Midterm: Part V, example 3

Here is the third example of a strong answer to Part V of the midterm, this one provided by Ruby. Thank you, Ruby!

Ruby’s essay offers a model of an evidence-rich analytical argument that fits in just one page. Notice that her first two paragraphs lay out detailed evidence from the production and the script, but that the last paragraph of each ties that evidence back into Ruby’s main argument. The third paragraph, then, dwells at greater length on that argument and its consequences for our interpretation of the text.

William Brown changed the last scene of the play, Act V Scene I, by giving the Indian boy back to the mortal world. It is related to the theme of imagination vs. logic because Brown is making a statement that true imagination cannot survive with human interference. The removal of the boy rekindles Oberon and Titania’s love for each other because with the boy’s presence threatened to tear the King and Queen apart, which would end the world of imagination. Brown, by adding the Indian boy’s last appearance, wants to explicitly show that by returning him to the mortal world, the fairy world will end with a ‘happily ever after.’

In the book, Oberon is able to take the boy from Titania and it is assumed that Oberon keeps the boy since that is the last time the boy is mentioned, but the play is not so; in the play, while all are dancing, the Indian boy enters the stage full of merriment, lights, and music and sadly looks upon happy Titania and Oberon dancing. He is then quietly ushered away by the fairies. This contrasts the stage setup of when Titania and Oberon are fighting over the Indian boy with no music or dancing and simple lighting. By doing this, Brown emphasizes his point that the happiness and existence of the fairy world is interrupted with human presence.

This interpretation is valid because the imaginative world can improve the logical world with its interference[;] examples are Helena and Demetrius falling in love and Hermia and Lysander falling in love again, but interference of the logical world into the imaginative world only causes mayhem, for example, Oberon and Titania quarreling over the Indian boy. The play interestingly showed this by creating a merry scene of dancing once the Indian boy was forgotten by the Queen and King of the fairy world, and the boy then being removed.

Midterm: Part V, example 2

This second sample answer to the A Midsummer Night’s Dream review prompt on the midterm was written by Cydney. (Thanks for letting me share this, Cydney!)

Cydney comes to two of the same conclusions as Rebekah, whose example is below:

1. She reads the Bergomask dance as a site of interpretive significance;
2. She argues that Brown’s interpretation of the script diverges from Larry’s.

Cydney’s essay differs from Bekah’s in that she draws evidence to support her argument from close analysis of only the dance.

Take a close look at her second paragraph: she analyzes the dance in three completely different ways:

• as an atmospheric element that changes the experience of the audience and counteracts the pedantry of all the speechmaking in Act V,
• as a visible resolution of the social fractiousness of Act I,
• and as a philosophical claim that humans have substantive authority over their own lives and don’t need to lean on supernatural explanations.

Analyzing one piece of evidence in three drastically different ways is a pretty solid way to do well in a short essay like this, and like the essays you will be writing for the final exam. What matters is that your evidence is detailed and relevant, and that your analysis moves smoothly between the specifics of the artwork and the abstractions of its meaning.

William Brown, the director of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” intended for the play to focus on the comedy and triviality of relationships rather than the world of imagination that most audiences and scholars dissect as the purpose. It is through the abridged ending and exaggerated stage directions that Brown reveals his own interpretation of the play[:] that it is a comedic commentary on how easily people can be manipulated, and a revelation on how intrusive societies can be concerning the lives of others.

In the Shakespeare version, Oberon and Titania, played by Michael Huftile and Carey Cannon, are king and queen of the fairy world [and] summarize the night with Puck by their side[;] but[,] in the production, the finalizing exit involves the entire cast performing a dance before Puck closes out. The effect of this alteration is three fold: For one, the dance is more theatrical than dialogue, which dramatizes far more than words. Secondly, the dance is a huge contrast to the conflict at the start of the play, which provides humor because the lives of the lovers were so easily distorted. Thirdly, having all characters dance at the end rids the play of the privilege that the fairies hold as the only ones who are able penetrate the borders of the magical world, thus reducing the authority that the fairies have over the rest of the world but instead shows how everyone has changed from start to finish. The lovers have all gone from quarrel to resolutions through magical manipulation, and this is meant to be much more comical in production form when it is displayed how easily the fairies can oversee and alter the lives of the lovers. This is precisely Brown’s intent when he sacrifices lines of the play for performance, he knows the gestures will make it all the more humorous, and the theatrics will convey more than words.

[Brackets] indicate slight grammatical emendations.

Midterm: Part V, example 1

I have asked a few students who wrote especially strong answers to Part V of the midterm if they would be willing to share those answers as examples of particularly successful exam essays.

This first example, written by Bekah, has two huge things going for it:

1. Bekah identifies a concrete interpretive problem: William Brown and American Players Theatre veered away from Shakespeare’s text by moving the changeling boy from the woods to Athens.
2. To answer this question, her analysis looks to another key piece of evidence from the performance—the Bergomask dance—and comes up with a startling but persuasive answer: Brown and APT offer a social rather than a literary interpretation of the play.

As you prepare to write three important essays for the final exam—an essay on visual art, an essay on Frenzy, another essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream—think about using Bekah’s essay as a model: identify, in some detail, two related pieces of evidence from the artwork that suggests what the artist’s hidden meaning might be.

Thank you, Bekah, for sharing this essay with us!

William Brown throws in an interesting twist by choosing for the Indian boy to come back at the end. When everyone is participating in the Bergomask dance (Greek influence) the Indian boy reappears. Brown’s analysis of this scene mirrors his interpretation of the entire play, inclusiveness. The Indian boy really does not have a place to belong. He is on the borderline between the fairies and the human world. By putting him in the last scene Brown meshes the two worlds together.

The Bergomask dance takes place when Oberon and Titania, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena are in their white wedding attire. They are seated in the audience and have just finished watching the play. At first, only David Daniel (Snout) and Andrew Truschinski (Flute) are dancing, then the cast of the Pyramus and Thisby. Following that, Brown chooses James Ridge, Egeus, to ask for a dance from Tiffany Scott, insinuating the famous daddy-daughter dance. They are joined by the other couples and in perfect harmony both working class and royalty are on stage. This complements the interpretation Brown is trying to convey of the closeness within family. The wedding atmosphere, a time for celebration is more enjoyable by taking out the aspect of class distinctions. Christopher Peltier’s entrance as the Indian boy only further emphasizes this point. One of the workers takes him in the circle and teaches him the dance. He has been removed from the fairy world and replanted in the human world. The common cliché “the only time people come together are for weddings and funerals,” proves true. It changes the atmosphere and relationships, and Maureen Janson, the choreographer, conveys the change visually by the dance. Greek culture is synonymous with family ties. A similar dance was seen in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Two vastly different cultures were tied as one, problems arose, but at the wedding everything came together. The same instance Brown depicted on stage, with this scene. They were not all family, but, at the end, the audience could feel the closeness.

Brown’s fundamental meaning of the play is troubles occur, by fault of the fairies, or fault of your own, but, in the end, everything can be brought back together with something as basic as a wedding. Brown’s interpretation is very interesting. Instead of dwelling on the power of imagination or love, it focuses on the power of family and how strong it really is.

Midterm: errors on part V (A Midsummer Night’s Dream review)

Scores for part V of the midterm follow this distribution:

Midterm part V (AMND review) score distribution

As you can see, the numbers don’t curve in quite the way I would have hoped—the average score was 12.7 out of 20, a D. These scores worry me—an instructor who sees an average this low has to confront the possibility that the low grades reflect a poorly-worded assignment, an unkind grading rubric, or some other incompatibility between instruction and examination. Were the essay instructions unclear? Did I grade essays in a way completely unrelated the other work we have done in this course?

As I graded these essays last week I spent several hours searching my soul—almost every time I encountered an essay that seemed to have missed the point I asked whether we instructors did enough work to be sure that the writer could have succeeded. I feel fairly confident that these grades are not deeply unfair, but let me explain some of my reasoning.

First, Larry’s lectures have been demonstrating the analytical process since the beginning of the course. His lectures on AMND, for example, looked at the relationship between the play’s themes (e.g. the conflictive powers of reason and imagination) and the play’s imagery (e.g. the structure of references to animals). Larry spends almost no time in his lectures discussing plot; instead, his analysis emphasizes the importance of structure, symbol, and theme.

Second, the assignment itself emphasizes the importance of explaining why the director and design team made the decisions that they made. Larry, in his lectures, has never argued that Shakespeare or Charlotte Brontë or Jean Renoir or Nadine Gordimer made such-and-such an artistic decision to make things “more relatable” vis-à-vis the audience. Larry always answers the why question by asking what the point of the artwork might be: Why did Jean Renoir take his camera outside? Because to him, as to his father, artwork was something that must live in the real world and not the sheltered space of the studio. Why did Nadine Gordimer have Vera die? Because she sought to expose the myth that innocence trumped evil.

The foregoing explain, at least to my mind, the reasons many students succeeded—some quite astonishingly well—in writing this essay. It’s just as important, I think, to explain why some of the essays did not do quite as well. What follow are four common approaches to the assignment that did not quite address the question:

1. The essay identified the setting as a script change

Many essays offered some variation on this main claim: “William Brown helps a 21st-century audience relate to this 16th-century play.”

There are two problems with this approach:

a. Because Shakespeare’s script says comparatively little about the characters’ outfits or the play’s setting, the American Players Theatre’s costuming decisions are not changes from Shakespeare’s original.

Brown’s decision to set AMND in contemporary Greece is not unusual: plays produced by Shakespeare’s own company (in the 1590s, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) would have been costumed according to contemporary fashion—no 16th-century theatre would have researched what kings wore circa 2000 BCE.

An audience in 1595 and an audience in 2008 have a different sense of fashion, but this doesn’t make a 21st-century performance in 21st-century garments unusual.

You could turn to specific costuming choices to defend more specific arguments about Brown’s interpretation of the play. Why is Theseus a wealthy businessman, for example? Why is Puck a Euro-raver?

b. Whether or not a play is “relatable” vis-à-vis its audience says nothing about the director’s interpretation of the play. Furthermore, it makes assumptions about the audience that might not be wholly sustainable.

2. The essay argued that script changes were unimportant

Example: “Although Brown cut the lyrics from the First Fairy’s song (II.2.9-24), those lyrics did not advance the plot and so were unimportant.”

True, Shakespeare’s songs can sound tedious, especially since the music to which we have become accustomed is not in iambic pentameter; however, we who were glad to hear the Fairy’s song rendered wordlessly fell victim to the blindness Larry described a while ago: Larry noticed he often skipped Bessie’s song in Jane Eyre (27) as though it were unimportant, but later recognized that a good structuralist could see in this song the novel in miniature.

When Larry lectured about the Fairy’s song in II.2 he said much the same thing: look at the animal imagery in that passage! Look at the correlation of magical powers and nocturnal creatures! A passage that does not advance the plot might advance something else—the meaning of the play, for example—and so the decision to cut it will have repercussions.

Remember that Shakespeare is no Dickens: he’s not paid to pad his plays with needless text. Every word is there for a reason: the reader’s job is to discern what that reason is; the director’s job is to discern whether that reason is sufficiently compelling to retain it in a new interpretation of the text.

3. The essay saw comedy as an interpretation

Example: “American Players Theatre performed AMND as a comedy rather than as a more serious or even tragic play.”

It’s easy to understand that a reader coming to AMND immediately after Romeo and Juliet might see a young-lovers-thwarted-by-authority plot as fundamentally tragic; however, AMND is unequivocally a comedy. Remember Larry’s first lecture on the play? He spent some 10 minutes explaining how Shakespearean comedies work.

Some essays focused on ways Brown and APT updated the comedy in AMND, adding several pieces of stage business. (Stage business: incidental events that originate outside the script; generally used for comic effect.) This led to several successful arguments that Brown interpreted the play as being primarily about the effect of comedy rather than, for example, the effect of imagination.

4. The essay discussed audience rather than production

I often tell students to keep a journal: journal-writing will strengthen you as a writer and help you process the information you’ll be dealing with for the next 4 or so years. But there’s a third advantage: journals force you to process your personal responses to information and so leave your brain free to process that information more objectively when you have to write an essay about it.

(So-called “response papers,” of which you will probably write several dozen, have nothing to do with your personal response to anything. Response papers and their ilk ask you to identify and analyze relationships that you’ve noticed between texts or ideas you’ve encountered.)

Essays often took a too-personal approach to reviewing AMND. Examples:

• By setting AMND in late 20th-century Greece, APT made the play easier for a 21st-century audience to relate to.
• By adding gags, APT helped AMND come across as a comedy.
• By cutting out sophisticated wordplay and imagery, APT made the play easier to understand.
• By removing lines, APT made the play and hence easier to sit through.

These observations tell me a lot about your experience of AMND, but don’t answer the analytical questions we have asked you to address in this essay. I agree that the play is easier to laugh at with the addition of cell phone jokes, and it’s easier to understand when “thou” is changed to “you,” but this information tells me nothing about why APT made these decisions and not any of the hundreds of others that were possible.

If APT was concerned only about how easy it was for their audience to relate to AMND, why set it in 20th-century Greece and not 20th-century Wisconsin? If length was an issue, why did they cut the fairy lullaby in II.1 and not the wordy chunks of IV.1—or, for that matter, the entire Theseus/Hippolyta storyline as Benjamin Britten did? And if a shorter play is a better play, why did APT add time-fillers like the cell phone gag and the Matrix-style time distortion in III.2?

Several essays dwelled on how much more easily the jokes and content of AMND could be understood when performed. This is certainly an important issue: the introductory Shakespeare course at UW–Madison (English 162) will usually require students to watch 1 or 2 versions of each play—Shakespeare didn’t write the plays to be read, indeed, he doesn’t seem to have published any of them himself, and so only to read the plays is to miss much of what’s in them. However, the essay did not ask you to explain the effect of seeing a play performed.

A note: Old English, Middle English, and Shakespeare’s English

Several essays observed that Shakespeare wrote in Old English. This is incorrect.

Here is the first line of Beowulf, an epic poem in Old English:

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum

Does that make any sense to you? Does it sound like Shakespeare?

Old English is the pre-Norman language of England. When William the Conqueror defeated the local English (themselves a mixture of native Gaelic speakers and invading north Europeans—Angles, Saxons, Jutes) in 1066, he brought with him a version of French that mingled with Old English and other local languages to, eventually, produce the language we know today.

Speakers of modern English cannot read an Old English text without training—in the English department here at UW–Madison we offer a one-semester Old English course (English 320). There is a fairly thorough, though not entirely accurate, synopsis of differences between Old and modern English on the Old English Wikipedia page.

A few essays observed that Shakespeare wrote in Middle English: also incorrect.

Here is the first line of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a delightfully raucous poem in Middle English:

Whan þat Aprill with his shoures sote

(That þ character is called a thorn; it represents a “th” sound.)

That line should make a little more sense to you than the beginning of Beowulf, though it is still nothing close to Shakespeare.

The name “Middle English” describes the language written in England between the Norman conquest and the arrival of the printing press, which helped regularize the English language. It can be a bit tricky to read at first, but a reader of modern English can pick up a Middle English text and understand what it means with only an hour or two of training—and you’ll have to do exactly this if you ever take English 215 (which I hope you will). After a little while of reading Middle English, you’ll begin to feel that it makes more sense than modern English: this is actually a good sign.

Shakespeare, who arrived in London several decades after the printing press, writes in modern English; sometimes you will see his language described as early modern English, but the difference is more one of spelling than of grammar or lexicon.

Samples from Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

If you’re deciding whether or not to come to tomorrow’s optional showing of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, here are a few samples from YouTube to give you a flavor of the music.

I don’t know which staging Larry has on DVD, but there is little chance we will watch one of these specific versions.

Fabrice di Falco as Oberon (2007):

Escolania de Montserrat boys’ choir as fairy chorus (2005):

David Daniels as Oberon (2005):

Inna Dukach as Helena (2004):

Randal Turner as Bottom (2002):

Emails from Larry: How to get extra credit for tomorrow’s showing of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Email 1:

Class starts at 8:30 on Thursday–we’ll be in our regular lecture hall.

Email 2:

Five issues to consider for tomorrow’s extra-credit opera by Benjamin Britten:

1. Britten uses three acts rather than Shakespeare’s five. Why?
2. Britten starts the opera in the wood rather than in Athens. Why?
3. Britten emphasizes the role of the fairies. Why?
4. In Shakespeare’s play, Snug lets us know that the lovers have been married. (p.70, end of Act IV). Britten omits this speech and accordingly alters the action of Shakespeare’s Act V. Why?
5. Onstage last night, the actors left out lines from pp. 86-88. Britten keeps most of these lines (though he gives some of Puck’s on p. 86 to the fairies to sing). Why? (Questions 2 and 5 are related.)

Please print this page and bring it to class tomorrow in you decide to do the extra credit.

How to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream at American Players Theatre tonight

For the AMND midterm essay you will evaluate the success of the American Players Theatre interpretation of Shakespeare’s script.

Like Larry, the director of APT’s performance—William Brown—will have an interpretation of AMND; if Brown’s interpretation differs from Larry’s, it’ll be easy to write about whether his interpretation works or doesn’t. Most likely, though, Brown will agree that the play is about the power of the imagination, so you will have to pay attention to subtle ways his reading of the play differs from Larry’s interpretation or your own.

To do this well, you’ll need to develop a detailed sense of how Brown altered and produced the script, and so, when you’re watching the play tonight, do four things:

1. Keep your script open and mark passages that Brown elides, edits, or moves. Keep an eye out for changes to any of the speeches Larry discussed in lecture today: those will be especially easy to write about.
2. Take notes at the beginning of each act: how are characters are dressed? how is the set designed? what is the music like?
3. Watch gesture and movement, and listen to elocution: what themes do the actors emphasize?
4. At intermission and during the ride back to Madison write down all your observations about the play. It will be late, you will be tired, but your memory of the play will never be fresher: the more details you write down immediately, the more details you will have at your command when you write the essay.

Today’s AMND quiz: correct translation

Larry passes along this translation of Theseus’s speech from V.1:

1. The lunatic (madman, crazy person), the lover, and the poet (writer, artist)
2. Are all composed entirely of (completely made up of, are governed by) the imagination.
3. One sees more devils than all of hell can hold (than can be contained in hell).
4. That is the madman. The lover, every bit as insane (crazy, mad, frenzied),
5. Sees Helen’s beauty in the face of a gypsy (see beauty in what isn’t beautiful).
6. The poet’s eye, looking about in a fine madness (insanity, frenzy, act of imaginative transformation),
7. Glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven (looks over the world);
8. And as imagination creates (gives reality to, embodies, gives physical shape to, transforms)
9. The forms (bodies, shapes, figures) of unknown things (things never seen before, things never imagined before), the poet’s pen (the imagination)
10. Makes (transforms) them into a reality (form, body, shape, figure) and gives to nothing (to what once didn’t exist, to what is now something made from nothing)
11. A local place (presence, reality, a palpable presence) and way of identifying it (gives it a name, makes real what didn’t exist before by recognizing it, transforms nothing into something by identifying it).

You earned 3 points for getting the gist of the poem, and the other 22 points were divided 2 per line.

Midterm: part V (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Updated 7/17

The teaching staff are splitting up the grading work on the midterms; this post lays out how I will be grading the AMND essay (part V).

So here is the prompt:

PART V. 20 points. A Midsummer Night’s Dream—one page (250 words)

Compare the text of the play to the July 15 production: What are the changes between the script and production? Are these changes good or bad? Why?

1. Hang on to your program: mention names of actors and production crew.
2. STAY IN PRESENT TENSE when you’re discussing the play and production!
3. Use the 44 Reminders to proofread: You will be docked points for mistakes (for example, don’t underline your own title; don’t call your review A Midsummer Night’s Dream but, rather, “A Review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; don’t write run-ons or leave out apostrophes, etc.).
4. Proofread out loud.
5. Spell-check.

Your task is to answer why director William Brown changed Shakespeare’s script in setting up this production of AMND and whether that change suceeds. You will need to answer two major questions:

• How does Brown interpret the play?
• Is his interpretation persuasive?

These are tough questions to answer in 250 words; before you commit pen to paper, spend 20 minutes thinking through how you’re going to answer the question:

• Review the point of the play. You can agree with what Larry says is the main point of AMND or you can have your own reading; what’s important is that you can claim and defend an argument that Shakespeare meant X.
• Focus on a single scene or speech. You don’t have the space to explain Brown’s every edit; focus on changes to 1 or 2 pages of the text.
• Think through non-verbal elements of the production: casting, blocking, costuming, elocution, gesture, lighting, music, props, set, sound design—each decision was made for a reason. If the production is good, every element complements the director’s interpretation of the script; if the production is bad, it is as though the director and the costume designer and the music composer had competing interpretations.
• Analyzing Brown’s interpretation of AMND. Like good scholars, good directors interpret a script in a way that differs slightly from what a casual reader would expect. How do Brown’s decisions about script and production affect the themes of the play? How does Brown interpret what AMND says about power? about love? about art?

Your essay might tackle these questions in the following order:

1. Paragraph 1: What scene/speech did Brown change and how did he change it? How does this change alter a significant theme in the play? How does this suggest Brown’s interpretation of the play?
2. Paragraph 2: How was the scene/speech acted? (Blocking, elocution, gesture, etc.) How was the scene/speech produced? (Costume and hair, lighting, music, props, set, etc.) How do these production decisions complement Brown’s interpretation, or do they?
3. Paragraph 3: Does Brown’s interpretation of the fundamental meaning of the play agree with your own? If it does, how has the production revealed something new or interesting about that meaning? If it does not, is Brown’s interpretation nonetheless valid, or at least interesting?

The essay will be graded as follows:

• 4 points: Argument. Do you have a direct, original thesis?
• 6 points: Evidence. Do you use ample details of script, design, and acting decisions from the play?
• 6 points: Analysis. Do you subject these details to persuasive analysis? In other words, do you answer why the director made the decisions he made?
• 4 points: Editing.

More resources for reading Shakespeare

Below I mention Prof. Heather Dubrow’s plot synopsis and study guide for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (PDF); you might also want to check out what she calls her literary toolbox: 8 questions to ask yourself when you read one of Shakespeare’s plays.