A Midsummer Night's Dream context Flashcards
(46 cards)
What does the RSC: A play for the nation 2016 reveal?
- Egeus wears an RAF costume
- Hippolyta’s power is reduced
What are the functions of comedy?
- To mock authority
- To subvert the status quo
- To invert accepted social hierarchies
- To challenge the social and political system
- To transgress what is normally accepted including social and sexual taboos
What are the dramatic comedy conventions?
- Natural fools as lower class characters who provoke laughter through their actions and innocence but ultimately provide life lessons
- Tripartite structure
- Stock characters often pushed to extremities
- Inversion and subversion
- Mistaken identity
- Violence or tragic element
- Bright lighting
- Happy ending that often includes marriage
- A core theme of love
- Tension between Apollonian (reason) and Dionysian values (desire/emotion)
- Sexual connotations
- Slapstick - physical comedy
- Diegetic sound - speech used by characters to create comedic effect and to build character
- Theories of laughter of superiority, relief and incongruity
- Separation and reconciliation
- A fantastical element
- Philosophical undertone
- Misunderstanding/dramatic irony
- Wit and wordplay
- Bathos - an effect of an anticlimax created a lapse in mood
- The licensed fool
- Carnivalesque - Barber used his knowledge of Elizabethan festival and rituals to argue that the subversion is justified by the lord of misrule
- Scheming and evasion through tricksters
- Doubling and comic pairings
- Bawdiness (behaving obseen)
- Sense of mockery
What is burlesque?
A type of dramatic comedy which mocks a sombre literary work or serious subject in an undignified way such as Pyramus and Thisbe
What is Farce?
Dramatic comedy which created humour through a series of ludicrous events. the atmosphere is often one of panic, confusion and hilarity, tinged with cruelty
What is romantic comedy?
Light hearted comedies that focus on foolish mix-ups between young lovers that end in happy endings
What is Satire?
Either a gentle teasing or vicious attack by an individual, society of institution is ridiculised for their failings
What was Shakespeare doing at the same time?
He was writing Romeo and Juliet at the same time and Pyramus and Thisbe draws upon similar themes
What does the Russel T Davis adaptation for the BBC present?
Theseus as impatient to gain power by entrapping Hippolyta within marriage through physical force as she is straight-jacketed
How does Shakespeare criticise the nature of love as a method to abuse power?
He calls into question Elizabeth’s position as she took lovers and was ignorant towards Cecil and Dudley’s early attempts to encourage a political match from the 1559 parliament (sexual politics)
What is the significance of the globe?
It was literally and metaphorically outside the city and Elizabethan court to make the theatre appealing to the working class so he can satirise courtly values in an attempt to subvert the hierarchy
How does Shakespeare draw reference to the mercantile economy?
The changeling boy is used as a pawn mirroring the growing economy through trade relations such as the 1600 East India company and the 1558 Levant company to trade with the Ottoman empire causing a rise in consumer goods. In addition the theme of conquering through the Hawkins trade route can be seen through Theseus and Hippolyta as it is alluded to that Hippolyta was raped
How is race addressed within the play?
India is seen as a source of fantasy and mystery acting as a borderland between Athens and the greenworld, fantasy and reality, Oberon highlights the growing usage of Indian and Africans as slaves to the upper class
What is Greece like?
It is a fallen world since in 1548, it was taken over by the Ottoman empire and the fairies being able to circumnavigate the world in 40 minutes could be a growing warning to the power of the Ottoman empire
How does the play view dreams?
It highlights the contrasting contemporary beliefs of madness with no meaning and seriousness (working out dreams based on the consciousness as Albertus defines as spirits are the vehicles of all processes of life proceeded from the soul)
How did Samuel Pepys view the play?
The most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life
What is the inspiration for Oberon?
He is likely taken from the Merovingian legend of a sorcerer names Alberichor Zeus adapted within Spenser’s faerie queene
What is the inspiration for Titania?
It means born from the Titans and was first represented in Ovid’s metamorphosis by the name of Diana drawing inspiration for Titania’s supernatural connections in the play. She is constantly associated with power as Ovid highlights that when she sees a naked man, she turns him into a stag to be torn apart by his own hunting hounds. Spenser presents her regally to his target audience Elizabeth I and Shakespeare reflects this as she is an, “imperial votaress,”
What preceded and followed plays?
Jigs and clowning like the Bergomask dance named after the clownish behavior of the people of Bergamo
How can the mechanical’s failures in the play be justified?
It was part of theater etiquette to avoid awkward silences by speaking to enter and leave the stage
What was the stage like?
- During the Golden age where high culture became a part of popular culture
- Increasing demand for plays on a regular basis as it received audiences of 24,000 people
How id Helena’s idealism of love significant?
It draws upon Neoplatonism which maintained that poetic meditation would enable them to refine their desire for physical beauty until it became love of the soul and finally love of god as the one source of reality
How did Shakespeare write the play for members of the lord chamberlain’s men?
He gave actors specific roles with developed characteristics such as John Sincklo who was strikingly thin and must have played starveling
How were fairies viewed in traditional flklore?
- Spirits who tormented, bewitched and abducted people sometimes doing the victim’s permanent damage therefore the audience would be amused by the friendly nature of the fairies
- Robin Goodfellow is known to be half animal and human with hoofs, arms like the devil, pointed ears and a mischievous look as a domestic sprite who spoiled milk, led travellers as tray or changed shapes. Country folk often flattered him in order to be left alone so Shakespeare is adhering to the societal context
- Fairies were also blamed for a bad harvest, sickness, disabled children and replacing good children with changelings
- They would be associated with the holiday as they blessed the marriagebed
