Perchance to Dream: all sorts of trivia

If music be the food of love…

Fairy land

In traditional folklore, the fairy queen has no name. Shakespeare took the name Titania from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where it is an appellation given to the daughters of Titans.

Puck - also known as Robin Goodfellow - is another character from English folklore: a woodland sprite, famed for his mischievous pranks and practical jokes. 

Cobweb is given her name because of how fragile a cobweb – reminding us how fragile this fairy is.
Sweet Peaseblossom is given her name because peaseblossom the flower is a symbol of sweetness.
Mustardseeds are very small so we know how tiny and vulnerable this fairy is.
Moth is given her name because she is as delicate as the moths who flutter about the Athenian woods at dusk.

Oberon (also spelled Auberon) is a legendary king of the fairies in medieval and Renaissance literature.

Planet sweet

British Astronomer William Herschel named the two moons of Uranus he discovered in 1787 after characters in the play, Oberon and Titania.

In the picture

Many artists have painted scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including William Blake, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Rackham and Edwin Landseer.

Shall we dance?

The play has also inspired several clasical ballets and Elvis Costello composed the music for a full-length ballet Il Sogno, based on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The music was subsequently released as a classical album by Deutsche Grammophon in 2004.

Silver screen

Likewise there have been numerous movies made. One of the best known was the 1935 version directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, produced by Henry Blanke and adapted by Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall Jr.

The cast included James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, Joe E. Brown as Francis Flute, Dick Powell as Lysander and Victor Jory as Oberon. Many of the actors in this version had never performed Shakespeare, and never would do so again, notably Cagney and Brown, who were nevertheless highly acclaimed for their performances in the film.

Much of Mendelssohn's music was used, but re-orchestrated by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The ballet sequences featuring the fairies were choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. The film won two Academy Awards: Best Cinematography for Hal Mohr  and Best Film Editing for Ralph Dawson.

The 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream was directed by Peter Hall. The cast included Paul Rogers as Bottom, Ian Holm as Puck, Diana Rigg as Helena, Helen Mirren as Hermia, Ian Richardson as Oberon, Judi Dench as Titania, and Sebastian Shaw as Quince. It is sometimes confused with Peter Brook's highly successful 1971 production, but the two are different, and Brook's production was never filmed. The fairies in Peter Hall's production wore green body paint.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999) is an American film adaptation of William Shakespeare's directed by Michael Hoffman. The ensemble cast features Kevin Kline as Bottom, Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett as Titania and Oberon, and Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel, Christian Bale and Dominic West as the four lovers.

The tragic lovers

Who were Pyramus and Thisbe – the lovers at the heart of the play performed by Bottom and his friends?

Some features of the plot of the play and its characters can be traced to elements of earlier mythologically based literature. For example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the transformation of Bottom into an ass is descended from Apuleius' The Golden Ass.

In Ovid’s version, Pyramus and Thisbe is the story of two lovers in the city of Babylon who occupy connected houses, forbidden by their parents to be married because of their family rivalry. They whisper their love for each other through a crack in one of the walls and arrange to meet near at Ninus' tomb under a mulberry tree and declare their feelings for each other.

Thisbe arrives first but when she sees a lioness with a mouth bloody from a recent kill, she  runs away leaving behind her veil.

The lioness by chance mutilates the veil Thisbe had left behind. When Pyramus arrives he finds Thisbe's blood splattered veil and assumes she has been killed.  In deep sorrow Pyramus kills himself, falling on his sword in heroic Roman fashion, and splashing blood on the white mulberry leaves.

Pyramus' blood stains the white mulberry fruits dark red. Thisbe returns, eager to tell Pyramus what had happened to her, but she finds his dead body under the mulberry tree.

Thisbe stabs herself with the same sword and the gods decide to mark their tragic lost love by changing the colour of the mulberry fruits for ever dark red.

The Mechanicals

The Mechanicals are Bottom, the weaver; Snout, the tinker; Snug, the joiner; Starveling, the tailor; Flute, the bellows-mender and Quince, the carpenter. The Mechanicals are also sometimes called the Hempen Homespuns or the Rude Mechanicals. Do you know what these jobs involve? We have plenty of weavers, joiners, tailors and carpenters today but not so many tinkers and bellows-menders!

A weaver makes cloth and a tailor makes clothes. A bellows-mender repairs the bellows used to increase the flow of air to a fire. A tinker mends metal household items such as pots and pans. A joiner is a skilled carpenter. Where a carpenter makes the structure of a building, the joiner makes the fittings to go inside, such as stairs and cupboards which involve 'joints' of wood.

The Royals: hit or myth?

Hippolyta first appears in myth when she encounters Theseus, king of Athens, who was accompanying Heracles on his quest against the Amazons. When Theseus first arrived at the land of the Amazon Hippolyta came to his ship bearing gifts. Once she was aboard Theseus abducted her and made her his wife. Then Theseus and a pregnant Hippolyta returned to Athens. Theseus' brazen act sparked a great battle between the Athenians and Amazons.

Though Hippolyta gave birth to a son, Hippolytus, to Theseus, she was cast off when Theseus courted Phaedra. Scorned, Hippolyta went back to the Amazons, while Hippolytus had problems of his own with his new stepmother. Some sources paint Theseus in a more favorable light, saying that Hippolyta was dead before he and Phaedra were wed.

Shakespeare depcits his Hippolyta as a strong woman. The fact that she stands up to Theseus when she disagrees with him in Act V is extremely significant. In Shakespeare's time, it was common practice for the wife to be the submissive, silent partner in a relationship. Hippolyta's role in her relationship with Theseus is indeed striking.

Theseus was, according to legend, a great adventurer and womaniser, most famous for slaying the Minotaur on the island of Crete.

It’s all Greek to me

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in Greece, in a wood just outside Athens. Athens is one of the oldest named cities in the world. It also has been continuously inhabited for over 4000 years, becoming the leading city of Ancient Greece in the first millennium BC. Its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of western civilization.

During the Middle Ages, the city experienced decline and then recovery under the Byzantine Empire, and was relatively prosperous during the Crusades, benefiting from Italian trade. After a long period of decline under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Athens re-emerged in the 19th century as the capital of the independent Greek state. It is now a hugely popular tourist destination with visitors wishing to see the Parthenon and other ancient ruins.