Steps Into Romance

From here to there is not done in a single bound

Shakespearean Fantasy

Recently I watched Peter Hall’s 1968 and Jonathan Miller’s 1981 versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is one of Shakespeare’s fantasies, set in a timeless ‘Athens’ ruled by one ‘Duke Theseus’ who has just won the heart of ‘Hippolyta.’ When two sets of lovers are frustrated in their desires, they flee to the woods, where the Lord and Lady of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, are at odds over a ‘boy’ Titania has taken as her own. Meanwhile a group of commoners has undertaken to stage a play at the festivities of the Duke’s wedding, and they go to rehearse in these same woods. Oberon has his most mischievous fairy, Robin Goodfellow or Puck, cast various enchantments that result in comic misalliances, including Queen Titania’s infatuation of one Bottom, an ass of a fellow of the acting troupe, now transformed into a literal ass.

Both these productions make some of the same mistakes in treating of the fantasy elements of the play.

For one, both shoot in a real wood. Now the camera has a great dead-weight upon whatever it photographs, and fantasy is fragile. When you shoot in a real wood, we the audience see a real wood. At best you can employ filters and color timing and other technical tricks to lighten the load of the camera. You can also choose a wood that looks to the naked eye somehow more magical than most woods, but you must then compose your shots to enhance this impression. You can shoot only near mid-day, to get the most sun to filter through the leaf canopy, and bring out the richness of colors. But alas, the play is set at night in the woodland scenes, and so you must shoot day for night, and desaturate color, and emphasize bluish tones over gold and green and the bright hues of woodland wildflowers.

A better choice would have been to follow the 1935 MGM example, and construct your own fantasy-wood on a soundstage. Ridley Scott built his own wood in Legend (1985) which gives a good idea what a talented production designer with a lot of money could do in the time very near to Miller’s version of Dream. The soundstage gives a couple of other advantages as well. For one thing, weather is no problem. For another, the dialogue can be recorded live and not looped, which allows for the actors to give full range to their vocal inflections and act in the moment.

Both these productions also shoot in real manors of British history of the 1700s. Once again, the dead weight of the camera depicts these villas in all their ponderous reality. Since this reality is moreover peculiar to us, we can’t accept it as ‘palace’ and ‘courtyard’ but we can only see it as ‘18th-century British mansion’ which is far from fairyland, let alone the ‘Athens’ of any period whatsoever. Costumes are chosen to fit, more or less, with this background. Miller, who was given the assignment of adapting all of Shakespeare on video, deliberately chose to costume his actors in garb of Shakespeare’s time rather than whatever setting any play employed. This gave his series a similarity of look, but resulted in some truly grotesque botches, for example his Taming of the Shrew where John Cleese is asked to play Petruchio … as a Puritan!

Fairyland and Foreign Land

Shakespeare had no known source for the story of his Dream. But he showed a keen knowledge of how to approach fantasy. The producers Miller and Hall didn’t quite grasp this; they treated the play as simple comedy, and their efforts at capturing fantasy were ill-used at best.

The heart of the play is what happens on that magical night. Various sets of lovers wander through an enchanted wood by moonlight, spell-wrought to comic misalliances. But Shakespeare does not plunge us into that wood straight away. Rather he gives us first a mythical Athens, where Theseus, a character of fable 2000 years before Shakespeare was born, wars upon and captures the Amazon Queen Hippolyta. Shakespeare writes all his dialogue in the stage-poetry of his day, but the very names of Theseus and Hippolyta are enchanted and magical. After all, in the first legends, Theseus captured Hippolyta on a campaign with Hercules at his side.

Thus Shakespeare gives us straight off two folds of distance from our daily lives (and both are just as distant from the daily lives of his Elizabethan audience as they are from our own). First there is ‘Athens’ which is far away in space. Second there is ‘Theseus’ who is far away in time. ‘Hippolyta’ as an Amazon is also far away in another sense, as is Theseus himself, for both are players on the stage of foreign myths and legends.

Already we are plunged into a world where anything can happen. And yet the court of the Duke is not so very different from a Renaissance court: Theseus has no magical powers, and hears the suit of one of his noblemen as any Prince of the middle ages might. We are thus taken only halfway to the wood where wonders will unfold.

In between the scenes of the crossed lovers and the Duke and his bride to be, we get the low-comedy scene of Bottom and his gang of would-be actors planning their production. Here we are about as ‘realistic’ as any scene in the play will get. But the story they intend to enact is one of classical legend as well, Pyramus and Thisbe, and the discussion of the legend aims our minds at the mythical realm.

From the commoners planning the performance, Shakespeare hurls us dead into the heart of fairyland. Puck is introduced, then Oberon, then Titania. This is the one misstep I can find in Shakespeare’s strategies in the play. It is too great a leap, and would have been better prepared with a scene of one set of lovers, Hermia and Lysander, getting lost in the wood on their way to his aunt’s house, where they hope to wed despite Hermia’s father’s objections. This would have led us deeper from a real-but-wondrous wood into the magical fairyland wood where the transformations of appearance and affections will take place. Puck could then have come upon the lovers, cast down and resting, with not a clue which way to go, and Puck could have led us to Oberon and Titania as happens in the play.

Frames Within Frames

The point is that there are in fantasy talesmanship two general strategies on how to bring the audience into the proper frame of mind where we can live and breathe and accept the unreal magicks of events to unfold.

The first is the direct plunge. This approach is best used when the audience already knows something of the setting or characters — for example, a tale of Robin Hood or Hercules, or a tale set in ancient Egypt. It is an approach that may also be forced upon the talesman, for example when there is no connection whatsoever between the events and setting of his tale and any known reality, past or present. Many current fantasy tales box in their talesmen in this way. But even here, if the talesman acknowledges that he is telling a tale, he can offer his audience an introduction in his own voice, which takes them from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and this need not take more than a paragraph.

The second strategy is the progression by stages, as we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is the most elegant approach.

A middle-way is to use what is called the ‘frame story’ or else some object that serves in place of the frame story. The frame story was popular in the more outlandish Romance tales of the end of the 1800s and early 1900s. In this we have a tale that introduces us to the subject matter, allowing us the audience a sort of antechamber through which we may enter fairyland. An example would be H. Rider Haggard’s opening onto his Cleopatra in which he offers us a letter he got from a prominent doctor in Egypt, describing the doctor’s entry into a newly-discovered tomb. In one sarcophagus there is a set of three rolls of parchment attached to one mummy, which will be translated and tell the first-person tale of Harmarchis, last native-born Pharaoh of Egypt, and his struggles against the last of the Ptolemy Pharaohs, Cleopatra herself.

In more modern versions of this frame, a simple object suffices, which itself is a product of fairyland, and so is less of an antechamber but rather a disguised introduction. Often this object is a Codex or other writing, either of history told in a subsequent age of fairyland, or from a previous age, representing a prophecy of the events the tale will tell us.

Now and There

Many modern fantasy talesmen seek to establish some link between our daily life and fairyland. This is seen as making fairyland ‘relevant’ to the audience, as someone from ‘our world’ who is much like the intended audience makes the journey into fairyland. It has some minor advantages of exposition, since the wanderer knows no more of this fairyland than we the audience do; as he wins explanations, we learn of matters at his side, and this further strengthens our identification with him.

An alternate approach to this seeks to bring fairyland into daily life, as magical objects or beings emerge from fairyland into the contemporary world, to wreak havoc before being destroyed or sent back whence they came.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 17, 2008)