Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is very much like the page-within-a-page world of a website. It offers the audience a world-within-a-world on the stage. In the woodland world of this play, Titania and Oberon are Queen and King of the Fairies. Their quarrel in Act 2 and their subsequent reconciliation in Act 4 frame the interlocking love stories of the mortals Helena and Demetrius and Hermia and Lysander. How do we know how Shakespeare intended his play to be seen? Well, we don't really know the playwright's intentions. We have to make what my father always called educated guesses through close reading of the text. Scholars, artists, poets, dramatists, musicians, dancers, and students like you have created works of art or scholarship to interpret Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Before we begin our guessing, interpreting, and creating, let's take a look at the text of The Quarrel from Act 2, Scene1.
Mary Robinson's Oberon to Titania & Titania's Answer to Oberon (c.late 1800s)
William Blake's Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c.1786)
George Romney's A Study for Titania, Puck and the Changeling (1793)
Joseph Noel Paton's The Quarrel of Titania and Oberon (c. 1850)
Charles
Vess' Titania(1986)
Your assignment
Part I: Choose either Nesbit's story or Robinson's poem and one painting. Referring back to your notes, examine how the writer has altered Shakespeare's version of the story. Compare text and plot. Consider the use of imagery and characterization. Describe the mood created by the words you have read. Be sure to take specific lines from the texts to draw comparisons or show contrasts between the various interpretations. Include your own ideas of how you would interpret the quarrel scene. Your essay
should be approximately 750 words.
Part II: Re-interpret the quarrel scene as a poem, painting or drawing. Read through Shakespeare's quarrel scene again. Take notes or print a copy to highlight important phrases. Consider visual images, but also look for indications of character and setting created by the mood of the scene.
