A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

ourselves which we bury under social convention.” 56 In modern productions of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, that buried part of the self has invariably been depicted as the sexual self—in keeping with the aspect of the May which so appalled Stubbes in Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare critic Mary Maher explains:
    If the visual image of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in the nineteenth century was the gauzy-winged fairy, the immediate icon of the late twentieth century was the up-thrust arm between Bottom’s legs, the oversized ass’s penis created by two actors positioned to show arousal in Peter Brook’s 1970 staging of the play … What Brook did was corrective; he was reinserting and reissuing the seminal strand of sexuality into the mainstream of the play’s production history. 57
    Despite being in a recognizable tradition of modern productions of the
Dream
, Michael Boyd’s 1999 production was criticized for itsovertly sexual reading of the play. He warned the public before it opened:
    It won’t be a decorative, picturesque dream world, or about public-school lovers with no sexual organs … [Oberon’s fairies were all male and Titania’s all female] … Just as Titania has refused Oberon her bed, so that diktat runs all through the fairy world. The wood will be full of sexual tension … It won’t remind you of a mythical Athens, but of fundamentalist society in the vice-grip of Puritanism and arranged marriage. That’s the world Shakespeare was exploring. 58
    When Titania begins her amour with furry-eared Bottom, the effect is usually a little less erotic than the teddy bears’ picnic. Not in Michael Boyd’s bold and brilliant revival … Multiple orgasms are clearly occurring in the bed hovering above the stage … When Josette Simon’s squirming, leggy fairy queen tells Daniel Ryan’s post-coital Bottom that one of her ogling attendants will “fetch thee new nuts,” her hand is on a part of his body that suggests she does not just mean tasty acorns. 59
    A party from a local Catholic school walked out of this production at the interval. Their teacher felt it was unsuitable for children, declaring that “The production has driven a horse and carriage through our school’s religious and sex education policies.” The tabloids headlined: “Sir Leads Walkout as Bard Sex Shocks Kids”
(Mirror)
and “Children Shocked by Shakespeare in Lust” (
Daily Mail
).
    Bottom strolls his way between the world of reality, theatricality, and the supernatural. His transformation gives the traditional hobbyhorse of the May Day celebration an ironic twist. The hobbyhorse combined the ritualized promise of communal renewal and regeneration through the hybridization of man and beast. Deriving from pagan origins, he symbolized fecundity and continuity. In Elizabethan London, records show that the hobbyhorse was known at Midsummer pageants and at other seasons, in church, city, and court activities. Bottom’s transformation, which Jan Kott found both“fascinating and repulsive,” has gone comically wrong—instead of being as virile as a beast and as beautiful as a human, it has worked the other way around. The nature of his “translation” turns Titania’s desires from something potentially dark into something comic.
    There is a tendency for people to assume that because a play contains fairies and magical elements that it has been written for children. This was not true in Shakespeare’s day, when a belief in the supernatural pervaded all ages and classes of society. Applauded by most critics for its inventiveness, Michael Boyd’s production did have its critics who felt that the overtly sexual reading of the dream, which began for the RSC with Peter Brook, had become old hat. It appeared as though the
Dream
had come full