Poet Julian Bishop shares three new poems written in response to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where dissension between its famous fairy characters plays out in ‘distemperature’ and ruptures in the patterns of nature and affairs of humans.
1,480 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
The setting: The Bridge Theatre, London, 2019. The play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A fabulously camp romp with a Beyoncé soundtrack and incredible acrobatics. Shakespeare so successfully updated, the same Nicholas Hytner production is revived in 2025. But of all the contemporary resonances, one of the play’s main preoccupations stood out for me as I sat in the audience swaying along to Love on Top at the end: climate change.
Rewind to Titania’s speech in Act II, Scene 1:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
The summer of 1594, shortly before the play was written, was famously cold and wet, with crops rotting in the fields and floods that wrecked bridges. But mark the last three lines of Titania’s speech — who or what is responsible for the progeny of evils described above but we, the audience, because of our dissension. The dictionary definition of dissension? A formal term for when a group of people who should be cooperating cannot agree on something. Sounds familiar?
I also latched onto the fabulous neologism ‘distemperature’, which surely deserves a revival, with its dual nods to political distemper and an out-of-sorts temperature — is there a better word to encapsulate our global predicament? Accordingly, I’ve used the word in several poems, including one of those you can read below.
Titania’s speech led me to explore Shakespeare’s eco credentials further and, sure enough, there’s ample evidence throughout the folio to demonstrate that he was aware of issues such as deforestation and the impact of expanding cities on the natural world. By his time, the forest of Arden was more patchy woodland thanks to the booming timber industry, used not just for house-building but England’s almost permanent war footing. A fleet to defeat a Spanish Armada demands a vast amount of timber and there’s no evidence of any active attempts to replant what must have been seen as an infinite resource.
Golden shovels — poems in conversation
The form I’ve chosen for my poetic response is the Golden Shovel, invented by the American poet Terrance Hayes. He responded to Gwendolyn Brooks’s short but classic poem We Real Cool by using a word from it at the end of every line of his own poem, The Golden Shovel — in order too, so you can read her poem down the right-hand margin of the page.
I also chose this form because it preserves the integrity of the original line and forces a very direct response. Of course, given this is Shakespeare, the language is often archaic, so I’ve had to bridge the difficult gap between authenticity and parody in how I use both syntax and language, probably not always entirely successfully. I also decided each poem’s title should come from a nearby line in the same play that relates to its theme.
Most of the poems are being written while I go for a run outdoors — I hold the relevant quote in my head and repeat it until it starts to generate a response. The tricky bit is waiting until I’m on an empty path to get the words down! There have been a few near-collisions but I’m lucky to live near Green Belt between London and the M25, which can easily accommodate an hour-long run through countryside.
I grew up in Wiltshire countryside which is gradually being eaten away by new houses, golf courses and the like, so these poems are also a kind of elegy as well. When I was a teenager, a friend and I used to catch the bus to Stratford-on-Avon after school on a Friday night and stay in a youth hostel so we could queue up at dawn outside the RSC to get returns for whatever was showing. I’d become obsessed by Shakespeare after my school took our class to a showing of Franco Zefferelli’s film version of Romeo and Juliet — I think it was the first time I became aware of poetry. By the time it came to O Levels (we studied Julius Caesar), I think I’d seen all the tragedies.
And unexpectedly, Macbeth proved initially to be the richest resource for possible Shovels. The setting for the play is a blasted heath, a place of fog and filthy air. After Macbeth murders Duncan — an unnatural act — nature goes haywire, with animals eating one another, appalling weather and at one point the Earth was fev’rous and did shake. It’s all fittingly apocalyptic but I’d like to think that there’s a more hopeful vision for the world than this, which brought me back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The circumstances aren’t dissimilar, as Titania’s speech makes clear: she and Oberon are parents and original of the distemperature and chaotic weather by fighting over the custody of an Indian changeling boy rather than attending to their normal duties (whatever it is that fairies do). As the play has it: so quick bright things come to confusion.
The play’s plot mirrors this of course, with Bottom acquiring an ass’s head and mistaken identity almost leading to tragedy among the two groups of young lovers. Significantly, the latter confusion occurs because Puck picks a flower to make a potion — is it too much of a stretch to include this among the acts of environmental destruction too? But in this play there’s a happy outcome: the lovers are reconciled, as are Oberon and Titania, although theirs is something of a forced marriage. There are also plenty of celebrations of the natural world, most famously Oberon’s luscious ‘wild violets’ speech:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine…
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act II, Scene 1)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — echoing ecological disorder
So, what do I hope this project will achieve? Obviously, I’ll be looking to get some poems published but, more importantly, I’d like them to echo the broader ecological disorder observed by Titania, and indeed Shakespeare himself, when we see floods, fire and seasons alter as a result of our own actions. Just ten years separate the writing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its happy ending and Macbeth with its apocalyptic ending… Let’s hope we get to the end of The Tempest without having to sit through all the tragedies on the way.
Three Midsummer Shovels (from the beginning of the sequence):
Enter Oberon with his train Once I knew of a bank where the nodding violets grew in a spring hung with dewdrops; I knew the scent of wild thyme on a summer breeze and eglantine on hill, the wild dale and mead, bees chiding the roses… but then autumn and all the four seasons turned angry, mutating to a state of never-winter where dithering outpaced change. Act II, Scene 1
Ill Met by Moonlight Proud Titania attributed the moon, forgeries of jealousy and her Lord’s distemper for unsettling the weather, a thorough if touch fantastical midsummer flight of airy chiffony for this man-stamped disequilibrium she pitched as distemperature, citing hoary-headed frost in the fresh lap of rose, of which we are parent and original. It begs a question: if a fairy could see how all the distemperatured and discombobulated seasons changed their liveries, why on earth did humans fail to alter? Act II, Scene 1
Wonder on, till truth make all things plain In the age before distemperature and tempests, this melodious plot of lichen’d oak and broadleaf’d green was backdrop to every scene. So well-made, the plot never changed. Years hence, what green props shall endure to grace our performance? What spirit will be left to emerge unseen from still’d wings? One day our tumbledown globe will host plays on an empty stage. Act III, Scene 1
Poems © Julian Bishop 2025
Find more
You can find more of Julian’s poems at his website, Julian Bishop: Writing & Poetry and his previous ClimateCultures posts, We Saw It All Happen and On Green Verges.
The poem that gave this form its name is Terrance Hayes’s The Golden Shovel, which you can read at Poem Hunter.
