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PROOF CONTENTS Acknowledgements x Notes on the Text xi Introduction 1 Discusses the date, text and sources of the Dream and outlines the rest of the Guide. CHAPTER ONE 14 1662–1898: Labyrinth of Enchantment Considers observations by Samuel Pepys, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Malone, Charles Taylor, Ludwig Tieck, August von Schlegel, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathan Drake, William Maginn, Joseph Hunter, Hermann Ulrici, Henry Norman Hudson, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Sir Daniel Wilson, Karl Elze, Denton Jacques Snider, John Weiss, Edward Dowden, Charles Ebenezer Moyse, Julia Wedgwood, E. K. Chambers and Georg Brandes. Topics include the supernatural elements of the play, its structure and genre, its possible symbolic significance, its representation of women and its portrayals of Bottom and Theseus. CHAPTER TWO 31 1900–49: Quest for Constancy Discusses the happy and dark elements of the Dream (G. K. Chesterton); Bottom as a great comic character (J. B. Priestley); the play as a creative transformation of the masque (Enid Welsford); patterns of imagery (G. Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon); the Dream as a comedy of love (H. B. Charlton); Titania as the Indian boy’s lover (Donald C. Miller). vii 9780230_238787_01_prexii.indd vii 2/4/2010 11:23:15 AM PROOF viii CONTENTS CHAPTER THREE 46 The 1950s: Concord from Discord Explores the Dream as an affirmation of marriage (Paul N. Siegel, Paul A. Olson); the unity of the play (Peter F. Fisher); its respect for both love and imagination (John Russell Brown); its scepticism about fantasy (C. L. Barber). CHAPTER FOUR 59 The 1960s: Order and Outrage Examines gaps in awareness between characters and audience in the Dream (Bertrand Evans); the visionary aspect of Bottom’s dream (Frank Kermode); the play as a dance (G. K. Hunter); the Dream as a ‘Defense of Dramatic Poetry’ (R. W. Dent); the erotic and dark elements of the play (Jan Kott); picturization and panoramas in the Dream (David P. Young); the play’s ambivalence (Stephen Fender). CHAPTER FIVE 75 The 1970s: Tongs and Bones Looks at the Dream as exorcism (Alexander Leggatt); the play as affirmation of dream over reason (Marjorie B. Garber); the excesses of Kott’s interpretation (David Bevington); the Dream as a fantasy of aristocratic domination (Elliot Krieger). CHAPTER SIX 88 The 1980s: Shattering the Dream Considers the Dream in terms of patriarchal, heterosexist ideology (Shirley Nelson Garner); the play’s representations of women, marriage, the craftsmen and drama (David Marshall); the Dream and the pervasive cultural presence of Queen Elizabeth I (Louis Adrian Montrose); the craftsmen’s struggle to produce a class-appropriate drama (James H. Kavanagh); the craftsmen’s deference to their audience (Theodore B. Leinwand); the craftsmen and festive theory (Annabel Patterson). 9780230_238787_01_prexii.indd viii 2/4/2010 11:23:15 AM PROOF CONTENTS ix CHAPTER SEVEN 106 The 1990s: Sifting the Fragments Discusses the Dream and ‘mimetic desire’ (René Girard); anamorphosis in the play (James L. Calderwood); its uses of ‘or’ and ‘and’ in the Dream (Terence Hawkes); its joining and misjoinings (Patricia Parker); its relation to race and empire (Margot A. Hendricks); its displacement of Ovid (Jonathan Bate); its generic instability (Helen Hackett). CHAPTER EIGHT 125 The 2000s: Refiguring the Maze Explores the Dream as apotrope (turning away) of myth (A. D. Nuttall); as a ‘queer’ play (Douglas E. Green); as less ‘queer’ than The Two Noble Kinsmen (Alan Sinfield); as an affirmation of marriage and family (Thomas R. Frosch); as an example of ‘impure aesthetics’ (Hugh Grady). CHAPTER NINE 140 1935–99: Dream on Screen Richard Watts Jr., Allardyce Nicoll, Thomas Marc Parrott, Harold F. Brooks, Roger Manvell, John Collick, Kenneth Rothwell on the 1935 film; Roger Manvell, Peter Hall and Maurice Hindle on the 1969 film; Amy Roberts, David Myerscough-Jones, Susan Willis, Martin White on the 1981 film; Kenneth Rothwell, Mark Thornton Burnett on the 1996 film; Peter Donaldson on the 1999 film. Conclusion: Dream on 152 Greening the Dream; the play and the way we live now; the Dream and the ‘re-enchantment industry’. NOTES 155 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 170 SELECT FILMOGRAPHY 175 INDEX 177 9780230_238787_01_prexii.indd ix 2/4/2010 11:23:15 AM PROOF Introduction ‘Now’ is the first word of the Dream, plunging us into the present of its fictional time: its last word is ‘amends’, in which we hear ‘end’ but which also carries the sense of a plurality of possible conclusions and further aims (‘ends’) and a suggestion that there are matters which may still need to be put right, amended, in this play of shadows, even though the lovers are now abed (though not, one hopes, asleep) and have the fairies’ blessing. Between those two words – those two worlds, perhaps – we have been plunged into a dizzying series of delays, conflicts, flights, dreams, visions, absurdities and awakenings; the proliferating masks of comedy have sometimes slipped to let us glimpse the open mouths and appalled eyes of tragedy; and, at a crucial stage of the play, the human mask has mutated into the beast-head of ancient ritual. At the end, we have witnessed a bravura performance by a magician who is, like Oberon, invisible to mortals, melting into the characters, the situations, the images which his flow of words, his sleights of hand, conjure up. How can we begin to understand this? That is where criticism starts. The Dream is one of the most popular comedies of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). It is a dazzling display which seems brilliantly to render the surfaces and reach into the depths of human existence. In doing so, it also prompts a desire to understand its many meanings and how these are produced; in other words, to interpret the Dream. This Guide aims to further such understanding by exploring the key criticism which has, in the past four hundred years, engaged in the process of Dream interpretation. This Introduction pre- pares us for our expedition by considering the date, texts and sources of the play and by mapping the critical journey ahead. DATE The Dream seems to have been written sometime in the mid-1590s. The clergyman Francis Meres (1565–1647) mentions it in his commonplace book Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (1598), so it had already been performed by then, though it would not be published until 1600. It has been suggested that it could not have been written earlier than 1594 because the craftsmen’s anxieties about a lion frightening the ladies and the Duchess in the audience (1.2.66–78) relate to a report on the 1 9780230_238787_02_intro.indd 1 2/4/2010 11:24:56 AM PROOF 2 SHAKESPEARE: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM baptismal feast of Prince Henry (1594–1612) on 30 August 1594 at which a chariot was drawn in by a Moor rather than a lion because of a concern that a lion’s ‘presence might have brought some fear to the nearest’ or that the lights and torches might have agitated the lion and made him dangerous.1 But there is no conclusive evidence for a con- nection between this incident and the Dream. In terms of its stylistic similarity to other Shakespeare plays, the Dream has often been placed in the period 1595–6, though the 1988 Oxford Complete Works goes for a slightly earlier date, 1594 or 1595.2 There has been particular interest in whether the Dream was written before or after Romeo and Juliet, since elements of the Dream, especially the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ sequence, parallel aspects of Romeo and Juliet; but no secure sequential relationship between the two plays has been established. Attempts to date the Dream more precisely have often become involved with the occasion thesis – the idea that the Dream was written and first performed in order to celebrate the occasion of an aristocratic wedding. There is no evidence whatsoever for this, apart from debatable inferences from the text of the play itself. This has not stopped some editors, scholars and critics from assuming it as virtually a fact; for example, John Dover Wilson (1881–1969), in the 1924 Cambridge edition of the Dream, states that ‘the play must have been written for some courtly marriage’ (Dover Wilson’s italics),3 though he acknowledges the impossibility of definitely establishing whose marriage it was, and Harold F. Brooks declares in his 1979 Arden edition: ‘That [the Dream] was designed to grace a wedding is a presumption as strong as it can be in default of the direct evidence that would make it certain.’4 On the other hand, Stanley Wells in the 1967 New Penguin Shakespeare dis- misses the occasion thesis and contends that the Dream was ‘always intended for the public theatres’.5 The debate continues: according to the Penguin 2005 edition of the play, David Wiles’s Shakespeare’s Almanac: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marriage, and the Elizabethan Calendar (1993) offers ‘the fullest exposition’ of the occasion theory while Gary J. Williams’s Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre (1997) provides ‘its fullest refutation’.6 It seems reasonable to say, however, that the weight of scholarly and critical opinion in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century has swung against the occasion thesis, not only because of the lack of any evidence for it, but also because of changes in the critical interpretations of the play traced in this Guide, especially in the shape of increased scepticism about the attitudes to marriage which it supposedly affirms. As David Marshall remarks, in an essay we shall discuss in Chapter 6, reading the Dream in this kind of sceptical perspective ‘makes it difficult to imagine that even with its comic scenes the play would have made a very suitable wedding present’.7 99780230_238787_02_intro.indd780230_238787_02_intro.indd 2 22/4/2010/4/2010 111:24:561:24:56 AAMM PROOF INTRODUCTION 3 TEXT Thomas Fisher published the first Quarto (known as Q1) of the Dream in 1600.

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