Page 72 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups / 61
Egeus, to arrogant Lysander. He in turn is fawned over by gawky
Helena, while shy Demetrius pines for Hermia. Here Shakespeare
drew on plots from Italian novels, endowing a stereotypical story with
his own strong sense of moral purpose. In defying her father, Hermia
is not unlike Juliet. Also Juliet, like Hermia, steadfastly remains
chaste, even while sleeping beside her beloved; the woman's rebellion
is directed at wrongheaded authority, not conventional values.
To represent the full social spectrum, Shakespeare created a set of
lower-class characters in Bottom the weaver and his companions,
who slip into the forest to rehearse Pyramus and Thisby, a tragic
play not unlike Romeo and Juliet. They are called "rude mechani-
cals," because these are men who work with their hands and are
caricatures of groundlings who might catch the play at some future
date. Finally, Will added the fairy plot: Oberon, king of the fairies,
tries to tame his own beautiful shrew of a wife, Titania.
All four plots are connected thematically via the recurring device
of difficult pairings—not surprising considering the author's own.
Earlier comedies, like The Taming of the Shrew, had been strictly
social; real people in a real world. A Midsummer Night's Dream pre-
sented his first Green World, where everday folk desert civilization
for some natural place and where they're in constant danger of
reverting to a bestial level. Bottom actually turns into an ass, the
physical symbol of what thematically threatens everyone. This is
done by the hand of Puck, who is a mischievous sprite rather than a
dangerous Satan. Always the pre-Freudian psychologist, Shakespeare
refuses to explain whether the dreams of fairies are real or imagi-
nary. Right you are if you think you are; if the characters believe
their dream, it's real for them.

"Scene shifters, rejoice!"

The Stage Tradition

The enchantments, which were probably only suggested in Will's
own time, were improved upon as the state of theatrical art became
ever more elaborate. In 1692, A Midsummer Night's Dream was
turned into an opera (with music by Henry Purcell), The Fairy Queen,
and enough Shakespeare was eliminated to make room for a Chinese
chorus and six dancing monkeys. An 1816 version (music by Henry
Bishop) proved pyrotechnically remarkable, in sight and sound, caus-
ing purist William Hazlitt to complain: "Oh, ye scene-shifters, ye
scene painters, ye machinists and dreamakers, ye men in the orches-