Shakespeare's Fairies

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The play features three interlocking plots, all of which are connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazonian Hippolyta. Two young Athenian men, Lysander and Demetrius, are both in love with the same woman, Hermia; Hermia herself loves Lysander, but her friend, Helena, is in love with Demetrius. When the father of Hermia forbids her to marry Lysander, the four pursue each other into the woods around the city, losing themselves in the dark and in the maze of their romantic entanglements. As usual with Shakespeare, the comedy has a bitter-sweet note, when Hermia's two lovers both, temporarily, turn against her in favour of Helena.

Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his estranged wife, Titania, arrive in the same woods to attend the upcoming nuptials. Titania refuses to lend her Indian page-boy to Oberon for use as his 'henchman', and Oberon seeks to punish her for her disobedience.

At the same time, a band of 'mechanicals' (lower-class artisans) have arranged to perform a crude pageant on the theme of Pyramus and Thisbe to stage for the wedding festivities, and venture into the forest for their rehearsal. Most notable among them is Nick Bottom the Weaver, one of Shakespeare's most admired comic creations.

Oberon recruits the mischievous Puck (also called  to help him regain Titania's devotion, but his simultaneous attempt to help the young lovers goes wrong, resulting in confusion. Bottom finds his head transformed into that of an ass, and the fairy queen is made to fall in love with him.

 

Oberon , also Auberon, King of Shadows and Fairies is feuding with his wife Titania, the queen of the fairies. They are fighting over a baby that Oberon wants to raise as his henchman. Titania wants to keep the baby because he is the child of Titania's mortal friend who died, and Titania want's to raise the child for her friend.  Oberon and Titania's quarrel has set nature in imbalance, causing drought and famine.

Midsummer Night's Dream by Heath Robinson

Titania reigns as queen among her fairies, guiding them, watching over them, and prodding them to do their jobs well. She is all that is ethereal; her beauty cannot be captured in the physical realm, nor beheld by the human eye. To see her loveliness would be to fall deeply into her faerie world, fully held in the glamour, or shaded, unreality of the fairies

The Fairy Queen Titania's name means daughter of the titans. The titans were the elder gods who were the children of heaven and earth, and sprang from chaos. They included Saturn, Rhea, Oceanus, Hyperion, and others. In Ovid's Metamorphoses Titania is another name for Diana, as well as other goddesses of the night, queens of the shadowy world, ruling over its mystic elements and powers. Like Isis, who personified the feminine, generative principle of universal nature, Diana and the others are all nature goddesses.

Puck by Arthur RackhamPuck (also called Hobgoblin and Robin Goodfellow) is a mischief maker in the play. He puts love-in-idleness juice on the eyes of Titania as commanded, leaving her besotted with "rude mechanical" Nick Bottom the Weaver (who furthermore has the head of a donkey following an earlier encounter with Puck); but the second command he messes up (partly due to incomplete instructions from Oberon), using the potion on Hermia's true-love Lysander instead of on Demetrius, and causing much confusion until things are straightened out.

Mustardseed and Peaseblossom are the representatives of the family of flowers, the flora. Moth and Cobweb are represented as relatives of the animal family, the fauna.

Mustard, Peaseblossom, Moth and Cobweb by Arthur Rackham

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

By far the best thing about director Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream is the extraordinary all-star cast, which follows the precedent created by Kenneth Branagh's Italian-set romantic Shakespeare comedy, Much Ado About Nothing (1993), of mixing major Hollywood stars--here Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer--with top British talent, in this instance Christian Bale, Rupert Everett, Roger Rees, David Strathairn and Dominic West. Kline makes a fine Nick Bottom, with Pfeiffer equally good as the fairy queen Titania and Everett brooding effectively as Oberon. Unfortunately, while both look ravishing, it is hard to tell which actress between Anna Friel (Brookside) and Calista Flockhart (Ally McBeal) gives the most wretched performance. Both are completely out of their depth the moment they begin to speak, and utterly outclassed by the excellent Sophie Marceau.

 


Last update 09 September 2007