(Arnold Kettle) Now, whatever the Elizabethans made of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'...
(Arnold Kettle) ..they didn't treat it as a Teutonic fairytale.
(Arnold Kettle) Yet it's this tradition that lurks behind the small grotesque figures…
(Arnold Kettle) ..in Fuseli's picture of Titania and Bottom finished in 1789,
(Arnold Kettle) the sort of picture that influenced the visual effects…
(Arnold Kettle) ..19th century producers of 'The Dream' had up their sleeves,
(Arnold Kettle) and that still influences the Walt Disney Corporation to this day.
Arnold Kettle: And then there's Mendelssohn's music - splendid music - which perhaps…
..more than anything has shaped producers' and our responses to 'The Dream',
even though we may not always be conscious of it.
(classical music by Mendelssohn with an operatic female vocalist)
Now the thing that above all I want you to notice about these images and that music...
..is that they belong to a period which is neither Shakespeare's nor ours.
And perhaps the key image is that of fairies as ballet dancers,
(Arnold Kettle) as we can see again in these Richard Dadd paintings of 1841.
(Arnold Kettle) There seems to have been at least two traditions behind this.
(Arnold Kettle) One is a rather austere classical one. And the other tradition…
(Arnold Kettle) ..linked with dancing is erotic with Titania treated as a Venus…
(Arnold Kettle) ..who manages like so many mythological goddesses to be…
(Arnold Kettle) ..sacred and profane at the same time.
We're lucky that we have preserved for us in an unlikely but available form,
the essential 19th century way of producing 'The Dream'.
Max Reinhardt's film wasn't made until 1935, and of course…
..it gets effects no stage production could ever achieve.
But forget about Mickey Rooney and the other Hollywood stars, but don't forget Mendelssohn…
..or the fact that the dancing was in the charge of Bronislava Nijinska,
sister of the great Russian dancer . And don't forget that Reinhardt himself was...
..a great experimental producer, who earlier had played an exciting part in making…
..Germany a great centre of the drama. It was because of Hitler that he happened to be…
producing 'The Dream' in the Hollywood Bowl,
and Warner Bros. persuaded him to have a go at filming it.
Puck: How now, here comes Oberon ! (fairies screaming and fleeing in terror)
Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania!
Titania: What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence. I have forsworn his bed and company.
Oberon: Tarry, rash wanton! Do you amend it then? It lies in you.
Oberon: Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
Oberon: I do but beg a little changeling boy to be my henchman. fairies screaming)
Titania: Set your heart at rest. The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a votaress of my order and for her sake do I rear up her boy;
and for her sake I will not part with him.
Oberon: How long within this wood intend you stay?
Titania: Perchance till after Theseus' wedding day.
Titania: If you will patiently dance in our round and see our moonlight revels go with us.
Titania: If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts.
Oberon: Give me that boy and I will go with thee.
Titania: Not for thy fairy kingdom! Fairies, away. (fairies giggling)
(laughter)