ABSTRACT
What happens when the fairy world and the mortal world collide? Disaster! Demetrius is in love with Hermia, who is in love with Lysander, who is in love with Helena, who is in love with Demetrius! Will they ever sort out this mess, or do they need a little help from the fairies? (Bevan blurb)
. . . there’s always something to learn, and if you let yourself get into its spirit, you may learn something new tonight. Remember, Dream is about love and theater and especially magic. So get out there and let yourselves be as bewitched as you are bewitching! (Singer 238)
Unlike Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not seem counterintuitive as a pre-text for children’s literature. Indeed, it appears so amenable to a juvenile audience that Peter Craven has commented, it is “a play that can delight people when they are young; it can be seen as almost a children’s version of what Shakespearean comedy has to offer” (R8). Such a view of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a children’s version of Shakespeare is at least attributable to its comedic, fantastic, and romantic elements. These three sub-plots, which I will be referring to as the actors’, the fairies’, and the lovers’ plots, appear often in children’s literature, often metonymically for the play’s concern with maturing:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream focuses upon different crucial transitions in the male and female life cycles: the fairy plot, upon taking ‘a little changeling boy’ from childhood into youth, from the world of the mother into the world of the father; the Athenian plot, upon taking a maiden from youth into maturity, from the world of the father into the world of the husband. (Montrose 108)
It is logical then, that Dream’s sub-plots are frequently appropriated by children’s literature. The exception ironically appears to be the play’s framing, or primary plot, that of the Athenian court and the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, “the single occasion to which we have learned its four stories are moving” (Brooks xc). This storyline is effaced because it disrupts the idealised version of the play most often presented to child readers as a template for maturation and romantic love.1 In appropriations of Dream, juvenile readers are exposed to the magic of Shakespeare’s play, and the value of that magic in their own lives. This exposure is consistently infl ected with heteronormative ideals of gender and sexuality.
