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?
