Abstract

Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream was composed and first performed in 1960, at a time when the performing arts were undergoing massive changes. While keeping the original text both as a pedagogical act and an act of allegiance, Britten nonetheless broke with the established aesthetic tradition of staging Shakespeare. He thus managed to create an innovative dramatic art capable of paving the way for other theatrical dramatic arts and for a different reading of Shakespeare’s plays, both in the opera and the theatre. By insisting on the sensuality and the physical dimension of the play and on its capacity to celebrate drama and all theatrical arts, Britten seems to have been at the centre of an aesthetic and ideological renewal which was to be carried on later by Jan Kott and Peter Brook, among others, thus making him an important figure in the history of the performances of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.