The Setting

The audience would be restless with excitement. If the first performance was for a wedding party they would be well fed, well wined, in a merry mood after the music and singing during the marriage banquet and looking forward to dancing after the play. There would be an expectation of amusement to finish the evening before the ritual of attending the bride and groom to their bedchamber. If the play was part of nuptial festivities then the audience would be in an excitable state anyway, ready to laugh at anything and susceptible to accepting fantastical happenings. And how appropriate the piece to be performed would be – the madcap mistakes of a night focused on love and marriage. There would be similar expectations for a public staging, only the social range would be wider. The Elizabethan popular audience had a natural love of clowning, slapstick and the mayhem that was released when the rules of society were relaxed, broken or subverted. A play set on Midsummer Night and structured as a dream would be fun and full of the resonances associated with a festal day that had age- old overtones of love, marriage, misrule and jollity. Midsummer was traditionally celebrated with dancing and feasting and always involved secret assignations in the woods later when it was dark. Indeed, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play with a bit of everything – magic, moonlight, mayhem, love's mad entanglements, fairies, mistakes, mechanicals as mummers – all set in the spookiness of the woods at midnight and all of it provoking laughter. Wherever it was first played and for whom, it was a fun- filled festivity, a celebration of the follies of man and the incorrigible persistence of the impulse of men and women to pair up, wrangle, break up, wrangle more and reunite. There is a wise duke, a stern father, four soppy sloppy lovers, a mischievous sprite, a magic flower, a vengeful king of the fairies, his beautiful queen and a gobby weaver who has his head changed into an ass's head. ‘Cupid is a knavish lad’ (3.2.40) indeed, for the partner changes of the lovers become hilarious.