Professor Burton discussed in class how A Midsummer Night's Dream really needs to be watched in order to experience the layers of the play. I began to believe that more and more as I watched adaptations. I've seen a lot of adaptations of Midsummer, and this time, watching an old 1968 adaptation that embraced a traditional approach, I was struck by how A Midsummer Night's Dream needs to be heard.
I know from literary courses that Shakespeare carefully applies rhyme and rhythm to his social classes, in part to vault their speech to a poetical level, but also to play with the idea of "importance." The fairies, of course, speak in iambic pentameter and couplets. Athenian nobility retains the rhythm but loses the consistency of the rhymes. The mechanicals, with a few exceptions, speak in prose.
However, reading the play with these language distinctions lacks the status that the actual performance can deliver. Fairies are difficult to take seriously, especially when they are as petty as Oberon, Titania, and Puck; however, with a musical cadence and consistent, musical rhyming, it's difficult not to fall into their mentality. They carry authority because their speech is distinctly different than those around them.
This fairly strict distinction can (depending on the direction) make Bottom's speech in Act V (when he initially awakes) a complicated, central passage in the play. Bottom speaks in iambic pentameter, like the fairies. Is it a residual effect of Puck's spell? Is Bottom glimpsing some cosmic truth traditionally beyond human understanding? Is Bottom being juxtaposed against the language mastery of the fairy world?
I really like the distinction you made in the way each of the groups of people speak. Obviously speech is really important, and the way the fairies or the nobility speak automatically place them into a class system--just as the way they dress or act also classifies them. I didn't notice that Bottom started speaking in iambic pentameter in the last part of the play, but I would love to discuss it in class. I wonder what kind of a commentary Shakepeare was trying to make.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't noticed the difference in Bottom's speech either! What an absolutely wonderful detail to focus on! I love the sneaky things that we may not notice outright while reading or watching an adaptation, but that strike us anyway on a subconscious level. We can feel the change.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I didn't pick up on Bottom's speech change! That's so cool! It's neat how Shakespeare uses rhyme and meter to distinguish classes or honorability in his other plays as well.
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is just a repeat of everyone else's comments... :) but wow! You're right, I never even noticed the difference in meter and rhythm between the different classes' speech! Really neat
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