Shakespeare’s duds

I love Shakespeare. But when he pulls on his wellies and hikes into the forest I yearn for the exit. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a moonlit, sylvan location populated by a syrupy crew of hectic fairies, humourless bumpkins, panting maidens and swooning aristocrats in disguise. Shakespeare wrote it during his apprenticeship and he had yet to learn that several romances are far less interesting than just one. The result is a cloying, over-busy fantasy whose highlight is a love potion that makes a sprite called Titania fall in love with a donkey called Bottom. If you find the passion that flowers between a Sloane-y dryad and a pack animal hilarious then poor you. Actors like performing ‘the Dream’ because of the ‘rude mechanicals’ (amateurs trying to act), who offer them a chance to forsake discipline and ham it up like crazy. Panto has similar attractions. And I’m always puzzled to know how much of the Dream is make-believe? Most of it? Or more likely all of it? Even a six-year-old is solemnly warned against ending a story with ‘and then I woke up’. This dud puts Shakespeare at the back of the class.

As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, repeats the fault of over-complexity and introduces us to a national park full of panting maidens and lovelorn swains. Jacques’ ‘All the world’s a stage’ soliloquy is of course timeless. But is it worth enduring three hours of ferny frolics just to hear a speech that familiarity has already staled?

And there’s Illyria. In Twelfth Night the comedy comes from romantic characters choosing to go out in the wrong clothes. Few plays can make cross-dressing work properly because the characters never seem to be responding authentically to what is in front of their eyes.