In Our Time - A Midsummer Night's Dream

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare's most popular works, written c1595 in the last years of Elizabeth I. It is a comedy of love and desire and their many complications as well as their simplicity, and a reflection on society's expectations and limits. It is also a quiet critique of Elizabeth and her vulnerability and on the politics of the time, and an exploration of the power of imagination.With Helen Hackett Professor of English Literature and Leverhulme Research Fellow at University College LondonTom Healy Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Sussexand Alison Findlay Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare AssociationProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Amit Summer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, with some of his most memorable characters, including Oberon, Titania, Puck, Peter Quince, and Bottom. To children at primary school, it can be a simple fairy story.

For anyone older, that depends on your experience of life and love and your imagination. The main plot crosses between comedy and tragedy, as does the rude mechanicals, Pyramus and Thysby, the play within the play. And the story's resolution, with three weddings and reconciliation, is joyful. If you don't look too closely, had thought many characters have had to give up. With me to discuss the Midsummer Night's Dream are Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Sussex, Addison Findlay, Professor of Renaissance drama at Lancaster University

and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association, and Helen Hackett, Professor of English Literature and Leiberhum Research Fellow at University College, London. Helen Hackett, where does this play sit among Shakespeare's plays? It's a play where I think we get a really exciting, exhilarating sense of him taking a step forward in his career, because it's a sort of transition between early and middle Shakespeare. So the date is 1595, or thereabout,

He's written some early comedies. He's written the comedy of errors, The Tamey of the Shrew, Love's Labor's Lost. He hasn't yet written what we think of as the golden comedies, so say, as you like it, and 12th Night. But I think what we get here is a sense of him really taking a step up, that transition from early to middle, as I said, and he's really kind of flexing his artistic genius. I think that's one reason why, you know, often the experience of reading or seeing the play is really one of pure pleasure. and I think he's communicating to us his pleasure in his own powers.

He's exploring, he's experimenting. So he's really testing out what language can do. It's one of his most poetical, lyrical plays. He's thinking about the imagination, both the individual poet's imagination and the communal imagination in the theatre. And he's also thinking about the great theme of love and how magical and strange love is.

When you say taking a step up, you mentioned one of two generalisations. Can you give us any specific? specifics? I think the kind of things I'm talking about that really his language goes up a gear and also the themes. In what way? Well, if we think of some of the wonderful speeches, say in Act 2, Scene 1, which is the great standoff between Titania and Oberon. Titania has a fantastic lyrical speech about the confusion of the seasons and Oberon comes back. He describes a vision of a figure who might be Elizabeth I first.

And then we have I know a bank where the wild time blows. It's just wonderful stuff. And has you not done this before? Not on this level. And it's been kind of traded by and forth between the characters, if they're almost competing to excel each other in the wonderful kind of poetical lyricism and the pictures that they're drawing in our imaginations, it's a play which is always through its language, making us imagine wonderful scenes, wonderful pictures. Why did it happen then? I think he's just at that stage. He's around 30. He's written a few plays by now, not only those early comedies, but also some histories. I think he's also just reflecting on what

his art can do. It's just a point in his career where he feels ready, to do that and he's doing that with some depth and complexity in this play. Is it true that he's writing Romeo and Juliet at the same time? It's intolerable, isn't it really? Yes. Well, I don't know. They kind of go together. I think of them as companion plays or sister plays

because there are lots of crossovers between the two plots, the story of Hermione and Isander. Running away together, yes. Yeah, yeah, the lovers who are blocked by parental opposition. That's there in the story not just of Hermia and Lysander, but also Pyramus and Thisbee. So there's lots of crossover with Romeo and Juliet. The fairies as well, the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet

corresponds with the fairy themes in this play. We've all got used to the idea that Shakespeare, Nick Stoll took, whatever he could, wherever he could, huge chunks, and turn them in, as in Anthony and Clairpatter, great chunks from Plutarch, turning a diverse, and normally went with the medieval plays. What source did he, was there a principal source here? This is actually a really unusual play for Shakespeare.

It's one of the very few where there's no obvious. obvious principle source. So we can think of it as springing from his imagination. At the same time, he's creating this fresh new thing from lots of pre-existent materials. And the striking thing about that is how diverse they are. It's very much a play about mixing high and low. So on the high side, we've got Ovid's metamorphosis, the great classical epic of change and transformation. There are all the way through. Yeah, Ovid is very, very present in this play. Pluto's Life of Theseus is there. There's lots of allusion to court drama, court poetry.

At the same time, on the low side, we've got folklore, particularly around the fairies, particularly around Puck. We've got folk festivals like Midsummer's Eve and May Day. And we've also got chucked into the mix, all sorts of other things like Chalph's Night's Tales. Yeah, we've got a really kind of rich brew here of different things. And I think he's very interested in what you can make out of incongruities. There's actually a point where Helena says things base and vile, holding no quantity, love can transpose to form and dignity.

What exactly does she mean by that? Well, she means things that don't seem to go together, like, say, Titania and Bottom, the beautiful, delicate fairy queen, and his clod-hopping, ass-headed weaver who fall in love, things that shouldn't go together. If you do put them together, something extraordinary, something wonderful can come out of it.

And I think Shakespeare is showing how his art can do the same thing. Thank you. Alison Finley, the play's set in Athens, What would that have meant to the audience? Well, Athens would have been the source of classical learning, the kind of high things that Helen was talking about. So we have the source of philosophy, we have the source of a great range of literature and drama coming from Athens. And we've also got the sense of democracy,

the origins of democracy in Athens and in classical Greece. However, 1458 Greece and Athens falls to the Ottomans, and after this time Greece and Athens represent a kind of fallen world so maybe in the play we've got in the way that the Ottoman Empire is expanding at this time we've got a sense of the dark side of the fairies who can put a girdle round the earth in 40 minutes

expanding across the whole world also being part of that vision of a magical world but a fallen world at the same time and there's a dark world from the start isn't I mean the cruel law which could be Spartan law couldn't it the father comes and says to Theseus my daughter won't marry

the man I wanted to marry what do I do and Theseus says she gets killed or she goes to an honorary Yes very I mean a savage And that's hanging over the play That's all the threat of death and the idea of The darker element of the play certainly is there Yes

And what else did they get out of Athens Well the Athens world is As Helen was saying before weirdly combined with this English folklore world at the same time. So we've got high culture and low culture mixed in Athens. We've got

a Theseus who was returned from the wars against the Amazons, bringing back Hippolyta, the Queen, as his prisoner of war. The Queen of the Amazons. Yes, and determined to marry her with pomp and triumph and with revelling, in spite of the

fact that he wooed her with his sword and she's basically a prisoner of war. So in that sense, there is disruption within the Athenian world to begin with, I think. If you were asked to summarise the plot in about four sentences, would you have a go? I'll try. Okay, so Theseus and Hippolyta arrived back in the court, the Athenian court at the beginning of the play. Their wedding plans are interrupted by the plot of the four lovers, who also are Athenian gentle folk.

And that's reflected in the fact that the language of that first scene is all in beautiful verse. And we hear that Lysander and Hermia are in love, but Hermia's father, Egeus, wants her to marry Demetrius instead. Demetrius is also in love with Hermia, but he is beloved by Helena, the fourth lover. So we've got those four lovers entwined in love triangles at the beginning of the play. The play then moves to a second scene which is written completely in prose and that features the hard-handed men of Athens

Bottom and his companions who are going to put on a play for the Duke's wedding at the end of the text and they decide to go out to rehearse their play in the woods and then the whole action goes to the woods well yes then the whole action moves to the woods and Act 2 opens with a completely different register of language So the audience know that they've shifted scene from Athens out to the woods

because we get the first fairy and puck speaking in a very different kind of verse over hill, over Dale, thoroughbrush, thoroughbriar, over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire. And this is Titania and Oberyn ruling the woods and the fairies and they come to the woods and it becomes darker. And that's when it becomes a mid-summer night's dream. It was brilliant. Thank you very much. Tom, what would have been here? first audiences for this in 95

and where would it be put on? So in the first published edition which is in 1600 it has said that the play has been performed sundry times by the Lord Chamberlain's men which were Shakespeare's company and that would have meant that it would have been

performed almost certainly at the theatre and the curtain theatres in Shoreditch which was where the company principally performed before the globe was built in 1519. and these were, like the globe, large theatres. The curtain is said to have a capacity of around 1,400.

The people who would have attended would have come from across a wide social class. It only cost a penny to stand in the courtyard and watch the performance. And at this stage, indeed, as the play picks up, six pence a day was a good, wage for an average working man in London at this stage. The mechanicals in the production they're going to put on for Theseus

get very excited because they think they'll get a pension of six points a day for life from the Duke for this performance. So that is, in instance, the extent of their horizons. Do we know the makeup of the audience at that time? It would have been... Your snapshot for us.

It would have been really quite a across a wide range of social classes. So people who would be both men and women, predominantly men, who would stand in the courtyard, then people of a might be called richer sort who would stand in the galleries, who would pay another penny, and indeed if you were really extravagant,

a further penny would buy you a stool to sit on. And then we know that some aristocrats also came along, often wearing masks and in disguise to, to witness the plays themselves. He's often thought it was a play for young people and many young people in this country have parted it. Do you think it is? It certainly wasn't when it started.

No, but do you think in generally speaking? No, the idea of Midsummer Night's Dream as a play, principally for young people, became really established in the Victorian, late Victorian period and into the early 20th century. That's really when a number of figures, particularly a famous theatre director called Ben Greet,

started to encourage children to take part in outdoor performances, and it becomes seen as a very innocent play, a play that's particularly associated often with Englishness in a way, a play of recapturing a type of lost world of the imagination.

And as Helen has indicated, I mean, there's a huge range of elements within this play. And it's certainly possible, as it was, from the Victorian period onwards, to pare the play down and shape it so that that innocence is highlighted. But in the original production, in the play itself, there would have been this interest between the high and the low, between the tragic and the comic. This is a moment where tragic comedy, the movement between the Sirius to the farcicle often takes place very easily

and as Helen has said Shakespeare is really demonstrating his astonishing dramatic control in weaving these elements together so if one thinks at the start of the play Theseus calls forth the Athenian youth to merriment This doesn't happen immediately we have

a tragic note introduced by Ageus denouncing his daughter Hermia who wants to marry who wants to marry Lysander rather than his preferred choice, Demetrius. She's under sentence potentially of death or certainly being placed in a nunnery. That seems to introduce a very highly tragic element within the play. But then in the next scene, Hermia and Lysander decide that they can escape outside the realm of Athens, which is only 20 miles, to his rich aunt.

And so this movement back and forth between the comic, the irreverent, and then the potentially tragic, is something that is part of the play's very nature of the character. And that was certainly the types of plays that seemed to have gone down very well with the original audiences. Yes, thank you. Helen, how does the play relate to Queen Elizabeth? But first, do we have any information about how well it went down at the time? Well, not a great deal of information. I think it would almost certainly have been performed at court as well as in the playhouse because most of Shakespeare's plays were at this time.

So that's another part of its kind of dual purpose nature and its mingling of high and low elements. In terms of how it relates to Elizabeth I think that picks up on what Tom's saying about there being darker aspects to the play in its own time, more serious aspects, because it's actually a surprisingly political play if we place it within the topicality of its own time. So, as we've said, it's a play of around 1595. The 1590s are often referred to by modern historians as the nasty 90s because it's a period of great turbulence, great discontent.

And Elizabeth I, in particular, is considerably unpopular at this time. She's in her 60s now. The problem is that she's the Virgin. Queen and as such, obviously, she has no child. Also, she refuses to name an heir. So we don't know who her successor is going to be, and there's a lot of anxiety about what's going to follow on from her death, which will inevitably be fairly soon. Also, as an ageing woman, she's seen as weak, she's seen as vacillating, and that's particularly so amongst a circle of young men who gather around the Earl of Essex. They're very frustrated because they want more aggressive, militaristic

foreign policy. And how does it... Is this shown in the plane? We can take this back to the play in various ways. Right from the very outset, there's that sense of masculine frustration. Theseus says at the opening, oh, how slow this old moon wanes. Now, Elizabeth was frequently represented as the moon goddess, so we might think of resonances reflecting on her. He says she lingers my desires like to a stepdame or a dowager,

long withering out a young man's revenue. And as the play continues, female power is consistently being suppressed and contained. So Hippolyta has been conquered by Theseus, has to marry him. Titania has to be tamed back into obedient wifehood to Oberon. Queens in this play have to be ruled by kings. Thank you very much, Alison. The first couple on the stage are Theseus and Queen of the Amherstens, Hippolyta. Now, what's the tension there?

Well, that's oddly enough in a few lines, as always. It does it in no time at all. He sets the course of the whole thing. Yes. I mean, we set up with this idea of her as the prisoner of war and he says, I wooed thee with my sword and won thy love doing the injuries. So it's not a good atmosphere. No, it's not a good recipe for a happy wedding. But having said that, he determines that they are going to have pomp and reveling for the wedding.

And we hear no reaction, really, from Hippolyta there. when Igeus comes in with his daughter Hermia and demands that she obeys him quite often on stage in productions we get a non-verbal reaction from Hippolyta at that point. Is that justified in the text? Well, Theos says at the end of the scene What cheer, my love,

suggesting that she isn't very happy at the end of the scene and there have been productions... Why would she not be very happy? Well, because as an Amazonian queen, she would stand up for Hermia's right to her own independence, her choice of lover, and the fact that the patriarchal power of Aegeus is coming down like a ton of bricks onto Hermia would not go down well with Hippolyta, I don't think.

So, I mean, there have been productions in which, you know, the Hippolyta character has slapped Theseus round the face and then exited, not going off in jollity with him to get ready for a wedding. She's most jarring in the play within the play when bottom and the weavers and all bottom of the weaver and the others are trying to make a play they're not quite up to it. She's

critical of it all the time and the old others are saying give them a chance, they're quite good, I'm enjoying this. Well, that's what I got from it. Yes, I think that they're not a good audience at the end of the play. I think they are an example, Shakespeare's example of a very bad

audience, a courtly audience who interrupt, who make fun, though when this be at the very end of the play appeals to the Sisters Three Come Come, You Sisters Three Come Woman with me, at the death of Pyrimus.

It could be thought that that actor is speaking to the three women on the stage who have been subdued by the men and that this is a moment of sisterly unity at the end of the play. This is Apollader.

Hermia and Helena, yes, who are silenced by the end of the play, but may be appealed to by the Thysby, there's a tragic heroine at the end of the text. I actually have a slightly different take on Hippolyta. I think when she's watching Pyramus and Thysby, when we're all watching it, that performance is kind of orchestrated. So we start rooting for them and sympathising, and it's true she starts off critically. But then when Pyramus dies, she says, beshrew my heart, I pity the man.

and we begin to feel pity for them, we begin to enjoy their wholehearted performance. She also, earlier in that same scene, she debates imagination with Theseus in a very, very important dialogue. And Theseus tries to disparage imagination, but Hippolyta talking about the strange experiences of the lovers in the wood, she says, but all their minds transfigured so together, growth to something of great constancy, but howsoever strange and admirable. Now she's talking about the strange experiences of the lovers, but it could stand for our experience of the play, something strange and admirable, something to be wondered at.

And I think she has the deepest access to that profound sense of wonder, which the play as a whole engenders in us. She quite often is doubled, isn't she, with Titania as well. So we get a sense of her, Hippolyt's sympathy for Bottom, the actor, is also linked into the love relationship between Titania and Bottom earlier on in the play. and sometimes you get a moment of her just remembering that or glimpsing that. Yeah, in production, that's often inserted. And it's very fascinating to think of Titania as a kind of dream persona of Hippolyta

who's working out the kind of tensions and frustrations in their forthcoming marriage. Queen of the Farrens. Yes, the whole of the middle acts, the space in the woods is like the kind of dream space of the play where characters work out their hostilities and their desires and their frustrations. And in that space, Titania seems to be the kind of alter-eagle. of Hippolyta. Somebody said they thought that it was like the unconscious working there. Yeah, I think that works very well.

I think we can think of the outer acts of the play, Acts 1 and 5 in Athens, as the rational world or the waking world of the play and the middle acts in the wood. Demetrius says, here am I and wood within this wood. Now, wood is an archaic word for mad. It's a place of madness of what Puck calls preposterousness where everything goes crazy.

So everything can get all kind of mixed up and worked out in the wood like a crazy dream and then we come back to the rational world of Athens at the end. Tom Healy, what about the courtly love quadrangle of Helena, Hermia, Hermia, Demetius and Lysander? So two things the play constantly asks us throughout are, can we believe what we see and can we believe what we hear? And this is particularly pronounced, I think, with the four lovers, with their various entanglements.

So Lysander starts out pledging eternal love to Hermia and she to him. Demetrius has loved Helena but now changed to Hermia and despises supposedly Helena now. Helena remains fascinated and fixed on Demetrius. But through a series of entanglements, they are drugged mistakenly into switching. Or rather, Lysander switches his allegiance to Helena. and Demetrius remains becomes infatuated with Helena now instead of despising her,

so Hermia is left out. And these characters use this very eloquent and very inflated lyrical language that Helen has alluded to to constantly try to rationalise their particular predicaments and why they've switched this sense of allegiance

as why they now love one another. And at one level the play is clearly saying these characters should not believe these characters should not believe what they're seeing. They are drugged. They have been misled and they're intoxicated.

But the play also hint... Park the slave, as it were, the Vover and goes around gets this flower and strokes it across the eyes of men. Always these men and these men turn, wake up to be the opposite of what they were when they went to sleep. Exactly. Just as he also strokes it across the eyes of Titania and she wakes up falling in love with Bottom who is now wearing an ass's head. So there is a potency to this drug. But equally, it is made clear at the

beginning of the play that Lysander's wooing of Hermia, if we can believe her father, is through really through trifles and the type of lovers' knick-knacks and assertions of love and most significantly sweetmeats that woo her to love him wholeheartedly. And similarly, it has been said that Demetrius, in an undrugged state, pledged undying love to Helena before he decided to switch his allegiance toomia. So the instability of love, whether through this drugged potion or Cupid's Arrow or whatever, but just in the normal coercive events

is one of the things the play highlights. And I think it brings too serious and frivolous attentions. So in one respect, if the mechanicals represent the ordinary, the uneducated workers of Athens,

and Theseus and Hippolyta represent, in essence, the aristocracy, the ruling governing class. The lovers are the in-between. Thank you very much. Helen, this is a dream.

What would Shakespeare have understood about dreams and the imagination? I think it actually picks up on what Tom was saying about the serious and the frivolous being very mixed up in this play because the Elizabethans had very diverse ideas about dreams. A dream could be just frivolous, it could be

just trivial. Thomas Nash, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, he writes a book called The Terrors of the Night around this time. And he says a dream is nothing but a bubbling scum or froth of fancy that the day has left undigested. So a dream could be just a lot of nonsense, just a lot of garbled nonsense. But at the same time, a dream could be deep and meaningful. It could be a message from God. Another Elizabethan writer Thomas Hill, he actually anticipates Freud by writing a book called The Interpretation of Dreams, which becomes an Elizabethan bestseller and it's a manual of dream symbols. It's a way of working out what your dreams mean. Is this related to the imagination? Definitely. Because in the, he says

Shakespeare in this place as I think the greatest thing ever said about imagination. Not the lunatic, the lover and the poet, Arab imagination or compact. Not that. The next bit, a few lines down, if you don't mind up, I read. And as imagination bodies forth, the forms of things unknown. The poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. That's extraordinary. I totally agree that it's extraordinary. It's one of the most wonderful things about imagination ever written. What we have to understand is that in Shakespeare's own time, this is a deeply radical statement because the Elizabethans actually had a very negative view of the imagination. They saw it as dark and dangerous. The Bible told them that the

hearts of men are full of wicked imagination, so the imagination is sinful. The law define treason as to compass or imagine the death of the monarchs, so the imagination is treacherous. Medical books at the time are full of people having all sorts of dark, disturbing delusions because of disordered imagination. So the imagination is unruly, it's dangerous, it should be governed by reason. And Theseus, in the speech that you've just quoted, he's just heard about the adventures of the lovers in the wood, and he's trying to dismiss them as shaping fantasies. He's trying to dismiss the imagination. But like everything in this play, it turns preposterous.

Proposterous literally means back to front. And it sort of turns into the opposite of itself and becomes a celebration of the free creative powers of the artistic imagination. Now, to us, that can seem quite normal and familiar. But that's because our ideas about the imagination derived from the romantic poets, who in turn derived their great philosophy of the imagination

from Shakespeare. But in Shakespeare's own time, this is very much at odds with the way. way that people were thinking about the imagination. It's really fresh and new. And also, fundamental and hasn't been surpassed really. Absolutely, yes. And listen, what are we to make of Titania and Bottom, the great love affair,

where he turns into an ass because of these drops on his eyes, and she thinks he's the greatest male person she has ever seen? Indeed. She's woken by him singing. So it's his singing that entrances her from the beginning. And it's ludicrous. It is preposterous. It's a preposterous mingling of the,

the high and the bottom of the weaver is one of the mechanical that's right yes he's a he's a weaver

and that I mean his name is significant because he does weave together the different elements of the story I think

and he branches from being bottom the lowest of the social classes in the play to having an affair with the queen of the fairies the most ethereal

supernatural figure of the play so that element of imagination that can span right across in a very democratic way. The whole social scale comes across through the affair, I think. That's to do

it in, to talk about it in a very philosophical way. In a very physical way, the ass that he gets changed into has the longest and hardest fallas of any animal on earth. And so therefore, Titania, the Gossamer-like queen, being attracted by this very beastial desire. of the fallacy in the text though, is there? No, but Elizabethans would have known that that was so, and productions like Peter Brooks really emphasised that very animal quality. A few hundred years on, Peterbrook decided to have a phallus there, but when it was first came on, would people think, ah, we know about donkeys? People would have known about donkeys, yes. And I think they might have also easily played up the sexual elements that go on with that. I mean, it's not, in

entirely clear what bottom and Titania get up to. And of course most modern productions and certainly productions for school children suggest that she just weaves sort of flowers in his hair. But the play does suggest I think. Where's that?

When Puck tells and Oberon are discussing how they're now going to actually release her, they've suggested they've left her at one stage with him, But how does that suggest that they've been at it, as it were?

No, no. So also the suggestion is that Barton and Titania have gone off into a private space. And I think the Elizabethans were very, very conscious about this nature of private spaces. So earlier in the play, for instance, Lysander and Hermia, Hermia won't let Lysander even lie next to her because this would potentially bring her into jeopardy. Infringe on her virginity. Helen. In fact, when Titania embraces Bottom, she says,

so the ivy and rings the barky fingers of the elm. You know, it's very erotic imagery, just to illustrate what Tom's talking about. The other thing I would want to say about Bottom is, again, coming back to the theme of imagination, when he wakes from his night in the wood, a bit like Hippolyta. I've said that Hippolyta has a very deep sense

of the wonder that seems to be present in the play. And she's a very disenfranchised figure. She's a woman, she's an alien woman at that. Bottom also, in a way, the lowest of the low in the play, a hard-handed working man, also seems to understand more fully than the young lovers that he's had some kind of transcendental experience. Yeah, he says, I have had a most rare vision,

and he says it shall be called Bottom's dream for it, hath no bottom. And that's what I was talking about earlier, the kind of Thomas Hill idea of dreams as portentous, as meaningful as some kind of divine message. He also, in that speech, quotes or misquotes, the Bible. In the Bible in St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he describes the mystical, ecstatic

state of those who know God. And St. Paul writes, the eye hath not seen, the ear not, hath not heard, etc. Doesn't Bottom send that? Bunglems that, of course, because he's bottom. But does he mangling it because it's a wit, or does it because it's thick? I think he does it because he's stupid, but it also has a wonderful

kind of foolish creativity about it. He says the eye hath not heard, the ear hath not seen, and so on. The point about that is he's not only misquoting the Bible. He's also misquoting the very important early 16th century humanist scholar Erasmus who had quoted that passage of St Paul and Erasmus uses it to talk about what he calls holy folly, wisdom in folly, an idea we know was really important to Shakespeare because he uses it again in as you like it in 12th night in the fooling King Lear. And bottom comes out as

as one of the holy fools to a certain extent at the end of this. Anderson, in the natural world, It's a short play, but the natural world is all over it. We're in that forest, and Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of natural life infests the forest or with that life. Can you talk a bit about that? Yes, certainly. I mean, the most important natural symbol is probably the moon. If you look at the play in terms of its language, the most significant linguistic feature of it, the words moon, moonshine, moonlight, those words that run right the way through,

which link in to the Elizabethan idea and the... of the aging Elizabeth, but also cast light on the fact of lunacy and madness. So we've got that governing feature of it. But underneath that, we've got all the references to cowslips, to flowers of the Warwickshire countryside that are part of the very English folk scene in the play. Maytime in particular and the flowers growing on banks within the forest, the flowers that Oberon evokes when he's thinking about where Titania's bower is. So it's very, very much a play that's rooted in the English countryside,

even though it's supposedly set in Athens. I think one of the interesting things, too, that the play does in relation to this, is that it presents the fairies and this sort of folkloric in a very benign type of way. Normally fairies and their like were seen at best ambivalently often as quite malicious and disruptive figures, even potentially diabolical. Whereas here, on the whole, they try to do well for the humans. They may play with them, but they're not actually out to seriously inconvenience and certainly not to bring them to a poor conclusion. We've slightly omitted, oh you have, or I have, we all have, the dark side. When the men change size, as it were, the language they're used to the women is terrible.

I mean, they're vicious, and they're belittling, and they're racist, and so we mustn't let that go by. No, I think that's absolutely right, and I think, you know, we've talked already briefly about how this is a play written at the same time as Romeo and Juliet. it's always haunted by those dark possibilities, not just the way that Hermione and Lysander's story could turn out like Romeo and Juliette. That's certainly very present, and the story of Pyramus and Thisbee, which they watch in Act 5 is basically the story of Romeo and Juliet

of star-crossed lovers who die. The only reason Hermione and Lysander don't end up like that is because of a good dose of good luck and fairy magic. So they watch their own, the tragedy they could have been. They watch at the end of the play. And I think that intensifies our sense of the comedy, because it's always shadowed by this tragic alternative. That's also there all the way through the play.

The wood in many ways is a very sinister space. It's full of snakes and thorny hedgehogs. It's very clear at different points that the women could be raped there. They're both sexually threatened by the men at different times. There are wild animals always waiting just out of view to devour people. So there's always this really kind of dark presence around the edge of the frame, I think. Now, poor Tom, what do you make of the resolution? At the end?

Well, one of the things that's fascinating, I think, is that when the fairies wander through, they very much play to what would be an ideal married outcome. That is, the lovers are now married lovers are going to go off. They're all going to procreate, which is what marriage was ostensibly for, and those babies are going to be extremely healthy. They're not going to be marked out by blemish or monstrosity. And this is so divorced, I think, from the reality of Elizabethan life that its theatrical quality, that it is a play, a wonderment, would really be emphasized.

And so the darker side, the side that what life is really about, would be very, very notable. And it must be remembered that this is a period in which the natural and the superflues, are intimately combined. So whether it be medical or legal sources, the idea that there is a type of moral pollution out there that causes deformity and ugliness and other types of inhibitions on people or brings them into league with the devil is something this era just takes for granted. And so that dark side is very, very present. And making it seemingly disappear brings attention to the fact that this is a wonderment and a managetive creation, but not something that's really figured in reality. Would it be too abrupt say that the women are subdued by the annipity? It starts with a subdued woman. The lady, the woman, who's been leader of the Amazons, has been subdued by the sword.

And by the end, all the women, they say very little, and they troop up to court to be married and live. happy ever after. Yes, and the audience are actually encouraged to laugh at the two women fighting each other in the forest. The men who are both in love with Hermia well, they nearly fight.

They want to fight, they can't find each other because it's too dark, they run away from each other. The men run away from each other but the women have to be restrained. Not quite run away from each other and fail to find each other and fail to find each other because it's too dark, yes. Yes. But Helena you know, is referred to by Hermia as thou painted maple.

You know, she's attacked because she's tall because Hermia feels jealous because Helena has stolen away Lysander from her at that point. And that is seen as something of, that is very dark, that is very painful, but that is comedy, is fun in the play. Just to add a slightly different note, what does happen by the end of the play

is all the, both the women, Helena and Hermia, get the men that they want, they get their desires. Hermia gets Lysander because Theseus overrules her father. Helena gets Demetrius because he remains under Oberon's fairy magic. So actually by the end of the play, the forces of female desire are aligned with the forces of patriarchal authority. And I think that's one of the things that makes the ending of the play feel particularly kind of harmonious and joyful.

These forces that were in conflict with each other have actually been brought into alignment with one another. And the other thing I would just add to that is I think we have to remember that, again, going back to this idea of can we believe what we see, that whether how these figures are depicted will also have an effect on the audience by how the actors themselves look. So if the actors, in a sense, are tall and small, there may be some aspect of that. And we should also remember that they're all male. They're all, their boys who are acting the role of women. and there is a play upon this, I think, throughout most of Shakespeare's drama. But there's business about love.

I mean, the idea put forward that love is not in the eye, but in the mind, that's very strongly stated by the poet. Yes, and therefore is winged cupid painted blind, Helena says. So, yeah, and that, I mean, it might make it sound as if it's in the mind, so it's rational. It's the opposite, actually. It's that crazy, imaginative, fantastical part of the mind that's being associated with love in this play. Alison, has the play always been as popular as it is today?

No. Samuel Pepys when he went to see it thought that it was trivial and rubbish and didn't ever wish to see it again. And we actually didn't have Shakespeare's text until a revival in the Victorian period in 1847, I think, with actually a woman playing Oberon. Madam Vestris played Oberon in this pretty,

production at Sadler's Wells. And it was produced to quite a varied audience, but with Queen Victoria also attending. And that idea of having a female Oberon at that point, suggesting that there were links there, I think, to the kind of political dimensions of Victorian imperialism and the idea of a woman in power again, as there was when Elizabeth was on the throne when the play was. written. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Helen Hackett, Tom Healy and Alison Findlay. Next week, it's Nero, the Emperor accused of burning Rome and murdering his mother, brother, wife and father declared an enemy of the people and yet the people loved him. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. We haven't scratched the surface. Just warming up. He's been a colloquy with what did we not say. Well, I think we need to say something about the Titania's vow to the votress of the order, because I think that lies in that relationship as well, that

the boy himself is kind of irrelevant almost. It's the fact that Titania's primary duty is to the votress of her order, another woman, and not to Oberon, that really makes that problematic. And she has that wonderful speech about

imagining the woman, the pregnant woman going forward in the, across the land to gather trifles. She talks about her womb then rich with my young squire, which is treasures and commodities again, but she also talks about how they sit together on the yellow sands in the spiced Indian air by night.

It's a sort of sensuality of the hararees. She's fellow like pregnant. Yeah, and what they're doing is mocking the merchant ships going by whose sales are merely big-bellied with the wind. They're just a hollow travesty of pregnancy. And it's one of many examples in the play where we have a really strong sensual female bond, which has to be broken up. It happens also to Helena and Hermia. It happens by implication to Hippolyta in the Amazons. These women have to be broken up and brought under male authority. And Shakespeare comes back to it in Two Noble Pinsmen with Fletcher at the end

of his career, goes back to Athens and we have again a strong hippolyta linking with Amelia, her younger sister and with the three queens there too. I think it's something he was interested in. It's a recurrent theme. I think also another thing I'd want to say a bit more about is a theatrical imagination, if I may, because we've talked about Theseus' big speech about the poetic imagination.

But I think the play is also thinking a lot about the collective imagination of the playwright and the actors and the audience all working together. And in a way, the mechanicals, through their blunders, they kind of educate us in how to be a good audience. So they don't trust the imagination enough. They think they have to bring a wall on stage

and explain that it's a wall. They think they have to bring moonshine on stage in the person of the man of the moon. And we react to that. We think how ridiculous. Of course we can imagine a wall or imagine moonshine. So it makes us engage our imaginations

even more actively with Shakespeare's own play. Theseus, watching Pyramus and Thysbby at the end, says the best in this kind, meaning actors, the best in this kind are but shadows, but the worse to no worse if imagination amend them. So if we work with the actors and the players,

we can create a virtual world and that's another part of the magic of the play that sense of the magic of the collective imagination in the playhouse. And I think throughout the play there is this way in which the theatricality, the plays within plays so when Puck and sets up these scenes with Oberon

to watch Lysander and Hermia and Demetrius and Helena working out their various foibles, he sees this as a type of amusement and of course in a way he's also saying to the audience who are looking at this, this is a type of amusement as well. Oberon interestingly realizes that Puck can take this too far and he's much more reserved about whether this is appropriate to let this go on very far and wants to call a halt to.

He does put a stop to it. There's a wonderful moment actually in those scenes where Obron and Puck are the sort of on-stage audience and Obron says, I am invisible. Yes, that's right. may have put on some sort of robe of invisibility. We know that one of the other Elizabethan playing companies owned a robe of invisibility amongst their props. But it's also, of course, a point about the imagination.

If he tells us in words that he's invisible, the language can work on our imaginations to make us believe that. It's a play in many ways all about the willing suspension of disbelief. If you don't mind, now, a little interpolation here, but one of the most important things I've ever heard said about the theatre, was when I was interviewing Mar Bergman in 1978, and he said the theatre is extraordinary. You walk on stage as an unletter man, you sit on an ordinary seat and you say, I am a king and everybody believes you.

Yes. Yes. And interestingly, that was precisely one of the things that the authorities in the city of London really did not like about the theatre. I mean, they felt that it allowed people to start feeling this social mobility and social imagination. Anybody could be a king. Anybody could be a king. you could pay your penny and go and watch somebody who, you know, become the lover of the fairy queen. But I think that's precisely it.

I think Bottom, Bottom, who wants to play all the parts can be anything. And he does have the most lines in the play. And there's another important thing. Yes. I didn't know that. Yes. So you have these high-status characters like Theseus Hippolyta, but it's actually Bottom who has the most lines in the text.

And I think the Mechanicals also teaches another important thing about theatre, which is as well as literalised. wall and moonshine. At the same time they do the opposite with lion. There they don't, you know, they believe the imagination too much. They think everyone will think it's a real lie and they have to explain it's just snug the joiner. So there they overtrust the imagination and again we react. We think that's ridiculous. Of course we know it's just an illusion. So they help us, they sort of train us to steer a middle course between believing in what we see, but at the same time holding back and knowing it's just illusion, just the perfect position to be in to appreciate theatre.

Do you think the rude mechanicals are usually portrayed too crudely? They can be. They're portrayed as very thick and stupid. They put a play together from a standing start. They've got proper jobs. I mean, a weaver, a carpenter. These jobs take thought and care. And yet they're always,

bottom is bully bottom, is a bit of a boister and all the rest of it. But he still does some very bright ideas. Yeah, almost in spite of himself. Why are people compelled to see them as sort of stumbling idiots around the place? I think, you know, perhaps because we're all words people. We've talked a lot about the language and the text of the play.

On stage, often there's a lot of visual humour, both in the combat amongst the four young lovers, and also in the scenes with the mechanicals. But at the same time, I think we do get emotionally invested with their performance of Pyramus and Thisbee, and by the time Fluters, Thisby is bending over the dying body of bottom as Pyramus and saying things like, his eyes were green as leaks. You know, it's ridiculous, but often you have a tear in the eye.

you know, by that time you're really kind of rooting for them and you'll move by them and you love them. I think it's... You don't feel the same. I know, I feel as I'm in a way, but I'm just interested in... Just en passant from reading the Shakespeare's attitude to the working classes, even they're educated,

not educated, even artisan working classes, is quite a bit dismissive. Is that too... No, no, no, no, no, thanks. I think, say, I think one of the things that's so fascinating about bottom and particularly if you look at him in comparison with characters in Ovid who undergo metamorphosis. So in Ovid, when people are changed, there's usually an extraordinary element of pathos around this.

Often a comic pathos, but nevertheless a pathos. So, you know, Action's friend saying, as he's been torn to pieces as a stag, you know, I'll pity Action's not here to witness this. He's an attempt to try to cry out to them, and of course he can't. Io, you know, writing her name with her hoof when she's transformed into a cow to her father. Whereas bottom just remains wonderfully consistent. I mean, he is, he, you know, has an ass's head. He wants his bottle of hay instead of his normal food.

He wants his hairy ears to be scratched. He loves it. He loves it. he remains consistently himself. And there's a real affection, I think, and solidity to that, which I think also put into a rather ironic comparison with the more socially elevated characters who are using all this very, very elaborate language,

but who are self-deceiving. Aniston. Yes, I think that Bottom and Peter Quinn's, Peter Quinn's in particular, actually, with his prologue of these references to will and goodwill. I think it is a kind of little dramatic portrait by Shakespeare. And I think that the ways in which you were talking, Helen, about the play being Shakespeare reflecting a little bit, the mechanicals are part of that self-reflexive technique, I think. And we find out a lot about, you know, Elizabethan theatre history, the distribution of parts to actors.

Yeah, the use of few scripts where they just have. their own role with cues, not the whole play. I think that goodwill that you're speaking about is absolutely vital to that imaginative participation that we have to make in the play. We have to show goodwill to the players. That's absolutely essential. Memme is the directors who are more culpable than Shakespeare.

And dare I say, they also bring attention to the fact that they are playing for money. That, you know, this is not that, as with the Elizabethan theatre, this is not just being done out of love. It is a way that people make money. and they're going to hopefully be rewarded for it. And it's a transition, isn't it, between that household performance or palace performance

and the commercial world in which Shakespeare's now working? And thinking about the stage history of the play, actually, interestingly, it's the mechanicals part of the play that survives in the mid-17th century when the theatres are closed. There's what's called a droll, a kind of cut-down version of many plays which existed, but there's one of a mid-Summer night's tree which would have been performed in inns or in the streets

in kind of illicit circumstances because theatre is banned. And it's just the bottom and mechanical's plot. All the rest is kind of sheared away. That's the part that people are most want to see. That's the popular part in every sense of the word. And also the colour part. I mean, that's what we did at school.

When I was about 12, so we did that part. And the teacher made sure it worked on its own. It worked on its own. Brilliantly as far as I remember. Yeah, so it's a play which, you know, it integrates all these different ingredients we've been talking about. And they can be disintegrated. Oh, yes.

Should we all confess? I got away very lightly. I just was snout. You were a snout? And you, Helen? Peter Quince. You, Peter Quintz. I'm an organiser.

We should have guessed that, huh? I was the first fairy. Well, there we are. We could do it again. When these people clear from the room, and you'll get the most lines of bottom. Yes. Yeah, well, I can't remember much of it,

except this toilet roll that I brought without telling the teacher. Well, Michael Dobson, when he was writing his book on amateur Shakespeare, felt that far more people in the country, he thought between 20 and 25% had taken part in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream, far, far more than ever see it is in a go to theatre and see it in a professional production. And it'll be in the mechanicals at most of them.

And the mechanicals are fairies or, you know, again, That makes it very special, doesn't it? The fact that it's used to introduce children to Shakespeare is not really a dismissive thing. It means it has a really special, closer relationship with most people than any other Shakespeare play. I think that everyone comes to disturb things. You were bottomed in the school play, no. Yes, I was bottom. I had a rare vision.

That's what he told me to say. Yeah, a cup of tea would be lovely. A black coffee would be lovely, thank you. Tea, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Oi, you? While you're here, have a listen to this, Richard. Forest, for, four, four.

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