A Midsummer Night's Dream, and: The Merchant of Venice (review)

2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-49
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Green
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Two Hamlets

Tempo ◽  
1969 ◽  
pp. 6-12
Author(s):  
Stephen Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Original Text ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Although Shakespeare has in the past been freely plundered for musical settings of every kind—from song to opera—it still seems a fair generalisation to say that his best work does not lend itself to this kind of treatment. Perhaps the most successful of all Shakespeare operas in English is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which follows closely the text of one of the less substantial comedies. Of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, no satisfactory opera has apparently been made (though Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict contains charming music), and for much the same reason—namely Shakespeare's unrivalled genius for linguistic imagery—the great tragedies have resisted direct musical setting, Boito's Otello and Piave's Macbeth being, of course, free derivatives, not translations. Only in our own century has it become normal to set Shakespeare's tragedies in the original text, translated or otherwise.

scholarly journals Shakespeare Comes to Indonesia

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (25) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Michael Skupin
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Indirect Influence ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Dutch Translation ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Lengthy Discussion

This paper discusses the circumstances of Shakespeare’s arrival in Indonesia via the translations of Trisno Sumardjo, published in the early 1950’s. Biographical material about the translator will be presented, and there will be a discussion of the characteristics the Indonesian language and of Indonesian verse which would determine the expectations of his readers, such as rhyme, meter and style, that would influence his renderings of the poetic passages in the Bard’s plays. These are illustrated in a sampling of passages from As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice. The Dutch translation of L. A. J. Burgersdijk was an indirect influence on the translations, and not always for the good. The paper concludes with a lengthy discussion of the extremely difficult problems that Sumardjo encountered in his translation of King Lear. This Lear was not published during the translator’s lifetime, Sumardjo’s prestige notwithstanding because he was not satisfied with the solutions he proposed.

scholarly journals Problem Plays

Spectrum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine DeCoste
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is typically identified in scholarship as a comedy. However, the play’s fourth act is troubling, as Shylock loses his wealth and is forced to convert from his ancestral Judaism to Christianity, undermining the play’s comic nature. In this essay, I examine what are called surface and fundamental conventions of comedy to discuss whether The Merchant of Venice can be classified as a Shakespearean comedy. Surface conventions appear regularly in comedies, but are not necessary to classify a play as a comedy; fundamental conventions are less immediately obvious. Although the play subscribes to surface conventions of comedy, it fails to present the fundamental conventions of a just universe or comically satisfying ending, particularly in the legal proceedings of both the trial scene and the protagonists’ marriages. Noting comic tropes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in contrast to The Merchant of Venice, I argue that Merchant is, in fact, a “problem play” that does not fit neatly into any generic classification. While typical comedies offer justice in the sense that characters achieve deserved outcomes, justice in The Merchant of Venice is undermined through Portia’s intervention in the trial. Ultimately, I aim to understand with more nuance the complex role that the legal system plays in constructing genre in The Merchant of Venice, and to question the play’s traditional, though not universal, classification in Shakespeare scholarship as a “comedy.”

The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Direct Influence ◽  
Large Structure ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Symbolic Action ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Organic Combination

This chapter examines Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. This play as a whole is not shaped by festivity in the relatively direct way as in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play's large structure is developed from traditions which are properly theatrical; it is not a theatrical adaptation of a social ritual. And yet analogies to social occasions and rituals prove to be useful in understanding the symbolic action. The chapter pursues such analogies without suggesting, in most cases, that there is a direct influence from the social to the theatrical form. Shakespeare here is working with autonomous mastery, developing a style of comedy that makes a festive form for feeling and awareness out of all the theatrical elements, scene, speech, story, gesture, role which his astonishing art brought into organic combination.

Shakespearean Comedy and the Senses

2018 ◽  
pp. 235-249
Author(s):  
Kevin Curran
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Powerful Source ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Senses

In Shakespeare’s comedies, sensation is both a problem and a solution. It is the source of division and the grounds of unity. This paradox is consistent with the early modern period’s mixed conception of the senses. If antitheatrical tracts and clerical literature denounced sensory experience as an impediment to truth and spiritual understanding, printed defences of theatre and a variety of medical and psychological tracts treated the senses as a powerful source of knowledge and judgement. This essay traces how Shakespeare’s treatment of the senses relates to both of these traditions. It addresses the connection between this double rendering of sensation and comic form and concludes by considering the ethical implications of sensory experience in the theatre. Examples are drawn from a variety of plays, including The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It.

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