"Plays exist for one purpose only: to be brought to life... A performance should bring the plays, with the audience, to the highest level of life within them." Peter Brook (quoted in Rosenbaum)
This edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, although superficially similar to other contemporary critical editions, is built on some very different concepts of what the purpose of an edition is, what an edition itself is, and even what – at the most fundamental level – the underlying work is.
As a result, it differs markedly in tone and substance from most other editions currently available. This preface will explore in greater detail what those differences are, but in the broadest strokes these can be summarized as conceptualizing you not as a literary reader with a predisposition for silent study of a fixed artifact, but a "user" with a bias for experiential exploration of a potential performance. While it will be particularly useful for actors and theatrical practitioners, the idea behind it is that the best way for anyone to approach a Shakespearean text is by speaking it aloud and imagining its theatrical potential. With just a little guidance, even very young students can successfully explore the text and discover it not only through intellectual processes, but by feeling its rhythm, shape and power.
"To understand any play text fully you have to speak it." (Patsy Rodenburg)
In addition to the bibliographic concerns (stable text, apparatus, notes and glosses) this edition also extensively engages with performance issues. Those include scansion, heightened language, current performance practice, and contemporary interpretations of the play. All editions attempt to make the play more approachable by adopting printing conventions and annotations that clarify the form. This one is following that tradition but instead of seeking primarily to make it easier to read, the goal here is to make it easier to use.
To the surprise of many a novice encountering Shakespearean editorial practice for the first time, there are no definitive versions of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's original handwritten manuscripts have long since disappeared and, in fact, may never have existed in the finalized and polished form modern readers imagine. We know the work only because of hugely flawed printed copies dating from before 1642. These have some claim to direct continuity with Shakespeare or his company, but are filled with so many obvious errors, omissions and contradictions, that their authority is at best uncertain.
Adding to the confusion, texts of a single title often exist in multiple versions that differ markedly from one another. Hamlet, for example, was printed in three different versions that feature different words, lines, scenes, scene orders, and, in some cases, different character names. The longest of the three is twice the length of the shortest. King Lear exists in two versions that differ from each other in enough detail that current editorial practice is to treat them as separate plays. Other plays show clear signs of revision that complicate - literally, necessitate - the editorial task.
An edition is simply the work of an editor (or team of editors) trying to make sense of the remaining, often conflicted, evidence in order to make the play(s) accessible to contemporary users. Individual editors try to go about this in a variety of ways, based upon their assumptions about the relationship of the printed Renaissance versions to Shakespeare's manuscripts, as well as their assumptions about the needs of current readers.
At the beginning of Shakespeare's career, plays occupied approximately the same "literary" position that television scripts occupy for us. The general public has an intense interest in the product, but the standard form of publication (in the most fundamental sense of "making public") is performance, not print. Despite the huge following many television programs have, most members of the audience have never seen a teleplay in print. On rare occasions some such scripts become available as books for writers and obsessive fans, but these are a specialty interest. They lack the intellectual placement as literature that novels, and even some film scripts, have. They are just a way for a small number of screenwriters at the pinnacle of the profession to make a few extra bucks off a script after it has been produced.
There is little reason to believe that when A Midsummer Night's Dream was originally written Shakespeare had the idea that it would ever see print. When, under various circumstances it did, the main reason for the errors, omissions and problems they contain is probably that these issues were unresolved in the original manuscript. In all likelihood Shakespeare was careless, or rather open-ended, about fixing matters that would be worked out in rehearsal anyway. (It made no real difference, for example, if in Julius Caesar, he wrote, "I had rather be a dog that bays the moon," instead of "I'd rather…" because any skilled actor would scan the line and know to contract the first two words.) It is just common sense that his time was more valuably spent as an actor preparing performances, from which he made his living, or writing the next play, than diligently proofreading a play that might expect to receive under a dozen total performances even when it was a big hit!
In short, MND was not a manuscript prepared for posterity as a record of what happened, or for enduring literary fame. This is hard for contemporary readers to grasp because our encounters with plays of all sorts, but especially those of Shakespeare, are usually in literature classes where they have become exactly the kind of historical documents they were not originally intended to be. Without necessarily intending to do so, most editions impose the role of passive observer onto the reader.
If not an historic record, then what is a play? Within the theatrical context, its native home, a play is a plan for a future event. It may be a very rough one, or it may be a somewhat polished one, but it is never assumed to be a finished product. It is not a map of an archeological excavation, but a blueprint for a structure still to be built. We all understand that a blueprint is not a building, it is just the directions for how to create one.
The best reason for the roughness of plays in Shakespeare's times (like teleplays in ours) is that the initial script is just the first step in a collaborative process. A host of other people, including producers, actors, directors, designers and technicians (and not infrequently co-authors and script doctors) are involved in order to bring the script "to life." This was as true of Shakespeare as it was of other playwrights in his time, and is still true of writers of teleplays in ours. The only difference, as scholar Stephen Orgel has pointed out, is that as a co-owner of the theater company and an actor in his own plays, Shakespeare was in on more parts of the collaboration than comparable authors (Authentic Shakespeare 84).
This edition attempts to restore the implicit assumption that the user is not a passive reader, but will become an active collaborator. It treats the theatrical event as fulfillment, not debasement, of the raw materials.
Although the Users' Guide will explore these concepts in far greater detail, here are quick indicators of a few of the ways this edition does so:
The elasticity of the English language is foregrounded so that the speaker (even if she is a student studying the work) can actively explore the rhythmic effect of the verse lines, and feel the actor's part in creating it. Every attempt is made to ease sight-reading the play aloud, instead of perpetuating print conventions.
Stage directions, even historically interesting ones that possibly came directly from Shakespeare, are modified into practical and accurate modern forms. For example, the wonderfully evocative "Enter a Fairy at one door, and Robin Goodfellow at another" is changed to "Enter a Fairy and Puck from opposite directions" because modern productions are highly unlikely to have doors in their "forests."
Notes on the text emphasize modern performance practice over historic explanation. Although it is interesting to know how early modern audiences might have experienced the plays, we cannot undo the viewpoint of audiences of our time with footnotes. This is especially true with issues of race, class and gender. For example, when Lysander spurns Hermia with the racial epithets, "Ethiope" and "tawny Tartar," many modern audience members are, justifiably, offended. How such challenges are addressed in modern performance becomes the focus of the note in this edition, rather than the usual historic contextualizing of these as mere rhetorical figures.