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Midsummer Night
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Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
In this course, Professor Diane Purkiss (Oxford) explores Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a particular focus on some of the more magical aspects of the play. The course begins with an exploration of the idea of the "Midsummer Night" in the Elizabethan imagination, before thinking about contemporary beliefs about dreams (and nightmares). After this, we look in turn at three major fairies in the play - Titania, Oberon and Puck - exploring how they might have been understood by teh original Elizabethan audience. The course ends with a consideration of Pyramus and Thisbe, characters in the play-within-a-play, and asks: "Why is it that audiences find this tragic story so funny?"
Midsummer Night
In this module, we explore the various associations that a "Midsummer Night" would have evoked for the original Elizabethan audience. We begin by exploring the idea that Summer was considered a particularly dangerous time for the Elizabethan audience, before going on to think about the relationship between "Midsummer" and the Saint's Day of John the Baptist, which took place at this time of year.
Hi, My name is Professor Diane Purkiss,
00:00:03and I'm speaking to you from Oxford University.
00:00:05I want to talk about Midsummer Night's dream
00:00:09and put in place some thoughts about what kind of play it is.
00:00:11I want to start by talking about the midsummer aspect
00:00:15of the title because we often just brush that over.
00:00:20We all like summer better than winter, right, because it's warm and it's holidays.
00:00:23Um, actually, in Shakespeare's time, they did like summer,
00:00:27but they were also nervous about it for a really interesting reason.
00:00:31So by calling his play Midsummer Night's Dream,
00:00:36Shakespeare is saying something about the idea that it's a play about pleasure,
00:00:39summertime pleasure, but also about risk.
00:00:44Because midsummer was seen as the beginning of the unhealthy time of year,
00:00:48it was the time when the dog star came into the
00:00:54sky and radiated terrible green rays of death onto the earth.
00:00:57And the effect of those rays on people was that they got sick.
00:01:05They got summer fevers, they got illnesses.
00:01:08And what this was really about was that the Elizabethans had noticed that
00:01:11people did get sick more often in so summer than in winter,
00:01:16because what they actually got was in Terek disorders from the water supply.
00:01:19The water supply was probably polluted.
00:01:23In summertime, people tended to go out more and because they won't help more,
00:01:25those diseases because they were contagious,
00:01:29spread more readily from person to person.
00:01:31So summertime was a time of sickness,
00:01:34and they associated it with the presence of the dog star in the sky.
00:01:36And there's quite a lot in the play about the power of the moon in the sky as well.
00:01:41Now, when we see a supermoon, we feel excited and pleased,
00:01:48and we think how lovely it is and Shakespeare's generation did, too.
00:01:52But they also saw the moon as an ominous planet, a little bit like the dog star.
00:01:55And they believe that the moon, when it was at its fullest and most visible,
00:02:01could actually send people completely mad.
00:02:05Um, the word lunatic actually connects with the word Luna,
00:02:09which is a word for the moon and its influence.
00:02:13So when we're talking about a midsummer night, we're talking about a time
00:02:16that's full of danger, that rains on you from the sky,
00:02:21and that kind of danger is largely to do
00:02:26with a kind of animalistic tendency towards sickness towards
00:02:29a sort of rage of the lower body towards having hot blood that would make you violent.
00:02:34Or that might make you a little bit prone to sexual indiscretions.
00:02:40And all those things would have been in the
00:02:45minds of an audience seeing the title midsummer night.
00:02:47What else would they have thought of?
00:02:52they would probably have still thought of the major
00:02:54ecclesiastical festival associated with that time of year.
00:02:57She's actually the last big festival of the church year,
00:03:00and it's the feast of John the Baptist.
00:03:04John the Baptist, as you may know, was a martyr.
00:03:07He was actually Jesus Christ's cousin, Um,
00:03:10and he was martyred because he had his head cut off by a tyrant called Herod.
00:03:13Um, at the request of a beautiful dancing girl,
00:03:19Herod rashly promised this beautiful dancing girl his
00:03:23name was Saleh Me Anything you want,
00:03:26you can have anything you want.
00:03:28And she said, I'll have the head of John the Baptist, please.
00:03:29And he said, Oh, all right, then, and presented her with the head on a platter.
00:03:32And this really connects with the play to that,
00:03:37we might be surprised to think of that,
00:03:40because quite a lot about the bottom character is to do
00:03:41with the removal of one head and its replacement with another.
00:03:46Now it might seem strange to connect having an asses
00:03:49head stuck on you with the cult of a saint.
00:03:52But let's bear in mind that by the time this play was written,
00:03:55the cult of saints have been brought into great
00:03:58disrepute and even ridiculed by Protestant Reformation thinkers.
00:04:01And though there were still relics lying around saying
00:04:06that there were parts of John the Baptist's head,
00:04:09Protestants believed that those weren't really parts of saints heads.
00:04:12But we're actually animal bones that people had pretended were parts of saints.
00:04:16So when we have a character whose head is removed and replaced by an animal head,
00:04:21what we might have, among other things, is a laughing stock figure of a saint.
00:04:25As believed in by a very naive kind of Catholic person,
00:04:32we might have a kind of mockery of the
00:04:36rituals associated with the feast of John the Baptist.
00:04:38The other big ritual of the feast of John the Baptist was night long celebrations.
00:04:42It's the shortest night of the year um,
00:04:47and to facilitate those night long celebrations and also to
00:04:50ward off the malevolent effects of the planet's gathering over had
00:04:54there were these huge bonfires,
00:04:58huge bonfires that lit the streets now what they
00:05:00were supposed to do was clean the air.
00:05:03They were supposed to remove all
00:05:05the horrible disease fragments that Elizabethans felt
00:05:07were lying around in the air and make them pure and clean.
00:05:10Now that arguably that ritual of cleansing was a key part of Elizabethan thinking.
00:05:14In a way, it's what festivals were meant to do.
00:05:20They were meant to make you pure and clean.
00:05:23They were meant to provide a sense of
00:05:25closure and finality where previously there'd been chaos.
00:05:28And right about now, you can probably start to think that comedy
00:05:32itself functions a little bit like a festival.
00:05:36It brings into disrepute things that are normally taken
00:05:41very solemnly or seriously like a Saint's Day celebration.
00:05:44It's also a cleansing ritual in which people tend to
00:05:48be plunged into disastrous punishments that are very short term
00:05:52and as well.
00:05:57It's festive in the sense that it cleans your humourous
00:05:58as an individual by making you laugh a lot,
00:06:02so as the actual Saint's Day celebration started to
00:06:05fade into the past with the advent of Protestantism.
00:06:08One of the things we're seeing here is that the theatre takes over the roles that was,
00:06:12We were previously performed by the mediaeval church.
00:06:18So whereas once upon a time you might have hung around a
00:06:21Saint's Day bonfire praying all night to ST John the Baptist,
00:06:25you instead went to the theatre on a long
00:06:29summer's afternoon and you saw a comedic play,
00:06:32which dealt humorously
00:06:36and
00:06:39in a carnival way with the cult of that saint.
00:06:40And you were cleansed in a this secular fashion,
00:06:43by your attendance at this event and by the laughter that it induced in you.
00:06:47So instead of being spiritually cleansed by a religious right,
00:06:53you were physically cleansed because laughter was supposed
00:06:58to be very good for you physically,
00:07:02particularly at dangerous times of death or disease.
00:07:04So instead of engaging with those dangerous times in a religious way,
00:07:07Shakespeare took over that religious function on behalf of the theatre
00:07:12
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Purkiss, D. (2018, August 15). Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream - Midsummer Night [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-a-midsummer-night-s-dream/oberon-and-puck
MLA style
Purkiss, D. "Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream – Midsummer Night." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-a-midsummer-night-s-dream/oberon-and-puck