“Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream through Middle English Romance,” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp. 140-160. (original) (raw)

2009, “Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream through Middle English Romance,” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp. 140-160.

Full Text: [(essay date 2009) In the following essay, Driver provides an overview of the various medieval sources that influenced A Midsummer Night's Dream and examines how they are rendered in past and contemporary performances.] Who may been a fool but if he love?"The Knight's Tale," 1.1799 This essay provides a brief overview of the several medieval sources that inform William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream (MND) and looks at their rendering (or not) in past and contemporary performance. Modern memory retains some vestigial sense of the underlying sources of Shakespeare's play, though the main intention of modern directors is to make Shakespeare relevant to present-day audiences. It is fascinating, however, to observe how many of the medieval underpinnings remain, even in modern production. 1 The influence of medieval romance, in particular, on MND seems clearly evident. While the many Chaucerian references in MND are well known, much discussed, and will be briefly summarized, this essay focuses on the influence of Middle English romance on Shakespeare's play, especially of the romance Huon of Burdeux 2 in shaping the supernatural characters and of Geoffrey Chaucer's comic masterpiece "Sir Thopas" on Shakespeare's representation of Bottom and on the Pyramus and Thisbe play. Though the medieval sources are themselves not precisely fixed, their characters, plots, and to some extent their language are appropriated and transformed in Shakespeare's drama, influencing (perhaps often unconsciously) modern performance, which is also malleable, shifting shape each time the play is staged or filmed. "Like textual variants, historical subtexts cannot easily be performed," as Diana E. Henderson has pointed out, but understanding more about the medieval texts influencing Shakespeare's plays "may lead us back not solely to the remembrance of things past but also to historically informed analogies within the present, a careful use of history that adds more drama." 3 This, then, is a reading of the play primarily through the lens of medieval romance, with which Shakespeare and several of his famous contemporaries seem to have been quite familiar, a reading that further examines several aspects of "late modern collaborations with an early modern Englishman's vision of his country's late medieval past." 4