“A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the Early Stage 

by Mario DiGangi

To imagine how A Midsummer Night’s Dream might have looked on the Elizabethan stage, it is necessary to banish the vision of gauzily attired ballerina fairies dancing through a moonlit forest. Elizabethan playing companies did not have movable scenery, lighting effects, flight machines, authentic period costumes, or a large corps of dancers to represent a fairy-haunted wood or an Athenian court. Instead, they relied on symbolic costumes and properties, richly descriptive language, and, most of all, playgoers’ willingness to use their imaginations. 

The original performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream probably took place at The Theatre, one of the large open-air venues that Shakespeare’s company used prior to the building of the Globe in 1596. Like the Globe, the Theatre was a three-story “round” (or multi-sided polygonal) structure surrounding a large rectangular stage approximately twenty-five feet deep by forty-five feet wide. At the back of the stage was the tiring (“attiring”) house, a three-tiered structure that contained rooms for storing properties and changing into costumes. The ornately painted façade of the tiring-house could serve as the backdrop for a royal court, as in the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At ground level, the tiring-house offered three modes of access to the stage: two side doors and a larger, central space that could be concealed with a curtain. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the artisans meet in the forest to rehearse, Quince observes that they can use “[t]his green plot” as a stage and “this hawthorn brake” as a tiring-house (3.1.3-4). Shakespeare cleverly has his audience imagine the actual tiring-house as a hawthorn thicket in the forest that Quince converts into an impromptu tiring-house. 

The experience of attending a play at the Theatre or the Globe was markedly different than the typical visit to the theater today. In modern theaters, the illusion that the actors occupy a separate world from the audience is created through a proscenium arch, stage curtains, and the dimming of house lighting at the start of the play. Since Elizabethan open-air theaters had none of these features, playgoers and actors were fully aware of each other’s presence. The large capacity of the playhouses, which could accommodate approximately 2,500 people seated in the galleries encircling the stage or standing in the yard at its front and sides, meant that playgoers were a visible, and probably frequently noisy, presence. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the artisans’ performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” provides an exaggerated instance of playgoers’ interactions with each other and with the actors. Unlike Duke Theseus’s court, however, public theater audiences were socially heterogeneous, and some playgoers might well have found the aristocrats’ ridicule of the artisans distressing or offensive. 

In a theater without scenery, costume was essential for establishing both geographical place and social place, or rank. Shakespeare’s company might have attempted to give Theseus a vaguely classical look or Hippolyta a recognizably Amazon costume, including buskins, or high boots (2.1.71). But as royalty, the Duke and his bride would have certainly worn the rich, ornately decorated clothing of the Elizabethan nobility. The Athenian lovers would have been dressed as fashionable Elizabethan gentlewomen and gentlemen; the artisans whom Robin mocks as “hempen homespuns” would have worn the coarse and simple garb of contemporary tradesmen (3.1.67). Like Snug’s lion costume, Bottom’s ass head probably featured a large mouth through which his face would be visible and his voice could project. Contemporary descriptions of Robin Goodfellow indicate that he might have been depicted as a satyr or quasi-demonic figure, with a rough calfskin suit and red face paint. The Fairy’s reference to Robin as a “lob” or Country bumpkin suggests that a larger actor, probably an adult, played the role (2.1.16). Because the fairies are described as small enough to hide in “acorn cups,” they might have been played by boys (2.1.31). But given the stretch of imagination required to imagine even a small boy as a miniscule fairy, the four adult actors who played the roles of the minor artisans might have also doubled as fairies. 

Since the Elizabethan theater was primarily an aural as opposed to a visual performance space, playgoers were probably sharply attuned to contrasts of verbal style. At the beginning of the play, for instance, Egeus’s comically agitated charges against Hermia and Lysander provide a vivid counterpoint to Theseus’s measured pronouncements about nuptial pomp. Distinct styles of speech might also provide insight into characters’ social rank, disposition, or present mental state. Hermia and Lysander convey their passion by speaking in stichomythia, or rapidly alternating lines (L1.135-140). Hermia’s shift to rhyming couplets imparts an appropriate formality to her vow of love (1.1.171-178), yet when Helena enters, all three characters continue to speak in couplets. The highly artificial style of their conversation emphasizes the conventionality of their distress as stereotypically thwarted lovers. 

The lyrical speech of the lovers contrasts sharply with the prose spoken by the commoners in the following scene. When Bottom does speak verse, it is only to imitate the hyperbolic rant of the stage tyrant. Nonetheless, Bottom’s language is not the plain prose of everyday speech, for it is enhanced with hilarious malapropisms and bawdy puns. The actors who played the artisans doubtless indulged in some improvised clowning. The famous clown Will Kemp played Bottom, and we can well imagine him initiating a roaring match With Snug in order to prove his ability to play the lion’s part. Flute’s presumably exaggerated miming of feminine speech and gestures for Thisbe would have contrasted with the more naturalistic impersonation of femininity by the trained boy actors who took the play’s female roles. Since the use of boy actors for female roles was conventional, most playgoers probably did not remain consciously aware that Helena or Hermia was really male. However, an overtly erotic episode, such as Titania’s dotage on Bottom, might have sparked a playgoer’s awareness of observing a cross-dressed boy courting an adult man. 

The distinctive language and appearance of the fairies usher the audience into the evocative world of a nighttime forest. In Act One, the lovers and artisans announce their plans to meet “tomorrow night” in the woods “by moonlight” (1.1.164, 1.2.88-89). Illuminated by the afternoon sun, an Elizabethan theater could represent neither darkness nor moonlight, and it is unlikely that actors or stagehands interrupted the rapid flow of the action by carrying prop trees onto the stage. (That the artisans try to compensate for the theater’s limited technical resources by casting actors as Moonshine and Wall proves their naiveté.) Instead, Shakespeare indicates the shift of locale from city to forest by having a spirit recount, in songlike poetry, his wanderings through hills and bushes. Robin’s reference to hostile encounters between Titania and Oberon “in grove or green, I By fountain clear or spangled starlight sheen” not only provides plot information, but also gorgeously evokes the natural setting (2.1.28-29). The initial appearance of Oberon and Titania emphasizes the grandeur of this imaginary setting, as they make simultaneous, symmetrical entrances from the doors on either side of the tiring-house facade. Courtiers in tow, the King and Queen of fairies sweep dramatically across the great empty platform to confront each other at center stage. 

Featuring complex interactions of various character groupings, the forest scenes require easily legible orchestrations of bodies and sounds. In Act Four, scene one, for instance, the four lovers remain asleep on stage, possibly against the tiring-house wait, while Titania caresses Bottom at the front of the stage. Observing Titania from behind, Oberon finally releases her from the love spell and asks her to dance. The music for the play’s many dances and songs was probably performed in the upper gallery of the tiring-house. Music was also used to create atmospheric contrasts. For instance, the rustic “tongs and bones” Titania provides for Bottom’s entertainment would have sounded much harsher than the fairy music (possibly soft recorders) that she calls for here to charm the mortals to sleep. After their dance, the fairies exit, at which point the sounding of hunting horns signals the arrival of day and of Theseus’s party, who discover and rouse the four sleeping lovers. Finally, Bottom is left alone on stage to awaken and recount his dream. 

Shakespeare’s comedies typically end with a communal celebration such as a dance or banquet. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not only do the fairies sing and dance to bless Theseus’s house, but Bottom and (probably) Flute conclude the performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” with a bergomask, a vigorous country dance that would have given Will Kemp an opportunity to display his noted athletic skills. Like many performances on the public stage, A Midsummer Night’s Dream probably concluded with yet another entertainment called a jig, a bawdy song-and-dance routine unconnected to the subject matter of the play. Imagine what it might have been like to see the actor who had just played the authoritative and restrained Duke Theseus return to the stage to dance an irreverent jig.”