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A Midsummer Night 's Dream By Pyramus And Thisbe

Good Essays

The inclusion of a play within a play often serves to highlight and reinforce the dramatic nature of the primary play. Pyramus and Thisbe do this exact practice in a midsummer night’s dream. Pyramus and Thisbe is the play which is performed by the mechanicals at the end of the play. Because the craftsmen are such bumbling actors, their performance satirizes the melodramatic Athenian lovers and gives the play a purely joyful, comedic ending. Pyramus and Thisbe face parental an social disapproval in the play-within-a-play, just as Hermia and Lysander do, in this sense the main storyline of both plays are fairly comparable, as both sets of lovers enter the sanctity of the woods to be together whilst evading the capture of an unjust ruler. This is a use of intertextuality which subtly drives the main story whilst playing on the minds of the audience. However the endings of the separate plays are completely different and Shakespeare juxtaposes the tragic ending of Pyramus and Thisbe with the comic ending of a midsummer night’s dream. Pyramus and Thisbe ends in tragedy when both the lovers kill themselves, yet is distorted into a comedy by the use of farce, due to the use of the language and the poor acting skills of the mechanicals. It could even be called a melodrama, whereas the final act of a midsummer night’s dream has all the functions of a comedic ending such as a happy resolution. The tragic nature of the ending in Pyramus and Thisbe serves to remind the viewer how close

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