Midsummer Night Research Articles

“He'll / Seem to Break Loose” in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

The Arden editor of A Midsummer Night's Dream has remarked that Act III, Scene ii, ll. 257–58 “would be obelized as corrupt, if it were Arden practice so to mark a crux for which no sufficiently ac...

SLEEP AND IMAGINATION IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s deep reflection on the power of the imagination, its somatic and affective presence in sleep and dreaming, its generative power in poetry and performance, its psychological associations with love, desire, belief formation and belief transformation.

“I Was Too Chickenhearted to Publish it”: Seán O’Faoláin, Displacement and History Re-Written

This article concerns the re-writing of an Irish historical moment within the short story genre, focusing on the renowned Irish writer Seán O’Faoláin (1900-1991). O’Faoláin, it is argued here, attempted to alleviate the “trauma” of the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) through his writing. This piece offers a comparative analysis of O’Faoláin’s treatment of the Civil War in his autobiography, Vive Moi! (1993), and in two short stories, “Fugue” and “The Bomb Shop”, from the collection Midsummer Night Madness (1932), examining his re-writing of several key episodes from the Civil War. As this article demonstrates, O’Faoláin re-wrote these so that they became part of a less contentious War of Independence narrative.

The Image of Egypt in a Selection of Elizabethan & Jacobean Plays

<p>This study communicates the question of representational Egypt(ians) through textual analysis and close reading of Elizabethan and Jacobean selected plays, whose main concern is Egypt and Egyptians: Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (All Is True)Henry VIII, and Cymbeline, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The False One, Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra, Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, and Webster’s The White Devil. It examines the process of labelling, the concomitant negative stereotyping of land and human, and its effect upon characters’ lives and future prospects as a result of the dramatists’ response to contemporary colonialist discourse that exaggerated the signs of cultural and epistemological difference.</p>

Cardiometabolic prevention in Romania: a midsummer night's dream?

Cardiometabolic prevention in Romania: a midsummer night's dream?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by The Royal Shakespeare Company with Poulton Drama at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare’s Globe at Shakespeare’s Globe, and: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Pendley Shakespeare Festival at Pendley Manor

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by The Royal Shakespeare Company with Poulton Drama at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare’s Globe at Shakespeare’s Globe, and: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Pendley Shakespeare Festival at Pendley Manor

An Effigy of Empire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Canadian Imperial Nationalism During the Second Boer War

On October 31, 1899, as a part of undergraduate University of Toronto Halloween celebrations, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Princess of Wales Theatre on King Street West was interrupted by shouts from the gallery calling for the death of “Oom” Paul Kruger, the leader of the South African Republic, who had recently declared war on the British Empire. The student demonstration was not, in itself, seen as objectionable or surprising—a similar interruption by Trinity students at convocation on October 25 was lauded in The Globe as “Patriotic.” What was unusual to the Toronto newspapers that spent the next week decrying the demonstration was the students’ lack of decorum at a Shakespeare performance. In this contribution, Andrew Bretz looks at the tension between how paratextual signifiers such as costuming choices, lighting, and the theatre space itself constructed the Halloween 1899 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an imperial text, and how Shakespeare as “high culture” moderated the ways in which individuals could express imperial allegiances. This alignment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Canadian and British imperial projects may serve to explain why the students chose a performance of that particular play to enact their patriotic violence, yet the condemnation of the event by the daily newspapers troubles the relationship between imperial identity, partially predicated on a sanitized vision of Shakespeare, and the enacting of violence against the colonized other. For the newspapers, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a representation of paternalistic British culture and identity, ultimately could not be reconciled with the bald violence of a jingoistic imperialism.

Ovid's Myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

The figure of the hermaphrodite was a complex symbol in the early modern era. Drawing on the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream uses erotic images of sexual entwinement, images that specifically invoke the mythical creation of the Ovidian man-woman, to suggest a range of sexual identifications. The hermaphroditic images in Shakespeare's play not only point to a cultural fear of powerful females who, like Salmacis, have the capacity to overpower men but also indicate male sovereignty in the spiritual joining of the male/female body in marriage.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

Four Women in the Woods: An Ecofeminist Look at the Forest as Home

Four Women in the Woods:An Ecofeminist Look at the Forest as Home Catherine Diamond (bio) In 2002, Futerra, a British media company advocating sustainability, launched "The Seasons Alter," a four-minute video of Titania's "bad weather" speech. Played by two actresses, Titania chides the surly Oberon, chasing him around the sparse modernist set dominated by an enormous clock. He responds to her recital of environmental disasters stemming from their quarrel by placing the onus on her: "Do you amend it then: it lies in you." She then repeats her own last line more forcefully: "We are their parents and original."1 Formerly, directors were wont to shorten this speech—the longest in the play—because its serious topicality broke the spell of comic fantasy. Futerra, by extracting its prescient relevance to the contemporary global warming crisis, thrust A Midsummer Night's Dream into the Anthropocene.2 By posing their fault equally, however, Futerra obscures the ethicality of their respective positions. It places Titania's commitments to rectifying the weather patterns upon which farmers depend and nurturing her votaress's child on the same level as Oberon's whim, an expression of power invested in him by a patriarchal hierarchy. Their debate also puts the Fairy Queen's concern for the world's inhabitants in conflict with her maternal affection for one particular child. She is not allowed by Oberon to love both. By trickery, he obtains the changeling, quells her rebellion, and reabsorbs her into his hierarchal order. However, Titania's challenge to his rule lingers from the image of her loving command over the forest dwellers, a delicate dream of an alternative relationship, of a possible something else. Titania's importance in the play and the expansive expression of her values and desires demonstrates one woman's conflict between her loyalty to nature and to her husband/king. Three other female characters in classical dramas also face similar dilemmas of having to choose between [End Page 71] their identities associated with forest life and their roles in patriarchal societies: Sakuntala in Kalidasa's eponymous fifth century Sanskrit play, Neang Seda (Sita) in the Reamker, the eighteenth century Cambodian version of the Sanskrit Ramayana,3 and Shakespeare's Rosalind in As You Like It. All four are unusual in that they are aristocratic women who spend the duration of their respective dramas in forests. Ecofeminism Their conflicts reprise one of the major concerns of ecofeminism that examines the "important connections between the oppression of women and the destruction and misuse of nonhuman nature within male-dominated cultures."4 This general formulation does not specify the important connections, but Karla Armbruster adds, "central to the ecofeminist agenda is the goal of individual, social, and ideological change—specifically, change that will improve the cultural standing of women and nature."5 She implies that the hierarchy of dualisms that divide the world and valorize the male side, such as nature/female and culture/male, has to be dissolved to allow more nuanced interconnections. These artificial divisions, with their concomitant ramifying dyads, were imposed not only to simplify, dominate, and unify the multiplicity of life forms, but also to justify that domination as the natural order. The mutual exclusivity of dualisms has been harmful to both halves, and ecofeminism challenges the gendered essentializing of qualities. It critiques those expected of women that perpetuate the notion that they are somehow physically and emotionally closer to nature, in contradistinction to mind, reason, and the scientific method, and that this association invalidates their environmental knowledge and concern. "Inherent in ecofeminism," writes Barbara Gates, "is a belief in the interconnectedness of all living things. Since all life is nature, no part of it can be closer than another to 'nature.'"6 At the same time, it must account for women's historical roles as nurturing caregivers and the current focus of agencies dedicated to poverty eradication by empowering poor women to protect their own environment. Moreover, ecofeminism challenges the cultural construction of "nature" within the humanist project of mapping the world as well as the aesthetic melding of women and landscape within a sexualizing gaze of Western art. Pleasures of the land and body have to...

Historicizing Shakesfear and Translating Shakespeare Anew

Historicizing Shakesfear and Translating Shakespeare Anew Lezlie C. Cross (bio) "Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated." A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM (ACT 3, SCENE 1) In 2011, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), helmed by artistic director Bill Rauch, started an experimental project to "translate" Shakespeare's plays into contemporary English. The project was funded by tech entrepreneur Dave Hitz and led by Dr. Lue Morgan Douthit, then director of literary development and dramaturgy at OSF. The experiment started with a single text: Timon of Athens. Poet and translator Kenneth Cavander, known for his work translating Greek plays into English, was chosen to undertake a trial "translation" of this lesser-known play into twenty-first-century English.1 In approaching this translation, Cavander did not paraphrase and worked to maintain the poetic integrity of the original, without writing in iambic pentameter.2 It was important for Douthit and Cavander that the new version not fall into the realm of either revision or truncation. They wanted "no editing, no cutting, no fixing, no personal politics, no regionalisms," any of which might transform the translation into an adaptation.3 The experiment became reality when Cavander's version of Timon was produced at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in April 2014, where it was, in Douthit's words, "incredibly well-received by critics and audiences."4 Indeed, Rick Harmon, the reviewer for the Montgomery Advertiser, called it "brilliant," "sleek, understandable and affecting" due to Cavander's "updating some of its language."5 Bolstered by the apparent success of this venture, Douthit, with the [End Page 211] financial support of Hitz, commissioned thirty-six playwrights (each partnered with a dramaturg) to create translations of all thirty-nine of Shakespeare's plays into modern English.6 To promote the idea that this project is simply a new way to play with, and thereby get to know, Shakespeare's works, the project was called Play on! Artistic Director Bill Rauch reassured skeptics that "The Play on! translations are not being commissioned because we despair that people will never understand the original language" but rather to create a new arena of engagement with Shakespeare's texts.7 This newness is twofold: (1) the nature of the project, which calls for translation rather than adaptation and (2) the demographics of the translation teams. More than half of the thirty-six playwrights are people of color and more than half are women.8 The aims of the Play on! project are to allow these important and emerging theatre practitioners a chance to intimately know Shakespeare's language and to have Shakespeare interpreted by a diverse body of artists. When the Play on! project was formally announced in September 2015, there was an instantaneous outpouring of both censure and support. On one side of the debate, the initiative was lambasted as a disturbing, misguided travesty. These detractors feared that translated Shakespeare would once again take the great playwright from the stage, as in the eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare. On the other side of the debate, the project was praised as a solution to the dread that Shakespeare, a treasure of Anglophone culture, was quickly disappearing from American life due to the density of his language. As the articles appeared one after another, the fear on both sides of the debate was palpable. Ultimately, both proponents and opponents of the translations were afraid of losing Shakespeare. In this article, I examine three of the major Shakes-fears stimulating the Play on! controversy and place those anxieties in historical context to demonstrate how these concerns have fueled the Shakespeare industry since the Restoration.9 Fear One: Audiences As students are taught in introductory drama classes, an audience is essential to theatrical performance; per Eric Bentley's famous formula, "A impersonates B while C looks on."10 For theatremakers, the audience is not only the consumer of the theatrical product but also the fuel that keeps the theatre running. According to American Theatre's 2014 "Theatre Facts," ticket sales account for 53 percent of the earned income of theatres in the United States.11 This significant [End Page 212] figure means that artistic directors and producers need to estimate accurately the appeal...

The Local and Global East India Company

The Local and Global East India Company Jyotsna Singh (bio) I begin with some evocations of personal, intellectual, and cultural "journeys" that have involved early modern Anglo-Indian encounters as they are represented in the travel narratives of Thomas Roe, Edward Terry, and Thomas Coryate—studies of which began in the mid to late 1980s. As a student of Renaissance studies, which at the time was a largely Eurocentric cultural formation, I was surprised and heartened to "travel" beyond the confines of the European world and look afresh at India through the eyewitness accounts of these early travelers, all of whom were directly or indirectly affiliated with the East India Company. Thomas Coryate (Traveller for the English Wits [1616], Mr. Thomas Coriat to his Friends in England Sendeth Greeting [1618]) was not a functionary, but a supplicant and "hanger on" of the East India Company during its first years in India. Writing from Agra, the dominion of the Great Mughal Jahangir, Coryate left behind an idiosyncratic personal memoir and cultural text that invoked both the local and global with a refreshing chutzpah. Thomas Roe was King James' ambassador in the Court of the Great Mughal and also a representative of the Company interests, as reflected in his journals and letter, later published as The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–1619. And Edward Terry also traveled at the behest of the Company as an accompanying chaplain to Ambassador Roe, and left us his rich account of his stay, published later as A Voyage to East India (1655). The imperatives of promoting English trade in Mughal India are conjoined with these travelers' complex and mixed reactions to the culture and society of India, often framed by the Christian view that their hosts were unbelievers and infidels. Since the 1980s, the postcolonial "turn" in English studies has influenced [End Page 121] early modern studies, opening up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel archives such as those above, while re-evaluating racial, sexual, ethnic, and religious inflections within early modern literary works. A case in point: the seemingly innocuous "Indian boy" in A Midsummer Night's Dream now globalizes the play, taking it to Indian shores. Directors and critics today offer distinctly global productions of the play which take into account the early modern English engagements with East India. And the 2016 production of the play at the Globe Theatre locates the action in a culturally Indian world! Thus we are at a promising moment in early modern studies, with the convergence of the literary, historical, and ethnographic in reappraisals of cross-cultural interactions—and what constitutes the boundaries of Renaissance England. These shifts in turn have complicated and pluralized the empirical—mostly economic and political—histories of the East India Company, often doing so by recovering new stories about the actors who were brought to the shores of various East India locations as well as the native interlocutors such as translators, traders, and in few cases wives, who all functioned and often interacted under the auspices of the Company.1 The local, the quotidian, the commonplace have begun to constitute a new prism through which the East India Company's global workings are coming to light in novel ways. This collection of essays expands the parameters of this research by, for instance, including the the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and by examining the East India Company's failed forays in Japan. In all instances, while we learn of the knowledge-production imperatives accompanying the commercial and political endeavors of the trading entity, we can also view the cultural and affective mediations of individual actors in the activities of the company. Thus this special issue of JEMCS, I believe, gestures toward a historiographical shift, pushing beyond the ubiquitous trope of the cross-cultural, face-to-face encounters between Europeans and the East Indian actors; the fixity of this trope falls apart along shifting chronologies that include a range of interactions, and this instability is evident in a theatricalized history of Anglo/European-Indian encounters under the auspices of the East India Company. Following and expanding on the imperatives of this volume, I want to reflect further on the possibilities of "connected...

Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism by Madhavi Menon

Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism by Madhavi Menon Ali-Reza Mirsajadi Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism. By Madhavi Menon. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Cloth $87.50, Paper $25.00. 142 Pages. Madhavi Menon's latest book is as an illuminating critique on the problematic ideology of identitarian politics and theory. Although Indifference to Difference deals most intimately with the ongoing debates within queer theory and LGBTQ rights, Menon's radical argument translates effortlessly to any identity-based field of inquiry. The crux of this book centers on the philosophical debate between particularism and universalism and its application within our contemporary discourse on identity. Especially in the arena of sexuality politics, which has historically insisted on explicating sexual identities and subsequently including each freshly-minted one within the acronymic alphabet soup (LGBTQ+), the power and perils of "naming" have been deeply felt. As Menon powerfully argues in her introduction, "Identity is the demand made by power—tell us who you are so we can tell you what you can do. And by complying with that demand, by parsing endlessly the particulars that make our identity different from one another's, we are slotting into a power structure, not dismantling it" (2). Although Menon's interventions within identity theory and politics are not entirely novel, Indifference to Difference artfully deconstructs identitarian labels through the lens of queer desire in a way that feels fresh and exciting. Menon begins dismantling this flawed system in her introduction, which labors in parsing the dense philosophical jargon of critical literary theory. Building off the identity theories of Ernesto Laclau, Eric Lott, Linda Zerilli, Karl Marx, G.W.F. Hegel, and most importantly, Alain Badiou, Menon argues for a theory of universalism that is loaded with particularity and identity, and most importantly, is indifferent to difference. She terms this "queer universalism," since queerness as [End Page 138] a marker not only expresses that desire which defies identitarian limits, but as she explains, "Everything is queer because no-thing—peoples, events, desires—can achieve ontological wholeness" (19). Menon's "queer universalism," then, would be defined as "indifferent to ontology—it does not give us particular identities, considering instead all identities as not fully determined, or knowable, in short, as queer" (20). While the introduction has the fiery determination of a manifesto, a rallying cry for true intersectionality in scholarship and activism, her three body chapters are less consistently successful in explaining the utility of this new theoretical framework, especially as it applies to theatre and the performing body. In chapter 1, "Out of Africa: Yinka Shonibare's Museum of Desire," Menon explores the art installations and paintings of Yinka Shonibare MBE, whose work challenges audiences' expectations and identitarian limits through infusing scenes of antiquated Western sophistication with bodies of color, sexual gratuity, and postcolonial critiques. Menon uses Shonibare's work to brilliantly dismantle the ideal of multiculturalism, arguing that this obsession with difference and bodily legibility is in fact rooted in institutions of power and the lingering oppression of colonialism. Chapter 2, "Disembodying the Cause: Shakespeare's Dramatic Elisions," positions Menon's reading of queer universalism within her particular area of specialty, Shakespeare and sexuality. This chapter hones in on the idea of desire, or in Menon's word, "that which in every instance hollows out ontology" (16), and its relation to identity categories. Primarily focusing on the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Desdemona's murder in Othello, Menon presents desire as an ineffable phenomenon which depends on its own immateriality, absence, and lack of finite origin to exist. Although the chapter is compellingly written, it does not contribute as fruitfully to Menon's thesis on queer universalism as do the other chapters, which unfortunately disrupts the flow of the book. With chapter 3, "Lesbians without Borders: The Story of Dastangoi," Menon ventures into the realm of theatrical performance and reception studies. Menon uses "Shahzadeh Chouboli Boli," a modern play based on a centuries-old storytelling tradition in Delhi, as a case study to explore how queer universalism can be used in practice, both by artists and audiences. This section beautifully chronicles the history of dastangoi and its relationship with theatre...

The Shakespearean Phonograph

This essay explores how reader-listeners process sound, importing their own turns of phrase and histories, poaching upon the text so that the authorial voice loosens its hold. As for mapping what sort of work the essay is performing, it offers a model of reflective, critical listening that describes and analyzes how actors perform selected moments or scenes. My own experience becomes a methodological tool drawing both from memories of live performance and digitally-reproduced performance, mediated by the camera and microphone and alert to the distinctions between the work of memory and the act of listening in the present. The piece moves from tracing James Hackett’s notes recording Edmund Kean’s performance of Richard III’s opening solo to Alan Howard’s rendering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Oberon and to a series of “Shakespeare Solos” from The Guardian’s 2016 web site: Adrian Lester speaking Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”; Eileen Atkins voicing Emilia’s ideas on men and women’s sexualities; and, finally, Joanna Lumley speaking Viola’s first soliloquy from Twelfth Night . This series of case studies begins with Hamlet’s moment of high interiority, segues to Emilia speaking privately though wrapped in a public ambience, and concludes with Viola performing directly for the listener-viewer, channeling farce, as though playing proxy to a stand-up comic.

My Beloved Man. The Letters of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears ed. by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer

Reviewed by: My Beloved Man. The Letters of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears ed. by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, Jude Brimmer Cameron Pyke My Beloved Man. The Letters of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Edited by Vicki P. Stroeher, Nicholas Clark, and Jude Brimmer. Foreword by Fiona Shaw. (Aldeburgh Studies in Music, vol. 10.) Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016. [452p. ISBN 978-1-78327-108-5 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-78204-629-5 (e-book). £25] This handsomely produced volume contains the complete surviving correspondence between Britten and Pears, from 1937 to 1967. A number of the letters have been previously published in full or in part in the series Benjamin Britten: Letters from A Life, but to present the letters complete (as Pears himself intended) in chronological order and conveniently annotated makes a compelling and readable narrative, shedding light on the development of a relationship which was of the greatest importance in both creative and personal terms. For the most part, these are, inevitably, letters defined by separation and there are some protracted gaps, as between October 1966 and February 1968. In addition, post-1970 letter-writing had clearly become subordinate to the telephone and falls off dramatically. Nevertheless, one is presented with a vivid overall sense of a relationship which was both personally and artistically driven. It develops from the sexual as well as artistic intimacy of the earlier letters, Pears giving Britten ‘a loving critical confidence – in every way’ (Britten to Pears, March ?22–4, 1950), to, one senses, a greater detachment on Pears’s part by the time the relationship settled into a regular domesticity focused on the Red House after his and Britten’s move there in 1957. Finally, during Britten’s final illness, we have the wonderful exchange of letters in November 1974, which eloquently sums up the entire relationship and is, appropriately, reproduced as an illustration. That said, those looking for startling revelations, either personal or musical, will be disappointed; there is likewise little reference to the contemporary political scene. There is also relatively little about Britten’s music beyond the genesis of Peter Grimes and Spring Symphony, although we have some telling glimpses of his working practice (as with ‘a solitary thinking walk’ in Venice in February 1968). What comes across much more strongly is a shared love of Bach, Mozart, and Verdi, the latter evident in Britten’s joy on receiving the score of La Traviata from Pears in 1950 (‘one learns so much from Verdi so B[illy] B[udd] will be a better opera for your present, I’ve no doubt!’], and a very practical (and unsparingly self-critical) focus on musical performance and communication. One is also left with a clear sense that Pears’s own cultural formation (not least at Lancing College, his alma mater) and his musical judgements were both strongly assertive whilst highly complementary to those of Britten: Pears thus wrote in November 1942, ‘I am so ambitious for you, as I am for myself’. Six years later, hearing a recording of Paul Bunyan made him ‘cry & shudder . . . The performance was appalling! and some of it is faintly embarrassing, though I believe by drastic cutting one could make a thing of it still’. Yet this is also elusive: there is very little reference to, for example, Pears’s significant influence on Britten in selecting poetry to set to music, or how Pears really viewed the instrumental works Britten composed for other performers. Indeed, whilst the letters are frequently indicative of a high cultural intelligence, with several notable exceptions they are practical, even prosaic, in tone, and perhaps increasingly so as the decades move on. Their responses to external events can also seem inhibited. If the experience of visiting Belsen in August 1945 undoubtedly had an immense impact on Britten, it is his sense of duty as a composer to perform there which comes across more strongly in his letter to Pears at that time. Yet we know that Britten’s acute appreciation of inhumanity was a potent creative force: in 1959, during the gestation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he has a nightmare of ‘moans & shrieks all night, just like animals or...

Secret Arts and Public Spectacles: The Parameters of Elizabethan Magic

Barbara A. Mowat's essay Prospero's Book, published in Shakespeare Quarterly in 2001, discusses an Elizabethan manuscript conjuring book, a grimoire, in the Folger Shakespeare Library's collection that has significant relevance to Shakespeare through its obvious relation not only to The Tempest but also to A Midsummer Night's Dream , since one of the spirits raised through its spells is Oberon. Secret Arts and Public Spectacles contextualizes the Folger's grimoire through the much more mundane and ubiquitous books of secrets in the period, handbooks of natural magic that teach ordinary householders the arts that will enable them to protect their property, cure ailments, and especially, over and over, keep them safe from enchantment. Enchantment in these books is everywhere and is a constant danger. The Elizabethan world was full of magic.

Shakespeare's Philosophy of Music

Shakespeare is one of the most widely read figures in literature, but his use of music is not usually touched on in literary discussions of his works. This paper discusses how Shakespeare portrays music within the context of his plays, both through dialogue and songs performed within each work. In Shakespeare’s time, Boethius’ philosophy of the music of the spheres was still highly popular. This was the idea that the arrangement of the cosmos mirrored musical proportions. As a result, every aspect of the universe was believed to be highly ordered, and this idea is prominent throughout Shakespeare’s works, from Hamlet to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To make this clear to the reader, the paper discusses dialogue symmetry weaved throughout The Merchant of Venice , clear allusions to the music of the spheres in Pericles, and the use of music as a signifier of the strange and mysterious – from madness to love – in numerous works, always relating these topics back to the philosophy of the music of the spheres. In order to compile this information and make it clear, the author researched the philosophy of music during Shakespeare’s era. The author also researched how Shakespeare uses music thematically to emphasize different characters’ struggles as well as plot details. After examining his plays as well as the other sources available on the subject, it is clear that Shakespeare was highly influenced by the philosophical and practical ideas regarding music of his time, specifically the theory of the music of the spheres.

“Thou art translated”: Remapping Hideki Noda and Satoshi Miyagi’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Post-March 11 Japan

Ever since the first introduction of Shakespeare to a Japanese audience in the nineteenth century, his plays have functioned as “contact zones,” which are translingual interfaces between communities and their cultures; points of negotiation, misunderstanding and mutual transformation. In the context of what is ostensibly a monolingual society, Japanese Shakespeare has produced a limited number of performances that have attempted to be multilingual. Most of them, however, turn out to be translingual, blurring the borders of linguistic specificity. As an example of this, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream as adapted by Hideki Noda originally in 1992 and then directed by Miyagi Satoshi for the Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre in 2011. Drawing on my experience as the surtitle translator of Noda’s Japanese adaptation “back” into English, I discuss the linguistic and cultural metamorphosis of Noda’s reworking and the effects of its mediation in Miyagi’s rendition, and ask to what extent the production, adapted in post-March 2011 Japan, can be read as a “contact zone” for a translingual Japanese Shakespeare. In what way did Miyagi’s reading of the post-March 11 events inflect Noda’s adaption along socio-political lines? What is lost and gained in processes of adaptation in the wake of an environmental catastrophe?

The Antinomic Structure of Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This essay examines the ways in which Shakespeare dramatizes the antinomic structure of love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Starting from the assumption that love operates only in its antinomic structure of ‘absoluteness’ and ‘relativity,’ this essay aims to show that Shakespeare’s two young couples experience two irreducible nature of love simultaneously throughout the play. Specifically speaking, Shakespeare sets up a legal scene in which absolute love and relative love collide against each other, resulting in the illustration of the antinomic structure of love, given that a court is the best place for the opposing argument of love to be heard. Needless to say, Hermia and Lysander argue for absolute love because they pursue true love. They believe that love is neither replaceable nor negotiable under any circumstances. Rather, it requires only faithfulness in the form of mutual oath between lovers. Love even transcends law in its creation of a new law and a new world. Demetrius and Egeus cannot buy this claim because love is also a certain business deal on the basis of the rationality of economy. Love is no exception to law, another form of rationality, either. However, as the play goes on, Shakespeare demonstrates how each argument contradicts itself, especially through the wood scene in which the young couples go through the mispairings and reparings. Consequently the play seems to affirm that love is neither absolute nor relative, but rather it requires both of its nature at the same time.

Directorial Polarization of A Midsummer Night’s Dreams in Korea

During the turbulent period from the 1990s to the present, when Korean society has experienced radical changes and various crises, Korean theatre have produced so many Shakespearean productions based on Korean social realities and theatre traditions. Shakespeare’s representative comedy such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no exception. Many of Dream productions of this period have focused on the dark side of the original play. Even though Dream would be usually regarded just as a funny and romantic comedy, its background is much darker than imagined. On the other hand, another group of Dream productions has shown the quite opposite tendency. They have created a much brighter world than the original play, erasing even its dark vestiges. This group employed traditional Korean theatre forms in common and tried to achieve ‘sinmyong,’ the state of excessive mirth for both the performers and the audience. When a Koreanized Dream production tries to follow the form of the traditional Korean theatre more thoroughly, Shakespeare’s pessimistic vision can be replaced by sinmyong. This sinmyong maximizes the festivity or the rituality of the play in return for sacrificing its philosophical darkness. While the dark group of Korean Dream performances can be said to reflect the dark realities of Korean society, the bright group of Korean Dream could be ritualistic attempts to be relieved of such dark realities. Korean Dreams, which showed the directorial polarization of extremizing the darkness and the brightness of the original play, must have extended Shakespeare’s possibility, even though they may disappoint those who want to enjoy Shakespearean texts as they are.