This is a four page paper. It is a costume design paper, and a lot of the paper is consumed by lovely images of costume designs gathered from cited sources on the Internet. These costume design images are ideas for a stage production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The main characters are all represented, including Lysander, Demitrius, Hermia, Helena, Puck, Bottom, and Titania.
Costumes
A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most whimsical plays, and therefore this production follows in its spirit. Designing costumes for A Midsummer Night's Dream allows for total creative license, as the play takes place within a fantasy world replete with fairies. The overall impact is captured well by an artist at Duke (image credit: http://sites.duke.edu/midsummer/files/2009/12/Study_for_The_Quarrel_of_Oberon_and_Titania.jpg):
This image is a study for what Oberon and Titania might look like. The fairy queen and king here seem innocent. Titania is rendered more angelic than fairy-like, which is why I only appreciate this image as an overall impression of the extent of the fairy world created on the stage. I prefer the fairy world to be peopled thickly like this image here, meaning that the cast of fairies should be as large as possible for the venue. This image also shows the changeling.
The main characters are not fairies, however, so it is important to render them richly. First, we have the two female humans, Hermia and Helena. One of the key points in rendering A Midsummer Night's Dream effectively is to visually differentiate between the two sisters while still allowing for significant role confusion. Role confusion and the blending of the two women is a major theme of the play, and during the scenes in which Lysander and Demitrius mistake Helena for Hermia and vice-versa, the costumes will also summarily trick the audience. Shakespeare purposely named the two women only a few letters apart, highlighting the fact that they are not highly individuated. Yet the audience will follow the story better if the two actors have different hair, or otherwise appear radically different. The costumes will signal when the identities are being confused.
Neither are the two human males in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander and Demitrius. Because the plays' characters are Greek, it is important to use Greek-inspired costumes as in:
As with the women, the two men become confounded in the play, as their love interests flit back and forth between Hermia and Helena.
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