|
As with most of his plays, Shakespeare drew on many different sources to help shape A Midsummer Night\'s Dream. There does not seem to be an earlier plot that he incorporated--rather, a series of myths and tales that he drew from to create his own work. But most of our understanding of Shakespearean sources is like detective work: we piece together similarities but we have no direct testimony.
Sir Thomas North\'s translation of Plutarch\'s Life of Theseus seems to have given Shakespeare some of the mythical background for the play, particularly relating to Theseus\'s past exploits, romantic and otherwise. The name Egeus (Hermia\'s father) probably also came from Plutarch.
Shakespeare seems almost certain to have borrowed some information from the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose \"Knight\'s Tale,\" in the Canterbury Tales, opens with lines about Theseus and Hippolyta. It also mentions observances of May Day.
Similarly, Ovid\'s Metamorphosis, translated by Arthur Golding, gave Shakespeare a very clear working of the story of Pyramus and Thisby. This is probably where Shakespeare picked up his word \"cranny,\" through which the unfortunate lovers are forced to speak.
And it is also likely that Shakespeare knew of the Roman writer Apuleius\'s story The Golden Ass. In it a poor man is transformed by enchantment into an ass. In the description of the transformation, there are many similar phrases that tie the two together.
For his fairies, Shakespeare had a vast store of folklore to draw on. Robin Goodfellow was particularly well-known in country lore, though Shakespeare may have been the first to give him the name of Puck. May Day (May 1) and Midsummer\'s Night (June 23/summer solstice) were two festivals important as background for the play. May Day (when A Midsummer Night\'s Dream actually takes place) was a favorite festival for rural England, a time in which the people left the city and headed for the woods, where they danced and celebrated. A king and queen of May were elected, and this \"royal\" couple went to the nobles\' houses to give their blessings, much the way Oberon and Titania do at the end of the play. May Day was, above all, a time of lovers\' madness: they, too, went to the woods and frequently spent the night there. Midsummer was a general celebration of madness and merriment, a time when magic was afoot and the fairies were particularly evident. Costumes and dancing played a large part in the festivities. \"Midsummer madness,\" brought about by the heat, affected everyone, opening the way for illusion (and delusion) to transform reality.
Shakespeare even drew on some of his own work. The situation of the workmen awkwardly performing their amateur theatricals is similar to the show of the Nine Worthies in Love\'s Labour\'s Lost. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, the way that couples mix up and transfer their affections is reminiscent of the Midsummer lovers. And if Romeo and Juliet was, as is often suggested, written directly before A Midsummer Night\'s Dream, it offers an entrance into the fairy world with Mercutio\'s famous description of Queen Mab.
|
