INTRODUCTION

William Shakespeare’s legendary status as a man of the theater has crossed time and place. Respected as an artist of considerable merit in his own time, his reputation has expanded in the more than four hundred years since his birth to classify him as one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. His plays have been translated into most of the world’s major languages, securing his place in theatrical traditions around the globe. While many have achieved great success in one genre of playwrighting; Shakespeare’s variety of work has been equally praised. While Hamlet and Macbeth are some of the most honored tragedies of our time, all comedy is held to the standard of As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. Of similar stature are the history plays of Shakespeare’s own creation: Richard III is said to be his most frequently produced work. For his prolific output, his mastery of the dramatic form, and the truth of the stories he tells, Shakespeare has been hallowed. For the ongoing contemporary nature of his plays, for their ability to cross cultural boundaries, and for the sheer beauty of his language, he is celebrated to this day.

For many, Shakespeare’s plays were an introduction to the theater; some were no doubt introduced to the magic of the stage through his fantastical comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this play, the worlds of the mythological Greece, Elizabethan England, and the fairy kingdom are united. In another writer’s hands, the transition from Theseus’ Greek empire to the fairy forest would seem jarring, but time and again audiences have willing suspended their disbelief to follow Hermia and Lysander, Oberon and Puck, Titania and Bottom on a journey through the pitfalls of love, the power of magic, and the miracle of dreams.

In the four hundred years since its first performance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has had a complicated production history. It was revived several times as an opera before it was restaged as a play. It has been adapted both as a ballet and as a swing musical. By the nineteenth century, A Midsummer Night’s Dream had become an important part of any respectable theater-manager’s list of credits — a distinction that continues today. The play was once presented as a celebration of Victorian ideals, with gossamer fairies and complicated scenic effects; in more recent years it has risen fully to the realm of metaphor, exposing itself as something more than a fairy story: a deeper experience of power, sexual love, and human nature.

When L‡szl— Marton returns to Court Theatre to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he brings the audience a production that is years in the making. First produced in his home theater of Vigszinhaz in Budapest, Hungary in the early 1980s, and later in Louisville, Marton’s production focuses on the cycles of romantic relationships, from the naive couplings of the young lovers to the highly formalized union of Theseus and Hippolyta to the tempestuous but passionate relationship between Oberon and Titania. Marton has mastered the comedic elements of Shakespeare’s text featured in a highly physical production. His mechanicals bring insight to the relationship between actor and character, between performer and audience. Four hundred years after its first performance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an ode to love, fantasy, youth, and the imagination of the theater.

BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Though William Shakespeare is perhaps the best known playwright in the Western world, little is known about his life. Attempts to create a complete biography have never been fully realized. His life is partially documented by church and public records that bear his name and some of his contemporaries have left behind references to his success. Otherwise, all that remain are the collections of his plays. Even those may be incomplete, though it is hard to believe he could have written much more. If his career spanned from his late twenties to his mid-forties, he had to produce an average of two plays a year to generate the collection that exists today. As Northrop Frye asserts, "(this) would have left him very little time to astonish the world in any other way."

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564. Though the exact date of his birth is not known, the Stratford Parish recorded his baptism on April 26, 1564. His birthday is usually celebrated on April 23 which is both a viable birthdate in relation to the baptism and also a poetic coincidence: April 23 is the feast of St. George, England’s patron saint. William was the son of John and Mary Arden Shakespeare. His grandfather, Robert Arden, was a land owning gentleman who bequeathed his property to Mary. This included Henley House, the home where Shakespeare grew up. John Shakespeare was a glover and a whittawer, and despite his later near bankruptcy, was a leading citizen of Stratford. He held several public positions in the town, including mayor. In Shakespeare’s teenage years, John was prosecuted for illegal moneylending, losing his stature in town. Though his son became the greatest writer England has ever known, John Shakespeare was illiterate.

Despite the fact that school records from the King’s New School in Stratford no longer exist, it is widely maintained, in accordance with Nick Rowe’s 1709 biography, that Shakespeare attended this school. Likewise the curriculum remains a mystery, though it seems reasonable to assume that students first learned to read and write in English and later turned to Latin and Greek. Shakespeare’s work reveals knowledge of the elementary required reading. In creating A Midsummer Night's Dream he turned to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. There is no evidence to suggest that Shakespeare continued his studies at a university; in fact, some of the criticism levied at him from university educated playwrights portrays him as one who flourished outside of that realm.

At age eighteen Shakespeare married the twenty-six year old Anne Hathaway. Records show the couple obtained a marriage license on November 27, 1582. In May 1583 Anne gave birth to their first child, Susanna. In February 1585 twins Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare were baptized and thus completed the Shakespeare family. Tragically, Hamnet died in 1596 at age eleven. Little else is known about Shakespeare’s family life. Between the hasty marriage and his prolonged life in London, some scholars believe it was not happy. Yet there is no solid evidence to prove happiness or unhappiness on either side.

Many scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as "the Dark years," as Shakespeare’s activities during these years are wholly unknown. Some theories regarding the bard’s occupation at this time include those that he worked as a lawyer, a soldier, and a schoolteacher. At some point during these years, Shakespeare took up residence in London and embarked on a career in the theater. The next record of Shakespeare appears in 1592 when rival playwright Robert Greene chastised him as "an upstart crow" in his deathbed pamphlet, A Groatsworth of Wit.

Between June 1592 and May 1594 London was seiged by the plague and all the playhouses were closed. It is believed that Shakespeare wrote much of his non-dramatic work during this time, including a good number of his sonnets. He lost no time returning to the theatre once the plague ended and the playhouses re-opened, working as an actor and writer for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. During the 1594 Christmas Season the company performed twice before Queen Elizabeth. From 1594 to 1597 the players performed at the Theatre in Shoreditch, northeast of London. In 1599 they moved to the newly built Globe Theatre, south of the Thames River. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men became one of the most successful theatre organizations in England. Northrop Frye maintains, "Shakespeare seems to have been popular and well-liked as a person and as a dramatist."

The first official documentation of Shakespeare’s residence appears in the 1596 tax records. These reveal that he was a resident of the parish of St. Helen’s Bishopgate, and later of Bankside, near the theaters. Subsequently he began to acquire property in Stratford and in London. In 1597 he purchased New Place, one of the largest homes in Stratford. This remained the family home until the 1670 death of Lady Bernard, Shakespeare’s granddaughter and last remaining relative.

In 1603 Queen Elizabeth died and her throne passed to King James I. On May 19, 1603, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men. In addition to obtaining honors and rank, the players performed many of Shakespeare’s plays at court. Gradually Shakespeare distanced himself from the company and began spending more time with his wife and daughters. In either 1611 or 1612 he relinquished his lodgings in London and retired to Stratford. On March 25, 1616, Shakespeare made a will. His death was recorded on his supposed birthday: April 23, 1616. He was fifty-two years old.

Under the supervision of his colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work was printed in 1623. This printing preserved many plays that might otherwise have been lost to history and provided the authoritative source for most of Shakespeare’s texts. Though Cromwell’s closing of the theaters from 1649 to 1660 kept much of Shakespeare’s work out of circulation, his plays were revived in the eighteenth century and by the mid-nineteenth century were produced almost as frequently as they are today.

CHRONOLOGY OF SHAKESPEARE'S MAJOR WORKS

1589-94 Comedy of Errors

1588-97 Love’s Labor’s Lost

1589-92 Henry VI, Parts 1,2,3

1590-93 The Taming of the Shrew

1592-94 Richard III

1594-96 Romeo and Juliet

1595-96 Richard II

1596-97 The Merchant of Venice

1596-98 Henry IV, Parts 1,2

1598-99 Much Ado About Nothing

1597-1601 The Merry Wives of Windsor

1598-1600 As You Like It

circa 1599 Henry V

Julius Caesar

1599-1601 Hamlet

1600-02 Twelfth Night

1603-04 Measure for Measure

Othello

1605-06 King Lear

1606-07 Macbeth

Antony and Cleopatra

1606-08 Pericles

1608-10 Cymbeline

1610-11 A Winter’s Tale

The Tempest

LITERARY INFLUENCES

Literary theory and educational practice in Shakespeare’s time held that writers should imitate classical models. During five years of formal education, Shakespeare mastered the elements of grammar and composition, acquiring a thorough grounding in the best of Latin culture - Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Terence, Plautus, and Seneca. By these means, he secured the background that was necessary to prepare him for his sudden emergence as the chief poet of the English Renaissance. From the histories to the comedies, every Shakespearean play yields a full crop of classical reference and allusion. Ovid was Shakespeare’s clear favorite and his first plays teem with Ovidian references and effects.

The Roman Comedy of Plautus and Terence was the main tradition of comedy at the time and the one inherited by Shakespeare. Their plays are set in the context of a specific social structure and a well-defined system of laws and morals. Erasmus’ educational principles, employed in sixteenth century England, included the study of Latin comedies in the original. This was a means both of learning the Latin that was spoken on the streets of Rome, and of acquiring the "health-giving qualities" that good comedy can suggest, including the value of good behavior.

Ben Jonson was the chief Elizabethan exponent of classical comedy, providing the finest examples of that tradition throughout the period. Technically, the comedy of Jonson and his predecessors is tightly structured; dramatic probability is maintained, despite the inevitable improbabilities of plot, by a careful exclusion of the magical, the strange, and the exotic. The kind of comedy written by Shakespeare was largely different from the comedies of Ben Jonson, and was in fact developed from a tradition that many of his contemporaries would have considered subordinate, and even inferior, to classical comedy.

In almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies, he ignores the classical unites of time and place and turns instead toward an enjoyment of plot and narrative pace. Unlike Jonson, Shakespeare includes the exotic and the strange, yet remains recognizably English. In short, his comedies are romantic, a development of a tradition established by George Peele, John Lyly and Robert Greene. His comic world, with its echoes of folk lore and country practices, is less rational than Jonson’s, and has its roots in something much older than classical comedy - in the county revels honoring the god, Dionysus.

SOURCES

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the few Shakespearean plays which has no single identifiable source. It is not a reworking of an older play or a dramatization of a specific story already in print. Instead, the story can be broken down into four sets of characters: the mythological characters (Theseus and Hippolyta), the human lovers (Lysander, Demetrius, Helena, and Hermia), the mechanicals (Bottom and company), and the fairies (Oberon, Titania, Puck et al.)

Theseus is a character from Greek mythology. Son of Aegeus and heir to the throne of Athens, he was responsible for uniting the Attic communities into a single state. It is generally believed that the love story of Theseus and Hippolyta was derived from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, with additional facts about Theseus found in Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579). In these sources, Theseus fights with monsters, kills the Minotaur that threatened to destroy the island of Crete, wins the hearts of several princesses, and defeats the invading Amazons to marry their queen, Hippolyta. The Amazons were a nation of women-warriors, who despised men and refused to marry. It was thought that they came originally from Africa and conquered almost the whole of Asia before being defeated by Theseus.

This particular story of four lovers seems to be original to Shakespeare, who frequently employed the themes of mistaken identity and misplaced love to bring people together in his comedies. Though Chaucer’s "The Knight’s Tale" tells of two men’s rivalry for a woman’s affection, Shakespeare adds both a fourth lover and the intervention of the fairy world.

The story of the mechanicals and their efforts to present a play to Theseus may be based in part on a play by Anthony Munday, John a Kent and John a Cumber (1587-1590). This play tells of a group of artisans and their comic tribulations as they attempt to rehearse a play for noble spectators. A boy named Shrimp employs some magic to interfere in their rehearsal process, much as Puck interferes with the mechanicals. The story of a man’s transformation into an ass is told in Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and in the legend of King Midas whom Phoebus Apollo curses. The play the mechanicals are rehearsing is based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and also Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women.

Within the British Isles, ideas about fairies vary from county to county. Often one small village cannot agree with its neighbor about the invisible creatures that live in the nearby woods, underneath the hill, or at the bottom of the garden. It is not surprising that Shakespeare had a great deal of "knowledge" of supernatural beings and their activities. As a boy he lived in a small market-town, and fairy stories are much more common in the country than the cities. Fairies were also popular subjects in late sixteenth century literature where they appeared in works like John Lyly’s Endymion and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Shakespeare likely turned to Huon of Bordeaux, a French romance translated by Lord Berners in 1540. This introduces a fairy king named Oberon who lords over a haunted wood where he practices magic. Titania is drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Puck from English legend documented by Reginald Scot in The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584).

While the stories of the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream may be traced to a variety of sources, Shakespeare’s genius was in bringing them together. If he had stuck to the traditional unities of time and place, a mythological Theseus and his courtiers would never have encountered the more contemporary mechanicals or the fairies of English folklore.

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

Oberon, King of the Fairies

Titania, Queen of the Fairies

Puck, Oberon’s attendant, also called Robin Goodfellow

Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseed, Fairies attending Titania

Theseus, Duke of Athens

Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons

Egeus, father of Hermia

Hermia, in love with Lysander

Lysander, in love with Hermia

Demetrius, preferred by Egeus as a match for Hermia

Helena, in love with Demetrius

Peter Quince, a carpenter (Prologue in the play of Pyramus and Thisbe)

Nick Bottom, a weaver (Pyramus)

Francis Flute, a bellows-mender (Thisbe)

Tom Snout, a tinker (Wall)

Robin Starveling, a tailor (Moonshine)

Snug, a joiner (Lion)

Philostrate, Master of the Revels at the court of Theseus

SETTING

The action of the play alternates between the two worlds of Theseus’ Athens and the fairy world ruled by Titania and Oberon.

SYNOPSIS

NOTE: One of the distinguishing features of L‡szl— Marton’s production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is his arrangement of the text. Because it differs in some respects from Shakespeare’s original format, the synopsis below follows Marton’s script.

The play begins in the forest with a meeting between one of Titania’s fairy attendants and Puck, the attendant to Oberon. When the fairy announces that Titania just behind her, Puck warns that Oberon is also near by and Titania should not come near him. The fairy recognizes Puck as the "the knavish sprite call’d Robin Goodfellow" and asks him if all the rumors of his mischief are true. As Puck begins to list his infamous deeds, Oberon and Titania wander into each other and begin arguing. The argument culminates in Oberon’s request that Titania give him the young Indian boy she has been raising. When Titania refuses to give him the boy, Oberon swears to torment her. After Titania leaves, Oberon summons Puck and tells him of a special "love-juice" that is administered to the eyes and makes the wearer of it fall in love with the next thing he or she sees. Oberon instructs Puck to place the love-juice on Titania’s eyes.

The next scene takes place in Athens, where Theseus, with Hippolyta at his side, sits in judgement over a grievance brought by Egeus. Egeus explains that he has given Demetrius permission to marry his daughter Hermia, but that Hermia plans to go against him and marry Lysander instead. Theseus warns Hermia that unless she follows her father’s wishes, she will be put to death or forced to become a nun. Hermia and Lysander make plans to run away to the forest where they will stay with Lysander’s aunt. Hermia’s best friend Helena appears complaining that Demetrius, whom she loves, will not look at her and thinks only of Hermia. Hermia and Lysander tell Helena of their plan to flee Athens, leaving Helena alone in lovesickness.

In another part of the forest, Peter Quince and the mechanicals have gathered to divide the parts in Pyramus and Thisbe, the play they will present for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding day.

When Helena tells Demetrius of Hermia’s flight from Athens, Demetrius follows Hermia and Lysander into the forest. Helena pursues Demetrius, pleading for his love, but Demetrius continues to reject her. After witnessing this exchange, Oberon takes pity on Helena, and orders Puck to put some of the love-juice on "the Athenian lover’s eyes". He takes some of the juice with him to use on Titania.

Hermia and Lysander lie down in the forest to rest for the night. Puck sees them sleeping and assumes Lysander is the Athenian lover Oberon wanted him to drug. Helena finds the sleeping Lysander and Hermia, and thinking they might be dead, wakes Lysander. With the love-juice in his eyes, Lysander promptly falls in love with Helena and pursues her even as she runs from him. Hermia wakes up in the forest alone.

The actors meet for a second time to rehearse their play. Puck watches their rehearsal in amusement, follows Bottom into a clearing, and "transforms" him into an ass. When Bottom returns to the rehearsal, the mechanicals run away frightened. Thinking his friends are trying to scare him by leaving him alone, Bottom begins to sing to himself. His voice wakes the sleeping Titania who sees Bottom (now an ass) and falls in love with him. She instructs her fairy attendants to pamper him and take him to her bower.

Oberon is pleased with the trick Puck has played on Titania, but when Demetrius enters still in pursuit of Hermia, he realizes Puck has given the love-juice to the wrong Athenian. When Hermia leaves, Demetrius falls asleep. Oberon tries to remedy Puck’s mistake by squeezing the love-juice on to Demetrius, who wakes to see Helena. When he declares his love to her, Helena becomes very upset, thinking that the two men who once loved Hermia are making fun of her. Hermia returns to witness the scene and the two girls begin to quarrel. The men are ready to fight each other for Helena’s love, but Oberon sends Puck to separate them. All four are lost in a dark mist and each one lies down to sleep. Puck removes the charm from Lysander’s eyes.

Titania plays with Bottom and her fairies until she falls asleep. Oberon watches Titania for a time, then feels sorry for her and removes the spell from her eyes. Waking, she is horrified to learn that she had been in love with an ass. Bottom wakes up, thinking he has only dreamed of being an ass, and goes home to find his friends. While he is out hunting, Theseus discovers the four sleeping lovers. When they awaken, Lysander is again in love with Hermia and Demetrius has now fallen in love with Helena. They explain their newly matched affections to Theseus, who overrides Egeus’ request that Hermia and Demetrius marry. The lovers follow Theseus back to Athens for a triple wedding ceremony.

Back in Athens, Theseus chooses Pyramus and Thisbe as the evening’s entertainment, against the warnings of his advisor, Philostrate, who has seen the rehearsal. Peter Quince’s company performs their play, much to the amusement of Theseus, Lysander, and Demetrius. When the play is finished, the fairies appear and give their blessing to the betrothed couples.

PRODUCTION HISTORY

No one knows for sure where or when A Midsummer Night's Dream was first performed. The first reference to the play appears in Francis Meres’ listing of the play in his Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, printed in 1598. Due to the stylistic similarities between A Midsummer Night's Dream and plays like Romeo and Juliet and Richard III, it is generally assumed that the play was written between 1594 and 1596.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespearean scholars have entertained the theory that A Midsummer Night's Dream was a play commissioned to be performed at a court wedding in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I. The structure of the play would have been cleverly suited to such an occasion, ending with a triple wedding at Theseus’ court when he and Hippolyta, Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander are all married. Furthermore, the festivities surrounding this triple wedding include a play performed at the nuptials by the mechanicals. The "play-within-a-marriage-within-a-play-within-a-marriage" provides an exciting layering of events appealing to those who espouse this theory. A Midsummer Night's Dream also contains the recurring themes of love and marriage, as well as allusions to Elizabeth I that some see as compliments meant to be spoken in her presence. The play ends with a fairy blessing of "this place" and the noble owner, lending credence to the supposition that the play was intended to be performed in the home of a patron. Though these textual allusions peaked interest in the court-wedding-play theory, historical records have been unable to place the first performance at a specific wedding and therefore the theory remains unconfirmed.

The two weddings most frequently mentioned as the site of the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream are those of Elizabeth Vere to William Stanley, Earl of Derby on January 26, 1595, and Elizabeth Carey to Thomas Berkeley on February 19, 1596. Elizabeth Vere was a goddaughter and maid of honor to Elizabeth I, and it is known that the queen was present at the Vere-Stanley wedding. Elizabeth also visited Vere’s family home four days later, perhaps to witness some sort of entertainment. Elizabeth Carey was also a goddaughter to Elizabeth I, though there is no record of the queen attending the Carey-Berkeley wedding. Carey was the granddaughter of Henry Lord Hunsdon, a patron of Shakespeare’s company. Because it is believed that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written to celebrate Carey’s father’s election to the Order of the Garter in 1597, the idea that a play might have been commissioned for her wedding is not unreasonable.

In recent years, one scholar has attempted to connect the Carey-Berkeley wedding to the premiere of A Midsummer Night's Dream by analyzing the astrological references in the play. In his 1993 Shakespeare’s Almanac, David Wiles draws on the Elizabethan interest in astrology and their attention to astrological conditions in the planning of significant events. He cites a detailed list of lunar and planetary references in the text of the play, maintaining all these references would have agreed with the astrological readings for February 19, 1596, the date of the Carey-Berkeley wedding.

Astrological readings aside, many contemporary scholars remain unconvinced. In his 1997 study of the production history for A Midsummer Night's Dream, Gary Jay Williams does his best to discount the court-wedding-play theory. First, he notes that masques rather than plays were suitable wedding entertainment in Elizabeth’s time. He also notes that the documentation of the Carey-Berkeley wedding (by a record keeper meticulous in recording matters concerning the court) makes no mention of the presence of the queen. So even with the astrological connections and the close ties to Shakespeare’s company, the absence of the queen makes this an unlikely host for the premiere. Finally, the title page for A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1600 Fisher Quarto contains no reference to either a wedding or to the queen’s presence at the play’s first performance, an event which would likely have been noted for posterity. While these points taken individually do not necessarily discount the court-wedding-play theory, taken together the theory remains unsubstantiated. Unless some previously undiscovered document surfaces with more information on the nature of the first performance, the debate and speculation will continue, unresolved. This is a source of great frustration to those who look to the nature of the first performance for some sort of guidance in the presentation of modern productions.

Regardless of their opinions on the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, most scholars agree that the play was probably kept in the repertory of the King’s Men through Cromwell’s closing of the theatres in 1642. It was among the ten of Shakespeare’s plays reprinted in Jaggard’s 1619 Quarto and was listed as one of the plays presented for King Charles at Hampton Court in 1630.

A Midsummer Night's Dream appeared in the Cromwell years as a "droll" performed clandestinely in underground playhouses. Two versions of this droll were published in the seventeenth century, first as The Merry Conceits of Bottom the Weaver in 1661, and then in 1673 as Pyramus and Thisbe. Both drolls began with the meeting of the mechanicals and ended with the performance of their play. The lovers were cut and the lines of the fairies were severely reduced, but the characters of Oberon, Titania, and "Pugg" (Puck) remained, alternating their scenes with those of the mechanicals.

A 1662 performance under the title of A Midsummer Night's Dream was recorded by the diarist Samuel Pepys, though it is impossible to know how much of the original play was actually presented:

The best documented seventeenth century production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was a 1692 opera by Henry Purcell titled The Fairy Queen, an opera. The production was intended to celebrate the fifteen years of marriage of William and Mary as well as Mary’s recent involvement in the government. Just as the compliments paid to female monarchs seemed to flatter Elizabeth I, these same compliments made the play a good choice for honoring Mary. In contrast to the operas of the Italians, English operas were structured in a way that did not completely eliminate the spoken word. In The Fairy Queen, spoken text comprised 40% of the performance time. It served as the structural framework of the play with each of the five acts ending in spectacular ballet performances for which Purcell wrote music. The text that did appear in The Fairy Queen was only half of Shakespeare’s original text. It was "Englishized" by cutting any mention of Athens or Greece and altered to fit the language of the Restoration, when some of the syntax and diction already seemed archaic. The Fairy Queen was popular enough to be briefly revived in 1693, but soon after the music was lost and the Purcell opera disappeared from view for some time. Since its rediscovery in 1900, The Fairy Queen has enjoyed a few concert performances, but has rarely been fully staged.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, there was some effort made to construct a national literary canon, of which Shakespeare was a major component. His plays were prefaced and edited by writers such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Though many of the tragedies and history plays were highly praised during this century, A Midsummer Night's Dream was not yet recognized as serious or substantive enough to support Shakespeare’s place among the great literary minds of England. Consequently, it was all but ignored until the mid-nineteenth century.

The one man who did see fit to produce A Midsummer Night's Dream was David Garrick, one of the great actor-managers of the eighteenth century and a man who spent much of his career promoting Shakespeare as England’s national poet. During his tenure at Drury Lane between 1747 and 1767, Garrick staged twenty-six of Shakespeare’s plays, including three productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The first of these productions was staged in 1755 and called The Fairies. Unlike The Fairy Queen, which retained spoken text, this opera was entirely sung. The twenty-eight songs, composed by John Christopher Smith, included both recitative and music to accompany dance. Both the story and the original text were cut drastically, including only the lovers and the quarrelling Oberon and Titania and using lines from the play in a mere seven songs.

In 1763 Garrick collaborated with the playwright George Coleman on a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that included more of the original text, with some of it now spoken. Twelve of Smith’s songs from the 1755 production were used; twenty-one new songs by various composers were added. Of the three productions Garrick presented, this version retained the greatest amount of Shakespeare’s original text, but was so unpopular it played only one night. From this version, Coleman extracted the script for A Fairy Tale which opened three days later and became a rather successful afterpiece. It told the stories of the mechanicals and the fairies, but eliminated the mortals. This was the last and most popular of the productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream under Garrick, but also the one which used the least of Shakespeare’s original script.

The Nineteenth Century and Pictorial Realism

The next production of record was not until 1816 when yet another musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream was presented at Covent Garden, under the supervision of Frederick Reynolds with music by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop. This production came a year after the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. In the same way that it was earlier recognized as a tribute to royalty, A Midsummer Night's Dream was now regarded as a celebration of the English national spirit. While Reynolds brought back more of Shakespeare’s text than his predecessors, he was still criticized for not using enough, an indication that the play was starting to find favor with a literate audience. Reynolds’ production was also praised for its lavish, expansive scenery, a trend which was to be the hallmark of nineteenth century productions. The painted scenery was changed as the location in the forest changed with successive scenes, inspiring Hazlitt’s famous comment on the spectacle of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The Reynolds-Bishop production went to America in 1826 and was revived in London in 1833.

Lucia Elizabeth Vestris’ 1840 production marked the end of the musical revivals and the beginning of the era of Victorian productions heavily focused on illusion and spectacle. In the midst of spectacle, this generation of productions also signaled an attempt to return more completely to Shakespeare’s original text. Vestris used more original text than any production since Shakespeare’s time, kept the series of scenes intact, and used songs with lyrics from Shakespeare’s texts alone.

Vestris planned the production as a tribute to the marriage of Victoria and Albert that had occurred earlier that year. When the royal couple attended the production, the young Queen Victoria wrote of "stupid duets and songs" in her diary entry on that day. As a female manager during the reign of Queen Victoria, Vestris not only chose to present a play portraying a strong queen, she also cast herself in the role of Oberon, a practice which lasted almost without exception through 1914.

The Vestris production came as fairies were populating literature, ballets, operas and art, and paid tribute to the trend with Titania’s elaborate fairy entourage. The fifty-two fairies were dressed in silver-specked white gauze dresses with wings attached and wore colored sashes to indicate their allegiance to Oberon or Titania. There were also fauns and satyrs in the band of fairies.

The most important element of the Vestris production was the onset of elaborate scenery it brought with it. The scenery was no longer used to create a representational palace or forest, but instead strove to create the illusion of real palaces and forests on stage, a trend that growing scenic innovations supported. This style has been referred to as pictorial realism and was a mainstay of nineteenth century productions. The spectacle of Vestris’ production included lavish scenery changes requiring long breaks in the action. With the additional songs and restored text, the production ran three and a half hours. It was a costly, but well-received and respected production.

Though this production history focuses primarily on English language revivals of A Midsummer Night's Dream, there have been a few non-English productions of note that have incontrovertibly influenced future productions or serve as remarkable milestones in the play’s history. A Midsummer Night's Dream has long been a favorite of German audiences and likely appeared in Germany in the early seventeenth century when English actors traveled there to perform similar pieces. In 1843 Friedrich Wilhelm IV commissioned a production that premiered at the Potsdam court theatre under the direction of Ludwig Tieck. It was for this production that Felix Mendelssohn wrote his well-loved incidental music, though his 1827 overture for the play was already quite popular. Mendelssohn’s score is considered by many the best incidental music ever written for A Midsummer Night's Dream and was used almost exclusively in productions throughout the nineteenth century. Its "Wedding March" became customary bridal procession accompaniment after it was played at the 1858 wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter, the princess royal. Though Tieck’s production is immortalized for introducing Mendelssohn’s score, it should also be remembered that he was the first to espouse the long debated court-wedding-play theory. He set the production on a stage that combined elements of the Elizabethan stage and pictorial realism, a practice that did not appear in English language productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream until the early twentieth century.

Back in England, Samuel Phelps was producing Shakespeare at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Between 1844 and 1862, he produced thirty-one Shakespeare plays. His audience was predominantly working class, quite different from the West End audiences for whom Shakespeare was most often performed. The spectacular scenic innovations of Phelps and his designer, Frederick Fenton, continued in the vein of pictorial realism. Night in the forest was created by using two rolls of painted scenery; the upstage roll with night clouds and moon was unfurled so the moon ascended while downstage the cutout trees unrolled in the opposite direction. The fog and green haze of the forest were created by hanging gauze and using the gas lighting installed specifically for this production. Phelps’ A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed for the length of the 1853-54 season and enjoyed revivals in 1855, 1856, and 1861.

Charles Kean left his mark on Shakespeare by striving to present an historical accuracy unprecedented in his time. As he attempted to recreate the historical world of the play on stage, his playbills and published editions of the plays documented his research. He took great care to make artistic decisions that illustrated the era in which the play was set, claiming that "in no single instance have I ever permitted historical truth to be sacrificed to theatrical effect." Consequently, it is interesting that Kean’s 1856 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream recreated Periclean Athens (fifth century BC) rather than the Athens of the mythological Theseus. Kean justified this decision by claiming the play would have a greater effect if set in the grandeur of ancient Greece "at a time when it had attained its greatest splendor in literature and art — when it stood in pride and glory, ennobled by a race of illustrious men." As a result of his decision, Kean was able to include the grandeur of the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Erectheum. The props used by the mechanicals were reproductions of the tools believed to be in use at that time. Whatever the era, Kean’s Athens looked less like Victorian England than previous productions. The ninety fairies he employed simply added to the spectacle of the production. Though Kean was meticulous about his historical research, his allegiance to the text was not as strong — he cut almost 40% of Shakespeare’s original script.

By the end of the nineteenth century, any reputable theater manager had to successfully stage Shakespeare. It had also become compulsory to stage his plays with lavish scenic design in the tradition of pictoral realism. A Midsummer Night's Dream was an obvious favorite for followers of this tradition and firmly established itself as a stronghold for Victorian theater. This attitude was reflected across the Atlantic as well.

Augustin Daly’s 1888 A Midsummer Night's Dream opened in New York with a visually stunning recreation of a lavish classical palace, an image that mirrored the Newport mansions of Gilded Age America. His production was distinguished by its use of novelties and technical innovations to heighten the spectacle of the theatrical event. Daly’s additions included fairies with battery-powered lights in their hair and on their wands, electric fireflies, chirping crickets, and his most infamous creation — Theseus’ ship. Through the use of moving scenery in the background, a moving "shoreline" in the front, and a stationary ship in between, Daly created the effect of a ship travelling from the forest into Athens. His production was revived in 1890, went to London in 1895, and toured the United States in 1895-96.

The crowning glory of pictorial realism in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream came in 1900 under the direction of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Like Daly, Beerbohm Tree employed battery-operated lights to illuminate the fairies, including lights placed on Oberon’s breastplate and crown. Many of the fairies were children, one of whom was suspended above the stage. Beerbohm Tree’s most notorious addition came with the 1911 revival when live rabbits appeared following trails of bran around the stage. It was no coincidence that Beerbohm Tree chose to stage A Midsummer Night's Dream when England was entangled in the Transvaal war with the Boers, the seeming beginning of the end for "good old England." A Midsummer Night's Dream had long been a celebration of imperial power — the original production honored Elizabeth I, Purcell’s The Fairy Queen paid tribute to William and Mary, and Vestris’ revival hailed the young Queen Victoria. It soon came to be regarded as a celebration of British culture and after 1890 received constant performance in England by all levels of performers and companies. Only Henry V has received more prominence in English life as a national play.

The lavish Victorian-era staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream reflected contemporary innovations in scenic design, sound, and lighting that made it possible to create ever more intricate illusions on stage. This trend was evident in the productions of virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays at the time, not just A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the chief opponents of pictoral realism was a nineteenth century theater manager named William Poel, considered revolutionary at the time for staging Shakespeare on an Elizabethan-style stage with little or no scenery. His expressed mission was to put the emphasis back on the text. Though he was mocked by most of the theater managers of his time, he did receive support from George Bernard Shaw who proclaimed, "the best scenery you get will only destroy the illusion created by the poetry." Unfortunately, Poel never produced A Midsummer Night's Dream and his movement away from the illusionist method was not fully realized in a major production until the twentieth century.

Three years after Beerbohm Tree brought live rabbits to the stage, Harley Granville Barker produced A Midsummer Night's Dream, the last of his three landmark productions of Shakespeare. Though he recognized the need to move away from some elements of the Victorian pictoral tradition, he also rejected William Poel’s return to the Elizabethan stage. With his designer Norman Wilkinson, Granville Barker created a set that espoused elements of Poel’s bare stage while incorporating some of the scenic advances of the last century. The design was more symbolic than those of his predecessors, though elements of it were equally lavish. His fairies’ costumes and exposed skin were covered in gold-leaf, causing quite a stir. Still, the focus of the production was the text. Granville Barker’s script included more original text than any other production since Shakespeare’s day and was delivered without the long, drawn-out oration of the Victorian era, moving the entire play along at a swifter pace. He eliminated Mendelssohn’s score (a hallmark of Victorian productions) and instead used old English folk songs to underscore the play.

The production was not embraced by the critical audience. Referring to Granville Barker’s production in his Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, George C.D. Odell exclaimed, "I hope that this silly and vulgar way of presenting Shakespeare died with all other vain, frivolous, unsimple things burnt up in the great war-conflagration." Though many of Granville Barker’s successors were deeply influenced by his ideas about Shakespeare’s text and presentation, the critical outrage over his A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to have affected him. He stopped directing shortly thereafter, though his famous Prefaces to Shakespeare have retained a permanent place for him in the study of Shakespeare.

In 1929 Granville Barker’s ideals were returned to the stage by Harcourt Williams whose A Midsummer Night's Dream focused on the swift delivery of Shakespeare’s verse, employing faster scene changes to keep the flow of the script. Williams was also heavily influenced by John Masefield’s 1911 William Shakespeare which revived the wedding-play theory first espoused by Tieck and now the subject critical scholarship. His production was the first in a series of productions that set the play in an Elizabethan-Jacobean court wedding. Williams also abandoned the Mendelssohn in favor of Granville Barker’s folk-song score.

Three years later, William Bridges-Adams staged a production at Stratford-upon-Avon, the site of Shakespeare’s birth and the final destination for many Shakespearean pilgrimages. 1932 was the first season in the new theater and A Midsummer Night's Dream was a logical choice for the celebration. Like Williams, Bridges-Adams set the palace scenes in an Elizabethan court with the courtiers costumed in Elizabethan dress. The sets were designed by Norman Wilkinson (Granville Barker’s designer) and the fairies were costumed in an "earthier" version of Granville Barker’s fairy costumes. Though Victorian-styled productions prevailed between the wars, modernist versions like those of Williams and Bridges-Adams constantly popped up to question this traditional approach and impacted the course of productions seen today.

Mendelssohn’s score, first employed by Tieck in 1843, remained an immensely popular musical choice in productions all over the world. When Hitler came to power in Germany, Mendelssohn’s Jewish name made his score an impossible choice for German directors wishing to produce A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the search began for a new score to accompany what was still a very popular play. There were national contests and several new productions; between 1933 and 1945, forty-four new attempts at the score were performed in Germany.

The productions of Ludwig Tieck and the music of Mendelssohn were not the only German influences on the production history of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The twentieth century brought Max Reinhardt, a major director and Shakespeare devotee who staged A Midsummer Night's Dream thirteen times between 1905 and 1934. His productions influenced the course of the modern director as we know it today — selecting "a style or scenic venue" suitable for each play. His own style was a reaction to German naturalism, producing a more festive theater that grew gradually darker as the realities of the twentieth century took hold.

The centerpiece of Reinhardt’s 1905 production was a revolving, three dimensional forest, benefited by a sophisticate lighting design that was able to isolate portions of the set. In some ways, it was very much a part of the pictorial realism tradition, though it has been described as less sentimental with a new energy. The fairies were more of the Grimm’s fairy tale vein and stood in opposition to the gauzy English fairies that pirouetted around so many English stages. Through 1927, Reinhardt’s productions remained free of the darker tones the World War II era would bring about; all nature and supernatural were benevolent.

In 1933, Hitler came to power in Berlin and Reinhardt left the country, losing most of his theater properties to the Nazis. Over the course of the next three years, he produced lavish outdoor productions in Florence (1933), Oxford (1934), and Hollywood (1935). Against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, Reinhardt began to explore the darker elements in Shakespeare’s forest. His Oberons were menacing, bordering on sexual predators; one of the fairies was "abducted" by a man in black as she finished a dance, her hands trailing behind her. Undoubtedly influenced by Freud, Reinhardt was also the first to hint that a trip through the unconscious might be less than a pleasant experience - both Bottom and the lovers express exuberant relief upon awakening from their dreams.

Surprisingly, Reinhardt’s 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream was markedly different in tone from his final stage versions. It was decidedly upbeat and billed as a romantic escape from the Great Depression. The text was cut significantly, probably to appeal to a wider market, but also to make way for the spectacle that film made possible.

America was also the backdrop for one of the more interesting, but less successful adaptations of the twentieth century. Influenced by recent takeoffs on Gilbert and Sullivan (The Hot Mikado and Swing Mikado), Swingin’ in the Dream set Shakespeare’s play in 1890’s New Orleans. With music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Eddie de Lange, Swingin’ in the Dream was created under the assumption that Shakespeare’s English was virtually a foreign language to most Americans. It included songs like "Jumpin’ at the Woodside" and "Darn that Dream" as well as a swing version of Mendelssohn’s "The Wedding March." The production opened in 1939 featuring Louis Armstrong as Bottom and Butterfly McQueen as Puck with choreography by Agnes de Mille and Herbert White. It ran for only thirteen performances and lost $100,000.

Back in England, the revivals continued. Tyrone Guthrie’s 1937 Old Vic production, starred Robert Helpmann as Oberon, Vivien Leigh as Titania, and Ralph Richardson as Bottom. Like Reinhardt’s Oberons, Helpmann was noted for his sinister take on the Fairy King, though at least one modern critic points out that Helpmann must have also brought a sort of androgyny and sexual ambiguity to the character, an interpretation that is interesting in light of modern understandings of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Guthrie continued in the vein of Granville Barker and Williams, placing emphasis on the text and using less literal images in his scenic design.

Michael Benthall’s 1954 production, also at the Old Vic, was performed a year after Elizabeth II’s coronation, another celebration of the female monarch. In a full revival of Victorian-era productions, it required thirteen tons of scenery. With Robert Helpmann returning as Oberon and Moira Shearer as Titania, the troupes of the Old Vic and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet were united for a dance-heavy production that marked the last use of the Mendelssohn score in a major production. Though some praised the production as a celebration of good taste, it was also criticized for reviving ideas about staging that were considered outdated.

The Victorian era finally disappeared after inspiring three more productions in the 1960’s. George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet became a staple of the New York City Ballet. Sir Frederick Ashton also composed a ballet in 1964 on the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Benjamen Britten’s 1960 opera was praised for its use of Shakespeare’s text, preserved by libretist Peter Pears. Incorporating an Oberon that is a counter-tenor and an all-boy fairy chorus, it was notable for the homoeroticism it inspired, a perfect segue into the post-modern productions of the last forty years.

Today’s productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream have been heavily affected by the increasing prominence of the director in the theater. Influenced by the atrocities of World War II and the cultural transformations of the 1960’s, the most recent set of productions are darker, more sexual, and less sentimental than their predecessors. While Peter Brook’s seminal 1970 production is sometimes credited with the advent of this tradition, the trend began at least ten years earlier.

In 1959 a 28-year-old Peter Hall directed a production featuring what was to become the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hall was somewhat influenced by Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s recent development of the open stage, a revised form of the Elizabethan stage that moved away from the proscenium setting and into a thrust stage. The set dressing was minimal for the time, using a backdrop for Theseus’ palace and bringing on shrubbery and flowers to indicate the forest. The courtiers were costumed in high Elizabethan style; Oberon and Puck were dressed similarly but were barefoot and barelegged. The fairies were no longer graceful ballerinas, but rather "impish urchins." The lovers were intentionally clumsy in their speaking of the verse, reflecting the trend of the entire production toward a less graceful and less consistently poetic presentation and away from more traditional, upper class renditions. Titania was no longer simply amorous for Bottom; she displayed an obvious sexual desire for the man turned donkey. Hall’s production proved a potent transitional piece into the productions that followed. Though rejected by many in its first showings, over the period of four years in which it was produced, its new style was eventually embraced by mainstream critics.

Another landmark foreign production was that of Ariane Mnouchkine and the ThŽ‰tre du Soleil in 1968. A Midsummer Night's Dream was her first Shakespeare production and was very much influenced by Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary and Antonin Artaud’s "Theater of Cruelty". It is one of the darkest productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream ever created. The stage was covered with goatskins, and all of the fairies were satyrlike; Oberon strangled one of Titania’s attendants and raped Hermia, while Puck was described as malevolent, even demonic, in his manipulations of the lovers. The mechanicals were clownish, dressed in nineteenth century working class costumes. The production was extremely popular in France as well as in Italy and the USSR where it later toured.

The defining twentieth century production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is almost indisputably Peter Brook’s 1970 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Though it received mixed critical reviews at the time, it was immensely popular with audiences and toured extensively abroad. Brook and his designer, Sally Jacobs, set the play within a trapezoidal, roofless "white box". There were three exposed walls with two doors upstage, ladders along the side walls, and swings hanging into the space. It was quite an athletic/acrobatic performance with actors using trapezes, catwalks, and stilts to move about the space. The costumes were modern, with Demetrius and Lysander clad in tye-died shirts and Hermia and Helena in long white dresses. The fairies were dressed in tunics and slacks. Brook moved his production away from any sort of illusionism or realism and entirely into the realm of metaphor. He heightened the role of the mechanicals who had gradually become simple comedic elements, not fully integrated into many other productions. Brook was interested in exploring the role of performer in their actions. Sexual elements of the production were given full attention in new and startling ways. Brook’s A Midsummer Night's Dream was revolutionary for pulling the play out of the literal worlds of Athens and the forest. Even productions like Mnouchkine’s that stretched the limits of the play failed to take it out of some literal picture of a fairy world. When Brook set the bar for Midsummer, it became "a summit that virtually every world-class director seeks to scale."

After Brook, a series of renowned directors sought to make their mark on the play. The strongest visions fell into two categories: those that emphasized the dark elements of the play and those that highlighted the sensual. Those that followed the first path owed a debt to Mnouchkine’s 1968 production, though they were also liberated by Brook’s sweeping reinterpretation. The most famous of the darker productions are those of Alexander Lang in 1980 and Liviu Ciulei in 1985. Both productions depicted a brutal patriarchy in which the women were sexual victims and prisoners. In Alexander Lang’s production, the play opened with Theseus fondling a non-responsive Hippolyta and Egeus carrying Hermia screaming onto stage, throwing her on the floor, and holding a knife to her throat as he pled his case to Theseus. Pointing to the virtual silence of the women in the fifth act, Lang showed these women passively settling into unconventional marriages. Liviu Ciulei’s production, which premiered at the Guthrie Theater also focused on the struggle for power, including not only the conflict between men and women, but also the tension between races. Hippolyta was a tall African woman who arrived in a white Theseus’ court as a prisoner, captured in her combat fatigues. She was soon stripped and redressed in a white robe to match the rest of the court. In the fairy world, a black Oberon was equally tyranical toward the white Titania, forcing the sleeping drug on her violently.

While the 1960’s and Peter Brook’s production brought a whole new sexual language to almost all productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Alvin Epstein’s 1975 production at Yale Repertory and Bill Alexander’s 1986 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company are particularly noteworthy. Epstein’s production explored the earthy eroticism of the fairy world, with Christopher Lloyd as Oberon and a young Meryl Streep as Helena. Bill Alexander set his lovers in the 1930’s and the mechanicals in the 1950’s, two decades in which male chauvinism was prominent. Janet McTeer played both Hippolyta and Titania, but the three men she encountered were all different actors; therefore, when she became bored with her straight-laced Theseus, she conjured up an entirely different Fairy King, who was later replaced by Pete Postlethwaite’s Bottom, a gentle, bohemian lover to Titania/Hippolyta.

In the midst of productions that explored the boundaries broadened by Brook, there remained more conservative versions. Robin Phillips presented A Midsummer Night's Dream in both 1976 and 1977 in Stratford, Ontario, in honor of Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee and her visit to North America. Jessica Tandy was Titania/Hippolyta in a production staged as Elizabeth I’s dream, touching again on the wedding-play theory. Theseus was portrayed as the kind of dominating man that might have discouraged Elizabeth from marrying. Her "dream" was her love fantasy. In the 1994 season, Adrian Noble and the Royal Shakespeare Company presented a version that ultimately went on tour in the United States. It paid tribute to the 1970 Brook production in its appearance, though many thought it failed to aggressively reexamine the themes of the play.

In the four hundred years since its first performance, A Midsummer Night's Dream has undergone a series of facelifts as the wisdom of the passing years finds new ways to illuminate it. Ironically, when audiences cry out for a "good old-fashioned" rendition of this play, they are frequently expecting a production in the spirit of the Victorian era. This conception of the play is a narrow part of the diverse history of A Midsummer Night's Dream and reflects only one’s century’s understanding of the events contained in Shakespeare’s comedy. As the passing years continue to inform the artists that tackle this play, audiences can be guaranteed a multitude of new interpretations.

SUGGESTED READING

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Volume II. Edited by David Bevington. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

William Shakespeare: His world, His work, His influence. Edited by John F. Andrews. New York : Scribner, 1985.

Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, 1997.

OTHER SOURCES

Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Edited by Robert Sandler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Granville Barker, Harley. More Prefaces to Shakespeare. Ed. Edward M. Moore. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1974.

Kennedy, Dennis. Looking at Shakespeare: a Visual History of Twentieth Century Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Norton, 1974.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by David Bevington, et al. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. Trevor R. Griffiths. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996.