(To kick things off, I’m going to put up some general posts on the thematics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in general, working my way towards some of the specifics of our production.)
Shakespeare’s comedies often seem kind of silly, and they often have titles that suggest their insubstantiality: As You Like It, What You Will, Much Ado About Nothing and especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which seems to suggest that the whole play is a kind of dreamy frolic, not worth lingering over. But the manifest triviality of the play masks a lot of serious material. A central serious focus of the play—from our opening exchange between Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen he defeated in battle and is about to wed, to the fate of Hermia if she does not submit to her father’s will, to the ongoing strife between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania—is gender.
Historically, Elizabeth I is an important context for the play. As the first unmarried queen of a deeply patriarchal society, Elizabeth was the source of enormous social and cultural anxiety, even as she was celebrated and glorified in painting, poetry, and drama. One might even say that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an attempt to come to terms (artistically, politically, and socially) with the fact of Elizabeth’s rule.
As the dominant model of female power in the period, Elizabeth is present in the play as both the Amazon queen Hippolyta (there were strong associations between Elizabeth and the Amazons) and the Fairy queen Titania. Only a few years earlier Edmund Spenser had published his great epic poem, The Faerie Queene, who title character was explicitedly connected to Elizabeth. Elizabeth was also famously “The Virgin Queen,” and images of virginity and evocations of Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon, are ubiquitous in the play. The love potion Oberon uses to bend Titania to his will is created when one of Cupid’s arrows is “Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon” and strikes a flower instead of its target.
Along with powerful female characters, the play is full of female spaces: mostly remembered or imagined locations, rather than places actually staged in the play. These include: the land of the Amazons, recently invaded by Theseus; the virgin emperess whom Cupid shot his arrow at; the nunnery in which Hermia will be enclosed if she doesn’t follow her father’s wishes; Titania’s remembrance of the mother of the changeling child when she was near the end of her pregnancy; Titania’s sleeping bower, into which Oberon will steal to drug her; and Helena’s childhood remembrance of sewing on a sampler with Hermia, which she uses to reproach her: “And will you rent our sacred love asunder, / To join with men in scorning your poor friend?” All these spaces are invaded by men in one way or another: although they are locations of female power, they are all vulnerable.
A central challenge of a modern production, then, is what you do with this: given the fundamentally patriarchal frame of the play, where female disobedience is always punished and independent female power is always quelled, how can a production make it speak to our own times? One kind of answer is that Shakespeare always problematizes the thematic structures he employs, often (or even principally) by creating characters that are too complex to be reduced to their structural roles: the more we invest our interest in Titania, for example, the more difficult it is to view her comeuppance and eventual acquiescence to Oberon’s rule in purely comedic terms. (More on this in subsequent posts.)