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).

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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).

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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

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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 per- formed 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

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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 edi- tion 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 occa- sion 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

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TEXT

Thomas Fisher published the first Quarto (known as Q1) of the Dream in 1600. The play was entered in the Stationers’ Register in the stand- ard way, as a means of securing to Fisher the sole right of printing or selling the book. The title page stated that the play had been ‘sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his Servants’ (i.e. the company of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later called the King’s Men, of which Shakespeare was a member). The phrase ‘sundry times publicly acted’ attests that the Dream had now entered the domain of the public theatre, even if the unproven asser- tion that it had originally been performed at an aristocratic wedding were true. The text of the Dream was printed by Richard Bradock and the type appears to have been set from ‘foul’ papers – that is, from Shakespeare’s draft handwritten manuscript, as distinct from the ‘fair’ copy, the version transcribed after final correction,8 which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men would have retained. The title page of the second Quarto (known as Q2) bears the date ‘1600’ and gives the printer’s name as James Roberts, but was in fact printed for William Jaggard (c. 1568–1623) in 1619. It repeated many of Q1’s errors and perpetrated a small number of its own, but restored some mislined passages. The Dream next featured in the First Folio collection of Shakespeare’s works (known as F1), compiled mainly by John Heminges (died 1630) and Henry Condell (died 1627), who, like Shakespeare, were members of the King’s Men (the company formerly called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men). Q2 seems to have served as the main copy text for F1, which repeats many of Q2’s amendments and errors. But it appears that Q2 was checked sporadically against another source, probably a playhouse prompt book, and that changes were made, mostly with regard to stage directions. Two of these changes are especially noteworthy: F1 assigns to Egeus all but one of the speeches which Q1 and Q2 give to Philostrate in Act 5; and F1 has Lysander, rather than Philostrate, read out the titles of the proposed evening entertainment, with Theseus providing responses. These alterations have, potentially, considerable interpre- tative significance. For example, if Egeus is absent from the evening festivities, exiting from the play for ever after Theseus has overborne his will and refused Egeus’s plea to apply the law to Lysander (4.1.178), it could emphasize his exclusion from the Dream’s reconciliatory set- tlements or indicate his tacit acceptance of them; if he is present at those festivities as the Master of the Revels, this could emphasize his inclusion or sharpen his humiliation (since, as Peter Holland points out, the Duke overrules Egeus once more when he rejects his strongly urged advice not to watch ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’). Lysander’s recitation

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of the titles of the offered entertainments might indicate an usurpation of Egeus’s prerogative or a tacit acceptance on Egeus’s part of his new son-in-law.9 The Oxford Complete Works, the 1994 Oxford edition of the Dream and the 2007 Macmillan RSC Shakespeare all follow F1 in assigning Philostrate’s lines to Egeus and the recitations of the titles of the evening entertainments to Lysander and it seems likely that further critical work will emerge in relation to these textual emphases.

SOURCES

The concept of ‘sources’ is a questionable one in regard to Shakespeare. It suggests that Shakespeare sat down to write his plays with a set of texts in front of him from which he drew plots, incidents, characters and ideas. But as R. A. Foakes points out in his edition of the Dream:

᭿ It is important to ask continually whether Shakespeare needed to go to a source for what was common property, or could have been on tap as flowing from an unconscious or subconscious assimilation of what was, so to speak, in the air, the common materials of the culture and discourse of his age.10 ᮀ

In other words, Shakespeare might never have actually read the texts which scholars propose as sources; he may have picked up the nec- essary material through conversation, or through an intuition finely attuned to the language, concepts, images and ideas which were circulating in the cultural air of his time. An alternative approach to the concept of sources (though not one which Foakes adopts) is provided by the idea of ‘intertextuality’: that a text always emerges in, and inevitably relates to, a welter of other texts and discourses, whether or not its writer has read or knows about these. An inter- textual reading can point to resemblances between Text A and Text B without positing that the author of Text A actually read Text B. But the more traditional concept of ‘sources’, provided that its limits are recognized, is likely to remain important to Shakespearean scholarship and criticism. In contrast to most Shakespeare plays, however, the Dream does not have one major source. Moreover, there are significant parts of the play for which no convincing source has been found. For example, the plot of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ comes from Ovid (see below), but the idea of the craftsmen putting on a play seems to be original with Shakespeare. There are, however, a range of texts which have greater or lesser simi- larities to aspects of the Dream, and those most relevant to the criticism explored in this Guide are outlined below.

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The Knight’s Tale

The Knight’s Tale, from The Canterbury Tales by the great medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343/4–1400), begins by describing a ‘Duke’ called Theseus (line 2) – a title not given to him in any other known text – who ‘conquered all the reigne of Feminy’ and ‘wedded the queene Ipolita’ (lines 8, 10). The tale also describes two young Theban princes, Palamon and Arcite, who fall for the same woman (Emelye, Hippolyta’s sister) and finally engage in a combat which Theseus and Hippolyta, out hunting in May, interrupt; Theseus sentences them to death but relents after pleas from Hippolyta and Emelye. Eventually, after Venus and Saturn intervene, Palamon mar- ries Emelye. This story was also employed by Shakespeare and John Fletcher (1579–1625) in The Two Noble Kinsmen (first published 1634) (see chapter 8 of this Guide).

North’s Plutarch

A second key source is the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North (?1535–?1601) of a French translation by Jacques Amyot (1513– 93) of the Lives of real-life and mythical soldiers and statesmen by the ancient Greek essayist and biographer Plutarch (46–126 AD). Plutarch, and North’s translation, highlight differing accounts of Theseus’s acti- vities and describe, among other things, the battle of Theseus with the Amazons – he ‘slew a great number of them’11 – and his marriage to Hippolyta (also known as Antiopa). North also contains a range of sto- ries about Theseus’s other, often dubious, sexual and marital exploits, for instance with Perigouna, the daughter of Sinnis, who ‘lay with him’ and whom he afterwards married off to Deioneus;12 with Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who gave Theseus the ball of thread to find his way back through the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur but whom he abandoned for Aegles, the daughter of Panopaeus; and Phaedra, whom he married after the death of Hippolyta (or Antiopa) and who fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and Hippolyta. There are ‘many other reports touching the marriages of Theseus, whose beginnings had no great good honest ground, neither fell out their ends very fortunate’.13 Some of these exploits are expli- citly mentioned in the Dream when Oberon refers to Titania’s ‘love for Theseus’ and asks ‘Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night / From Perigouna whom he ravished, / And made him with fair Aegles break his faith, / With Ariadne and Antiopa?’ (2.1.76, 77–80). (Here ‘Antiopa’, an alternative name for Hippolyta in Plutarch, seems to be treated as a separate figure.). It is interesting to ask how far these

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aspects of the Theseus myth – both those mentioned in the play itself and those in Plutarch and in North’s translation – should enter into the interpretation of the Dream. Later twentieth- and early twenty- first-century criticism, often, but not necessarily, of a feminist kind, has increasingly felt that Theseus’s record as a sexual predator – and the shadow of the tragedy of Phaedra – must be admitted in evidence and that it does affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the significance of the play (see, for example, the discussion of A. D. Nuttall (1937–2007) in Chapter 8 of this Guide).

Huon of Bordeaux

A third significant source is the translation of about 1534, by John Bourchier, second Baron Berners (?1469–1533) of Huon of Bordeaux, a thirteenth-century chanson de geste (song of deeds). Huon unknow- ingly kills the son of Charlemagne but is reprieved from death and set a series of seemingly impossible tasks, which he successfully carries out with the aid of a king of the fairies called Oberon, only three feet tall but with the face of an angel, who dwells in a wood. The Oberon of Huon of Bordeaux also has strong associations with the Orient, which is significant for the link the Dream establishes between Oberon and India and for the postcolonial reading of the Dream by Margo Hendricks, considered in Chapter 7 of this Guide.

The Golden Ass

A fourth important source is The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (born c. 123 AD), the only surviving complete novel in Latin. It was trans- lated into English in 1598 by William Adlington (active 1556), with a subtitle which ran ‘containing the metamorphosis of Lucius Apuleius, interlaced with sundry pleasant and delectable tales, with an excellent narration of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche’.14 The Golden Ass is an extremely entertaining and sometimes bawdy account of the adven- tures of a man who, in contrast to Bottom in the Dream, has his whole body, not just his head, transformed into that of an ass, who encounters many hardships and perils (including the threat of castration), has a sexual encounter with a wealthy and noble matron (toned down in Adlington’s translation), and eventually enjoys a vision of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. Frank Kermode (born 1919) will relate this passage to Bottom’s dream in an essay we shall discuss in Chapter 4 of this Guide, and in Chapter 8 A. D. Nuttall will consider the encounter with the matron in Apuleuis’s novel.

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The fifth and perhaps most significant source for the Dream here is the Metamorphoses of the Latin poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC–AD 17/18), a rich poetic compendium of more than two hundred ancient legends, often about changes of shape and interchanges between gods, goddesses and mortals. The influential, if sometimes awkward, translation of the Metamorphoses into English verse by Arthur Golding (?1536–1605) appeared in 1595–7. The clearest contribution of the Metamorphoses to the Dream is the story of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the subject of the craftsmen’s play-within-a-play, which appears in Book 4, lines 55–166 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in Book 4, lines 67–201 of Golding’s trans- lation. The Metamorphoses was also the source of the name ‘Titania’, which does not appear in Golding’s translation but only in the original Latin, where ‘Titania’ and ‘Titanis’ are epithets which indicate a female descendant of a Titan and which are applied to Pyrrha (Book 1, line 395), Diana (Book 3, line 173), Latona (Book 6, lines 185, 346) and Circe (Book 12, lines 968; Book 14, lines 14, 376, 382, 438). Golding translates the epithet by the term ‘Titan’s daughter’. But it can be argued that the relationship between Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the origi- nal and in Golding’s translation, extends well beyond the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ story and the name ‘Titania’ – that metamorphosis, as topic and poetic technique, is crucial to both Ovid and the Dream (Jonathan Bate (born 1958) makes a strong case for the Dream as ‘a displaced dramatization of Ovid’ – see Chapter 7 of this Guide).

Other Sources: Scot, Seneca, St Paul

Other suggested sources for the Dream are The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) by Reginald Scot (?1538–99), a sceptical account of superstitions and marvels, which mentions the tales about ‘Robin Goodfellow’, whose activities include ‘sweeping the house at midnight’, like Robin Goodfellow/Puck ‘sweep[ing] the dust behind the door’ after mid- night in the Dream (5.1.20). Scot also discusses how ‘[t]o set a horse’s or an ass’s head on a man’s neck and shoulders’. Harold F. Brooks has also proposed links between the Dream and passages from the trag- edies Oedipus, Medea and Hippolytus by the ancient Roman playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65); for example, Brooks compares the account of the plague of Thebes in Seneca’s Oedipus with Titania’s account of the disorder in the elements caused by her quarrel with Oberon. There is also one significant Biblical source for a key passage in the Dream: Bottom’s account of his dream, where the passage ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not

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able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’ (4.1.108–11) echoes, and scrambles, a passage in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 2, verse 9: ‘the eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him’ (this is the translation in the Bishop’s Bible of 1568). This echo has aroused consid- erable scholarly and critical comment – see Frank Kermode in Chapter 4 and Annabel Patterson in Chapter 6 of this Guide. Any consideration of sources for the Dream inevitably involves interpretation, of Shakespeare’s text and of the proposed source texts, and of those significant parts of the play which seem to have no source. Such interpretation is likely, if pursued at any depth, to turn into criti- cism, into explorations of significance and quality. It is those critical explorations of significance and quality which are the main subject of this Guide and it is now time for an overview of the criticism which we shall consider in the chapters to come.

CRITICISM

Chapter 1 of this Guide explores Dream criticism between 1662 and 1898. There is a sense in which, as René Girard (born 1923) says, the ‘first criti- cal debate’ about the Dream ‘took place during the first performance’, in the exchange on the significance and quality of the ‘story of the night’ between Theseus and Hippolyta at the start of Act 5 (5.1.1–27). But there is no doubt that the diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), among his other claims to fame, has written himself into the history of Dream criti- cism, indeed into its founding moment, with his casual dismissal of the play in a 1662 diary entry. Our first chapter opens with Pepys’s remarks and then follows the emergence, from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, of a distinctive repertoire of topics in Dream criticism: these include the function and value of its supernatural elements, its representation of women, its portrayal of Theseus, the character and sig- nificance of Bottom, the play’s treatment of love, its unity and harmony and its genre (is it, for example, a parody, an allegory, or a masque?). After citing Pepys, Chapter 1 considers observations by the poet and dramatist John Dryden (1631–1700) and Samuel Johnson (1709–84), both of whom try to justify the supernatural aspects of the play. It goes on to discuss Elizabeth Griffith (?1727–93), who both affirms the duty of a child to obey a parent and defends Hermia’s defiance of that duty. The chapter then discusses Edmund Malone (1741–1812), who finds that Theseus and Hippolyta fail to live up to their exalted legendary status; and Charles Taylor (1756–1823), who switches the focus to Bottom, whom he sees as a ‘coxcomb’.

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Chapter 1 goes on to trace the development of Romantic criticism of the Dream. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the German writer Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) provided a Romantic appreciation of Shakespeare, which was taken up in the early nineteenth century by August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845), who affirms the unity of the Dream. William Hazlitt (1778–1830) elevates the figure of Bottom and lauds Shakespeare’s poetic power, while Nathan Drake (1766–1836) stresses the emotional unity of the play and anticipates some feminist themes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) offers a very brief but intriguing characterization of the mixed genre of the Dream. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Maginn (1793–1842) takes up the topic of Bottom, which is pursued by Charles Knight (1791–1873), who also praises the harmony of the whole play. Joseph Hunter (1783–1861) considers the implications of the idea of the play as a ‘dream’ and Hermann Ulrici (1806–84) offers a strikingly origi- nal account of its unity in terms of interacting parodies. Both Henry Norman Hudson (1814–86) and Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–71) are concerned with the unruliness and capriciousness of the Dream, and Gervinus goes on to see it as an allegorical comparison of sensuous love and dreaming. In the later nineteenth century, Sir Daniel Wilson (1816–92) focuses on Bottom and Karl Elze (1821–89) considers the Dream as a combina- tion of masque and antimasque. Denton Jacques Snider (1841–1925) offers an interpretation of the play in terms derived from the German philo-sopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), while John Weiss (1818–79) comes down to earth again with Bottom, whom he sees as an example of a self-made man. Edward Dowden (1843–1913) elevates Theseus to a central role in the Dream and Charles Ebenezer Moyse (1852–1924) interprets the play as a symbolic work in which the wood in which the lovers get lost is the world. Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913) considers the relationship between Titania and the mother of the Indian boy, and the significance of the Indian boy him- self. E. K. Chambers (1866–1954) regards the Dream as a symbolical portrayal of youthful love and Georg Brandes (1842–1927) draws attention to the play’s concern with erotic and unconscious elements, bringing Chapter 1 to an end Chapter 2 considers Dream critics from 1900 to 1949. The academic study of English Literature develops in the early twentieth century but initially it devotes much more attention to Shakespearean trag- edy than to comedy. The first two critics considered in this chapter, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), write from outside the academy. Chesterton sees the Dream as a mystically happy play but registers those darker elements which will be more strongly emphasized in later twentieth-century criticism; Priestley hails

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Bottom as a great comic creation. Enid Welsford (1892–1981) takes a more scholarly approach, examining the Dream as a creative transfor- mation of the masque. In the 1930s, the focus of critical activity shifts towards the academy. The study of patterns of imagery, which was so crucial to academic literary studies in the mid-twentieth century, is exemplified in relation to the Dream by G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) and Caroline Spurgeon (1886–1942). H. B. Charlton takes a different approach, regarding the play as a comedy exploring the place of love in life, while Donald C. Miller, in 1940, opens up the issue of sexuality in relation to Titania and the Indian boy. But in 1949 Thomas Marc Parrott (1866–1960) reaffirms the benign and innocent view of the Dream. Chapter 3 explores key Dream critics of the 1950s, a period of con- solidation and expansion in Anglo-American literary criticism. Paul N. Siegel sees the play as an affirmation of a certain set of ideas about marriage. Peter F. Fisher examines the way in which the different worlds of the Dream are finally brought into harmonious order. Paul A. Olson further explores the ideas about marriage which he sees the play as presenting. John Russell Brown focuses on the way in which the Dream suggests the need to respect both the subjective truth of lovers and the imaginative illusions which drama creates, while C. L. Barber argues that the play both releases fantasies and promotes scepticism about them. By the end of the 1950s, a rich and substantial body of work on the Dream had appeared which emphasized order, reason and harmony and which established the play as a highly fruitful object of study. Chapter 4 considers the Dream criticism of the 1960s which developed the interpretations of the 1950s and also began to challenge them. Bertrand Evans is concerned with the way the play exploits the gaps in awareness between the characters in the play and between the characters and the audience. Frank Kermode argues for the visionary quality of the nature of Bottom’s dream in relation to The Golden Ass and classical and Renaissance dream theory. G. K. Hunter (1920–2008) sees the Dream as a dance which highlights the variety and irrationality of love, while R. W. Dent contends that the Dream is much more sub- stantial, approximating to Shakespeare’s ‘Defense of Dramatic Poetry’. All these perspectives emerged within the boundaries of established academic criticism, but Jan Kott (1914–2001) breached those bounda- ries. His stress on the erotic and threatening aspects of the Dream aroused outrage in the corridors of academe and provoked a damage limitation exercise which continues to this day. The later 1960s, how- ever, saw two notable books devoted to the Dream emerging from aca- demic contexts. David P. Young’s Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1966) stressed the coherence of the play and offered especially interesting accounts of its use of ‘picturization’ and

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‘panoramas’; Stephen Fender’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), in Edward Arnold’s Studies in English Literature series, emphasized the play’s ambivalence. It is in Fender, more than in Kott, that one can see the beginnings of the kinds of questioning which were to emerge much more strongly in the 1980s. Chapter 5 examines the significant Dream criticism produced during a transitional decade for literary criticism, as established approaches took on a defensive aspect, while alternative approaches struggled to emerge. Alexander Leggatt’s analysis of the play in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1972) is a kind of concealed argument with Kott which con- tends that the Dream exorcises the darker forces which threaten it. In Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (1974), Marjorie B. Garber boldly reverses the view that the Dream ultimately endorses reason, and argues strongly for the play’s affirmation of the positive value of dreams, which she links to the power of metaphor and to the act of artistic creation. David Bevington engages in an open debate with Kott, acknowledging his insights but reproving his excesses. In a harbinger of the more politicized readings which would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, Elliott Krieger’s A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies (1979) offers a political reading of the Dream, suggesting that the play ultimately endorses a fantasy of aristocratic predominance. Chapter 6 looks at the key readings of the Dream which flourished during the transformation of Anglo-American literary studies in the 1980s. Shirley Nelson Garner analyses the patriarchal, heterosexist ideo- logy of the play and David Marshall raises a host of questions about its representations of women, of marriage, of the craftsmen and of the relationship between plays and audiences. Louis Adrian Montrose, in what is probably the most influential essay on the Dream in the last three decades, examines the relationship of the Dream to the pervasive cultural presence of a Virgin Queen. James H. Kavanagh interprets the craftsmen’s concerns about their projected play as an attempt to pro- duce a performance which is acceptable to their aristocratic audience. Theodore B. Leinwand also addresses this issue in the context of arti- san unrest in 1590s England, and in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989), Annabel Patterson pursues the matter further by relating it to festive theory. By the end of the 1980s, much has changed in Dream criticism, as in Anglo-American literary criticism more generally: issues of sexual politics and class politics, banished beyond the stage door in the 1950s and still largely in the wings in the 1960s and 1970s, have moved centre-stage. Chapter 7 starts by discussing two books by critics who were draw- ing together, developing and expanding material on the Dream they had published earlier: René Girard’s A Theater of Envy (1991) applies his concept of ‘mimetic rivalry’ to the play and James L. Calderwood’s

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Twayne’s New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare series, presents the especially intriguing argument that the play should be seen in terms of that form of visual distortion called ‘anamorphosis’. The chapter then goes on to consider Terence Hawkes on the significance of the words – and concepts – of ‘and’ and ‘or’ in the Dream. Patricia Parker, in Shakespeare from the Margins (1996) traces images of joining and misjoining across the play, particularly in regard to the craftsmen and the lovers, and Margo Hendricks opens up the question of the Dream’s relationship to racial and colonialist dis- courses. Jonathan Bate, in Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), explores the play’s intricate links to the work of the Latin poet and Helen Hackett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1997), in the British Council’s Writers and their Work series, synthesizes major developments in Dream criticism from the 1980s and discusses the play in terms of generic intersections and instabilities. Chapter 8 focuses on key critical essays of the early twenty-first century. A. D. Nuttall argues that the Dream performs an apotrope, a turning away, of the malign elements its mythological resonances invoke. Douglas E. Green explores the ‘queer’ moments and implica- tions of the play produced by reading it ‘against the grain’, while Alan Sinfield urges the need to distinguish clearly between a ‘with the grain’ and an ‘against the grain’ reading of the Dream and suggests its limita- tions as a ‘queer’ play by comparing it to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen. Thomas R. Frosch offers a full-blown psycho- analytical interpretation of the Dream as one which ultimately affirms marriage and procreation, and Hugh Grady takes it as an example of the ‘impure aesthetics’ which he advocates as a way of restoring an aesthetic dimension to politicized criticism. Grady’s essay brings us up to 2008, and the final chapter goes back in time to consider the criticism of five key films of the Dream which were made in the twentieth century. As this Guide, like the other Guides in the Essential Criticism series, concentrates on critics who are text- centred rather than performance-centred in order to maintain its sharpness of focus, it may seem inconsistent to include a chapter on crit- ical responses to Dream films. But there is a crucial difference between a live performance of the Dream and a film adaptation. A live perform- ance offers an irreplaceable experience of interaction between the text, the bodies, senses and voices of the actors and the bodies and senses of the audience; but when it has gone, it has gone. It may be partly reconstituted from its traces in memory, in documentation, indeed on film, but the physical and psychological encounter can never be recap- tured. We cannot bring the famous 1970 production of the Dream by Peter Brook (born 1925) into a seminar room or sitting room but we can bring the 1935 film of the play into any fixed or mobile space which

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has the appropriate equipment. With today’s digital technology, a film, like a text, is, in principle, accessible anywhere and at any time by any- body. This means that films, and the criticism which focuses on them, are more intimately involved with textual criticism than stage produc- tions can be; it is possible to show a film, a primary text, and critical texts, on adjacent screens or on the same screen; and these technologi- cal facilities are likely to be enhanced in the future. Thus the chapter on critical responses to film in this Guide is both of intrinsic interest and an acknowledgement of contemporary cultural reality. ‘Now’. That word which starts the Dream signals the start of our journey through the essential criticism of the play. It is an intellectually exciting and sometimes strange voyage which, like the Dream itself, will leave us, at the end, seeing things differently.

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INDEX

Adlington, William 6 Hamlet 33, 37 Adorno, Theodor W. 137 Oberon 101, 117 Aeneid 134 Theseus 100 aesthetics 136–9 Titania 17–18, 19, 21, 23, 36, 38, Agrippa, Cornelius 63 49, 50, 52, 53, 61, 68, 69, 75, Alagna, Robert 149 76, 83–4, 87, 91, 95, 103, 109, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 28, 117, 121, 127, 128, 133, 134, 29, 146 138, 153 alienation effect 98 as actor 15, 16, 33, 92, 95, 107, 113 All’s Well that Ends Well 38, 54 artist 34 Althusser, Louis 97 averted Minotaur 127 Amyot, Jacques 5 blockhead 21 anamorphosis 12 changeling 117 Apology for / Defence of Poetry 67 coxcomb 8, 16, 33 Apuleius, Lucius 6, 61, 62, 109, 127 Everyman 21 Arcadia 52, 53 foundation 50 Arden, Mary 110 fulcrum 103–4 Aristophanes 56 great comic creation 10 art 75, 77, 136, 137, 150 hero 24 As You Like It 38 lucky man 21, 33 Athens 48, 72, 76, 80, 85, 109, 113, natural genius 24, 33 116, 117, 133 object 86 Pyramus 133 Barber, C. L. 10, 56–8, 102 representative 21, 24, 33 Barrie, J. M. 31 romantic 18, 33, 34 Bate, Jonathan 7, 12, 106, 118–21, self-made man 9, 26 135 visual pun and emblem 103 Baum, L. Frank 146 exuberant imagination 129 Baumgarten, Alexander 137 raped by Titania 69, 84 BBC TV Shakespeare 144, 145 rich sub-consciousness 33 Bellini, Vincenzo 148, 149 Bottom, film/TV portrayals 145, 146, Berger, Harry, Jr 85 147, 148, 149–50 Bevington, David 11, 75, 80–4, 85, 89 Bottom’s dream 6, 7–8, 10, 62–3, 64, Biblical references 65, 95, 104, 128 Bathsheba 144 Bourchier, John, second Baron David 63 Berners 6, 115 Susanna 144 the Boy (in 1996 film) 145, 146–7 Bird, Thomas 100 Bradock, Richard 3 Bishop’s Bible 8 Bradshawe, Richard 100 Bloch, Ernst 136 Brandes, Georg 9, 29–30 Bottom 6, 9, 23, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 45, Bray, Alan 128 61, 64–5, 66, 70, 79, 89, 104–5 Brook, Peter 12, 88, 143 and ass’s head 15, 17–18, 18–19, Brooks, Harold F. 2, 7, 94, 141 23, 36, 41, 69, 71, 73, 92–3, Brown, John Russell 10, 53–6, 57, 58 120–1, 127, 128, 154 Bruno, Giordiano 63 177

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Buchanan, Judith 147 Devereux, Robert, second Earl of Bunnètt, F. E. 23 Essex 118 Burnett, Mark Thornton 146 dialectic of enlightenment 137 Dieterle, William 140 Calderwood, James L. 11–12, 106, Dinteville, Jean de 108 108–10 The Discovery of Witchcraft 7, 121 The Canterbury Tales 5 dissociated sensibility 46 Carroll, Lewis 28, 146 Divine Comedy 18 Caruso, Enrico 149 Donaldson, Peter 148–50 Chambers, E. K. 9, 29 Donizetti, Gaetano 148 Chapman, George 118 Dowden, Edward 9, 27, 49 Charlton, H. B. 10, 31, 34 Dracula 142 Chaucer, Geoffrey 5 Drake, Nathan 9, 19–20 Chesterton, G. K. 9, 22, 31–3, Dryden, John 8, 14, 18 37, 39 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 62 ecological criticism 153 cinema 138–9 Eden, Richard 116 Clayton, Thomas 103 Egan, Gabriel 153 Coghill, Nevill 52 Egeus 3–4, 27, 39, 70, 93, 111, 112, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9, 10–11 122 Collick, John 141–2 and Demetrius 90 Columbus, Christopher 29 Helena 110 Comedy 77 Hermia 8, 15, 70, 90, 91, 93, 98, The Comedy of Errors 60 111, 122, 153 Comus: A Masque presented at Ludlow Lysander 3–4, 90, 93, 98, 111 Castle 35, 36 homoerotic inclinations 90 Condell, Henry 2 overruled by Theseus 3, 98 Cymbeline 38 L’elisir d’amore 148, 149 Cyrus 116 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland 94, 95, 96–7, 105, Dad’s Army 147 120, 137, 154 Danaë 144 Elizabethan secret service 101 Danaë in the Pool 144 Elizabethan social policy 101 Dante Alighieri 18, 27 Elze, Karl 9, 24–5, 35, 36 Darwin, Charles 153 Enslowe Hill Plot 100–1 De republica 62 E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 146 deconstruction 88, 130 Evans, Bertrand 10, 59–61 Demetrius 71, 93, 154 and Egeus 90, 153 The Faerie Queene 14, 27, 52, 53, Helena 41, 60, 64, 65, 68, 71, 95, 116 76, 81–2, 90, 91, 92, 96, female bonding 130 106, 107, 111, 122, 133, 153, feminist criticism 28, 88, 121, 136 154 Fender, Stephen 10–11, 71, 72–4, Hermia 39, 64, 65, 90, 91, 106, 76, 88 107, 109, 111, 122, 153 Feydeau, Georges 76 Lysander 39, 60, 65–6, 73, 90, Fisher, Peter F. 10, 49–51, 58, 86 106, 107, 131, 151, 154 Fisher, Thomas 3 Demetrius, film portrayal 147 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 42 Dent, R. W. 10, 65–7 Fletcher, John 5, 12, 130 Descartes, René 58 Flute, film portrayal 147, 150

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Foakes, R. A. 4 Hendricks, Margot 12, 29, 106, Forman, Simon 95 115–18, 132, 135 Fox Searchlight 147 Henri V, King of France 95 Frazer, Sir James 49, 134 Henry, Prince 2 Freud, Sigmund 30, 78, 132, 133 Henry IV Part I 55 Frosch, Thomas R. 12, 132–6 Henry VIII, King of England 154 Hermia 8, 15, 39, 93, 110 Garber, Marjorie B. 11, 75, 78–80, 89 and Demetrius 39, 64, 65, 90, 91, Garner, Shirley Nelson 11, 89–91, 105 92, 93, 106, 107, 111, 122, 153 gender 88, 94 Egeus 8, 15, 70, 90, 91, 93, 98, Gervinus, Georg Gottfried 9, 23 111, 122, 153 Gilbert, W. S. 42 Helena 19, 20, 25, 28, 41, 42–3, Girard, René 8, 11, 106–8 65, 79, 84, 90, 92, 107, 113, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin 42 122, 131 Goldberg, Jonathan 128 Hippolyta 91 The Golden Ass 6, 10, 61, 109, 127 Lysander 28, 38, 39, 40, 49–50, The Golden Bough 49, 134 60, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 76, 81, Golding, Arthur 7, 119 85, 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 106, Grady, Hugh 12, 136–9, 152–3 107, 110, 111, 122, 129 Green, Douglas E. 12, 113, 127–30 Oberon 93 Greene, Robert 116 Theseus 98, 122 Griffith, Elizabeth 8, 15, 20 Titania 93 as flapper 42, 43 Hackett, Helen 12, 106, 121–4, 127, unruly woman 96, 97–8 129 absent mother 110 Hall, Sir Peter 140, 142–3 dream of serpent 76, 80 Hamlet 55 silencing 91 Hartmann, Heinz 132 Hindle, Maurice 143–4, 150 Hawkes, Terence 12, 106, 110–12, 114 Hippolyta 15, 18, 36, 39, 45, 48, 71 Hawkins, Sherman 84 and Hermia 91 Hazlitt, William 9, 18–19, 33, 34 Oberon 45 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 25 Theseus 8, 15–16, 19, 22, 28, 35, 36, Helena 42, 64, 66, 68, 73, 92, 93, 38, 39, 40, 47, 49, 50–1, 52, 58, 119 64, 65–6, 66–7, 72, 73–4, 80, 90, and Demetrius 41, 60, 64, 65, 68, 71, 91, 96, 98, 108, 111, 113, 126, 76, 81–2, 90, 91, 92, 96, 106, 130, 133, 134, 153 107, 111, 122, 133, 153, 154 Titania 38, 45, 90 Egeus 110 as Amazon 15, 90, 96, 113–14, Hermia 19, 20, 25, 28, 41, 42, 43, 122–3 49, 65, 79, 84, 90, 92, 96, 106, androgynous 90 107, 113, 122, 131 frame (with Theseus) 18, 25, 64 Lysander 49, 64, 65–6, 91, 96, silencing 91, 130 106, 107, 110, 154 Hippolyta, film portrayal 147, 148–9 Titania 122–3 Hippolyta (in Phèdre) 126 as assertive, independent 42, 92 Hippolyta, sources 5 flapper 42, 43 Hippolytus 7, 96 Nedar’s daughter 110–11 The Historye of Travayle in the West and pre-Raphaelite maiden 42 East Indies 116 spaniel 42, 68, 81–2, 133 Hoffman, Michael 140, 145, 147–8, Heminges, John 3 149

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Holbein, Hans, the Younger 108, Inferno 27 109 The Interpretation of Dreams 30 Holland, Peter 3 intertextuality 4, 94–5, 96, 146 Homer 28, 118 Iohn Hvighen van Linschoten, his Discours Horkheimer, Max 137 of Voyages 116 Hudson, Henry Norman 9, 23 Hunter, G. K. 10, 63–5, 86 Jaggard, William 3 Hunter, Joseph 9, 22 James I, King of England and Huon of Bordeaux 6, 116–17, 135 Ireland 142 Hurault, André, Sieur de Maisse 95 Johnson, Samuel 8, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 33 ideology 97, 105, 122, 137 Jones, Inigo 142 Illiad 28, 118 Jones, Osheen 145 imagery Jonson, Ben 25, 36, 52, 53, 142 animal 68–9 Julius Caesar 63 bird 41 Jung, Carl 133 eyes 63 moon 40–1 Kavanagh, James H. 11, 97–9 nature 41 Keats, John 19 imitatio 118 Kehler, Dorothea 43 imperialism 135 Kermode, Frank 6, 8, 10, 61–3, 65, 135 In somnium Scipionis commentarii Kett, Robert 104 (Commentary on the Dream of King’s Men 3 Scipio) 62 Knight, Charles 9, 21–2, 24, 33, 34 India 115–18 Knight, G. Wilson 10, 31, 37–40, 41, Indian boy/changeling 9, 28–9, 118 58, 89 and Bacchus 135 The Knight’s Tale 5 Bottom 83, 117, 134 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 141 Cupid 135 Kott, Jan 10, 11, 58, 67, 68–9, 75, Oberon 19, 28, 38, 45, 53, 83, 96, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 89, 117, 128, 131–2, 133, 153 105, 109, 127, 143 Puck 115 Krieger, Elliott 11, 75, 84–7, 89 Titania 10, 19, 20, 28, 38, 43–5, Kyd, Thomas 56 52–3, 83, 89, 92, 96, 109–10, 115, 117, 120, 128, 131–2, 134, Lacan, Jacques 110, 136 135, 153, 154 Leavis, F. R. 143 as Ganymede 120 Leech, Clifford 84 hybrid 117 Leggatt, Alexander 11, 75–8, 81, metaphor 93–4, 114 85, 89 missing child 134, 135 Leinwand, Theodore B. 11, 97, property 93 99–102 status symbol 117 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 116 colonial context 29, 115–18 literary criticism 1, 10, 11, 12, 75, 77, Indian boy, film portrayal 146 112, 136, 140 Indian boy’s mother 44, 110 literature 31, 33, 97, 99 and Oberon 128 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 3 Titania 9, 20, 28, 44–5, 89, Louise, Anita 140 109–10, 115, 117, 122–3, 128, Love’s Labours Lost 38 131, 135, 154 Luhrmann, Baz 146 Industrial Revolution 98 Lyly, John 52, 53, 56

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Lysander 3–4, 28, 38, 39, 40, 42, 49, happy comedy 122–3, 127, 136 54, 60, 64, 66, 70, 78, 93, 110 lyric divertissement 64 and Demetrius 39, 60, 65–6, 73, 90, reciprocal parody 22–3 106, 107, 131, 151, 154 specimen of dramatized lyrical Egeus 3–4, 90, 93, 98, 111 20–1 Helena 49, 64, 65–6, 91, 96, 106, wedding play 2, 3, 46–9 107, 110, 154 aesthetics, impure 12, 136–9 Hermia 28, 38, 39, 40, 49–50, 60, allegory 8, 9, 23–4, 27–8, 51–2, 53, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 76, 81, 85, 61, 137, 138 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 106, 107, ambiguity 48, 53, 63, 79, 83, 110, 111, 122, 129 143 dowager aunt 110 ambivalence 11, 72–4, 88–9, 143, Lysander, film portrayal 147 149 anamorphosis 12–13, 108–9 Macbeth 18, 39, 40 animality 53, 63, 68–9, 81, 83, 117, Macrobius, Ambrosius 119, 143 Theodosius 62 bestiality 76, 83, 88, 128, 133 Maginn, William 9, 21, 33 antimasque 9, 25, 34, 36 Malone, Edmund 8, 15–16, 18, 20, argument 49–51, 58 28, 49 art 65, 77–8, 78–9, 80, 97, 98, 121 Manning, Brian 102 benign view 10, 39–40, 45, 54, 58, Manvell, Roger 141, 142 83, 89, 104, 125, 126, 127, Marlowe, Christopher 56 136 marriage 43, 88, 122 borderlands 115 Marshall, David 2, 11, 91–4, 96, 114 changeling(s) 93–4, 114, 117 Marxism 88, 97, 105 characterization 20, 32, 36, 54, 64, Mary Poppins 146 68, 72 Master of the Revels 3, 35, 120 class 11, 22, 24, 84–7, 89, 97, 98, Measure for Measure 44, 54 104, 115, 117, 118, 129 Medea 7, 96 courtly aspect 2, 42, 49, 51, 52, 53, Mendelssohn, Felix 141, 143, 148 72, 76, 85, 86, 102, 103, 104, The Merchant of Venice 44 129, 144 Meres, Francis 1 craftsmen (clowns, mechanicals) 1, The Merry Wives of Windsor 55 4, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 22, 25, 26, mestizaje (mixedness) 117–18 30, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 50, Metamorphoses 7, 44, 120, 134, 135, 137 66, 67, 71, 73, 75, 79, 86, Metastasio, Pietro 20 92–3, 97, 98–9, 99–102, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, film/TV 104–5, 107, 108, 112–14, 115, versions 118–19, 127, 152, 153 1935: Reinhardt/Dieterle 140–2 dark/malign view 9, 11, 33, 37, 1969: Hall 140, 142–3 39–40, 68–9, 71, 77, 80–4, 88, 1981: Moshinsky 140, 144–5 89, 97, 103, 123, 125, 126, 1996: Noble 140, 145–7 127 1999: Hoffman 140, 147–51 date 1–2 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, topics dialogue 20, 49, 54 as apotrope 12, 125–7 disorder 7, 38, 70, 80, 88, 101, 107, dance 10, 36, 37, 63–4, 152 113, 128, 131, 137, 153 dramatic fantasy 29 dramatic/theatrical illusion 10, 18, fertility rite 89 47, 54, 55, 56, 58, 73, 79–80, festive comedy 56–8, 92, 102–5 98, 112–13, 114, 121

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gender 88–91, 94–7, 103, 105, topics – continued 113–14, 117, 118, 119, 121, 152 dream 1, 9, 10, 11, 16–17, 20, 22, genre 8, 9, 20–1, 23–5, 30, 34, 76–7, 23–4, 28, 30, 32–3, 35, 40, 41, 121–3, 129 47, 50–1, 56, 57, 58, 61–3, 68, green world 89, 153 69, 75, 78–80, 89, 93, 134, Hamlet 31–2 137, 138 harmony 8, 9, 10, 21–2, 25–6, 27, ecocritical interpretation 153 28, 30, 35, 36–7, 39–40, 42, editions: Arden (1979) 2, 141; 49, 50, 51, 52, 65, 66, 74, 75, Cambridge (1924) 2, 111; 77, 86, 87, 88, 90, 101, 104, Macmillan RSC (2007) 4; New 137, 138, 152 Penguin (1967) 2; Oxford heterogeneity 17, 22 (1994) 4; Penguin (2005) 2; hierarchy 46, 52, 73, 88, 90, 98, Warwick (1897) 29 102, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, elite culture 25, 56–8 121, 137, 152 empire, imperialism 28, 29, 106, humour 26–7, 56, 69, 143 114, 115–18, 135, 138 ideology 11, 53, 97–9, 105, 115, ending 11, 60, 65, 72–3, 86, 90, 93, 118, 122, 128, 96, 101, 111, 114, 117, 122, 129–30, 132, 137–8 123, 129–30, 134 illusion 30, 55, 56, 58, 77, 78, 79, exorcism 11, 77, 129 154 fairies 14, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27, 32, 43, imagination 26, 27, 29, 34, 45, 47, 44, 47, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 75, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65–7, 82, 83, 108, 115, 116, 126–7, 70, 71, 73, 78, 79, 80, 86–7, 88, 134, 137 92, 93, 94, 111, 116, 138 as Cupid 23–4 imitatio of Ovid 118–21 emanations of Hymen 36–7 Indian dimension 38, 70, 115 fairyland 28, 29, 32, 38, 39–40, intertexts 4, 94–5, 96, 118, 152 109, 116, 117, 128, 141, joining/misjoinings 94, 112–15 153–4 language 26, 35, 49, 54, 72, 76, fairy dances 36 85–6, 93, 99, 111, 133, fairy songs 35, 36, 68 152, 154 fairy world 26, 77, 137 law 3, 15, 48, 82, 85–6, 113, 114 film/TV portrayals 141, 144–5, love 8, 9, 10, 23–4, 29, 30, 39, 146, 149–50 41–3, 47, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, fantasy 10, 11, 14, 17, 20, 22, 29, 61–2, 63, 64, 65–6, 68–9, 73, 30, 38, 47, 48, 49, 50–1, 56, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 89–90, 86, 87, 89, 94–7, 107, 116, 90–1, 105, 113, 114, 119–21, 133, 142 122–3, 126, 137 fathers 15, 85, 89, 90, 91, 96, 110, love-juice (love-in-idleness) 41, 50, 111–12, 122, 133 53, 54, 59–60, 61, 64, 71, 82, female bonding 89–91, 131 85, 117, 120, 122, 128, 149 festive theory 102–5 Macbeth 39, 40 First Folio (F1) 2, 3, 103 marriage 10, 36–9, 47, 51–2, 82, First Quarto (Q1) 3–4, 90, 103 85, 88, 92, 111, 112, 113, 122, forest (see also wood) 60, 61, 68, 76, 129, 134, 152 80–1, 82, 85–6, 109, 110, 133, masque 9, 10, 24–5, 28, 34–7, 134 51, 63 film/TV portrayals of forest meta-aesthetic drama 136–9 144–5, 150 metadramatic aspects 15, 26, 55, 57, gaps 10, 59, 129 92–4, 97, 121

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mimetic desire/rivalry 11, 106–8 unity 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 33, 36, mothers 95–6, 110, 111, 133, 134, 37, 65, 75, 77–8, 137, 152 135 vision 78, 79, 80, 86, 104 occasion thesis 2, 102 wood (see also forest) 9, 15, 21, 27, order 10, 29, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 32, 33, 40, 41, 45, 49, 50–1, 77–8, 88, 90, 91, 96, 98, 101, 54, 56–7, 61–2, 64–5, 70–1, 72, 105, 112, 113, 152 73, 76, 81, 84, 85, 100, 111, Othello 33 113–14, 120, 122, 129, 133 panoramas 10, 70–1, 109 film/TV portrayals of wood 145, 149 patriarchy 89–91, 95–6, 110, 122, see also names of individual characters; 129, 133, 137, 138 imagery; speeches pattern 10, 36, 37, 38, 51, 52, 62, The Mikado 42 64, 72, 75, 78 Miller, Donald C. 10, 43–5, 52, 53, picturization 10, 70, 109 83, 89 play-within-a/the-play 30, 35, 48, Miller, Jonathan 144 49, 55, 65, 73, 79–80, 92, 111, Milton, John 35 119, 123, 129, 133–4, 138 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della 63 primary/second world 84–5 Montrose, Louis Adrian 11, 94–7, 103, procreation 12, 82, 85, 96, 111, 129, 120, 121 134, 152 Moon 79 queer moments 127–30 Moshinsky, Elijah 140, 144 race 106, 114, 115–18 Moyse, Charles Ebenezer 9, 27–8 rape 69, 81 Much Ado about Nothing 38, 55 reality 22, 35, 57, 66, 78–80, 84–5, Murnau, F. W. 142 98, 133, 134 Mustardseed 79 reason, rationality 64, 65, 66, 78, Myerscough-Jones, David 144 79, 82, 85, 138 mythological references Romantic poetry 19 Aegles 5, 126 Romanticism 16–17 Aeneas 50 Romeo and Juliet 127 Aesculapius 134 Second Quarto (Q2) 3–4 Amazons 95–6, 113, 115, 116, 122, sexuality 10, 29–30, 43–5, 68–9, 123, 126 76–7, 80–4, 86, 87, 88, 89–91, Antiopa (Hippolyta) 5, 126 105, 122–3, 127–30, 130–2, Apollo 113, 119, 121 133, 137, 152 Ariadne 5, 126 heterosexuality 11, 43, 88, 89–91, Bacchus 135 107, 113, 123, 129, 130, 131, 152 Ceres 37 homoeroticism 122, 127 Corin 70 homosexuality 107, 128 Creon 130 same–sex relationships 89, 91, Cupid 23–4, 40, 64, 70, 119–20 113–14, 123, 128, 131–2, 152 and Indian boy 135 film/TV versions 146–7 Psyche 61 sources 4–8, 115–16, 121 Puck 120 structure 19, 36, 49, 51, 52, 54, 68, Danaë 144 97, 141, 152, 154 Daphne 113, 119 sunderings 92–4, 114 Diana 37, 44, 76, 134, 144 supernatural 14–15, 29, 30, 32, 71, Ganymede 120 72, 79 Helen 73 symbolic aspects 29 Hercules 15 text 3–4 Hippolytus 5, 126, 134, 135 The Two Noble Kinsmen 5, 12, 130–2 Hymen 36

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mythological references – continued 96, 103, 110, 111, 113, 115, Isis 61 117, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 137, Jove 120, 135 153 Juno 37 as bisexual 83 Jupiter 121 Dream’s internal dramatist 95 Midas 121 voyeur 128 Minos 109 blessing 87, 96 Minotaur 109, 127 homoerotic desires 89 Orpheus 63 Oberon complex 133 Pan 121 sources for 6, 115–16, 135 Pasiphaë 109, 127 Oberon, film/TV portrayals 141, 150 Perigouna 5, 70, 126 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 19 Phaedra 5, 6, 126, 134 Odyssey 28 Phillida 39, 45, 70, 71 Oedipus 7 Psyche 61 Olson, Paul A. 10, 51–3, 54, 55, 58, Semele 135 65, 83, 89, 92, 137 Sefostris 116 The Origin of Species 153 Semiramis 116 Orphic mystery religion 63 Virbius (Hippolytus) 134 Othello 44 Venus 61 Ovid (Publius Ovidus Naso) 4, 7, 12, Zeus 110 44, 106, 118–21, 134, 135, 137

Nedar 109–11 Painter, William 95 Neoplatonism 63 Palladis Tamia 1 Neptune 120 Parker, Patricia 12, 94, 106, 112–15 new historicism 88, 94, 121 Parrott, Thomas Marc 10, 45, 141 Nicoll, Allardyce 141 Patterson, Annabel 8, 102–5, 114 Nijinsky, Bronislava 141 Paul, Saint 63, 65 Nijinsky, Vaslav 141 First Epistle to Corinthians 7–8, 62, Noble, Adrian 140, 145, 147 104 Norfolk Uprising (1549) 104 Peaseblossom 79 Norma 148, 149, 150 Pepys, Samuel 8, 14, 152 North, Sir Thomas 5–6, 126 Pericles 38, 144 Nosferatu 142 Peter Pan 31 Numantinus, Publius Cornelius Petrarch, Francesco 119 Aemilianus Africanus 62 Phèdre 126, 127, 134 Nuttall, A. D. 6, 12, 125–7, 134 Philostrate 3, 27, 34, 39 Plutarch 5–6, 96, 126 Oberon 5, 17, 19, 22–3, 25, 28, 41, 49, politics 105 60, 61, 76, 87, 90, 93, 101, 133 post-structuralism 88 and Bottom 101, 128 power 94, 101 Hippolyta 45 Priestley, J. B. 9, 31, 33, 34 India 115–16 psychoanalysis 30, 33, 68, 78, 88, 103, Indian boy 53, 83, 89, 110, 117, 105, 110, 121, 132–6 128, 131–2, 133, 153 Puck (Robin Goodfellow) 7, 15, 19, Puck 39, 45, 60, 61, 69, 85, 101, 39, 40, 41, 45, 50, 60, 61, 69, 111, 117, 120, 121, 128, 133, 70, 79, 86, 87, 101, 111, 122, 141 128, 133, 141 Theseus 38, 79 and Cupid 120 Titania 36, 38, 40, 43, 44, 50, 53, Indian boy 115 54, 68–9, 70–1, 86, 91, 92, 95, love-juice 50, 60, 85, 122, 128

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Oberon 39, 45, 60, 61, 69, 85, First Folio (1623) 144 101, 111, 117, 120, 121, 128, histories 38, 54 133, 141 romances 54 epilogue 57, 93, 111, 129–30, 134, tempest-music opposition 37, 38 135–6, 145 tragedies 38, 54 use of ‘prepost’rously’ 113, 128 Shakespeare criticism 41, 53–4, 75, Puck, film/TV portrayals 140, 145, 147 102, 121, 125 Pyramus 18, 79–80, 92, 99, 107, 110, Shakespearean aesthetics 136–9 133 Shakespearean comedy 31, 41, 52, 53, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ 2, 3, 4, 7, 28, 68, 84 48, 55, 57, 66, 79–80, 92, 102, Shakespearean tragedy 9, 68 103, 104, 113, 118, 121, The Shepheardes Calendar 118 123, 128 Sidney, Sir Philip 52, 53, 67 Siegel, Paul N. 10, 46–9, 50, 51, 53, queer reading 130 55, 58 queer theory 127 Sinfield, Alan 12, 130–2 Quince, Peter 18, 39, 50, 79, 99, 110, Snider, Denton Jacques 9, 25–6 119 Snout 92, 103, 110 Snug 92, 107 Racine, Jean 126 sodomy 128, 129 Rackham, Arthur 146 Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of The Rape of Lucrece 44 Scipio) 62 Reinhardt, Max 140, 142 speeches Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 144 ‘Apollo flies and Daphne holds Roberts, Amy 144 the chase’ (Helena to Roman Catholicism 154 Demetrius) 113, 119 Romantic criticism 137 ‘His mother was a vot’ress of my Romantic poetry 19 order’ (Titania on Indian boy’s Romanticism 16 mother) 20, 117, 122 Romeo and Juliet 2, 21, 127 ‘I am your spaniel’ (Helena to Rooney, Mickey 140 Demetrius) 68, 81–2, 133 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 42 ‘I have had a most rare vision’ Rossky, William 67 (Bottom’s dream) 62–3, 65, Rothwell, Kenneth S. 140, 142, 73, 149 145–6 ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme Rubens, Sir Peter Paul 144 blows’ (Oberon on Titania’s bower) 70, 153 ‘Sabrina’ lyric 35 ‘If we shadows have offended’ (Puck’s same-sex relationships 130 epilogue) 57, 93, 111, Schlegel, August von 9, 16, 17–18, 25, 129–30, 134, 135, 145 35, 64, 93, 137 ‘Now the hungry lion roars’ (Puck’s Scot, Reginald 7, 121 penultimate speech) 39, 40, The Scottish Histories of James the 87, 101, 145 Fourth 116 ‘That very time I saw’ (Oberon on Selves, Georges de 108 origin of love-in-idleness) 70, Semiramis 116 76, 96, 120 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 7, 96 ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet’ sexuality 88 (Theseus on imagination, Shakespeare, William Hippolyta’s response) 27, 47, as artisan-playwright 101–2 54–5, 57, 65, 72–3, 73–4, 108, comedies 54, 84 111, 133, 138

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speeches – continued homoerotic inclinations 90 ‘These are the forgeries of jealousy’ overrules Egeus 3, 98 (Titania on disorder in the sources for 5–6 elements) 7, 38, 41, 70, 100, Theseus, film portrayal 147, 148–9 143, 153 Thisbe 110, 133, 150 ‘Things base and vile’ (Helena’s Tieck, Ludwig 9, 16–17 soliloquy on love) 68, 73, Titania 5, 7, 9, 10, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 119–20 25, 28, 36, 60, 64, 73, 76, 79, ‘This is the silliest stuff’ (Hippolyta on 93, 143 the craftsmen’s play, Theseus’s and Bottom 17–18, 19, 21, 23, 36, response) 48, 55, 57, 66–7 38, 49, 50, 52, 53, 61, 68, 69, ‘We, Hermia, like two artificial gods’ 75, 76, 83–4, 87, 91, 95, 103, (Helena’s ‘double cherry’ 109, 117, 121, 127, 128, 133, speech) 113, 122, 129, 131, 133 134, 138, 153 Spenser, Edmund 14, 27, 52, 53, 95, Indian boy 9, 20, 28, 43–5, 89, 92, 116, 118, 137 109–10, 115, 128, 131–2, 135, Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. 10, 31, 34, 153, 154 40–1 Indian boy’s mother 20, 28, 44, Stanislavski, Konstantin 150 45, 89, 90, 91, 109, 122–3, Starveling 73, 99, 110 128, 131, 135, 154 Stoker, Bram 142 Oberon 36, 38, 40, 43, 44, 50, 53, subconscious 79, 80 54, 68–9, 70–1, 86, 91, 92, 95, Sullivan, Arthur 42 96, 103, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, Swift, Jonathan 69 126, 128–9, 131–2, 137, 153 Theseus 5, 109 The Taming of the Shrew 55 as fertility and love goddess 137–8 Tarzan 140 mother figure 96, 133 Taylor, Charles 8, 16, 33 Pasiphaë 127 The Tempest 14, 16, 18, 34, 35, 38 Titania complex 133 Theilade, Nina 141, 142 Titania, film/TV portrayals 140, 144–5, Theocritus 118 147, 149–50, 150–1 Theseus 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 25, 28, 30, 35, travel narratives (sixteenth– 36, 38, 39, 40, 49, 52, 55, 65, century) 95, 116–17, 118, 66, 72, 73, 76, 86, 98, 103, 107, 135 108, 109, 111–12, 122, 123 Travers, P. L. 146 and Bottom 100 La traviata 148, 149 Hippolyta 8, 15–16, 19, 22, 28, Troilus and Cressida 54, 68 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 47, 49, Turner, Victor 103 50–1, 52, 58, 64, 65–6, 66–7, The Two Gentleman of Verona 38 72, 73–4, 80, 90, 91, 96, 98, The Two Noble Kinsmen 5, 12, 130–1, 132 108, 111, 113, 126, 130, 133, 134, 153 Ulrici, Hermann 9, 22–3, 37 Oberon 38, 79 unconscious 30 Titania 5, 109 as centre of play 9, 27 Verdi, Guiseppe 148 frame (with Hippolyta) 18, 25, Vermeer, Jan 144 35, 64 Vertomannus, Lewes 116 representative of reason 65, 78, Victoria, Queen of the United 80 Kingdom 21 sexual predator 52, 90 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 118, 134

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Wall 79, 103 Willis, Susan 144–5 Warner Bros. 142, 147 Wilson, Sir Daniel 9, 24, 33 Watts, Richard, Jr. 140–1 Wilson, John Dover 2, 111 Wedgwood, Julia 9, 28, 146 Wind, Edgar 63 Weimann, Robert 103 Winnicott, D. W. 132, 134 Weiss, John 9, 26–7 The Winter’s Tale 38 Welsford, Enid 10, 31, 34–7, 37, 64 A Woman Bathing in a Stream 144 White, Martin 145 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 146 White, R. G. 111 Wrightson, Keith 100–1 Wiles, David 2 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 146 Young, David P. 10, 69–71, 74, 88, Williams, Gary J. 2 109

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