A Midsummer Night's Dream Mary Pickford's "Taming of the Shrew" in 1929. Rooney (Puck) and De Havilland (Hermia and Zara) reprised their roles from the Hollywood Bowl cast. James Cagney starred, in his only Shakespearean role, as Bottom. Other actors in the film who played Shakespearean roles just this once included Joe E. Brown and Dick Powell. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was brought from Austria to arrange Mendelssohn's music for the film. He not only used the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music but also several other pieces by Mendelssohn. Korngold went on to make a Hollywood career, remaining in the US after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
A Midsummer Night's Dream essay "does not (seek to) rewrite "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ... moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy." Green does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "discontents of civilisation", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not resolve so neatly in real life. Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality"—the first hint of which may be Oberon's obsession with