How does Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream respond to the specific theatrical conditions and legal restrictions placed upon commercial theatres in late sixteenth-century London?.
In the Renaissance period only men performed on stage, which meant that boys played the female roles. This provides several implications regarding conventional views on gender and male dominance over women, mainly in response to women wearing men's clothing. It made them "masterless women,"1 beyond the control of men and exclusive from the general hierarchical ideology, such as that of Eustace Tillyard in his book "The Elizabethan World Picture": "take away order from all things, what should then remain" with the indefinite response of "chaos."2. Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night's Dream3, challenged as well as upheld this idea. Theatre conditions such as sunlight and weather were naturally out of control and affected performance, particularly when the setting contrasted the setting of reality. By describing the setting in the script and using actions to emphasise them, Shakespeare successfully provides the audience with an understanding of what the situation should be. .
R. B. Graves in Lighting the Shakespearean Stage 1567-1642 assesses the positioning of the sun, in relation to the stage, and its significance. He suggests that although a modern lighting designer might be inclined to put the stage on the northeast side of the yard to encourage more of the sun's rays onto the stage "the practice in Shakespeare's times was less predictable; [] in fact, the orientation appears to have been the exact opposite to what we might expect."4 This suggests that the sun's lighting may not have been as influential upon performances as one would think. Act Three Scene Three, where the four Athenian lovers (Lysander, Demetrius, Helena and Hermia) fall asleep, is set in the nighttime.
