A Midsummer Night's Dream

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On a Midsummer’s night, four young lovers find themselves wrapped in the dream-like arms of an enchanted forest where sprites lurk and fairies rule. While a feuding Fairy King and Queen are at war, their paths are crossed by Bottom, Quince, and their friends presenting a play within a play. Chief mischief-maker Puck is on hand to ensure that the course of true love is anything but smooth—and games of fantasy, love, and dreams ensue.

This is A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Considered Shakespeare's most popular comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream is believed to have been written in 1595 or 1596. This is due to references in Act 1, Scene 2 to courtiers being afraid of a strange lion that may allude to an incident in Scotland in 1594.

In creating A Midsummer Night's Dream, we extensively researched how William Shakespeare incorporated the senses into his works. As Holly E. Dugan argues in "Shakespeare and the Senses," sensory history "offers a unique approach to understanding life in the past." Dugan states:

'"As a central figure of the English literary canon, yet one about whom we know so very little, Shakespeare’s sensory archive is both omnipresent and illusive." Scripted performances provide "...a theatrical sense-scape that works with and against a binary opposition of the two senses of hearing and sight." 

Shakespeare would have had familiarity with the aromas described in his plays. And presumably so would most of the audience in the theatre. And thus, historians, like Dugan, invite a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Specifically, how does a multisensory interpretation impact or alter the understanding of and experience with Shakespeare's work. Dugan rightly states that "then, as now, perception was multi-sensorial."

In this spirit, we wanted to not only stay true to olfactive history, as our company mission states, but also provide an olfactive interpretation of a select scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream—a scene with a description that would generate a potent imagined smellscape for the audience. We chose this scene in Act II, which is arguably one of the play's highlights (original monologue, spoken by Oberon, Scene I):

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: 

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, 

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight; 

And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, 

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in: 

And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes, 

And make her full of hateful fantasies.

We worked closely with Royalty Now to develop a candle that captured the aromatic essence of this particular scene. Our goal was to not only create a fragrant interpretation of this moment in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but also to provide a different-in-kind olfactive experience for one of Shakespeare's most celebrated plays. We wanted to engage an additional sense, along with the sense of sight and sound, and provide an opportunity to feel not only transported to the "bank where the wild thyme blows" but also to Shakespeare's multisensory world. 

KLEIO's A Midsummer Night's Dream candle features fragrance notes of Midsummer Night Air, Sweet Musk Roses, Nodding Violets, Luscious Woodbine, and Wild Thyme.