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Comparative Study - A Midsummer Night's Dream


Performances of Shakespeare's plays are not isolated, unrelated occurrences. They function in a larger cultural context and are products of their society, with which they interact. In other words, an adaptation of a Shakespeare play is not simply a creation of the director's or designer's imagination, but the joint result of multiple factors. .
             With the representation of magical creatures, there must be some upward limit to what people may be asked to believe. Because beliefs about magic have changed, the representation of magical creatures in A Midsummer Night's Dream has also changed through history. Impossible creatures, such as fairies, must be made acceptable by incorporating fantasy into the ideas of the time. The representation of fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream has, through history, been influenced by external factors such as folkloristic stories about fairies; contemporary beliefs and artistic influences from previous adaptations or foreign cultures. By comparing and relating a specific production to these external factors one can find parallels between the adaptation and its cultural framework. So, due to the position of adaptations of Shakespeare's plays within a large cultural framework one can analyse and explain the appearance of an adaptation. In this paper I will explicitly examine which traditional sources, theatrical conventions, contemporary beliefs or cultural elements Haitink, Hall, Bury and Hoffman's work relate to. In which framework does their production function and has this framework influenced the representation of the magical creatures. .
             Fairies in folkloristic tradition and within A Midsummer Night's Dream exist in a wide variety. In the course of this paper I hope to demonstrate the variety of fairies and how they appear in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream at first appear to be homogenous, and critics often see them this way.


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