ABSTRACT
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that begins by remembering another canonical author from an earlier age (Chaucer), it dramatizes the (past) centre of Western cultural history (Athens) and it dramatizes the fringe, or the local, in the moment of performing the canonical in adaptation (Ovid, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’) for an audience at the centre. In its focus on adaptation and revision, on language and translation, on the tension between the regional and the central, it dramatizes a number of the issues that are at the core of the study of Shakespearean adaptation. The patronization of, and the qualitative judgments offered to, the mechanicals’ performances raise issues for the attitude of the academy towards performance and adaptation at the ´local´ level by non-metropolitan companies. 1 Many of the same things can be said of its sister play, the collaborative The Two Noble Kinsmen, but that play also highlights something that is only briefly alluded to in the earlier Dream, the fact that Theseus is the ruler not just of a kingdom but of an empire, an empire that has colonized and subsumed the Amazon nation (for one) into its own political mass. 2 So when Hippolyta responds to the critique of the mechanicals’ play she does so from the centre but not as the centre, she occupies a space at the centre of the empire as (imminent) wife to the emperor, but also still as foreign. Very few people can be argued to be of the centre anymore and the empire that Shakespeare was once a symbol of has crumbled, 3 and is moreover in danger of dividing even further in the wake of the ‘Brexit’ referendum to leave the European Union (in which Scotland and Northern Ireland seem to wish to remain).
