Hi everyone! I'm doing an essay about different adaptations on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. So I chose to do Dream Country in the Sandman graphic novel. I kinda already have my own thoughts on the subject...but I was wondering if anyone would share their opinions/thoughts exploring the changes and choices made by Neil and how this adaptation changes the interpretation of the original by Shakespeare.

Lookin' forward to reading your comments! Thank you very much!!

Amanda

Hi Amanda, and welcome to the Board.

I've read and seen the play a while ago, along with Dream Country. I'm not really an expert, but let me see what I can throw out there.

Well, off the bat you have some of Shakespeare's personal history written into the story -- the names of his acting troupe, and the presence of his son Hamnet. You actually see the actors putting together and performing the plays, and your exposed to some of the realities of acting at that time (such as the roles of women being played by younger men). At this point, in your observations, you can see a very meta-textual reality at work.

Kind of like seeing the magician's stage behind the scenes. So, you have the layer of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and then the layer of Shakespeare and his acting troupe.

Then, you add another layer to it. The "audience" for the play. The Faerie. They themselves are derived from a very complex, rich and often dark mythology. Shakespeare himself used some of this in constructing this play, but not to the extent that they are shown here. We travel from fiction, from the play, and then to some actual history (for all we know of it) all the way to realms of mythology and the cththonic.

The layer of the Faerie audience, watching humans at their "shadow-play" accentuates the natural environment and the sheer ancient power of ... really, human interaction with the elements. Drama itself was once, and in some ways still probably is a way for the human to relate to the non-human (much like Northrop Frye posits about literature and mythology in his Educated Imagination if you are ever interested and want to read it) -- and also to the spiritual. And also bear in mind that many fairytales are derived from older and darker oral tales as well.

In my opinion, that is what I think Neil's story accentuated on in A Midsummer Night's Dream -- the human link to the supernatural in Nature. Shakespeare does this exact same thing, of course, and in to that degree the two really aren't that different.

I think what I ... really liked though was this:

Most of Shakespeare's plays are based off of historical events, or legends. What I like about this play of his is that I think he made it up. I mean, he obviously drew on older stuff -- faeries, Athens and Theseus and the ancient Greeks up to a point. But what I liked in terms of what Neil did, or stressed upon was the idea that the entire play was an event that actually did happen to some extent in ancient Greece thousands of years ago and, somehow, Shakespeare translated that into his work.

In that sense (and please forgive me for really rambling here), you get to see very blatantly how story is translated over time into another work, or communicated to a different audience with different expectations of the performers and the piece. I think you could explore that if you wanted to -- how Neil's piece explores the adaptation of a story for a different audience and how some aspects will be different and yet will remain the same.

It's funny because we were having a similar discussion about his adaptation of Beowulf a little while ago and if it remained true to the original. And I think his Midsummer Night's Dream definitely does, only it's expanded on perhaps?

Well, this is all my opinion anyway. And it has been a while for both. Anyway, good luck with your assignment Amanda, and take care.

quote:

So I chose to do Dream Country in the Sandman graphic novel

Uh oh, Bad start. The story you refer to is called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, collected in the Graphic Novel entitled Dream Country, from the Sandman series. If you’re writing an essay, it’s always best to know the name and details of your sources.

quote:

I kinda already have my own thoughts on the subject

Come come! Don’t be coy, share them.

My thoughts are fairly simple.

Neil Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not an adaptation of the Shakespeare play. Though the story revolves around the fictional first performance of the play, shares title and character names, it is not an adaptation. It uses the play, mirrors some aspects between the play and the story, but does not retell the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a different medium or in a non-traditional interpretation. A true adaptation would be an opera, a film, a Novel told from the perspective of one of the trees. And there are plenty of those to look at.

Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about sources and inspiration. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unusual in that there are no single sources for the story aside from his own imagination. The clowns and fairies appeared in The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom The Weaver, Theseus and Hippolyta were probably taken from Plutarch and the play within a play of Pyramus and Thisbe (So difficult not to write Clitoris and Frisbee) from Ovid, alongside the name Titania. (Pyramus and Thisbe was very popular in the late 16th Century, so that’d be why Quince selects it as their piece.). But there is no single source to the main story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (And the main story is that of the lovers.) It is a tale composed mostly from Shakespeare’s imagination. Which is where it is highly suited, the supernatural connections aside, for a tale about telling stories, owning stories and why stories are written. And so fits perfectly with the idea that it was the first play commissioned by Morpheus from Shakespeare.

So you see, pleasingly, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not an adaptation itself, and Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not an adaptation of Shakespeare’s.

That’s not to say that the edges are not blurred, and the play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t feature outside of the performance. For example, the desire of the play Titania for the Indian Boy is mirrored by the true Titania’s desire for Hamnet. In the play that desire to possess him has already resulted in her possessing him. So like the rest of Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, what you see in the story is what happens offstage. The pre-text. The inspirations for the characters and their personalities.

What you don’t see is an alternate telling of the story of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There’s no Theseus, Hippolyta, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, Helena or Egeus. You could argue that the actors represent the Rude Mechanicals (Peter Quince et al) and the fairies appear as themselves. But there are no lovers, forbidden from seeing each other, fleeing into the forests outside Athens to escape.

It uses the device of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream to tell the story around it, not to re-tell it. So I do find it quite a stretch to consider Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

quote:

So I do find it quite a stretch to consider Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Clearly not an adaptation - but for relevance to the essay, what could be more Shakespeare than writing a tale about a tale about a tale?

Well, I suppose finding one's own Marlowe right here on a Neil Gaiman message board might count. Hope you get credit for jump-starting that essay.