SHAKESPEARE AND POPULAR CULTURE

Introduction
Contemporary readers, especially youngsters, may find Shakespeare’s portrait of the oppression of
women shocking when compared to today’s values. At the time Shakespeare wrote his plays, women
were submissive and subordinate to men: they were not allowed to attend school and were absolutely
dependent on males, and this meant that marriages were usually arranged denying them the opportunity
of choosing a husband of their like.
And to make it worse, Shakespeare set this play in Athens, in ancient Greece, where equality was an
admired state, but only among free men. Women and slaves were accepted as having lower status. In
addition, the social class to which a person belonged largely dictated the amount of autonomy an
individual had. Authority of men with a higher status was absolute. The relationships, social norms,
gender roles and inequality were very strict for disobedient women; for at that time, there was a law
which was typical of a patriarchal society, this law decreed that a father had the right to marry his
daughter to the man of his choice or condemn her to death.
Nevertheless, after the initial shock we get at the very beginning of the play, where we can read how
Theseus, Duke of Athens, tells Hermia not to go against her father’s wishes, saying, ‘To you, your
father should be as a god;’ (1.1.47) and how Egeus asks for full penalty of law to fall on her, i.e. living
as a nun, abjuring forever the society of men, or being executed.
We will discover that Shakespeare used this conflict between father and daughter as the springboard to
deepen on the struggle of men to dominate women and, even though many scholars and critics are of the
opinion that he was a misogynist, female characters in this play are quite subversive and rebellious and
they fight to find themselves in order to be free of authoritative and sexual conflicts.
Do XXth and XXIst century adaptations and appropriations of the play reflect these strong-minded,
rebellious and fighting-for-their-right women? How have all the female characters been portrayed in
current productions?
Let’s see and study how Hippolyta, Hermia, Helena and Titania have been depicted in three different
modern adaptations of this play:
1. One film: Michael Hoffman's 1999 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream 
2. The novel Love in Idleness by Amanda Craig, 2003

3. The graphic novel The Sandman Vol 2. 19 written by Neil Gaiman and published by DC
Comics, 1990

Analysis of the Adaptations according to the Source text

1. Original Text-Play
Throughout history, women have faced intense discrimination.
In Shakespeare's England, women still had little to no status unless they were very high class.
Does Shakespeare reflect it so in this play?
Hippolyta is an onlooker to Hermia´s case; she allows Hermia be sentenced to death if she does not
obey her father. However, she is commanding in her relationship with Theseus; this is very unusual and
not right according to the time. She goes against the social rules and develops a different role to Theseus
from the one expected from her.
Hermia is promised to marry a man named Demetrius. However, she is not in love with Demetrius but
with another man called Lysander. The first act states quite precisely what role women are expected to
fulfil in the play:
Theseus: What say you, Hermia? be advised, fair maid:
To you your father should be as a God;
One that composed your beauties, yea and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted but within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.
(1.1.46-51)
But, against all odds, Hermia contradicts the Duke of Athens, shows that she has her own will and is
ready to fight for Lysander. In the following speech, she even dares to speak her mind in front of
Theseus:
Hermia: I do entreat your Grace to pardon me.
I know not by what power I am made bold,
Nor how it may concern my modesty,
In such a presence here to plead my thoughts.
(1.1.58-61)
Helena is in love with Demetrius, the man whom Hermia’s father wants to marry his daughter.
Unfortunately, Demetrius is not interested in Helena. However, Hermia is in love with Lysander and
tries everything to tell Demetrius that she does not love him. She contradicts her gender by breaking
society’s rules by chasing after men; this is very opposing to how a typical woman should act:
Helena: We cannot fight for love as men may do.
We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo.
(2.1.226-27)
She also betrays Hermia, her longtime friend; she betrays her own gender, and gossips to Demetrius to
achieve her own ends.
Titania is the strong-willed and independent queen of the fairies. She does not hesitate in fighting her
husband for control of the changeling boy. She is also powerful and her fairies always follow her
commands. While Oberon and Titania obviously love each other, they aren't exactly faithful to each
other and this is not what we should expect from a wife at Shakespeare’s days: wives owed absolute and
total fidelity to their husbands
Concluding Remark
According to this brief analysis, we can say that Shakespeare’s female characters are strong and
determined women who elaborate plans in order to escape from those situations they do not like even if
it means going against the established rules.
The fact that he wrote women with complex inner lives, with fears and sexual desires and brave enough
to go against men’s desires and wills was pretty radical 400 years ago.

2. Michael Hoffman's Adaptation of  A Midsummer Night's Dream

Michael Hoffman´s film tries to stay in-between high and popular culture. To achieve his goal, he has
not changed Shakespeare´s basic plot and the Elizabethan dialogue remains, but the setting and some
character attributes and manners have.
The drama’s action is transported from ancient Athens to an Italian village named Monte Athena in the
nineteenth century. Switching the setting from Athens to Italy does not enhance our understanding of
the play and we have lost the rich mythological resonance Shakespeare created by locating his play in
Greece. As far as the shift in time is concerned, that Hermia would be sentenced to death for
disobedience to her father does not make sense.
A narrator tells the audience at the beginning of the film that these are new times; and, as a signal of
these new times, we can watch characters riding bicycles, which are an important element in the film,
signalling the physical freedom to move around.
This declaration of ‘modern times’ plus the use of mechanicals lead us to expect a portrait of strong,
modern, feminist characters. Let’s check if this film fulfils these expectations.
Hippolyta, once the leader of the Amazons, an all-female society, isn´t the powerful Queen of
Amazons, but a dull and bland bride-to-be. It is significant that Hoffman leaves her silent, cutting the
lines from the play she pronounces on her wedding day and which are a reminiscence of her hunting
days when she was a warrior and took part in battles and hunts at men´s level.
Hippolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
(4.1.112-18)
Hoffman also removes Helena and Hermia’s female friendship history. He suppresses the lines in
which Helena accuses Hermia of forgetting:
Helena: All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?
 We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key;
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted;
But yet a union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.
(3.2.203-15)
Shakespeare insists on the idea of women’s strong bonds of friendship – the idea of the Amazon´s
society again? – whilst Hoffman insists on suppressing it. He reduces Helena’s mournful call for
solidarity and sisterhood to:
Helena: Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us—oh, is it all forgot?
And will you rent our ancient love asunder
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
It is not friendly, ’tis not maidenly.
Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it,
Though I alone do feel the injury.

(3.2.198-201,216-220; see Hoffman 66)

Not only he suppresses this female link of sisterhood, but he goes even further and adds a scene of mud-
wrestling to display their rivalry over men.
The fairy female world exhibits an atmosphere of passion, lust and Bacchanalia. Hoffman introduces a
sensual Titania who takes Bottom’s hand and cups it to her breast, giggles at his apparent arousal and
sits astride. Next, she caresses his chest and rolls on her back submissively; and then, Bottom brays like
an ass.
By contrast, Oberon is presented all powerful, seated in a throne and decorated with rays.
This sensuality, vulnerability and even comic side on Titania´s role is entirely Hoffman´s contribution.
We find a completely new character in the film: Bottom´s wife. We first meet her when she angrily
seizes one of the passers-by and asks furiously where her husband is. We can see Bottom is dissatisfied
with his marriage. Hoffman names her a ‘shrew’.
Concluding Remark
Hoffman introduces a sensuality that may make the film more commercial but which we cannot trace in
the original play. He uses women to achieve this goal: Titania’s outlook with sparkling blond tresses of
hair falling in the right tactful places; Hermia and Helena wrestling in the mud with their clothes stuck
to the body,...
Shakespeare´s strong-minded Helena becomes a vulnerable and comic young girl who, as she pursues
Demetrius, suffers all manners of indignity during her madly journey into the woods.
And last but not least, we find the odd addition to the play of Bottom´s wife, a shrewish woman whose
character does not reflect the original text.
The play transformed into a film has tried to be faithful to the basic plot and dialogue but as long as the
female characters are concerned we find simpler and blander women, endowed with less temperament
and strength and with much more sex appeal.

3. ‘Love in Idleness’  by Amanda Craig

Some years later, in 2003, a female writer, Amanda Craig, published her novel Love in Idleness, a
contemporary telling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which takes the title from Oberon´s description of
the flower that will produce instant passion when applied to eyelids. This novel, quite curiously, is also
set in a hill-top villa in Italy.
It is what we could call ‘light-hearted literature’; its main purpose is to entertain the reader.
We would expect from a nowadays female writer to magnify the strong and brave Shakespeare’s female
characters but, on the contrary, we find clumsy stereotypes.
Polly –Hippolyta- is a housewife whose only concern is to bring domestic order to the villa. She is
married to a successful American lawyer with whom she can´t remember last time they had sex and
who will finally dismiss her to become Guy Weaver’s lover – a TV star with ‘braying laugh’ and ‘furry
ears’-.
We watch the once all-powerful Queen of the Amazons arranging meals non-stop and collecting
everyone’s laundry.
Polly has let herself go and has lost herself in being the stay-at-home mother.
She declares her choice was to oppose her academic, feminist mother.
Ellen –a glamorous shoe-designer – and Hemani –an Indian eye-surgeon and single mother of an
Indian boy- are the lovesick maidens, Helena and Hermia.
Ellen is depicted as a wealthy British sexy girl who is desperate to get married. Hemani –whose
profession is a wink to Shakespeare´s references to eyes in his play- has cut herself off from sexuality in
order to be the perfect single mother.
Ellen´s attitude to both male counterparts makes readers feel dislike towards her. She is full of
resentment to Ivo Sponge -Lysander-, an inveterate playboy. Such is Ellen´s withering scorn that we can
´t help feeling sorry for the poor Ivo. She keeps savaging him and, we find out later in the book, that the
reason for such a behaviour is because she can´t forgive him for having fallen asleep once when they
 were about to have a sexual intercourse. Sex and curves and high heels and fashion is what characterizes
this ex-model who is firmly resolved to get a match equivalent to her status.
By contrast, Hemani has been indoctrinated in the more rigid idea of chastity because of her origins.
She was married to someone her parents had ‘lined up for her’. i.e. an arranged marriage. But, though
now she believes in romantic love, here in Cortona she is desperate to have sex with Ivo Sponge and
states ‘she had been able to ignore her body in England, keeping it wrapped up and subdued, but now it
was bleating on and on about needing sex, about dying for it, about not wasting what was left’1
Of course, we will see them fighting ‘like cats’ over men as in the original play but the language and
tone they use is not comparable to the original. Nevertheless, Daniel –Demetrius-, a Shakespeare’s
scholar, says wonderingly: ‘this all sounds familiar, somehow’2.
And what about Tania? The Queen of fairies has been reduced to a bad-tempered, spoilt nine-year-old
girl.
Particularly inconsiderate and tough is the image we get from one of the female newcomers to the story:
Betty, Polly´s mother-in-law. She is only interested in money and status and cosmetic surgery. Polly
calls her the Demon Queen.
Concluding Remark
Reading a twentieth-century novel written by a female writer one expects female characters at least as
powerful and full of determination as the ones in the original play.
We feel absolutely disappointed since the novel is entirely contrary to our assumptions.
We should have guessed it when the first two characters Amanda Craig introduces are two women
sweeping and cleaning, preparing the house as they imagine who the new tenants will be.
The novel takes the form of a contemporary telling of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ but its female
characters have no comparison to Shakespeare’s.

4. Sandman No. 19 "Dream Country: A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Neil Gaiman

Graphic novel is generally thought of as being ‘mass culture’. This series has its own story and includes
William Shakespeare as a character. By having Shakespeare walking around in the world he creates
Gaiman tries to fade the boundaries that separate low and high culture. We can read excerpts of the
original play intermingled with the character of Shakespeare in an excellent mastery of intertextuality.
What we have here is a double adaptation: the author’s personal life and his play.
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is not the first place where Gaiman´s character, Sandman, encounters
William Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Sandman meet for the first time in ‘Men of Good Fortunes’
(The Sandman, volume 2); Sandman can overhear Shakespeare telling Marlowe:
‘I would give anything to give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead; I’d bargain, like
your Faustus, for that boon’ 3
Sandman offers the playwright that gift and demands two plays in return. The first one will be ‘A
1
Craig, Amanda. Love in Idleness. Kindle Edition. Abacus, 2010.Page 138
2
Ídem. Page 304
3
Gaiman, Neil. The Doll's House (The Sandman #2).  D C Comics. 1995:126
 Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Shakespeare and his company will perform on a hill in England, Wendel’s
Mound, for Sandman who invites King Auberon and Queen Titania with their servant Puck and other
fairy creatures to watch the performance.
Gaiman places the focus of his story on Sandman and Shakespeare’s bargain: how a man sacrifices
everything for the Dream of reaching immortality. ‘The Sandman’ appropriates ‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream’ in order to explore this topic, the rewards and punishments of literary creation, humanity’s
desire for fulfilling dreams and the price to pay for attaining them.
The female universe in the graphic novel is reduced to Queen Titania and some of the fairies. As far as
the fairies are concerned we can say they are not very fairy-like. They look dangerous creatures,
monstrous in both appearance and behaviour. They will be the ones who summarize the plot for the
reader in order to tell them the progression of the play since there is no way to show every scene. Once
we discard the fairies as womanlike, the only character Gaiman includes in his novel with female
characteristics is Queen Titania. The role assigned to her is crucial.
In Shakespeare’s play, the Indian boy over whom King Oberon and Titania argue never appears in the
play. Gaiman introduces Hamnet, Shakespeare´s eight-year-old son as the actor playing the orphaned
Indian boy.
The triangle: Shakespeare-Hamnet-Titania is critical to grasp Gaiman´s message to the audience.
Hamnet complains that his father is ‘very distant’, he declares ‘I am less real to him than any of the
characters in his plays. Mother says he’s changed in the last five years ... All that matters is the stories’4
This is the price Shakespeare will pay: his own son and family. He achieves his dream, he has written a
great play but has done so against the bitterness of his son, whose feelings of abandonment will be
easily manipulated by Titania. She is quite fond of the boy and tries to attract him by talking to him
about the wonders of her world, and her attitude contrasts with Shakespeare’s unwillingness to give his
son any attention. Hamnet desires desperately his father’s attention and Titania supplies Hamnet the
attention he demands and seduces him and promises him things a boy that age would dream of:
‘and bonny dragons that will come when you do call them and fly you through the honeyed amber skies.
There is no night in my land, pretty boy, and it is forever summer’s twilight’5
Shakespeare is too busy to give his son the attention he needs, he does not appreciate the dream
memories of his son and does not realize the dangers when he tells him:
‘I had such a strange dream. There was a great lady, who wanted me to go with her to a distant
island”6
The last panel, painted in that honeyed amber colour contains the following words:
‘Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, aged eleven’7
We learn Shakespeare paid a high price for being granted his desire; dreams can be dangerous and

4
Gaiman, Neil. Dream Country: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Sandman #19).  D C Vertigo. 1990. P.13
5
Ídem. P.16
6
Íbidem. P.24
7
Íbidem. P.24
harmful.

Concluding remarks
The late twentieth and early twenty-first century have seen adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays to
different media and formats. Four hundred years after his death women have attained many rights they
did not have in Shakespeare’s days. So, we expect, in those adaptations see and watch powerful women
who are and fight to become the masters of their own destinies, just as great as they can be found in the
original text.
Nevertheless, we feel absolutely disappointed with Hoffman´s portrayal of women in his film and even
more with Amanda Craig´s one in her book. Neither of them has kept the sense of powerful, strong-
minded and no ordinary women Shakespeare characterized in his original play.
Against all odds, the only adaptation which is not faithfully focused on the story and which has been
written in a format which has always been regarded as the kind of work that attracts male teenagers
mostly is the one that best keeps the spirit of the relevance of women. Illustrator’s images in “The
Sandman” cooperate with Gaiman to bring his message across; we meet a lovely and queenly Titania,
who is the supplier of the attention children need. She is the one who takes Hamnet for herself, giving
him the attention that Shakespeare neglects.
This novel is a complex adaptation in which different layers of reality make readers reflect on our own
desires.
It comes as little surprise that this story won the World Fantasy Award for best short story in 1991
which was the first time ever for a comic to win a prize in the category of prose fiction.

Bibliography and Webgraphy

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. The Norton Shakespeare W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1997
Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman Vol 2 (Book 19) DC Vertigo, 1990
Traub, Valerie, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and
Race OUP Oxford, 2018
Kehler, Dorothea, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays. Garland Publishing Inc, 2001
Nevo, Ruth. Comic Transformations in Shakespeare. Routledge, reprint edition 2005
Lancaster, Kurt Neil Gaiman’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare Integrated into Popular
Culture N.P., 2004. Th. 15 May, 2018,
< https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1537-4726.2000.2303_69.x>
Frank, Jacqueline E. Shakespeare, Youth and Comic Books: A thesis presented to the University of
Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in English – Literary
Studies N.P., 2014. Th. 15 May, 2018.
< https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/8372/frank_jacqueline.pdf?sequence=1>
Sanderson, Mark Midsummer night's scream Mark Sanderson The Guardian Sat 6 Sep 2003. 13 May,
2018.
< https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview21>