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Essay on Analysis of Rationality In A Midsummer Night's Dream

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William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not simply a light-hearted comedy; it is a study of the abstract. Shakespeare shows that the divide between the dream world and reality is inconstant and oftentimes indefinable. Meanwhile, he writes about the power of the intangible emotions, jealousy and desire, to send the natural and supernatural worlds into chaos. Love and desire are the driving forces of this play’s plot, leaving the different characters and social classes to sort out the resulting pandemonium. While the overseeing nobles attack the predicament with poise and logic, the tradesmen and nobles stricken with love recede to foolishness. Yet, it is not the ‘wise’ nobles who find any truth within the haphazard happenings of …show more content…

Here, the structure and rhyme scheme of the lovers’ lines reveals Shakespeare’s underlying meaning for this otherwise playful comedy. Most of the lines between the lovers in the woods are heroic couplets, rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Being nobles, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and Helena speak in the formal, intellectual iambic pentameter; yet, love has left them acting foolish and silly, as shown through the constant rhymes reminiscent of a juvenile love poem. The couplets dismantle the formality and intellectual aspect of the lovers’ language, as the lovers rhyme lines including Helena’s “No, no I am as ugly as a bear,/For beasts that meet me run away for fear” (Shakespeare II.ii.100-101). This structure creates the chaotic, comedic tone of the scene, which ultimately leaves the lovers looking like fools lost in delirium as they run about the woods. Yet, emerging from the woods in Act 3, Demetrius has been detached of his previous life of delusion, saying that it is as if he has recovered from a sickness and now can properly taste. Finally disenchanted with Hermia, Demetrius has realized his true love for Helena. Meanwhile, Lysander and Hermia reunite after splitting earlier in the woods. It was not the lawful decree of the logical Theseus that concluded the primary conflict of this play. The illogical lovers with their heroic couplets ultimately created two stable couples out of the abstract social

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