Beyond the Stage: Shakespeare’s summer festivities

The literary scholar C. L. Barber called Shakespeare’s mid-career comedies from the late-1590s “festive comedies,” which includes Love Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. In his influential 1959 book, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom, Barber argued that Shakespeare drew inspiration (not to mention some of his titles) from major English holiday festivities such as Candlemas, Shrove Tuesday, May Day, Midsummer Eve, Halloween, and the twelve days of Christmas ending with Twelfth Night. Furthermore, Shakespeare structured his plays as pseudo-rituals that evoke the free and joyous atmosphere of these special times during the year. The idea of “festival,” which is also foundational to the Illinois Shakespeare Festival’s artistic identity, is all about people coming together to laugh, have fun, and celebrate life.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is grounded in two major English holidays: May Day and Midsummer Eve. The play’s title suggests that the play takes place on Midsummer, but references in the text suggest that May Day might actually be the main holiday being observed. After a night of magic and confusion in the forest, the lovers are discovered by the adults asleep in a grove. Theseus, the ruler of Athens, remarks: “No doubt they rose up early to observe/The rite of May, and hearing our intent,/Came here in grace of our solemnity” (4.1.131–3). The rite of May here refers to May Day celebrations, although, as I discuss below, the actual date could be flexible.

Earlier in the play, when the young lovers discuss running away together, Lysander tells Hermia:

This means that the forest outside Athens—where most of the play takes place—is the very same place that the townsfolk go for May Day festivities. Although May Day refers to May 1, celebrations often occurred for weeks in the early summer, overlapping with Midsummer Eve in some cases. Celebrations often involved people going out into the woods or countryside for various parties, games, and rituals. The most famous May Day ritual is probably the Maypole, which was usually painted green and white, and decorated with flowers. The community would carry the Maypole in a parade out to a communal ground, where they raised it and danced around it. This ceremony bears many similarities to fertility rituals, which suits the summer season of long, warm days and abundant greenery.

Midsummer Eve, which takes place on the summer solstice (June 24 this year), also involved people going out into the woods, sometimes looking for flowers and herbs that were believed to have magical properties if gathered at midnight. Although Oberon, the King of Faeries, explains to Puck that the magical flower in the play originated from a wayward arrow shot by Cupid, the classical god of love, Shakespeare’s audiences may have connected the flower to Midsummer rituals, which also involved young couples and courtship. Midsummer Eve was also associated with magic, a time of witchcraft, fortune telling, and spirits, which also relate to Shakespeare’s world of fairies and supernatural mischief. Some rituals involved going out into the woods at night and returning to town in the morning, which is the exact structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But there is a second night of festivities in Shakespeare’s play: the wedding banquet in the last act where the town’s amateur theatre company puts on a play to entertain the noble newlyweds. Barber writes that many of the games, pageants, and entertainments that occurred on holidays like May Day and Midsummer Eve were also presented on special occasions like weddings of important figures, or village wassails (door-to-door performances) and wakes. So, there was already an established tradition of bringing outdoors festivities into aristocratic courts and town halls, which might have also inspired Shakespeare to incorporate them into the stage.

All these festivities inform the joyful and life-affirming world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Audiences in Shakespeare’s time may not have made clear distinctions among May Day, Midsummer Eve, and wedding celebrations that took place during the late spring and early summer, blending all these occasions into a kind of extended super-festival that Barber calls “Maying.” He takes this term from Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Nashe’s play Summer’s Last Will and Testament, which includes a song with the lyrics:

Shakespeare is often viewed as a sophisticated writer and master of the theatrical craft. But before he moved to London to start a career in the theatre, he was a country boy, growing up in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where his father was a glovemaker and his grandfather a farmer. The many references in his plays to rural festivities that follow the agricultural calendar suggest that he was just as inspired by the rituals of the English countryside as he was classical Greek and Roman sources. Shakespeare’s love of summer festivities could add another layer of enjoyment when you see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at ISF, where you can hear the birds and the crickets right outside the outdoor theatre’s walls.