1A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to play a special part in the eighteenth-century construction of the Shakespeare canon. If one is to trust the records kept in The London Stage (Van Lennep), it first appears that the play was performed surprisingly few times between the first years of the Restoration and the early decades of the nineteenth century. Referring to “authentic” performances of Shakespeare’s text, Gary Jay Williams is even more categorical when he writes: “For almost two hundred years, from 1642 to 1840, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was never seen in its entirety in the English or continental theatre” (Williams 38). Besides, the notorious failure of some of the productions that have come down to us also points to what seems to have been the blatant incompatibility of the intricacies and heterogeneousness of Shakespeare’s plot with the aesthetic stance imposed by neo-classical precepts like order, symmetry, propriety or logicality. The point of view once expressed by Samuel Johnson in his “Preface to Shakespeare” ideally illustrates such an attitude: “We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothick mythology of fairies” (Johnson 1963, 251). One also remembers that Johnson found the Dream “wild and fantastical” (Johnson 1958-2005, 7: 160), a point of view that somehow echoes Samuel Pepys’s comments on the play’s alleged ridiculousness and insipidity, as formulated in the wake of the 1662 revival:

2

To the King’s Theatre where we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing & some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.

3Compared with some of Shakespeare’s other major plays, the treatment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream also stands apart in respect of the so-called return to the original text that supposedly took place in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The various adaptations successively offered to the London public from 1692 to 1763 do indeed belie Michael Dobson’s statement according to which “as Shakespeare’s status as a British hero rose [in the 1730s], so the practice of rewriting his plays came to be seen as positively treasonous” (Dobson 1996, 64). Even the 1763 production of the play, which allegedly marked a certain return to Shakespeare’s initial words, strongly contradicts Peter Holland’s comment on Garrick’s well-known efforts to restore Shakespeare in the original: “[Garrick] began a move to call the texts ‘back to day’, reversing the movement to adaptation, restoring speeches and scenes, refusing the by then habitual performances of Restoration adaptations” (Holland 71). The Dream may be one of those few exceptions which prompted the same critic to qualify his statement, the following quotation insisting on the extreme difficulty of assessing the degree of authenticity of any given revival: “But, while it is often difficult to define easily what is an adapted version and what is not, most plays were increasingly played in relatively un-adapted forms” (Holland 71-72). As far as the 1763 production of the play is concerned, a close examination of Garrick and Colman’s cutting does indeed betray to what extent the highly poetical nature of the Dream apparently escaped Georgian ears, the published version of the play displaying the usual Restoration methods of simplifying Shakespeare’s language by shortening lengthy passages, modernizing diction and syntax, eliminating elaborate conceits, etc.

4However inauthentic eighteenth-century renditions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have been, one of their common features lies in their extremely strong dependence on the various newly-experimented operatic genres that had begun to infiltrate British cultural life in the decades following the Restoration, and which obviously provided better vehicles for the fantastic ingredients of the play so much inimical to the theatrical rules of the Augustans. In that respect, the play’s immersion in supernatural fairy-land was unsurprisingly linked to the irrationalities and absurdities supposedly inherent in Italian opera, as evinced by Horace Walpole’s famous words on Garrick’s first adaptation of the Dream, the English opera The Fairies (1755): “and to regale with sense, it is Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera books” (Walpole 3: 288 [letter to Richard Bentley, 23 Feb. 1755]).

5The issue addressed in this paper is precisely the assessment of how the successive versions of the play all relate, at different levels, to the realm of native or newly-imported operatic forms, each version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflecting the gradual evolution of those ever-developing musical genres. The aim of the present approach is thus to examine the special articulation between drama and music in the way music is treated as a theme in each of the various adaptations. Considering the highly musical nature of the source-play itself, at least in its treatment of themes, metrical forms and polyphony—not to mention Shakespeare’s own use of music for theatrical purposes (in that respect see Price 323; Guinle 41-130)—, it is little surprising to notice that the treatment of music offers another common denominator between the eighteenth-century versions of Shakespeare’s play, which all provide a reflexive account of their own use and exploitation of music. The leading thread of the present article is therefore the demonstration that a play usually seen as a meta-theatrical work exploring the possibilities of drama was repeatedly and consistently turned into a meta-operatic play dramatising the expressive potentialities of song and music.

6The principles of the first major adaptation of the Dream, Henry Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen (first version, May 1692; second version, February 1693) were long misunderstood by critics, unanimously prone to deplore the mutilation inflicted by the so-called “improvement” of Shakespeare’s text. To some The Fairy Queen was merely “. . . a barbarously mutilated version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Dent 216), to others “Shakespeare’s poetry was butchered with unnecessary or inapposite interpolations” (Arundell 84) and for George Odell, Shakespeare’s play was “tortured into an opera” (Odell 1: 71). More recent scholarship has been more lenient towards The Fairy Queen, merely emphasizing the disconnectedness of the verbal from the musical parts, usually found “only tangentially connected to the drama” (Holman 214) or, to quote Sir Michal Tippett, “a set of five unrelated masques, or divertissements, interlarded with a hotch-potch version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Tippett 50). Yet, in 1937, Jack Westrup still lamented that the work was “simply a succession of masques, which have so little connection with the play that no one who merely heard the music would have the remotest suspicion that it was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Westup 137). A few years later, Eric W. White was hardly more complimentary when he referred to The Fairy Queen as a regression, in terms of dramatic efficiency, after Purcell’s other works for the stage, especially King Arthur (White 121).

7If nowadays it is usually agreed that the musical parts of Purcell’s work are a symbolic extension of the themes and moods displayed in the spoken play (Moore 100-29; Price 320-57; Savage), Gary Jay Williams, in his fascinating study of the staging of the Dream over the centuries, recently found new meaning in what some modern commentators still see as “a generic mistake along the road to the modern ideal of opera” (Williams 42). Indeed, Williams establishes a link between the special design of the play, meant to structurally distinguish the pedestrian world of ordinary mortals from the magical world of deified royals, and the tradition of the allegorical court masque. According to Williams, music and the lavish scenic display associated to it are mainly used to idealize and celebrate royal power by featuring special compliments to King William and Queen Mary. His interpretation of the final tableau, with its allegory on the marital harmony exemplified by the two sovereigns, finally gives some dramatic coherence to a scene still found puzzling by critics (for instance Holman 213). However convincing Williams’s demonstration may be, especially in his explanation of the birthday song for Oberon (Williams 52, 57) and in his commentary on the “China-Orange-trees,” “a familiar icon representing the House of Orange” (Williams 55), his interpretation somehow fails to obliterate the incongruity of the analogy that links Queen Mary to the Fairy Queen (Williams 48-49), the representation on stage of Titania’s indecorous infatuation with Bottom being slightly incompatible with the idealized presentation found in the musical parts.

8Another possible allegorical reading of the play’s interpolations lies in the thematization of the division between the verbal and the musical parts proper, the political allegory then co-existing with a form of “generic” allegory which in turn reflects the various strategies— verbal and musical—at work in the adaptation. One can indeed notice that the text to which the musical parts are set glorifies the opera’s own methods of fabrication, the lyrics functioning as an almost perpetual celebration of the supreme power of music, repeatedly presented as the highest expressive medium, far surpassing that of words. In her call for an Edenic world right before the beginning of the masque in Act 2, Titania herself welcomes music as the epitome of sensual delight:

9

Let your Revels now begin,

Some shall Dance, and some shall Sing.

All Delights this place surround,

Every sweet Harmonious Sound,

That e’re Charm’d a skilful Ear,

Meet and Entertain us here.

Let Eccho’s plac’d in every Grot,

Catch, and repeat each Note.

10The first song of the masque is appropriately an invitation for the well-meaning birds of the sky—a possible image for the musicians of the theatre—to meet up and perform while the fairies’ revels are in progress:

11

Come all ye Songsters of the Sky,

Wake, and Assemble in this Wood;

But no ill-boding Bird be nigh,

None but the Harmless and the Good.

12The next lyric, a direct appeal for the nine muses to “Shew the utmost of their Art” (Anon. 1692, 15) also seems to suggest the artistic perfection achieved by the reunion of all possible art forms, i.e. precisely what the operatic genre should be about:

13

May the God of Wit inspire,

The Sacred Nine to bear a part;

And the Blessed Heavenly Quire,

Shew the utmost of their Art.

14The part allotted to the “sacred nine” remains strictly musical, each muse corresponding to a vocal line in the chorus, thereby restricting its allegorical value to a purely musical part. Here, song and music seem to be performatively presented as the one and only outlet for artistic expression, the wish expressed in the lyric being instantly made concrete in the musical translation and rendition of the words. The very structure of the ensemble-piece, a three-voice number traditionally sung by nine voices, emphasizes the supremacy of song and music over all other art forms. As with the musical depiction of the four seasons in Act 4 (Anon. 1692, 41-42), the next numbers, with the description in musical phraseology of such allegories as “Night,” “Mystery,” “Secrecy” and “Sleep” (Anon. 1692, 16-18), also provide the composer with the opportunity of displaying the evocative potentialities of his art, quite in accordance with the imitative theory of “word-painting” so much in vogue during the baroque era.

15Needless to say, the notorious chaos of Shakespeare’s Act 3 is duplicated in the next musical masque, notably with the hilarious “Dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa,” a musical mise en abyme of the dramatic topsy-turvydom displayed in the spoken parts of the play. The song “Ye gentle spirits of the air,” which in the 1693 version directly precedes the arrival of the grotesque, lecherous haymakers, also functions as an invitation for the newly-summoned musicians to restore peace and order. However, the use of the term “division,” a word traditionally opposed, in musical terms, to harmony, and which refers to the musical breaking up of a long note into a number of short ones, also points to the dramatic situation at this stage of the play, where each “legitimate” couple is so to speak “divided,” to say nothing of the “poetry/music” dichotomy, a new “division” as far as the artistic media of this new semi-opera are concerned:

16

Ye gentle spirits of the air, appear!

Prepare, and join your tender voices here.

Catch and repeat the trembling sounds anew,

Soft as your sighs and sweet as pearly dew.

Run new divisions, and such measures keep

As when you lull the God of Love asleep.

17The restoration of order and harmony actually occurs in the course of the Act 4 masque, which begins after Titania and Oberon’s reconciliation, in response to the King of Fairies’ call for music:

18

Oberon

Titania, call for Musick.

Titania

Let us have all Variety of Musick,

All that should welcome the rising Sun.

19If Gary Jay Williams interprets the presence of the sun-god Phoebus as an allegorical representation of William III, and consequently as a celebration of absolute power (Williams 51), one can also see in the ordering of chaos by Phoebus—a figure that naturally also stands for the god of music and poetry—an incarnation of the infinite power of the musical art in its structuring and organising capacities. Such attributions are notably made manifest in the first lines of Dryden’s own celebration of music, “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687.” Incidentally, Dryden has been counted among the possible candidates for the authorship of the libretto of Purcell’s opera. At all event, the libretto clearly associates Phoebus not only with the preservation of seasonal order—a direct continuation of Titania’s Act 2 speech in the play—but also with the performance of play and song: “Spring: All your Sweets before him lay,/ Then round his Altar Sing and Play” (Anon. 1692, 41).

20If the Act 4 masque is meant to mark the musically-achieved return to order and harmony, the final entertainment is endowed with yet another function. As Gary Jay Williams has pointed out (Williams 52-53), the last masque of the opera begins after Theseus’s reputed speech on the force of the imagination supposed to express the character’s scepticism about the lovers’ stories of the night. The musical masque is thus explicitly introduced by Oberon as a corrective to the Duke’s doubts, music and spectacle being jointly presented as likely to succeed where mere words have failed:

21

Duke

I hear strange Musick, warbling in the Air.

Oberon

‘Tis Fairy Musick, sent by me;

To cure your Incredulity.

All was true the Lovers told,

You shall stranger things behold.

Mark the wonders shall appear,

While I feast your eye and ear.

22In the context of the final act, the mangled, over-simplified paraphrase of Theseus’s Act 5 speech also radically belittles the role of the poet, here transformed into an unreliable, oversensitive and romancing fantasizer, whose attributes are entirely amalgamated to those of the lunatic and the lover. Moreover, the belittling of the poet’s part, which marks the 1692 adaptation of the Dream both structurally and thematically, happens to be dramatized in the musical episode added for the 1693 revival of the play. The actual dismissal (“Drive’em hence away, away” [Anon. 1693, 7]) towards the end of Act 1 of a group of “three Drunken Poets” (6), mainly guilty of “Crimes,/. . . Nonsense, and. . . Dogrel Rhymes” (7), seems indeed to materialize the empowerment of the musical elements at the expense of the purely verbal ones. The topical allusions that have been deciphered here and there (Moore 108; Price 337-38; Holman 209-10, Pinnock and Wood), plus the uncertainty as to the number of poets involved—one in the score but three according to the stage directions, a possible allusion to the “committee” collaboration that presumably occurred (Savage 206; Williams 59-60)—, all point to the symbolic removal of the authors of the libretto, leaving pride of place to the triumphant musician, the only reliable authority in charge of the semi-opera. However conjectural such an allegorical reading may be found—but what allegorical reading is not!—, it does provide some meaning to an episode usually found “curious and. . . irrelevant” (Dent 216), “dramatically incongruous” (Price 338), the scene with the “scurvy Poet” (6) marking, in what appears as a dramatization of the tension opposing words and music, the final and definitive victory of the latter. If the genre of the semi-opera—a form deemed “generically troubling” by Williams (2), or “a problematic label” (38)—supposedly originated in the reluctance of the English “to see the spoken word completely sublimated to [the] seductions of music” (Williams 45), it is somehow tempting to imagine the composer himself, reportedly active in the conception of the whole libretto (Moore 103-104), deliberately taking the opposite view and lending a hand in the writing of the Act 1 addition.

23If one accepts to see the new versions of the Dream as manifestations of an aesthetic debate opposing different art-forms, one should be little surprised that the next two adaptations of Shakespeare’s play both replace the figure of the dismissed poet by that of an all-controlling musician.

24Indeed, Richard Leveridge’s and John Frederick Lampe’s successive settings of the artisans’ play Pyramus and Thisbe, respectively dated 1716 and 1745, both deal with the musical climate prevalent in their respective days (for an extended version of the following part, see Degott). Even though the two texts basically follow Shakespeare’s original, the de-contextualisation of the interlude radically diverts the original purpose of the play-within-the-play, now used to mock the formal exuberance of Italian opera, as made explicit in Leveridge’s preface:

25

This Tragical Tale the great Shakespear thought fit to turn into a most Comical Interlude, in a Play of his call’d The Midsummer Nights Dream, as Perform’d by a Company of Rusticks, set out in the lowest Air, and Style of downright Farce and Doggrel.
From that Immortal Author’s Original, I have made bold to Dress out the same in Recitative, and Airs, after the present Italian Mode, hoping I have given it the same Comical Face, though in a Musical Dress.

26In order to carry out such a transposition, Leveridge’s libretto inserts in the spoken part of the text the role of the fictive composer of the interlude, the aptly-named Mr Semibreve, a musician intent on introducing into England the beauties of Italian opera: “This is nothing to what we have abroad, and by degrees I am in hopes to bring our dull English to this polite Taste” ([Leveridge] 7). Two other invented characters, Gamut and Crotchet, find themselves endowed with the blasé, ironical words initially entrusted to the Athenian spectators of the artisans’ play in Shakespeare’s original. The two “personnagi” ([Leveridge] vi) thus vent the common-sense scepticism of the typical Englishman, appalled at the display of artificiality and absurdity taking place before his eyes. The new context of the adaptation adds different meaning and connotations to Shakespeare’s original words, such as the question “I wonder if the lion be to speak” (5.1.151), which finds in Leveridge’s version—“I wonder if the lion be to sing [emphasis mine]”—a new topical significance. It was the presence of a lion in the Italian opera L’Idaspe fedele (1710) which, following Addison’s furore in The Spectator (Addison 1: 55-65 [n°13 and 14]), had sparked off the heated debate on the appropriateness of Italian opera for the English stage.

27Lampe’s 1745 production takes even further the reflexive elements of the interlude which, thirty years later, acquire yet another dimension than that of 1716. Gamut and Crotchet have now been replaced by “Two Gentlemen” fresh from their grand tour on the continent and it is now Mr Semibrief’s task, with the performance of his opera Pyramus and Thisbe, to convince the two young fops that English opera is just as viable a product as the Italian opera so much favoured by the two petits-maîtres. The composer John Frederick Lampe had been extremely active in his effort to fight the hegemony of Italian opera by establishing English opera on the London stage (Fiske 127-70; Milhous and Hume):

28

Semibrief
You must know, Sir, one of these Gentlemen having made the Tour of Italy, has but little Taste for our homespun, English, Entertainments—nor has he yet got the better of his foreign Prejudice: But, between you and I, I don’t doubt, when he has heard a little of this Piece, I shall bring him to our Opinion; and let him see, the English Tongue is as fit for Musick, as any foreign Language of’em all.

29The conversation that precedes the overture thus includes all the musical topics of the day, such as the suitability of the English language for song, the extortionate fees demanded by Italian singers and the much-debated quality of English singing. Once again, the context of the new adaptation gives additional meaning to familiar words. The answer provided to the previous question—“I wonder if the lion be to sing”—, which now points to the topical issue of good singing, ideally fits the new context. If, in Shakespeare’s original, Demetrius’ reply— “No wonder, my lord: one lion may when many asses do” (5.1.152-53)—can be related to Titania and Bottom’s nocturnal indiscretions, the same sentence, in the new context of Lampe’s opera, is more likely to be understood as a slightly mischievous allusion to the Italian castrati of the day whose singing, intellect, psychology and even sexuality were often compared, in contemporary lampoons and engravings, to that of asses (Cervantes).

30The major difference between Leveridge’s adaptation and Lampe’s own rewriting of the text lies in the staged public’s appreciation of the musical interlude, the two young snobs finding themselves extremely lavish in their praise once convinced of the workability of the new art form—English opera—so much neglected in real life by the British nobility of the 1730s and 40s. The epilogue added by Lampe does indeed evoke the hopeful possibility of future similar entertainments:

31

Gentlemen and ladies, we’ve a boon to ask,

That you would deign to like our masque.

And, in return, our thanks we’ll pay,

With strife to please you day by day.

32Besides, the quality and the delicacy of Lampe’s music (Martin 87-164), neither incompatible with the burlesque nature of the libretto nor with its essentially parodistic intent, does much to give credit to this little afterpiece which entirely recycles Shakespeare’s words so as to translate the meta-theatrical dimension of the play-within-the-play onto the plane of contemporary musical practice and aesthetics. In giving a new context to Shakespeare’s verse, Lampe, while merely exploiting and altering some of the possibilities offered by Shakespeare’s original for the sake of publicizing his own generic forms, actually paved the way for the next adaptation of the Dream, the very illustration of the musical genre that the composer had tried to promote throughout the best part of his career.

33Although Garrick and the composer John Christopher Smith’s work The Fairies would unquestionably be regarded as an opera today, the entertainment offered to the public in 1755 was received as a generic oddity. This is at least what comes out of Theophilus Cibber’s appreciation of the piece: “The Midsummer Night’s Dream has been minc’d and fricaseed into an undigested and unconnected Thing, call’d The Fairies” (Cibber 36). George Odell’s later clarification, which also uses the slightly derogatory “thing,” somehow lacks conviction: “The whole thing is really an opera” (Odell 358).

34Indeed, the work thoroughly abides to temporary rules of operatic creation, what remains of Shakespeare’s text, duly sung throughout, having been transformed into a conventional succession of recitatives and arias (Fiske 242-44). The anonymous author of the libretto, assumed to be Garrick (Garrick 1980-1982, 3: 438-39) despite the actor’s protestations to the contrary (see Garrick 1963, 1: 256 [letter 178]), actually re-processed the original text to which were added sundry fragments, some of which from other Shakespeare plays (see preface) so as to provide the composer with the appropriate number of set-pieces (exit arias, simile arias, tempest arias, etc.). The following example, which draws the analogy between the agitations of the tempest of those of the mind, is thus in the purest tradition of the aria di paragone, or simile aria:

35

Helena

Love’s a tempest, life’s the ocean,

Passion crosst the deep deform;

Rude and raging tho’ the motion,

Virtue fearless, braves the storm:

Storms and tempests may blow over

And subside to gentle gales;

So the poor despairing lover,

When least hoping, oft prevails.

36In some cases, the librettist was apparently at pains to preserve a semblance of Shakespearian verse:

37

Helena

O Hermia fair, O happy, happy fair,

Your eyes are load stars, and your tongue’s sweet air,

More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear,

When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear:

O teach me how you look, and with what art

You sway the motion of your lover’s heart.

38Again, in an artistic genre where music naturally takes precedence over words, it comes as no surprise that some of the textual borrowings celebrate the superior power of music, hence the presence for instance of the celebrated passage from Henry VIII:

39

Queen

Orpheus with his lute made trees,

And the mountain tops that freeze,

Bow themselves when he did sing:

To his musick, plants and flowers

ver spring, as sun and showers

There had made a lasting spring.

40The main generic infringement of Smith and Garrick’s creation comes from the addition of a spoken Prologue, quite a novelty in the all-sung opera of the time. Not only does Garrick irreverently break basic operatic rules, but the very circumstances in which the Prologue was delivered acquire some meaning in the present discussion on the “music/words” dichotomy. Garrick’s interruption of the musical overture—the stage direction “Interrupting the Band of Music” (Garrick 1755, 4) could hardly be clearer—seems to mark the forceful intrusion of straight drama conventions into operatic practice. The words of Garrick’s Prologue, while first underlining the various incongruities of the whole enterprise including his own presence on stage, do indeed remind the public that, however prominent the part played by music may be, the poetical text should also have a say in operatic ventures:

41

A Moment stop your tuneful Fingers, pray,

While Here, as usual, I my Duty pay. [To the Audience.

Don’t frown, my Friends, [to the Band] you soon shall melt again;

But, if not There, is felt each dying Strain,

Poor I shall speak and you will scrape in vain.

To see me Now, you think the strangest Thing!

For, like Friend Benedick, I cannot sing:

Yet in this Prologue, cry but you, Coraggio!

I’ll speak you both a Jig, and an Adagio.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Three Nights ago, I heard a Tête à Tête,

Which fix’d, at once, our English Opera’s Fate:

One was a youth born here, but flush from Rome;

The other born abroad, but here his Home;

And first the English Foreigner began,

Who thus address’d the foreign Englishman:

An English Opera!’tis not to be born;

I, both my Country, and their Music scorn.

42The very name of the putative author of the libretto—a certain “Shakespearelli”—, not to mention the actor’s broken Italian or oxymoronic developments on the composer’s origins, also point to the specific nature of this adaptation, an impossible mixture of English and Italian traditions, a monstrous blend of verbal and musical practises (“speak […] a Jig, and an Adagio”), to which Garrick’s paean to Handel’s English oratorios adds further incongruity:

43

But why would this rash fool, this Englishman,

Attempt an Op’ra?—’tis the strangest Plan!

Struck with the Wonders of his Master’s [Handel’s] Art,

Whose sacred Dramas shake and melt the Heart,

Whose Heaven-born Strains the coldest Breast inspire,

Whose Chorus-Thunder sets the Soul on Fire!

44What is dramatised here, at this stage in the series of operatic adaptations, is clearly the call of the verbal text for more importance and transparency, for more clarity and visibility. Given the context, one cannot help establishing a parallel between the poet’s physical intrusion into the musical material of the work and the symbolic dismissal of the group of poets, as seen in Act 1 of The Fairy Queen.

45As was to be expected, the 1763 staging of the play marked a significant return to the spoken text, even though it still contained some 33 songs, some with music by Smith and other by Charles Burney or other composers (Loewenberg and Fiske 317). The composite nature of the plot, but also the generic indeterminacy of a show judged to be “more a masque than a play” (St. James Chronicle, 24 November 1763), seem to be both responsible for the disastrous flop of the first and only eighteenth-century performance of Shakespeare’s play bearing its original title. By several accounts, the failure was due to some of the singers’ poor acting and incapacity to deliver the versified part of the play, a problem no doubt unthinkable at the time of Purcell’s semi-operas when the singing and speaking casts were completely segregated:

46

I was last night at Drury Lane Theatre, to see the Revival of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream . . . . I never at one time saw at the Playhouse so much good and so much bad acting. The Children were admirable, most of the Grown Gentlemen and Ladies execrable. Three or four of the Performers showed themselves incapable of delivering blank Verse, except in Recitative.

47Whatever the real causes of the play’s failure, the issue of the dual task of performers expected to both deliver verse and sing elaborate music happens to be put in perspective by the new treatment of the “palpable gross play.” Although the mechanicals explicitly refer to a forthcoming performance of the theatrical interlude, duly rehearsed in Act 3, the actual rendition of the play is completely omitted in the 1763 production, replaced as it is by a musical number at the close of Act 1 supposed to be the rehearsal of the interlude’s sung epilogue. To the rehearsal of the spoken play is thus added the rehearsal of a musical epilogue, in a passage which strongly highlights the vocal and musical expertise of the artisans as well as their awareness of the existence of the more “polite”—and more lucrative—musical genres so much favoured by the aristocracy, whose constant support of Italian opera in the eighteenth century was a permanent source of vexation for the British intelligentsia:

48

Bottom

But hold ye, hold ye, neighbours; are your voices in order, and your tunes ready? For if we miss our musical pitch, we shall be all sham’d and abandon’d.

Quince

Ay, ay! Nothing goes down so well as a little of your sol, fa, and long quaver; therefore let us be in our airs—and for better assurance I have got the pitch-pipe.

Bottom

Stand round, stand round! We’ll rehearse our epilog—Clear up your pipes, and every man in his turn take up his stanza-verse—Are you ready?

49Musical matters, whether they be of an aesthetic or of a sociological nature, are once again at the core of the new derived version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which dramatizes the very ingredients making up the dual texture of a work equally composed of verbal and musical elements. Significantly, Garrick also makes use of music in order to enhance the theatrical aspects of the play, some of his verbal insertions occasionally dealing with the theatrical potential of music when used for purely dramatic reasons. Such is the case in Act 2, when Robin’s pouring of the magic juice onto Lysander’s eyes is accompanied by the playing of “soft musick,” the entrancing power of which, duly mentioned by the two characters, efficiently depicts and seconds the magic power of the juice:

50

Puck

But first I’ll throw into a trance,

This youth; that elves may round him dance:

Melting sounds your power impart,

That I may pierce his harden’d heart!

[Soft musick]

Lysander

Whence this sweet enchanting harmony!

51Here, the fusion of verse and music performs a function other than purely decorative, music being used as a dramatic agent invested with a specific purpose. By using stage music as a theatrical instrument, integrally related to the dramatic development of the play and meant to further and intensify the action, Garrick was going far beyond some of his predecessors or contemporaries, for whom music was essentially an incidental embellishment. In searching for musico-dramatic efficiency, the new adapter was actually amalgamating theatrical and operatic traditions, importing into straight drama some of the major ingredients of the new contemporary musical genres that were competing with native forms. In crossing and fertilizing traditions, Garrick was not only recognizing what Peter Holland called the “fluidity of [Shakespeare’s] text” (Holland 72) but he was innovatively and imaginatively playing with all possible forms of generic hybridity. Nowhere could the actor’s intentions be better formulated than in the dialogue preceding his operatic version of The Tempest (1756)—also with music by John Christopher Smith—, in which two characters discuss the desirability of adapting the works of the great writers for the musical stage. If the former deplores “this frittering and sol-fa ing our best poets” (Garrick 1980-1982, 3: 270), the latter strongly advocates the marriage of music and poetry:

52

We may boast, sincerely boast of many English composers. . . . Where can they show their talents unless upon the English stages?. . . let not our musical brethren be cast off because fashion, caprice, or manners too refined may have given you prejudices against’em. Music is the young sister of poetry and can boast her charms and accomplishments.

53Such a dialogue, in all ways reminiscent of the many debates on the primacy of words or music that were then raging in the world of opera, can be seen as of the crowning point of all the attempts at casting Shakespeare’s Dream into the mould of those ever-fermenting artistic forms. From the Restoration semi-opera to the post-Handelian all-sung opera via sundry intermediary compromises, the present survey can thus be read as an account of the evolution of the discourse on opera and on the relation between text and music. If, as many commentators have observed (Fiske, Price, White), the path towards genuine English opera was a tortuous one, it may well have been the use of music in supposedly straight drama that actually paved the way forward towards the creation of the distinctly all-sung English opera that, according to some, was still cruelly missing on the English stage.

54If Michael Dobson, in one of his studies of Shakespeare adaptations, mentions the eighteenth-century opposition between the nascent “vernacular culture hero” mainly supported by the English mercantile class and “the decadence of Continental taste” (Dobson 1996, 63) of which Italian Opera was supposed to be the epitome, the scrutiny of the successive adaptations of the Dream also exposes to what extent the vernacular musical genres derived from those oft-execrated continental imports informed the rendition and appreciation of Shakespeare’s play.

55While most versions of the Dream betray the Augustans’ proclivity for toning down some of the irrational and irregular aspects of the play, the successive adapters did not balk at blending art-forms and conventions, all the adaptations, even those far removed from their original source, constituting a fascinating spectrum of generic indeterminacy. Even though there may be little Shakespeare in some of them, all versions testify to the utmost resilience and adaptability of the play, each adaptation offering its own drastic reconsideration of the Dream. Indeed, each version illustrates the basic contradiction, once mentioned by Michael Dobson (Dobson 1992, 5), between the eighteenth century’s irrepressible wish to reinterpret the play’s meanings and the period’s simultaneous desire to canonize and deify Stratford’s Bard.