Reimagining "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
The Ben Greet Shakespeare for Young Readers and Amateur Players: A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be found at Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library. This book is relatively small and measures seven and one half inches long and four and three fourths inches wide. This book has a hard cover. The front cover of the book has a dark green color and features tooling above and below the title. The tooling appears to be a student performing at the discretion of a teacher. The title: The Ben Greet Shakespeare for Young Readers and Amateur Players: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is inscribed in an easy to read, metallic gold colored font.
The backside of the front cover and the corresponding right page both feature a print of a painting of a forest, presumably the forest in which the story takes place. This same print is featured on the front side of the inside back cover of the book.
The left-hand side of the cover page provides an image of the fairy, Titania, in color while the right-hand side displays the title of the play with the first letter of each work in calligraphy in red ink. Under the title is an image of a fairy playing a musical instrument.
Following the cover page is the copyright date of 1912 along with an ownership mark that reads ‘March 5, 1914 Lucy Draker/Draper’. Although the book is old, it is still in relatively good shape, aside from a few frayed page edges. ‘A Few General Rules or Customs of Acting’ is featured on the right page. An introduction is found after turning the page and takes a full page-- front and back. A black and white image of an example stage with certain stage instructions can be found after the introduction.
The introduction leads to the beginning of the play. Another title page is found with ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ written in black with a black and white imageof fairy sitting under a mushroom. On the back of the title page is a list of characters and their descriptions.
The play officially begins on page one. The left hand side of the pages features foot notes consisting of zero to 30 lines of explanations. Some of these pages have sample diagrams of where certain characters should be standing on stage in relation to one another. On the right-hand side of the pages is the text of the play. Each page of text has ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ written as a header. This alternating of footnotes on the left and the actual play on the right continues for 165 pages.
The pages of the book are white. The font throughout the book is easy to read and the wide margins prevent the lines of the play from becoming crowded and difficult to read.
The back cover is the same solid green color as the front cover. The spine of this book features the title: A Midsummer Night’s Dream written from bottom to top.
The object assigned to us from Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library is The Ben Greet Shakespeare for Young Readers and Amateur Players: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When considering what interpretative form we could use to represent this object, we considered not only the content of the book but its physical appearance as well. Ultimately we decided that our object is best represented through the artistic form of watercolor paint.
There are multiple reasons why we chose to use watercolor paints. One of these reasons was to acknowledge Shakespeare and the time period he lived; during his time there was no photography, so we thought paint was a more appropriate form. We wanted to do an artistic representation through painting because this specific book contains depictions of the forest and drawings of the characters, so it seemed fitting we try and capture this quality. We specifically chose to use watercolor paints instead of a richer alternative such as oil paints. The reason for this is in the title and the content of the story. Water colors can produce the most beautiful, vibrant images while also containing a diluted and hazy quality. For this reason, we think that watercolors are the best option to capture the essence of dreams and confusion found in the play.
We paid careful attention to the size and framing of our paintings. This book is relatively small and measures seven and one half inches long and four and three fourths inches wide. We chose to produce three painting which all measure the same size as the book. The framing around the pictures represent the wide margins used in the book’s format. The three images we chose to represent our object are the forest during a starry night, the fairy Puck, and Nick Bottom when his head is turned into that of a donkey. We used these three illustrations in order to embody the setting and epitomize the two most colorful characters. We believe that imagery is an important element highlighted in this play. The paintings help to reinforce and remind readers to focus on the setting and vibrant characters. The book we used has a very simple layout with an easy to read font. To represent this, we chose to use non-abstract, easy to interpret, clear depictions for our paintings.