Bottom and the gramophone: Media, class and comedy in Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night's Dream

Summary

Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) is one of a number of Shakespeare films in which media histories or sustained thematic attention to media regimes and practices play a central role. In such films as Olivier’s Henry V, Mazursky’s Tempest, Godard’s King Lear, Prospero’s Books, Loncraine’s Richard III;, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Titus and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, media themes rise to the level of subject matter, vying for attention with and sometimes supplanting the story line of the source play to such an extent that one may think of them as media fables or media allegories as well as Shakespeare adaptations. Not all of these films imply a narrative exclusively concerned with cinema – instead they often suggest journeys across media – from page or stage to screen, to be sure, but also, for example, from book to the magically animated and animating volumes in Prospero’s collection in the Greenaway film, or from toy analogue video camera to complex digital editing suite in Almereyda’s Hamlet or, in the case of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, in the blending of many media, including billboards, newspapers and newsmagazines, and broadcast television into a ubiquitous, reality-challenging array of simulacra.