Clip: Oberon and Titania 1935 (Clip Available

Clip: Oberon and Titania 1935 (clip available on You Tube)

Foolish fairies and mortals: Multiple interpretations of Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times. One of the most popular cinematic versions, directed by Max Reinhardt in 1935, depicts the play as a fantastic spectacle. The fairy king Oberon and the fairy queen Titania are shown as otherworldly beings, flitting through the air, shimmering and transparent. Oberon is manly and aggressive, while Titania is shy, retiring, and feminine in her tenderness.

However, the actual text of the play seems to belie such an interpretation. Shakespeare's words stress the humanness of the fairy characters as well as their fantastical nature. Oberon is frustrated with his inability to control Titania on their first meeting. He wants a young boy in her entourage, the child of a woman whom Titania loved. Although the fairy king and queen are lovers, they are not monogamous. Titania implies that Oberon was the former lover of Theseus' current bride, and he notes her love for Theseus: "How canst thou thus for shame, Titania, / Glance at my credit with Hippolyta, / Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?" (2.1). Their sexuality is also seen in the intensity with which the two talk about the 'changeling' boy and Titania's relationship with the boy's mother. This seems to suggest that the two have had bisexual affairs. Although the relationship is sexually charged between the fairy king and queen, it is not analogous to a conventional, heterosexual coupling or marriage.

This unconventional relationship is more accurately represented in the 1999 Michael Hoffman version of the Shakespearean comedy. Although Oberon and Titania are still dressed in fantastical garments, they spar with one another in a very human-like fashion. Their passions and their magical powers are transcendent but they are still subject to the same passions and envious feelings as mortals, just as Titania falls prey to the magical love potion as easily as her human counterparts. When Titania seduces Bottom she is lusty and sexy, and when Oberon commands her to give up the boy there is an erotic, dominating yet ambiguous quality to his desire. The Reinhardt version shows the couple hand-in-hand, with Titania doting on her new master, the couple a picture of wedded bliss. Their feelings for one another are uncomplicated, despite the terrible humiliation to which Oberon has subjected Titania. The relationship in the more recent film is more psychologically complex and reflective of Shakespeare's text.

From a visual perspective, the Hoffman film is notable for its choice of setting the play into a kind of never-never world of the 19th century. The warring between Oberon and Titania, as only referenced in the text, is also shown to have literal, cataclysmic natural results. "But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport. / Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,/As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea/Contagious fogs" (2.1). The Reinhardt version tries to remain true to that of the Shakespearean setting in a pagan Athens and is even more fantastical, as manifested in the rich foliage of the forest, shimmering garments on the fairies, and fairytale-like clothes on the human Athenians.