ABSTRACT
A Midsummer Night’s Dream occupies a high place within the iconography, the critical discourse and the literature of the romantic period. This elevated extra-theatrical position coexists, paradoxically for a text written for the theatre, with a relatively ‘low’ theatrical life, thus creating an inversely proportional relationship between the presence of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the collective imagination and its presence on the stage. The lack of attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream on stage was undoubtedly influenced by an antitheatrical prejudice against the comedy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the romantic period, the play was generally considered unsuited to the stage. Like all Shakespearean plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been subjected to transformations, manipulations, rewritings, and adaptations whereby the comedy has been reconstructed and reappropriated in relation to new contexts and new intertexts.
