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Whereas the director of a play in performance never ventures more than a provisional interpretation, content with its truth at a particular moment in time, literary critics have until relatively recently presented their judgements as definitive. Jan Kott, who has probably had greater influence over the living theatre than any other critic of his generation, is closer kin to the director in his acceptance that any written judgement of a play also stands open to redefinition. Thus, his first view of A Midsummer Night's Dream, offered in his seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, was reconsidered some fifteen years later in the title essay of The Bottom Translation. Now, in a third major essay on the play, Kott addresses the issue of ‘translation’ in relation to the practicalities of the Elizabethan theatre, and the likelihood that the mechanicals, doubling as the fairies, were played by boys brought in for the wedding celebration where it is thought to have been first performed. Jan Kott, who has been an advisory editor successively of Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly since 1971, has most recently published The Gender of Rosalind and The Memory of the Body: Essays on the Theatre and Death (Northwestern University Press, 1992). Next year NTQ plans to celebrate his eightieth birthday in a special issue, NTQ40, for which appropriate contributions are invited.
1. All quotations from Shakespeare and line numberings are from the Cambridge text established by Wilson, John Dover, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (London: Octopus Books, 1981).Google Scholar
2. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam, 1968), p. 374 b: ‘Changeling 2.b (1): a child left in place of another child carried away surreptitiously in early infancy (as a lowborn substitute for one of noble birth); (2): in folk tradition: a deformed or weak-witted off-spring of fairies or elves substituted by them surreptitiously for a comely human child – called also elf child.’
3. ‘The mortal child stolen by fairies; normally the fairy brat left in exchange’, Spenser, Faerie Queene, I, ix, 65.
4. This ‘night-rule’ is usually overlooked by critics and translators, although it can be considered an important key to the interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
5. See Ringler, W. A. Jr, The Seventeenth Stage (1968)Google Scholar; Melchiori, Giorgio, ‘Peter, Balthasar and Shakespeare's Art of Doubling’, Modern Language Review LXXVI1I (1983)Google Scholar; and John C. Meagher, ‘Economy and Recognition: Thirteen Shakespearean Puzzles’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXV.
6. See Hillebrand, H. N., The Child Actors (1926Google Scholar, reprinted 1964); and Shapiro, Michael, Children of the Revels: the Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and Their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
7. See Brooks, Harold F., Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare, Arden (London: Methuen, 1979), p. lvii.Google Scholar
8. See: A[rkwright], G. E. P., Notes and Queries, 05 1906Google Scholar; and PMLA, XXI (April 1914). In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas (1616), Mother asks the Master of the Revels: ‘How does His Majesty like him, I pray? Will he give eightpence a day, think you?’
9. Shapiro, op. cit., p. 109.
10. Ibid., p. 110.
11. Ibid., p. 3.
12. See Clayton, Thomas, ‘The Wall Scene’, Shakespeare Studies, VII (1974), p. 101–12.Google Scholar
13. See Richter, Alan, The Language of Sexuality (1951)Google Scholar: ‘Hymen pun on cherry = Young girl and fruit with red juice’, ‘cherry pie = girl of cherry’; and Rubinstein, Frankie, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance (1984)Google Scholar: ‘Cherry pit: child's game of rolling pits into a small hole’.
14. Shapiro, op. cit., p. 194. ‘HIPPOLITA: I warrant you, sister, an old lady in Lacedemon taught me a preservative against that, VIOLETTA: For the love of cherries what, HIPPOLITA: Marry this, it was, still said she, betwixt every cherry, said she, be sure to crack a stone, said she. VIOLETTA: Then let me alone, I'll crack a couple of stones betwixt every cherry, rather than surfet on ‘em.’ In Colette's novel Gigi I find similar double meaning or euphemisms expressed by a teenage girl (from the beginning of our century, of course): '… il faut que je pense a mon ce-que-je pense, avec mes jupes trop courtes.’
15. See Brooks, op. cit., Note 331.
16. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Golding in 1567: ‘Ye Ayres and Windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods …’.
17. There are many records concerning shows with children performing as elves: see Nichol, J., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (1788)Google Scholar. All these suggest that the fairies are rooted in court feasts and masquerades, not in folklore.
18. In Stony Brook the female students of the Swedish language course came to a party on 13 December (St. Lucia's Day in Sweden, celebrated as the girls' day), wearing wreaths with colourful lighted candles in them. Shakespeare must have known this customary attire.
19. The Maid's Metamorphosis (1597?).
20. Such an image of a boy with the ears of an ass next to a youngish Titania was drawn by Théophile Gautier about 1935. See Richter, Jean, Etudes at recherches sur Theophile Gautier prosateur (1981)Google Scholar
21. Rimbaud, A., Collected Works, trans. Fowlie, Wallace (Chicago, 1966).Google Scholar