Finally, in reading Shakespeare’s plays we should always remember that what we are reading is a performance script. Some stage action is described in what are called “stage directions”; some is suggested within the dialogue itself. Be alert to such signals as you stage the play in your imagination.
When, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robin Goodfellow says to the Fairy, “room [i.e., stand aside], fairy. Here comes Oberon,” and the Fairy responds, “And here my mistress. Would that he were gone!” it is almost certain that Robin and the Fairy would move aside for the entrance of the king and queen of Fairyland. Similarly, a few lines later, when Titania orders her fairies to “skip hence,” it is almost certain that they would obey her orders. Her later orders to them, “Fairies, away,” show that, when they earlier “skip hence,” they do not leave the stage.
At many places in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, signals to the reader are not quite so clear. When Demetrius says to Helena in the first scene of Act 2, “Let me go,” it is clear that she has earlier taken hold of him, but it is not at all certain when she did so. Nor is it certain when she turns him loose (or, perhaps, when he pulls away from her) nor even when he exits. In these uncertain situations, the director and the actors and you, as reader, must decide what makes for the most interesting, most likely, action.
Many scenes in this play give scope for imaginative “staging”: Just how do Oberon and Robin “anoint” the eyes of their sleeping victims? How does Robin stage the mock combat between Lysander and Demetrius? What stage action accompanies the speeches of Titania to (and about) the transformed Bottom: “Out of this wood do not desire to go”; “Tie up my lover’s tongue. Bring him silently”; “So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle / Gently entwist; the female ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm”?
Learning to read the language of stage action repays one many times over when one reaches scenes such as the final scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where much of the pleasure of the scene turns on our ability to visualize the performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” before a scoffing court, as Wall provides a “chink” through which the lovers whisper, as “Moon” defends his bush and his lantern, and as Thisbe imbrues her breast with a “trusty sword.”
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. © 1993 Folger Shakespeare Library
