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‘This Palpable Gross Play’

‘This Palpable Gross Play’. Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What does a fairy look like?. ‘Puck and a Fairy’ by Arthur Rackham (1908). . From Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranckes and Merry Jests (1639). . Silly Shakespeare?. Samuel Pepys:

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‘This Palpable Gross Play’

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  1. ‘This Palpable Gross Play’ Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  2. What does a fairy look like? ‘Puck and a Fairy’ by Arthur Rackham (1908). From Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranckes and Merry Jests (1639).

  3. Silly Shakespeare? • Samuel Pepys: • ‘…to the King’s Theatre, where we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor ever shall again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.’ (29 September 1662) [N.B.: Pepys would have seen a heavily adapted version of the play.] • Echo of Hippolyta? • ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.’ (5.1.209)

  4. Pictorial realism Herbert Beerbohm Tree, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, His Majesty’s Theatre, 1900

  5. Pictorial realism • Victorian tendency to cut text and replace with flying fairies, spectacular scenery, music, dance, crowd scenes, etc. • Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, His Majesty’s Theatre, 1900 • seen by 220,000 people • 28 actors, a further 80 supernumeraries • classical Greek costumes • stream of real water • fairies on wires • first production to include Felix Mendelssohn’s complete score (1842) • introduced live rabbits in 1911 • Tree: ‘the entire business of the stage is – Illusion. … all that aids illusion is good, all that destroys illusion is bad’ (1913: 57).

  6. Dream as metatheatre • 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 fear. (Bottom, 3.1.16-20) • You, ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fearThe smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,May now perchance both quake and tremble hereWhen lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.Then know that I one Snug the joiner amA lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam.For, if I should as Lion come in strifeInto this place, ’twere pity on my life. (Snug, 5.1.217-24) • Why are these utterances comical?

  7. Metatheatrical jokes • Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company;For you in my respect are all the world.Then how can it be said I am alone,When all the world is here to look on me? (Helena, 2.1.223-6) • …here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house… (Quince, 3.1.2-4) • Conversation about difficulty of staging moonlight (3.1.43-56)

  8. A play about audiences • Unruly audience in 5.1 • Oberon and Puck as audience: • Shall we their fond pageant see?Lord, what fools these mortals be! (3.2.114-15) • Several plays within the play? • Artifice of lovers’ discourse? • Are there echoes of 1.1 in the mechanicals’ play?

  9. Anxiety about theatre? • Puck’s epilogue: a genuine anxiety about offence? Or merely conventional? • Plato’s Republic: • ‘he [the poet] wakens and encourages and strengthens the lower elements in the mind to the detriment of reason, which is like giving power and control to the worst elements in a state and ruining the better elements’. • Theseus on the simultaneous romance and danger of fantasy: • The lunatic, the lover, and the poetAre of imagination all compact.One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-17)

  10. Theatre as conjuring • Puck is a self-described ‘actor’ (3.1.74) and shape-shifter (2.1.44-57 and 3.1.103-6). • Titania accuses Oberon of similar deception (2.1.64-8). • Love potion tricks the senses: does the enchantment and disenchantment of Titania and Lysander mimic the theatrical effect of the play? • What about Demetrius? (‘I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.’ 4.1.190-1)

  11. Fantasy and shadows • ‘Whatsoever we present we wish it may be thought the dancing of Agrippa his shadows, who in the moment they were seen were of any shape one could conceive’ (Court Prologue to Campaspe, John Lyly, 1583) • ‘Shadows’ in Dream: • Oberon as ‘king of shadows’ (3.2.348) • Fiction as shadows: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’ (5.1.210-11) • Players as shadows: ‘If we shadows have offended…’ (Epilogue 1)

  12. Dream as a dream • Metaphor explicit in both title and epilogue • ‘Bottom’s Dream’: • I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. (4.1.202-8) • Presentations of dreams upon waking in 4.1: ‘like far-off mountains turned into clouds’ (4.1.187).

  13. What does a fairy look like? • Costume of fairies? • Fairies’ shifting shapes and sizes • ‘Robin Goodfellow’ in Grim, the Collier of Croydon (c. 1600) wears • ‘a suit of leather close to his body; his face and hands russet-colour, with a flail’ [club for threshing corn] • Oberon’scostume: • But who comes here? I am invisibleAnd I will overhear their conference. (2.1.186-7) • Henslowe’s 1598 inventory of the Admiral’s Men’s properties lists ‘a robe for to goo invisibell’ (Foakes 2002: 325).

  14. Locus and platea in performance • The tension between the ‘abstract and symbolic’ register of the locus and the ‘immediate and concrete’ register of the platea is one which the performance critic Colin Counsell has found ‘useful for conceptualising modern theatre’ (1996: 19).

  15. Peter Brook’s Dream (1970) Metaphorical staging: white box, Slinkies, giant feather. Circus skills: trapezes, stilts, spinning plates, clown nose ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends.’

  16. Counsell’s adaptation of locus and platea The platea equates to the ‘Concrete’ register of performance: the actor the ‘spinning plate’ The locus equates to the ‘Abstract’ register of performance: • the character • the ‘flower’

  17. Locus and platea in modern performance But because of the skill involved in spinning the plate, Counsell argues, the locus’ dependence upon successfully-executed platea is openly displayed: ‘The spectator must therefore acknowledge Concrete object and performer, and cooperate with him or her to build of the performance an other-place.’ (1996: 164) Other productions taking a similar approach: Robert Lepage (NT, 1992), Edward Hall (Propeller, 2003), Tim Supple (Dash Arts/RSC, 2006).

  18. Representing the forest • Forest as ‘green world’ • Transition from forest to Athens (and back again) • Closure or not?

  19. Representing the forest: Supple 2006

  20. Representing the forest: Supple 2006

  21. Representing the forest: Lepage 1992

  22. Representing the forest: Lepage 1992

  23. Casting the fairies • Doubling Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta: implications? • Cross-gender casting: • Original practices • Victorian tradition of female Oberon and Puck • Hall/Propeller 2003

  24. Bottom’s transformation Gregory Doran, RSC, 2008 Mike Alfreds, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2002

  25. Bottom’s transformation: Brook 1970

  26. Bottom’s transformation: Lepage 1992

  27. Bottom’s transformation: Supple 2006

  28. Dream as celebration of theatre • Presentations of Flute as Thisbe (Supple 2006, Hoffman 1999) • Dancing: bergomask, then fairy dance • Dance as symbol of unity throughout play: • If you will patiently dance in our round,And see our moonlight revels, go with us.If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts. (2.1.140-2) • Sound music. Come, my queen, take hands with me,And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be. (3.3.84-5)

  29. Dream as celebration of theatre

  30. Puck’s Epilogue • ‘Give me your hands’ in Brook 1970 • Celebration in Supple 2006 • Sadness/liminality in Hall 2003 • Effect of multiple endings? • Puck’s speech in 5.2 • Resolution or irresolution?

  31. References • Counsell, C. (1996) Signs of Performance, London: Routledge. • Foakes, R. A. (2002) Henslowe’s Diary: Second Edition, Cambridge: C.U.P. • Tree, H. B. (1913) Thoughts and After-Thoughts, New York & London: Funk & Wagnalls (available at archive.org).

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