Abstract
We now consider the interrelationships of script, performance, text and interpretation in the particular example of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I begin with a debate between criticism and performance as modes of interpretation, and go on to consider the play as a historical subtext for several other kinds of performance.
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Notes
I quote from Sir Thomas North’s Elizabethan translation, which Shakespeare used. Cited in Harold F. Brooks’ Arden A Midsummer Night’s Dream (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 136.
E.g., Stephen Gossen, The Schoole of Abuse (1579), p. 10.
E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 1:362.
For a discussion of James’s attacks on women as an index both to his relations with his mother and his sense of himself, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 24–25.
The most detailed consideration of James’s homoerotic liaisons is David M. Bergeron’s King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). See also my book Impersonations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 40–49.
Cited in G. P. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 13.
From a letter of 5 October 1612, quoted by J. W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror (New York: AMS Press, 1978), pp. 138–39.
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© 2003 Stephen Orgel
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Orgel, S. (2003). Magic and History. In: Imagining Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596108_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596108_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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