The Song Inside Your Mind

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-92
Author(s):  
Drew Massey
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Contemporary Opera ◽  
Public Imagination

Adès’s second opera, The Tempest (2003), has been celebrated for many reasons. In the public imagination it has solidified comparisons between Adès and Benjamin Britten (the composer of one of the other most well-known Shakespeare operas of the last hundred years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1960). The Tempest also established Adès as a leading presence in contemporary opera. My goal in this essay is to explore how two interrelated concerns—the expressive possibilities of moving from one medium to another and the interpenetration of different subjectivities with one another—show one way of thinking about The Tempest which is emblematic of several recurrent aspects Adès’s sensibility. The Tempest, as the largest work he completed in the decade after his initial flush of success in the 1990s, demonstrates the longevity of his quest for what he calls “new objects” which transcend their medium and engender singular subjective experiences.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Mind

Why has Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the cognitive discourse of imagination not been noticed before? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus’ speech on imagination is followed by the play-within-play of “Pyramus and Thisbe” enacted by Bottom and the other “rude mechanicals”; it shows that Shakespeare was interested in the mechanical applications of imagination, its cognitive uses in playmaking. But this interest was obscured by Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers, who prized the fairies above the mechanicals: Shakespeare was remade from a man of the theater into a visionary poet; imagination was remade from a mechanism of the mind into a mystical force of creativity. It is time to recuperate the scientific and epistemological background of Shakespeare’s interest in imagination, whose crucial achievement was to bring the complexities of cognitive theory into the realm of art.

A Note on the Four Chords in act II of A Midsummer Night's Dream

Tempo ◽  
1963 ◽  
pp. 36-37
Author(s):  
Eric Roseberry
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Major Chord ◽  
The One

We know from the composer's own account that work on A Midsummer Night's Dream was by no means always easy going. Therefore when I accidentally stumbled (aurally, be it noted) upon the remarkable fact that the four chords used in Act II of the Dream were almost identical with those used in the setting of Keats's ‘Sonnet to Sleep’ in the Serenade I fully expected to learn that the composer had consciously borrowed from the earlier work, reversing the order of the first two chords (adding a B to the D major chord) and magically re-spacing and re-scoring them. As the poetic element in each piece is concerned with the properties of sleep (inducing a healing forgetfulness on the one hand, a fantastic change of identities on the other) the conscious re-working of those earlier chords of the Serenade would have seemed by no means inapt.

Journey through light and darkness: a study of duplication in Shakespeare

1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Aimara Da Cunha Resende
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ideological Stance ◽  
Renaissance Poetics

As Shakespeare matures, his ideological stance changes from that of a writer believing in and backing up the establishment, to that of one who, though deeply aware of man in his human condition, doubts the validity of the status quo. His art then reflects the changes in his stance. At first it tends to present Renaissance poetics, becoming essentially Baroque, in its greatest phase, to move back to more firmly delineated forms and structures, in his last plays. This study of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and The Tempest aims at presenting some characteristics both of the Renaissance elements in the structure, based on "mise en abyme," and of the Baroque poetics found within this structure. These aspects are viewed against the background of the ideology of Shakespeare's England at the same time that duplication, in Lacan's sense, is analysed and shows to coincide with the support and/or acceptance of the social cannons.

The Ritual and Rhetoric of A Midsummer Night's Dream

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Sequence ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Human Love ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The One

Two comic ideas inform the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The traditions of festival and ritual help to explain the one idea of celebrating man's quest for renewal in communion with nature and divinity; the traditions of Roman comedy and rhetoric help to explain the other, the idea of understanding man's folly in his quest for order in society. Shakespeare creates two contexts, finite society with its mores and laws, and nature with its transcendent gods, and then assimilates the two in the action and language of the play. The action combines a dialectical sequence based on social conflict and a symbolic sequence based on magic and myth. The language ranges between debate and song, argument and incantation. The gods of nature become both measure and mirror of the absurdity of human love, and the result is both satiric and celebrative: folly is understood as folly and celebrated as myth. Shakespeare's amusement at the artist's power through language to comprehend the relation of nature and experience and translate the comprehension into comic myth is apparent throughout. Bottom's wedding to Titania is summary of the comprehension and the play-within-a-play is a burlesque of the power.

scholarly journals Shakespeare and the Demonization of Fairies

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 194-213
Author(s):  
Piotr Spyra
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Reflection

The article investigates the canonical plays of William Shakespeare - Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest - in an attempt to determine the nature of Shakespeare’s position on the early modern tendency to demonize fairy belief and to view fairies as merely a form of demonic manifestation. Fairy belief left its mark on all four plays, to a greater or lesser extent, and intertwined with the religious concerns of the period, it provides an important perspective on the problem of religion in Shakespeare’s works. The article will attempt to establish whether Shakespeare subscribed to the tendency of viewing fairies as demonic agents, as epitomized by the Daemonologie of King James, or opposed it. Special emphasis will also be put on the conflation of fairies and Catholicism that one finds best exemplified in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The article draws on a wealth of recent scholarship on early modern fairies, bringing together historical reflection on the changing perception of the fairy figure, research into Shakespeare’s attitude towards Catholicism and analyses of the many facets of anti-Catholic polemic emerging from early modern Protestant discourse.

scholarly journals Remediating Global Media in Recent Shakespeare Productions on Romanian Stages

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mădălina Nicolaescu
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Computer Game ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
New Type

Abstract The paper discusses recent Romanian Shakespeare productions of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Bucharest. It argues that global mass culture, in the form of TV sitcoms and musicals, YouTube clips and computer games, is re-circulated on Romanian stages with the result of re-mediating the older forms of Romanian Shakespeare performances. The paper interrogates the popular character of the new type of productions, which are largely unpolitical and motivated by commercial reasons. The last part of the paper presents a radical deconstruction of Shakespeare’s text in the form of a computer game, which, however, re-introduces the political orientation of older, pre- 1989 performances.

Victorian Fairies and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream in England

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marian Wilson Kimber
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Incidental Music ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Predominantly Female ◽  
To Receive ◽  
British Nationalism

In art, literature, theatre and music, Victorians demonstrated increased interest in the supernatural and nostalgia for a lost mythic time, a response to rapid technological change and increased urbanization. Romanticism generated a new regard for Shakespeare, also fuelled by British nationalism. The immortal bard's plays began to receive theatrical performances that more accurately presented their original texts, partially remedying the mutilations of the previous century. The so-called ‘fairy’ plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, were also popular subjects for fairy paintings, stemming from the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. In such a context, it is no wonder that Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was so overwhelmingly popular in England and that his style became closely associated with the idea of fairies. This article explores how the Victorians’ understanding of fairies and how the depiction of fairies in the theatre and visual arts of the period influenced the reception of Mendelssohn's music, contributing to its construction as ‘feminine’. Victorian fairies, from the nude supernatural creatures cavorting in fairy paintings to the diaphanously gowned dancers treading lightly on the boards of the stage, were typically women. In his study of Chopin reception, Jeffrey Kallberg has interpreted fairies as androgynous, but Victorian fairies were predominantly female, so much so that Lewis Spence's 1948 study, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, includes an entire section on fairy gender intended to refute the long-standing notion that there were no male fairies. Thus, for Mendelssohn to have composed the leading musical work that depicted fairies contributed to his increasingly feminized reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.

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