A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream

An early comedy (1595-1596) one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works, one of his most imaginative plays (introducing us to the world of fairies and the realm of dreams, a rich store of images that stretch far beyond the limits of the real world of everyday experience).

For Shakespeare the fun of the play is in showing how the world of the fairies intersects with the world of real people, and we can interpret the play as a hint of what would happen if the world of dreams were to cross the world of real experience. He also finds some new and amusing ways to interpret the device of mistaken identities.

Four different groups 1. Duke Theseus & Hippolyta (the queen of the Amazons) 2. Four young people: Hermia falls in love with Lysander Helena does with Demetrius. Hermia’s father wants her to marry Demetrius. Hermia’s refusal to follow her father’s wishes drives her into the woods, where she is followed by both young men and Helena.

3. Oberon (king of fairies) & Titania (queen of fairies) – Theseus and Hippolyta never meet Oberon and Titania. In the original performance, the respective roles were likely to have been doubled. The contentious king and queen of fairies thus become the dark psychological doubles of the betrothed courtly couple. 4. Mechanicals (Bottom, Quince, Snug, Flute, and Starveling)

Puck - an impish spirit, ordered by Oberon to put the juice of a certain flower in Demetrius’s eyes so that he will fall in love with Helena. He puts it in Lysander’s eyes instead, and the plot backfires. According to Oberon’s order, he places the same juice in the eyes of Titania. Bottom - the “rude mechanical” (ignorant artisan) whose head has been transformed into an ass’s head.

Shakespeare’s double vision Shakespeare’s double vision – the play’s movement between the city and the wood, day and night, reason and imagination, waking life and dream.

Wood, night, imagination, dream These are the co-ordinates of the second form of sight, which is best described as magical thinking. It is the mode of being that belongs to visionaries, astrologers, ‘wise women’ and poets. Magical thinking answers a deep human need. It is a way of making sense of things that would otherwise seem painfully arbitrary – things like love and beauty.

The Theme of Love “Love is merely a madness” (As You Like It 3.2.400) Love and reason are not always compatible and nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening of this play where Hermia’s choice of husband – Lysander – clashes with that of her father, who insists on his daughter marrying Demetrius. Hermia laments that her father does not see things from her point of view: “I would my father looked but with my eyes.” Theseus admonishes Hermia, “Rather your eyes must with his judgment look” (1.1.56-7).

Egeus’s vision is not reasonable or even remotely justifiable. In insisting on Demetrius as a husband, Egeus insists on a young Athenian who is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Hermia’s choice, Lysander. Demetrius is from the same background as Lysander, as rich as Lysander, and as handsome.

Aristotle’s view The Aristotelian conventions of the drama: Aristotle’s view that drama imitates life One of the great comic devices in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the play-within-the-play that Bottom, Quince, Snug, Flute, and Starveling are to put on before Theseus and Hippolyta.

The Play-Within-the-Play In a play-within-the-play, one group of dramatic figures from the wider play performs a inner play to another group of figures. By inserting a second fictional level into the text the dramatist duplicates the performance situation of the external communication system on the internal level. The fictional audience on stage corresponds to the real audience in the auditorium and the fictional authors, actors and directors correspond to their real-life counterparts in the production of the text.

The play-within-the-play takes the form of a short episode inserted into a more extensive sequence of primary action, which thus carries the predominant focus of the text. The play enacted by workmen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents the climax of the wedding celebrations of Theseus and Hippolyta and the quartet of lovers.

Four interlocked sequences The macrostructure of this text consists of a hierarchically graded pattern of four interlocked sequences 1. The primary amorous confusions surrounding Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, 2. The quarrel between Titania and Oberon, 3. The preparations for Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s wedding 4. The theatrical activities of the group of workmen

All four sequences follow a similarly structured pattern involving a transition from a dynamic situation filled with potential conflict and suspense to one that is static and, once reached, marks the end of the text.

The conflict within the quartet of lovers and that between Oberon and Titania are resolved and the preparations for both the marriage of Theseus and Hipployta and the theatrical performance are successfully concluded. Thus, the play-within-the-play is integrated into a system of equivalent structures and this is emphasized by the fact that it is motivated from within the context of the wedding preparations.

The play-within-the-play is linked with the sequences involving the two pairs of lovers in a number of thematic and situative ways. For like the conflict-ridden plot sequences involving the lovers, the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe relates the story of a love that is thwarted by parental opposition. Shakespeare invokes the mirroring principle to contrast the two different solutions to this kind of conflict – one is tragic, the other comic.

Within A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare created the same highly suggestive contrast between a love-comedy and a love-tragedy that was also suggested by the chronological proximity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet – both were written around 1595 – in the external communication.

Audience It is important to remember that the clumsy ineptitude of the workmen’s performance is not simply intended as a parody of the ‘primitive’ dramaturgical skills of traditional popular drama. It is also designed to demonstrate the inadequacies of all theatrical presentations – including A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself – and to emphasize the role played by the audience’s imagination in making the dramatic illusion actually work.

The play-within-the-play refers implicitly to the theatrical medium itself, thereby exposing it and distancing it from the real audience. This is further emphasized on the primary level in comments made by the fictional spectators: Hippolyta: This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard. Theseus: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

Theseus’ ‘shadows’ refer to the functionality of dramatic presentation which is, after all, one of the key conventions of theater. In fact, Puck uses this very word in his epically mediated epilogue (V.i.412) and applies it to the text as a whole which he regards retrospectively as a shadow-like dream-play.

Puck’s epilogue to the audience If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: If you pardon, we will mend. And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call. So, goodnight unto you all.

In the context of these implicit references to the fictional and illusory qualities of drama we should not omit the unwittingly comic dimension of the way Bottom and his comrades grotesquely exaggerate their ability to create a theatrical illusion in their play-within-the-play and then believe that they must mitigate the effects of the scary events on their aristocratic audience by adding their own comments on the illusionary nature of their performance.