ABSTRACT
A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains Shakespeare’s most frequently produced play on the British (and, especially, the English) stage. Between 1990 and 2003, there were 180 professional productions of various kinds; if we add to this total the undocumented amateur, school and university versions, the statistical evidence suggests that the Dream represents the kind of Shakespeare that English culture holds closest to its heart. The key factors in the play’s appeal as national folktale can be readily isolated: its naïve and nostalgic connections with the world of childhood, where it is still just possible to believe in fairies, and the atavistic lure of woodland, a scene of fantasy and desire which traces the contours of an ideal England best glimpsed by looking backwards. But these qualities are equally capable of provoking reactions of ennui, embarrassment, exasperation and nausea. Such feelings may be alleviated by the introduction of a third perspective: rather than a child-friendly pastoral fantasy, the play is, thanks to Jan Kott, Peter Brook and a succession of ‘dark’, cynical and emphatically non-literal stage and film versions, imagined as an adult entertainment steeped in brutality and eroticism, its magic metaphorical, secular or illusory. As Barbara Hodgdon has compellingly argued, relations between these variant Dream scenarios have, in the English theatrical and cultural context, generally been reduced to an antagonistic binary, between the ‘traditional’ (both ‘innocent’ and pictorially elaborate) and the ‘modernist’ (represented pre-eminently by Brook’s landmark RSC production of 1970, obsessively re-engaged in subsequent productions); and this division has been defined, in part, through a sense of nationhood. Thus ‘the binary not only marks out a history of Dream’s theatrical formations but tropes a nexus of its supposed cultural functions in constructing a perfected national community’, by means of ‘a geography that no longer exists and an imaginative space riddled with desire’; in the end, though, the ‘magical, enraptured, and quintessentially English wood and the Athenian patriarchy offer locales where a late twentieth-century spectator (even one who has read Jan Kott) may still come away refreshed’ (Hodgdon 1998: 175). This essay traces some of the ways in which, in recent performance, refreshment has been imbibed as guilty or anxious pleasure: focusing upon the English theatre, I examine how its culture continues to dream the Dream, through a scrutiny, first, of the historic legacy of imperial and colonial discourse, then of some key moments in the post-modern era that was effectively inaugurated by Brook’s production (in many ways, the first recognizably ‘global’ stage Shakespeare), and finally of two productions in 2002 (mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe) which, in different ways,
articulate the ambiguities, and the nervousness, of contemporary ‘English’ Shakespeare, in the cultural and economic context of globalization. I am concerned, in particular, with the relationship between the historic legacies of nationhood, and performance’s engagements with, and constructions of, race and ethnicity. If globalization has, at once, rendered Englishness both more tenacious and more precarious, it has also created a hugely expanded and diversified context of reception for the internationalized Shakespeares of the twenty-first century.
