In the shakespearian play, on a Midsummer’s night, four young lovers find themselves wrapped in the dream-like arms of an enchanted forest where spirits lurk and fairies rule. While a feuding Fairy King and Queen are at war, their paths are crossed by Bottom, Quince and their friends presenting a play within a play. Chief mischief-maker Puck is onhand to ensure that the course of true love is anything but smooth, and games of fantasy, love and dreams ensue in Shakespeare’s most popular comedy. All the while the preparations of a wedding are in full swing, Theseus, the powerful duke and ruler of Athens is to marry Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons.
The play combines mythology of Ancient Greece with elements of Renaissance England, set in antiquity in the wood outside of Athens. To the Elizabethans the period known as midsummer was not an idyllic time of year, but a dangerous time. The crops were out in the fields, but had not ripened yet. The harvest could be threatened by bad weather, which would lead in turn to rising prices, discontent, riots, social instability. Precautions had to be taken to appease the old Gods. Humans had to prepare against the odds of nature. On the eve of St. John’s day, it was thought that a portal opened up between the mortal and the fairy world and for the next few days until St. Peter’s day, fairies would flood the land creating mischievous havoc. Folk would hang garlands of midsummer flowers as vervain, corn marigold, and St John’s wort, around the byres of their cattle, or the cradles of their children, so the fairies would not swap them for changelings.
This play is so rich on so many topics:
It’s prevailing themes touch on order and disorder, the balance of the rational and the irrational, the dichotomy of control and impulse; on reality and appearance; on love and marriages and the difficulty of relationships; the dominance of the male over the female; of the elite and educated class over the uneducated working class, of human order over nature; on creative imagination and its reliance on the unconscious, the magical, the mysterious. Nature is presented as a magical world in contrast to the orderly court of Athens. The moon plays an important role, reflecting change, disruption, unpredictability, romance, the magical mysterious, a journey. Sleep and Dreams take us to mysterious places, states of consciousness, states of innocence and vulnerability; they cause confusion and the blurring of boundaries between fantasy and reality. Magic represents the unseen, the unpredictable the irrational, the inexplicable.