Secret Life of Books

Midsummer Nights Dream: are true love and sexual attraction magic tricks?

• Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole • Season 1 • Episode 16

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“The course of true love never did run smooth.” 

It certainly did not in Shakespeare’s psychedelic fantasy about cross-dressing, polyamory, speaking truth to power and tik-tok – centuries before the internet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is endlessly adapted and readapted. At its heart, it’s a play about the madness and thrill of attraction and love; about how strange it is when one human spots another human to spend their life with. 

In this episode there are green fairies who fight and turn flowers into love-potions. Is falling in love always this random and inexplicable? But the really big question is: are the faeries Incredible Hulk Green, or Fungus the Bogeyman Green? Help us decide. 

Will you side with Jonty that the “Rude Mechanicals” are hilarious and the young lovers are a tedious bore – or do you agree with Sophie that Bottom, Snug and Flute are unfunny and that Hermia and Helena are internet influencers before their time? A queen falls in love with a donkey, and the Duke of Athens compares lovers, poets and madmen. 

Join the SLOB team in a moonlit Athenian wood for love and laughs, and a moment of nostalgia for Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in the 1980s hit film Dead Poets’ Society.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading:

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The New Cambridge Shakespeare.” (2003).

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, (Norton, 2004).

Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton University Press, 2019.

Leonard Barkan, Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me, (Fordham UP, 2024)

Bart van Es, “Captive children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and child impressment on the early modern stage,” Renaissance Studies, 33;2, 2019.




Speaker 2:

Every book has two stories. The one that tells. And the one that hides.

Speaker:

Welcome to the secret life of books.

Speaker 2:

I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer. And I'm Sophie G, academic and writer. In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.

Speaker:

Today, A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.

Speaker 2:

So Sophie, A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps Shakespeare's floweriest, most poetic play it's written at a turning point in his career, early to mid, 1590s. It's got a whole load of famous lines like ill met by moonlight and the course of true love never did run smooth. It's got a king and a queen of fairies, who turn out to be a lot less=cute== and a lot more menacing and complicated. Then we expect of creatures who go around enchanting flowers and hiding acorn cups. And it's got a play within a play. There's a stolen Indian boy and a bizarre scene where the queen of the fairies falls in love with a donkey. There's a genuinely funny comedy sequence about artisans trying to put on an adaptation of a story from Ovid. In short, it's classic Shakespeare. It's been adapted many times. It's an opera by Benjamin Bri and a ballet by Felix Mendelssohn So what goes on that moonlit summer night in a forest outside classical Athens? Why is this a story that directors and actors and creatives keep coming back to? Sophie, give us a flavour of this flowery text.

Speaker:

Boy, Jonty, that was a nice little opener., it was tough picking a teasing opening text. sample for this one there's a rich archive of adaptations of Midsummer Night's Dream and rather than treating listeners yet again to one of our dulcet voices, we're actually going to outsource it on this occasion. So I was torn, should we choose from Baz Luhrmann, the Australian film director's famous opera version of this play, a disco pop dance number called Until Now, The Break of Day. should we go with that? Or should we go with this unbelievably brilliant swinging 60s, sort of Spinal Tap esque adaptation by Peter Hall?

Speaker 2:

I'm hurt. I think you let awake last night thinking I cannot do this. I can't bear the thought of hearing John T. Mangle Shakespeare. Anything but that. I mean, we're only on episode 15 and already you've reached a point to, you can't take it anymore. You've broken me.

Speaker:

The Peter Hall 1968 film, is Amazing. And as Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, Ian Holm and, Ian Richardson in it as Oberon, I'm going to do Oberon's famous speech. There was so much to choose from watching this. And as the listener hears this, I want them to know. that Ian Richardson is dyed a kind of pale off green. There is some incredible backlighting, there's some really hallucinogenic looking foliage, and he's got very vivid pinkish red lips.

Speaker 2:

He is really green. I mean, he's incredible Hulk green. Yeah, he's,

Speaker:

it's full green. Fungus the bogeyman green.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah. Okay, here we go.

Speaker 3:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where ox lips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over canopied with luscious wood vine, With sweet musk roses and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight, And there the snake throws her enameled skin Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

Speaker:

You would have done a great job with that too, Jonty. We can have a kind of, um, dream off.

Speaker 2:

Now you need to tell us something about this film because this is the first time we've used a clip from something and I'm terrified of multi conglomerate lawyers coming down on us like a ton of bricks but my understanding is that if we talk about the work of art that we've just featured We're in the clear. We're in what's called review and criticism. Yeah,

Speaker:

I've got two words for you, Jonty. Fair use.

Speaker 2:

Fair use. Okay.

Speaker:

So here's, I mean, I'll show you fair use.

Speaker 2:

Fair play.

Speaker:

Too easy. Okay. So, this is a film ill suited to the audio format because there are green faced scary fairies, on the fairy side of things. And then on the human side of things, this unbelievable costuming, sort of swinging 60s mini skirts and long socks and suits for the lovers. It's an epic adaptation that puts its finger, brilliantly I think, on how unhinged and menacing and it's downright psychedelic. This play, like Michael Pollan would want to make a movie about, you know, your mind on Midsummer Night's Dream. But it's also completely enchanting. And the adaptation that we just heard a clip from It's unbelievably kitsch, but it's also got this kind of Austin Powers groovy baby kind of piece to it. so people are always trying to adapt Midsummer Night's Dream to bring out its profound strangeness. And I think, you know, it's variably successful. But how was it for you, Jonty, re reading this play?

Speaker 2:

Yes, well, the thing about Shakespeare is you always forget how good Shakespeare is, right? We

Speaker:

always do. We all know Shakespeare's a

Speaker 2:

genius and then you sort of sit down to read Shakespeare with a slight sinking feeling and then you're always, oh, this is so good. but I tend to lean more towards Shakespeare's later plays. I find a lot of the early comedies Well, just not very funny. So I was slightly dreading reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, and actually, it, is a joy to read. I think the Act Three, where all the young Athenian lovers are getting very confused about their feelings, dragged a bit. Drags a bit, yeah. But I loved it. I thought the Rude Mechanicals I thought the Rude Mechanicals were genuinely funny. Yeah,

Speaker:

you wouldn't even let me say in the, in the working up of this episode that they were unfunny.

Speaker 2:

One of my things is Shakespeare isn't very funny, right? And I was reading this and thinking, oh, this is really funny. It's

Speaker:

really funny. Yeah, the Rude Mechanicals are amazing. I actually want to mount a robust defense of that, the tedious act three with all the interchangeable lovers, but Let's save that. Okay, so we are,

Speaker 2:

so we're coming into this with you thinking the rude mechanicals aren't funny, and I think they are funny, and you think that the Athenian lovers in the woods. Yeah, I think they've got a lot to offer to a contemporary audience. Well, I find them just a bit fraught and tedious. Yeah. So we've got some, real. Some

Speaker:

brawling to do. Okay, so let's have a summary of the play. It's a tricky play to summarize. So, Jonty, how are you going to go?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you've written me a summary, but I'm going to go jazz, okay? Oh, wow. You're improv. You're going to improv the

Speaker:

summary.

Speaker 2:

And this is a nightmare of a plot. But imagine, if you dare, Duke Theseus of Athens is getting married to Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, who he is. beaten in battle and is now marrying her as part of the weird way. Amazing.

Speaker:

And just to situate listeners, I think the Queen of the Amazons made a cameo in a recent adaptation of Wonder Woman, didn't she?

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, she did. There she was, Hippolyta. Go on. So there she was. And suddenly a lord called Aegeus says to Theseus, I'm in a terrible dilemma. My daughter Hermia is pledged to be married to a man called, Demetrius, but she doesn't want to marry him. She wants to marry this guy called Lysander. And, um, the duke says, well, she's got to do what her father says. Otherwise, she's got to either accept death or exile or become a nun.

Speaker:

Play for our times.

Speaker 2:

There is and there's a lot of riffing by Shakespeare and the characters about how it's better to choose death over becoming a nun because if you become a nun you can't have children. sex with men

Speaker:

through Shakespearean. So

Speaker 2:

you may as well just die. And also then it turns out the rude mechanicals appear who are local artisans in Athens and say that they want to do a play to celebrate Thetis's marriage to Hippolyta. Everyone heads into the local woods at night, as you do, to sort things out. Also in the woods are the king and queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, who are having a row because Titania is obsessed with a boy she has stolen from India, an Indian prince. And Oberon asks Puck, his underling, to make some trouble and douse Titania's eyelids with a love potion, so that she will fall in love with the next creature she sees. Oberon tells Puck to do the same thing to Demetrius, so that he will fall back in love with

Speaker:

This is right. I know you think it's wrong.

Speaker 2:

With Helena. Okay, this is my point about the young Athenian lovers. Rich, large, here. You can't tell who is who. Anyway, it does not work out. Chaos ensues. Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with Helena. Hermione is Hermia and Helena have a huge cat fight and Queen Titania falls in love with Bottom, the local weaver who's had his head turned into a donkey's head by. Eventually Oberon gets Puck to fix the whole kerfuffle. Hermia and Lysander end up together and Demetrius falls back in love with Helena and they all get married and then they watch Bottom and the Rude Mechanicals do their Pyramus and Thisbe play. Oberon and Titania make it up and Oberon gets the Indian child and Q Puck's famous closing speech, If We Shadows Have Offended. Boy, oh boy, if anyone has been able to follow what I've just said,

Speaker:

they win the prize of going to see Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. I remember, If We Shadows Have Offended from the 1980s before. Blockbuster Dead Poet Society. I do as well. Yes. Where Robert, Sean Leonard, if we shadows, have offended think, but this an all is mended.

Speaker 2:

What? What a beautiful film that is. Yes, I

Speaker:

could So good. Captain.

Speaker 2:

My captain.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

We're gonna stand on the tables right now. Yeah. Right

Speaker:

now. Yeah. Uh, Sophie,

Speaker 2:

why is this? barmy psychedelic play, a classic.

Speaker:

Well, Jonty, it's by Shakespeare. So that makes it a classic and it's about fairies. I mean, what more, what more is there to say? And I think Shakespeare invented the genre of fairy talk, stuff like, and I serve the fairy queen to do her orbs upon the green. I mean, how do you do someone's orbs? I think he means put. dew on the grass. Yes. I must go and seek some dew drops here and hang a pearl in every cow's lip's ear. That's Robin Goodfellow.

Speaker 2:

Who is Puck?

Speaker:

Yes, who talking about his fairy jobs. It's a farce. It's like a vicarage comedy Um, but it's instead it's set in the woods and it's a big romance. I mean, I'm always captivated by the, by the feelings of this play, by that feeling of like, why do we see someone, the most random person? And we know that we're attracted to them and not the person standing next to them. And why do we fall in love? I mean, it's, it completely puts its finger on, that is the person for me, that feeling. What about you? Why do you think it's a classic?

Speaker 2:

I love the fact that Shakespeare basically makes the story up himself, up until this point in his career he's worked with a lot of sources and historical stories and I think there are a few sources that he draws upon, but the story is Shakespeare's and I think the Rude Mechanicals are just a great innovation, and they steal the show totally for me.

Speaker:

Such a ballsy call,

Speaker 2:

it's like an Ealing comedy. He's giving us a glimpse of working class life, which I can't imagine there was much of in theatre at that point.

Speaker:

No, not at all. it's a massive departure for Shakespeare in his own writing trajectory. So this kind of gets us to the secret. I think that Midsummer Night's Dream has a couple of great secrets actually. It's written between 1594 and 1596, which is the first performance. And it's a pivot moment for Shakespeare because it's in the year of 1594 that he joins a company of actors called the Lord Chamberlain's Men. And the main guy in the company is Richard Burbage. And Shakespeare becomes a sort of part owner of this, of this acting company. And as a result he really changes his style as a writer. Up until that point, he's done a lot of collaborative writing. As you say, he's kind of written on classical themes and sort of, historical mashups. But after this, he changes the way he writes. And it's really about the interactions between the characters who, of course, we're remembering were the same set of actors. So audiences would have known who they are. So that's a great secret about the play. And then the other great secret, I think, is the whole subplot of the Indian boy, the changeling boy, which is normally talked about as a colonial moment in Shakespeare. And it definitely is. Titania and Oberon have stolen this child from, from India, I think that another really fascinating thing about the Indian boy subplot is, Shakespeare's kind of satire on slash attack on the practice of using young boys in, in theatricals in child theatre troupes. And It was a sort of unspoken scandal of the period. These theatre troupes were usually financed by high flying aristocratic men, and it had grown out of a choristry tradition, men who had choir boys in their households,, and then it became a theatrical thing. It was a big issue in the 1580s, the decade before Shakespeare rights. And then, child theater troops were suppressed in the 1590s. How about you? What are your secrets? Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Gross, by the way. Yeah.

Speaker:

It's so, so gross.

Speaker 2:

I think for me, in this play, Shakespeare is really making his mark. It's like, we know it's an early play, we don't know exactly when it's written, but we know it's an early ish play. Shakespeare is here showing his chops to anyone who isn't convinced that he's the greatest playwright around. Because in a way, the whole of A Midsummer Night's Dream is an illusion, and it's an illusion created by Shakespeare. language. He, he hasn't got a historical source. No one gets killed. He just weaves a whole spell out of language and poetry and creates a couple of hours of entertainment from that. And I think for people seeing it, for his rivals or competitors seeing this play, this would have been the moment when they thought, okay, he's better than all of us.

Speaker:

Yeah,

Speaker 2:

and he's saying, I can create all this out of nothing, out of thin air. Yeah,

Speaker:

Okay, so what's going on with Shakespeare? Tell us, take us through Shakespeare up until Midsummer Night's Dream.

Speaker 2:

Okay, there's two main bits I want to linger on because We did Macbeth very early on in this podcast and we didn't talk much about Shakespeare's life, not least because we don't really know much about Shakespeare's life. But I was reading Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant book, Will in the World. Yeah, it's a wonderful

Speaker:

book.

Speaker 2:

There is, fascinatingly, an incident that happened during Shakespeare's childhood, which scholars believe is a huge, inspiration on A Midsummer Night's Dream. So it gives us a chance to look a bit at Shakespeare's early years. So he's born in a town in the English Midlands called Stratford upon Avon in the 1560s. And when he's 11 years old in 1575, Queen Elizabeth I goes to stay with Lord Dudley in England. his nearby castle of Kenilworth. And Lord Dudley was one of the noblemen who she got very close to. People thought she might marry. But by this time, the relationship is cooling off rather. And she goes to stay with him as part of her traveling through, through England. And for 19 days, he puts on this Feast of entertainment for Queen Elizabeth. There's all sorts of acts, and plays, and

Speaker:

How exhausting for her. I mean, if we think it's rough to have to go to a two hour Shakespeare play, imagine what it's like for Queen Elizabeth to have, how many days? Nine days of non stop entertainment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, nineteen. Nineteen days of being entertained. That

Speaker:

puts immersive experience in context, doesn't it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, are you not entertained? Yeah. Stephen Greenblatt and presumably scholars before him, they don't know, of course, if Shakespeare at age 11 was able to go and see some of these spectacles, but they are fairly sure that this, period at Kenilworth, these 19 days, is being commented on in a Midsummer Night's Dream because one of the entertainments was that an enormous, uh, 24 foot long mechanical dolphin rose outta the waters of the lake by the castle at at kennelworth. Yeah. For Queen Elizabeth's astonishment and entertainment. Amazing. And it had musicians inside and an actor, on top. And there's a moment in the Midsummer Night Stream where Oberon King of the fairies says to Puck that once I sat upon a promontory and heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back. So this is, seems to be calling to mind this mechanical, dolphin incident. Not least because he then says, goes on to say Oberon, that on this occasion cupid, the god of love took aim at the fair vest thrown by the west. And that's thought to be Queen Elizabeth. the fair vest. She, she was a virgin queen but the imperial votress, the queen, passed on in maiden meditations fancy free. And so again, this is believed Shakespeare is reminding Elizabeth herself, who it is thought saw an early performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, of this moment earlier in her life when she was very close to Dudley. She might even have married him, but in the end it didn't happen. And it's Shakespeare flattering Elizabeth, reminding her of this rather charmed moment in, in her life. So, so there is a strong implication that Shakespeare certainly knew about the celebrations at Kenilworth, that they happened near him, and was something he may even have seen as a, as a child.

Speaker:

Sort of casting myself into the scene at Kenilworth, and presumably you couldn't go and get a hot dog or a burger when you got a bit bored. You were sort of trapped on wet grass watching this gigantic dolphin being cranked. You could probably get

Speaker 2:

roast chestnuts, I would have thought. Yeah,

Speaker:

maybe,. Or watch some cock baiting or something. Yes. But you would have been watching this dolphin being cranked out of some sort of wooden box I mean, it's not, Titanic. It's not gripping, is it?

Speaker 2:

No, but it probably was at the time what I want to know is how did the musicians who are inside the dolphin survive being underwater before they were cranked to the surface? Yeah,

Speaker:

great point. So there was actual water?

Speaker 2:

Well, we don't know. I mean, obviously

Speaker:

there wasn't because they wouldn't have survived. Let's

Speaker 2:

leave the 24 foot long mechanical dolphin.

Speaker:

So to sum it up, Bottom line, Shakespeare's sort of, it's a breath of fresh air in A Midsummer Night's Dream that his play within a play is very short. And it turns into this really sophisticated interplay between the people rather than the kind of gimmick or the trick of the stagecraft itself.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Shakespeare's saying, I don't need 24 foot mechanical dolphins. I'm so good with words. I'm a raw dog. I'm a raw dog.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So anyway, it's a nice glimpse into the world of Shakespeare's childhood, but, jump cut 20 years. We believe the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably around 1595 or 96.

Speaker:

And it's not in the Globe. So this is a point that I want to clarify for listeners, because I think that nowadays, people think of Shakespeare as being performed in the Globe all the time, but he wasn't. He starts out as an actor, as a player, as it would have been called. And he, is writing, but he's often collaborating on plays with other people. Then he joins, this troupe called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, with the well known actor Richard Burbage. their first performance was in a disused archery studio or something, called Newington Butts. The real reason I wanted to reprise the history of the Lord Chamberlains made itself was, you could say Newington butts, so that I could say Newington butts. Okay, yeah. But now it's done. then they had to shift to a place called Cross Keys in, but there was a lot of complaining from the residents about how much noise they were making. And so eventually they moved into a playhouse, which was called appropriately enough, the theater owned by Berg's father James.

Speaker 9:

And in this career move on Shakespeare's part into, being one of the co owners of a theatrical company, he would have been exposed to the real everyday life of trying to get a bunch of actors of pretty variable quality to put on a play. So he would have seen people forgetting their lines, because of the way that,, theater scripts were written at the time. It was often the case that an actor would accidentally read his as part of the performed lines. So in other words, the jokes that he's making in A Midsummer Night's Dream about this amateur theatrical troupe, the Rude Mechanicals, is very much a riff on his experience of becoming, a kind of theater impresario.

Speaker 10:

I want to pick up on something you said earlier. Did you say that they were working in a particular theatre or space and they got moved because the neighbours complained? Yeah, I did, yeah. Imagine being the person who complained about Shakespeare, you know, talking in the building next door. There's this

Speaker 9:

guy, he's making a hell of a lot of noise, move him on. That's not a

Speaker 10:

great No. There's not much foresight in that, is there?

Speaker 9:

No, they missed it. They missed the point. The other thing to add about Shakespeare's, position in Lord Chamberlain's Men is that the actors who were playing the main characters were really well known. So Richard Burbage, who was the most celebrated, dramatic, he was like the Laurence Olivier of the day, he was playing Oberon. And then there was another actor, called Will Kemp, who was incredibly popular. he was physically very enormous He was quite plain spoken. Famously, he didn't like grand words or big speeches. So Will Kemp played bottom. in, Midsummer Night's Dream. He was like a fan favorite. The audience would have really loved him.

Speaker 10:

They would applaud when he came on, wouldn't they? Totally. It would be like in a sitcom. Yeah, totally. Where the Fonz comes on in Happy Days. Yeah, yeah. And the canned laughter occurs. He was the Fonz.,

Speaker 9:

Um, what does the Fonz say? I'm cool. Isn't that what he

Speaker 10:

said? Yes, do you think Will Kemp had his little catchphrases? Yes, he would come on, everyone would applaud, and then he would say a catchphrase. Yeah, like,

Speaker 9:

I'm cool. Yeah, and so lots of parts in those plays that we just mentioned were written for Will Kemp. Remember that everyone was played by men at the time, so, we're really aware of the, the comedy and the personal interactions among the players as much as we are, of the kind of plot of the story itself.

Speaker 10:

I was thinking about what you were saying about this relationality between the, the actors and the characters. It's a reminder of this extraordinary. evolution that theatre as an art form had just gone through because when Shakespeare was growing up there was theatre. You had, the Miracles, the Miracle Plays. Yeah, the Miracle Plays. Oh, boring. Oh, my God. They're so boring, the Miracle Plays. So

Speaker 9:

they're sort of, these medieval plays that were played. Put on in like town streets and squares and stuff. And they were basically rehashings of already quite boring episodes from the Bible.

Speaker 10:

Yeah, they're a real buzzkill. I mean, if you're in a good mood walking down the high streets, you know, Friday night.

Speaker 9:

And a medieval mystery play is coming

Speaker 10:

your way. Yeah, you're, it's a massive downer. And then there were morality plays, which are much more about having a laugh but you have these very, two dimensional abstracted characters who are literally called things like vice. And so everything that seems to be going on in the London theatre at the time, in the 1580s and 1590s, as it's becoming a much more of a commercial market, is making characters three dimensional, aligning them with the actors, having the characters engage with one another in new and interesting ways.

Speaker 9:

Yeah, And so there is source material for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Theseus and Hippolyta, for example, are characters found in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. so Shakespeare's kind of nicking material from other literary sources, but he's putting his own story out. stamp on it as never before. And the tale of Pyramus and Theresby actually, which is the story that the Rude Mechanicals put on, that's nicked from Ovid's metamorphoses.

Speaker 10:

He's opened the fridge. It's Sunday night, he hasn't had time to go shopping. There's like an egg at the back, a bit of cheese in the cupboard. He's rummaging around and then he's putting an amazing dinner together. Yeah, the

Speaker 9:

inevitable soy sauce. Yeah,

Speaker 10:

and just out of a few loose ingredients he's constructing something delicious. And

Speaker 9:

the diners are like, oh my god, this is like the best chicken dinner I've ever had.

Speaker 10:

So, That is what Shakespeare is doing in this play.

Speaker 9:

So what we're going to do today is, rather than going sort of plot point by plot point through this play. we're going to talk in terms of a couple of big themes and then we're going to look at some of the most important character groupings in the play.

Speaker 10:

I've got a big word in capitals here in your notes. It says AUTHORITY. Which is a bit of a buzzkill.

Speaker 9:

Such a buzzkill. Authority, I feel like, was one of those words that was always being written on the chalkboard when I was a university student. Why did I write authority in all caps? Well, I think what the very first stages of this play set in the court of Theseus in Athens are introducing us to is this idea that there are very tightly held authority structures that are active in the world of Athens, and it's from those authority structures that the characters ostensibly escape. when they flee into the woods to either practice their play or find the right lover or elope. They think they're getting away from authority, but what we discover when we go into the world of the fairies and of Oberon and Titania is that they, in their own way, reproduce these kind of very hierarchical and quite oppressive power structures and authority structures. So the question in Shakespeare always is where does freedom come from? Where does a release from constraint come from? Obviously, Theseus's court is itself a way of containing power, of holding power. And we see not just royal or legal power with the threat that if you don't do what your dad says, you have to either go into a nunnery or be killed. We're seeing parental power too.

Speaker 10:

So just to recap on that, What happens very early on at the start is one of Theseus's sort of minor lords comes to Theseus and says, I've got a dilemma. My daughter is refusing to marry the man I've decided she's going to marry. I want her to marry Demetrius, but she says she's in love with Lysander. And if she chooses not to marry him and doesn't, defy me, I'm going to assert my right in Athenian law as a parent, I can have her killed. So totally, this is authority in capitals at, at Plaham.

Speaker 9:

And so the statement made to Hermia, who's the disobedient child To you your father should be as a god, one that composed your beauties, yea, and one to whom you are but as a form in wax by him imprinted, and within his power to leave the figure or disfigure it. So, even though this seems to be a statement about parental authority over children, that children should, be imprinted by their parents as though they were a wax seal. It's also actually Shakespeare thinking about, what an author is doing. See, author, authority, auctoritas. Oh, yes. Yes. So Shakespeare's thinking about, the way in which an author also is creating figures and is he figuring them or disfiguring them? So there's this glimpse of the kind of intricacy that becomes the hallmark of Shakespeare. He's never just saying one thing. All right, so basically everyone's down in the dumps at the beginning of the play, and what they need is a bit of magic. The big event of this play is the advent of Oberon and Puck and their ability to create magic. And I think it's a really, really fascinating, complicated presence in Midsummer Night's Dream. What do you think about the magic? What is the magic?

Speaker 10:

Well, big question. What is magic in a Midsummer Night's Dream? Yeah.

Speaker 9:

Good essay question.

Speaker 10:

So there's all the obvious things, you know, in a way magic represents the magic of the theatre, theatre itself. On one level, and I talked about this earlier, I think magic in the play is poetry. So poetry more than theater. And Shakespeare is saying with poetry, with just a couple of people on an almost bare stage or space and there is a theory that the display was first performed not in a usual theatre but actually at a wedding. So it would've been a very bare,, background. And even

Speaker 9:

if you discredit that it's definitely important to remember that in an open air theatre like the Lord Chamberlain's men's theatre, It was open air, there were very few effects, there was no way of controlling sound, there wouldn't have been a lot of props, it's sort of the opposite actually of cranking a giant dolphin out of the water, it was very minimalist, so the language is doing the work.

Speaker 10:

Right, and so on one level Shakespeare is saying, through poetry I can create illusions, I can create these characters and take you on a whole journey. journey. And in this very famous speech by Theseus at the end, where he's heard from the young lovers about all the strange things that have happened in the woods, he makes a comparison between lovers, madmen and poets that, they are of imagination, all compact. But he says specifically of poets, The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Actually, I'm going to do this in that kind of 1960s television Shakespeare. Yeah, please do. The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth, The forms of things unknown, The poet's pen turns them to shapes And gives to it. Eddie Nothing, a local habitation, and a name.

Speaker 9:

Oh, you really brought it back to the 60s at the end there. In the middle, there was a sort of David Attenborough bit, but then you brought it back to Ian Holm.

Speaker 10:

Well, thanks. That's a neg, but I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it anyway. Take

Speaker 9:

what you can get.

Speaker 10:

Anyway, but of course, being Shakespeare, it's never that simple that magic is just a metaphor for poetry. It seems to be doing a whole lot of other things as well. So

Speaker 9:

much. I find magic in Shakespeare. extremely interesting. It comes up a lot, famously in Tempest toward at the end of his writing life, but I think that Shakespeare's often staging scenes that are magical or quasi miraculous. Think about the dagger or think about the trope of Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane in Macbeth. These and the witches, you know, he's always playing around with this idea of, of what is magic. and in Midsummer Night's Dream, he's using magic to explore the phenomenon of something that is invisible it's not solid or permanent, but at the same time, it's completely real and substantial and powerful. So I actually want to give a few examples of what I mean by this. So the whole play is structured around a marriage. It's the marriage between Theseus and Hippolyta. And the play sort of diverts off into this caper in the wood. But one of the things I think Shakespeare's wanting us to think about is marriage as a form of magic. Actually, as a form of rather dark magic, this very random imagined idea of transforming two lives into a single life. It's a piece of conjuring. It's a magic trick. Another instance of this would be, for example, the power of a monarch, in this case, the queen, Queen Elizabeth, that's a kind of magic or a kind of conjuring. What is it that allows a human to, you know, uh, conjure up magic? pretend to basically have so much more authority than anybody else. storytelling and especially the theater are forms of magic. They create these sort of uncanny senses that something is being told to us that is real, but we know that it's not real. and then another one, which I'm particularly interested in is romantic love and sexual attraction. I mean, what the hell is if not a kind of magic, uh, an effect in the world that is. is actual. We know it to be real, but we couldn't for a moment say how or why it happens, least of all in Elizabethan England when they didn't know about pheromones or anything. So the magic is doing the work of standing in for all these phenomena in human life that are palpable and important and actually have a lot of authority, but can't ever be pinned down to specific or visible causes.

Speaker 10:

I think it's so interesting what you're saying and the idea that everything In this play is a form of magic, not just the magic, so that the authority is a form of magic. What makes Duke Theseus a duke? What gives him authority? It's an illusion or authority and therefore it's a form of magic. Or as you're saying as well, the idea of love and marriage just being a form of magic. And so if you strip away the magic from this play, there is nothing.

Speaker 9:

So that's a nice little segue, I think, to some of the important characters and character pairings in this play

Speaker 10:

let's start with Hermia and Helena because this is how the play begins, right? Just to recap again, because it is deeply confusing. Hermia is in love with Lysander, a young man. Lysander is in love with Hermia. Unfortunately, Hermia's father has promised that she's going to marry Demetrius. Hermia is not in love with Demetrius, but her best friend Helena is in love with Demetrius. Yes, this is hard enough to follow as it is, but at the point in the play where Puck starts flinging around love potion on people's eyelids, and everyone's falling in love with

Speaker 9:

the wrong

Speaker 10:

person, the wrong person, it gets confusing. And I said at the start, I found the act three of this play where these young lovers are just getting all very confused and fraught. I found it a real drag, but you're a big fan of it. No, I

Speaker 9:

love it. So here's, here goes my defense. First of all, TikTok. Why is it like TikTok or Instagram or, or any of the socials? So Shakespeare's doing some clever stuff here. So Helena and Hermia, he's aware of the fact that they are on some basic level, kind of interchangeable and the fact that he gives them, pretty interchangeable names is queuing us to the idea that he thinks it's funny too, that these girls are more or less identical, and remember of course that all four of the lovers would have been played by boys, no one was actually played by a girl. So the way he differentiates them is he makes one short and one tall, and one of them has dark hair and one of them has blonde hair. And he would have cast actors to reflect that. But then when we start looking more closely, there's actually a lot of difference between Helena and Hermia. I find Helena actually a very affecting figure in the play. She's basically quite depressed. She has really low self esteem, once they're in the woods, she's kind of trailing around after Demetrius, who used to love her., they used to be engaged and then he broke it off to, want to marry Hermia. But Helen says, I am your spaniel and Demetrius, the more you beat me, I will fawn on you. Use me, but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, neglect me, lose me, only give me leave. unworthy as I am to follow you. So she's very depressed. she has dark thoughts, she probably has ruminative thoughts.

Speaker 10:

And she's vulnerable then to abusive relationships. Very. She's,

Speaker 9:

she's having sort of intrusive thinking here,, and you could really easily sort of read over that. That's one of the things I always find interesting about Shakespeare is we can always read over it and just think, oh, that's how they talked back then. But it's not how they talked. She's describing herself as like a lap dog and she's asking him to hit her. And actually the character of Hermia, she's someone who's used to being pretty and popular, having all the boys really love her, and what happens to her in the wood is that the love potion causes both Lysander and Demetrius to turn their attentions to Helena instead of to Hermia. And, Hermia is unbelievably disconcerted by this. She doesn't know what to think of it and actually gets, really upset. And so there's this climactic scene between her, Hermia and Helena where Hermia is basically just feeling completely paranoid. What is going on? I used to be the popular girl and now this other girl, Helena, who used to be the depressed one, she's preferred. Is it because she's taller now? This is sort of what I meant about like the Instagram TikTok mind coming into play. Well, we're in

Speaker 10:

real reality TV world here, aren't we?. I mean, this is made in e Essex type stuff, isn't it? Yeah. Or,

Speaker 9:

or John Deere. You know, I think this show is our age. We're in, we're in YouTube, content creator, right? Territory, you know,

Speaker 10:

I think it's because we're in social media sort of bickering territory why I find this section quite boring. I think it's because I find those sorts of dynamics inherently boring. Yeah, they totally are boring. I

Speaker 9:

mean, it seems like Helena and Hermiera are just doubles, but actually they have completely different,, psychological problems.

Speaker 10:

That's true. I buy that. I buy that, definitely. Yeah,

Speaker 9:

thanks, Um, okay, So Titania and Oberon, they're a sort of brawling power couple, right? The whole thing kicks off because they're having this big fight about the changeling boy, the Indian human child who's been abducted from his mother, or he wasn't abducted actually she died and asked

Speaker 10:

Titania to look after him.

Speaker 9:

But he has been brought back from India. I think they're sort of a pre version of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Oberyn and Titania. Their strife, their marital difficulty resonates out into the world and causes huge amounts of trouble for other people.

Speaker 7:

The Titania for me is the character who sort of carries a lot of the most moving and charged moments in this play. There's the, we're going to talk about the rude mechanicals in a minute and I know they're your favourites, but there's this extraordinary moment where Oberon, the whole play is set in motion basically, because Oberon wants to punish Titania, for having stolen this changeling boy by putting potion on her eyes so she falls in love with him. some ridiculous person. And actually what happens is that she falls in love with the figure of Bottom who has been magically turned into a donkey. So it's supposed to be a moment of devastating humiliation for Titania as she sees this donkey. And this is her speech. What angel wakes me from my flowery bed? I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee, and they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, and sing while thou on pressèd flowers dost sleep. And I will purge thy mortal grossness, so that thou shalt like an airy spirit go. And so they go on. It's such a magical moment for me, like, properly, truly magical, because she's shaken off all the constraints of being a fairy queen, and she just kind of, you know, very body positive, she falls in love with this donkey, and you can imagine being bottom, you know, he's a weaver, he's a rude artisan who's lived in, You know, the hierarchy of Athens and he wakes up and a queen is in love with him. It's an amazing moment of the transformative imagination.

Speaker 8:

I also love the way she bosses it out later when, after she's been restored to her senses Yeah. And realizes that she's been in love and probably had sex with a man, with a donkey's head. Yeah. She, you know, she doesn't, she doesn't back down. She doesn't back down. Yeah. She just moves on. Yeah. No, it's totally great. So total respect for Titania for the way she handles that. Let's talk about the changeling boy because there is something troubling what's Shakespeare doing here? Because he's not a major character either. No, he has no speaking part.

Speaker 7:

He's a symbol. Yeah, he's, he's completely a symbol. And again, testimony to Shakespeare's greatness that instead of making him the main event in the play, he's a symbol., or the focus or even doing a Shylock on him or, an Othello on him,, these troubling figures in other plays. He barely appears. He, he, and he doesn't speak. and yet he carries anxiety about colonialism. He carries a lot of anxiety about gender and sexuality. Why has Titanius taken this, Young boy to be her play thing. And why at the end is Oberon taken back? Why is that the restitution of the order of the fairy world? And, you know, to set it in this context of the 1580s where a lot of young male actors were being apprenticed into these sort of child acting,, troops, it was a specifically English phenomenon it was often the case that they were financed by a powerful aristocratic man. The most notorious of these was the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, The child actors were known as Oxford's Boys, so Edward De Vere's play things. And he was himself a notorious,, pederast who had had legal action taken against him and was known to keep a choir boy in his house for his own private entertainment. Other playwrights, rival playwrights of the period wrote about this problem. Thomas Decker described how when you were at Blackfriars Theatre, by sitting on the stage you may, with small cost, purchase a dear acquaintance of the boys. So it was quite a controversial phenomenon in the culture of the period. And in some ways, Shakespeare's sort of cleaning things up by, making all the people in this play, kind of adults, by keeping the changeling boy largely off stage, and actually by performing this, you know, sequence between Titania and Bottom, it's like a sort of writing back to the tradition of, child actors being the playthings of aristocratic men, I think.

Speaker 8:

And yet for the audience who would have known about this troubled history of boys in theatre, the changing boy would have brought that note of sourness into the. into the play. And in a play which is about magic and lightness, you suddenly have something slightly uncomfortable, which would be the presence, the brief presence of this boy on the stage.

Speaker 7:

Yeah, totally. So, Jonty, we've got to, this is your big moment, you know, I got to do my thing about magic, I got to mention Newington butts, but this is your moment. Yeah, I

Speaker 8:

mean, you've had a real I've had a run. You've had a run. Yeah.

Speaker 7:

So it's your turn. The rude mechanicals.

Speaker 8:

Okay. So for me, A Midsummer Night's Dream is all about the rude mechanicals. Who Jaunty

Speaker 7:

thinks are funny.

Speaker 8:

Who I think are funny. I mentioned earlier in this episode that, one of the influences on a Midsummer Night Dream were the festivities that occurred at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 in honor of Queen. Elizabeth. And indeed the open letter that was written by this minor official called Robert Langham about what happened there, and again Greenblatt and others think Shakespeare probably saw this letter at some point, it turns out there was a group of, quote, good hearted men of Coventry led by a mason named Captain Cox. So this is likely very much a model for the rude mechanicals,.. And, in a Midsummer Night Dream, amidst all of this magic, we have these very real working class characters that they are described by one of the noblemen as hard handed men that work in Athens here, which never labored in their minds till now. And, bottom is a weaver, Francis Fluch, who's one of them, is a bellows mender. There's a tailor, there's a joiner. These are very real professions and they, come together and say they want to put together a play to honor the marriage, which is very sweet really, this idea that any play they might do might be well received. A lot of comedy comes from them rehearsing the play of Pyramus and Thisbe. They get very confused when trying to use long words, so, they say they're going to do a most lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. And Bosom says, a very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry one. So, they're both very Confused. throwing together tragedy and comedy, in this completely inchoate way. And coming back to the Coventry Hawk Tuesday play, which was staged at Kenilworth Castle in 1575, what we know from Robert Langham is that the good hearted men of Coventry wanted to do a play that would make Queen Elizabeth feel gladsome and merry, but the topic they chose for the play was a recreation of the Massacre of the Danes by the Saxons before the Norman conquest. So it's completely confused that somehow staging a massacre is going to make Queen Elizabeth merry. Yes.

Speaker 7:

And similarly, Pyramus and Thisbe is a tragedy, isn't it? It's a tragical story of how they meet. I've sort of forgotten the details but they basically have to sort of whisper at each other through a wall and then

Speaker 8:

It's, it's basically Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare is writing around the same time and they die, so not a great one for a wedding. Yeah, it's not a barrel

Speaker 7:

of laughs. And I

Speaker 8:

think a lot of the comedy is wonderful, so they start rehearsing. Oh, you're right, you're

Speaker 7:

right.

Speaker 8:

One of the characters has to play a lion, They get very concerned that their acting is so good that the ladies in the audience are going to think that there's a real lion. And so Bottom decides that they have to have a prologue which will tell the audience that what they're seeing isn't a real lion. So I think this is very funny, right? You may not laugh. No, it's lovely. No. May not laugh. No, it's lovely.

Speaker 7:

It's lovely.

Speaker 8:

and He says, Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say We will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed. And for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the Weaver. This will put them out of their fear. And then on the lion, he says, Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion's neck, and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect, Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or I would request you, this is Bottom trying to think of sophisticated language, or I would entreat you not to fear, not to tremble, my life for yours. because if you think I am come hither as a lion, no, I am no such thing. I am a man as other men are and there indeed let him name his name and tell them plainly he is Snug the Joiner.

Speaker 7:

No, it is lovely, Jonty. And as you're saying it, I'm filled with this warm, kind feeling because actually when you watch these mechanicals, you know, they're this parody of different kinds of of magic, actually. They're a parody of fairy enchantment, because they don't have any real magic to them. And they're also a parody of Athenian royal power, because they don't actually have any political authority. And yet, actually, they do have their own magic. impact and their own force and, wonderfulness in this play. And there's this, the great final scene involves the high characters Theseus and Hippolyta and the others watching the play. And they're incredibly rude and mean about it, but ultimately it's the artisans who carry the day because we feel for them so much. And when you were reading the bottom bit about His anxiety about the lines and, the tragedy being too much for the audience. It reminds me of when Bottom gets turned into a donkey. And Titania the queen, offers him anything he wants. You know, you can have anything. And this man, this is the chance of a lifetime. But he says, I could munch your good dry oats. He thinks I have a great desire for a bottle of hay. It's the highest. He chooses oats because he's a donkey. And you know, it's the highest thing he can aspire to.

Speaker 8:

And I think Shakespeare with the rude mechanicals, he's having fun, but there's also a lot of affection and nostalgia here for what theater was like when Shakespeare was growing up, you know, theater over the previous 10 years to writing this play has gone through this revolution and become this incredibly sophisticated art form. But back in the 1570s, it was a very rudimentary art form, often done by amateurs and Shakespeare's looking back affectionately on on that time. And You know, when they do the play at the end, Shakespeare again has a lot of fun with the terrible poetry that was put into these plays. And Bottom has this, as Pyramus, has this speech, which is Shakespeare having, a laugh on the sort of language that people today often think Shakespeare himself wrote. But Pyramus comes on, played by Bottom, and says, O grim looked night! O night with hue so black! O night, whichever art, when day is bright! Not. Oh night, oh night. Alack, alack, alack. I fear my Thisbe's promises forgot. Oh yeah. I think this is funny. No, it is.

Speaker 7:

You're completely right. And, and, you know, so we have all these sort of voices and presences and, as we boringly said at the beginning, forms of authority in this play. And by the end, the characters who have power, namely Theseus and Hippolyta, although

Speaker 8:

power is only a form of magic and illusion, as we've discovered. And

Speaker 7:

that's exactly the thing, isn't it? That sitting in the audience, you're juggling all these ideas and they sit there and they try to weigh up the significance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And the thing I find so brilliant about the ending is that no one can sum it up. No one can really say. So, who gets the last thought in this play? The audience really has to decide. Hippolyta watching the Rude Mechanicals says, this is the silliest stuff that I ever heard. That's her dismissing of it. You mentioned before Theseus,, the Duke of Athens does this love a poet and madman speech, which is kind of required writing for essays in this play. Theseus is a bit of a stick in the mud. He doesn't get lovers or poets or madmen. To him, they're all, well, as he says, of imagination, all compact. But what he means is, oh, they're all sort of wastrels. They're dilettantes. They're hopeless. You know, Theseus is a guy who, if living now, he'd want, more workflow production schedules and benchmarking and circling back. He's a corporate order kind of a guy.

Speaker 8:

And he agrees to watch a play, but only he says very specifically, we've got three hours between having dinner and then going to bed where I get to bed Hippolyta. Right. And so he's willing to watch a play really just as a sort of digestif, before he can go and make love to his wife. So.

Speaker 7:

Totally.

Speaker 8:

Yeah, and you said there's two wrap up speeches, right? So the first is that one by Theseus, and the second, which, I'll come to in a moment is Puck's final speech. But of course Theseus's speech begins Act V and what happens in between is the very long play within a play of the rude mechanicals and I, and so Theseus is there sort of saying poetry is akin to love and madness and has no substance. But actually what we then get with the Rude Mechanicals in their play is a defensive theater. Because even though it's appallingly bad and it's done by people who have no acting ability or writing ability whatsoever, You mentioned earlier that Hippolyta just dismisses the whole thing. But there's also a wonderful moment when Bottomus Pyramus is doing one of his melodramatic speeches, and she says, in astonishment at herself, she says, Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man. She's moved, even though she's watching the worst art imaginable, the power of art is such and the power of theatre that it still moves us. And so I think that Puck's final speech at the end. Is the kind of last words and it is Shakespeare in a, you know, speaking and asking the audience for their approval.

Speaker 7:

Okay.

Speaker 8:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear. And this week, an idle theme, No more yielding, but a dream. Gentles, do not reprehend. If you pardon, we will mend. And, as I am an honest puck, if we have unlearned luck, Now to scape the serpent's tongue we will make amends ere long. Elster Puck, a liar call. So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.

Speaker 7:

It's very nice. It really asks for applause, doesn't it? Give me your hands. Best moment, worst moment, Jonty?

Speaker 8:

Oh, well, the best moment is to read Mechanicals, and the worst moment is all that thrashing about of the young lovers in the woods in Act 3. For you? Uh,

Speaker 7:

best moment? Oh, so many. I love Midsummer Night's Dream, it's one of my faves. I'm going with actually the speech I picked for the opener, I know a bank where the wild thyme blows. There's something about that description I just find Completely transformative.

Speaker 8:

It is. It's amazing, isn't it? Uh,

Speaker 7:

wait, haven't said my worst. Actually, there are no bad moments. I love it. I love it. Sorry, that's a cheat.

Speaker 8:

No, it's not a cheat. It's, if you haven't got a worst moment, you haven't got one.. Maybe the

Speaker 7:

changeling boy, actually. My worst moment's the changeling boy. I find him dreary, sort of.

Speaker 8:

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't get much chance to bore you. He doesn't say anything. He

Speaker 7:

doesn't personally bore me. But the sort of back and forth about him, I find a bit trying.

Speaker 8:

Okay. Our question around underrated, overrated doesn't really stack up when you get to Shakespeare, does it? Well,

Speaker 7:

it should though. You know, we, we are in the serious business of reassessing Shakespeare.

Speaker 8:

Okay.

Speaker 7:

A Midsummer Night's Dream is underrated,

Speaker 8:

you? I think it's overrated. You think

Speaker 7:

it's overrated? Yeah. Oh,, good answer..

Speaker 8:

I don't think it's one of my, even close to one of my favorite Shakespearean comedies. I'm a pure as you like it kind of guy.

Speaker 7:

You like as you like it?

Speaker 8:

Love as you like it. I'll tell you

Speaker 7:

one thing. We'll be doing a lot of Shakespeare before we cover as you like it on this, on this show.

Speaker 8:

That's a threat.

Speaker 7:

Okay.

Speaker 8:

On which note?

Speaker 7:

You've been listening to the Secret Life of Books.

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Jonty Claypole

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