Shakespeare

The play was successful, therefore, and on the title page of the first published text it is referred to as one “that hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely.” The phrases of Romeo and of Juliet were on everyone’s lips. The students of Oxford University, at a later date, wore through by intensive studying and copying the pages of Romeo and Juliet in a chained edition of the First Folio. There were two versions published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The first is considerably shorter than the second, and is likely to have been the text actually used by the performers. In this version there is even a joke about the actor (“faintly” speaking the prologue “without-booke”) who needed the prompter to help him through it. In asides like this, the life of the Elizabethan stage revives. The second version seems to be transcribed from Shakespeare’s own papers, before the text had been altered and condensed in the course of rehearsals or in the process of rewriting. After the play was performed he added some passages, for example, and reassigned certain lines to other characters; he seems to have elaborated on Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech by inserting words in the margin of his copy, which the printer mistook for a prose addition. There are also minor inconsistencies in stage-directions and speech prefixes.

But this was undoubtedly his usual procedure: to alter, expand or cut, after seeing the play in performance. It is exactly what any playwright would do. And then he went on to the next venture, a more overt comedy in which star-crossed lovers eventually find fulfilment.

It has been suggested that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in order to celebrate the marriage of Southampton’s widowed mother, Mary, Countess of Southampton, to Sir Thomas Heneage. It took place on 2 May 1594, and was perhaps celebrated by the dramatist in the summer of that year. This may seem a trifle early for so accomplished a play, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility. The play itself seems to bear witness to the terrible summer of that year- “very wet and wonderful cold”¹ according to Simon Forman – in the long complaint by Titania that “the seasons alter”(462). But other noble marriages have been identified as the occasion for this paean to the married state. At the beginning of 1595 the new Earl of Derby, William Stanley, married Lady Elizabeth de Vere. They both had a connection with Shakespeare. William Stanley had inherited the earldom on the sudden death of the Earl of Derby, who was Shakespeare’s patron, Lord Strange, and Lady Elizabeth had been the intended bride of Southampton. The associations are not the most auspicious, however, and a more plausible candidate for the occasion must be the marriage of Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Carey at Blackfriars on 19 February 1596. The bride was the granddaughter of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, and it seems a suitable occasion for him to deploy his players. Previously she had been the intended spouse for William Herbert, heir to the earldom of Pembroke, and there is evidence to suggest that the earliest of Shakespeare’s sonnets were designed to encourage that match. So he might have been considered the perfect dramatist to celebrate her eventual union. It is ironic that historians, looking for the wedding that A Midsummer Night’s Dream might celebrate, have found no fewer than three possibilities. But the world in which Shakespeare moved was a small one, in which affinities are not hard to find, and in any event these real Elizabethan marriages make no difference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

With its woodland setting, its noble protagonists, and its fairies, it can be deemed wholly Shakespearian; this is the “sweet Shakespeare” of contemporaneous discourse, the Shakespeare of burlesque humour and lyricism and dream. All of his reading, of Chaucer and of Ovid, of Seneca and of Marlowe, of Lyly and of Spenser, combines to create an enchanted landscape – where the mythical Theseus and Hippolyta celebrate their marriage, where Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, squabble over the possession of a changeling child, where Bottom and his country players put on an entertainment, and where star-crossed lovers are allowed at the close to fall into one another’s arms. The moon is the mistress of these proceedings, and all within her silver empire are touched by mystery. It is a play of patterns and of symmetries, of music and of harmony restored. One of its great delights lies within the formality and fluency of its design.