The Scenic Language of Empire: A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1816

On 17 January 1816, a new semi-operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, the nineteenth century's first production of the play. Since Shakespeare's time, the play had been seen only in operatic adaptations. The libretto of the new one was by Frederick Reynolds, with music by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, and it was built on the 1763 operatic version of David Garrick and George Colman the elder. But the more interesting and historically significant text of the 1816 production was in the staging and the new pictorial scenery, whose vocabulary must be read in the light of empire.