A Midsummer Night’s Dream presides for Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 30th-Year Presentation

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream presides for Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 30^th-Year Presentation

 

by Michael Todd Steffen

 

Shakespeare’s wonderful fantasy comedy of otherwise and elsewhere, all about the confusion of young lovers and the curative transformations brought about by the woodland fairies—A Midsummer Night’s Dream is back, for its 3rd performance in the 30-year life of Shakespeare on the (Boston) Common, directed by Steven Maler.

 

The pending marriage at the opening between Theseus and Hyppolyta polarize the two source conflicts of the play: Hermia’s refusal to obey her father Egeus and accept Demetrius’s suit for her hand in marriage; and the quarrel in the realm of the woodland fairies between Oberon and Titania over the possession of an Indian boy left orphan by one of Titania’s devotees.

 

Viewers of the play retain the memorable scene of Hermia arguing with her father against the arranged marriage. We remember the two sets of lovers running off and falling prey to the fairies’ interventions and confusion in the woods outside Athens.

 

The cover of my Folgers Library pocketbook version of the play shows the fairy queen

Titania holding the ass’s head to her bosom, gently embracing and kissing its elongated muzzle.

Of the dozens of other versions of paperbacks, CDs, Bluerays and DVDs available on my

library network, about 4 out of 5 of them present a similar image, as do the majority of posters

I’ve seen for live performances staged here and there. In abstract: the ass’s ears, the goddess’s

tiara, stardust, woodland greenery, the delicate mesh of dragonfly wings with the bodies of

fairies… This is from Act 4 Scene 1, where Titania dotes on Bottom:

 

TITANIA 
Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick muskroses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

 

We are less apt to remember the waste land the world of the play is depicted as, in a speech by Hyppolyta recalling to Oberon the wide catastrophic effects the quarrels of Heaven cause simple mortals on earth, natural environments, farmland and even their fun time:

 

But with thy brawls thou has disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

 

Some of this is literaria from Shakespeare’s many classical sources. Some of it, though, does hit home to those who have studied the period, especially aware of the wave of Plague in and around London in 1593.

 

More specifically, political deaths were in the air in 1595 when the play was first staged. These deaths touched the playwright and actors:

 

Threats against French, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had been pasted or nailed on the

streets. On 5 May [1593] a bitterly xenophobic poem of fifty-three lines had been

placed on the walls of the Dutch churchyard. It had been signed “Tamburlaine.” Not

unnaturally, perhaps, these attacks were considered to be the work of professional

writers…[who] were to be arrested and examined…One of the first arrested was the

author of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd, who was duly put to the torture. He named

Christopher Marlowe himself…Ten days later [Marlowe] was dead, stabbed through the

eye as a result of an apparent brawl in Deptford. Kyd himself died in the following year.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of these events on the fraternity of the players…It

was a series of shocking events, of which no one could see the outcome. The uncertainty

and anxiety were intense, the fearfulness rendered even worse by the prevalence of the

plague and the closure of the theatres. [Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography, Doubleday, New York, 2005, 202]

 

In the congenial disguise of the witty mechanicals, staging the play within a play, to be performed at the Theseus’ and Hyppolyta’s nuptials, artistic fear of violent censorship is playfully evoked in an arresting question as to the fright Snug as Lion might give the ladies in the audience: “and that were enough to hang us all.” The fear of the players being hanged, and elaborate measures in the way of apologetic addenda to the play’s script in order to avoid scaring the audience, are repeated in this scene and in Act 3 Scene 2. There the players reconvene and Bottom is transformed. Indeed, the contemporary audience could gather nuances of much more immediate danger than we might pick up on these 430+ years later, inclined as we are to enjoy the comical elements as being “pure.” Especially in the repetition of the“hanging” notion, we can detect these elements might not have been so innocently written order claimed. The gallows especially fixates Bottom, underscoring the less than evident

terror of the transformation he is to undergo.

 

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Hamlet’s experience simply could not have happened to a plumber.” The range of Shakespeare’s characters, in different registers of society, high and low, would challenge the witty Shaw observation. A vital and guiding world beyond, be it the ghost of a slain king, or the benighted queen of the woodland fairies, is indeed concerned with and apt to reveal itself to prince and “rude mechanical” alike. It is a truth so intimate, so tailored, so personal. Only the centuries-long upholding of a genuine companion to the imagination in its great, generous range could possibly wit-ness to the experience’s validity, up and down the social scales. Why is Shakespeare still so widely appreciated? Because the mirrors he used to reveal the strangest yet most persistent missteps of our lives are still powerfully at work, reflecting our world, with its willful, dark, dangerous sometimes absurd center stage, as well as its shrugging yet willing survivors closer to the general, vulnerable, yet all the more humored and fluent proverbial bottom of the barrel.

 

To note in this year’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production, eight of the principle characters will be played by four actors doing double duty, underscoring the “mirroring” aspect of the Athens and woodland scenarios in the play. De’lon Grant will embody Theseus and Oberon; Nora Eschenheimer doubles as Hyppolyta/Titania; Nick Cearly: Puck/Philostrate; and Brook Reeves as Egeus and Starveling; with Meghan Carey as Hermia; Annika Burley playing Helena; Jaime José Hernández as Lysander and Jack Greenberg as Demetrius.

 

Presentations of Shakespeare on the Common are free and open to the public. Staged at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common, A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs from July 22nd to August 9th. For more information, specific dates and times, chair rentals, etc., visit https://commonshakes.org/production/dream26/