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From the very start, A Midsummer Night's Dream has been difficult for literary critics to evaluate. A great part of this difficulty stems from the fact that Shakespeare has brought together such distinct styles, which various productions over the centuries have freely edited or simplified. For example, the first known review of the play was actually of a production done on New Year's day, 1604, featuring Puck and called A Play of Robin Goodfellow. Other variations focused on the land of the fairies, or else put Bottom, a crowd pleaser, at the front. With so many versions around, even in the early years when the play was newly written, it is difficult for literary critics to know exactly what a writer saw on stage. Variations were not only edited from Shakespeare's original work but added songs and characters to round out the main story that each production chose as the feature.

This play is mentioned by Samuel Pepys, a civil servant whose diary is so thorough and descriptive of its times that it is studied in schools to this day. Pepys attended a performance on September 29, 1662, noting in his diary that this was a play that he had never seen before: ''nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.'' Pepys scholars note that he found the clowning, love, and fairy stories to be too simple for his sophisticated tastes.

Other writers, of course, understood and appreciated what Shakespeare had accomplished with this play. In 1817, William Hazlitt noted his regret that Shakespeare was often considered by foreigners to be a dour, serious writer, when in fact his fanciful side was plainly evident. ''In the Midsummer Night's Dream alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together.'' By using this particular play as an example, Hazlitt demonstrated an appreciation of Shakespeare's comedies that had grown throughout the eighteenth century and reached fullest blossom in the late 1800s, in the Victorian Era.

The music that Felix Mendelssohn wrote for the play in 1843 has frequently been used since as a soundtrack, giving a light, airy mood that befits the story of love and magical forest dwellers. Throughout its history, A Midsummer Night's Dream has been as interesting to audiences for the elaborate production values as for Shakespeare's dialogue and structure, with each production raising the bar on how to cut from royal pageantry to woods to invisible fairies.

By the latter half of the twentieth century, critics, applying more psychological interpretations, found that the play hinted at darker things. One of the most influential readings of A Midsummer Night's Dream was the one done in 1964 by Polish critic Jan Kott, who is often referred to as having given the play more depth than was previously thought. James L. Calderwood explained Kott's emphasison the romance between Bottom and Titania, in which Kott found ''brutality and eroticism beneath the veneer of romantic love. Thus Titania's drug-induced infatuation with Bottom becomes for Kott a rapacious but liberating desire for animal love, mirrored less obviously by the other lovers.''

Since Kott's criticism, productions of the play have focused more heavily on its sensuality and its theme of liberation from repression. Of these, one particular modern production--the one staged by Peter Brook in London in 1970--stands out as a presentation that changed the way that critics and audiences alike viewed the play. While previous productions were lavish, they also tended to be reverent and sterile, appealing to audiences' intellects as much as to their emotions. Brook's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, by contrast, used no background but a white wall, but it added such unexpected and unconventional interpretations as acrobatics and trapeze artists to reinvigorate audiences' expectations. Since that groundbreaking production, which is still discussed to this day for its audacity, theater companies have felt free to offer a wide variety of interpretations, using any number of modern devices that have become available to explore the play's contemporary relevance.

Bibliography:

1) Calderwood, James L., A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twayne, 1992, p. xxii.

2) Hazlitt, William, in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream; A Casebook, edited by Antony Price, Macmillan, 1983, p. 32, originally published in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817.

3) Pepys, Samuel, in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream; A Casebook, edited by Antony Price, Macmillan, 1983, p. 25, originally published in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, Penguin, 1970.

4) Phialas, Peter G., Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies: The Development of Their Form and Meaning, University of North Carolina Press, 1966, p. 105.

5) Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Cambridge University Press, 1964.

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