A Midsummer Night in the Middle of Winter

If people are the stuff upon which dreams are made, then William Shakespeare is the merry wanderer of imagination.

At least that's the part the bard played in writing A Midsummer's Night Dream, his play of enchantment and attraction.

On Thursday Judson Scruton led more than 30 people in the Wilton Library's Rimer room through the comedy. It was the first in Scruton's four-part series probing Shakespeare's use of imagination. The program will examine how Shakespeare's words have inspired contemporary films and other works of art for ages.

"The most memorable play I saw was King Lear in Wisconsin. Lear was played by a Hawaiian-Asian actor," Scruton said. " A thunder and lightning storm was literally shattering the theater but people sat through it. It was moving."

The Stratford scriptwriter wrote the comedy around the same time as he penned the tragedy Romeo & Juliet. That Shakespeare embedded the former with elements of the latter illuminates his brilliance, Scruton said.

"Plays within plays are imagination at work," Shakespeare said.

In A Midsummer's Night Dream, Shakespeare wove four plots together. One of the sub-plots concerns the mechanics, actors who stage a play for the impending marriage of a Duke. The embedded play, "Pyramus and Thisbe," is really the story of Romeo & Juliet.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has inspired for centuries. Scruton showed slides of various paintings, such as William Blake's "Oberon, Titania, and Puck," William Fuseli's "Titania, Bottom, and the Fairies," which explored the dark side and Joseph Noel Patton's 1850 rendering of "Titania," which was a "cornucopia of sexual abundance and play," Scruton said.

Patton's painting appeared to inspire the set designers of the 1999 movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania and Kevin Kline as Bottom.

"Of course that is just one of many interpretations. The fairies could be interpreted as vicious, mean, and living in mud puddles," Scruton said.

The play uses enchantment the way children's fairy tales do, Scruton said. It addresses inner struggles and offers solutions. Shakespeare wrote the comedy amid highly politicized times.

He wrote it between 1594 and 1596. It was a time of suppression. Queen Elizabeth I had ordered her Catholic half-sister Mary Queen of Scots executed in 1587.

"Some say one can't possibly understand A Midsummer's Night Dream without understanding the politics of the time," Scruton said.

In Shakespeare's day Midsummer's Eve, which falls on the longest day of the year, was considered a Catholic and Pagan holiday. According to some accounts, Elizabeth's troops smashed the stained glass windows in Shakespeare's village church on Midsummer. Shakespeare used the comedy as a metaphor for the holiday of which only fragments remained.

"The play says 'You smashed our churches, you smashed our windows, but with theater we can re-imagine how it was,' " Scruton said.

Scruton has taught Shakespeare at several universities and has led study/travel programs to workshops at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The next sessions, all at the Wilton Library, will look at Henry IV, Hamlet, and The Tempest.

Each of these plays provides reference points for culture, Scruton said. Hamlet treats vacillation, Henry IV looks at politics and the Tempest looks at love, revenge and greed. And Shakespeare's ability to permeate so many levels of culture is difficult to rival, Scruton said. 

"In polls about the most influential person, Shakespeare came out way ahead."