Giving “Airy Nothings” Shape: Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract:In The Renaissance of Lesbianism (2002), Valerie Traub calls readers to imagine “a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Titania’s complex and implicitly colonialist affections for her votaress are not minimized but explicitly motivate her resistance to Oberon,” a production that “gives temporary life to Titania’s beloved votaress” (76). About a decade later, in Julie Taymor’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Theatre for a New Audience (2013), the Indian votaress entered as a soft yellow light when Titania spoke the words: “His mother was a votaress of my order” (2.1.123). This light illuminated Titania’s face against the “progeny of evils” born of her marital strife, and softened the sounds of storm and thunder that accompanied Oberon onstage. Taymor’s production might not have made the colonialist intimacy between the Indian votaress and Titania as explicit as Traub imagined, but this particular staging of the Indian votaress’s affective force in Shakespeare’s play deviated from the production history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the pregnant Indian votaress is rarely represented, although her son often appears onstage. In this chapter, I put the Indian votaress’s ghost—this light—in conversation with contemporary performance and critical race theorists, to argue that Taymor’s interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream underscored the Indian votaress’s potential to offer audiences more than a vision of racist, European colonization. In the ominous world that Shakespeare and Taymor construct, the brightest light is the Indian votaress.