Midsummer Night Research Articles

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

The Poetics of Body: Representing Cultural Imaginations in Yang Jung-Ung’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream"

This article explores the psychology that motivates Yang Jung-Ung and his actors in the process of translating Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a Korean style. By focusing on the ways of showing the theme of the play in modern styles fused with traditional modes of theatrical practice, the director attempts to develop his own ways of expression to communicate with the modern Korean audience. In this process, Yang reconstructs the dialogues between the characters rather than rely heavily on Shakespeare’s text and language. For this reason, his production has often been criticised for missing Shakespeare’s poetry. However, the beauty of poetry is not only in Shakespeare’s language itself, but rather it is in the mental process of how the artist and audiences understand and translate its meaning in their cultural contexts. Shakespeare’s language includes a great deal of imagery that provides the artists with concrete information for constructing the stage mise-en-scène. In Yang’s production, Shakespeare’s poetry is expressed through the visual images created by the performer’s physical bodies, which reflects the director’s interpretation of the play in his cultural context. By analysing the performers’ physical movements, this article studies how Yang perceives the theme of Shakespeare’s Dream in relation to a Korean cultural context and presents his unique vision on the play.

Instability, Disruption, Dissonance: A Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the unstable nature of love, the changeability of affection, and the “alarming mobility of desire” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play explores moods and passions that have their roots in the subconscious and unconscious. It is unique among the comedies in its presentation of the savagery of men towards women and the verbal violence and threat of physical violence of women towards each other. The disruption and dissonance that mark the play throughout, together with the issues that remain unresolved at the conclusion, make this one of the most disturbing of Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. By Patricia Parker

Addressing a BBC radio audience in 1937, Virginia Woolf imagined words as “the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.” They live “variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together.”1 What Woolf celebrates about language—their strange lives and unpredictable movements, their unexpected and promiscuous relations—Patricia Parker has devoted her distinguished career to interrogating. By honing a feminist philological practice attuned to the intersections of language, class, gender, sexuality, and race, Parker illuminates how single words and their discursive networks firm up or challenge hierarchies of self and other in early modern English culture. This book requires and rewards slow reading. Throughout six chapters, it advances an “experiment in interconnection” (28) that offers literary and cultural critics a “strategy of reading” (29) the relations between words and their discursive networks. Working across historical periods, geographies, discourses, and languages, Parker traces how single words range far afield to mate, drawing other terms into the orbit of the self-same in subtle, queer, and preposterous ways. As one has come to expect from Parker, delight is in the details. Highly filigreed arguments organized around distinct Shakespeare plays—Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Othello, and Cymbeline—demonstrate how single words in multiple forms (verbs, nouns, prepositions, proper and place names), as well as the discursive networks in which they circulate, illuminate contexts, subtexts, and complexities that have been critically “marginalized or have gone unnoticed by [the plays’] editors and critics” (1). Parker’s word-hoard comprises an expansive range of unexpected terms: preposterous, awkward, (in)continence, supposition, construing, occupation, cambio, cashier(ing), Ganymede, Low Countries, Brabant, quince, breeches, part, and latter ends, among others. Tracing how such words—as well as phonemes, sounds, and orthographic variants—participate in the broader scope of an early modern English cultural semantics requires Parker to attend to plays as well as to dictionaries, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Protestant polemics, new theories of military science, eye-witness accounts of military campaigns, works on grammar and orthography, conduct books, marriage manuals, accounting and bookkeeping manuals, the visual and textual aspects of emblem books, non-Shakespearean drama, Histories, and more.

Worlds of Experience: Fiction, Image, and the Ontology of Ideas in Sidney and Shakespeare

Abstract: This article examines ideas about worlds, fiction, art, images, nature, and experience in Philip Sidney's A Defence of Poetry (1580) and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) by drawing on accounts of the image in classical culture, on dreams and shamanistic worldviews, and on John Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism. The article suggests how theater might offer resources for bringing diverging human and nonhuman worlds into new alignments by furnishing us with accounts of knowledge and collective action that differ from those of modern science.

Schmidgen, Wolfram. Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Schmidgen, Wolfram. <i>Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730</i>

On the Performability of Drama Translation: A Case Study of Zhu Shenghao’s and Liang Shiqiu’s Versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Drama translation, as a part of visual art, is more than just textual translation; it is a component of dramatic performance portrayed in the form of verbal action. Lines in drama translation are thus dialogues that render the drama performance rather than descriptive languages that provide information. Translators must use a variety of translation strategies to achieve performability in drama translation. Following Lev&amp;yacute;&amp;rsquo;s (2011) translation theory, the paper conducts a contrastive analysis of Zhu Shenghao&amp;rsquo;s and Liang Shiqiu&amp;rsquo;s Chinese versions of A Midsummer Night&amp;rsquo;s Dream from the aspects of the acquisition of speakability and intelligibility, restoration of semantic contexts, reflection of verbal action, and achievement of characterisation, exploring how the performability is satisfied in drama translation, and summarising strategies for fulfilling performability in drama translation. It is discovered that Zhu Shenghao (Zhu) insisted on his principles for drama translation, placed emphasis on performability in his translation, and used the following strategies to achieve performability in his translation: using colloquial style language, adjusting the order of sentence segments, reconstructing the syntax, uncovering the indeterminacy for different contexts, using modal particles, using dialects of the target language, and revealing characters&amp;rsquo; intentions. However, in order to achieve speakability and intelligibility, Zhu abandoned the stichomythia rhyme, failing to present the verbal action. On the other hand, Liang preserved the stichomythia rhyme, reflecting the verbal action. Furthermore, Zhu replaced the personal pronoun in the original text with notional terms, resulting in the loss of semantic contexts, whereas Liang Shiqiu (Liang) preserved the personal pronoun, restoring the semantic contexts.

Exploring Theater Neuroscience: Using Wearable Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy to Measure the Sense of Self and Interpersonal Coordination in Professional Actors.

Ecologically valid research and wearable brain imaging are increasingly important in cognitive neuroscience as they enable researchers to measure neural mechanisms of complex social behaviors in real-world environments. This article presents a proof of principle study that aims to push the limits of what wearable brain imaging can capture and find new ways to explore the neuroscience of acting. Specifically, we focus on how to build an interdisciplinary paradigm to investigate the effects of taking on a role on an actor's sense of self and present methods to quantify interpersonal coordination at different levels (brain, physiology, behavior) as pairs of actors rehearse an extract of a play prepared for live performance. Participants were six actors from Flute Theatre, rehearsing an extract from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sense of self was measured in terms of the response of the pFC to hearing one's own name (compared with another person's name). Interpersonal coordination was measured using wavelet coherence analysis of brain signals, heartbeats, breathing, and behavior. Findings show that it is possible to capture an actor's pFC response to their own name and that this response is suppressed when an actor rehearses a segment of the play. In addition, we found that it is possible to measure interpersonal synchrony across three modalities simultaneously. These methods open the way to new studies that can use wearable neuroimaging and hyperscanning to understand the neuroscience of social interaction and the complex social-emotional processes involved in theatrical training and performing theater.

Following Puck virtually in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream experiment: Live theatre and high-tech innovations

The thirty-minute experiment titled Dream represented a collaborative effort between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Audience of the Future. It fused live performance with motion capture technology, 3D graphics, and interactive gaming techniques, and let the audience remotely guide Puck through a virtual forest. Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, it focused on Puck and the fairies. If, for online audiences, the virtual fairies moving through a digital forest suggested a video game, the eight performances were delivered live and in real time. This Dream represents a new format for Shakespeare’s performance that evolved during (rather than emerged from) the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rebels in Marriage—A Case Study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Duchess of Malfi

Rebels in Marriage—A Case Study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Duchess of Malfi

Faith and Meaning: A Study of the Chinese Translation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by Liang Shiqiu from the Perspective of Topology

Faith and Meaning: A Study of the Chinese Translation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by Liang Shiqiu from the Perspective of Topology

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England

“Cheerful, carefree, beautiful life”: The Trouble with Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Early Soviet Theater

“Cheerful, carefree, beautiful life”: The Trouble with Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Early Soviet Theater

Local Habitations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has invited recent directors to tell particular kinds of socially progressive stories. This article uses the notion of social reparation to theorize remedial uses of Shakespeare in adaptations that give artists and audiences more moral agency. By imagining more inclusive local habitations for Dream, these socially progressive adaptations seek to remedy injustices in our times and the power asymmetries that inform Shakespeare’s play. My research indicates that place and social space feature prominently in reparative adaptations. To examine the significance of place in performances of Dream, this article analyzes the queer film Were the World Mine, the cross-cultural mime-dance production Dreamer, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s pandemic-era, interactive, digital performance. All three adaptations draw on the dynamics of their newly created localities to perform various social or artistic mediations.

Asserting Boundaries and Conflict Resolution with "A Midsummer Night’s Dream"

This paper explores an applied theatre workshop using William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for educating university students on techniques to assert boundaries, communicate effectively, and resolve conflict. Choosing to focus on the four major relationships within A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides theatrical scenarios for students to learn about unhealthy desire, miscommunicated feelings, unrequited love, and consenting relationships. Using these predetermined scenes, a barrier is created between students’ potential personal experiences and the work they will do in this workshop to reduce the possibility of retraumatizing participants. By the end of the workshop students are expected to have the confidence and techniques to assert physical and emotional boundaries, and have the language to communicate problems and resolve conflict.

The Carnival Features of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a romantic comedy work, which is full of strange and absurd elements, presenting a romantic color of fantasy humor. The dramatic presentation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is very consistent with the literary theorist Bakhtin's carnival literary theory, who is from the former Soviet Union. This paper will discuss the connection between Bakhtin's carnival theory and the creation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and then a concrete analysis of the carnival characteristics of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is made, in order to achieve a deep interpretation of the creation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage by Andrés Pérez-Simón

Reviewed by: Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage by Andrés Pérez-Simón Andrew A. Anderson Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage. By Andrés Pérez-Simón. New York and London: Routledge. 2020. xii+158 pp. £48.95. ISBN 978–1–0320–4820–8. In his Introduction, Andrés Pérez-Simón states clearly the three basic aims of his book on Lorca's drama: to draw attention away from the so-called rural tragedies and focus instead on works more modernist in nature; to study Lorca's activity as a theoretician of the stage and as a hands-on director; and finally to propose a vision of Lorca 'as archaist playwright and director', informed above all by 'the tradition of Spanish Baroque' (pp. 4–5). The rationale for the first two goals is overstated. The last twenty-plus years have witnessed a major shift in Lorca criticism away from Bodas de sangre, Yerma, and La casa de Bernarda Alba (and Romancero gitano) and towards El público, Así que [End Page 512] pasen cinco años, and El sueño de la vida (and Poeta en Nueva York). Likewise, there are multiple studies of Lorca's theoretical statements on drama and his leadership of La Barraca. The real novelty of Pérez-Simón's book resides, therefore, within the remit of the third contention: while other critics have pointed to Lorca's two-pronged approach, seeking inspiration in foreign avant-garde theatrical movements (Symbolism, Expressionism) as well as classical Spanish theatre, he proposes that the two approaches need to be understood holistically and that Lorca's forward-looking reform and modernist innovation lie precisely in the very appropriation and utilization of a variety of works and genres originating mainly in the Golden Age. Other notable aspects of the book include the emphasis on the role of Eduardo Marquina in Lorca's career, the contextualization of the latter's oeuvre within the framework of the drama rural, and some provocative comparisons drawn with Pirandello's dramatic output. The five chapters offer analyses of El maleficio de la mariposa and Mariana Pineda; the puppet plays La zapatera prodigiosa and Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín; El público; El sueño de la vida; and the rural trilogy. Así que pasen cinco años and Doña Rosita la soltera are not studied. There is much thought-provoking critical commentary here, with plenty of fresh ideas as well as controversial contentions. True to his title and subtitle, throughout Pérez-Simón teases out persuasively the intertextual presence, in one or other play, of the Auto de los Reyes Magos, Cervantes's entremeses, Lope de Vega, Calderón's honour plays, and, perhaps above all, Calderón's autos sacramentales, especially El gran teatro del mundo, allegorical texts that were only just beginning to be rehabilitated in the 1920s. (There are also, naturally, references to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.) The author relies heavily on William Egginton's concept of the baroque, while his Lorca critics of choice appear to be María Delgado, Luis Fernández-Cifuentes, Paul Julian Smith, Christopher Soufas, and Sarah Wright. I was not always convinced by interpretations based on different strains of modern theory. While rightly debunking simplistic life-to-literature approaches, Pérez-Simón does not always have the full biographical, historical, textual, and editorial facts at his fingertips. This results in overly convoluted readings of, for instance, the prologue to El maleficio de la mariposa, the incomplete state of the unique surviving manuscript of El público, or the fine political line Lorca trod as director of La Barraca. Chapter 2 would have benefited from a discussion of Edward Gordon Craig's notion of the Übermarionette and perhaps of Jacinto Grau's El señor de Pigmalión; there is no puppet show in La zapatera prodigiosa (p. 62); and the chronology for El retablillo de don Cristóbal is incorrect (pp. 45–46). No one writing on Lorca today could be expected to have consulted everything...

Анализ книги в стихах для детей "Сом в летнюю ночь" Эгвины Фет

This article presents an analysis of the book "A Midsummer Night Catfish" by Egvine Fet in terms of text, illustrations and design, relevance in the context of children's literature. The article discusses the storylines of the book, the dramatic structure of the texts, analyzes each text. The article also gives an idea of the strategy of illustrating the book, new approaches to interaction with the reader and emphasizes the distinctive features of the book.

ENGLISH COLONIAL OBSESSIONS AND A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM

William Shakespeare, a genius of his time, must have been well aware of the socio- economic and political conditions of Europe as well as of England. The English tradesmen at the time Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream were obsessed with colonizing India because their Iberian rivals had already accumulated great riches from India by capturing many coastal areas. Shakespeare could not resist being affected by this wave of the English obsession of colonizing India. So consciously or unconsciously he depicted the condition of heated rivalry among the European nations over the Indian sub-continent by symbolizing India, England and Portugal in the characters of the Indian changeling, Titania and Oberon respectively in his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Dreaming of Serpents and Asses: Shakespeare’s Ovidian Animal Dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

ABSTRACT This article investigates Shakespeare’s use of animal dreams – dreams of or by animals – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It argues that the Ovidian model of human-animal transformation, in which animal states and animal imagery describe, amplify, or symbolise aspects of human character, is fundamental to understanding Shakespeare’s use of animal dreams in this play. The article further contends that Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream successfully adapted Ovidian animal symbolism for early modern culture by filtering it through religious and demonological references. The article falls into four parts. Firstly, it investigates the representation of animals, dreams, and animal dreams in classical culture and particularly in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The article then goes on to investigate Hermia’s dream of a serpent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, combining close reading with examinations of early modern dream books and with cultural historical insights into the representation of serpents in Christian iconography. Then, the article proceeds to a discussion of Bottom’s oneiric transformation into an ass, drawing on classical source texts, demonological treatises, and early modern animal symbolism. The article concludes with a (re-) consideration of the dramatic functions of Shakespeare’s Ovidian animal dreams in the context of the moral and aesthetic imperatives of Renaissance culture.