Places: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

First published: 1600

First produced: c. 1595-1596

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of work: Antiquity

Places DiscussedTheseus’s palace

Theseus’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Apalace. Home of Theseus, the “duke of Athens,” in which the play opens, shortly after Theseus has militarily subdued the Amazon queen Hippolyta, whom he plans to marry in the evening. Theseus is an important figure in ancient Greek mythology, but the Athens of William Shakespeare is partly classical and partly medieval, hence Theseus’s title as a “duke.” The Athens of the play mirrors a courtly world with inflexible codes of conduct that become oppressive to the quartet of young lovers.

At the end of the play, all the characters who have appeared in the play reappear at Theseus’s palace for the marriage festivities, on which the Fairies bestow a final blessing. By this point, the palace resembles an Elizabethan great house.

Woods

Woods. Forested region close to the palace that is the setting for most of the play. Woodlands are familiar English locales with their beautiful moonlit glades and common English insects and flowers. However, the woods are also mysterious and alien, with fairies and spirits. Within these woods, confusions about love and imagination crystallize. The play’s woodland fairyland has its own laws of time and space. For example, the king of the Fairies, Oberon, appears in an instant from India, and the mischievous fairy Puck circles the earth in forty minutes. The woods’ rhythms are those of sleeping, dreaming, and awaking. Dangers lurk–not only those of hunting but the bafflements of reason, illusion, random desires, and shifting identities.

Bibliography

Arthos, John. “The Spirit of the Occasion.” In Shakespeare’s Use of Dream and Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. Connects nature with the dream world and its dual potential of horror and bliss. Dreams stem from and inform the psyche, and they share a cognitive function with the world of art.Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare and His Comedies. New York: Methuen, 1957. Focuses on Theseus’ speech connecting the madman, the lover, and the poet. Reveals how the play negotiates and validates varying responses to the unknown.Calderwood, James L. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. New York: Twayne, 1992. Drawing on all the different theoretical approaches to literary interpretation, Calderwood organizes the experience of the play around the topics of patriarchal law, desire and voyeurism, marginality and threshold experiences, the power of naming, performativity, and the illusion of conciliation and unity. An excellent summary of the state of reading Shakespeare.Patterson, Annabel. “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory.” In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Reads the presentation of the lower class in political terms. Bottom’s malapropisms represent a suppression of voice and class, yet his creative use of language points toward a more synthetic utopian society.Welsford, Enid. The Court Masque. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1927. Reads A Midsummer Night’s Dream in light of the tradition of the court masque, which was a popular form at the time the play was presented. Focuses on the visual and aesthetic qualities of music and dance to try to interpret the play in its cultural context.