Ba Dissertation

Samantha Janssen: The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted: Contents

Samantha Janssen, 0225215Orchideestraat 56674 BL, HerveldB.A Dissertation: The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted.

Contents

Introduction

p. 2

The Representation of Fairies and their Relationship with the Human World

p.5

Titania and Oberon and their Retinue of Fairies

p. 21

The Indian Boy among the Fairies

p. 35

The Puck and the Fairies

p.41

Conclusion p.

53

Bibliography

p.56

1

Samantha Janssen: The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted: Contents

2

Samantha Janssen: The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted: Introduction

The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted

Introduction

In this comparative study I will examine the

representation of the magical creatures in two adaptations of

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the eponymous video

registration of Benjamin Britten’s opera performed at the

Glyndebourne Festival in 1981, conducted by Bernard Haitink,

produced by Peter Hall and designed by John Bury, and Michael

Hoffman’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play of 1999. I have

chosen these two productions because they belong to two

different cultural domains. Hoffman’s film is a Hollywood

product, intended for a broad audience and has been shown in

cinemas across the world. Haitink, Hall and Bury’s performance

of Britten’s opera was especially designed for the Glyndebourne

Festival. Even within the opera culture Glyndebourne holds a

special position. As critic Mary Duffy points out:

opera fans […] struggle to get to Glyndebourne, but

tickets have always been virtually unobtainable. Much of

the small house, 40 miles south of London, is presold to

corporate or individual sponsors. For these wealthy

3


people, an evening at Glyndebourne is a social rite, a

rare chance to behave like a true English eccentric.

(“Smiles of a Summer Night”)

Haitink, Hall and Bury’s production thus belongs to the upper

echelons of the elite opera domain.

One might say that the appearance of a play is for the

larger part determined by the designer or director’s

imagination and that therefore artistic or cultural external

influences are of lesser importance. It is the director or

designer who selects the source materials and who shapes the

performance. However, directors are as much a product of a

cultural framework as their plays are. The choices of a

director are unconsciously inspired by the spirit of the times

and are not independent from their personal characteristics

such as age, gender and social background. Because these

factors are highly personal it is difficult to illustrate to

what extent they influence an production, but one might

consider what the relationship is between the play and the

cultural framework. Performances of Shakespeare’s plays are not

isolated, unrelated occurrences. They function in a larger

cultural context and are products of their society, with which

4


they interact. In other words, an adaptation of a Shakespeare

play is not simply a creation of the director’s or designer’s

imagination, but the joint result of multiple factors. With

the representation of magical creatures, there must be some

upward limit to what people may be asked to believe. Because

beliefs about magic have changed, the representation of magical

creatures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has also changed through

history. Impossible creatures, such as fairies, must be made

acceptable by incorporating fantasy into the ideas of the time.

The representation of fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has,

through history, been influenced by external factors such as

folkloristic stories about fairies; contemporary beliefs and

artistic influences from previous adaptations or foreign

cultures. By comparing and relating a specific production to

these external factors one can find parallels between the

adaptation and its cultural framework. So, due to the position

of adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays within a large cultural

framework one can analyse and explain the appearance of an

adaptation. In this paper I will explicitly examine which

traditional sources, theatrical conventions, contemporary

beliefs or cultural elements Haitink, Hall, Bury and Hoffman’s

5


work relate to. In which framework does their production

function and has this framework influenced the representation

of the magical creatures.

Fairies in folkloristic tradition and within A Midsummer

Night’s Dream exist in a wide variety. In the course of this

paper I hope to demonstrate the variety of fairies and how they

appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fairies in A Midsummer

Night’s Dream at first appear to be homogenous, and critics often

see them this way. However, on closer examination they are

heterogeneous. For this reason I will discuss certain magical

characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in separate chapters. This

enables me to highlight their specific features. The fairies

interact with each other, but also with other characters in the

play. In each chapter I will discuss how the fairies relate to

the topic concerned. The magical creatures in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream are, above all, ambivalent creatures and open to various

interpretations, and I will try to prove this ambivalence in

each chapter as a connecting thread.

I will work from the general to the specific. I will

start with a general analysis of the topic related to

Shakespeare’s text. Next I will describe and try to explain the

6


particular elements of Haitink, Hall and Bury’s adaptation and

of Hoffman’s film and relate the representation of the film and

opera to other productions. By doing so I hope to illustrate

that adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not unrelated

events, but part of a larger cultural framework which

influences the appearance of each performance.

7

Samantha Janssen: The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted: The Representation of Fairies and Their Relationship with the Human World

The Representation of Fairies

and

Their Relationship with the Human World

According to K.M Briggs Shakespeare’s fairies are

“elementals, they control the weather and seasons” (The Anatomy

of Puck, 45). Indeed, Shakespeare’s text suggests that the

magical creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream could be explained

as physical allegories of nature. In other words, they are

explanatory phenomena for natural processes, such as dew in the

morning. One could also use the allegorical fairy to explain

occurrences in the household. Shakespeare’s Puck himself

acknowledges that he is the cause of little domestic accidents.

Significantly these interpretations of the fairies denote that

they are not real creatures. They are explanatory figments of

the imagination. However, critics point out that the fairies in

A Midsummer Night’s Dream are important presences in the play who

not only influence the lives of the lovers and control nature,

but who also have private concerns, a distinct identity and a

fairy homeland. Therefore they could be seen as equal in

8


existence to the humans in the play. In this chapter I will try

to prove that both interpretations, allegorical or real, are

equally possible. The fairies’ allegorical or real position

determines their relationship with the lovers: are they

allegories for the humans or real beings? Beside this choice a

director must decide if his/her fairies are close to mankind or

alien creatures. This also affects their position with regard

to the humans. I will examine the relationship of the fairies

with the human world as it is presented in Shakespeare’s text

and see how Michael Hoffman and Bernard Haitink, Peter Hall and

John Bury interpreted it in the play and how they represented

the fairies in their screen and stage production.

The first fairy to appear on stage in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream describes her task to the audience:

To dew her orbs upon the green.

The cowslips tall her pensioners be.

In their gold coats spots you see;

Those be rubies, fairy favours;

I must go seek some dewdrops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear. (2.1.9-14)

9


This fairy appears to be a physical allegory rather than an

actual creature. Such physical allegories were first used in

the fifth century B.C to explain Greek mythology, because:

with the growth of philosophic rationalism in Greece […],

the traditional myths [with its humanlike, and sometimes

immoral gods] came under attack. […] Physical allegory

assumes that the myths were invented to account for

natural phenomena. (Isabel Rivers, 21)

Employing this allegory, fairies could be explained as

metaphors for natural occurrences, such as dewdrops on flowers.

However, according to fairy tradition fairies are not

indifferent to men. “Tales, description and anecdotes of the

fairies from all over the country and, indeed, from all over

the world, make it clear that they are not generally conceived

as existing in a independent and self-contained state, but have

great concern with mortal things” (Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition

and Literature, 95). Ronald F. Miller, author of the critical essay

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery

of Things,” also allegorises the fairies, but relates them to

humans:

10


When the fairies come on stage […] their status is

immediately called into question. Puck’s first extended

speech is full of what C.L Barber calls ‘a conscious

double vision:’ ‘The plain implication of the lines,

though Puck speaks them, is that the Puck does not really

exist-that he is a figment of the naïve imagination,

projected to motivate the little accidents of household

live. (255)

So, the influence of the fairies on the lives of humans is,

according to this model, an allegory. However, according to

Michael Taylor the fairies do not merely function in the play

as an explanatory phenomenon for the human world and natural

occurrences, but as characters equal in existence to the

lovers. He elucidates this in the light of Titania’s speech in

act two, scene one in which she recites the effects her fight

with Oberon has on the climate:

[…] the function of such an extended treatment of the

climate’s inconsistency is to remind us that the effects

of Titania’s and Oberon’s bickering are not confined to

the metaphysical world. Their quarrel causes hardships in

a world that is more real than fairy-land […] As a result

11


of flooding, the corn has rotten, the fold stands empty,

and only the crows are well-fed as they have surfeited on

the flocks of sheep smitten with disease: this is the

world of reality. (264)

William E. Slights points out an inconsistency in this

explanation:

Extending the indeterminacy of Titania’s account of the

grief caused by the struggle for custody of the changeling

boy is the fact that no one else in the play seems to

notice any bad weather. However much the Athenian lovers

quarrel, not so much as a cloud emerges on their

horizons.” (264)

He, however, immediately remarks that it is:

not an adequate response […] to say that Titania’s lines

apply only to the lofty idealities of fairyland and are

not intended as an description of ordinary human reality

when she has gone to such a length to locate all that mud

in the nine men’s morris and to de-rhapsodize her speech

with the sweat of redundantly ‘human mortals.’ (264)

However, this does not explain why the four lovers neither

mention nor appear to notice the bad weather. Extending the

12


allegory, one could say that the bad weather is a metaphor for

the fight between the lovers and Hermia and her father. So, the

fairies are ambivalent creatures: they can be seen as actual

beings or as allegories.

Whether or not the fairies are allegories or actual

beings, either way, they influence the lives of the humans. In

Macbeth and Hamlet the supernatural world also affects the human

world. Macbeth’s foul crimes are inspired, or perhaps even

caused, by his encounter with the witches, and the supposed

ghost of Hamlet’s father urges the prince into action. The main

action of these plays is located in the human world, but

particular supernatural elements, three witches and a ghost,

penetrate into the human world and change it. In A Midsummer

Night’s Dream, however, the situation is reversed. The four

lovers, who represent the human world, enter fairyland. Titania

first mentions fairyland: “When thou hast stol’n away from

fairyland/ The fairyland buys not the child of me” (2.1.65 and

2.1.123). This suggests that fairyland is an actual

geographical place. However, the first fairy to appear on stage

says that fairies “wander everywhere,” and the Puck can “put a

girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” (2.1.6 and

13


2.1.175). So, the fairies are not really bound to a

geographical location. Titania appears to have a residence in

India, where she is worshipped as a kind of goddess, but she is

also at home in the Athenian woods where she sleeps on:

a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine” (2.2.249-53)

According to Briggs “their power of motion is almost unlimited;

[…] it seems they move continually” (The Anatomy of Puck, 45).

This constant movement makes a geographical fairy homeland

unlikely since the concept of distance does not exist to a

fairy. Fairyland itself can be seen as a metaphor. In many

myths the entrance to fairyland can be opened anywhere by

performing certain rituals, for example by burning a leaf of a

wreath (Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 53). Fairyland

might be a symbolic idea that unites the fairies worldwide and

each place in which they reside could be fairyland. The main

action in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is staged in the forest outside

Athens. Because the fairies dwell in these woods “where fairies

are the major manipulators” this could be the fairyland of A

14


Midsummer Night’s Dream and the four lovers enter this world

(Michael Dervan, 36).

The supernatural in Macbeth and Hamlet is part of the

plotline in the human world. The supernatural entities recount

their adventures: “A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,

And munched, and munched, and munched. ‘Give me,’ quoth I.

‘Aroint thee, witch,’ the rump-fed runnion cries” (Macbeth,

1.3.3–5). Or they contemplate their fate:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain time to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires (Hamlet, 1.5.10-

11)

However, they do not have an isolated plotline They are

integrated into the tragedy of respectively Macbeth or Hamlet.

The supernatural world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a separate

plotline, that of the quarrel between Titania and Oberon. “[I]t

is even possible to stage elements of the Mechanicals and the

fairy plots separately […] the Athenian court characters, the

fairies and the Mechanicals do maintain remarkably independent

existence for much of the action” (Trevor R. Griffiths, 2).

15


The fairies have an identity independent of and different

from that of the human world, which makes it hard to reconcile

them with the human world. Michael Hoffman, director of the

1999 film adaptation of the play, solved this problem by

creating a common ground for the fairies and humans:

Hoffman perceives the central problem of the play to be

the achievement of unity among the play’s disparate

elements: “What common motivations,” Hoffman asks, “could

one hope to find among characters as different as Titania,

Queen of the fairies, and Snout the Tinker.” […] The

common motivation that Hoffman finds for them is love:

“Everyone in the play wants to be loved,” he claims, “but

love’s attainment for each of them has obstacles imposed

from within or without.” (Sarah Mayo, 296-97)

16


This common “reductive premise,” as Mayo calls it in her

critical essay “A Shakespeare for the People”, forms the spine

of Hoffman’s film (296). According to Mayo, Hoffman attempts to

integrate A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the great stream of

Hollywood love stories. “Shakespeare’s extended warning against

the dangers of doting and the pitfalls of romantic love becomes

a quintessentially Hollywoodean playing out the quest for true

love” (297). Mayo claims that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s

Dream is a complaint against love rather than a romantic love

story. One could quote numerous lines from the play to support

this claim. However, although these are indeed “extended

warning[s],” they do not obliterate the romantic aspects of the

play, which are also to be found in the text. The play’s

attitude toward love is more ambivalent than Mayo proposes.

Hoffman’s focus on love as the binding factor between the

magical and human world is, according to Mayo, “[t]he

projection of purportedly universal romantic narrative […] in

order to establish a point of continuity between the

Shakespearean text and the Hollywood film […] to popularize,

democratize and universalise Shakespeare” (303). However, from

Miller’s critical essay one could deduce that love as a binding

17


aspect might not be so unlikely since the “fairies are (among

other things) the metamorphic agency of love personified,

pansy-juice and all; and an ambivalence in the status of love”

(256). Although ambivalent, it is love, in various forms, that

binds the magical world to the mortal world.

TITANIA

[…]

But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon [Hippolyta],

Your buskin’s mistress and your warrior love,

To Theseus must be wedded, and you come

To give their bed joy and prosperity.

OBERON

How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,

Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,

Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night

From Perigenia, whom he ravished?

And make him with fair Aegles break his faith,

With Ariadne and Antiopa?

[…]

18


OBERON

How long within this wood intend you stay?

TITANIA

Perchance till after Theseus' wedding-day. (2.1.70-139)

Oberon and Titania are bound to Hippolyta and Theseus out of

genuine affection instead of egocentric, possessive love. They

have come to bless Hippolyta’s and Theseus’s wedding bed, which

indicates a positive attitude towards marriage and thus love.1

Hoffman did not, as Mayo claims, reinterpreted Shakespeare’s

play in Hollywood fashion by giving the text meaning that was

not there, but highlighted elements that were already present.

Love is a typical human quality and Hoffman grasped this aspect

to create a common motivation and shape a bond between the

mortal and fairy world.

Haitink, Hall and Bury’s fairies could not be called human

or lovable because of their alien, almost animal like, nature.

Their strangeness is emphasised by “the voices [Benjamin]

1 One might wonder whether Hippolyta, according to Greek mythology an Amazon

princess who was overthrown by Theseus and forced to wed him, does marry

him out of genuine love. This is, however, not the scope of this essay.

Although many directors inserted a certain tension between Hippolyta and

Theseus there is little textual evidence that they are in discord.

19


Britten chose for the fairies [which] are in ‘unearthly’

registers” (Parsons, “Guide to Records,” 85). The fairies carry

long branches that serve as spears. Instead of Hoffman’s

exuberant introduction of the fairies, Haitink, Hall and Bury’s

fairies carefully sneak on to the stage, holding out their

branches for protection. These shy fairies are closer to nature

than to mankind, as is illustrated by the colour of their

costumes that blend in with the wood. “The fairy costumes are

colored the same as the forest itself, highlighted with white

and silver” (Parsons, “Guide to Videos,” 303). The spears

denote a hostile nature. Dervan points out that Benjamin

Britten “was struck by ‘a kind of sharpness’ in Shakespeare's

fairies” (53). What’s more, Britten was a great admirer of

Purcell, who based his opera The Fairy Queen on A Midsummer Night’s

Dream. As Gary Schmidgall says: “Purcell haunts Britten’s

fairies scene” (289). The nature of Purcell’s fairies becomes

clear in “The Scene of the Drunken Poet” in which two fairies

plague and pinch a poet who happens to wander into the forest.

“Pinch him forty, forty times, Pinch till he confess his

crimes,” the crime being drunk (Purcell, The Fairy Queen). Indeed,

Haitink, Hall and Bury’s fairies do seem to suggest a hostile

20


nature with their unearthly, shy, defensive but also aggressive

character.

The fairies’ defensive behaviour suggests that they are

guards of Titania and Oberon. This is shown when Titania

resides in her bower in act two, scene two. Hoffman’s fairies

occupy themselves with their own things. For example, they play

with human appliances such as gramophone records that midgets,

which were seen loading goods upon a wagon in a preceding scene

set in Athens, have just delivered, or take a bath in pond

nearby Titania’s bower. Haitink, Hall and Bury’s fairies, on

the other hand, probe the trees to see if everything is safe

and put their spears protectively over Titania. In their

protective behaviour, they incidentally resemble Tyrone

Guntrie’s fairies who “were […] camouflaged [like] modern

soldiers engaged in a jungle warfare” (Griffiths, 120). This

behaviour relates to Elizabethan beliefs about fairies. In the

early sixteenth century fairies were seen as evil spirits who

plagued men and although in the Elizabethan period these

“beliefs seem to have been much less widespread […] they had

not died out completely” (François Laroque, 22).

21


Hoffman extends his comparison between the human world and

the fairy realm. His magical creatures, although alien in

appearance, display a whole variety of human characteristics.

In scene 2.1, “How now, spirit, whiter wander you?” Shakespeare

introduces his audience to the fairy world. Hoffman presents

his fairies from their first appearance as colourful, diverse

creatures. As Hoffman himself puts it:

I didn't want [the] fairies to all be pretty and ethereal,

I thought [the fairy] world should be peopled by […]

archetypes, which means everything from Tinkerbell to

Medusa, and from a child to a grandmother. You have beauty

and ugliness, age and youth, weight and airiness. (John

Calhoun, 83)

Hoffman’s first fairy scene is staged in a place that is

recognisable as a pub. The drinking, laughing, dancing and

lovemaking fairies remind the audience of a party. The first,

obviously bored fairy tells Puck that it is her task to “serve

the Fairy Queen” and Puck explains his position towards his

master by saying: “I jest to Oberon, make him smile” (2.1.8 and

44). Both the fairy as Puck are servants to Titania and Oberon

but appear to be off duty and spending their free time in this

22


primitive pub. Hoffman enlarges and exaggerates the human

behaviour and thus holds a mirror up to life. Some Hollywood

comedies are based on a similar mirroring principle. For

example, the film Bridget Jones’Diary was a success because

Bridgit’s blunders in everyday live were enlarged into the

ridiculous so that women could not only relate to, but also

laugh at Bridget’s mistakes.2 Enlargement of one’s own flaws or

virtues in film is a safe way to confront, or dissociate from

them.

A scene set in the human world precedes Hoffman’s

introductory scene of the fairies. This scene is set in

“neither the mythic Greek landscape of the play nor in the

barely disguised Elizabethan realm [that] many stage

productions [opt for]. Instead, Hoffman laid his adaptation in

turn-of the century Tuscan” (Calhoun, 83). In this scene the

preparations for Hippolyta and Theseus’ wedding are being made.

Its inhabitants perpetuate the aristocratic atmosphere that

emanates from this scene. According to J. Welsh:

Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus is a powerful warrior who has

defeated the Amazon Queen Hippolyta in battle and is then

2 Susan Maguire’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, 2001, after the eponymous book by Helen

Fielding.

23


determined to marry her and make merry. Hoffman’s Theseus

(David Starheim) lacks the grandeur and the comic

pomposity of Shakespeare’s Theseus, and his lines are so

abridged in keeping with the new setting that he appears

to be merely the maitre d’ of a swanky Italian resort, not

a ruler in charge, but a stiff, wooden mannequin oddly

detached from the festivities of his own nuptials.

Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau) is likewise translated into a

genteel, aristocratic lady, rather too frail to be

imagined wearing Amazon battle-garb” (160).

Whether or not Hoffman’s formal Athens and stiff representation

of its rulers do justice to Shakespeare’s original text, it

does cause a clear break with the scene in the fairy pub. The

fairy bar is set in a badly lit cave. To the music played by a

single pan flute satyrlike creatures play a board game and

flirt with scarcely dressed nymphs. The cave with its wanton

occupants and lively, almost barbaric rumour stand in stark

contrast with the refined world of Hippolyta and Theseus. In

1960 Michael Langham “began to raise issues […] between the

mortals and the fairies in terms of the relationship between

the consciousness and the unconsciousness […] which would

24


become the key to A Midsummer Night’s Dream production for the rest

of the century” (Griffiths, 65). Hoffman’s flamboyant fairies

might be the representation of the unconsciousness of the stiff

Athenian aristocrats. Michael Taylor, author of “The Darker

purpose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream” would say that the behaviour

of Hoffman’s fairies, and the fairies in general, are

anthropomorphisms of human behaviour:

His [Puck] sense of superiority over his human victims is

human in its pettiness. ‘Lord, what food these mortals

be!’ (3.2.115) he sighs disparagingly, he enjoys the

rather pitiable ‘jangling’ of the four lovers: ‘And so far

I am glad it so did sort,/ As this their jangling I esteem

a sport’ (3.2.352-353). And his description of Bottom

cuttingly as ‘The Buryowest thick skin of that barren

sort’ (3.2.13), and this criticism is echoed by Oberon-

‘this hateful imperfection of her eyes’ (6.1.66). It is

not just Puck, then, who is anthropomorphized in this

manner. Oberon and Titania seem more typical of a husband

and wife in the real than in the fairy world. Their

squabbling is trivial: a dispute over Titania’s

‘changeling’ boy who Oberon desires. The king and queen

25


are only reconciled through Oberon’s subduing Titania to

his wishes, and it seems that masculine hegemony is as

traditional in fairy-land as it is in the human world.

This comparison between the two worlds is even more

ironically exact when Oberon accuses Titania of an

improper interest in Theseus; whiles she in turn accuses

him of harbouring base thoughts about Hippolyta. […] It is

amusing to see fairies behaving as foolish and predictable

as human beings. (263)

However, Hoffman’s fairies are not only anthropomorphisms of

human behaviour. They are actual beings. From Shakespeare’s

text one cannot derive that the lovers are aware of the

existence of fairies. The existence of the magical creatures

then remains questionable. In the final scene Hoffman lets his

tiny luminous fairies fly over the beds of the lovers to bestow

them with blessings. Both couples see the fairies and respond

to them, proving the existence of fairies.

Haitink, Hall and Bury’s appearance of the fairies in the

human world also occurs in the final scene. However, they

invade the house when the humans have already left. The last

scenes of the opera is also the only time when Haitink, Hall

26


and Bury show the audience the human world because Britten’s

libretto deleted the first act. “The opera, more than the play,

is dominated by the wood [the magical realm], in which all but

the final scene is set” (Michael Kennedy, 23). By dispensing

with the first act entirely, the relationship between the

fairies and humans is difficult to portray because the audience

cannot compare the behaviour of the fairies with the behaviour

of the humans in their natural environment. We only see the

lovers in the wood and as we learn from Lysander in the

original text the lovers travel through the woods to flee the

Athenian law:

And to that place the sharp Athenian law

Cannot pursue us. (1.1.162-63)

So, in the magical world the lovers are free from the

restrictions and codes of the human world. What’s more, the

play is situated around the festivities of May Day, which

allowed behaviour that normally would be “condemned as

licentious” (Laroque, 111). Furthermore, in former productions

the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious was

mainly explored by “doubling Theseus and Hippolyta with Oberon

and Titania” (Griffiths, 64). Hoffman does not double the fairy

27


pair with ducal couple, but Hippolyta does give Theseus

disdainful looks when he decides that Hermia must make a

choice: marry Demetrius or reside in a nunnery. Hippolyta is

obviously not pleased with this verdict and their relationship

is only amended when Theseus decides that Hermia may marry

Lysander. Although subtle, and only suggested by looks, this

silent, subtle struggle between Hippolyta and Theseus echoes

Titania and Oberon’s quarrel. Adrian Noble did the same in his

1994 production in which “the rift between Theseus and

Hippolyta [was established] in her reaction of [Theseus]

treatment of Hermia” (Griffiths, 78). In Britten’s opera,

Hippolyta and Theseus are only introduced in the final act.

Haitink, Hall and Bury’s operatic fairies are all played by

prepubescent boys and are therefore difficult to relate to the

adult human world. The boys are all dressed in similar

Elizabethan outfits that give them a uniform appearance while

Hoffman’s fairies are all separate entities. Britten symbolises

through music the three groups in the play:

Britten elucidates and interprets the text in his own

magical way. Each of three groups of characters has its

own kind of music. (Parsons, “Guide to Records,” 85).

28


So, the lovers, the fairies and the rustics are portrayed

through music in groups instead of characterising each

character individually.

Britten intended the score for the fairies to be sung by a

boy choir, so Haitink and Bury continued this tradition.

However, according to Griffiths, there is evidence that the

fairies were originally intended by Shakespeare to be performed

by boys ( 7). So, the representation of the fairies is also a

product of its time. For example in the eighteenth century:

successive generations of directors and audiences have

convinced themselves that Shakespeare’s diminutive fairies

[…] can best be staged by giving some or all of the fairy

roles to children. Given the persistence of such beliefs

that among audiences and managements […] there appears to

be some metonymic logic in accepting that, say, a child

three foot tall is more credible as a fairy less than an

inch high than an adult would be.” (Griffiths, 15)

However, employing children as fairies often harmed the

complexity of the text because the children did not understand

the lines. Some three hundred years later, when the accurate

presentation of the text became more important than truthfully

29


representing the supernatural, mainly adults would play the

fairies. For example, Peter Brook’s production of 1970 was set

in “a white box [that] reminded critics of a circus ring, a

gymnasium and a operating theatre,” and his adult fairies wore

plain clothing (Griffiths, 66). The setting of Brook’s

production illustrates the importance of the text. Devoid of a

colourful stage or costumes the text itself had to carry this

production.

Hoffman’s humanlike fairies can also be connected to a

change in beliefs. According to Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark

in the late twentieth century beliefs about magic were

associated with “a desire for greater individual self-

expression and self-fulfilment” (viii). Humanizing occult

creatures and thus giving them an identity expressed this

desire for individuality. One of the first and best known

series to portray magic from a more individual human side was

the television sitcom Bewitched, created by William Asher in

1964. Before this television show, witches were either seen as

a fabrication of fairytales or still identified with medieval

ancestors who “held nocturnal meetings at which they made

sacrifices to the devil and performed forbidden magical acts in

30


order to injure others” (Edward Peters, 223). Bewitched,

however, dealt with the adventures of Samantha, a member of the

society of witches. Samantha married an ordinary man and tried

to lead a normal, human life, but she could not resist using

her magic abilities to solve domestic issues. The show focused

more on character development in combination with magic and

gave a whole new face to witchcraft. In the nineties there was

an explosion of television shows in which occult characters

were humanized. To name a few, the film The Craft directed by

Andrew Flemming, about four high school girls who get involved

in the occult. Together they have a unstoppable power; Angel by

Joss Whedon that revolves around a vampire with a soul, and

Charmed by Constance M. Burge about three sisters with magical

powers who attempt to lead a normal live but are occasionally

attacked by demons.

Haitink, Hall and Bury follow an more conventional

operatic tradition. The fairies in their “surreal, neo-

Elizabethan” costumes suggest that Haitink and Bury followed

the Elizabethan style which was among else applied by Andrew

Leigh in his production of 1938 and John Barton in 1977 (Jon

Alan Conrad).

31


Perhaps the most influential of […] critical readings was

the one promulgated by Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover

Wilson in their widely circulated and much reprinted 1924

New Cambridge edition of the play, which was taken up most

notably at the Old Vic in 1929 and Stratford in 1932, and

by Peter Hall in his 1956/1962 Stratford production. The

important characteristics of these productions were their

use of broadly Elizabethan costumes for the mortals […]

and the use of a set for the Athenian scenes which

resembled an Elizabethan great house. (Griffiths, 6)

Haitink, Hall and Bury do not only apply this style to the

mortals, also the fairies stand in the Elizabethan tradition

and thus connect to other theatre productions, while Hoffman

connects to a relatively modern TV and film convention.

Hoffman unites his fairies with the human world through

love. Hoffman highlighted the romantic aspects in the text and

so integrated A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the stream of

Hollywood love stories. His fairies display humanlike behaviour

and although they could be called anthropomorphisms of human

behaviour, or the representation of the human unconsciousness,

they are also actual beings. Haitink, Hall and Bury never

32


answer the question whether the fairies are real or

imaginative. Britten dispensed with the first act, set in the

human world, entirely and Haitink, Hall and Bury’s fairies are

shy, unearthly creatures who cannot be related to the human

world. Hoffman’s humanlike fairies connect to a late twentieth-

century change in representing magical creatures that focused

on the magical creatures as persons with feelings instead as

oddities.

33

Samantha Janssen: The Magical Creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adapted: Titania, Oberon and Their Retinue of Fairies

Titania, Oberon, and Their Retinue of Fairies

In this chapter I will discuss the representation and

origin of Titania and Oberon, the King and Queen of the fairy

realm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In addition I will describe the

position of the fairies towards Titania and Oberon and how this

is represented. As described in the previous chapter

“Shakespeare’s fairies are not […] straightforward and unitary,

deriving from a single tradition, whether literary or popular.

Instead, they are drawn from many different traditions” (Trevor

R. Griffiths, 4). Fairies are first mentioned in medieval

scriptures. Titania, however, is a remnant of the Greek

mythology and in some aspects she resembles the Greek

goddesses. Oberon originated in the Middle Ages in the

Charlemagne romance Huon the Bordeaux. In this story Auberon, the

king of the Elves, is born from a human father and fairy

mother. Although Titania and Oberon are a legacy from Greek

mythology and medieval romance, this does not necessarily mean,

as this chapter will show, that they are similar to their

ancestors in all respects. Shakespeare’s text often deviates

34


from the source materials. For example, Shakespeare’s Oberon

has little in common with his humane ancestor and might even be

more closer to the soulless fairies who have to pay tribute to

hell. Bernard Haitink, Peter Hall and John Bury turned their

Oberon into a cruel and unearthly master while Michael

Hoffman’s version of the fairy King is more amiable. The

similarities with the source materials can also be nullified by

a different interpretation of the part, as Hoffman’s

interpretation of Titania shows. The difference in

interpretation of Titania between Hoffman’s film and Haitink,

Hall and Bury’s adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s opera becomes

particularly clear in her love affair with Bottom. Titania and

Oberon are not simply husband and wife. Together they represent

harmony. However, their quarrel concerning the changeling boy

distorts the natural order. Their bond is apparently so strong

that when it is disturbed, it creates havoc in the human world.

The relationship of the fairies towards Titania and Oberon is

also shown through their fight. They support either Titania or

Oberon, but this does not necessarily mean that they are

different creatures. Titania and Oberon depend on each other

and are one, so consequently their followers are a homogeneous

35


group but, just like their masters, they are temporarily in

discord.

Shakespeare derived Titania’s name from Ovid’s

metamorphosis in which the goddess Diana is called Titania

because she is a daughter of the Titans. Shakespeare’s Titania

could be called a goddess because she “has votaresses; [and]

she is so much a goddess as to have a cult” (K. M. Briggs, The

Anatomy of Puck, 45). Another striking parallel between the fairy

Queen Titania and the Greek goddesses is their preference for a

particular mortal man. Shakespeare’s Titania led Theseus

“through the glimmering night From Perigouna whom he ravished”

(2.1.77-78). In this she resembles among others the goddess

Minerva3 who guided Ulysses on his journey and pleaded for him

by Jove4:

Then Minerva said, “Father, son of Saturn, King of kings,

[…] it is for Ulysses that my heart bleeds, when I think

of his sufferings in that lonely sea-girt island, far

away, poor man, from all his friends. […] This daughter of

Atlas has got hold of poor unhappy Ulysses, and keeps

trying by every kind of blandishment to make him forget

3 Also called Athena.

4 Zeus

36


his home, so that he is tired of life, and thinks of

nothing but how he may once more see the smoke of his own

chimneys. You, sir, take no heed of this, and yet when

Ulysses was before Troy did he not propitiate you with

many a burnt sacrifice? Why then should you keep on being

so angry with him? […] Minerva then made him look taller

and stronger than before, she also made the hair grow

thick on the top of his head, and flow down in curls like

hyacinth blossoms; she glorified him about the head and

shoulders as a skilful workman who has studied art of all

kinds under Vulcan and Minerva enriches a piece of silver

plate by gilding it- and his work is full of beauty.

(Homer)

This same goddess, however, can be proud and revengeful, as is

shown in the famous story of Arachne who enters into a weaving

contest with Minerva:

Minerva could not find fault with the work, not even Envy

herself could. Angered by Arachne’s success, the golden-

haired goddess tore up the embroidered tapestry with its

stories of the gods’ shameful deeds. In grief Arachne

37


strangled herself, stopping the passage of life with a

noose. (Robert J. Lenardon, 166).

Just like the goddess Minerva, Titania possesses both a

compassionate side as a proud revengeful side. In her

benevolence she takes care of a little orphaned Indian boy. On

the other hand, she quarrels with Oberon, denies him her “bed

and company,” and, as a true jealous Hera who “consistently

appears [in Greek mythology] as the vehement wife […] who will

punish and avenge the romantic escapades of her husband

[Zeus],” she condemns Oberon’s preference for Hippolyta (2.1.62

and Lenardon, 113).

Michael Hoffman focuses on the benevolent side of Titania

by portraying her with the Indian boy sitting on her arm to

illustrate the adaptive mother-son relationship. However,

Richard Alleva points out another way to interpret Hoffman’s

Titania. He claims that Titania’s generous behaviour is not

inspired by true love for the boy and his deceased mother:

Hoffman sees the fairy world simply as a kingdom in exile,

driven into the woods by the triumph of Christianity.

These ousted deities, denied the fealty of mortals and

confined to a sylvan ghetto, have become clumsy,

38


enervated, aimless, petty, and irritable. (I began to

wonder why the wings hadn't dropped off the fairies long

ago.) In Shakespeare's text, Titania denies her mate the

little pageboy because of her regard for her friend, the

lad's dead mother. But here, with that motive de-

emphasised, the real cause of the quarrel seems to be a

kind of cabin fever. After sixteen hundred years of exile

in a very small forest, Oberon and Titania just can't

stand the sight of each other. (20)

Haitink, Hall and Bury’s approach of Titania comes closer to

her Greek and divine origin. She strides through the forest as

a true diva. While Hoffman’s Titania almost yields to Oberon

when he approaches her lovingly, the operatic Titania stands

her ground. Clearly she does not long for Oberon’s love and she

acts out of the conviction that she is just. The fashion for

this more active and self-conscious Titania was set by Judi

Dench in Peter Hall’s production of 1962. “Traditionally

Titania’s were expected to look pretty and regal in a fairy

like way, and to sing and dance well, attracting attention only

when diverged from those norms” (Griffiths, 123). Dench,

however, was described by The New Statesman as “frisking and

39


swooping as a Persian kitten turned maenad” (Griffiths, 124).

The operatic Titania may not be as physically active as Dench

was, but she possesses the same autonomous power that separates

her from the film Titania. The operatic Titania’s anger is

shown by her composure. She does not physically attack Oberon

as John Barton’s Titania did in his 1977 production who staged

a “wimpish Oberon” whom Titania “ground with a flick of the

wrist, angrily rejecting his sovereignty,” but she restrains

her anger (Griffiths, 124). Like a true Queen she does not

stoop to physical combat but simply leaves the stage offended.

Alleva described Hoffman’s Titania as a “gracelessly spoken

performance, [but Titania] seems middle-class in her

shrewishness rather than regally furious, like a Scarsdale

matron whose ex-husband has missed his last two alimony

payments” (21).

Via the love affair between Titania and Bottom the

difference between the operatic and film Titania becomes

poignantly clear. When the operatic Titania is under Oberon’s

spell, she suddenly changes. Her autonomy is exchanged for the

adoration of Bottom. Traditionally Titania’s infatuation “with

Bottom portrays the degradation of physical love that lowers

40


man to love a beast. [I]t gives no offence, it is pure comedy”

(J. H. Walter, 12). This “pure comedy” is what the opera

attempts to evoke. The adoration of this proud woman is drawn

into the ridiculous. Despite his appearance and behaviour

Titania continues to worship him. In Hoffman’s film, however,

Bottom is rather an asset than a comic impediment to Titania’s

fairy realm.

Titania may be able to command lightning and rain but she

and her nymphs can't work the phonograph filched from the

villa of Theseus. When Bottom finally winds the

contraption up and plays “Casta Diva,” the nymphs look at

him with new respect. He may not be the most glamorous

lover Titania's ever had, but he sure is a handy guy to

have around. (Shakespeare's term for working man,

“mechanical,” here takes on new meaning.) (Robert Alleva,

20)

The irony and at the same time comic effect, of the love affair

in the opera is that of all people the proud Titania should

become infatuated with the clumsy, translated Bottom. Once

again this relates to the Greek mythology. In Ovid’s

Metamorphosis “Lucius [is] changed into an ass by enchantment

41


[and] is passionately embraced by a woman of noble birth, and

he is promised adornments and food by the imprisoned maiden

Charite” (Walter, 175). Titania, as a Queen, is of noble birth

and the spell Oberon has cast upon her could be seen as the

imprisonment.

Hoffman reinterpreted the love affair between Titania and

Bottom. According to Sarah Mayo, Hoffman described his Titania

as a “a woman who want[s] to love simply, unconditionally, in a

way the politics of her relationship with Oberon [make]

impossible” (298). Sarah Mayo develops this thought by saying

that:

Bottom the Weaver is reimaged […] as a hopeless dreamer

who spends his spare time dressing up in a immaculate

white linen suit […] However, as Hoffman claims, ‘It is

only when we learn that it is the only suit he owns, that

he has a lousy marriage, that he lives in a dingy flat,

that we know he clings to the delusions of grandeur

because he has no love in his live.’ […] The

reinterpretation of these characters leads Hoffman to play

the Titania-Bottom relationship not for the conventional

laughs but […] to appeal to the audience’s latent romantic

42


inclinations, and we are encouraged to believe that a

couple of nasty pranks played by Oberon and Robin

Goodfellow have turned into a love-story remarkable for

its beauty and simplicity” (298).

So, instead of the comic “incongruity of the beauty wooing the

beast” Hoffman’s affair between Titania and Oberon fulfils

their longing for true love (Walter, 12).

Oberon is first mentioned in the French Charlemangean

romance Huon the Bordeaux Night’s Dream. Oberon, or Auberon according

to the Huon the Bordeaux, is the name of the King of the Elves in

this medieval French poem. Auberon helps the hero Huon to

complete an apparently impossible task even though the latter

tries to deceive his patron and lacks either morality or

gratefulness. In this benevolence he resembles Oberon who takes

pity on Helena.

[To Puck]

A sweet Athenian Lady is in love

With a disdainful youth. Anoint his eyes;

But do it when the next thing he espies

May be the lady. Thou shalt know the man

By the Athenian garments he hat on.

43


Effect it with some care, that he may prove

More fond on her than she upon her love; (2.2.260 - 266)

However, there are lucid differences. Auberon is a:

child of a fairy mother, the lady of the isle, and a

mortal father, Julius Caesar (who, in the Middle Ages,

obtained the same magical reputation as Virgil). Auberon,

therefore, is mortal, he can weep, he falls sick; but he

is never of more stature than a child of three years, and

his magical powers are so absolute that he has only to

wish, and his will accomplishes itself. […] He is a much

better Christian than Huon, and, when he dies, his corpse

is buried in an abbey and his soul is carried to heaven by

an innumerable company of angels. (Alice D. Greenwood)

Oberon can perform magic but he is not as powerful as Auberon

who simply has to wish to accomplish his will, while Oberon has

to depend on a flower to cast a spell on Titania. Another

auspicious difference is that Auberon, because he is partly

human, possesses a soul and therefore may enter the eternal

kingdom after his dead. Oberon is completely fairy and

therefore does not posses a soul. One of the best-known stories

of a fairy without a soul is that of The Little Mermaid. Mermaids

44


“are often hardly regarded as fairies [although] they posses

all the necessary qualifications” (Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and

Literature, 146). Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairytale is,

in contrast to Disney’s pro-children adaptation, not a story

about a girl who finds true love, but a story about a fairy

that obtains a soul and thus finds salvation. She refuses to

kill the prince and therefore turns into salt sea foam:

[S]he continued to rise higher and higher out of the foam.

“Where am I?” asked she, and her voice sounded ethereal,

as the voice of those who were with her; no earthly music

could imitate it. “Among the daughters of the air,”

answered one of them. A mermaid has not an immortal soul,

nor can she obtain one unless she wins the love of a human

being. On the power of another hangs her eternal destiny.

But the daughters of the air, although they do not possess

an immortal soul, can, by their good deeds, procure one

for themselves. […] “After three hundred years, thus shall

we float into the kingdom of heaven,” said she. “And we

may even get there sooner,” whispered one of her

companions. “Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where

there are children, and for every day on which we find a

45


good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves

their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child

does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile

with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year

less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty

or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every

tear a day is added to our time of trial!” (Hans Christian

Andersen).

The little mermaid has died as a human, and therefore possesses

a soul, and thus may join the daughters of the air. Oberon

might be more similar to this soulless fairy than to Auberon

because a traditional qualification for a fairy is that it

lacks a soul. In fairy tradition fairies often owe a tribute to

hell (Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 115). Because they do

not possess a soul they have to buy off their freedom. Assuming

that Oberon relates to this fairy tradition one might wonder to

what extent he possesses human qualities. It could also be

claimed that Oberon is closer to humans than to fairies because

he is capable of empathy and love, which are typical human

qualities. However, because Oberon is capable of love, this

does not mean that the entire scale of human emotions is at his

46


disposal. As we learn from Ariel in The Tempest, human emotions

are alien to fairy like creatures:

ARIEL

That if you beheld them, your affections would become

tender.

PROSPERO

Dost thou think so, spirit?

ARIEL

Mine would sir, were I human (5.1.18-20).

One could say that the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are,

as Oberon says, “spirits of another sort” and that they are

therefore different from Ariel and can feel emotions (3.2.87)

However, Oberon “distinguishes himself from ghosts and night-

wandering spirits that cannot bear the day” and not from airy

spirits such as Ariel (Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 46).

Hoffman and Haitink, Hall and Bury portrayed Oberon, in

contrast to Auberon who always has the stature of a three year

old, as an adult male. Yet, his behaviour appears slightly

childish and peevish and he even stoops to devious tricks to

get his own way.

OBERON

47


Having once this juice

I’ll watch Titania when she is asleep,

And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.

The next thing then she waking looks upon-

Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,

On meddling monkey, or on busy ape-

She shall pursue it with the soul of love.

And ere I take this charm from her sight-

As I can take it with another herb-

I’ll make her render her page to me. (2.1.177-85)

A symbolic explanation for this behaviour is that Oberon

portrays the divine, which has to subdue the earthly.

In these higher love (Oberon) finally subdues rebellious

earthly, sensual love (Titania) who had captured a

rational soul (changeling) by reducing her love to the

lowest physical infatuation for a beast (Bottom). (Walter,

10)

This traditional explanation is derived from “Renaissance

psychology [in which husbands were] dominant […] over their

wives” and in which men represented higher values and

superiority. However, through time the play has always been

48


open for new interpretive possibilities. For example, according

to Humprey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten wanted Oberon to be a

kind of Peter Pan, a child that never grows up. This could

explain his choice to turn his Oberon into a countertenor. The

voice of a countertenor voice resembles the high soprano voices

of prepubescent boys. However, the voice of James Bowman, the

Oberon of Haitink, Hall and Bury’s production:

is much darker in sound than [Alfred Deller’s, who played

Oberon in the original stage production]—masculine even,

yet unearthly. […] His Oberon is cruelly precise, each

syllable carefully chosen and colored to create effect. He

knows what he wants. It isn’t his fault that Puck messes up

his plans. (Parsons, “Guide to Videos,” 303)

Haitink, Hall and Bury stress Oberon’s cruelty in the scene in

which Oberon reprimands Robin for his mistakes. “This is thy

negligence. Still thou mistak’st, Or else commit’st thy

knaveries wilfully” (3.2.347-48). Oberon’s physical punishment

of Robin resembles a father who disciplines his child, but his

punishment is severe. He drags the Puck across the stage who

obviously suffers under this harsh treatment.

49


Hoffman’s interpretation of Oberon is gentler. Stanley

Tucci, Hoffman’s Oberon, succeeds in letting “Why should

Titania cross her Oberon” sound like a declaration of love. He

tries to convince Titania to forfeit the boy to him by

approaching her lovingly and speaking softly to her. The Puck

mimics Oberon’s gestures, as a child would mirror its parents.

Yet, their relationship is friendlier and more equal than that

in the opera and they are often shown lying brotherly together

in the grass. The Puck only receives a cuff on the ears when

Oberon learns about his mistake. Hoffman’s Oberon is laidback

and has been described as an “overripe lounge lizard” (Alleva,

21).

Titania and Oberon are not, as Walter puts it “whimsy to

be regarded with

amused condescension as pretty pieces of decoration” (10). They

are not simply husband and wife, but each other’s counterparts,

both different sides of the same coin. As said, Oberon is often

described as the representation of the divine which is

associated with the sky and Titania with earthly love. Their

union echoes “Zeus en Hera’s […] sacred marriage between the

shy-god and earth-goddess” (Lenardon, 111). Together Titania

50


and Oberon symbolise harmony, but when they are in discord the

natural order of things is disturbed:

TITANIA

But with thy brawls thou has disturbed our sports.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs which, falling in the land,

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretch his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

The folds stand empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fattened with the murrain’s flock.

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

The human mortals want their winter cheer (2.1.87-101)

Titania and Oberon are, as Titania herself acknowledges, the

cause of this disturbance:

And from this same progeny of evils comes

51


From our debate, from our dissension

We are their parents and original. (2.1.115-17)

This does, however, not mean that they are insensitive towards

human and do not care what havoc their behaviour causes:

Titania feels concern at the hardship which their quarrel

are inflicting on the human mortals, Oberon intervenes to

set the lovers affair to rights, they both go to bless

Theseus’s marriage bed. Even Titania’s child-theft has an

affectionate motive. No doubt she left a lingering

voracious image as heir to the India King, but she took

the child because of love for its dead mother (Briggs, The

Anatomy of Puck, 46).

They are similar in their benevolence and in their attachment

to Theseus and Hippolyta. One could say that they resemble the

so-called tutelary spirits from folklore. “The fairies who take

interest in human destiny and work for human friends […] the

ancestral fairies who is attached to a family, and who most

commonly bewails coming tragedy or occasionally gives advice or

even luck-bringing gifts” (Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and

Literature, 25).

52


The portrayal of the bond between Titania and Oberon is

important because it suggests that they symbolise one harmonic

power. This in turn explains why their breach has far-reaching

consequences. Haitink, Hall and Bury portrayed the connection

between Titania and Oberon in their clothing. Both wear a

velvet looking Elizabethan garment that is very much adorned,

and the big collars and white faces echo the historical

costumes of the Elizabethan period. When placed next to each

other, as in their first duet, what strikes most is that they

actually wear the same costumes. The fabric, colours and

adornments are identical, with the only difference that Titania

wears a female version and Oberon a male one. This coherence in

appearance illustrates the bond between Titania and Oberon.

Hoffman’s Titania and Oberon differ in their appearance.

“Rupert Everett’s Oberon is […] more naked than lordly, [and]

Michelle Pfeiffer’s Titania is overly made-up” (J. Welsh, 160).

“Like the medieval fairies [Titania and Oberon] have their

ridings; Oberon covets the changeling as a ‘knight of his

train’ [and] Titania has her court ladies and her bodyguard”

(Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 45). Haitink, Hall and Bury

interpreted the fairies however not merely as the retinue of

53


Titania and Oberon, but as an extension of their masters.

Britten divided the fairies from Titania, Oberon and Puck

through their voices. “Oberon is a counter-tenor, Tytania a

coloratura soprano […] Puck is a spoken role, all the attendant

boy fairies are] boy trebles,” but Haitink, Hall and Bury

related them to Titania and Oberon through their behaviour and

costume (Parsons, “Guide to Records,” 85).

The fairies are a homogeneous group. They all wear

Elizabethan clothing similar to the wardrobe of their masters.

Because they wear the same costumes one cannot derive from this

which camp, Titania or Oberon’s, they support. Haitink, Hall

and Bury show this through their behaviour. They placed the

fairies at the first appearance of Titania and Oberon literally

opposed to each other in two groups, pointing to each other

with their spears. Contrasting the groups in terms of behaviour

had been done before by Beerbohm Tree. “In [his] production, as

Oberon’s train left each boy shook his finger at a [fairy] in

Titania’s train” (Griffiths, 129).

Hoffman contrasted the two groups of fairies by means of

costume. “Oberon is attended by bat-winged spirits in contrast

to the airy spirits of Titania” (Welsh). This separation

54


between Titania and Oberon’s fairies through costumes is also

not alien to productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Sometimes Oberon’s followers have been differentiated

from Titania’s. In F.R. Benson’s production Oberon’s train

carried musical instruments made of flowers and were “of

more masculine aspect than those of Titania’s; but this

aspect is not unduly emphasised, as sexlessness seems to

be the leading characteristic of all of the elfin band.”

(Griffiths, 121)

With this portrayal Hoffman does not simply differentiate

between Titania and Oberon and their fairies, he suggests that

they are of a different fairy species. What’s more, Hoffman not

only made a division between the fairies, but also between

their realms:

Titania’s section of the forest, loosely inspired by Pre-

Raphaelite paintings, contains a classical temple for the

fairies and a nest that raises and lowers for the Queen.

“It’s soft and gentle and green, and the light is warm,”

says Hoffman. Oberon’s realm, on the other hand, is

“starker, cooler, less accommodating.” Here, Etruscan-

55


style temples and tombs are overgrown with roots and

greenery. (John Calhoun, 39)

With this Hoffman suggests that Titania and her retinue are of

a different species than Oberon and his followers.

In representing Titania and Oberon and their fairies

Hoffman and Haitink, Hall and Bury followed a different path.

The bond between the operatic Titania and Oberon becomes clear

through their costumes. Titania possesses an ambivalent mix of

pride and benevolence, which she inherited from her Greek

ancestors. Oberon might not be so magnanimous as his forerunner

Auberon, but his unearthly, almost cruel behaviour, is a

perfect match for the proud Titania. Hoffman’s colourful fairy

couple might be the ideal pair for Hoffman’s enchanted forest,

but their relationship is not stressed. Even their realms

differ and their retinue of magical creatures, although clothed

in beautiful customs, are nothing more than pretty adornments

to the forest.

56


The Indian Boy among the Fairies

Although the Indian Boy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

technically does not belong to the magical creatures, I will

discuss him in this chapter in relationship to the fairies

because he is an important character who has a exceptional

position both in the play and in fairy tradition. The Indian

boy is neither a fairy nor human and therefore hard to

represent. The most important function of the Indian Boy, is to

illustrate the fight between his adoptive parents; Titania and

Oberon. Bernard Haitink, Peter Hall and John Bury chose not to

let the boy come out on stage. In doing so they did not have to

answer the question whether the boy is magical or human, and it

shifted the attention from the boy to Titania and Oberon and

57


their struggle. Michael Hoffman, however, does let his

changeling make his appearance on the film. He portrays the boy

as magical creature who perfectly fits into the fairy realm

that Hoffman has created.

The Indian boy first appears in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream

in act two, scene one. He is simultaneously introduced with

Titania, Oberon and the fairies. Titania and Oberon’s quarrel

revolves around this “lovely boy” that Titania has stolen “from

an Indian king,” and which Oberon wants to make part of his

train of knights (2.1.22). Already in this scene the variety

within the play concerning the Indian Boy becomes clear.

Titania has stolen him from a king. This suggests that the boy

is human. However, Oberon wants him as a knight of his train

made up of magical creatures. So, in this respect the boy is

resembles the fairies. Because of this ambivalence in the play

itself, is hard to represent the boy.

In nineteenth-century productions, as Trevor R.

Griffiths points out, the presence of the Indian boy was a

“fixture,” he was present on stage in every production (126).

This changed in the twentieth century:

58


He appears not to have been present in most twentieth-

century productions until resuscitated by [Nevill] Coghill

[…] and has made intermittent but largely unremarked

appearance since. (Griffiths, 126)

The Indian boy occupies a unique position both in the play and

in fairy tradition. Strictly speaking the boy does not belong

to the magical creatures because of his human descent; he is a

changeling. Traditionally a changeling is a human infant that

fairies, or other magical creatures such as goblins or pixies,

have stolen before its christening. Usually these children

would be sacrificed to the devil. However, the Indian boy lives

among the fairies and although Titania and Oberon quarrel over

him they do so to, according to Stephen Greenblatt, “bestow

love and favor upon him.” (808). Magical creatures rear the boy

and he is therefore an integral part of their world. He

“receives a wide range of responses from the characters in the

play and invites even more complex unsettling responses from

the audience” (W. E. Slights, 262). Consequently, the Indian

boy cannot be neglected in a study about the magical creatures

in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Furthermore, “he is the cause of all

the dramatic action” and, according to K. M. Briggs, “perhaps

59


the only changeling in any pre-Victorian literature that we see

from the fairy angle” (Allan Dunn, 22 / The Anatomy of Puck, 46).

Can we consider the boy as human if he has spent his whole

live among the fairies? As Slights strikingly puts it the

Indian boy “straddles the border between human and fairy.”

(261). Clearly, the Indian boy is an ambivalent character and

therefore hard to represent. A director must take great care in

creating him because misrepresent him could harm his bilateral

position, fairy and human, or underestimate his effect on the

other characters and the theatre audience. Based on this

information one could say that there are four main ways to

portray the Indian boy. As a human; as a fairy; as a

human/fairy hybrid; or four: not at all because, as Slights

points out “the text never calls for this ‘character’ to appear

on stage” (260). Haitink, Hall and Bury settled for this last

option and did not let the boy appear on stage. This may seem a

good solution to the complex question; how to represent the

Indian boy, but it also creates a vacuum that has to be filled

by the other characters. The Indian boy is introduced through

the other characters, mostly through Titania, Oberon and Robin

Goodfellow, the Puck. The boy’s absence on stage helps the

60


audience to focus their attention completely on Titania and

Oberon, since these characters are the only source of

information regarding the boy. However, via Titania and

Oberon’s songs the audience does not obtain any information

about the boy; but they acquire insight in the psychology of

Titania and Oberon. The Indian boy is not really a character

but a theatrical device through witch the different views of

Titania and Oberon are disclosed. Oberon’s way of seeing the

matter is that he:

has suffered an intolerable injury […] at the hands of a

‘wanton wife’ (II.i.63) […] Titania’s view of the

changeling boy is altogether different from […] Oberon’s.

To her, caring for the boy is an ac of loyalty to a woman

with whom she has shared the most intimate and delightful

female companionship, until the fatal moment of the

child’s birth.” (Slights, 260)

Haitink’s and Hall’s Indian boy echoes the make-believe fantasy

child in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which centres

on a married, middle-aged couple George and Martha. Although

they love each other their marriage is lingering and they have

created an imaginary son. This make-up son functions as self-

61


preservation and offers them a common meeting ground. The

Indian boy in Haitink’s and Hall’s production serves a similar

function. The Indian boy is the topic of their quarrel but he

is also, or perhaps therefore, the common ground between

Titania and Oberon. “[The Indian boy] does not appear but [he]

is responsible for both the discord between his parents and for

their eventual reconciliation” (Dunn, 22). Oberon uses the

fight over the boy, through trickery, to reprimand Titania for

her superior behaviour. “Thou shalt not from this grove Till I

torment thee for this injury” (2.1.147-48). One must bear in

mind that Elizabethan women had very few rights. A man was seen

as the head of the marriage and had therefore the legal right

to reprimand his wife. Titania refuses to forfeit the boy and

by doing so she defies her husband who, according to

Elizabethan tradition, is superior to her. This independent,

self-conscious behaviour of Titania was seen as undesirable,

and women who displayed such behaviour were sometimes thought

to be witches. The Indian boy can be seen as a device through

which the position of man and woman is redefined. “The lesson

is largely concerned with the hypothesized superiority of

reason (identified as a male strength) over will (identified as

62


female weakness)” (W. E. Slights, 262). However, Slights

immediately enfeebles this claim by saying in his article that

this argument “assume[s] or assert[s] a kind of particularity

about the nature and the function of the changeling boy that

[because of the conflicting views of Oberon and Titania]

Shakespeare’s text does not provide” (262). However, it is

precisely because of these conflicting views and indeterminacy,

as Slights calls it, that the struggle between man and woman is

emphasized. The conflicting views about the boy, functions as a

metaphor for the universal conflict between man and woman. The

indeterminacy of the boy highlights the conflict. Because the

boy himself has no identity the attention of the audience is

directed to Titania and Oberon and their struggle. By not

letting the Indian boy appear on stage but turning him into an

abstract entity, Haitink and Hall focus on this struggle. The

imaginary character of the Indian boy in the opera is

reinforced by the fact that, when Oberon takes away “the

hateful imperfection” of Titania’s eyes that leads to renewal

of their amity, neither mentions the Indian boy anymore. In the

end Oberon does not appear not to interested in the boy as a

new recruit for his train of knights, but in winning back

63


Titania’s love and to subdue her. Titania’s silence about the

boy suggests that she concedes in this. This does not mean

“that the differences of perception regarding the boy have been

resolved” or forgotten but that the relationship between man

and women has been reset.

Michael Hoffman does let the Indian boy appear in his

film. He turns his Indian boy into a Shivalike creature with

the appropriate blue skin and jewellery. Hoffman’s “fairy world

cast features various fairies and dwarves, as well as the

satyr-like puck, Robin Goodfellow, representing the diverse

characters of Elizabethan folklore, along with nymphs, fawns

and other mythological beings drawn from Shakespeare’s local

and classical sources ” (Sarah Mayo, 307). This blend of

magical elements from different cultures is a relatively modern

phenomenon. It is only when cultures and religions are

perceived as equal that they start to function alongside to

each other. “One aspect of this collapsing of categories is

eclecticism; that modern witches, like ritual magicians, will

often address classical goddesses and gods, and Hebrew angels

and Demons, in he same sequence of operation” (Gardner, “The

History of Pagan Witchcraft,” 73). Earlier productions, such as

64


Gerhard Divine’s production in 1954 and Kenneth Branagh’s in

1990, also used an eclectic style. Branagh’s fairies “were an

unlovely mixture of Flower Power, pantomime and Cats ”

(Griffths, 121). However, in these productions the Indian boy

was not distinctly sided with the magical creatures, while

Hoffman’s Indian boy, because he is a part of the eclectic

blend, is. His appearance denotes that Hoffman’s Indian boy is

a magical creature, which is not the case. Dunn confirms this

in his article “The Indian Boy’s Dream Wherein Every Mother’s

Son Rehearses His Part.” “[T]he Indian boy is a changeling,

stolen from earthly parents, […] He is either the son of the

Indian woman or, according to Puck and more in keeping with

fairy tradition, a prince himself, the stolen son of a king”

(21, my italics).

Hoffman’s Indian boy perfectly fits into his diverse group

of fairies and he is clearly recognizable among the characters,

but the boy does not add an extra dimension to the text. The

Indian boy in the opera’s “ultimate defense is his absence,”

while the weakness of boy in the film version is his present

(Dunn, 22). The Indian boy in the opera provides the audience

with insight in the psychology of his fairy parents. He slowly

65


disappears to the background to make room for the conflict and

reconciliation between Titania and Oberon. To understand the

problem and struggle the audience must be alert. Hoffman’s

portrayal of the boy makes the topic of the quarrel visible and

therefore more accessible. However, the boy’s presence also

distracts from the higher problem between husband and wife, man

and woman. The absence of the boy in the opera suggests that,

although Oberon and Titania are united, the abstract, universal

problem between men and women, represented by the boy, still

exist. Hoffman:

completely sidesteps this thorny question of the

changeling boy, disregarding Oberon’s petulant demand that

Titania render the boy to him, and Titania’s neglect of

the child during her infatuation with the ass, which

allows Oberon to claim the boy at last. A final, fleeting

shot near the end of the film shows the three grouped

together in a idyllic family picture. (Mayo, 298)

This idyllic picture conforms to the classical Hollywood love -

story that is the tradition Hoffman designed his film for.

Hoffman focuses more on the visual, but therefore loses touch

with the main problem between Titania and Oberon, Hall and

66


Haitink focus on the text with minimal visual support but does

emphasise the universal struggle between man and woman.

The Puck and The Fairies

According to K. M. Briggs, “there is a school that

believes that we owe the race of tiny fairies to the literary

fancies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.” (The Fairies in

Tradition and Literature, 3). Although Shakespeare and his

contemporaries may have strongly influenced the representation

of fairies through history they are, as Briggs correctly points

67


out, by no means the product of those poets’ imaginations. They

are the legacy from folkloristic stories and superstition and

numerous fairy species exist. Fairies can be benevolent, but

some fairy groups possess eerie characteristics and are

malevolent. They possess a benevolent and a malevolent side.

However, as I will explain in this chapter, the malevolent

nature is rather a characteristic of the Puck, Robin

Goodfellow, than of the fairies. The Puck is only distantly

related to the fairies, which may explain his deviating, wicked

behaviour. However, although Robin plays pranks on people, and

even his own queen, he cannot be called truly devilish because

he also rewards good housewives, is part of the plot to help

Helena, and in the end rights his mistakes. Robin is a unique

character with a clear narrative function. He sometimes

functions as a storyteller and can therefore be dissociated

from the other characters. In this chapter I will examine the

ambivalent nature and unique position of the Puck, and how this

is represented in Michael Hoffman’s film and in Bernard

Haitink, Peter hall and John Bury’s production of Benjamin

Britten’s opera, and compare or relate this to other

performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

68


The legends about fairies are abundant, and often

contradictory. However, it may also occur that the same fairy

species are named differently. The species are often mutually

interchangeable because one species merges into the next.

Numerous variations of fairy-species exist and in each area in

which they occur they bear different names:

We have the child-sized fairies whose kingdom Elidor

visited, the fairy bride of human size and more than human

beauty, the wild hunt, the miraculous passing of time in

fairyland, the fairy who needs a human midwife and is

invisible except by the help of a magic ointment, the

changeling, the misleading night fairy, the bogey beast

and the Love-Talker or Incubus.” (Briggs, The Fairies in

Tradition and Literature, 3)

Fairies can be benevolent. “Folklore is full of kindly

fairies, the lending fairies of Frensham, the fairy boy who

repaid the hospitality of the Laird of Co, Habitrot, the

patroness of spinners, Elidor’s fairies, Hob-Hole Hob, who

cures whooping cough, and many others” (Briggs, The Anatomy of

Puck, 46). However, some fairies are associated with death and

69


are malevolent. They play pranks on people, kidnap, hurt or

even kill them. For example, in the fairy story November Eve:

a young man who had stayed out imprudently on Hallow e’en

was swept into a band

of fairies going to a fair. […] they gave him fairy gold

and wine and were full of merriment, but for all that they

were the company of the dead When he looked steadily at

one of them he found him to be a neighbour who had died-

perhaps many years before. When he recognized them they

came around him, shrieking with laughter, and tried to

force him into the dance. He resisted them until he fell

senseless, and when he woke next morning he was lying in a

stone circle, and his arms were black and blue with the

marks of the fairy fingers. (Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and

Literature, 15)

The fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are difficult to fit into

any of these categories because they possess benevolent and

malevolent features. According to Briggs the fairies are

generally benevolent. “It is not only that they do not all the

harm that seemingly they have power to do, but they show an

active kindness” (The Anatomy of Puck, 46). Briggs draws a sharp

70


distinction between fairies and witches, who are

personifications of black magic, and thus of malevolence. The

fairies “drive away the owl, snakes, spiders, newts and bats,

all creatures that are associated with witchcraft” (The Anatomy

of Puck, 46):

FIRST FAIRY

Weaving spiders, come not here;

Hence, you long-legged spinner, hence;

Beetles black, approach not near;

Worm nor snail do no offence. (2.2.20-23)

On the other hand, the first fairy to appear on stage describes

the pleasure that the Puck, Robin Goodfellow, takes in plaguing

people:

Are you not he

That fright’s the maidens of the villag’ry

Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,

And bootless make the breathless housewife churn,

And sometime make the drink to bear no barm

Mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm? (2.1.34-

39)

71


Brigg’s list of fairy species also includes the misleading

night fairy that wilfully guides travellers into the swamps

(The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 3). So, perhaps Robin’s

unfavourable qualities might be traced back to folkloristic

beliefs. “In the time of the witchcraft trials […] fairies […]

were thought to be part of the diabolic machinery for ensnaring

the souls of men” (Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 140). The Puck does

seem to exhibit some malicious traits that connect him to black

magic. Although, as Michael Taylor points out, it would be an

exaggeration to call the Puck satanic, certain parts of his

texts suggest that he:

seems to be spiritually closer to the Witches in Macbeth

than to the good fairies of a fairy story […] The closets

he comes to the strain of Sycorax is in his ogreish

descriptions of the “black –browed night.”

And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger;

At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there,

Troop home to churchyards; damned spirits all,

That in crossway and floods have buried,

Already to their wormy beds are gone.

For feast lest day should look their shames upon,

72


They wilfully themselves exile from light,

And must aye consort with black-browed night (3.2.380-87)

(261-62)

Oberon reminds the Puck that they are “spirits of another sort”

(3.2.388). However, “we [still] associate the fairies with

night [because the] Puck explicitly states, later, that the

fairies avoid the day-light for they

run

By the triple Hecate’s team

From the presence of the sun,

Following darkness like a dream (5.2.14-17)” (Taylor,

262)

This explanation denotes that the fairies and the Puck are

subject to the same fairy laws. Both must avoid the sun. This

may be so, but this does not automatically mean that, as Taylor

suggests, they are the same creatures and have the same

malevolent nature.

It is the Puck who, throughout the play, is associated

with mischief most, not the fairies. Oberon and Titania,

according to the text accompanied by dancing fairies, even

demonstrate the kind nature of fairies in the last act:

73


OBERON

Now until the break of day

Through this house each fairy stray.

To the best bride bed will we,

Which by us shall blessèd be (5.2.31-4)

Robin is often seen with these benevolent fairies because he

accompanies the fairy king Oberon and mingles with Titania’s

retinue of fairies:

ROBIN

How now, spirit, whiter wander you?

FAIRY

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire:

I do wander everywhere

Swifter than the moones sphere

And I serve the fairy Queen

To dew her orbs upon the green.

[…]

ROBIN GOODFELLW

74


I jest to Oberon, and make him smile (2.1.1-9 and 44).

Also Briggs, in The Anatomy of Puck, sides the Puck with the

fairies and associates him with the friendly, cough curing Hob-

Hole Hob. However, in her book The Fairies in Tradition and Literature she

discusses the Puck in the chapter “Hobgoblins and Devils.”

Contrary to what many believe, Robin Goodfellow is not a fairy.

Robin is, thanks to Shakespeare, the most famous of the shape-

shifting hobgoblins. He is closely related to the folkloristic

Welsh Puca and the Irish Phooka. Like Titania and Oberon, Robin

is a specifically named character from folklore that

Shakespeare has integrated into A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The

difference in nature between Robin and the fairies may be

explained by the fact that Robin, as a hobgoblin, is only

distantly related to the fairies. However, Briggs compares in

Fairies in Tradition and Literature Robin with the fairies because, says

she, he is an “airy Puck,” and thus benign (71). According to

her he does not possess the eerie characteristics of, for

example, the nightmare inducing Hobgoblin the Incubus. “Puck,

indeed, is glad to do a certain amount of mischief, but that is

almost by accident, and is from no spite to mortals, for he is

equally ready to play a prank on his own queen” (Briggs, The

75


Anatomy of Puck, 46). Indeed, Robin in the end “restore[s]

amends” (Epilogue, 16). However, Briggs underestimates Robin’s

mean streak, which is among else elucidated by the “delight

[he] takes in the agitation of the mortals” (Ronald F. Miller,

259).

So, one could say that Robin at least has two sides. As

Stephen Greenblatt puts it; he is “both mischief maker and

matchmaker” (808). He has a benevolent, though naughty, side

that plays pranks on people but also rewards good housewives

and a darker, grimmer side that laughs at the misfortune of

mortals that he himself is the cause of. However, as Michael

Taylor puts it, “[t]here seem to be fine lines drawn between

fragile charm, impish mischief, and trivial malice” (261).

Haitink, Hall and Bury captured the delicate line between

innocence and mischief by staging Robin, in accordance to the

1960 world premiere, as a prepubescent boy. In the film

production of director Christine Edzard not only the Puck, but

all parts were performed by children. Critics have defiled this

production but her motivation to stage children could also be

applied to the operatic Puck:

76


It seemed to her that children could say lines like: “I’ll

run from thee, and hide me in the Brakes, And leave thee

to the mercy of wild Beasts.” (Demitrius, II.1) and make

them ring completely true. Who hasn't heard such a 10-

year-old in a rage threatening to “kill you if you tell”).

Children will have both the awkwardness and the passion

like no adult actor ever could. Children will come to

Shakespeare new, raw, fresh -and innocent. (Oliver

Stockman)

Haitink, Hall and Bury’a Robin does play pranks on people but

because he is a child it is rather out of playful

thoughtlessness than real spite. Benjamin Britten himself said:

the Puck is “absolutely amoral and yet innocent” (Michael

Dervan, 34). Although the Puck possesses a bad side, he is not

ethically bad and can therefore still be innocent.

The middle-aged actor Stanley Tucci plays Hoffman’s Robin.

Hoffman completely sidesteps the innocence of the Puck with

this “lecherous satyr, [who] encounters one of Titania’s

nymphs, […] comes on to her like a spiv trying to pick up a

secretary on her lunch hour. A few seconds later, he’s

urinating against a tree” (Robert Alleva, 20). Just like his

77


Greek counterpart Pan, Hoffman’s Robin is portrayed with pointy

ears and little horns, and in the first fairy scene a creature

similar to Robin is playing a syrinx-like instrument, which is

associated with Pan. He also resembles the Greek god in turns

of behaviour. “[Pan] is not completely human in form but part

man and part goat-he has the horns, ears and legs of a goat […]

he is full of spirit, impulsive and amorous” (Robert J.

Lenardon, 297). Pan is particularly known for his pursuits of

the nymphs Echo and Syrinx, who fled for him. Hoffman refers to

these myths when Robin tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce the

first fairy. Another classical story that relates the Puck to

Pan is that of King Midas. After a musical contest between

Dionysus and Pan, which Dionysus won, Midas challenged the

verdict:

At this the god of Delos could not bear that such stupid

ears retain their human shape.

He made them longer, covered them with white shaggy hair,

and made them flexible at their base so that they could be

twitched. As for the rest of him, he remained human;

In this respect alone he was changed, condemned to

be endowed with the ears of a

78


lumbering ass. (Lenardon, 244)

The translation of the operatic Bottom occurs off stage.

Although the Puck follows him it never becomes completely clear

that he is the cause of Bottom’s translation. When Bottom

reappears on stage his entire head has changed into that of a

donkey. In Hoffman’s film is Robin the direct cause of the

translation and the transform happens on screen. It also

follows the myth more closely because only Bottom’s ears and a

small part of his face have changed. He is still recognizable

as Nick the Weaver.

Haitink, Hall and Bury connect with their boyish charmer

to many nineteenth-century productions in which the “Puck was a

female part […] often played by a child” (Griffiths, 115). The

fact that Britten, and as a consequence Haitink, Hall and Bury,

chose for a boy to play the part instead of the more

traditional girl might be motivated more by Britten’s personal

preferences than theatrical considerations. In Humprey

Carpenter’s book Benjamin Britten: A Biography he says that Britten:

was more attracted to pre-pubescent and pubescent than to

younger men. He noted that Sophie Wyss’s elder son, than

aged twelve, was “a special pet of mine,” while the boy’s

79


infant brother was not yet “really at an interesting age.”

(102)

However, Carpenter’s book heavily relies on speculation that

tries to connect the life of the composer to his music, which

might give the reader a distorted view of the importance of

Britten’s homosexuality. But, as Dervan puts it: “Into [the]

twilight scene arrives the chorus of fairies [and later Puck],

boys voices with a potency in the opera […] counterparted in

real life by the potency of boys for a composer of Britten’s

particular emotional and sexual disposition” (Dervan). Haitink,

Hall and Bury’s child Robin emphasises the Puck’s, sometimes

malicious, but mostly childish pranks and innocent playfulness.

Hoffman’s Robin connects to the more malicious Robin. “The

trend toward using male [and adult] Pucks may have contributed

to the tendency for twentieth-century Pucks to be more

malicious than nineteenth-century ones” (Griffiths, 115).

Robin occupies a unique position in the play. He is

neither an evil spirit nor a fairy. “Often there is a

compromise between regarding him [somewhere between] a fairy

and […] a devil” (Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 72).

Robin’s exceptional position is strengthened by his importance

80


to the audience. He provides the audience with information they

need to understand the play. For example, he first tells the

spectators about the fight between Oberon and Titania.

Take heed the Queen come not within his sight,

For Oberon is passing fell and wroth

Because that she, as her attendant, hath

A lovely boy stole’n from an Indian King.

She never had so sweet a changeling;

And jealous Oberon would have the child. (2.1.19-24)

So, Robin sometimes functions as a kind of storyteller and

addresses the audience directly. This isolates him and gives

him a unique position vis-à-vis the other characters. He is, as

becomes clear from the epilogue, aware of the fact that he is

part of a play:

If we shadows have offended,

think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme

No more yielding but a dream […]

If we have unearned luck

81


Now to ‘scape the serpents tongue […]

Give me your hands, if we be friends. (Epilogue, 1-12)

The Puck in Bernard Haitink, Peter Hall and John Bury’s

production of Benjamin Britten’s opera must forfeit many of his

lines to the choir of boy fairies which reduces his

storytelling function. However, Benjamin Britten isolates the

Puck by letting him speak his lines instead of singing them:

Britten shrewdly isolated Puck’s agility and fleet-rhymed

poetry by keeping his role declamatory rather than sung

and identifying his escapades with a jazzy side-drum and

boisterous solo trumpet. (Gary Schmidgall, 288)

Speaking is a more efficient form of communication than singing

and thus more suitable for a storyteller. The jazz-like music,

which stands out in the opera, gives him a special position

among the other characters that sing to the accompaniment of

classical music5. Haitink, Hall and Bury also captured Robin’s

position in his portrayal. His costume is similar to that of

5 Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream cannot be simply called “classical”

because it has been influenced by several music styles. The word

“classical” is thus used relatively and serves in his context as an

illustration between the difference of the music that accompanies the Puck

and the music that accompanies the other characters.

82


the fairies, but he has no wings, and his hair is red. “The

only true bright color in the production is [the] Puck’s

magenta hair” (Parsons, “Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream”).

The fairies’ reaction to Robin emphasise that they are of a

different origin. When Robin Goodfellow burst into the opera’s

opening scene they flee away from him defending themselves with

their branches. They are obviously afraid of Robin and their

careful, servile behaviour denote that Robin occupies a higher

position in the fairy hierarchy than they do.

Hoffman’s Robin does not stand out. Among the many

colourful inhabitants of Hoffman’s fairyland Robin is just one

of the satyr-like creatures. His deviating position is shown in

the first fairy scene. The first speaking fairy recognizes

Robin, “you are that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin

Goodfellow” (2.1.32-3). Robin in response tries to silence her

but soon other creatures assemble around their table,

interested in Robin and what he has to say. The other

characters elucidate his position. Director John Caird

portrayed Robin in his production of 1989 in a similar fashion:

Caird’s Fairy screamed and crossed to clutch at Puck’s

legs like a groupie at “wanderer of the night”; he knelt

83


as if to kiss her on “smile” before making a horse noise,

put his hands down neck and onto her chest at ‘bob,’ took

her onto his knee an dropped her to illustrate the story

of the wisest aunt, and signed her autograph book at

“cough.” (Griffiths, 118)

In both productions the fascination for Robin denotes that he

is a famous figure in fairyland.

So, numerous variations of fairy species exist. Some of

them are kind, others are wicked. The fairies of A Midsummer

Night’s Dream prove their benevolent character by blessing the

wedding beds of the lovers. The Puck, Robin Goodfellow, though,

displays a mean streak alien to the fairies. Robin is, contrary

to popular belief, not a fairy but a hobgoblin which might

explain his behaviour. However, Robin could also be seen as a

basically innocent character who plays pranks on people but,

childlike, cannot oversee the consequences of his behaviour.

Haitink, Hall and Bury focused on the innocent side of the Puck

and turned him into a boyish charmer. Therefore his pranks are

rather seen as childish naughtiness than malice with intent.

This connects to the nineteenth-century tradition which often

staged children as the Puck. Hoffman’s Puck is played by a

84


middle-aged actor. This Robin is more malicious and displays

some similarities with the Greek god Pan. Robin occupies an

exceptional position in the play. He is sometimes the

storyteller and is aware of the fact that a Midsummer Night’s

Dream, is a play, and thus he and the other characters merely

fiction. Britten captured Robin’s unique position in the music

that accompanies him and let him speak his lines instead of

singing them. Haitink, Hall and Bury elaborated on this and

emphasise the Puck’s position by his costume. Hoffman’s film

Robin blends in with the other magical creatures. However, the

reaction of those creatures to Robin does denote that the Puck

is, somehow, special, though in a very different way than the

operatic Robin. According to Dervan “Britten’s experience of

the agility and mimicry of Child acrobats in Stockholm ”

inspired him to create Robin as an acrobatic Puck (34). Indeed,

the young Damien Nash, who played Robin in Haitink, Hall and

Bury’s production, plays the part with boundless energy. Their

Robin rather runs than walks and tumbles back and forth across

the stage and sometimes enters from a tree branch that is

lowered onto the stage. Hoffman’s Robin, on the other hand, has

been described as “an unspritely Puck,” and “amusingly jaded

85


after centuries of playing tricks on hapless mortals” (David

Sterrit, 15 and Jack Kroll, 75).

Conclusion

In this comparative study I have examined the

representation of the magical creatures in two adaptations of

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Michael Hoffman’s film

86


adaptation of the play of 1999 and the video registration of

Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed at

the Glyndebourne Festival in 1981, conducted by Bernard

Haitink, produced by Peter Hall and designed by John Bury. I

have related the representation of the magical creatures in

these two productions to external influences such as

folkloristic stories, contemporary beliefs and previous

productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With this I have tried to

prove that adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not

unrelated events, but part of a larger cultural framework that

creatively affects the appearance of a performance.

The spectator of a play,

opera or film sees the representation in a different way than

the designer originally intended. This does not mean that the

viewer is erroneous. He/she just looks at the play without, or

within another cultural framework than that of the director. I

have attempted to achieve in my paper a certain objectivity

regarding cultural frames. Without judging, or letting myself

be influenced by my own temporal space, although this is never

entirely possible, I looked at the adaptations and tried to

explain the appearance of the magical creatures via external

87


influences, in which all influences are equal to each other.

This means that I have sometimes made connections the directors

themselves were probably not even conscious of. In trying to

explain the productions I looked at the work itself, not the

creator.

Cultural frameworks change through history. So,

adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, which function within

numerous cultural frameworks, also change and are historically

specific. For example, Hoffman’s focus on the individual

humanlike side of the fairies connects to the late twentieth-

century interest in the character development of occult

creatures. Hoffman’s male, adult Robin relates to the most

commonly used twentieth-century version of the Puck, which was

more malicious that its nineteenth-century counterpart who was

often played by a young girl who symbolised childlike

innocence. By writing this paper my main

goal was to illustrate how the magical creatures of A Midsummer

Night’s Dream are a product of external factors. However, in the

course of this paper I found that the representation of the

fairies is not only inspired by tradition. The appearance of a

character is also plot determined. In other words, the position

88


of a character within the play partly decides their

representation. The Puck’s deviating position is often shown in

his costume, as is the bond between Titania and Oberon.

Although tradition may have influenced the appearance, the text

itself also indicates the special position of these characters.

The

variety of fairies both within A Midsummer Night’s Dream as in the

adaptations of the play was at first merely a side issue to

illustrate my main point. However, while writing this paper I

discovered, time and again, that the magical creatures have an

ambivalent nature. They are not all the same, and all tend to

be inconsistent to a degree. There are always at least two

sides to a character. For example, the fairies could either be

seen as allegorical beings of natural processes,

anthropomorphisms of human behaviour or as real beings. Titania

and Oberon are cruel to each other, but show an active kindness

towards Hippolyta and Theseus. The Puck is both benevolent as

malevolent and the Indian Boy belongs to the fairy world, but

also to the human world. So, contrary to what many critics

claim, the magical creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not

univocal characters. The unequivocal view upon the fairies that

89


many critics think they should support is generated by the

desire to answer the question; what are the fairies in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream? In this paper I have shown that there is

no correct or wrong answer to this question. The text itself

inspires numerous different fairies and the adaptations with

each their own fairy breed, of which I have described a few in

my paper, prove that many interpretations, and thus

representations, are possible. Hoffman, Haitink and Bury mainly

concentrated on the alien aspect of the fairies. The

supernatural creatures in their production of Benjamin

Britten’s opera are surrounded by status and aloofness. The

fairies are shy, aggressive creatures with matching unearthly

voices and Titania and Oberon move slowly against a cold,

stylised forest and show each other no affection. Hoffman, on

the other hand, presented the supernatural beings as creatures

with human feelings and human like behaviour. Hoffman’s fairies

may be more accessible to the broad audience than the aloof

operatic fairies, but one might wonder if the fairies are

really merely humans who happen to look funny.

90


Bibliography

Works are arranged in alphabetical order by the surname of theauthor.

Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” Trans. H.P Paull. Giliad.org. Ed. Zvi

Har’El. 21 November 2002. May 2005. <http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_merma.html>.

Alleva, Robert. “Reworking Shakespeare.” Commenweal 126.12 (June 1999): p. 20-21.

Omega Project. 2002. University Library of Utrecht. April 2005<http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

91

http://omega.library.uu.nl/cgi-bin/journal/ebscoft?issn=00103330&file=ebsback/1999/afo_19990401-19990631.col&offset=36872832&db=omega11&lang=nl&frame=1

http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_merma.html


Ankerloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark. Witchcraft and Magic In Europe: The Twentieth Century.

Ed. Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark. London: The Athlone Press, 1999.

Briggs, K. M. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors. London: Batsford, 1959.

---, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1967.

---, The Vanishing People: A Study of Traditional Fairy Beliefs. London: Batsford,1978.

Calhoun, J. “A Midsummer Set in Fellini’s Backyard.” Entertainment Design 33.5

(May 1999): p. 38-39. Omega Project. 2002. University Libraryof Utrecht. April 2005. <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

Conrad, Jon Alan. “Recordings.” Opera News 58.11 (February 1994): p. 32. Omega

Project. 2002. University Library of Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

Carpenter, Humprey. Benjamin Britten, A Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Dervan, Michael. “Midsummer Magic.” Opera News 61.6 (December 1996): p. 35-37.

Omega Project. 2002.University Library Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

Duffy, Mary. “Smiles of a Summer Night.” Time June 1994. 68-71.

Dunn, Allen. “The Indian Boy’s Dream Wherein Every Mother’s sonRehearses His Part:

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare’s Studies 20.1 (1988): p. 15-28. Omega Project. 2002. University Libraryof Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

92

http://omega.library.uu.nl/





Greenblatt, Stephen. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Walter

Cohen and Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W.W Norton &Company, 1997.

Greenwood, Alice D. “English Prose in the Fifteenth Century, II: Huon of Bordeaux.” The

Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller et al. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; Cambridge, England: University Press, 1907–21. Bartelby.com. January 2000. March 2005 <http://www.bartleby.com/212/1407.html#txt4>.

Griffiths, Trevor R. Shakespeare in Production: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. The Internet Classics Archive. Ed.Daniel C. Stevenson. 1994-2000. March 2005 <http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.6.vi.html>

Kroll, Jack. “Midsummer Madness.” Newsweek 133.21 (May 1999): p. 74-76. Omega Project. 2002.University Library Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

Laroque, FranÇois. Shakespeare’s Festive World. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press,

1993.

Lenardon, Robert J, and Mark P. O Morford. Classical Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003.

Miller, Ronald F. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Fairies,Bottom and the

Mystery of Things.” Shakespeare Quarterly 26.3. 1975: 254-268.

Parsons. “Guide to Videos: Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”American Record

Guide 58.6 (November 1995): p. 303. Omega Project. 2002.University Library

93


http://www.bartleby.com/212/1407.html#txt4


of Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

---. “Guide to Records: Britten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”American

RecordGuide 57.1 (January 1994): p. 85.Omega Project. 2002. University Library Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

Peters, Edward. “The Medieval Church and State on Superstition,Magic

and Witchcraft: from Augustine to the Sixteenth Century.” Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages. Ed. Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark. London: The Athlone Press, 2002.

Rivers, Isabel. Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students Guide. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 1994.

Schmidgall, Gary. Shakespeare & Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Norton Shakespeare.Ed. Walter

Cohen and Stephen Greeblatt et al. New York: W. W Norton &Company, 1997.

Slights, William. E. “Changeling in a Dream.” Studies in English Literature 28.2. 1988. 259-

272.

Sterrit, David. “A ‘Midsummer Night’ that’s Lost Some Magic.” Christian Science Monitor”

91.113 (May 1999): p: 15. Omega Project. University Library of Utrecht. April 2005 <http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

Stockman, Oliver. “The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Sandsfilms. Ed.Oliver

Stockman. 27 Oct. 20042. March 2005 <http://www.sandsfilms.co.uk/midsummer/midsummer.htm>

Taylor, Michael. “The Darker Purpose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Studies in English

94

http://www.sandsfilms.co.uk/midsummer/midsummer.htm





Literature: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama 9.2 (1969): p. 259-273. Omega Project. 2002. University Library of Utrecht. Utrecht. April 2005 <http://www.jstor.org>.

Walter, J.H. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Players Shakespeare. London: Heinemann

Educational Books. 1983.

Welsh, J. “Ill Met by Moonlight.” Literature Film Quarterly 27.2 (April 1999): p. 159-161.

Omega Project.2002. University Library of Utrecht. April 2005<http://omega.library.uu.nl>.

95


http://www.jstor.org/


96

Ba Dissertation

Documents

Transcript of Ba Dissertation