SHAKESPEARE'S WORLD
William Shakespeare
What do we need to know?
There's a lot that we don't know about Shakespeare; records of his life were either lost or never existed. People weren't super into documenting everything 400 years ago (or if they were, people were really good at throwing things away). For example, we don't know Shakespeare's exact birth date. We know he was baptized on April 26, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, but we can only guess that he was born a few days before that; most people celebrate his birthday on April 23. We know that when he was 18 he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway and they had three children--Susanna, Judith, and Hamnet. We also know that his life revolved around two locations: Stratford and London. His family stayed in Stratford, while Shakespeare pursued a career in London.
So, why do we care? What does this matter to a bunch of folks producing his play in 2016? Well, Shakespeare's world was one in which there were a lot of rules. These rules governed who your friends were, where you lived, how you lived, how much money you could make, what you could or could not say in public, who you could (or could not) marry, etc. Through his writing, readers/performers can see how Shakespeare challenged those rules--he crafted characters who could "escape" these stringent social structures; he invented worlds in which these rules could be broken with different results.
In Midsummer, Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander escape the confines of their ordered world, enter a chaotic one, and when they return to court they fall back into a harmonious social order. Through leaving the real world and entering into an imaginative one, these characters' lives get subverted, perverted, and recapitulated into a happy ending when they wake from their dream.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A History
Midsummer was probably performed at The Theatre between 1595 and 1599. We don't know for sure when it took place exactly, but many historians date it to around the same time as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and Love's Labor Lost citing similar writing styles. Also, the introduction to the first published version of Midsummer (published in 1600) states that the play "hath been sundry times publickley acted" by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This tells us that there was more than one performance of the play prior to 1600. The Theatre was Shakespeare's first performance venue. While there aren't any surviving illustrations, written accounts describe a building similar to the Globe: a vast, polygonal, three-story timber structure, open to the sun and rain.
Narrative Sources
This play cannot be connected to a single literary source unlike most of Shakespeare's plays. He did, however, draw on the myth of Theseus and Ypolita (which appeared in Chaucer's Canturbury Tales), fairytailes about Robin Goodfellow, and other popular myths and legends of his time.
Plot Summary
Theseus, duke of Athens, is preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. He commissions his Master of the Revels, Philostrate, to find suitable amusements for the occasion. Egeus, an Athenian nobleman, marches into Theseus’s court with his daughter, Hermia, and two young men, Demetrius and Lysander. Egeus wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, but Hermia is in love with Lysander and refuses to comply. Egeus asks for the full penalty of law to fall on Hermia’s head if she flouts her father’s will. Theseus gives Hermia until his wedding to consider her options, warning her that disobeying her father’s wishes could result in her being sent to a convent or even executed. Nonetheless, Hermia and Lysander plan to escape Athens the following night and marry in the house of Lysander’s aunt, some seven leagues distant from the city. Hermia tells her friend Helena the plan. Helena, however, is in love with Demetrius so she tells him about Hermia's plan and they follow them into the forest.
In these same woods are two very different groups of characters. The first is a band of fairies, including Oberon, the fairy king, and Titania, his queen, who has recently returned from India. The second is a band of Athenian craftsmen rehearsing a play that they hope to perform for the duke and his bride. Oberon and Titania are at odds over a young Indian prince given to Titania by the prince’s mother; the boy is so beautiful that Oberon wishes to make him a knight, but Titania refuses. Seeking revenge, Oberon sends his merry servant, Puck, to acquire a magical flower, the juice of which can be spread over a sleeping person’s eyelids to make that person fall in love with the first thing he or she sees upon waking. Puck obtains the flower, and Oberon tells him of his plan to spread its juice on the sleeping Titania’s eyelids. Having seen Demetrius act cruelly toward Helena, he orders Puck to spread some of the juice on the eyelids of the young Athenian man. Puck encounters Lysander and Hermia; thinking that Lysander is the Athenian of whom Oberon spoke, Puck afflicts him with the love potion. Lysander happens to see Helena upon awaking and falls deeply in love with her, abandoning Hermia. As the night progresses and Puck attempts to undo his mistake, both Lysander and Demetrius end up in love with Helena, who believes that they are mocking her. Hermia becomes so jealous that she tries to challenge Helena to a fight. Demetrius and Lysander nearly do fight over Helena’s love, but Puck confuses them by mimicking their voices, leading them apart until they are lost separately in the forest.
When Titania wakes, the first creature she sees is Bottom, the most ridiculous of the Athenian craftsmen, whose head Puck has mockingly transformed into that of an ass. Titania passes a ludicrous interlude doting on the ass-headed weaver. Eventually, Oberon obtains the Indian boy, Puck spreads the love potion on Lysander’s eyelids, and by morning all is well. Theseus and Hippolyta discover the sleeping lovers in the forest and take them back to Athens to be married—Demetrius now loves Helena, and Lysander now loves Hermia. After the group wedding, the lovers watch Bottom and his fellow craftsmen perform their play, a fumbling, hilarious version of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. When the play is completed, the lovers go to bed; the fairies briefly emerge to bless the sleeping couples with a protective charm and then disappear. Only Puck remains, to ask the audience for its forgiveness and approval and to urge it to remember the play as though it had all been a dream.