"Cliff Notes - Midsummer Night's Dream, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Though a playwright does not generally have an all-seeing or subjective voice to speak from, he does have characters to represent various points of view. But can you always tell what Shakespeare himself feels about things in A Midsummer Night's Dream? Do his characters speak for him? Or do you feel that he sometimes disappears behind his characters, making the reader decide what to feel about the issues?

Theseus is the voice for reason, for civil order and the mature subjugation of romantic passion in marriage. The four lovers, on the other hand, speak out for romance. Since their interactions are the basis of the comedy, and since they are all married in the end, they too make us feel the frivolity of romance. But Oberon, Titania, and Puck keep things from getting too structured or domestic. In them we feel authentic wild powers, a force of nature (we might call it magic) that need not be tamed. This natural force is also aligned with art. These different forces keep us from settling too easily into judgments about love and reason.

By presenting us with two distinct worlds--the courtly domain of order and the wild woods--Shakespeare also shows us the necessity for a balance between the two. Neither one will suffice alone. Theseus seems too constricted by reason, the lovers too driven and distracted by emotion. You may feel sympathetic with all the different characters and levels of experience of the play. Shakespeare's architecture seems to insist that all together are necessary for a rounded view of our world.

^^^^^^^^^^A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: FORM AND STRUCTURE

Though Shakespeare's plays are now divided for us into acts and scenes, these are very likely the work of later editors. We do not really know where Shakespeare's players made their pauses. The Elizabethan stage was so bare and fluid that it wasn't necessary to stop frequently for scene or costume changes, as it is today. It's more interesting to look at the play itself to get a sense of form and structure.

^^^^^^^^^^A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: THE FIVE-ACT STRUCTURE

ACT I: EXPOSITION. The problem with the four lovers is revealed. They each seem to be in love with the wrong person.

ACT II: RISING ACTION. The quarrel between Oberon and Titania intensifies. Lysander is given the love juice.

ACT III: CLIMAX. Oberon's plan works: Bottom is transformed and Titania humiliated. The lovers are in complete disarray.

ACT IV: FALLING ACTION. The lovers, Titania, and Bottom wake up from their "dreams." Oberon and Titania are reconciled.

ACT V: RESOLUTION. The three couples prepare for marriage, and the play within the play is performed, exorcising the tragic element in favor of the comic.

The play has a very simple time architecture. Most of the action takes place during one long frantic night, framed at either end by a brief spate of day. And time parallels place. The play opens at court, in the sunny, rational, social world of Theseus the duke. The main course of the play takes place in the Athenian woods outside of town. There it is night--a mysterious world filled with spirits and human passions. At the end we are in court again. Day has returned, the order of marriage is triumphant, and the bonds of the social world are re-strengthened.

You might also find structural beauty in the way Shakespeare juggles the four realms his characters inhabit. By the way they speak and the kinds of characters they reveal, the people in the play seem to occupy distinct realms or zones of existence, which Shakespeare interweaves throughout the play. Theseus and Hippolyta, as members of the royal court, live in an extremely social world and stand for the orderly workings of society. The four lovers, in their travels from court to wood and back to court again, exist in a realm governed by the passions, and so come to stand for man's volatile emotional life. The rustic workingmen, with their simple trades, physical comedy, and earthy sensibilities, represent the material world. And the fairies--delicate, mysterious, elemental, with creative power and poetic art--represent the world of the spirit. All these worlds exist simultaneously. Shakespeare means us to see that the structure they combine to create is the human universe.

^^^^^^^^^^A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: SOURCES

As with most of his plays, Shakespeare drew on many different sources to help shape A Midsummer Night's Dream. There does not seem to be an earlier plot that he incorporated--rather, a series of myths and tales that he drew from to create his own work. But most of our understanding of Shakespearean sources is like detective work: we piece together similarities but we have no direct testimony.

Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Theseus seems to have given Shakespeare some of the mythical background for the play, particularly relating to Theseus's past exploits, romantic and otherwise. The name Egeus (Hermia's father) probably also came from Plutarch.

Shakespeare seems almost certain to have borrowed some information from the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose "Knight's Tale," in the Canterbury Tales, opens with lines about Theseus and Hippolyta. It also mentions observances of May Day.

Similarly, Ovid's Metamorphosis, translated by Arthur Golding, gave Shakespeare a very clear working of the story of Pyramus and Thisby. This is probably where Shakespeare picked up his word "cranny," through which the unfortunate lovers are forced to speak.

And it is also likely that Shakespeare knew of the Roman writer Apuleius's story The Golden Ass. In it a poor man is transformed by enchantment into an ass. In the description of the transformation, there are many similar phrases that tie the two together.

For his fairies, Shakespeare had a vast store of folklore to draw on. Robin Goodfellow was particularly well-known in country lore, though Shakespeare may have been the first to give him the name of Puck. May Day (May 1) and Midsummer's Night (June 23/summer solstice) were two festivals important as background for the play. May Day (when A Midsummer Night's Dream actually takes place) was a favorite festival for rural England, a time in which the people left the city and headed for the woods, where they danced and celebrated. A king and queen of May were elected, and this "royal" couple went to the nobles' houses to give their blessings, much the way Oberon and Titania do at the end of the play. May Day was, above all, a time of lovers' madness: they, too, went to the woods and frequently spent the night there. Midsummer was a general celebration of madness and merriment, a time when magic was afoot and the fairies were particularly evident. Costumes and dancing played a large part in the festivities. "Midsummer madness," brought about by the heat, affected everyone, opening the way for illusion (and delusion) to transform reality.

Shakespeare even drew on some of his own work. The situation of the workmen awkwardly performing their amateur theatricals is similar to the show of the Nine Worthies in Love's Labour's Lost. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, the way that couples mix up and transfer their affections is reminiscent of the Midsummer lovers. And if Romeo and Juliet was, as is often suggested, written directly before A Midsummer Night's Dream, it offers an entrance into the fairy world with Mercutio's famous description of Queen Mab.

^^^^^^^^^^A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: THE GLOBE THEATRE

One of the most famous theaters of all time is the Globe Theatre. It was one of several Shakespeare worked in during his career, and many of the greatest plays of English literature were performed there. Built in 1599 for L600 just across the River Thames from London, it burned down in 1613 when a spark from one of the cannons in a battle scene in Shakespeare's Henry VIII set fire to the thatched roof. The theater was quickly rebuilt and survived until 1644. No one knows exactly what the Globe looked like but some scholarly detective work has given us a fairly good idea. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has a full scale re-creation of the Globe.

When it was built, the Globe was the latest thing in theater design. It was a three-story octagon, with covered galleries surrounding an open yard some 50 feet across. Three sides of the octagon were devoted to the stage and backstage areas. The main stage was a raised platform that jutted into the center of the yard, or pit. Behind the stage was the tiring house--the backstage area where the actors dressed and waited for their cues. This area was flanked by two doors and contained an inner stage, with a curtain that was used when the script called for a scene to be discovered. (Some scholars think the inner stage was actually a tent or pavilion that could be moved about the stage.) Above the inner stage was the upper stage, a curtained balcony that could serve as the battlements in Hamlet or for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Most of the action of the play took place on the main and upper stages.

The third story held the musicians' gallery and machinery for sound effects and pyrotechnics. Above all was a turret from which a flag was flown to announce, "Performance today." A roof (the shadow) covered much of the stage and not only protected the players from sudden showers but also contained machinery needed for special effects. More machinery was under the stage, where several trapdoors permitted the sudden appearance in a play of ghosts and allowed actors to leap into rivers or graves, as the script required.