Introduction – Part 1

Hello. I'm John McCrae.

And the subject is A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It's the most fun of Shakespeare's comedies.

It's the most magical of all Shakespeare's plays.

It's the one about fairies and Bottom

and Oberon and Titania.

The gods, the the court, the the working class.

It's about running away to the forest with your lover.

It's about love and marriage.

It all leads to a marriage by the end.

It's about sex.

It's about death.

It's about power and toxic masculinity and, oh,

all sorts of things.

But above all, it's about dance, harmony, music.

It's the most joyous celebration

of life and love.

And

in that sense, it is unique among Shakespeare's plays.

It's the first of his brilliant comedies.

It was first performed around fifteen ninety five,

nineteen six, as far as we can judge.

It's about the twelfth or so of his plays.

You know how many plays he wrote, don't you?

Come on. Have a guess around.

That's right.

Thirty seven is the official number of plays

that Shakespeare wrote.

He had a hand in one or two others as well.

And this one has little references to one or two of the

other things he'd done including a famous one you

probably heard of called Romeo and Juliet.

In many ways, this is a comic

sideways take on aspects of Romeo and Juliet.

But the thing is, it's also meta theatrical.

As in it has a play within the play which is the bit

that they often do in school plays.

The tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe as played by Bottom and

his crew, where the tragedy becomes comedy and the comedy

nearly becomes tragedy.

And that is the balancing act that this wonderful

dancing play

manages to keep going all the way through.

A balancing act between tragedy and comedy.

Because Shakespeare was still a young dramatist,

he was probably only in his early thirties,

30s and that's young, I'm here to tell you.

He had written things like Romeo and Juliet,

the Henry the sixth plays and one or two others.

He hadn't yet written the biggies like Julius

Caesar and Hamlet and King Lear and all of these which are seen

as his more mature plays.

There's nothing immature about this one, however.

In fact, it's got layers and layers and levels and levels,

which every time I explore it,

I find more to enjoy in it.

And I hope that I'll be able to indicate to you some of these

levels at which you can process the

play.

But first of all, we have to look at what we mean by plays.

Up till now,

Shakespeare had written history, Henry the sixth,

Roman tragedy, Titus Andronicus,

Roman comedy, the comedy of errors based on

ancient Roman playwright Plautus,

and doubling the plot and writing a complete farce of

mistaken identity.

Brilliant comedy.

He'd written a romantic, a sort of rom com,

The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

which is one of his least staged works,

but it's very pretty.

He'd written The Taming of the Shrew,

which is a kind of problematic

role of women, role of patriarchal society one.

Still a worrisome play, but great fun.

And he'd written one of the very big hits

in Richard the third, and his biggest hit so far just

before this one, Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet, you remember,

is the one where the star crossed lovers die at the end.

Simple.

Lots of misunderstandings

and a forbidden love.

That is echoed throughout Midsummer Night's Dream, the

idea of forbidden love, the idea that the patriarchy,

the father figure, Aegis, in in Seven Night's Dream,

dictates to the woman who she can love and who she can't.

I. E.

It's not love,

it's following orders, it's arranged marriages.

Shakespeare time and again

takes issue with the whole question of arranged marriages,

which leads some people to wonder about his own marriage

to Agnes known as Anne Hathaway,

the mother of his child, Hamnet.

Shakespeare was about love,

and love transcends death

in a play like Romeo and Juliet.

Love conquers all.

He was writing his sonnets, which are all about all

the multiply

confusing aspects that there are in love.

He was ahead of his time in handling love.

Straight love, gay love, trans love.

The whole idea of trans doesn't come into this play,

it comes into things like As You Like It, Twelfth Night.

Deriving from John Lilly in Galatea,

plays like that in the fifteen eighties.

The whole questioning of what love was

beyond

the religiously established love between one man and one

woman, that

is a major concern of Shakespeare throughout all his works.

And if you want a modern, inverted commas,

angle into Shakespeare, Diversity

is there everywhere.

But it's all down to freedom of choice.

The individual can choose and love should be what dominates.

Now, of course, love can go wrong as in Romeo and Juliet.

Love can go dreadful as in Anthony and Cleopatra about ten

or twelve years later than this.

Love can have to be rejected as in Hamlet.

Love can be family love as in King Lear.

This one here is pure or possibly not so pure

and simple love.

Sex is involved.

Of course it is.

But it's about, the line is in this play, the course of true

love never runs smooth.

There are always ups and downs. And you know why that happens?

Because we're human and we are not great at controlling our emotions.

We're not great at balancing the

intelligence and the emotion.

And here we have to go into why all of this

is dead fashionable and important in fifteen ninety five.

That's going to be an exciting little

Exploration.