A Midsummer Night's Dream

This episode may be familiar territory for many, but sometimes the things we think we know quite well can yield the most surprises. 

Do you have an appetite for a smorgasbord of stories or liking for lunacy? Do you want to know when it's appropriate to throw your heroes off a cliff or if fairies are really good or bad? If so, join Bill as he wends his way through the magical forest glade of Shakespeare's all time fan favourite: A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Special thanks to Lottie Tickner for providing the short'n'snappy Synopsised Shakespeare for this episode

Transcript

William Ross-Fawcett: 0:09

Hello, and welcome to the Bard with Bill. This episode may be familiar territory for many, but sometimes the things we think we know quite well can yield the most surprises. If you have an appetite for a smorgasbord of stories, or liking for lunacy, or want to know when it's appropriate to throw your heroes off a cliff, friends, lend me your ears and take my hand as we wend our way through the magical forest glade of Shakespeare's all time fan favorite in Episode Four, A Midsummer Night's Dream. I am bill, and it is my great pleasure to serve as your guide into the works of the Bard. Before we begin, allow me to clarify something that sometimes proves as tricky. What is the name of this play? Now, I don't mean to be patronizing. And please don't take offense if this isn't or has never been an issue for you. But since this is one of Shakespeare's most talked about plays, the name gets bandied around a lot and with multiple variations and abbreviations that can all get caught up in a potentially confusing soup of words. Some people call this play the dream or just dream. Other people refer to it as Midsummer's. I know I've stumbled over the wording of this play or hesitated before speaking the title in public before. So if only to cement in my memory for my own peace of mind, let's put this to bed. The play is called Midsummer Night's Dream, a, not the and the apostrophe s comes after the word night. And since we're already talking about apostrophes, and all that jazz, let's crack on with this section of the podcast that I've lovingly taken to calling the language lounge, where we have a look into some of the words and phrases found in the play that we might still use to this day. Sometimes the meaning is the same. Whilst other times it has changed in that maddening mean magical way language does. And if you feel a bit of magic tingling in your fingertips, why not try your hand at illustrating some of these phrases, and posting your creations to the handle bonds Twitter using the hashtag BOD with Bill. Now let's start with this fun phrase, fancy free. If we say this today, we mean without a care or free from emotional ties or restrictions. And in the play, Oberon says this, and the Imperial voters passed on in maiden meditation fancy free. Now in Elizabethan English, the word fancy came about as a contraction of the word, fantasy. It was used as a noun to mean an inclination or a desire. So to have a fancy was to have a want for something usually in a romantic context. And therefore to be fancy free was to be without one. Overtime, the word fancy has shifted from a noun to a verb, it's no longer something we have. It's something we do. We might say, Oh, I really fancy a biscuit. Or did you hear that Robin fancies, Rachel. And then, just to make things even more confusing, at some point, the word also became an objective. So now we might say, well, that is one fancy Flamingo, all born from this single word, fantasy. Now keep that word in your head. It's going to be important later. Oberon has some more phrases for us. Have you ever been described as the apple of someone's eye, and we use this phrase to mean someone, particularly beloved or cherished by someone as being the apple of their eye, Oberon says, flower of this purple dye hit with Cupid's archery, sync in apple of his eye. Now hearing this line, we hear about Cupid, the God of desire with his love laced arrows we hear sinking apple of his eye, and we already know who the target is. So we come up with this idea of Helena becoming the new apple of his eye. But actually, if we take a closer look, the meaning is a little different. Oberon isn't willing that the juice of the flour hits Helena. He wants it to hit Demetrius and one part of him specifically. That's because this phrase, the apple of one's eye, originally just referred to the pupil, in the same way that we call the navel, the belly button, the apple of someone's eye was just another way of saying their pupil. And now this phrase isn't Shakespeare's creation. In fact, it seems to come to us all the way from the Bible, although there's debate about where this apple word comes from. Some people translate the original Hebrew phrase to literal man of the eye, because the pupil is where you see yourself reflected in someone's eyes. So why do we now use apple of the eye to mean a beloved person rather than just the pupil? Well, I'm not a linguist. But I've got a little theory that says Shakespeare might be somewhat to blame here, since he muddled these metaphors by including the phrase in a story about people falling in love as a result of bewitched eyesight. So although he didn't invent this phrase, he might be responsible for giving it a nudge towards an alternative meaning. This next phrase is evidently a favorite of Shakespeare's we see it appear in sonnet, 66, and 85, as well as Richard the third, and we see it used twice in different forms throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream. The phrase is, tongue tied, a state of being where a person finds themselves at a loss for words or unable to speak. Theseus says, Love therefore, and tongue tied simplicity in least speak most, while Titania commands her fairies to tie up my lover's tongue. It's a very clear and visual phrase, as well as being alliterative tongue tied, which Shakespeare was clearly a fan of. It also hasn't changed at all in the meaning over 400 years, and Shakespeare used it. It conjures this funny almost cartoon like image in the imagination, but it's been suggested that it was inspired by a real life medical condition, that in the 16th century, they become known as a tongue tie. And killer glossier is a condition where the lingual frenulum, that's the bit that connects the tongue to the bottom of the mouth is too short, which limits mobility. And I idly wonder whether Shakespeare's usage of this phrase stems from some sort of morbid fascination or fear at the idea of having one's ability to speak impaired. Now, here's one last lick of language for you. In the play, Oberon says, I do beg a little changeling boy to be my henchmen. Now, we'll look at changelings a little later. But at the moment, I'm interested in in this word, henchmen. Whenever I hear this line, I can't help but consider Oberon in the role of villain at this moment. And that's because this word henchman has this loaded connotation for us today. We think of henchmen as thugs in the employ of criminal villains, typically there to provide muscle. In fact, the word hench in modern slang means to be heavily muscled, and it likely comes from this word henchmen. But I was interested to discover that henchmen hasn't always had this meaning, and at the time Shakespeare was writing it was a much more neutral term. It derives from an old English compound word hensman, where hengest means stallion, and man means man hengst still means stallion in German and Dutch today. A henchman was someone interested with looking after a person's horse. And over time, this evolved into a trusted servant figure. And then somewhere, it became the villainous sidekick thug that we know and love today. It's an interesting example of language changing over time, and thereby altering audience's opinions on characters. So we can let Oberon off the hook. We no longer consider him in this villainous light. Well, that remains to be seen. Time for a plot refresher. I think A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most watched plays, and it's usually the first introduction many young people have into Shakespeare's works. But there can be a bit of confusion surrounding who loves whom, who's chasing whom and why and how this man ends up with a donkey's head to clear up all this comical confusion this time, fellow handlebar Lottie Tickner is bravely stepping up to the podium to deliver our short and snappy synopsize Shakespeare all in under two minutes. break her leg Lottie, Your time starts now.

Lotte Tickner: 9:47

A Midsummer N ght's Dream is one of S akespeare's most famous c medies filled with magic and m schief. It's set in Athens in a forest inhabited by fairies. T e story follows a few sub p ots that mix and merge t roughout the play. One of four onflicted Athenian lovers ermia, Helena Lysander and emetrius, another that follows group of amateur actors ehearsing a play for the royal edding, and another following a eries of domestics between the ing and queen of the fairies, beron and Titania. Now, King beron decides to play a trick n Titania, and orders park his airy servant to find a magic lower, which, if sprinkled into omeone's eye, will make them all in love with the first hing they see. Pop sets of preading mischeif all over the orest. To Tanya falls in love ith Nick bottom. One of the ctors who Park has turned into donkey Lysander awakes and alls in love with Helena, his irlfriend's best friend. emetrius is also doused in the ye by the magic love potion and ools for Helena to it is all a ess. A hot, heady hilarious ess, Oberon orders park to set t all straight. apoc removes he spells and everyone awakes, elieving it had all been one ig dream, and Midsummer Night's ream. The play ends with the oyal wedding between Theseus nd hippolyta. Attended by all.

William Ross-Fawcett: 11:31

Thank you very much for that whirlwind tour of A Midsummer Night's Dream Lotte. It's a familiar story to many, but as Lahti will no doubt be able to attest when you have to retell it all with a time limit. It's a much trickier business. Now the overall shape of the play is easy enough to follow. Like As You Like It, it shares the general progression found in a pastoral. There's a problem in the city, the heroes go out into the country to discover truths about themselves and the nature of existence, and then they return to a resolution back in the city. Although we might say that Shakespeare actually subverts this by having the truth concealed from the lovers rather than revealed in the forest. But overall, it's very cyclical and neat. It's so neat, in fact that some people are of the opinion that this play was written to be first performed at a wedding celebration, where the play would mirror the Vogue at the time for wedding masks. Now, a mask spelled ma s qu e was a dramatic entertainment form, where fantastical stories were presented with sections of spoken verse, music and dance. They featured elaborate, exquisite costumes, and every character would as the name suggests, wear a mask. sounds very much like a play you might be thinking, Well, yes, in many ways, but also know in several important ones. The parts in a mask were not performed by professional actors, but by amateurs. This was an evolution of the practice of mummers plays, where it's significant events in the year, members of a community would dress up and perform roles and shows that might portray events from the Bible or folk traditions. And by the 16th century in England, this had become a fashionable pastime for the nobility. Instead of happening at set festivals throughout the year, they started to be organized for events such as weddings or birthday celebrations, might be more accurate to think of them as costume parties with scripted elements, a bit like a murder mystery dinner in the modern day. Many of Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights made some money on the side by lending their writing talents to scripting these events, including john Fletcher, and Ben Johnson. Another notable difference at the time was the fact that women could appear in masks, whereas they were not allowed to perform on a professional stage. If we return to A Midsummer Night's Dream, we see a play that revolves around an upcoming wedding in the festivities provided for that wedding. If it was intended to be performed at a wedding, we can see how it would provide a fun, sometimes daring, meta commentary on the theme of marriage, love and couples. But whether or not that's the truth behind its original creation, A Midsummer Night's Dream remains a very neat play. Now, one usually for Shakespeare. The general plot of this play is his own creation, rather than him just retelling a story, the story of pyramids and thursby that the mechanicals haplessly perform is pinched from the Roman poet of it, but then he supposedly pinched the story from ancient Babylon anyway. Structurally, the play is sound and finishes with a satisfying resolution. It's got a good pace to it. Most of the longest speeches serve to embellish the action rather than wandering to the realms of profound filler. topical points like in some of Shakespeare's other works, there's very little in the way of confusion for the audience. The characters are all distinct. There's no mistaken identity between twins or cross dressing disguises. There's no onstage violence, there's just a threat to provide a bit of parallel in order to move things along. All in all, it's a very nice play. For some, it's a little too audience friendly. Samuel Peeps describe this players, the most insipid, ridiculous play I ever saw. Meow. What's the most insipid, ridiculous play you've ever seen? And if you agree with Mr. peeps, is that because of one particular performance you've seen? Or is this the fault of the play itself? Now, if you ask someone, what's A Midsummer Night's Dream about? They might shrug and say something like, fairies. But that wouldn't be a satisfactory answer. That's a description of the dramatics persona, which is a fancy word for the list of characters in the play. You might get an answer about lovers going into the woods and magic flowers. But that's a plot description. When it comes to actually pinpointing the things and ideas of the play. The words don't immediately leap to the mind like they do for other ones. Romeo and Juliet, you've got love across boundaries cycles of violence fate. Macbeth, you've got ambition paranoia, betrayal, Destiny Hamlet, you've got madness duty, mortality, morality spirituality, Midsummer's love I think this is partly due t the place dominant position i one of Shakespeare's best love and most performed works. It' such a monolith in our societa consciousness that it's giganti presence actually serves t obscure things rather than brin them to light. At least, that' how I feel about this play. Fro the top one of the key issues i absolutely spelled out for th audience. The conflict i between ideas of familial dut and complying with the laws o Athens and the pursuit o freedom to love and to choose It's a bundle of classi contrasts, youth versus age rebellion versus obedience rationality versus emotion order versus chaos. The plot s far would be familiar t Shakespeare's audience, th overbearing father and th separated lovers desperate to b together as a tale as old a time. The setting would als have been comfortably familiar As we keep seeing, Renaissanc tastes tended to hark back t the ancient Greek and Roma world. So the court of Theseu and Athens would be fantastica enough to be entertaining, bu orthodox enough a choice so i not to be too challenging

Lucy Green: 17:52

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William Ross-Fawcett: 18:39

Theseus heroic Slayer of the Minotaur and savior of the Athenian youth. Now, if he's one of your favorite heroes, and you couldn't possibly be hearing his name besmirched, then feel free to skip ahead a few seconds. On his return voyage from slaying the Minotaur. Theseus abandon the princess who had proved instrumental to his quest to Ariadne on an island while she was sleeping, then, puffed up in his own self importance, he neglected to change his sails to signal to Athens that he was successful, which caused his heartbroken father to throw himself into the sea in grief. As is related to us in the play. Theseus attack the Amazons, a female led Society of warrior women and abducted their queen in politics at sword point. According to many tales, Theseus was actually a serial abductor of women. He abducted Helen who later was known as the legendary Helen of Troy when she was a child to be his bride, before storming down to the underworld in an attempt to pick kidnap her Stephanie, the queen of the underworld herself. Now, all these deeds seem to have catched up with him in the end since you'd said he was thrown off a cliff after he lost the popularity of the people of Athens. I wonder why. So with this in mind, Theseus is actually the perfect character to represent the patriarchal stifling, toxic or authoritarian Society of Athens that the young characters seek to escape. Now, different theatre makers make different choices about how to represent Theseus and the court, it's not really necessary for him to reflect every aspect of the legend. It's not even necessary for him to have any basis really in Shakespeare's mythological inspirations, he could just share a name. And perhaps that's all Shakespeare intended for the character, a fancy name to give them a bit of gravity and stage presence, someone to command the audience's attention at the beginning of the play, and settled them into the role of an audience. Because the forest is where the fun really happens is the part of the play everyone likes. This is the part that seems like it was written for outdoor open air summer performance is filled with language and dwells on the beauty of the countryside and the wild places. It talks about folk traditions and seasonal changes. And it's also where the magic happens. Now, let's talk theories. Now when I say fairy, what image springs to mind, for many, it's a tiny person with wings small enough to Nestle within the petals of a flower. And this is certainly an image Shakespeare presents us with not only in this play, in Romeo and Juliet, Queen Mab, a fairy queen is said to be in shape no bigger than an aggregate stone on the forefinger of an older man. So the size of a gem in a ring. And in mid summer's itself, Park says all their elves for fear creep into acorn cups and hide them there. These are diminutive fairies, they're tiny, they're sweet, and the audiences have always delighted in the descriptions of their antics in a world that we can easily imagine because it's our world just made gigantic weather bags of honeybees and single grapes are enough to feed us and the wings of a batter enough to fashion a quote from and Shakespeare adds to this cutesy nature by inventing names like mustard seed and peas blossom and cobweb and moth, which also serve to emphasize the characters closeness to the natural world. They conduct their business and pleasure outdoors. And much attention is given to describing the floral Bower where Titania goes to sleep. The world these characters live in is in direct contrast to the urban world of Athens. It's where revels happen, it's where mischief and trickery rain, it's where desires are pursued with passion. Now, almost every culture in the world has a fairy. Some are very similar to Shakespeare's portrayal being short and evasive and connected to the wild places of the world. Like the men who may have Hawaii or the Aziza spoken of by the Dahomey people in West Africa. Others are shape shifting tricksters, like the Kitsune fosse Fox spirits of Japan, while still more engaging amorous affairs with mortals like the selkie of Irish and Scottish folklore other older folk of Scandinavia. Some you can bargain with for favors like the gin of Arabia, or the Slavic, Dom avoid, whilst others you simply hope never to run across in the dark of the night, like the monstrous knuckle levy of the Orkneys. You could do a whole podcast about the different types of fairies of the world. And this is because there seems to be a universal need for humans to populate the world beyond rational observation with bizarre and wonderful creatures. Some psychologists even suggest that it's hardwired into the human brain to attribute motivation to things we can't quite see or comprehend. So Shakespeare is just tapping into a very old and rich tradition with these characters. But where do they come from? Well, Oberon the fairy King, is a name that springs up in French chivalric literature from the 13th century onwards, and he's a creature of the forest. He sometimes acts to aid the hero, and other times serves as an antagonist. This Oba Han is believed to evolve from old Germanic and Nordic heroic legends, where the character is named alberic, or ulfric, who is a king of the Elves or dwarves depending on the tale. After A Midsummer Night's Dream appeared on the literary scene, Oberon became the definitive name for the king of the fairies in poems and pamphlets and stories. But whether this is due to Shakespeare's influence, or whether the name has become just lodged in the public consciousness from other sources at the time, it's a bit difficult to say, Tanya, is even more difficult to pin down in other words, looks around the time the queen of the fairies was called glory r&r or Mab but Shakespeare pilfers the name Titania. from something we've already discussed, the Roman poet Ovid, now offered us the name to Tanya little indiscriminately to describe all sorts of supernatural women, from goddesses to nymphs to sorceresses and Shakespeare's to Tanya is a bit of an amalgamation herself. Now she's clearly associated with the fairies and she has command over them, but she also inhabits the traits of a goddess. The discord between her and Oberon causes nature to falter. She has the power to bless the union of the lovers at the end. But she isn't all powerful, as is proved when Oberon tricked her into falling in love with an ass headed mortal, and all that just so we can steal the changeling prints. The presence of a changeling in the play refers to is centuries old folk superstition. The stories tell of infants who were stolen from their cradles by the fairies, whilst an identical replacements get swapped in. Now Sadly, this story was sometimes used to explain babies explained neurodivergent behavior or health conditions that weren't quite recognized at the time, leading in some cases to the child being neglected or even abused for their supposedly otherworldly origins. Robin Goodfellow or Park also has a little darkness in his background. Actually, that's a little unfair since the stories might not be talking about him per se. The word Park actually describes a specific type of fairy and it comes to the English language from other British languages like the Welsh, Booker, the Irish fuka, the Scots path, and the Cornish Pixi. All of these creatures display a taste for shape shifting and trickery as Shakespeare's Robin displays in the play, many of them like to adopt the guise of horses, as Park himself describes neighing in the likeness of a filly foal, and if pleased with gifts, parks were thought to assist in domestic tasks, which we see reflected at the end of the play when Robin picks up a broom. But for Shakespeare's audiences that happened to live near marshes or moers, or wetlands, the scene where Puck gleefully proclaims up and down, I will lead them up and down I am feared in field in town, Goblin lead them up and down may have been a little too uncomfortably reminiscent of real lived experiences of being lost out in the swamp paths led astray by flickering lights or strange noises, something that parks were blamed for. Now despite the somewhat frightening and fierce connotations these fairies might have had for some audience members, Shakespeare definitely tries to redeem them as whimsical, fantastical diversions. And he makes very clear at the end that the play was just that parks closing soliloquy describes the action as having been a weak and idle theme no more yielding than a dream, which sounds a bit like all peeps, his description of the play, we're confronted with the reality of the situation. These are just actors, and this is just a play reality make believe the two distinct things, aren't they? Theseus says, the lunatic, the lover, and the power of imagination all compact, and this play is the perfect play for the lunatic, as in the original sense, one who is driven into temporary insanity by the moon, because the word Moon is said 45 times throughout this play, which is including compound phrases like moon shine or moon beam, but it's not including other references to the moon of a more poetic nature. The moon and magic have often been associated throughout history. And the night is when things we hold the certainties in the daytime, lose their concrete nature and reality becomes far less rigid. Shakespeare's play is absurd. But what is more absurd, the presence of fairies and magical Herbes or the ridiculous lengths the lovers go to for the object of their desire. Or even the fact that the courtiers will spend time watching some random mechanicals pretend to be things that they are quite clearly not. It's a sort of meta commentary on the nature of audiences to misquote Obi Wan Kenobi, who is the bigger fool, the fool who indulges in make believe, or the fool who watches it? If we reject the workings of magic and belief, do we also have to reject love The art world without any of these things would be a sterile and dry one. Indeed, yes, I have several quibbles with A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oberon and Theseus both triumph by dominating their female counterparts through physical force or manipulation. Lysander also reveals himself to be unsettlingly racist at points, when under the influence of the flowers magic. Demetrius effectively has his own desires, erased and replaced for convenience to the plot. I also, I just know this play quite well at this point. And as the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt, or, as Shakespeare puts it in sonnet, 102, and sweets grown common, lose their dear delight. Nevertheless, I like what A Midsummer Night's Dream represents a foray into fantasy, a celebration of the irrational and the subjective, whether that be love, magic, or the artifice of storytelling. Each person on the planet has their own unique relationship with all three of these things, which means that the possibilities for this play are really infinite. Holly Granville Barker put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in the extravagant science fiction splendor of space back in 1914. At a time when the world was about to embark on one of the most destructive acts of collective madness that ever previously experienced, our lives are made up of the stories we are told, and that we tell others, and sometimes, a little splash in the midnight waters of the insipid and the ridiculous, is something we need. I can't help but feel that if the world spent a little more time doing that, it might be a better place. It would certainly be a wonderfully weird one. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Bard with Bill. Next time, prepare to clamber aboard as we sail to the end, not of this series, but of Shakespeare's working life. Expect more magic, more mayhem, and more existential questions. as we explore the mysterious paradise that is the tempo.

Lucy Green: 32:41

This podcast was brought to you by the handlebards. Please remember t subscribe and leave a review. I was produced by Tom Dixon an Paul Moss, and researched an voiced by William Ross Fawcett It was introduced by me, Luc Green, and the music was create and performed by Guy Hughes. T find out more about th handlebards, just head over o our website handlebards.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebo k, and Instagram. Just search at handleba