Wayward Sons and Daughters: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry IV, Part 1

Shakespeare ◽  
1993 ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
Susan Bassnett
Keyword(s):  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

A midsummer night's dream and "Romeo and Juliet"

1955 ◽  
Vol CC (jan) ◽  
pp. 13-14
Author(s):  
Ernest Schanzer
Keyword(s):  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare’s Popular Songs and the Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Newman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Song ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Common

This chapter investigates how Shakespeare exploits the possibilities of popular song to foreground lyric’s capacity to condense affect, to model the absorption of his audiences, and to engage with conflicts over ‘the common’—the push of the common-as-vulgar and the pull of the common-as-universal. At the same moment that song collections are attempting to sort out elite lyric from low broadside, Shakespeare repeatedly draws on these lesser lyrics to ask his audiences what they share and what they do not with these singers and songs, and the warrants, real and fantastical, for those identifications and distinctions. These lyric dynamics are most apparent in the comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night) but also play a key role in history (2 Henry IV), tragedy (Hamlet), and romance (The Winter’s Tale).

“Truly, and very notably discharg’d”: The Metamorphosis of Pyramus and Thisbe and the Place of Appropriation on the Early Modern Stage

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-220
Author(s):  
Louise Geddes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Asymmetry

In the mid 1590s, Shakespeare began a trend when he appropriated Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in two different genres, the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and the comic performance by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream The latter was the more subversive act, transforming the source material into a satire on the amateurs’ unskillful remix of their text, by focusing on the asymmetry between the performers’ transformative ambition and their skills. This janus-faced use of Ovid marks a divergence of appropriative treatment that saw the tragic adaptations struggle to maintain popularity against the widespread enjoyment of Shakespeare’s “tragical mirth,” and implicates Shakespeare in debates about the place of fidelity in appropriation. Pyramus and Thisbe’s Ovidian devolution aligns Shakespeare’s appropriative work with current theories about rhizomatic adaptation, and recognizes the collaborative and transformative nature of remediation.

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