EN301 2007- 2008 Rutter’s Shakespeare Without Chairs
A Midsummer Night’s Dream - or- Shakespeare’s Sex-War Opera
Everybody in this play is at war. What’s their beef? How is war resolved (or not)?
You have approx. 25 minutes to work with the seminar on your section. Please,
everyone, read the whole play a couple of times and go over the marked text several
times so that you can read fluently. I want you to be thinking about story, dynamic,
character/role (read: Styan’s ‘Changeable Taffeta’), poetry and Big Ideas (not least
among them: sleeping and waking; dreaming and reasoning). Simple questions:
what’s going on here? How do we put the scene on its feet? All of you, too, will
have particular information (from your ‘knowledges’) to bring to the seminar. Make
sure you ALL have read through the material I gave you in week 1 and use it to
inform yourself so that you can offer expert ‘witness’ for your colleagues.
Courtiers:
Look at the first 127 lines of the play (to ‘Exeunt all by Lysander and Hermia’)
Lovers:
Look at 3.2.191 (Hermia: ‘You speak not as you think; it cannot be’) to line 345
(Oberon: ‘This is your negligence’).
Mechanicals:
Look at 3.1.1 (Bottom: ‘Are we all met?’) to line 114 (Quince: ‘Bless thee, Bottom!
Bless thee! Thou art translated’).
Fairies:
Look at 2.1.60 (Oberson: ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania’) to 189 (Demetrius: ‘I
love thee not, therefore pursue me not’).
1. Music (Knight/Wanless): what ‘sound’ does this play make? The acoustic
world of this play? Music as poetry? How does music function here? What
work does music perform?
2. Clothing (Edewor-Thorley/Sands): what visual systems are operating here?
How does costume identify? Confuse? ‘Perform’?
3. Medicine (Chapman/Pollard-Davey): what kind of disease is love? Physically,
where does it infect a person? Symptoms? Cure? Connection to
madness/frenzy/lunacy?
4. Cosmography (Marks/Turner): what is the significance of the moon in this
play? The classical/folklore aspects of the emblem (i.e., Triple Hecate, Lucina,
Cynthia/Diana; Virgin Queen)? What’s her influence? Where is there
moonlight in this play? How does the Moon operate as an organising image?
5. Religion (Dean/Truslow): What does ‘faith’ mean in this play? Faithlessness?
Heresy? The ‘vow’?
6. Poetry (Bogdanova/Abderabbini): how does Shakespeare ‘score’ this play for
poetic voices? Give examples of the poetic ‘sounds’ the play makes.
7. Maps/worlds (Burke/Woods): two settings in this play. What do they signify?
How to they operate as locations, as systems of ideas? What does ‘Athens’
mean to Shakespeare and his contemporaries?
8. Books/Printing (Hodgson/Turney): where do we see writing in the play? The
‘book’? what do people make of writing?
9. Government/authority/monarchy ((Brown/xxxx): Who’s in charge? What is
the power of the Prince here? Of the father? Of the subject? Of the ‘director’?
What strategies of subversion operate?
10. Plays and Players (Reid/King): what is the purpose of playing? What do we
learn about the material practices of the Elizabethan theatre from this play?
How does a play change from casting to rehearsing to performing?
11. Ovid (Altneu/Walpole): how is Shakespeare using Ovid in this play? What
does ‘metamorphosis’ mean? ‘translation’?
12. Rhetoric (Denison/Pournori): how does debate/argument structure the play?
What is ‘the argument’? What are the uses of persuasion?