ARTicles vol. 2 i.3a: Shakespeare’s Enduring Dream

What kind of dream did William Shakespeare create? A romp? A nightmare? An erotic fantasy? In the four hundred years since the first production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play has been staged in wildly varying shades of dark and light. The major bone of contention in Dream is sex. Some critics argue that the play moves from the chaos of lust to the social order of marriage. Others argue that it challenges social hierarchies and explores the complexity of gender and desire. Whatever the case, Shakespeare’s dialogue contains unsettling views of relationships. The erotic elements of the Dream, however, were virtually unexplored onstage until the last thirty years. We have few clues to tell us exactly how Elizabethan productions interpreted the sexual negotiations of Dream or how audiences received these interactions. However, the standard practice of filling women’s roles with boys added an extra layer of artifice that downplayed the characters’ sexuality. In any event, after zealous Puritans shut down English theatres in 1642, the subject matter alone of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was enough to keep it off the stage in its original form for almost two hundred years. Several bowdlerized adaptations appeared during the eighteenth century. At Drury Lane in the mid-1700s, David Garrick made the play morally palatable by setting the text to popular music of the time and by cutting every line that might bring a blush to a virginal English cheek. The original text of the Dream reemerged in 1840 with Madame Vestris’ production at Covent Garden. Vestris herself played Oberon, wearing a revealing dress that bared her shoulders, arms and legs. Despite Vestris’ clear understanding of her sexual capital, her production was still absolutely safe. While Vestris used more of Shakespeare’s text than any other production in two centuries, her cutting was still prompted by propriety. Vestris’ whitewashed text became the prototype for a typically Romantic production of the Dream. Sexual suggestions were expurgated. These Romantic traditions continued through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Spectacular pictorial scenery and Felix Mendelssohn’s lush musical score dominated productions, creating a context in which it was nearly impossible to express eroticism. Harley Granville-Barker’s 1914 production of the Dream, with its symbolist scenery, orientalized fairies, and English folk songs, nudged the play toward modernism. Barker’s production broke from the scenic and musical traditions that had encrusted the play. Despite the fact that he restored almost all of Shakespeare’s text, however, the development of the characters’ relationships became secondary to visual splendor. Exploration of sexuality was not on Barker’s agenda. The first sparks of erotic energy occurred in Max Reinhardt’s 1934 Oxford production, one of the dozen versions of the Dream he directed over thirty years. Reinhardt staged a ballet to Mendelssohn’s nocturne in which a physically imposing man in black carried off the First Fairy into the dark forest. While the scene lasted only a few moments, it hinted at sexual themes and imagery. Few directors delved further into these ideas, however, until after World War II. After Peter Hall’s 1959 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which flirted with the irrational sexual desire among both fairies and lovers, the tides turned. The sexual revolution of the early 1960s, in conjunction with newly influential critical readings of the play, forced the eroticism of the text out of the depths of the forest and onto center stage. In The Theatre and its Double, Antonin Artaud condemned Western theatre for reproducing lifeless productions of masterpieces, particularly Shakespeare. He called on the theatre to free itself from reverence for safety by embracing the dark side of human nature. Similarly, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Jan Kott devoted a chapter to a disturbing interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In “Titania and the Ass’s Head,” Kott asserts that the main theme uniting the three separate story lines of the Dream is brutal eroticism. He describes the partner switching and confusion among the lovers as sexually driven experimentation and Titania’s coupling with Bottom as a cruel fantasy of sexual prowess. Shakespeare Our Contemporary came out in 1964, and its influence was appearing onstage by the late 1960s. In John Hancock’s production in 1967, the design was heavily influenced by pop art, including a Wonder Woman costume for Titania and a caged, leopard-skinned Hippolyta. Sexual perversion figured prominently in the production: Demetrius had a flashing electric codpiece to demonstrate his passions, and a six-foot-four-inch man played Helena in drag, which cast the lovers’ relationships in a new light. Peter Brook set his seminal 1970 production in a giant white box. In Brook’s theatrical circus, the sexuality of the characters was not only explored, but also celebrated. Oberon and Titania groped each other freely, and Titania and Bottom’s union became a festive party, scored, ironically, with Mendelssohn’s famous “Wedding March.” During the last thirty years, the sexual nature of the Dream has been foregrounded. Notable productions include Mark Lamos’ 1988 production at the Hartford Stage Company, featuring scantily dressed, leather-harnessed flying fairies, and Robert Lepage’s 1992 production with a giant mud pit utilized for erotic wrestling among the lovers. The representation of sexuality within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while extraordinarily varied throughout the years, has always presented a challenge to each production. Shakespeare’s text, with its ambiguous exploration of love, lends itself to many interpretations, but productions that explore both the moonlight and shadow of the forest offer the richest understanding of the Dream. Emily Otto is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.