A Midsummer's Night Dream--Self-conscious Theatricality

I attended the Durham Shakespeare Company’s Production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Cornell plantations last Friday. There was a half-moon, and you could hear animals shuffling in the trees and the sound of crickets. I felt curiously distant from the mechanisms of life for a moment. But the play took me away from reality, and back.

Watching Puck’s final prologue adds a curious postmodernist dimension to a Renaissance play. Rather than asking us to suspend our disbelief, Shakespeare entreats us to be aware of the highly wrought theatricality of the play, a reflection of a highly self-conscious art: “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here.” The Durham Shakespeare Company reinforced the theatricality of the play by putting its characters in ludicrously over-the-top costumes—Puck and the workmen were dressed like characters out of X-Men, complete with that punk, androgynous, grungy look.

The self-satirizing reflects an awareness of the propensity of art to employ smooth sugar coated endings and its all-too-easy reconciliation of the tensions of real life, “Give me your hands and if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends,” “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended.” The prologue also demystifies the nature of stage as existing outside the real world: “I am an honest Puck” hints at Puck’s assessment of his social status as a workman, the addressed title “Gentles” makes a reference to the aristocratic gentry, enacting a return back to the hierarchical structure of the Renaissance.

Puck denies his theatrical art, “you have but slumbered here”, reducing it to a series of “visions,” “[a] weak and idle theme,” isolated from the sphere of the real world. The iambic tetrameter and paired couplet add a sense of poetic flourish and provide the illusion of artistic completion to the poem, while its contents deny its significance as art. The staged persona remains standing, while his dramatic signification flees from him. In the production, the same actors who played Oberon and Titania—symbolizing art, anti-reason, youth—played Theseus and Hippolyta—symbolizing reality, reason, hierarchy, and political leadership. Theatricality and reality are not necessarily mutually exclusive poles; both deconstruct each other. And it is in deconstructing one another that they reach a mutual formulation of each other, and themselves.