The great paradox of the performance history of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that a play written to take full advantage of an empty stage has enticed producers into spending enormous sums of money to supply the most expensive forms of magic. Lampe's Pyramus and Thisbe, a modest entertainment, is an exception; but Christopher Rich's company spent £3,000 to produce Purcell's The Fairy Queen; Felix Mendelssohn wrote his famous incidental music for Ein Sommernachtstraum for a production financed by the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1843, partly based on his 1827 overture); and Erich Wolfgang Korngold provided about two hours of music, mostly arranged from Mendelssohn, for Max Reinhardt's film extravaganza of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1934), starring Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland, with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska of the Ballets Russes. This is an easy project to ridicule, with its heavyhanded strewing of sequins and fairy dust, its moonbeams coagulated into slides for little boys, its trees covered with aluminum paint, its thick neo-Biedermeier upholstery of orchestrations of Songs without Words, as well as plush versions of the familiar incidental music. But Korngold's score contains some imaginative touches, especially a setting of Over hill, over dale to the tune of Mendelssohn's song Neue Liebe; and the movie fascinates in that it represents a limit in the perverse evolution of A Midsummer Night's Dream toward masque. The Fairy Queen interspersed Shakespeare's text with masques; Reinhardt's film converts the play itself into a masque to the glory of Jack Warner, a king fit for the new age.

Every improvisatory element of Shakespeare's dramaturgy is carefully expunged from the film. Reinhardt was one of the supreme technicians of the histrionic, and the project everywhere dramatizes its own high-budget, calculating intelligence.