A Midsummer Night's Dream'

So often has it been said that Elizabethan public playhouses were devoid of scenery of any sort that critics of Elizabethan plays have come to regard the actual settings prescribed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as of little or no direct relevance to either the form or content of their plays. The purpose of this essay is to question this assumption in the light of what I have said about the use of scenic emblems in the mediaeval and Elizabethan theatre in Essay 8. In discussing A Midsummer Night’s Dream therefore my object is to examine the particular relationship of setting to text within this play rather than to attempt a critical analysis of fable and story for its own sake: for I believe that mediaeval and Elizabethan playwrights were just as vividly aware of the visual aspects of drama as any of their successors and took as much care to assist the spectator to an understanding of their plays through setting and costume as through verbal imagery: but they were careful, like the Greeks before them and unlike the Romans or contemporary Italians, to keep spectacle in a subordinate relationship to character and action.