camera work. Rapidity of action is indeed the main element in the filmic characterization of Puck, he who can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and it is all enhanced by the sudden surprises of his appearances and disappearances. Bottom is restored to his normal shape by another magic-filmic intervention, and the lovers are all married off, in an anachronistic gesture toward the Athenian setting, by what looks like a Greek Orthodox priest.
His boss is actually Penelope, mysteriously substituted for Oberon. This presumably satisfied a need to give the company’s other leading actress a role, but it also followed a strong theatrical tradition in the nineteenth century of having female Oberons, beginning with Mme. Vestris at Covent Garden in 1840. Mme. Vestris was a key figure in making the play once more accessible to the London stage, and her innovations lasted well into the era of film.5 She had already staged some fairy extravaganzas, and her marriage into the French Vestris family of ballet dancers gave her ideas for presenting the supernatural: dancing en pointe gives an expression of weightlessness appropriate for fairies, at least as they were conceived in the nineteenth century. Her productions also responded to the newly popular delight in wild landscapes notable in both poetry and painting. Her singing ability explains why she chose to play Oberon: she had already appeared in the 1826 production of Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon. She could also bring into the production Felix Mendelssohn’s music, first performed on the London stage in 1833–34 in a revival of an 1816 production of Dream by Frederic Reynolds. Instrumental and vocal music, as well as dancing fairies, became staples of subsequent productions. Special effects were increasingly practical: moonlight reflecting off watery surfaces and then slowly yielding to sunrise as the lovers awaken, returning the world of the play to daytime normality; and fairies waving tiny lamps on the ground and in the air, “till the entire palace seems sparkling with the countless hues of light.”6 Puck too was often played by a girl, the most famous and influential being probably the eight-year-old Ellen Terry in Charles Kean’s production of 1856. In the Vitagraph film it was the gamine Gladys Hulette. Having mostly female and lightly tripping fairies adds an extra contrast with the heavily patriarchal Athens, and it is hard to imagine that the studio was not conscious of the same-sex attraction caused by the substitution of Penelope for Oberon.7 In their final scene, she and Titania hold onto each other and walk out of frame gazing into each other’s eyes. By the end of the century, however, George Bernard Shaw could fulminate against the casting of an actress as Oberon.8 And film would soon make available new techniques for representing the fairies and the transformations.
THE REINHARDT-DIETERLE DREAM
The silent film celebration of the new medium had receded by the time of the 1935 Hollywood extravaganza A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, which not only makes use of some remaining shards of Shakespeare’s words but also includes Eric Korngold’s arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Overture plus incidental music.9 Instead this film is, or has become, in the words of Trevor Griffith, “the nearest thing we have to a film of the old spectacular tradition of staging the play”10—a record of how the nineteenth-century audience loved elaborate stage effects, including flying fairies and magic puffs of smoke or explosions, Mendelssohn’s music, lengthy ballets, and live animals. At one point Puck appears riding “what can only be described as a Shetland unicorn.”11 The film won two Oscars, for best film editing (Ralph Dawson) and best cinematography (Hal Mohr), the latter by popular vote, not as an official nomination. Students laugh in mixed embarrassment and relief when they see the film (because surely no one could expect them to take this seriously: it’s not Shakespeare, after all), and Sir John Gielgud said watching it was akin to having surgery. This may be unfair, given the interest the film has for historians of the genre, but it is understandable and makes the lyrical generosity of some critics (stating, for example, that “the overall effect is exhilarating”) seem a trifle ridiculous.12 Today’s youths, schooled in the films of Stephen King and Neil Jordan, are unlikely to agree with G. Wilson Knight, who wrote in 1936 of “the nightmarish fearsomeness of the wood and its wild beasts.”13
Reinhardt, who had been directing the play in Germany for some thirty years (and followed his countryman Ludwig Tieck’s Potsdam production of 1834 in using the Mendelssohn music), said he thought of it as “a plea for the glorious release to be found in sheer fantasy”—which makes it all the more important that he shared the direction with Dieterle, whose darker view of the play and especially the fairies gives the film its slightly creepy watchability (Reinhardt’s English was apparently still limited, such that he had to communicate via his German colleague). The cheerful cruelty of Mickey Rooney’s celebrated and almost naked Puck may be Dieterle’s design,14 and although the child often crows a little too loudly and emphatically, it does not take much to imagine yourself into his power, and so helpless with fear. Witness in particular the only moving bits of James Cagney’s unlikely Bottom: when he is first made to see himself as an ass (which removes the point of his joke about the others making an ass of him), he weeps against the tree, and then again, when he is restored to himself, his whole body trembles. This film’s Puck in his first scene emerges slowly from the forest leaves in which he is sleeping and with which he is at some level, the image suggests, identical. He is less threatening perhaps when he imitates the lovers, leads them astray, and puts them to sleep, but without him and his humor those scenes would be unbearable for the dreadful acting: the lovers behave like sulky and spoilt children—except for Olivia de Havilland, who is melodrama incarnate as she wakes from her snake dream (2.2.150) and manages to lose all its suggestive power. The final act is framed by Puck’s mischievous laugh, as he wakes in the forest, first pretends to be frightened, then sees himself in the stream and lets out a peal of laughter, which the soundtrack transforms bizarrely into Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” He then reappears at the end, when the fairies invade the Athenian space, bringing their sparkling screen with them. And his childish cackle echoes and sums up the other slightly hysterical and often unfunny laughter of the film.
This would have been a very different film if Reinhardt had been able to follow his first ideas. Russell Jackson’s research has shown that Reinhardt initially hoped to cast Charlie Chaplin as Bottom, Greta Garbo as Titania, Gary Cooper as Lysander, Clark Gable as Demetrius, Joan Crawford as Helena, Myrna Loy as Hermia, and, best of all, Fred Astaire as Puck. Nonetheless, many established stars agreed to join the fun. An early script draft for the film also included a role for Bottom’s wife, subsequently abandoned by Reinhardt only to be resurrected more than sixty years later by Michael Hoffman’s film of the play in 1999.15
What links Reinhardt’s film to its silent forebears is mostly the tradition of stage magic. Elaborate sets and sudden irruptions from the wings, chemical flashes of light, and swirling fog had long been part of the stage tradition, as explored by Jack Jorgens and Trevor Griffith. But whereas the films made in the immediate wake of Méliès’s inventions were full of trucage, this film returns for the most part to the staged magic of the nineteenth century. The balletic fairies shimmer distantly through the trees, as they could have done on stage through gauze, but they are shot in soft focus and so gain an extra layer of shimmer. Oberon in particular is shot frequently in medium or close-up through sparkling screens or sheets of glass, and he wears a bizarre set of antlers on his head from which light gauze drapes as if he were trying out for the part of the Green Man but inadvertently walked into a spider’s web. The sudden cuts to more threatening images like the occasional goblins, however, are probably more effective on film than on stage.
The transformation scenes themselves, of course, are done with the latest resources of film—Méliès-style stop-action shots updated by fades—now in the service of Puck’s potent magic. As Puck mimes the features of an ass, Bottom’s head (and only his head—he keeps his clothes on) is transformed before our eyes. And just for a moment there is the suggestion that he is becoming not an ass but a werewolf—an idea that is surely present just beneath the surface of the play and is often activated by the less benign directors, as it was in Adrian Noble’s immensely successful 1994 Stratford production (and 1996 film).16 Puck suddenly becomes on-screen the hound and the hog he says he is in act 3, scene
