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ABOUT THE PLAY
by Geoffrey Kershner

If you will, imagine a wedding, indeed a very special wedding. This wedding you imagine is for someone beloved, wealthy, and famous. In honor of this individual, a group of actors has been hired to create a play to be performed as a part of the wedding festivities. This sounds like some of the plot to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but this description is also the circumstances of the first production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play was created for a wedding of such high profile that the Queen of England at the time, Queen Elizabeth I, would have also been a guest. So, the quality and nature of the play was extremely important and one of England’s greatest playwrights, William Shakespeare, was hired for the job. Shakespeare would have wanted to create something appropriate for a wedding; something to keep people happy, relaxed, and celebratory. So, Shakespeare wrote both a romance and a comedy filled with magic, music, and poetry. Shakespeare also managed to write a play that both praised married love and single life at the same time. The play’s most famous and powerful guest, Queen Elizabeth I, was known as the “Virgin Queen.” Keeping her majesty pleased with the production would have been crucial for Shakespeare and his actors because the royal court was a very valued patron of the arts. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written sometime in the mid-1590s. The play was most likely written shortly before Shakespeare penned his famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written over 400 years ago, it is far from old fashioned. The characters that Shakespeare has created for us and the feelings they express are alive in our world today. We all know husbands and wives who argue, pranksters who like to cause trouble, “know it alls” who drive us crazy, and of course we all know young men and women who are in love. Love, which is familiar to us all, is the driving force in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

FAIRIES AND MAGIC
IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

Fairies play a very large role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Communities across the globe have stories and superstitions about creatures that are neither human nor divine. They are usually ageless and immortal. They are capable of magic and they use this magic to both aid mankind and torture them. These myths and figures vary from culture to culture, and within the British Isles, stories vary from county to county. Often, a village may not even agree with their neighboring village about the magic and mythical creatures that live in the wooded areas they share. The humans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream come from both classical mythology and the everyday Elizabethan world. The fairies also belong to multiple traditions, collected by Shakespeare from a myriad of sources. Fairies had very specific meaning to Shakespeare and those living in Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare knew a lot about the tales of fairies and magic. As a boy, he grew up in a rural market town and fairy stories were very popular in the English countryside, much more so then in the cities. Shakespeare also read a lot, learning from books about the fairies of literature as well as the folklore he heard in his home town. TITANIA: The name of Titania, The Fairy Queen, comes from the Roman poet Ovid who gave this name to Diana, the goddess of chastity. Titania is of course not chaste because she is married to Oberon and also becomes very “familiar” with Bottom within the course of the play, but she still has qualities of a goddess. She refers to humans as “mortals” and also claims mankind as her children. The state of the natural world is also at the hands of the decisions made by herself and Oberon. OBERON: The Fairy King first appeared in a French romance written in the fifteenth century and which was translated to English shortly before Shakespeare wrote the play. Shakespeare then invented Titania as his wife and contemporary for the purposes of the play. COBWEB: In Shakespeare’s original text, there are four fairies he designates with names. (Our production has created a character that is the synthesis of all four) These four fairies are Peaseblossom, Moth, Mustardseed, and Cobweb. These four fairies are an invention of Shakespeare’s, but all the names suggest things that are tiny and delegate. This is different from many of the fairy stories of Shakespeare’s time in which fairies were large and hostile. These fairies would steal beautiful human children from their cribs and replace them with their own ugly fairy babies. These fairy babies were known as “changelings.” PUCK: Although Shakespeare has made Puck famous, Puck was not an invention of Shakespeare’s. At the time of the play, it was common place in Elizabethan England to speak of a puck or the puck. A puck was a kind of fairy and stories of these figures was common all over the British Isles. A puck was known to change shapes and could look human or could look like an animal. One of Puck’s most famous tricks was taking on the form of flickering lights that would mislead travelers at night. A puck was also known to do good deeds, particularly to those who spoke well of him.