A Midsummer Night's Dream

The purpose of my thesis has been to establish the reasons for adapting Shakespeare for children in the modern age and to see if adaptations are influenced by the time they are written. From my analysis of forty- two adaptations for children of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, covering a period of almost two hundred years, three distinct trends have emerged. The first is the evolution of Shakespeare, in terms of his reputation and literary prestige. The second is the growth in the variety of adaptations of Shakespeare for children. The third is the tendency of treatments to reflect the eras in which they were produced. This project represents an under-discussed field of Shakespeare studies. Comparing a wide variety of texts in the context of the time they were written has been neglected, as has the comparison of texts in different eras. This project covers seven time periods (with a chapter devoted to each): 1800 to 1840 (The Beginning); 1850 to 1910 (The Golden Age), 1919 to 1939 (Between the Wars); 1940 to 1959 (Post War Recovery); 1960 to 1979 (Performance Adaptations); 1980 to 1989 (Shakespeare in Schools) and 1990 to 1999 (End of a Millennium). I argue three points: The first is that the prestige of Shakespeare has been systematically and consistently reinforced in each generation echoing his development from England’s greatest writer to an international icon. The second is that adaptations of MND have been influenced for the past 200 years by education in one way or another, either for pedagogic use or as metatheatrical device, ensuring an increasing variety of adaptations. The third is that MND has been rewritten to suit a specific era and audience.

“Bottom’s Dream” at the end of act 4 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been recognized as an extended allusion to Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. This passage also develops a complex version of political aesthetics. In this essay, I trace how the peculiar aesthetics of Bottom’s discourse are intertwined with the theological and political concerns of the Pauline text. The aesthetics of “Bottom’s Dream” are intrinsically linked to the way that Paul’s epistle composes the mystical body, a major trope for religious and social order in premodern Europe. Paul’s text develops the incarnational and eschatological elements of the mystical body that will form the foundation for a liturgical tradition that remained resonant into the sixteenth century. Bottom’s allusive vision maintains an essential relation to the eschatological aspects of the Pauline original even as its synesthetic elements reimagine the incarnational dimensions of Paul’s text. “Bottom’s Dream” merges aesthetics with politics and theology, but this aesthetics cannot be reduced to either pure politics or theology. Ultimately, the multifaceted character of this aesthetic vision resists becoming assimilated to the instrumental politics of the Athenian elite at the end of the play.

In this essay, I explore how Nicholas Hytner's 2019 immersive production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Bridge Theatre incorporated popular music, cultural references and anachronistic textual  additions to Shakespeare’s play in order to respond to issues of contemporary gender politics and questions of desire, and to update the play for a modern audience.

From the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the idea of consent comes to the foreground as Theseus recounts winning Hippolyta's love by doing her "injuries" and Egeus insists upon the primacy of his "consent" in his daughter's choice of  husband.  The idea of consent goes beyond the issue of love, however, as is fitting for a play that associates lovers with madmen and poets for their fevered imaginations.  Consent in the affairs of love is directly linked in the play with the need for the audience's consensual imagination in creating the fictional reality on stage.  To borrow Hippolyta's words regarding the strange stories of the lovers, it is required that the audience's minds also be "transfigured...together," that they give their consent in the etymological sense of the word (con-sentire).  If the play thus offers a meditation on the workings of the imagination in make-believe and in the affairs of love, it also glances at what realism on stage consists in.  However, the link between love and fiction-making contains an element that complicates the equation. As Theseus's words above and the etiological story of "Love-in-Idleness" indicates, the origin of love is inseparable from injury—from the "purple," or the black-and-blue bruising, of "love's wound."  Remarkably, I will argue, the play draws parallels between the violence that is insistently figured as a constitutive element of love and representational practices that act upon the audience's imagination.

This paper argues that the multisensory and synesthetic dream experiences depicted in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) and Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) transcend the commonplace concern with the typology of dreams by instead exploring the raw and sensorially embodied experience of dreaming. The paper further shows how and why the depiction of dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili points to a (hitherto neglected) direct or indirect influence of Colonna on Shakespeare. The chapter begins by showing how dreams were in early modern England viewed primarily as sensory phenomena. This is also seen in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the characters’ romantically (or erotically) fulfilling dream worlds are made up, above all, of multisensory and synesthetic perceptions. But the chapter suggests that Shakespeare’s representation of dreams as multisensory realisations of love, rather than simply reflecting the early modern cultural understanding of dreams, may owe much to the influence of Colonna’s dream romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In addition to topographical similarities, borrowings of imagery, and comparable uses of dream frames, Shakespeare’s and Colonna’s shared interest in the raw and sensorially embodied experience of dreaming bespeaks a connection between their dream worlds.

If it is the role of the humanities is to interpret the expressions of human experience over time, what exactly can Shakespeare offer in response to critical environmental concerns?  How can an ecological reading of Shakespeare serve to inform humanity’s role in the health of ecological systems?  This paper presents an ecological reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bridging allegorical interpretation with the principles of deep ecology, a philosophy founded by mountaineer Arne Naess. Specific to the philosophy are concepts which promote wider identification with nature. Deep ecology is predicated on the idea that non-human living beings have an equal right to live as humans.  My discussion elucidates the connection between deep ecology and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, beginning with its fundamental precepts, moving into the ecological history of Elizabethan England, and finally into an allegorical interpretation of Jack Bottom and Puck, the intermediaries between nature and social order.

A contrast between appearance and reality is one of the most important themes in Shakespeare’s plays. This theme is necessary for the progression from ignorance to knowledge that Shakespeare’s characters often go through, as in the case of King Lear, Othello, and Twelfth Night. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this theme permeates every aspect of the play. In Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, mistaking appearance for reality is the action that produces the tragic and comic effect respectively. Whichever the case, it is used to both comic and tragic effect, providing a means for the conflict of the play to occur.

If Faustus dramatizes Calvinist cosmology, my first chapter treats A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a cosmology based on the theology of Richard Hooker. Rather than the tragedy Faustus locates in the paradoxical mixture of voluntarism and predestination, Midsummer is a comedy grounded in Hooker’s assumption of God’s rationality expressed as love and the enabling of creaturely virtue (Spinks 111-112). For Hooker the universe is structured according to a hierarchy of laws, including the laws of reason, nature, and scripture; crucially, ritual practice is embedded in these general laws and is part of the ordinary functioning of the universe. This universe, therefore, is anything but arbitrary. Following Peter Lake’s analysis of the trends within the Elizabethan church Hooker was responding to, particularly a Calvinist stress on predestination and a quietist approach to ritual practice (Lake 145-6), I begin by locating these trends in the interference of Duke Theseus and Egeus, sovereign and father, with the marriage plans of the young lovers Hermia and Lysander. This reading is possible because the play frames the problems of marriage and love as metonyms for the problems of free will, predestination, and grace in relationship to religious ritual.
This reading of Athenian patriarchy pits a Calvinist political theology against the natural world outside Athens and the play’s enchanted fairies. The “hiccups” Poole alludes to in Hooker’s theorization of natural law generate the metaphysical structure of the play; the most prominent hiccups are fertility’s uncertain relationship to lunar influence and the fairies’ unpredictable magic. The fairies are partly legible as theatrical allegorizations of natural processes, but their chaotic agency and appeal to higher powers makes them more than that. Against the natural or astral determinism that Faustus attacks in his final scene, the natural world of Midsummer is decidedly irregular; yet whereas the arbitrariness of cosmic structure made it meaningless for Faustus, the constrained unpredictability of nature in Midsummer creates its significance. By making love and fertility unpredictable but not completely arbitrary the play suggests they may be read as visible signs of grace, an extension of the traditional definition of the sacraments. Marriage’s reformation from sacrament to institution and the complex echoes of its sacramental origin still present in English custom and law make marriage the ideal test-case for a Hookerian understanding of ritual’s relationship to nature.
Ritual is therefore one way Midsummer’s fairies can be distinguished from Faustus’s metaphysical demons. The fairies are located in space and time and sometimes act through evidently natural means (their love-potions have precise floral origins). But though their internal arguments can ramify into natural disorder, they do not cause this disorder directly. Instead Titania’s speech culminating in the anger of “the moon, governess of floods” (2.1.103) describes natural disorder’s inextricable but obscurely acausal connection to disturbances of both human and fairy rituals. In other words, this particular occasion of natural order is only a large-scale case of a more general ambiguity in the functioning of ritual, which, like nature, only sometimes works as intended. Along with the fairies’ awareness of higher levels of existence – for example in their allusions to Venus and Cupid – their own dependance on unpredictable ritual expresses the limitations of fairy power. Whereas in Faustus ritual, pace the neoplatonist magicians, was meaningless ceremony, in Midsummer meaningful but unreliable ritual is everywhere.
While the fairies may offer something of an explanation for human ritual, their own use of ritual with its own unpredictable results means that their explanatory power is only partial. They cannot therefore be considered as merely theatrical allegories; their one moment of frame-breaking, the metamorphosis of Bottom, is the exception or Hookerian “hiccup” which proves the rule.  Though this metamorphosis and other aspects of the fairies are Ovidian, they are in Ovidian in different sense than Faustus’s demons. In other words, the phenomenology Poole describes can apply equally well to both plays, but with quite different metaphysical or theological underpinnings. In particular, Faustus’s tension between predestination and voluntarism can be accommodated by Midsummer’s treatment of ritual. Because fairy ritual in Midsummer is only partly predictable, it can accommodate the tension Nicholas Tyacke has identified between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists over the relationship between predestinatory and sacramental grace. Fairies are agents of both nature and grace, but though they can directly affect the will (like Faustus’s God but unlike Faustus’s demons) with their love-potions they can preserve both apparent human and divine freedom by virtue of their unpredictability. 
While the play locates its understanding of natural irregularity primarily in the moon and fertility, and uses natural irregularity to theorize how rituals can be partly efficacious, it also considers how ritual can be used to tame social discord. I argue that the play tempers its Hookerian understanding of ritual efficacy with a Pauline treatment of religious adiaphora (things indifferent to scripture) that associates different attitudes towards ritual practice with different degrees of spiritual maturity. While examples are distributed throughout the play, the most striking are the heterogeneous responses to the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Through a series of allusions to controversies over ritual practice and the myth’s own Christianization in the Ovid moralisé tradition, the play-within-a-play presents theatre as a form of religious ritual which, due to general uncertainty about ritual efficacy, can be at once sacramental or merely edifying to various participants – as long as it avoids giving offense. But the truly spiritual, the play suggests following St. Paul’s elaboration of Christian liberty, are not offended so easily; the can interpret away potentially misleading material signs when necessary.
In an ideologically complex strategy of compensation, the play suggest that its female characters (human women or gendered fairies) are in this sense generally spiritually superior its males, and that this spirituality may help them endure the offenses associated with their social subordination. The play therefore adopts the quietist view of Christian liberty which defines freedom with respect to ritual practice while preserving the subjugation of women and servants. Yet this spirituality also allows women, as they mature, to transcend the narcissistic desire for material likeness evident in the intense, near-identification of Hermia and Helena, and to accept more substantial differences in their older friendships – for example that of Titania and her Indian votaress, a friendship between a fairy queen and her mortal servant. Unlike Faustus’s intense homonormativity, narcissism, and desire for transubstantiation, the superior “spirituality” of the women in Midsummer is not a question of their substance, but, again following St. Paul, a question of their attitude towards ritual and society, manifesting in a superior capacity for friendship.
Again, in the play’s treatment of the social role of ritual, Bottom’s “translation” is the exception that proves the rule. Bottom’s humility and eventual restoration to his human shape contrasts with Faustus’s alignment of transubstantiation and an antisocial desire for uniqueness. Bottom’s theatrical impulse, however inept, is towards charity and social unity. Bottom views the aesthetic constructs of the theatre as socially salutary rituals that even in misfiring are controlled by a theological discourse that allows offense to be interpreted away. This understanding of art is incompatible with Faustus’s view of it as an aesthetic distraction from invisible grace or inevitable damnation; theatre in Midsummer is either easily neutralizable or edifying, if not sacramental. This understanding of theatre is possible because its efficacy (like all ritual, according to Hooker) is metonymically linked with lunar influence through their common effects on the imagination. Puck and Oberon’s verbal juxtapositions of fruitfulness and imagination when discussing the lovers’ dream-like experience in the woods, and again in the epilogue discussing the audience’s experience in the theatre, presents these two domains of experience as fungible. In both cases, these pseudo-dramatists aim to contain the negative feelings produced by bad or offensive ritual by simply interpreting them away as dreams. Rather than Faustus’s polarization of art against excrementality, in Midsummer artistic ritual, when misfiringly infertile, is at worst inoffensively neutral.
Midsummer thus is legible as a local response to Calvinist cosmology, which works by partly reversing the nominalist/voluntarist uncertainties that motivate Faustus; it reconstructs a meaningful cosmology.  In a recent historiographical review of Max Weber’s thesis of the Reformation’s “disenchantment of the world,” Alexandra Walsham argues for more local attention to processes of “desacralization and resacralization” (“Reformation”); comparison of these two plays can help make Walsham’s point. In Faustus, in a supposedly strictly Calvinist universe, demons are (equally supposedly) all-powerful and unbound by natural laws; in Midsummer, a much less Calvinist work, fairies are everywhere but identified with a precariously regular nature.

Ce texte est issu d’un cours consacré aux mises en scène des pièces de Shakespeare (théâtre et cinéma) et donné en première année de licence d’arts du spectacle (« Lectures de films et de spectacles », Université de Strasbourg, 2009-2010). Il porte sur Le Songe d’une nuit d’été, sur la multiplicité des interprétations et des adaptations dont la pièce a fait l’objet et sur la mise en scène de Yann-Joël Collin, créée en 2008 au Théâtre de l’Odéon et reprise en 2009 au Théâtre National de Strasbourg.

This paper argues that Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" utilises many features of the Attic Comedy and disrupts the structure of common Elizabethan Comedy. It argues that the play can be seperated into two rather independent stories (the Athenian lovers and the craftsmen) by which features of Attic Comedy (story of the Athenian lovers) are opposed to the features of Elizabethan Comedy (story of the craftsmen).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in 1595-96, is arguably Shakespeare’s most Ovidian play: the story of Pyramus and Thisbe comes straight from Book IV, the love chases invert Apollo and Daphne, and the etiology of love-in-idleness burgeons out of similar floral fantasies in Ovid.  The navel of the Dream is the metamorphosis of Bottom, at once an endlessly giving generator of asinine comedy and a bracing plunge into the mysteries of vitality. The only realized animal transformation in Shakespeare, Bottom’s translation interweaves aspects of Actaeon, Midas, the Minotaur, and Io, while also borrowing from another Metamorphoses, The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius, written in Latin by a Greek-speaking North African in the second century C. E. and translated into English by William Adlington in 1566.  The allegorical tradition of the Middle Ages and the Platonizing mythopoesis of Renaissance humanism placed Ovid and Apuleius in an ancient wisdom tradition where ideas from Jewish and Christian scriptures, Greek and Roman philosophy, Egyptian religion, and Eastern mysteries could uneasily touch, mix, and reconcile under the creative direction of poets, philosophers, and priests. These sapiential specialists bear many names, including Plato, Orpheus and Pythagoras. Apuleius adds Psyche, hero of her own wisdom quest, and Isis, who oversees the de-transformation of Lucius, the novel’s “golden ass.” Wisdom literature includes women and men as well as Egyptians, Numidians, Indians, Greeks, Romans, and Jews among its readers, writers, and sagacious guides.

Ο άνθρωπος και η σχέση του με τη φύση. Ποιος από τους δύο είναι πιο ισχυρός εν τέλει; Μπορεί ο άνθρωπος να επαναστατήσει και να ελέγξει το φυσικό περιβάλλον ή να το παραμορφώσει; Από την άλλη η φύση είναι σε θέση να κερδίσει το χαμένο έδαφος και να συμμορφώσει  το επαναστατημένο της παιδί; Μία αμφίδρομη σχέση και μία διελκυστίνδα που κάθε φορά επανακαθορίζεται από εποχή σε εποχή. Η ομιλία αυτή σκοπεύει να δείξει μέσα από το θεατρικό λόγο κορυφαίων συγγραφέων το πέρασμα από τη μία όψη της πραγματικότητας στην άλλη και κλείνοντας να δώσει όλο το φάσμα των αλληλεπιδράσεων από την αθώα έμφυτη τάση των ανθρώπων έως την καταστροφική τους μανία. Τα παραδείγματα θα προσπαθήσουν να καλύψουν ένα μεγάλο χρονικό φάσμα από τον Σαίξπηρ έως σήμερα.

Al quarto centenario della sua morte, William Shakespeare resta uno dei punti di riferimento essenziali della cultura occidentale. Per lo scrittore italiano Raffaele La Capria, nato insieme al fascismo e formatosi sulle pagine degli autori della leggenda americana, la figura del Bardo assume esplicitamente il ruolo di “padre nobile” soprattutto nella seconda stagione della sua carriera. Ma La Capria non si serve di Shakespeare soltanto «per metterlo “tra virgolette”». Il suo sembra essere una sorta di ritorno alle radici europee della cultura straniera che ha tanto amato. Un ritorno che gli consente di riprendere e di sciogliere, anche retrospettivamente, alcuni dei nodi più importanti della sua poetica. Nello 'Stile dell’anatra', ad esempio, l'autore rievoca il monologo di Shylock per parlare della sua idea di ‘simpatia’, che definisce come la «capacità di essere coinvolti dalla sofferenza di un altro». E per spiegare ciò, sostituisce la parola “ebreo” con la parola “altro”, e smorza intenzionalmente la conclusione del monologo, tutta incentrata sul tema del risentimento e della vendetta. Recensire le citazioni di Shakespeare e valutarne la risonanza nell’opera di uno scrittore contemporaneo di altra nazionalità può allora divenire un’occasione per studiare la figura del drammaturgo inglese da un’angolazione alternativa e privilegiata.

"«Shakespeare on Pointe Shoes: Dramaturgy of A Midsummer Night's Dream by George Balanchine».
[English abstract at the end of the article]
A reading of Shakespearean comedy and a technical and dramaturgic analysis of the ballet (La Scala Theatre, Milan, 2003) may lead to the conclusion that Dream by Balanchine is a new creation of the drama (as desired by the choreographer), although at the same time it is extremely faithful to its source."

In Shakespeare's plays, translation is a common rhetorical trope
that referred to the conveyance of ideas from one geo-cultural location to another, from one historical period to another, and from one artistic form to another. Translational moments create comic relief and heighten the awareness that communication is not a given.

Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a Southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and its newly created past. In highlighting the often-forgotten link between so-thought 'harmless' aesthetics and politics, the invention of a Northern aesthetics is shown to be the rhetorical and eristic premise for direct political change. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening, all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment. With its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights – interpreted as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy – the invention of Northern aesthetics was set against the Southern aesthetics of order, harmony, and beauty. Challenging the European Grand Tour, the new aesthetics championed the Domestic and Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, the English garden, Hogarth’s new ‘line of beauty' and his 'shell-aesthetics', Francis Grose's revolutionary ‘aesthetic regionalism', and a, both old and new, more consonant 'Gothic' and rough, aesthetics of sublimity. This last there to defy the constant resurgence of an a-historical metaphysics of beauty. Intellectuals privileged thus the autochthonous tradition of British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion and superstition that sanctioned an authoritarian politics which they disclaim and which the Gothic Novel mocks.
    However, if empiricism, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain’s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes, magic creatures, and a celebration of what would come to be known as the ‘fairy way of writing', institutionalised by the creation of the first literary university canon of ‘English’ poets and authors (T. Warton).
  The mythological "invention" of an autochthonous past, nevertheless, produced  a sort of  “amnesia of the processes of ethnogenesis and migrations” (P.J. Geary p. 153) which, in the end, is what creates that engrafting of peoples on peoples that produce a new people (182). E. Brontë will, soon later, address exactly this topic and react to it, incisively speaking of the "North wind" that preoccupied her (see ch. 5.4:  Emily Brontë’s 'Wuthering Heights': “This North Wind that Chills Me” pp. 205-24).
First chapter for free download from the Editor's page, at Cambridge Scholars.

Helen of Troy is famous for two things: her abduction from
Sparta to Troy by the Trojan prince, Paris, and her beauty. In this article I consider the interest taken in these two topics by Renaissance writers. 1) ‘Rape’ was a term which was being
redefined in the 1590s when Helen’s story received several
innovative retellings and reinterpretations; I argue that changes in rape law gave this old mythological story of abduction a newly urgent topicality. 2) As the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy is an absolute – the paradigm, the standard of beauty. Representing her in language is therefore difficult, if not impossible, since language is, by definition, plural and relative. The Renaissance were aware of this conflict. I consider the
responses of narrative and dramatic representation to the
challenge which Helen’s beauty presented.

From July 1, 1934, to November 1, 1968, the Production Code Administration (PCA) oversaw the creation of American motion pictures, in order to improve Hollywood’s moral standing. To assist in this endeavor, the studios produced film adaptations of classic literature, such as the plays of William Shakespeare. In the first two years of the Code’s inception, two Shakespearean films were produced by major studios: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). But were these classic adaptations able to avoid the censorship that other films endured? With the use of archived collections, film viewings, and an in-depth analysis of the plays, multiple versions of the scripts, and other available surviving documents, I was able to see how these productions were affected by the enforcement of film censorship and what it said about the position of Shakespeare’s work in society.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream tended to use self-regulation, so as to avoid the censorship of the PCA. However, the film did not escape without some required changes. In spite of the filmmakers’ efforts, there were a few textual changes and the fairy costumes required revisions to meet the PCA’s standards.

In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the PCA was far more involved in all stages of the film’s production. There were many documented text changes and even a case in which the censors objected to how the actors and director executed a scene on film. The motion picture was created as if it were of the greatest importance by all involved. And, as it were, the existing archives paint a picture of a production that was a sort of battleground in a sociopolitical war between the censors and the filmmakers.

As both films arrived on the international stage, this sociopolitical campaigning did not end. During international distribution, the films were each accepted, rejected, and forced to endure further censorship, in order to become acceptable for public screening. This censorship often relayed a message about the location’s societal views and its contrast to American society.

"ABSTRACT:
This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life."

about the important solo flute in orchestra
Ravel _ “Daphnis & Chloé” Süit No: 2
Mendelssohn _ Scherzo “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” op: 21
Bizet _ Carmen Act III “Entr’acte” Süit No: 1
study of solo flute in this musical works & how to play it

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature—how-to books on self-improvement—this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers, including but not limited to “blackness,” indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call “racism.” A careful reading of Shakespeare's plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, and Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened and otherwise indelibly marked as un-cultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism and the global early modern world.