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The one real Midsummer Night's Dream from an American studio, Vitagraph, prolific in producing prestige films from Shakespearean sources between 1908 and 1913.

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Vitagraph's claim to cultural kudos, was constantly reinforced as title after title, Antony and Cleopatra, A Comedy of Errors, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice,

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Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, the list goes on, was exhibited in moving picture houses on both sides of the Atlantic. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a delightful and energetic film,

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and also an attentive engagement with the Shakespeare play, although with one tantalising central departure from its source, which will come to in due course. This was shot in the summer, as you can see from the weather

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and the trees visible in the background there, but it wasn't first exhibited until Christmas Day 1909. Usually, these one-reelers were moved through the cycle of production, distribution, and exhibition,

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with impressive commercially-minded speed. So it may be that Vitagraph deliberately held this film back for a few months for a Christmas release in order to increase the impact of a seasonally festive prestige

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film by bringing it out at a seasonally festive holiday moment. If so, it was a marketing strategy that was successful. The film certainly received extremely warm reviews.

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Here we see Hermia and Lysander. Lysander, played by Maurice Costello, who went on to play Sydney Carton in Vitagraph's Tale of Two Cities, and Orlando in As You Like It.

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Demetrius is going to hurry after them, and in a moment Hermia, played by Julia Swayne Gordon, will follow him. Julia Swayne Gordon was Vitagraph's principal leading lady in this period,

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and had already, for example, played Desdemona, Portia, and Cordelia in earlier Vitagraph Shakespeare productions. She will reappear on this DVD as Olivia

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in the Vitagraph Twelfth Night. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now we're introduced to the Mechanicals and William V. Ranous, known as Billy Ranous, in the centre there as Bottom

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the Weaver. He dominates the scene, ostentatiously claiming the attention of the camera. Perhaps as any Bottom is more or less

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required to do, particularly in this scene in which he's volunteering to play all the parts. Ranous had been a theatre man in various capacities, some more above board than others, until 1908,

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when he came to Vitagraph and both directed and starred in many of the studio's Shakespearean one-reelers. But he did not, it seems, direct A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was almost certainly directed by J. Stuart Blackton, who

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had co-founded the company back in 1899, and Charles Kent, about whom I'll say more in the context of the Vitagraph Twelfth Night later in this collection.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] With pleasing balance, the film now introduces the third community of the drama, the fairy world. And it's here that we discover a curious departure

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from Shakespeare. Oberon's role in ruling the fairy world and having a lover's quarrel with Titania has been supplanted by a feminine fairy called Penelope.

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And despite her long, floaty dress, she is clearly orchestrating events with all the authority of an Oberon. Now, this is a well choreographed and crisply edited

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sequence, in which Puck is dispatched to gather the love in idleness flower, nicely combining a stage wire with some simple trick photography to evoke Puck's putting

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a girdle around the world. Puck was played by a little girl called Gladys Hulette, who was much admired at the time for her sprightly energy. We don't who played Penelope, nor does the film

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offer any explanation for her presence. Although if one trade paper's plot synopsis is to be believed, she may actually have been more conventionally titled Oberon in some early prints.

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Officially, we now move to another part of the wood, but actually find ourselves back in exactly the same location in which we've just seen Titania fall asleep, possibly reminding us of how magically transmutable space is in this play.

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Or possibly, more prosaically, simply maximising the use of a pleasing tree formation as a backdrop to the action. With a series of graceful gestures, Hermia instructs Lysander to lie further off,

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and Puck appears in order to mistake the Athenian and begin the cycle of muddles. These woodland scenes were shot, as Robert Hamilton Ball reports, in a forest now gone in the southern part of Flatbush

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in Brooklyn, and conveniently close to the Vitagraph studios. The trade papers particularly commended Vitagraph on the location shooting and use of natural scenery in their Midsummer Night's Dream.

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Most of their previous Shakespeare films had certainly been much more studio-based. And this is undoubtedly a visually appealing film. Later in the century, of course, the play

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was to become a more tonally mixed exploration of the power of the imagination, and the wood was to become a space that could take its visitors to dark places as repressions surface.

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This production, however, predates that dramatic tonal adjustment by 50 or 60 years, and allows itself a much more picturesque and, well, essentially, a 19th century view of both delicate fairies and momentarily

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wayward lovers frolicking in an Arcadian retreat. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lysander now makes his transferred allegiances clear. "Not Hermia, but Helena I love, who will not

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change a raven for a dove. Hermia, sleep thou there, and never mayst thou come Lysander near." [MUSIC PLAYING]

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While Peter Quince conducts his rehearsal and tries to keep his principal actors' fragile ego intact, I should alert you to the fact that this print, like so many others from the era, is incomplete.

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In fact, nearly a third of this film is missing from this print. A whole section of it from the end of the film. So unfortunately, although we've seen the casting and now also the rehearsal for a performance of Pyramus and Thisbe,

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the final performance itself back in Athens, to which early audiences of the film would have been privy, is sadly not now available to us, and this film will run out disappointingly early.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] There's a telling little moment coming now, which alerts us to how standardised classical film grammar was later to become, but which in 1909, had not yet

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been established. So Bottom's about to exit out of shot frame right, followed by Puck. And then, breaching rules of continuity editing,

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in the next shot, he will re-enter from frame right. Intuitively, to our cinema savvy contemporary eye that wants to be able to map the space, this would mean that they have both already turned round.

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An impression that seems to be confirmed by the fact that they now exit frame left and re-enter from frame right. This time, making more sense of the spatial organisation than had been the case in the previous shot change.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] Making something of the part of Bottom while wearing an all-smothering ass's head would always be something of a challenge for an actor.

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And nowadays, Bottoms are frequently decked out in much more minimal headgear than this to allow them more opportunity to convey subtlety of expression.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] Ranous's winning geniality and ever polite nodding helps him, more or less, to hold his own, even next to Puck's impishness and the calculated decorative charm

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of Titania's retinue of little fairies, two of whom are played by Maurice Costello's own daughters. Penelope's realisation that Puck has put the love juice on the eyes of the wrong Athenian

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here is abruptly replaced by the catfight between Hermia and Helena. The abruptness of the shot change signals the point at which there is

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a substantial section of footage missing from this print. The missing scenes include the anointing of Demetrius's eyes by Puck, Lysander's suit of Helena, Demetrius awakening and parallel suit of Helena, Hermia's re-entrance,

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and a quarrel between the men. What we do get here is a gleeful Puck choreographing the incensed lovers' outrage progress towards their restorative sleep.

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It seems, however, that the subsequent de-anointing or re-anointing of Lysander's eyes was never part of the picture. Either it was forgotten, or simply

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left at the level of inference. But certainly when these four wake up again, they are happy to pair up in ways that correspond to the play and make possible a happy ending.

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So we have to assume that Lysander does, at some point, by some means, recapture his love for Hermia. Maybe in the magic of the Vitagraph wood, a sleep itself is sufficient to perform its own natural magic

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about perception. The trade paper the London Bioscope had suggested about this film that here finally was a Shakespeare film that was accessible enough

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and appealing enough to be of interest, even to those who didn't know the Shakespeare play. It was, that is, a film thought to have its own standalone value independent of its source.

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Though clearly much more true of this film than most, the effects of the extraordinary and mostly pretty efficient compression of the complexities of the play into a one-reel format do take their toll on intelligibility

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occasionally. When Herbert Beerbohm Tree revived his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1911, he wrote of it that it "Presents a picture of pure love,

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unsullied by any grossness of sensual passion." In this, Tree was speaking not just for himself, but for his age. Rather than any grossness of sensual passion,

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Victorians had consistently found a delicate beauty and poetic sweetness in the play. And this film works with the grain of such a reading. Productions later in the century,

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influenced by the critic Jan Kott's take on the play, would not be content to leave Titania and Bottom sweetly and chastely lying together under a tree. Penelope's curious displacement of Oberon cannot help but raise

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a question about the relationship that is then to be inferred between Titania and Penelope, having been sexually humiliated by sharing her bed with an ass. This Titania, like Shakespeare's, is

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delighted to abandon him to be reunited with the fairy consort, who first caused her torment. As they clasp each other and take their final exit by walking out of frame still entwined,

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one can't entirely suppress the thought that Vitagraph daringly seems to have dramatised an idea which could itself have been lifted straight from one of Shakespeare's festive comedies, namely that patterns of attraction

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do not always conform to society's dominant heterosexual organisational principle. [MUSIC PLAYING] As Theseus extends his largesse to the runaway lovers found

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sleeping in the wood, it's perhaps worth noting how cosily happy this Hippolyta seems with her Theseus, visible there in centre frame. There's a widespread tendency now for Hippolyta's status

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as a conquered prisoner to determine her performance. This dream transports us back to a world in which there was no sullying cloud upon the Theseus-Hippolyta relationship, no exhuming of partially repressed dark sexual fantasies,

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and no predatory crawling serpents in Hermia's or anyone else's dream. By reminding us of a very different set of interpretive performance priorities,

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this film helps us to map the culturally revealing adjustments in tone and emphasis the play has undergone since. [MUSIC PLAYING]