The fey beauty of A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Shakespearean comedy in its courtly context

Shakespeare Studies

Volumn 32, Issue , 2004, Pages 118-172

  Conlan, J P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650609418     PISSN: 05829399     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (139)

1. E. R. Curtius, "Poetry and Rhetoric," European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953; Princeton: Princeton University Press, paperback, 1953; seventh printing 1990), 145-66
2. N. J. Halpin, Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer-Night's Dream, compared with Lilie's Endymion, Shakespeare Society Publications 16 (London, 1843)
3. The Complete Works of John Lyly, 3 vols, ed. R. Warwick Bond, M.A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902)
4. "A Key to the Cast," ibid., 10
5. G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge, 1962), 114
6. David Bevinton, "John Lyly and Queen Elizabeth: Royal Flattery in Compaspe and Sapho and Phao," Renaissance Papers (1966): 57-67
7. Peter Saccio, The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 11
8. John Weld, Meaning in Comedy: Studies in Elizabethan Romantic Comedy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), 123
9. C. C. Gannon, "Lyly's Endimion: From Myth to Allegory," English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 220-43
10. Robert Knapp, "The Monarchy of Love in Lyly's Endimion," Modern Philology 73 (1976): 353-67, esp. 363
11. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). The first paperback edition was 1971; the third printing was 1973
12. Northrop Frye, "Romance and Masque," Spiritus Mundi (1976)
13. Marie Axton, "The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama," 24-47 in English Drama: Forms and Development: Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 46
14. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, "John Lyly's Midas: An Allegory of Epiphany" Studies in Medieval Culture 12 (1978): 133-39
15. Lloyd Davis, "Praise and Presence in Elizabethan and Jacobean Court Drama," AUMLA 83 (May 1995): 3
16. Leah Scragg, "Shakespeare, Lyly and Ovid: the Influence of Gallathea on A Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare Studies 20 (1977): 125-34. Leah Scragg saw thematic patterning on metamorphosis and love key conceptual links that show the influence of Lyly's Endimion on A Midsummer Night's Dream
17. Kevin J. Donavan, "Recent Studies in John Lyly" English Literary Renaissance 22.3 (Fall 1992): 446
18. Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare the King's Playwright, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
19. Derek Alwes, "'I would faine serve'": John Lyly's Career at Court" Comparative Drama 34.4 (Winter 2000-2001): 399-421
20. M. C. Bradbrook, "Courtier and Courtesy: Castiglione, Lyly and Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona" for instance, 161-78 in Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991)
21. Alexander Leggatt, Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 19
22. Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2000), xiv
23. Charles Boyle, "Bitter Fruit: Troilus and Cressida in Queen Elizabeth's Court" Elizabethan Review 2.2 (Fall 1994): 11-18
24. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 3
25. Erica Sheen, "'The Agent for his Master': Political Service and Professional Liberty in Cymbeline," in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, 74
26. G. V. P. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), 240-41
27. James Calderwood, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), xvi
28. Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Pol itics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 161
29. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 176
30. See also Louis Montrose, "A Kingdom of Shadows," 216-40 in Dorothea Kehler, ed. A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 227
31. Theodora Jankowski, "The Subversion of Flattery: The Queen's Body in John Lyly's Sapho and Phao" Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 69-86
32. Douglas Peterson, "Lyly, Greene, and Shakespeare and the recreation of Princes," Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 67-88
33. Helen Cooper, "Location and Meaning in Masque, Morality and Royal Entertainment," 135-46 in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 135
34. Ulrich Suerbaum, "Performing Royalty. The Entertainment at Elvetham and the Cult of Elisa," 53-64 in Word and Action in Drama: Studies in Honour of Hans-Jürgen Diller on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1994), p. 62
35. N. J. Halpin, Oberon's Vision, makes a good case for the 1575 Kenilworth entertainment put on by the Earl of Leicester; however, Oberon was not in attendance there
36. See Lisa Hopkins, Elizabeth I and Her Court, (London: Vision Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 164
37. Bevington, "Introduction," pp. 150-52, derives these dates by triangulation with the 1584 title page, which lists the play as performed by a combined troupe of the Chapel Children and Saint Paul's on Strove Tuesday before the Queen, and the Revel's accounts of payment to Lily
38. Hunter refers to the Queen's "canopied and stepped-up throne - where she could be seen and where she herself could hear." He also makes reference to the occasion of James's visit to Christ Church where the king's position had to be moved from the point of best perspective so that he could be seen. See Hunter, John Lyly, 105-6. The fact has been made public elsewhere by Boas, Keith Sagar, and Alvin Kernan. Yet it does not appear in Montrose's analysis
39. Quoted by Hugh M. Richmond, "Shakespeare's Verismo and the Italian Popular Tradition," 179-203 in Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (London: Macmillan, 1991), 179
40. Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 244
41. Gary Schmigdall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981), 145
42. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors from the Edition of 1612 (London: reprinted for the Shakespeare Society, 1841), 49
43. For a full analysis of this canto, see Mary Carruthers's excellent discussion of the ethics of reading in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990: repr., 1994), 185-88
44. Hunter, John Lyly, 113
45. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 3:311
46. Elyot, The Boke named the Governour, writes, "How shall he [the child] abhorre tyranny, fraude and avarice, whan he doth se the paynes of Duke Theseus, Prometheus, Sisiphus and such othere tourmented for their dissolute and vicious lyvying" (1:65). The parallelism suggests Theseus served as the paragon of tyranny
47. See W. Y. Durand, "Palemon and Arcyte, Progne, Marcus Geminus, and the Theatre in which they were Acted, as described by John Bereblock (1566)," PMLA 20 (1905): 502-28, for a translation of several accounts of the performances in 1566
48. See Boas, University Drama, 92
49. Richard Edwards, Damon and Pythias, collected in W. Carew Hazlitt, ed., A Select Collection of Old Plays, originally published by Robert Dudley in the Year 1744, fourth edition (London: Reeves and Turner, 1874), 8-9
50. Peter Happé, "Damon and Pithias by Richard Edwards at Shakespeare's Globe," Medieval English Theatre 18 (1996): 161
51. Cicero, De Officiis, tr. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library 21 (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1913; 1997), 313
52. More enthusiastically, Allan Holaday, "Shakespeare, Richard Edwards, and the Virtues Reconciled" JEGP 66 (1967): 200-206
53. See Andrew James Hartley, "The Color of 'Honesty': Ethics and Courtly Pragmatism in Damon and Pithias," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 88-113, for an excellent discussion of the conflation of friendship with loyalty to the monarch as the central problem of the play
54. Hazlitt, A Select Collection, 7
55. Leo Salingar, "Jacobean Playwrights and 'Judicious' Spectators," Renaissance Drama n.s., 22 (1991): 209-10
56. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:259-84, on the full extent of Elizabeth's knowledge of these matters and the flattery she nonetheless reaped
57. Aristotle, Secretum Secretorum, tr. Robert Copland (London, 1528) Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), C1
58. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Dodge Wilcock end Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 63
59. See F. S. Boas, University Drama, 198, for an account of the particularities of the interpolations
60. D'Orsay Pearson's neglected study referencing the irony of Theseus's end is a notable exception, though this too is somewhat imprecise about the nature of the irony and the cause of Theseus's misfortune. See D'Orsay W. Pearson, "'Unkinde' Theseus: A Study in Renaissance Mythography," English Literary Renaissance 4 (1974): 276-98
61. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, second printing 1972), 11
62. Hardin Craig, An Interpretation of Shakespeare (New York: Dryden, 1948), 35
63. Dorothea Kehler, "A Bibliographic Survey of the Criticism," 3-76, in Kehler, ed., 3
64. David Bevington, "Singing in the Rain," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 499-502, on Kenneth Brannagh's 1990 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford. Bevington only concedes that "[d]irectors can ruin it, of course, but they have to work at doing so" to prepare his criticism that "Brannagh does come close to ruining the scenes centered around Theseus and Hippolyta, Oberon and Titania, and Puck (all of which adds up to a substantial part of the play), but elsewhere the production is generally delightful and amusing" (500)
65. Janey Gallicani Casey, "'Hounds and Echo in Conjunction': Musical Structure in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Studies in the Humanities 21 (1994): 42
66. Vicki Shahly Hartman, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Gentle Concord to the Oedipal Problem," American Imago 40 (1983): 355-69, characterizes the progress into the woods as "[t]he fairy tale part of the play" that, like the "real world" of Athens, "also opens with an oedipal scene" (356) to conclude that Dream is "refreshingly optimistic concerning man's ability to answer the discord between societal restrictions and instinctual impulse with a 'dream'; to discover in his own imaginatively reconstructed childhood 'a gentle concord'; and - to hell with noble motives - to be happy" (368)
67. Likewise, James Calderwood, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Anamorphism and Theseus' Dream," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 409-30, interpreting the doubling in the forest of Theseus and Titania as the subconscious means by which Theseus relaxes rigid patriarchical controls, has written that fairyland itself "brings about the corrective realignments among the lovers that prepare for the multiple-marriage finale" (410)
68. See David Marshall, "Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream," 87-115, in Harold Bloom, ed., William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), esp. 91, 101, 112
69. David Daniel, "Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy," 101-21 in The Cambridge Companion of Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; reprinted 1987), writes, "the fairy world, verbally ablaze with warfare and mischief, is anything but sweet" (109)
70. See Gary Jay Williams, "The Scenic Language of Empire: A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1816," Theatre Survey 34 (1993): 47-59, for a discussion of nineteenth-century productions in relation to British colonial discourse
71. Skiles Howard, "Hands, Feet and Bottoms: Decentering the Cosmic Dance in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 325-42, illustrating the class status of the dances in Dream, has contended that the aristocratic dance of the faeries is "not intended to create a timeless image of community, an imaginary unity based either on the cosmic dance or the medieval round," but to permit its beholder to understand better the social construction of rank and gender (342)
72. Hendricks, "'Obscured by Dreams': Race, Empire and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream," 59
73. Kott, "Titania and the Ass's Head," 227
74. Craig, An Interpretation of Shakespeare, 35
75. Casey, "Hounds and Echo in Conjunction," 37
76. Sagar, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Marriage of Heaven and Hell," 43
77. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 139
78. Jane K. Brown's Neoplatonic interpretation of the play, "Discordia Concors: On the Order of A Midsummer Night's Dream," Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 20-41, offers an extreme example of the gulf between politically aware criticism and the defense of the comedy's happy ending: more than once, she refers to the "Afric boy" (sic) (26-27) as the object of two different kinds of love, and she concludes that "Truth is both transcendant and immanent in A Midsummer Night's Dream and because it is unproblematically everywhere, the play embodies a kind of universal order, the concord of all discord" (41)
79. Calderwood, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare, goes on to say, "A major danger in writing 'politically conscious' criticism of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that the critic may discover in himself a capacity to ferret out sins that borders on genius but that also belies the spirit of comedy and militates Malvolio-like against life's cakes and ale" (xxv)
80. Calderwood, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 44
81. Robert L. Reid, "The Fairy Queen: Gloriana or Titania?" Upstart Crow 13 (1993): 25
82. Peter Holland, "Theseus' Shadows in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 139-51, esp. 145
83. Anne Barton, "The Synthesizing Impulse of A Midsummer Night's Dream," 7-13 in Harold Bloom, ed., William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 12
84. See Pearson, "'Unkinde' Theseus," 276-98
85. James Andreas, "Remythologizing The Knight's Tale: A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen," Shakespeare Yearbook 2 (1991): 49-67, discusses Dream and Kinsmen as demythologized adaptations of the Chaucerian source, Dream bringing in the fairies from The Merchant's Tale but granting them a kind of humanity
86. Douglas Freake, "A Midsummer Night's Dream as a Comic Version of the Theseus Myth," 259-74 in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 272
87. Louise Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 147-48
88. See Shakespeare's Ovid, book 15, lines 585-92
89. J. O. Halliwell, Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare Society 26 (London, 1845)
90. See also Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 192-96, who insists the fairies are drawn from folklore
91. Roland F. Miller, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of Things," Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 254-68
92. Marjorie Swann, "The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern England," Renaissance Quarterly 53.2 (2000): 451
93. Wendy Wall, "Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives and Social Struggle," Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001): 73-75
94. Keith Sagar, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Critical Survey 7 (1995): 34-43, esp. 36-37
95. Halliwell, Illustrations, xii
96. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)
97. Reginald Scott, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), book 7, chapter 15, pages 152-53
98. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 7
99. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 26
100. See Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 76
101. The Bible (London: Deputies of Christopher Barker, 1589-92), Alv. The 1583, 1596 and 1598 versions appear identical in this regard
102. Francois Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 229
103. Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World, 230
104. Wiles, Shakespeare's Almanack, 103
105. Elizabeth I, "Verse Exchange between Queen Elizabeth and King Philip of Spain, circa Spring 1588," Poem 13 in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, ed. Leah Marcus, et al. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 410
106. The Booke of Common Prayer with the Psalter or Psalmes of David [STC 2171] (London: Deputies of Christopher Barker, 1596), alv
107. Jean Pironon, "Les structures imaginaires euphémisantes dans A Midsummer Night's Dream," Études Anglaises 50 (1997): 259-69, takes a formalist approach to these references
108. For a more complete history of the calendar, see Malcolm Freiberg, "Going Gregorian, 1582-1752: A Summary View" The Catholic Historical Review 86.1 (January 2000): 1-19
109. The Booke of Common Prayer 1596, Alv
110. Cf. The Bible 1583, 1596 and 1598, Alv
111. Geoffrey Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, part 2, section 1, lines 5-15, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 669
112. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969; 1971), 84-109
113. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 60-61
114. On the culture of greed plague established among the parish clergy, see Zeigler, The Black Death, 259-63
115. Ziegler, The Black Death, 70
116. Anna Montgomery Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931)
117. David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
118. see also Raymond A. Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995), esp. 23-42
119. Rebecca Totaro, "English Plague and New World Promise," Utopia Studies 10.1 (1999): 1-12, esp. 4-6
120. Brian Pullan, "Plague and Perceptions of the Poor in Early Modern England," 101-23 in Epidemics and Ideas; Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 101-7
121. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 17
122. J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare's Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 96
123. Watts, Epidemics and History, 1-39
124. See Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare's Theater, 94-95, on the logical convergence of miasma and the climate in which the plague-bearing flea propagates
125. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 23-50, explained how attitudes and actions at once encouraged prophylactic measures without denying the effectiveness of divine aid
126. cf. Slack, Impact, 26-29
127. On the artistic manifestations of astronomical causes, see Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 53 (Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2000), 46-47, 96, and 190n.179
128. Bede, The Reckoning of Time, tr. Faith Wallis, Translated Texts for Historians 29 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 80
129. Harry Guest, "Aspects of the Dream: Shakespeare, Purcell and Britten," Shakespeare Yearbook 4 (1994): 198
130. Andreas Stiborius and G. Tannstetter, De Romani Calendari Correctione Consilium in Florrentissimo Studio (Vienna, 1514) sig. A3
131. Christopher Clavius, S.J., Novi Calendarii Romani Apologia, adversus Michaelem Maestlinum Gaeppongensem in Tubingensi Academia Mathematicum, tribus libris explicata (Rome, 1588), 77-81
132. Both Malcolm Freiberg, "Going Gregorian, 1582-1752: A Summary View," The Catholic Historical Review 86.1 (January 2000): 1-19, esp. 4
133. and Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare's Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 20, refer to Elizabeth's correspondence with Archbishop Edward Grindal to approve the new calendar and Grindal's imposition of unacceptable conditions on such a reform
134. See Freiberg, "Going Gregorian" for a full review of the religious tensions that accompanied the British changes to the Gregorian calendar and led up to the riots
135. Robert Poole, "Making Up For Lost Time," History Today 49.12 (December 1999): 40-46, suggests eighteenth-century historians have made too much of the Calendar Riots for classist and narratological reasons. In an earlier article, Poole explained that the clamor against the change arose from the resultant confusion about the dating of popular festivals
136. See Robert Poole, "'Give us our Eleven Days': Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century England," Past and Present 149 (November 1995): 95-139
137. Sohmer, Shakespeare's Mystery Play, esp. 17-25, 77-88, 197-247
138. Simon Kellwaye, A Defensative agaynst the Plague (London: John Windett, 1593) [STC 14917], sig. 2
139. Jim Sharpe, "History from Below," 25-42 in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd ed., ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 33