De La Cruz, Romell Ian B. English Block No.

R31 A Midsummer Nights Dream Adaptation

21 March 2014 Mr. Miggy Escao

For this paper, I am going to compare A Midsummer Nights Dream by William Shakespeare to its movie adaptation released in 1999, which was directed by Michael Hoffman. As with all adaptations, one expects a lot of differences so as to cater to the different point of attack that is available for the type of presentation that is to be used. From stage play to screenplay, there is a big change. A stage play is carried by its dialogue, meanwhile, the screenplay, or film, is highly dependent on the visual elements. This entails a big change in how characters are to be played and shown to the audience. For the adaptation of A Midsummer Nights Dream, I found only one change though. That is the setting. The original play by Shakespeare was set around the 1600s in Greece. In the film adaptation, this was changed to a time around the 1800s, as evidenced by the use of bicycles, in Italy. From the opening scene of the movie, you find a vastly different setting than that which you could imagine when reading the play itself. But is this changing of setting a wise move? In my opinion, it is not. The changing of setting involves more than just changing a few visual elements, props and backdrop, to imply a different setting and make it believable. In the film adaptation, the change was shown by the change in attire, a change of scenery and the items that were being used. The issue with it is that the dialogue still references, rather, uses the original, or something close to the original, dialogue. What this would mean is that the references made to Greek culture is lost. This renders the film viewers who are knowledgeable, or at least acquainted, with the original story confused. There is a disjoint in the visual imagery to the auditory imagery that is being created.

A change of setting involves a change of dialogue, or at the very least, a change in the references. In Demetrius trial, Egeus references to Greek law, and strongly abides by it. But, this reference creates a disjoint. This statement is not what the expected decorum is for him. And this is the trouble for the entirety of the film. The decorum is now that was expected, which were set by the implied location. This change, though, is a bit justified, in terms of the target market. When it was released in 1999, the 1800s have already been a century ago but the imagery is not as foreign to the moviegoer as imagery from the 1600s. This creates a sense of familiarity with the audience. Yet, the lack of dialogue change counters this thinking. The lack of other evident changes is troublesome. As aforementioned, there is no change in dialogue which creates a blurred imagery due to the conflict of sight and sound. There is also the difficulty in understanding, or following, of the story due, again, to the unchanged, or minimally edited, dialogue. The dialogue in the film is like that of a classical play. It is in poetry form. For the style of a film, this would be very difficult for the audience to follow. Poetry, and one that is in the Early Modern English version, is very taxing on the mind to understand. Imagine that you were already confused with the conflicting images that you see and hear, then you try and compensate by just focusing on the dialogue. But, alas, your effort will be futile as the Early Modern style, and the poetic form, makes for a more complex image to digest. This difficulty in following the plot, and what is being said, destroys the flow of the film, thus rendering it as a bad portrayal. But, on a good note though, it has stayed true to the original plot and character list. In many film adaptations of different books and stories, certain characters are given a change in

image or scrapped altogether. There are also those instances wherein a scene from the original text is cut short, placed in a different time, or cut altogether from the adaptation. For this adaptation, there is no change in the order of action. They stayed true. That is a good thing for traditionalists, who would say that changing order, or absolutely removing, a scene is butchering the original text. And this is good so that the audience will have something to hold on to inside all of the chaos created by the conflicting images. Are the non-changes of the plot and dialogue justified? I would say not. In terms of target market, you would want to immerse them into the world of the characters and of the story. You want them to associate themselves with the characters. But because of the aforementioned disjoint in dress and decorum, the audience is left to think of how everything works. While watching the film, I was thinking to myself: No one ever speaks like this. Taking into consideration that this is a film, wherein the dialogues are expected to be true to life, or close to it, there is no signs of that. Instead, they were always talking poetically. This destroys any association between the audience and the film. Yes, it might make the dialogue more opaque, as the moviegoer needs to put in more attention to it, but the medium calls for a more familiar tone. Is there something lost in the adaptation? Definitely. The adaptation lost the charm of the original play due to the conflicts that I have repeated throughout this paper. It lost its whimsical feel because of the disjointed image. You would associate the original play to a time where people greatly believed in the supernatural. But in the film adaptations setting, supernatural beings are not believed in. It was set during the Industrial Revolution. The level of idyllic lifestyle shown in the film is, again, in stark contrast to that of the lifestyle of that period.

I would definitely say that the original play is better than the film adaptation, in terms of development of everything. The screenplay is heavily founded on the original text. There is nothing the film gives that the original text does not. Character development is taken from the original text. But, given the chaos between image and sound, this development is even skewed. It has not been clearly given, since there is a language barrier. For plot development, it is, again, from the play. Has it also been blurred by the chaos? Thankfully, no. The story is still pretty clear. The difficulty is just in the following the plot, especially if you have no prior knowledge on the story. If one really wants to immerse in the story of A Midsummer Nights Dream, one is better off reading a synopsis, than watching this screenplay. Better yet, just read the full text and get acquainted with their use of language.