Why An Athenian Setting Works Better for A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The 1999 film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides a decent portrayal of Shakespeare’s classic play. Stanley Tucci steals the show as the lovable Puck and the rest of the cast also delivers, including my favorites, Calista Flockheart and Christan Bale as Helena and Demetrius, respectively, and Rupert Everett as the brooding Oberon. Can’t forget about the hilarious Bottom played by Kevin Kline. What surprised me the most about the film was how much it stayed relatively faithful to the original play, with lines matching word for word. It made Helena seem even more insane because of all the moments she spent talking to herself out loud in public.However, there’s one glaring difference in the 1999 film: the setting. And the mud wrestling scene. While the original play is set in Athens Greece, the film changes the setting to a completely different time and place, to what looks like the Victorian era. I suppose the new setting matches the flowery prose the characters use and it works to deliver the basic plot and humour, but it completely takes away some of the deeper philosophical undertones of the play. There are several reasons why A Midsummer Night’s Dream works better in an Athenian setting, with the three most notable being Greek gods, architecture, and Plato’s Cave.
Greek religion was very much connected with Greek life. Festivals involved everyone and appeasing the gods was believed to help with the success of the state. Temples dedicated to a patron god became important centers in the city. There were twelve main Greek gods, among them being Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Poseidon, and Ares. The Greek gods lived on the highest mountain in Greece, Mount Olympus. In Homer’s Iliad, a classical book that heavily influenced Greek thought, the gods are portrayed as interacting heavily with humans, swaying the tides of battle and even engaging in sexual relationships. It’s almost like they treat the humans as toys for their amusement. While the Greek gods are essentially immortal, they can get “hurt” in battle and they aren’t “all powerful.” Indeed, when Zeus consults the golden scales to decide the Battle of Troy, it seems to show that there is a fate higher than the gods.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon and Titania can be thought of as being like Greek gods. They interfere with the lovers and their antics can be compared to the Greek gods choosing sides and causing a general mess during the Battle of Troy. Just like the Greek gods, Oberon and Titania are also controlled by a fate higher than themselves. This is shown when Oberon squeezes the pansy juice onto Titania’s eyes, which causes her to fall in love with Bottom. Even though Titania is Queen of the Fairies, she still goes through the same problems that befell the lovers. Oberon and Titania’s squabbles seem awfully similar to Zeus and Hera’s. Things don’t go their way and they constantly have to go back and fix things. If we move the story to a non-Greek setting, then that whole subtext disappears. Instead of it being Shakespeare’s commentary on the interactions between gods and humans, it becomes a random event that there just happened to be fairies in the forest.
In Classical Greece, architecture played a big role in Greek life. The Classical style of architecture focused on employing values of reason, mathematics, balance, and harmony. Instead of creating intricate designs, what Greek art ideals hoped to achieve was to portray beauty in a simplistic way. Constructions of buildings and statues of humans represented the perfect, ideal form of what they were meant to be. This simplistic beauty was intended to calm and civilize human emotions.
The Parthenon is a Greek temple dedicated to the goddess Athena.
This form of art that relaxes emotions would serve as a direct contrast to the mysteries of the forest, where the lovers venture off into. Their home of Athens would represent what is orderly and ideal, while the forest would represent what is wild and fleeting. If we move the setting to the Victorian era, which is in itself frilly, intricate, and sexual, then there is no longer that feeling of the characters getting lost in a completely different world. If both the forest and their home are equally frilly and sexual, then there is no longer a contrast and that impact is lost.
This idea of contrasting worlds continues into Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. According to Plato, what we see in reality is not really the truth. When we look at a chair, it’s not really a chair, but just a shadow of what a chair really is. A real chair exists in the world of Forms. The perfect, ideal, and real chair exists outside of our reality. Plato uses this philosophy to create the Allegory of the Cave.
In the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates is talking with a group of philosophers about a scenario where people are trapped in a cave, chained, and their heads locked forward since birth. There is a large fire behind them and in front of them there are figures moving that casts shadows on the wall. They would think the shadows are real because that’s all they’ve ever experienced.
If someone happened to be unchained and permitted to stand up to discover that it was the fire that had created the shadows of the objects, that person would still hold onto the belief that the shadows are more real, because that’s what’s familiar. This person would feel discomfort if forced to look at the fire or dragged out of the cave onto the surface, to look upon the Sun. He or she would be blinded by this new revelation, but eventually they would get used to the idea.
Socrates then goes on to explain that if this person, with their newly found knowledge about the world, were to go back to the cave, they would be met with hostility. What used to pass as knowledge for the people in the cave would now seem insignificant to the person who was exposed to the surface. The escapee would also become worse at identifying the shadows.
This philosophy of questioning reality comes into focus for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When the lovers pass into the forest, it is like they are stepping out of the cave. Here in the forest is where their true emotional inhibitions take shape. Relationships fall into their ideal set ups. When Bottom enters the forest and his head turned into an ass, he is met with hostility from his friends. When he finally wakes up from his “dream,” Bottoms says, “I have had a most rare vision,” almost as if he had just returned from the surface. When Bottom breaks the fourth wall during his play, it was like the strangeness of one who is “enlightened,” attempting to teach the others that what they’re seeing is not really real. Shakespeare’s purpose of putting a play within a play would seem to make the audience (us) think that we’re part of the world of the characters watching Bottom’s play, even though it’s all still a play. Almost as if we’re viewing shadows through different layers of reality. If we move the setting away from Greece, then we take away the philosophy of ideal forms and questioning reality, which is a prevalent thought for Greeks. If the characters are Greeks, then they experience that philosophy, instead of just having a really bad trip.
In the end, while the 1999 film adaption of A Midsummer Night’s Dream allows us to see the words of Shakespeare in action, changing the setting to a Victorian era completely takes away some of the underlying themes, which helps bolster this comedy into a more deep and thoughtful work. It also serves as a precaution for any future adaption of this classic play to stay true to the setting, lest it become a muddy experience.
