scholarly journals Making Amends: The Transformation of Theseus and the Feminization of Marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Charles Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Love ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Way

This study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream asks why Theseus changes his mind about forbidding the marriage of Hermia and Lysander and what this change means for the view of marriage developed in the play and for the experience of art which the play engenders. By emphasizing the love of women for each other, the vows of sisterhood and the cult of Diana, the play prepares the way for Theseus’ change of mind and for the feminization of marriage and the celebration of imagination with which the play ends. We can observe these emphases in patterns of language and imagery (especially the flower motif), in metaphors and allusions and in descriptions of the union of opposites. The interplay of chaste love and desire delineates the art of metaphor and drama which the audience must grasp to fully appreciate the play. In Acts 4 and 5 Theseus’ resistance to romantic love melts away, along with his opposition to the imagination. Thus, during the wedding feast of Act 5, Theseus defends the amateur theatrics of the workmen as being excellent «if imagination amend them» (5.1.209); and he is associated in his language and ideas with Puck, the most fantastic and transformative character in the play. Theseus is himself transformed from the seducer and betrayer of women described in 2.1.77-80 into a worthy husband for Hippolyta, one who meets her halfway in her respect for the visions of lovers and poets. 

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

The Manifestation of Desire

2021 ◽  
pp. 120-147
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Way

Chapter 4 conceptualizes the device of ‘manifestation,’ the term identifying the causal power of desires, thoughts, and words to call forth objects and even characters in Shakespeare’s comic world. In the spirit of critic Elena Zupančič, the device shows, among other things, the way that comedy can surface the amusing monstrousness and presumptuousness of human wishes. The concept of manifestation entails various literary and dramatic values that characterize Shakespearean comedy. Historically, it reflects interests and theories found in Renaissance treatises on magic, and it even parallels certain modern-day linguistic patters. The chapter formalizes and theorizes the device, drawing examples from a range of comedies. The Comedy of Errors (Dr. Pinch), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helana and the love potion), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (the Witch of Brainford) come in for special discussion. The chapter ends by situation manifestation in relation to entrance effects in medieval and Tudor drama and to allegorical effects in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity in As You Like It

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Shakespeare's As You Like It. The play is very similar in the way it moves to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labour's Lost, despite the fact that its plot is taken over almost entirely from Lodge's Rosalynde. It argues that the reality we feel about the experience of love in the play, reality which is not in the pleasant little prose romance, comes from presenting what was sentimental extremity as impulsive extravagance and so leaving judgment free to mock what the heart embraces. The Forest of Arden, like the Wood outside Athens, is a region defined by an attitude of liberty from ordinary limitations, a festive place where the folly of romance can have its day.

A Struggle with Alterity: A Lévinasian Reading of Macbeth

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Mehrdad Bidgoli ◽  
Shamsoddin Royanian
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Play ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn Macbeth (ca. 1606), William Shakespeare returns all the way back to his metaphysics which he had demonstrated magnificently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) and Hamlet (ca. 1600). These works represent Shakespeare’s dramaturgical treatment of Being, substance, essence, etc. One of the chief elements of these plays is supernaturality, or nothingness (non-being) in a sense interrupting Being and human activities. These elements are presented in Julius Caesar (1599) as well, a history play which has commonalities with Macbeth. Yet few of his tragedies offer a world so dipped in horror and darkness as Macbeth. Ethics might thus be a far-fetched component among these grisly sensations and in the bloody atmosphere of this tragedy, but with the help of Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), traces of ethical exigency can be discerned. Approaching Macbeth through Lévinas’s philosophy, we attempt to study some ways in which ethics can be addressed and studied in this dark world. We will discuss Macbeth’s struggles with time (mostly his future) and the Other as metaphors of alterity intruding into and interrupting his totalizing conatus.

scholarly journals Teatro Praga’s Omission of Shakespeare – An Intercultural Space

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (30) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Maria Sequeira Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Stage Design ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Henry Purcell ◽  
The Way

Teatro Praga’s (a Portuguese theatre company) adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest omit what is usually considered crucial to a Shakespearean adaptation by giving primacy to neither text nor plot, nor to a stage design that might highlight the skill and presence of the actors, a decision arguably related to what the company perceives as a type of imprisonment, that of the lines themselves and of the tradition in which these canonical plays have been staged. Such fatigue with a certain way of dealing with Shakespeare is deliberately portrayed and places each production in a space in-between, as it were, which might be described as intercultural. “Inter,” as the OED clarifies, means something “among, amid, in between, in the midst.” Each of Teatro Praga’s Shakespearean adaptations, seems to exist in this “in-between” space, in the sense that they are named after Shakespeare, but are mediated by a combination of subsequent innovations. Shakespeare then emerges, or exists, in the interval between his own plays and the way they have been discussed, quoted, and misquoted across time, shaping the identities of those trying to perform his works and those observing its re-enactments on stage while being shaped himself. The fact that these adaptations only use Shakespeare’s words from time to time leads critics to consider that Teatro Praga is working against Shakespeare (or, to admirers of Henry Purcell, against his compositions). This process, however, reframes Shakespeare’s intercultural legacy and, thus, reinforces its appeal.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document