Performance

We touched briefly on the idea of performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I mentioned in class that the fact that there is a play within a play is indicative of the performances that we put on in our daily lives—regardless to whether we realize that or not. In the last act of Midsummer, the royals watch in mirth as the rude mechanicals perform for them. As was pointed out, their play is basically just Romeo and Juliet, but comedic because Pyramus and Thisbe, as well as the rest of the company, are not actors. Two aspects of this are interesting. First, that Shakespeare chose to include a play at all—was he simply including a spectacle for the sake of it, or was there a deeper meaning to this decision? I choose to think the latter—that Shakespeare purposefully placed the play right at the end to point out to us, in the most meta of ways, that we are simply players, as is stated in “As You Like It”. We are not people going about life, simply existing. We are beings of design, meant to perform for the world, each one of us on our personal stage. The second piece of this is also extremely meta. The play, “Pyramus and Thisbe” is not just a story. It’s the plot of Romeo and Juliet. So Shakespeare chose to make fun of one of his most famous plays by making a shenanigan out of it. He basically acknowledged his own plays while writing Midsummer. Was this a commentary theater as an art form, or simply a meta-nudge to his other works? This becomes more interesting when the plays are actually performed because in Shakespeare the fourth wall is somewhat nonexistent. Who was Shakespeare really highlighting here? The actors, the writers, the theater-people who perform for a living? Or the watchers, the audience, the theater-goers who live to perform?