Midsummer Pageants

In an essay on MSND entitled “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory,” Annabel Patterson lays a historicist treatment of the play that relies in equal parts on Barber’s theory of festive comedy, Victor Turner’s studies of ritual, and Bakhtin’s theory of comedy and subversion. Here are some notes on her main themes: She opens with the famous quotation from Pepys: “To the King’s Theatre, where we saw ‘Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,’ which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, and which was all my pleasure.”

Patterson uses this reference to “good dancing” to indicate the checkered performance history of MSND, a superb example of the movement from theater to pageantry in the history of Shakespearean performance: “one can tell from his mention of ‘good dancing’ [that the play] had succumbed to operatic or balletic impulses. These impulses dominated all productions from 1692, when it was rewritten as a spectacular opera with music by Henry Purcell, through 1914, when Harley Granville-Barker produced the uncut text ‘in a world of poetic and dramatic rather than scenic illusion.’ For over two centuries, then, the play that Shakespeare wrote was rendered invisible by conspicuous display; and its most striking metadramatic feature, the concluding amateur theatricals of Bottom the weaver and his colleagues, lost both its structural and social force. In 1692 ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ was moved to the middle of the performance, and in 1816 the Covent Garden performance had as its grand finale a pageant of ‘Triumphs of Theseus.’ The result was a performance whose last word, in the year after waterloo, was the extravagant celebration of monarchical and military power.” One effect of this was to neutralize the impact of Bottom, the mechanicals, and the play-within-a-play.