Abstract
It is surprising how often A Midsummer Night’s Dream is associated with crime. There may be some grounds for this affinity in that it is in the nature of crime fiction that we must suppose all manner of people to be capable of very dark deeds, and the entire structure of Dream, particularly in performance, is underpinned by the idea that apparently respectable humans may have much darker and wilder counterparts, since Theseus and Hippolyta are usually doubled with Titania and Oberon. Moreover, there are crimes and darknesses at the heart of Dream itself: Theseus’ record of abandoning women; the self-harm of the Amazons; fairies’ abduction of human children, symbolised by the Indian boy; since Theseus was sometimes counted as one of the Argonauts, a possible glance at the story of Medea and Jason; and, Louis Montrose suggests, foreshadowings of the death of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and Hippolyta who was brought to his death by his stepmother Phaedra’s unrequited passion for him. It is notable too that what is in effect the play’s sequel, The Two Noble Kinsmen, renounces the comic tone of Dream entirely by opening with a story of bodies left unburied and closing with the death of one of its two heroes. Two other early modern plays which arguably both respond to Dream, Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon and Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, both also darken the tone considerably: The Whore of Babylon deals with treachery and national danger; The Witch of Edmonton offers partner-swapping, magic and a blurring of the boundary between human and animal, but the stories it tells are of murder, damnation and execution.
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Notes
- 1.
Rebecca-Anne C. do Rozario observes that ‘The woods indicate a crossroads between the ordinary and supernatural for both Bilbo and Bottom’ (44).
- 2.
On the drugs in Dream, see Pollard 21–2.
- 3.
This was based on the 1949 novel of Maria Lang, sometimes called the Swedish Agatha Christie.
- 4.
The surviving trench in Château Wood and the adjacent museum give a good indication of the state of Polygon Wood.
- 5.
The first Lady Fairfax thinks Shakespeare ‘was something of a weasel. He had already left wife and children and now he was leaving us’ (429); ‘Nothing will come of nothing, unless it’s the beginning of the world’ (15); when her father returns ‘neither the exterior nor the inward man resembled that it was’ (46); Malcolm Lovat ‘is a prince out of my star’ (47); Debbie finds ‘her lawn as blighted as a blasted heath’ (57); Carmen is ‘more of a beast-with-two-backs kind of girl herself’ (86); ‘The wood was full of noises’ (157); Vinny’s first cat was called Grimalkin (90); and Isobel thinks ‘I should never have tried to kill time. I wasted it and now it’s wasting me’ (189). Isobel’s father thinks his children might turn out to be Shakespeares (125), though Charles’s vision is rather of a parallel world in which he might be ‘a famous Shakespearian actor’ (240); ‘Eliza lay coldly in bed next to Gordon. The second-best bed’ (142); and ‘Some say that Shakespeare himself spent time at Fairfax Manor’ (19). We also hear ‘We know who we are, but not who we may be’ (253), Debbie classifying jam ‘After every couple of jars … has to go over to the kitchen sink and wash her hands like some strangely domesticated Lady Macbeth’ (278), and Isobel thinks ‘I’ve murdered sleep’ (328). Gordon tells his mother that Eliza ‘doth teach the torches to burn bright’ (288), there are ‘violent delights’ (428), and Isobel thinks of Perdita as a name for the doorstep baby (254). Isobel wonders if she is experiencing ‘the metamorphosis of yet another hapless girl into something rich and strange’ (362) and recovers consciousness on 23 April (406), Shakespeare’s birthday.
- 6.
She includes in her Campion novels quotations from or references to The Winter’s Tale and Henry V (Mystery Mile), Macbeth (Mind Readers 235), The Tempest (Fashion in Shrouds 22–3), the Henriad and Julius Caesar (More Work for the Undertaker 183–4 and 27), King Lear (Mr Campion’s Falcon 77, which was continued by her husband Youngman Carter after her death), Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and As You Like It (Cargo of Eagles 81, 102, 147 and 196), Othello (Mr Campion’s Farthing 13), and, as so often in crime fiction, Hamlet, which is openly identified as a whodunnit in More Work for the Undertaker, where Evadne hands out apples at her party because her murdered sister always used to and the solicitor’s comment is ‘Hamlet and the play, sort of. Jolly bad show’ (235).
- 7.
In effect this is a version of counterfeiting, and In ‘The Three Garridebs’, Sherlock Holmes declares that ‘the counterfeiter stands in a class by himself as a public danger’ (133).
- 8.
This was one of the three Campion novels which Allingham’s husband Pip Youngman Carter published after her death, in some cases drawing on notes and drafts she had left. Warde and Gill observe that ‘The shift, completed after the Second World War, from coppice to mature timber—whether conifer or deciduous—was the most striking change to occur in recent history’ (2).
- 9.
On the interest in art in Sayers and Marsh, see Schaub 2013, 59.
- 10.
Suggestively, a particularly notable case of a forge being converted to a filling station was at Dane End in Hertfordshire in the 1930s, and much is made of the fact that the spelling of the Andersen family’s name marks them as Danish (see http://www.geolocation.ws/v/E/1871532/the-old-forge-dane-end-hertfordshire/en); the name of Dane End could thus be seen as an omen of their eventual extinction.
- 11.
In Much Ado the Hero character is a weather girl, reflecting the archetypal British preoccupation but corralling it in a specifically south coast setting (Wray 186), and The Taming of the Shrew is set mainly in and around the Houses of Parliament.
- 12.
In Edmund Crispin’s Love Lies Bleeding, in which a wood is a place of danger for a young woman lying on a grassy bank who becomes a target for a murderer’s bullets, Fen echoes this view as he tries to shield her: ‘“Nature,” he observed gloomily. “I can’t say I’ve ever had very much use for it”’ (201).
- 13.
It is difficult to be sure given the generic similarity of the four sites, but at least some of the shots of the park do not appear to have been filmed at the Sherwood Forest site.
- 14.
When talking about Midsomer Murders I discuss mainly those episodes which had already been seen when A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first shown, with the addition of three, ‘Dead Letters’, ‘Vixen’s Run’, and ‘Four Funerals and a Wedding’, which were being filmed during summer 2005, at the same time as Dream.
- 15.
In the pilot episode, ‘The Killings at Badger’s Drift’, Cully rehearses the part of Annabella in Ford’s’Tis Pity She’s a Whore for a production at the ADC theatre in Cambridge while her father investigates a series of murders perpetrated by an incestuous brother and sister; at one stage he has a dream in which Mendelssohn’s wedding march is playing. In ‘Written in Blood’, the second ever episode, Cully is preparing to act in Much Ado, and in ‘Death’s Shadow’ she rehearses a scene from The Duchess of Malfi with famous director Simon Fletcher, who as a boy was partly responsible for the death of another child and is consequently murdered in an act of revenge during the course of the episode; she also recalls acting Ophelia and that Fletcher had directed Antony Sher in The Jew of Malta at the Barbican.
- 16.
It is a coincidence, but an appropriate one, that the Inspector Morse episode ‘The Way Through the Woods’ (dir. John Madden, 1995), which features a young Neil Dudgeon, contains the line ‘If you want to walk on the land you’re supposed to apply for a permit’.
- 17.
Although Midsomer Murders was an ITV programme and Dream a BBC one, there is evidence that channel loyalty is not a particularly relevant factor: the Thinkbox ‘Audience Profile’ pages observe of women aged 55 and over that ‘ITV (and its multi-channel extensions) rank amongst the most watched commercial stations for mature women … They also appreciate the BBC’s output … but tend to turn to commercial channels for news and general entertainment. Half of this group watch Coronation Street, Midsomer Murders and the ITV news regularly’ (Thinkbox).
- 18.
In the Shakespeare Retold, the jilted Harry is much more prominent and interesting than Hortensio, on whose role his is loosely modelled, and in this film so obviously influenced by Bridget Jones’s Diary it is actually he who takes the Bridget role of dealing with heartbreak by drinking alone and who is seen sitting alone waiting for the phone to ring. Even more noticeable is the attention paid to the emotional state of Petruchio, whose cross-dressing can surely be related to the legacy of the trauma of being abandoned by his mother when he was six (which Harry estimates as his present mental age).
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Hopkins, L. (2016). Who Owns the Wood? Appropriating A Midsummer Night’s Dream . In: Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53875-8_3
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