known in some lands and regions by other names and titles such as the Irish animal spirit. As such, he often takes the form of a black dog, known as the 'Pooka', in French 'Pouque', or in Welsh, 'Pwca' or 'Bwca'. This family of words is arguably the root of the term 'Pixies' (in Cornwall, 'Piskies').[1] There are other theories for the origin of theword 'Puck' (See below).

Puck is in some traditions, a land fairy.

The pagan trickster was reimagined in Old English puca (Christianized as "devil") as a kind of half-tamed woodland sprite, leading folk astray with echoes and lights in nighttime woodlands (like the German and Dutch "Weisse Frauen" and "Witte Wieven" and the French Dames Blanches - all "White Ladie"), or coming into the farmstead and souring milk in the churn.

Significantly for such a place-spirit or genius, the Old English word occurs mainly in place names. Some believe this to suggests that the Puca was older in the landscape of Britain than the language itself.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of the name Puck is "unsettled", and it is not even clear whether its origin is Germanic (cf. Old Norse puki, Old Swedish puke, Icelandic puki, Frisian Puk) or Celtic (Welsh pwca[2] and Irish púca). A logical inference wouldsurmise that the Proto-Indo-European origin for both is earlier than thelinguistic split.[3]

In Ireland, "puck" is said to be sometimes used for "goat." Other similar names:

> In Friesland, there is a “Puk”
> In old German, the “putz” or “butz” is a being not unlike the original English Puck.
> The “Puk” (or the Draug) in Norwegian is a water sprite, a supernatural being of evil power.
> In Icelandic a “Púki” is a little devil. “Púkinn” with the definite article suffix "-inn," "The Puck," means the Devil.

The folklore of Puck was magisterially assembled by William Bell, in two volumes that appeared in 1852[4] that have been called a "monument to nineteenth-century antiquarianism gone rampant."[5]

Since, if you "speak of the Devil" he will appear, Puck's euphemistic "disguised" name is "Robin Goodfellow" or "Hobgoblin,"[6] in which "Hob" may substitute for "Rob" or may simply refer to the "goblin of the hearth" or hob. The name Robin is Middle English in origin, deriving from Old French Robin, the pet form for the name Robert. The earliest reference to "Robin Goodfellow" cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1531. After Meyerbeer's successful opera Robert le Diable (1831), neo-medievalists and occultists began to apply the name Robin Goodfellow to the Devil, with appropriately extravagant imagery.

If you had the knack, Puck might do minor housework for you, quick fine needlework or butter-churning, which could be undone in a moment by his knavish tricks if you fell out of favor with him. "Those that Hob-goblin call you, and sweet Puck, / You do their work, and they shall have good luck" said one of William Shakespeare's fairies. Shakespeare's characterization of "shrewd and knavish" Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream may have revived flagging interest in Puck.[7]

According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898): [Robin Goodfellow is a] "drudging fiend", and merry domestic fairy, famous for mischievous pranks and practical jokes. At night-time he will sometimes do little services for the family over which he presides. The Scots call this domestic spirit a brownie; the Germans, kobold or Knecht Ruprecht. Scandinavians called it Nissë God-dreng. Puck, the jester of Fairy-court, is the same.

[End Wikipedia entry.]

1. I know something about draugs. They were troll-like creatures who sometimes were known to disguise themselves as stones, which, if you happened to take one out in your boat, would grow heavier and larger and eventually sink you. I have a picture of one someplace. But that's a bit of a way from our Puck.

2. There are other less reliable rumors, one of which refers to "pucks"as being like banshees who would attack Canadians screaming "Ha-keee!"But I've never see a "Ha-keee" puck myself. There is another rumor that an early puck founded a medieval university and named it after himself, and that, further, teams playing for that university were kept out of intercollegiate sports because of the obscenity of some of their fight songs and cheers. But that's another business.

Ernst

Midsummer Night's Dream - A Puck By Any Other Name

John says he's been thinking about Puck recently. I have a few questions about Puck that I've always found curious. Some years ago, I found a small volume in Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California called Robin Goodfellow: His Merry Pranks and Mad Jests (but I can't position the text in relation to Midsummer Night's Dream; the published Robin Goodfellow dates to 1628, but one note I found suggests the story may date back before 1600). It made me curious about why Puck has more than one name: Puck, Robin Goodfellow. In the First Folio edition, he's listed as "Robin Goodfellow" when he enters in Act 2, scene 1, and "Robin" as he speaks. A "puck," my Folger Shakespeare edition tells me, is a sort of hobgoblin. Johnson defines "puck" in his dictionary as "some sprite among the fairies, common in romances."

So what is Puck's history? Is "Puck" a proper name or just a descriptive term ("I am an honest Pucke," "Else the Pucke a lyar call" [First Folio 162]), synonymous with "hobgoblin"? John, does "puck" have an etymology? Ernst or Gil, do you have any contemporary knowledge of the character? Cindy, do your students raise the issue of Robin Goodfellow vs Puck? How do you chart the tricky, and time-consuming, waters of arcane or antiquated background information? Mike, just what is "puck" in Spanish?

And how did we, as a Shakespeare reading community, come to call the character Puck and not Robin?

Randall

Midsummer Night's Dream - Who But ...?

To absent friends,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is indeed a wonderful play. Ernst has asked which characters “speak” most clearly to us at this moment. Let me take “this moment” literally and thus choose to choose Hippolyta, though my other choices would be Helena and Puck. For Hippolyta, who has thirty-five lines, perhaps I’m just continuing my whimsical attraction to minor characters. I’ve told my students I would try out for Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet to introduce the fact of boy actors in women’s roles, but then I’d confess the real reason is there are so few lines (none) to memorize. Once I was asked by an examining committee who was the “hero” of Hamlet, and I blurted out Voltemand, imagining it was a question like “who is buried in Grant’s tomb,” then I had to give a rationale for my choice. Well, if Branagh can cast Gerard Depardieu as Renaldo…

Ah, Hippolyta, bride-to-be of Theseus. Theseus opens with

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another mood; but, O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Like to a stepdame, or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man’s revenue. (I.i.1-6)

Promising coda, no? There is the plot: “the nuptial hour,” which animates all four couples in the narrative which follows. It introduces “the moon,” which will be a major player until it is manifest by a physical appearance, resembling Starvling, during the performance of “Pyramus and Thisby.” And Theseus confesses his sexual tension, premarital desire, which animates so much of the following action. Ernst explores the speeches, rich in dark, dignified sounds and lovely drawn out metaphors. But I would like to isolate Hippolyta alone here:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities. (I.1.7-11)

Note the difference in Theseus’s simile (like to a stepdame withering out a young man’s revenue) and Hippolyta’s metaphor (days and nights personified, immersed, and the moon likened to an image of a bow drawn afresh). How no-nonsense, how material Theseus’s image is, a young man calculating the sheckles diminishing in his inheritance because his widowed mother insists on living a few more days, whereas Chipolata’s images are rich in nature, in imagination, and introduce the gap between “real” time and lovers’ time. She trumps Theseus’s “lingers” with her “steep” and “dream away.”

Theseus instructs his Master of Revels, Philostrate, to design entertainments, then explains to

Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword,
And won thy love doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling. (I.i.16-19)

Already, I suspect a predatory lover here. “I won thee doing thee injuries”—the queen of the Amazons, similar to Achilles’s Briesies, is merely a trophy won in battle. Notice there is no response, though Hippolyta remains present as the Duke turns his attention to business, Egeus’s petition that Theseus enforce the law of Athens, that daughter Hernia be put to death if she refuses to marry her father’s choice (a bit creepy in that we recently had the trial of Warren Jeffs, the high authority of the Fundamental schism of the Mormon church, for commanding the bedding of fourteen-year-old girls to his religious followers). Despite a courageous appeal by Hermia, Theseus hides behind the law:

For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself
To fit your fancies to your father’s will;
Or else the law of Athens yields you up
(Which by no means we may extenuate)
To death, or to a vow of single life. (I.i 117-121)

(Anticipate how much this immutable law will be so easily eroded by lovers’ time and the alternate universe of the imagination.) After Theseus rules, as he passes this sentence of death on young Hermia—another of those absolute grim laws which so many comedies open with, The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, for instance—he turns from the business and says “Come, my Hippolyta; what cheer, my love?” Stage this? After Theseus (“my love”?!?) has ruled Hermia merely a chattel to her father and has deemed betrothal to a man she despises, how do we see Hippolyta react? Surely the common sense Hippolyta doesn’t like this disposition of the young woman at all. Can we visualize her visible disgust? Indeed Theseus must ask “what cheer.”

Then, into the woods we go, elopement, pursuit, the night, the moon, the shadows, the faeries, delusions and illusions. At dawn, the sleeping lovers, all, except Demetrius, restored to natural affection, wake to the sound of hounds and hunting horns. Enter Theseus and Hippolyta (remember her?). Theseus tries to impress her, loosing his hounds up to the mountain top for “musical confusion/ Of hounds and echo in conjunction” but, as in the opening images, Hippolyta tops him:

I was with Hercules and Cadmus once [among the immortals],
When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
With hounds of Sparta….
… I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. (IV. i.112-114, 117-118)

Theseus blathers about the superiority of his dogs, trying to impress the Queen of the Amazons, but Hugh Richmond tells us to be skeptical of a warrior who marries his enemy and trains his hunting dogs so they are unfit for tracking. The dogs do discover the lovers, sleeping, after the mistakes of the night, and they tell their stories and, over Egeus’s insistence on that immutable Athenian law, Theseus acknowledges natural law (though he will have one more rejection of love and imagination) and heralds that “nuptial hour.” “Three and three,/ We’ll hold a feast in great solemnity./ Come, Hippolyta,” (IV.i.184-186).

I would direct Hippolyta as open-mouthed with astonishment and soon she remarks “’Tis strange, my Theseus, [what] these lovers speak of,” which provokes the Duke’s dismissal of lunatics, lovers, and poets, “of imagination all compact.” Theseus is regularly quoted out of context as a description of Shakespeare’s notions about poetry, dreams, romantic love, and other lunacies, but as my Hippolyta has demonstrated Theseus is the figure who is deficient in these qualities. Hippolyta is shrewder and less defensive than Theseus:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds tranfigur’s so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23-27)

Something has happened to the lovers, whatever their stories, a creative transformation into a higher consciousness (as opposed to downward metamorphoses we read about in Ovid).

After this, the rude mechanicals perform “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and Hippolyta, again, is judicious: “I love not to see wretchedness o’ercharged,/ And duty in his service perishing.” As the travesty unfolds, she may seem to be among the snobbish derision the aristocrats heap on the guildsmen, but, to me, the most interesting line is her “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.” Does she mean “Pyramus and Thisbe” itself and its romantic glop or the performance or possibly the jeering by Theseus and Demetrius, though that is not yet as vicious as it will soon be. But when Theseus plays critic and says “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend it,” Hippolyta again clarifies imagination: “It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.”

Theseus, who has scorned antic fables and fairy toys, lunatics, lovers, and poets, finally is himself transformed and acknowledges “’tis almost fairy time,” And so to bed, Hippolyta inevitably with him. But I have seen Hippolyta double cast with Titania, and I have judged her superior to the pompous (see I.i.19) bureaucrat Theseus, superior in reason, nature, and the imagination. If there were a sixth act, can one imagine Theseus with ass’s ears?

Notes to Ernst’s other starters:

1. (cont.) Ernst, in September, invited us to choose a character “speaking” to us at this moment in the world. I hope I haven’t merely deconstructed Hippolyta, and I hope Ernst still remembers why he nominated Theseus back then so we can rassle. If not, I may try also to account for my connection to Helena (starting with a wonderful B. Iden Payne production in which Helena had a lisp and doomed me to refer to “Dimetweus” in front of my students) and of Puck (starting with me being cast as Puck, chosen over Richard Chamberlain in open audition). But that for another time. I notice Ernst’s first character is Bottom. Tempting. Cindy—can you make an argument for why Bottom is the only mortal in the play to see the faeries. That’s you, isn’t it, or did I hear it from our friend and colleague Dick Henze?

2. Great parallel between the openings of Richard II and Midsummer Night's Dream.

4. Bottom. Henry Myers has a little piece on Romeo and Bottom

5. Fairyland. I like the way Oberon gets hooked on the richness of describing nature.

6. Double casting in production. And there is a gaudy, but unexceptional film directed by Michael Hoffman with a memorable melancholy, contemplative Kevin Kline as Bottom. Calista Flockhart’s bare breast pale in comparison to those of Judi Dench as Titania in Peter Hall’s version.

Gilbert

Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare's Blues

Dreamers,

I'm sitting in a plantation-era shack in Clarksdale, Mississippi, about a mile from the legendary crossroads where Robert Johnson is supposed to have died of strychnine poisoning in 1938. And perhaps a little further on down the road, near Dockery Plantation if you believe the legend, he sold his soul to the devil for the ability to become the greatest bluesman ever. So I am surrounded by vibrant symbols of poverty, power, poetry, and the supernatural, all elements of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Johnson's scant history suggests he was the son of itinerant field workers, an agrarian life not too far from the shepherds or cowherds depicted in pastoral (except for the nasty and brutish part that tended to come with picking cotton). Johnson, however, turned out to be something of a poet, and the 24 recordings we have from his mere five days of recording sessions in 1936 and 1937 include such lyrics as:

"You better come on
in my kitchen,
baby, it's goin' to be rainin'
outdoors.
Winter time's comin'
hit's gon' be slow;
you can't make the winter, babe,
that's dry long so." ("Come On In My Kitchen")

This last line may refer to Fate, suggesting that since the woman can't do anything about the coming winter rains, she should just hang out with him in his kitchen. Oh, the rain it raineth every day!

Johnson also concluded a song, from his final recording session, this way:

"When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my blues
and the red light was my mind
All my love's in vain" ("Love in Vain")

I'd say this would be a good song for Berowne in Love's Labor's Lost, only trains didn't exist yet and Johnson's a better poet than Berowne. My roundabout point here is that if the pastoral still existed, tragically dead Robert Johnson might be its American standard bearer, and that makes communing with his ghost, as I am this chilly moonlit night in northern Mississippi, appropriate for a discussion of pastoral in Midsummer Night's Dream.

In his opening remarks, Ernst pointed out Midsummer Night's Dream's "earmarks of a pastoral romance" and John qualified the reference, stating "the couples certainly escape the strictures of urban life to the freedom and magical, mischievous, but ultimately healing and benign, influence of the wild wood." I seem to be forever finding Shakespeare turning things on their head, but I do not see the playwright cozying up easily to this tradition; in fact I see some gentle mockery of it. But perhaps I misunderstand the genre, and you can set me straight with what I get wrong. My introduction to the pastoral came in college with John Milton's "Lycidas," a poem that reminds us of the Greek origins of the form and displays its key conventions while, if I remember, attacking church corruption. What I remember most about the form is the elevation of simple shepherds to idyllic literary geniuses. Yet in both Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, the simple country folk are the worst poets. Take Bottom's extemporaneous poesy:

"The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates;
And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish fates.
This was lofty!" (1.2.29-37)

Funny, but doggerel. (And as an interesting comparison, note that Shakespeare's jest anticipates Milton's "Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme" ("Lycidas" 10-11). I could further annotate the less-than-accomplished talents of the uncouth swains in both plays, but I don't want to belabor the point … with Orlando's tortured rhymes to Rosalind, or Quince's lumbering prologue to "Pyramis and Thisbe." Now, both these guys are outsiders, city-dwellers, not trained shepherd-poets, but I do think Shakesepare is making fun. City people commune with nature, and it turns them into fools.

This point is made again as Shakespeare takes on the convention, if I remember it right, that the simplicity of rural life makes it idyllic. Midsummer Night's Dream gives us anything but idyllic life. Four city folk enter the woods, and they are nearly driven insane. They become enamored of the wrong people, they fight with their friends, they become lost and disoriented, and even after all is set right they can't tell what reality is (Demetrius concludes: "Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream."). Even the representatives of Nature are not at peace in Nature – Titania and Oberon are at war, making each other's lives (and the lives of the poor mortals around them) very complicated indeed.

As an interesting side note, Jonathan Miller, in his 1981 BBC production of the play, really plays up an anti-pastoral take on the text. He first has the fairies persistently standing in pools of murky water, Puck consistently hauling his head out of said pools before he speaks his lines, and the lovers emphatically ending up rolling in muddy water at the ends of their various confrontations. It's a decidedly messy and humiliating set of depictions, and it's what first got me looking at and becoming skeptical about the attitude toward the pastoral in the play.

I'm not supporting it very well, but my contention here is that Shakespeare specifically mocks pastoral conventions (as I thought he was specifically mocking epic conventions in Taming of the Shrew). So what say you? What important conventions am I missing? What hommage to pastoral does the play support? Or do you agree that Shakespeare might be tweaking pastoral in that way that he seems happy to tweak all established forms as he remakes them?

Okay. Tomorrow I'm off to New Orleans, so I'll be out of touch for a few days. Look forward to your Midsummer thoughts when I get back. Or, in the words of Robert Johnson:

"When I leave this town I will bid you fare farewell.
When I leave this town I will bid you fare farewell.
And when I return again, you'll have a great long story to tell." ("From Four 'Til Late")

Randall

RE: Midsummer Night's Dream - Solemnities

Just to keep the ball that Randall has again set in motion rolling, I'm going to quickly post random responses rattling around in my brain now in no very coherent form, with plans to return with a more polished piece.

First, Ernst notes, rightly I think, that this play reveals a more mature Shakespeare. It seems to me that there is a marked qualitative shift in this play that I can't completely articulate. But this seems much more like the work that we praise as a product of the great Bard than most of the earlier works we read. Did something happen?

On a different tack, I've been thinking about Puck recently. Theseus sends him half way around the world to procure a desired flower with special properties. Now I'm no specialist in Elizabethan commercial history, but as I recall at the time, the English navy and commercial special interests were spreading around the world and regularly bringing back wonders to the English shores. Would it be too much to say that Puck partly represents a wonderment at the growing ability of people with means to obtain undreamed of exotic products from undreamed of farthest reaches of the world?

And what is our Puck today? Is it not the undying "person" with fairy-like super power to procure for us undreamed of goods from the farthest reaches, that is the corporation? While this fantastic entity can serve our desires, our modern Puck has also come to shape those desires, as well as controlling our government.

Sorry if I'm drifting into something perhaps resembling Marxist criticism here. Watching what looks like the beginning of the collapse of world capitalism this week has my mind walking down strange paths, perhaps.

I like the connection of this play to the pastoral tradition, not something I had thought of before. The couples certainly escape the strictures of urban life to the freedom and magical, mischievous, but ultimately healing and benign influence of the wild wood. Sounds like the dream that helped create the blight of suburbia across much of the land.

OK, enough random provocation for now. More later.

John

Midsummer Night's Dream - Solemnities

As bears through the long winter hibernate,
nestled in their dark caves, breathing slowly,
body temperature low, body fat
supplying life-giving warmth, sustenance,
and protection from the cold, but all the
while inanimate to the outside world;
then stir, their reduced metabolic rate
recovering, their torpor shaken off;
So we William Shakespeare Experians
shed months of listless inactivity
and amble forward to the spring of our
continued dramatic conversation.

Ernst has posed a number of challenging prompts in his post. I am intrigued by the question about pastoral romance, mostly because I don't really know much about it. So I'm thinking I'll do something on that, and I may look to you all to fill in where I don't get it.

In the meantime, I'll start here: Ernst writes of Act 1, scene 1 that Midsummer Night's Dream begins with "speeches rich in dark, dignified sounds." I agree, but ask: what is a "dark" sound? Examples? Is it the 'd's: "draws," "days," "desires," "dream"? Is it vowels? John, is there a linguistic definition of a "dark" sound?

The idea of darkness, though, got me thinking. The most epiphanic moment of Shakespeare-going I ever had came back in 1985. I saw Liviu Ciulei's production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie, the design of which was dominated by a huge, intimidating, blood-red, plastic wall. (Ciulei, a Romanian, was Artistic Director of the Guthrie from 1980 until 1985.) Before a single line of the text was spoken, the audience saw a striking African-American woman with an aggressive Grace Jones flat-top haircut and camouflage battle fatigues hauled out, in chains, to the center of the stage by two be-toga'ed white men with short swords. They threw her down, removed her chains, her clothes (I remember her wearing an olive-drab bikini), and wrapped her in white Athenian garb, before presenting her, with armed guards, to Theseus, who strode onto the stage, looked her over and said: "Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace." Solemnities, indeed!

Three things happened for me. First, what I conventionally expected to be a light, comic discourse on "seriousness and frivolity" or any of those other themes that Ernst lists became something else entirely -- a dark, at times disturbing, reflection on the power, confrontation, and sexual violence lurking below the tension between genders. Ciulei's wordless prologue reframed the play, and no line, character, or scene that followed went unaffected by it.

Second, this was my first introduction to this technique of recasting an audience's expectations through the use of an aggressive reimagination. Ciulei's was seamless, coming both from the play and outside of it at the same time. I am wondering if any of you have had similar experiences -- familiar Shakespeare texts reshaped by some thought-provoking exposition, or a particularly apt but unexpected reading of a line or speech, or a particular characterization (when we get to Twelfth Night remind me to review Mark Rylance's Olivia)?

Third, given that Ciulei is taking Theseus at his word here ("I wooed thee with my sword...") and that he is treating her as the spoils of war, listen to what happens to the lines that follow. Theseus's "fair" in the first line becomes ironic. Her "fairness" is applied, as she has been metaphorically stripped of her culture and dressed in Athenian fashion. In addition, the casting of an African-American as Amazon against whites as Athenians recycles the postcolonial dynamic behind words like "fair" – not "fair" as in beautiful, but "fair" as in light-skinned, which she is not. Instead, Hippolyta is made fair in her acquisition by Greece. Next, Theseus's comment that the moon "lingers my desires / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man's revenue," takes on a more economic tone. The simile becomes less frivolous, as the moon (time) stands between Theseus and his rightful but unconsummated property.

Hippolyta's lines are no less affected. "Four days will quickly steep themselves in night," she says. Her transition from Theseus's "days" (line 2) to "nights," from light to dark, becomes significant because of the racial tension enforced by the scene. And Hippolyta matches Theseus's moon simile with one of her own, but here it becomes war-like, as befitting her warrior status: "And then the moon, like to a silver bow / New bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities." Is this a threat?

Through all of this Hippolyta does not look pleased, which may explain Theseus's mollifying words that bring the short scene to a close: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword / And won thy love doing thee injuries, / But I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling." The male chauvinism that Ernst points to in Oberon is certainly here in Theseus (played by different actors in the Guthrie production). Triumph? How is she supposed to take that? As this scene dissolved into Egeus's interruptive complaint about Hermia and Lysander, the tone was set – power and the battle of the sexes would be presented in dark relief. And Puck's final concern – "If we shadows have offended" – became real.

I often am distressed about how little of live theater remains in my head, so many unremembered quality moments and images. It does not surprise me that film has surpassed theater in the 20th century as a dominant art form because of theater's fleeting and unretainable nature, especially in a society that consistently seeks to own experiences (thus, the cliché image of the tourist replacing true experience with picture-taking). What I love and respect about the opening five minutes of Ciulei's Midsummer Night's Dream is that they immediately became, for me, indelible.

So what am I asking that we do here? Ernst alluded to the difficulty of discussing this play because so much has been written and said about it already. I offer the memory of production, because I think we have probably all seen one, as a unique tool for processing the key moments and themes (enumerated by Ernst) of the play.

Randall