Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 38, Number 1 (2017)

An Effigy of Empire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Canadian Imperial Nationalism During the Second Boer War

Submitted
August 15, 2017
Published
2017-07-06

Abstract

On October 31, 1899, as a part of undergraduate University of Toronto Halloween celebrations, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Princess of Wales Theatre on King Street West was interrupted by shouts from the gallery calling for the death of “Oom” Paul Kruger, the leader of the South African Republic, who had recently declared war on the British Empire. The student demonstration was not, in itself, seen as objectionable or surprising—a similar interruption by Trinity students at convocation on October 25 was lauded in The Globe as “Patriotic.” What was unusual to the Toronto newspapers that spent the next week decrying the demonstration was the students’ lack of decorum at a Shakespeare performance. In this contribution, Andrew Bretz looks at the tension between how paratextual signifiers such as costuming choices, lighting, and the theatre space itself constructed the Halloween 1899 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an imperial text, and how Shakespeare as “high culture” moderated the ways in which individuals could express imperial allegiances. This alignment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Canadian and British imperial projects may serve to explain why the students chose a performance of that particular play to enact their patriotic violence, yet the condemnation of the event by the daily newspapers troubles the relationship between imperial identity, partially predicated on a sanitized vision of Shakespeare, and the enacting of violence against the colonized other. For the newspapers, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , as a representation of paternalistic British culture and identity, ultimately could not be reconciled with the bald violence of a jingoistic imperialism.