Shakespeare Among the Fairies: Myth and Folklore in A Midsummer Night's Dream
If we include high school and community theater productions, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably the most-performed Shakespearean play in the United States. The play is funny and fantastical, and many companies are drawn to the performative potential of the fairies, especially when they hope to attract an audience that includes children. But Elizabethans did not see fairies as the tiny, adorable Tinkerbells that we think of today. Instead, they viewed fairy folk as fickle, alien, and often frightening figures, blamed for innocent pranks and malicious ill-fortune. Oberon claims that he and his fellow fairies are “spirits of another sort,” unlike those “damned spirits” who haunt the night and fear the day, but the fey in Midsummer are complicated, delivering delight and terror, love and loss, fear and wonder. This paper will explore the myth of fairies in the play through folklore, popular culture, and early modern cultural attitudes, concluding with a brief comparison to recent performances of fairy bodies in Shakespeare.
Nota biográfica
Jim Casey is the Conference Coordinator of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and co-founder of Empty Box Press. He is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities Grant recipient, editor of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, and co-editor of the collections Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Comics. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published on fantasy, monstrosity, early modern poetry, medieval poetry, pedagogy, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, adaptation theory, digital humanities, old age, comics, anime, masculinity, the supernatural, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ovid, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. His current projects include Science Fiction Shakespeares, with Brandon Christopher, and Fantasy Literature through History.