SOURCE: “‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 37-60.

In the following essay, Hendricks examines Shakespeare's “figurative evocation” of India in A Midsummer Night's Dream, probing “the play's complicity in the racialist ideologies being created by early modern England's participation in imperialism.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘England’ any more … welcome to India brothers!”¹

In July 1991 I was engaged as a textual advisor for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream performed by the Shakespeare Santa Cruz repertory company (hereafter SSC). In a camp rendering of Shakespeare's text, director Danny Scheie sought to illuminate what he viewed as the sexual politics of the text. Featuring a variety of pop-culture motifs (ranging from 1950s American teenage attire and behavior to Disney's Snow White), the production obstructed any possibility of seeing the play as merely a romantic idealization...