PRODUCTION CONTEXT- MID SUMMER NIGHTS DREAM
The Elizabethan popular audience had a natural love of clowning, slapstick and the mayhem
that was released when the rules of society were relaxed, broken or subverted. A play set on
Midsummer Night and structured as a dream was going to be fun and full of the resonances
associated with a festal day that had age old overtones of love, marriage, misrule and jolllity.
Midsummer was traditionally celebrated with dancing and feasting and always involved secret
assignations in the woods later when it was dark. Indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play
with a bit of everything – magic, moonlight, mayhem, love’s mad entanglements, fairies,
mistakes, mechanicals as mummers, all set in the spookiness of the woods at midnight - and all
of it provoking laughter.
The business of comedy was more important and serious than simply raising a laugh. It has
always served a much graver purpose than mere humorous entertainment, but has also been
regarded by religious, moral and cultural guardians as a lesser form than tragedy and a morally
questionable one. In a world where society was strictly stratified even the arts had hierarchies.
In painting devotional studies (Annunciations, Nativities, Crucifixions) were thought to be the
highest endeavour, and historical subjects were thought superior to landscape and portraiture.
Grotesque topics of common life (card-playing, village dances, tavern scenes) were thought of
as very low art. In literature the epic poem, tragic drama, religious poetry, history plays, even
lyrics and love verses were thought of as higher forms than mere comedy. Though the plays of
Terence and Plautus were studied, translated and performed by schoolboys and
undergraduates, and the satires of Juvenal and Horace were similarly on educational syllabuses,
comedy was regarded with suspicion. It was thought to be a too vulgar form, too associated
with the bourgeoisie and the commoners, too concerned with trickery, knavery and sex.
It would not be amiss to re-title the play A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare, for, though matters
in Athens are complicated and tense enough, the escape to the woods releases all manner of
dark things and makes the entanglements even worse. The piece can be acted in two ways. The
traditional approach has been to display it as a fast-moving, action-packed, farcical romp, a
carnival of silliness; a light-hearted celebration of human foolishness, full of mistakes and
misperceptions, nonsense and laughter, but turning out all right in the end, and not to be taken
seriously as it is only a playful entertainment. It may also be seen as a play where
oppressiveness, manipulation, misplaced love, hatred and menace dominate and the
inconstancy of the human heart is disturbingly exposed. Hermia escapes from Egeus’ dictatorial
threats only to find herself (and her complacent assumption of happiness to come in exile) at
the mercy of forces she cannot control and does not understand. What happens in the woods is
unsettling and represents the more frightening fears that lurk in the psyche and emerge in
dreams. It is the woods that provoke the dream/nightmare element.
