SOURCE: Burnett, Mark Thornton. “Impressions of Fantasy: Adrian Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, pp. 73-101. London: Macmillan, 2000.

[In the following essay, Burnett discusses Adrian Noble's 1996 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, noting that while Noble's 1994-95 Royal Shakespeare Company stage production of the play was lauded by critics, the film adaptation received primarily negative reviews. Burnett reevaluates the film, praising it as a reinvention of the comedy “for the millennium.”]

When Adrian Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of its 1994-5 Stratford-upon-Avon and touring programme, the production attracted widespread acclaim. Eminent critics joined to sing the praises of a ‘magnificent’, ‘notable’, ‘outstanding’, ‘stunning’ and ‘vibrant’ reinterpretation of Shakespeare's play.¹ No doubt spurred on by this theatrical success, the RSC, in collaboration with Channel Four, quickly set about transferring the production to celluloid. The film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, again directed by Noble, was commercially released to a limited number of cinemas in 1996 and, in 1997, made its way to a TV showing and the video market. But the passage from stage to screen proved an unhappy experience. As a film, A Midsummer Night's Dream, contrary to the expectations aroused by the reception of its previous incarnation, was roundly criticized. Directorial inadequacy had resulted in a ‘botched’ creation (stated The Daily Telegraph), an ‘unmitigated disaster’ (asserted The Observer: Review) and a ‘highbrow pantomime’ (agreed The Sunday Times: Culture).² Concluded The Times: ‘Noble still thinks like a primitive’, offers us a reading of the play that is ‘charmless under the camera's close scrutiny’ and ‘puts the Bard's cause back a hundred years’.³ Such a chorus of condemnation invites a considered response. In this essay, I aim to redress the filmic reputation of Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream by concentrating on its stylistic felicities and postmodern aspirations. Rather than putting the Bard's cause back a hundred years, I will suggest, the film reinvents Shakespeare for the millennium, both recalling high Victorian decadence and looking ahead to the dawning of the new century. Before that argument can be developed, however, we need to return to the play itself.

In the opening scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Egeus, outraged at his daughter Hermia's reluctance to accept his choice of marriage partner, accuses her lover, Lysander, of having ‘stolen the impression of her fantasy’.⁴ This printing metaphor is quickly taken up by Theseus, who reminds Hermia that her ‘father should be as a god; / One that composed your beauties—yea, and one / To whom you are but as a form in wax / By him imprinted’ (I.i.47-50). Thus does the play evoke women's positions in relation to patriarchal discipline and perceived malleability in the hands of fathers and governors alike. But the metaphors deployed here also suggest the role of the imagination in the artistic process: at one and the same time Hermia is a pawn in a struggle for an appropriate alliance and the raw material out of which will be fashioned a new entity. Indeed, the shaping ‘imagination’ (V.i.8) can be seen as essential to the action as a whole. It is not accidental that the ‘mechanicals’ are made up of carpenters and joiners (both types of artist). Nor is it irrelevant that Theseus should, towards the conclusion, play a variation upon his original argument, claiming that ‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such … fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends’ (V.i.4-6). In many ways, the power struggles of A Midsummer Night's Dream are conducted through representations of the myriad ‘forms’ (V.i.15) that the creative faculty is driven to produce.

In New Historicist criticism, in particular, these struggles have been read in terms of contemporary anxieties that obtained in the Elizabethan state. Louis Montrose, in a 1996 study, approaches A Midsummer Night's Dream by mapping the various contexts—the interplay among discourses of gender, social status and theatricality—that were a ‘condition of the play's imaginative possibility’.⁵ However, it also needs to be recognized that, as much as the play's prevailing concerns are in dialogue with the cultural complexion of the 1590s, they have an equally significant contextual location in later historical periods. Taking the various ‘impressions’ or ‘forms’ made by ‘fantasy’ or the ‘imagination’, Noble's filmic A Midsummer Night's Dream serves them up as a postmodern mixture of childhood reminiscences, self-conscious literary allusions, sexual awakenings and reminders of a turn-of-the-century environment.

Chiefly, it is through the interpolated character of the Boy (Osheen Jones) that the film manages to rewrite the play's imaginative topos. The film opens with the Boy asleep in his bedroom, which is crowded with books, puppets, a rocking-horse and a miniature theatre. It quickly modulates to the scene of the play itself—the Athenian court. By placing the Boy first under and then at the table in this aristocratic world, the film grants him a key responsibility in the ensuing narrative: his is the guiding perspective, to the extent that he is capable, dramaturge-like, of giving birth to fairies from the bubbles created by his own toy pipe. At other points, the Boy assumes a more directive role still, as when he pushes Bottom's motorbike and propels forward a spherical moon, suggesting the centrality of the child's imperatives and projections to the play's unfolding events. Like Puck (Barry Lynch), the Boy has the power to activate and to generate. He ‘bodies forth’ (V.i.14) in the ‘empty space’ of his invention both the personalities and the properties that will people his dream.⁶

Crucial to the film are the ways in which the Boy's imaginative energies simultaneously empower and enslave. Even as he authors the ‘forms’ of his ‘fantasies’, appropriately envisioning the fairies as much younger versions of himself (their baggy trousers recall infants in diapers), the Boy is represented as the ‘changeling’ (II.i.120) over whom Titania (Lindsay Duncan) and Oberon (Alex Jennings) fight. During the realization of Titania's speech about the ‘votaress’ of her ‘order’ (II.i.123), the camera focuses in on a conventionally ‘Indian’ (II.i.124) image of the Boy in a turban—his distraught expression indicates his alarm at becoming the object of the King and Queen's dissension. In addition, when the toy theatre is magically transported to the forest, the Boy must struggle with Oberon for ownership of the puppets' strings. Oberon's seizure of a model figure from the theatre implies that he has no qualms in usurping the Boy's manipulative privileges. Power in Noble's conception of things is a matter of contest, and no one is permitted to exercise a secure and unchanging control. If, in the play, then, tensions cluster about the father's hopes for his daughter, in the film, they are extended to encompass wider generational conflicts and the predicament of a child in a divided familial landscape. In common with other recent ‘Shakespearean’ films, such as Lloyd Kaufman's Tromeo and Juliet (1996) and Jocelyn Moorhouse's A Thousand Acres (1998), Noble in A Midsummer Night's Dream deploys the Bard to hint at the increasing untenability of the late twentieth-century nuclear family as a practical ideal. For all his imaginative abilities, the Boy is still subject to the crises and estrangements of his adoptive parents.

To shore up the role of the Boy in the imaginative process, the film draws upon a variety of motifs from children's literature. Its opening frame of the Boy asleep is lent additional force by the copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, which lies beside him on the bedclothes. When he falls through the night sky and a chimney pot to encounter the ‘mechanicals’, the descent of Alice down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the depiction of the tornado in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) are brought to mind. (Crying ‘Mummy!’ and screaming as he is pitched into darkness, the Boy seems on the point of entering not so much his dream at this point as his nightmare.) Each pivotal moment is accompanied by allusions to narratives that either evoke childhood richly or appeal to a collective children's memory. For instance, the flying umbrellas used by the fairies for their wonder-inducing entrances and exits recall P. L. Travers' Mary Poppins (1934); the departure of Bottom (Desmond Barrie) and Titania across the water in an upturned umbrella is reminiscent of Edward Lear's sea-loving and moon-seeking animals, the owl and the pussycat; and the scene of Bottom flying across the moon on his motorbike harks back to the escape of ‘E. T.’ in the film of the same name. The result is less an experience of Shakespeare as it is an intertextual rehearsal of familiar children's stories, past and present. In this way, Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream pushes back the perimeters of what constitutes ‘Shakespeare’, combining elements from ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural traditions and mixing ‘old’ and ‘new’ representational materials.

The film's investment in the trappings of childhood has a three-fold effect. First, the echoes of both literary and filmic forms point to the ways in which the imaginative impetus has assumed a wide range of manifestations across history. On the one hand, A Midsummer Night's Dream longs nostalgically for the heyday of children's literature in a late Victorian context; on the other, it revels in the possibilities afforded by a unprecedented wave of children's films, as references to ‘E. T.’ and Home Alone suggest.⁷ (In this connection, the print culture outlined at the start is placed in a rivalrous relationship to the power of alternative media and new informational practices.) It is as if Noble seeks a mode of production that addresses the ‘special effects’ requirements of a younger, cinematically demanding spectator, while also answering to the more intellectual expectations of the twentieth-century Shakespearean filmgoer. The invocation of popular literary predecessors argues for the Bard's perennial appeal; the use of technological wizardry discovers the dramatist being appropriated to satisfy a modern sensibility.

Motifs from children's literature speak to the implied child in the audience in more specific ways, however. At a secondary level, the narratives alluded to in A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the film itself, work to equip the Boy (and thus the generation he represents) with important social skills and interpersonal capacities. Like Alice and Dorothy, to whom, in his parentless condition, he is allied, the Boy undergoes a series of extraordinary dislocations, as a result of which he is finally able to confront ‘reality’ in a more self-aware and constructive fashion than before.⁸ This, of course, is the pattern elaborated in children's stories in their more traditional guise. As Paul Schilder states of the Alice stories, ‘the child uses Carroll's … anxiety situations in a way similar to the manner in which the child uses Mother Goose Rhymes. They take them as an understood reality which one can hope to handle better after one has played and worked with it.’⁹ It is also the pattern characteristic of the fairy-tale, a form with a similar educative aspect. Bruno Bettelheim has said of fairy-tales that they explore the ‘need … to find meaning in our lives’. By suggesting ‘solutions to perturbing problems’, he argues, such tales reveal the ‘struggle to achieve maturity’ and ‘caution against the destructive consequences if one fails to develop higher levels of responsible self-hood’.¹⁰ Although A Midsummer Night's Dream, in its self-conscious elaboration of a child's experiences, follows neither of these trajectories exactly, the Boy's experiments with his creative abilities, involvement in his adoptive parents' conflicts and property disputes with a father figure reveal more than a passing resemblance to the generic processes whereby other fictional children are enabled to foster their personal development. They show the Boy testing and stretching the boundaries of childhood, striving towards a realizable autonomy.

A key element of the child's development is the confrontation with his or her own sexuality. In this regard, the third effect of Noble's investment in the cultural production of childhood comes into play. Through amalgamating a Shakespearean art form with the stuff of childhood ‘fantasies’, the director reactivates the sexual dimensions that underlie all mythic archetypes. In his classic The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim posits that fairy tales negotiate the uncertain sexual terrain between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, at times concerning themselves with specific crises such as ‘Oedipal anguish’.¹¹ With reference to Alice in Wonderland, A. M. E. Goldschmidt makes more detailed claims for the sexual import of children's stories: the lock and the key, and the descent down the well, he contends, belong to ‘the common symbolism of … coitus’.¹² Nowhere in Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream are obviously Oedipal crises hinted at; however, the film abounds in scenes of sexual revelation and voyeurism, which read in many ways as a working through of Goldschmidt's critical position. Sexuality in A Midsummer Night's Dream is initially brought to the Boy's attention via moments of heterosexual tension and displaced masculinity. Thus the Boy undergoes something of a primal scene when, at the start, he is privy to the chief protagonists' ‘nuptial’ (I.i.1) plans: Hippolyta's reference here to the ‘silver bow / New-bent’ (I.i.9-10) is, in Lindsay Duncan's delivery, made to bristle with all the erotic energy of unconsummated desire. More obscurely, perhaps, sexuality is paraded before the Boy during the rehearsals of the ‘mechanicals’, which take place in the war-time austerity of a corrugated hut. As Noble admitted in interview, a Dad's Army effect was aimed for in these scenes, and certainly the fire extinguishers, dartboards and old sporting trophies that adorn the hut walls appear as telling indicators of the 1940s.¹³ But the temporal markers are also instrumental in constructing the ‘mechanicals’ as sexual outcasts, who can have no place in the war effort. The effeminacy of Francis Flute (Mark Letheren), it is implied, identifies him as an unfit soldier, while the braggadocio of Bottom, the film suggests, constitutes the sublimated sexuality of a man debarred from the battlefield. Because the Boy is simultaneously the voyeuristic auditor of the rehearsals, the film allows him to bear witness to a range of expressions of sexuality, from pre-marital badinage to compensatory theatricals. His is the blank page on which A Midsummer Night's Dream writes a vicarious experience of sexuality's frustrations and possibilities.

Nor do glimpses into the sexual world of adulthood end with the opening scenes. What might be termed a floating phallus is, via visual details and linguistic emphases, frequently tied to the Boy, suggesting a particularly forceful engagement with the archetypal paradigms that inform mythic narratives. The elongated handle of the sumptuous red parasol in which Titania drapes herself first suggests the male member, and the spectacle is lent an additional phallic flavour by the arch rendering of the accompanying song: ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue, / Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen’ (II.ii.9-10). That which the film suggests at the level of metaphor it soon takes up in physical action. Once Bottom, as an ass, has been granted a view of Titania's pudenda, he is spurred on to penetrate her violently from the rear. Given the graphic nature of Bottom's transformation, it therefore seems appropriate that the recollection of his ‘vision’ (IV.i.203) should be imbued with a sexual charge: with its bawdy ‘methought I had’ refrain, his account is presented as a reverie upon the delights of priapic tumescence. Dovetailing with, and suffused through, these moments are the Boy's responses. In them, an audience is prompted to discover the ‘impression’ of an awakening consciousness, one poised between the child's sense of sexual wonder and the adult's knowledge of sexual practice. Indeed, at one point the Boy actually assumes the phallic qualities that characterize his adult counterparts. Coming across Hermia (Monica Dolan) as she dreams of the ‘crawling serpent [at her] breast’ (II.ii.152), the Boy, magician-like, subjects her to levitation, thereby becoming, through a process of association, the phallus that is at the heart of the nightmare. Confirming the connection are the broader visual links forged between the Boy's stripy pyjamas, the strip flooring and the snaky implications of the parasol handle. Part of the business of achieving sexual responsibility, it might be argued, is knowing what to do with the phallus, and this is borne out in A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the Boy is chief participant in a number of organ-oriented scenarios. Dominated and dominant in his imagined universe, the Boy is forewarned of both the pleasures and the dangers of his future maturity.

Such is the nature of Noble's direction, moreover, that the Boy's experience is not restricted to examples of heterosexual behaviour alone. The film, in fact, is equally rife with interludes of homoerotic attraction. Perhaps inspired by recent queer appropriations of Shakespeare, Noble chooses to have Demetrius (Kevin Doyle) highlight the phrase, ‘cheek by jowl’ (III.ii.338), as part of a homerotic alliance with Lysander (Daniel Evans) against Helena (Emily Raymond). Similarly, just before he is turned into an ass, Bottom struggles to rid himself of Puck, who has climbed aboard his back. The implication is that the same-sex combination of fairy and mortal sets the seal on the weaver's subsequent bestial metamorphosis. While the Boy is not directly involved in these scenes, the underlying idea is still that sexuality is an uncertain property, that a child's gendered identity may be ‘shape[d]’ (V.i.16) by the external factors with which it comes into contact.

Cumulatively, and not surprisingly, the shifting sexual perspectives that characterize Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as its ironic rewritings, invocations of modes of artistic production, confoundings of the states of ‘fantastic’ and ‘real’, conjurations of competing temporal markers and signifiers, and manipulations of forms of history mark the film out as a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon. As the late twentieth century draws to a close, Shakespeare and postmodernity, in fact, have become increasingly familiar bedfellows. In an age of post-capitalist ‘mechanical reproduction’, discussion invariably attends to the ways in which the dramatist operates less as a point of origin than as a prompt for all manner of cultural associations, a commodity that can be copied and imitated as well as applied and exploited.¹⁴ Richard Burt's Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (1998), a study of the semantics of Shakespearean authority in modern American culture, is indicative of this shift in the critical mindset. If hybridity, pastiche, pluralism, cultural ransacking and the recourse to other texts and images are the defining marks of postmodernity, then the mise-en-scène of Noble's film makes a timely contribution to the postmodern debate.¹⁵

Through its self-conscious deployment of a number of representational ‘forms’, A Midsummer Night's Dream makes newly relevant the play's ‘antique fables’ and ‘fairy toys’ (V.i.3). In particular, by granting the parentless Boy some of the power of the dramaturge himself, it questions the extent to which Shakespeare still signifies an ‘original’, the ‘parent’ (II.i.117) to which the later development of the ‘great literary tradition’ can be traced. Even the set design functions as an important element in the film's interrogative confrontation with the Bard's mythic status. Numerous mirrors festoon the Athenian and forest interiors. At court, Helena contemplates her reflection in a glass; in the forest, Bottom glimpses pursuing fairies in the mirror of his motorbike. Privileging mirrors in this way serves a meta-cinematic purpose. It urges us to be sensitive to another reflective surface (the lens of the camera) and thus to recognize the constructed nature of the visions the film provides. Mirrors in A Midsummer Night's Dream, then, provoke an attempt to distinguish the authentic from the counterfeit, to adjudicate between the various accretions of Shakespearean doubling, reproduction and imitation in postmodern culture. Noble reminds his audience that he deals not so much in Shakespeare as in the meanings that a filmic engagement with the Bard might stimulate. ‘Forgeries’ (II.i.81), in short, A Midsummer Night's Dream implies, may eventually prove more resilient than the ‘originals’ to which they are parodically related.

Postmodernity, as critics have recently argued, cannot be linked to the twentieth century in its entirety. For it acquires much of its impact from an association with specifically fin-de-siècle anxieties. As Hillel Schwartz observes, ‘what the postmodernist narrative celebrates is suspiciously millennial: a world of unending variety … a world of transitive and playful identities, a world unencumbered by traditional demarcations of space or normative experiences of time’.¹⁶ Ever alert to the implications of such connections, Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream elaborates its material in not one but several end-of-century modes. In itself, of course, as a play dating from 1594-5, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a millennial production, written in a decade of economic crisis. Ian Archer sums up the contemporary climate in the following terms: ‘Harvest failures spelt impoverishment for the mass of the people, and crime soared … Poor harvests in 1594 and 1595 were followed by two years of dearth in 1596 and 1597.’¹⁷ The play is acutely responsive to this situation, and Titania's extended meditation on ‘Contagious fogs’ (II.i.90), the bank-breaking ‘river’ (II.i.91), rotting ‘green corn’ (II.i.94), ‘distemperature’ (II.i.106) and altered ‘seasons’ (II.i.107) can be profitably read as a nervous reaction to a desperate moment in England's economic fortunes. Noble's filmic A Midsummer Night's Dream, too, works to acknowledge the speech's point of origin in the fraught years of the 1590s. As Lindsay Duncan as Titania intones the celebrated words, the camera pans out to show mists gathering ominously over the sea and the music swells to climax on a foreboding note. True to the film's postmodern credentials, however, the montage here simultaneously invites spectators of the 1990s to assimilate messages pertinent to their historical location. For a late twentieth-century audience, the visual conjunction between water and fog points to chemically induced ‘natural’ disasters in the same moment as it precipitates memories of the Holocaust and fears of the imminent apocalypse.

Both the 1590s and the 1990s, however, are arguably overshadowed in the film by references to the nineteenth century's final decade. From the very start of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is the symbolic appurtenances of the 1890s that predominate. The Boy's copy of the play, for instance, emblazoned with the name of Arthur Rackham, evokes that turn-of-the-century artist who enjoyed considerable success with his illustrated edition, published in 1900, of Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.¹⁸ The turn of the century is returned to again in the borrowing from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, also published in 1900, and finds cinematic confirmation in the scenes set at the Athenian court. Here, the cast-iron fireplaces, chandeliers, red and green corridors, sash windows, four-panelled doors and tessellated floors function as carefully chosen signifiers of a decadent late Victorian historical juncture: not surprisingly, Theseus comes into this Homes and Gardens setting dressed as a Wilde-attired aesthete. Commenting on the 1890s, Robert Newman observes: ‘In ways that present striking parallels to the 1590s and the 1990s, the 1890s attempted to constrain threats to the social order in a context marked by shifting articulations of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity.’¹⁹ Newman does not elaborate, but it may be that he has in mind the traditional construction of the 1890s as a period in which the splendours of imperialism were beginning to be tarnished, in which fears of ‘anarchism’ circulated, in which established religion was on the decline, in which the so-called ‘New Woman’ was paving the way for the Suffragettes and in which belief was fading in the power of the middle classes.²⁰ As a transitional moment in history, then, the 1890s lend themselves well to the premeditated imperatives and overall effect of Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taking off from the 1590s, the film addresses the 1990s via a detour of the 1890s, borrowing from a spectrum of fantastic ‘impressions’ to reflect upon the future ‘forms’ that the ‘Shakespearean’ imagination will surely adopt or may never assume.

Nowhere are the connections between imagination and reproduction, overlapping sexualities and historical time-frames, and autonomy and domination more precisely illustrated than in the film's final moments. Earlier in the film, we have seen both the Boy and Puck as auditors at the rehearsals of the ‘mechanicals’, suggesting that each is an influence upon the ultimate shape of the play-within-a-play. This idea is elaborated upon in the closing stages of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the imaginative impetus features not so much as an autonomous endeavour as an aspect of collaborative enterprise. Reciprocity is hinted at when Philostrate (Barry Lynch) takes the Boy's hand and leads him into the theatre where the amateur theatricals are about to take place. The theatre itself is an enlarged version of the toy theatre, earlier seen in the forest scenes and the Boy's bedroom. Such a shift in scale implies that the Boy's power will be diminished while that of the ‘mechanicals’ is about to be increased: no longer is a child able to aspire to absolute control over the imaginative experience. Nor is an audience frustrated in its meta-theatrical suspicions. As the performance begins, the Boy is seen in the wings raising the curtain and generally pulling at the ropes of the stage machinery. Even if he is able to conjure images and sequences from his favourite texts, the film suggests, the Boy requires the assistance of a host of underlings to bring his visions to life. Bruno Bettelheim has argued that fairy stories enable children to achieve ‘meaningful and rewarding relations with the world around’ them, since they concentrate on integrating isolated ‘personalities’ with the social and cultural collective.²¹ A comparable operation can be detected in Noble's film, for it is only when he participates in a joint venture, rescinding theatrical authority to the ‘mechanicals’, that the Boy's dream can be fully realized.

Closely allied to his newly collaborative role is the Boy's developing grasp of the potential consequences of adult sexual conduct. The phallus, the film implies, cannot forever float irresponsibly, but must form part of an integrated whole. When the hymenal wall has been broken and the bloody ‘mantle’ (V.i.274) connoting deflowerment has been cast upon the stage, therefore, the mood of levity lifts, the Boy and the theatre audience becoming sober, calm and quiet. Along with his aristocratic auditors, the Boy hovers on the cusp of a liminal moment, an incipient awareness of the relationship between sexuality and mortality.

Illuminating still further the Boy's imaginative collaboration and evolving sexual identity is the film's concluding emphasis upon the restorative power of familial relations. Even before the closing celebrations, the Boy has been prepared for the healing of fractured families, having overheard the prediction made by Oberon that the lovers will soon be ‘Wedded with Theseus all in jollity’ (IV.i.91). At the end, the focus of the film thus moves away from the isolation of the Boy in his private box and toward his incorporation within a series of new family scenarios. Once the ‘mechanicals’ have concluded their performance, the back of the theatre gives way to reveal a magical, moon-lit stretch of water. The liquid spectacle suggests rebirth, and this is clarified in the accompanying shot of the Boy being embraced by Oberon, Titania, Puck and the fairies. Picking up upon the references to ‘nativity’ (V.i.403) in Oberon's benediction, the film constructs the assembly as a welcoming family, as a parent, child and sibling group that only now can announce itself with certainty. Given its postmodern credentials, however, A Midsummer Night's Dream does not settle upon one family alone. The film's very last image is of the Boy in the lap of another family: returned to the theatre, he is cradled by the whole cast for the curtain call. It is, of course, to the cinema spectators that the cast appeals for applause, a move which neatly identifies us as the key collaborative element in the exercise of imaginative judgement.

With these final moments, the film blurs purposefully once again the dividing-lines between its ‘realities’ and ‘fantasies’, court and forest locations, and characters and institutions. It hints, in fact, at the interchangeability of Shakespearean representations, reminding us, at a deeper level of its fabric, of the collaborative transferability of a production that, via a complex of funding agencies, managed to gravitate from a stage performance to a screen presentation. The play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the film wants to suggest, does not only exist on the printed page; rather, it consorts with, and is revitalized by, the new media and technologies that have revolutionized the twentieth century. As the clock chimes twelve in the closing sequence, harking back to the striking of midnight in the Boy's bedroom at the start, it seems as if one era has ended and another is about to commence.

Notes

1. Michael Coveney, ‘Filth well worth revelling in’, The Observer, 7 August 1994; Louise Doughty, ‘Dream lovers’, The Mail on Sunday: Review, 7 August 1994; John Gross, ‘Heady stuff, this reality’, The Sunday Telegraph, 21 August 1994; The Sunday Times, 7 August 1994.

2. The Daily Telegraph, 26 December 1997, p. 31; The Observer: Review, 1 December 1996, p. 12; The Sunday Times: Culture, 1 December 1996, p. 9.

3. The Times, 28 November 1996, p. 39.

4. A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Stanley Wells (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), I.i.32. All further references appear in the text.

5. Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 160.

6. I am recalling here, of course, Peter Brook's famously unadorned production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970-1 and the title of his book, The Empty Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

7. On the Home Alone parallel, see Richard Burt, Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), p. 3. Peter Pan (1953), Pinocchio (1940) and Time Bandits (1981) would be related films which transport a parentless child from ‘reality’ into an imaginative landscape.

8. For further Alice/Dorothy parallels, see Martin Gardner, ‘A child's garden of bewilderment’, in Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs and L. F. Ashley (eds), Only Connect: Readings of Children's Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 153.

9. Paul Schilder, ‘Psychoanalytic Remarks on Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll’, in Robert Phillips (ed.), Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dreamchild as seen through the Critics' Looking-Glasses, 1865-1971 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 343.

10. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp. 3, 5, 183.

11. Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, p. 115.

12. A. M. E. Goldschmidt, ‘Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalysed’, in Phillips (ed.), Aspects of Alice, p. 330.

13. Matt Wolf, ‘From Stratford’, The Times, 19 December 1995.

14. I draw here, of course, on Walter Benjamin's essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. See his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp. 219-53.

15. See Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 187-8; Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 54, 161; Angela McRobbie, ‘Postmodernism and popular culture’, in Lisa Appignanesi (ed.), Postmodernism: ICA Documents 5 (London: ICA, 1986), pp. 54-7.

16. Hillel Schwartz, ‘Economies of the Millennium’, in Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (eds), The Year 2000: Essays on the End (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), p. 315.

17. Ian Archer, ‘The 1590s: Apotheosis or Nemesis of the Elizabethan Régime?’, in Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman (eds), Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 65, 71.

18. It might be suggested that Rackham is a particularly appropriate artist for the film to invoke. One of his reflections on his art—‘[I believe] in the educative power of imaginative … pictures … for children in their most impressionable years’—is conducted in language redolent of Shakespeare's play. See Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 806-7.

19. Robert Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Newman (ed.), Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 7.

20. See Asa Briggs, ‘The 1890s: Past, Present and Future in Headlines’, in Briggs and Snowman (eds), Fins de Siècle, pp. 157-95.

21. Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, pp. 11, 14.