Shakespeare's Plays in Popular Culture by Douglas Lanier

• "It is the Green-eyed Monster": Othello in Popular Culture
• "Caviar to the General": Hamlet in Popular Culture
  
• "That You Have but Slumbered Here": A Midsummer Night's Dream in Popular Culture
  
• "A Kind of Merry War": Much Ado About Nothing in Popular Culture
  
• "Unaccommodated Man": King Lear in Popular Culture
  
• "What's In A Name?": Romeo and Juliet in Popular Culture
  
• "Hours Dreadful and Things Strange": Macbeth in Popular Culture
• "Determined to be a Villain": Richard III in Popular Culture
• "O, What a Fall Was There, My Countrymen!": Julius Caesar in Popular Culture
• "Kiss me, Kate": The Taming of the Shrew in Popular Culture
• "A Sea Change / Into Something Rich and Strange": The Tempest in Popular Culture
  

Excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream

“That You Have but Slumbered Here”: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Popular Culture

Though A Midsummer Night’s Dream has become one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, it was not always so. Throughout the later seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, Midsummer was widely regarded as minor Shakespeare, and it was rarely staged by the legitimate theaters of the day. When diarist Samuel Pepys saw the play soon after the reopening of the theaters in 1662, he dubbed it “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” a judgment apparently shared by many others. (Pepys goes on to add that “I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure,” pointing toward the atmosphere of sensuality with which the play was later identified.)

Drolls and Music
Until the nineteenth century, A Midsummer Night’s Dream appeared before audiences primarily in two forms. One is the “droll,” a short play long on farce, slapstick, and punning that would be performed at fair booths, taverns, and the like. The Merry Conceits of Bottom the Weaver, first published in 1646, splices together passages from Shakespeare’s play involving Bottom into the theatrical equivalent of his greatest hits. The eighteenth century also saw a vogue for operatic adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a trend begun by Henry Purcell with his opera The Fairy Queen (1692) and followed by several others in the next one hundred years. Some adaptors even used the Mechanicals’ play as a platform for parodying Italian opera, an approach revived in the twentieth century by Benjamin Britten in his opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). As Gary Jay Williams observes in his fine overview of the play’s stage history, Midsummer’s mythological, earthy, erotic, and fanciful elements were ill-suited to the dominant rationalism and neoclassical tastes of the eighteenth century, and so music served as an appropriate vehicle for its mix of fantasy and foolery. The impulse to adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream to musical form remains strong, though none has been successful with the general public. At the height of popularity of swing, Swingin’ the Dream (1939), an ambitious jazz adaptation, appeared briefly on Broadway. The roster of luminaries involved in the production is breathtaking: to name a few, Benny Goodman played in the band, Agnes DeMille directed the choreography, “Moms” Mabley and Butterfly McQueen sang, and Louis Armstrong played Puck. Later musical theater versions—Babes in the Wood (1964), The Dream on Royal Street (1981), Midsummer Nights (1989), Another Midsummer Night (1995), Dream Nights (1997), A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Rock Musical (1999), and The Dreaming (2003)—have, despite their adaptational ingenuity, similarly failed to find a wide audience.