"Strange and Admirable": The Continuing Relevance and Influence of A Midsummer Night's Dream

          From the Restoration through the first half of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was often dismissed as a trifle, a piece of gossamer fluff and moonshine spectacle not worthy of serious consideration. Only in the last fifty years or so has its artistry come to be more fully appreciated. Bottom's speech at the end of Act 5, scene 1, for instance, provides a fine example of the play's light-handed and sleight-of-handed juggling of absurdity, paradox, and wisdom. Its self-deprecating and self-referential theatricality (see the "rude mechanicals" plot-line and play-within-the-play) and lyricism (see Theseus's speech in Act 5, scene 2, or Oberon's speech at the end of Act 2, scene 2) point to ways in which this play's a thing of more than just fluff and fancy. Since June is midsummer in the four hundred year old reckoning of the play, I thought it would be a fine theme for the June issue of The Pedestal.
     
          I had many wonderful works to choose from among those submitted for this issue—and would very much have liked to publish much beyond the 6000 words I was allotted—but I chose to focus on those submissions which adhered fairly strongly to the "look and feel" of the play while also giving something of a sense of the range of the play's continuing influence. So it is that you find here the multicultural spin of David Landrum's "The Indian Boy," the sly feminism of Patricia Puckett's "The Captured Queens Go To Tea," the historicist speculation of Tim Myers' "A Hummingbird Tale," and the transformative power of art to deconstruct the magical/real dichotomy as displayed in Caroline Hansen's "Angel in Disguise."
     
          Enjoy, for though this issue's fiction may stem from a "weak and idle theme/ No more yielding but a dream," still we ourselves are such stuff as dreams are made on....

Howard V. Hendrix