preview

Fairies In A Midsummer Night's Dream By William Shakespeare

Decent Essays

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play written by William Shakespeare in 1595 - 1596. Although there were some ill-conceived notions about fairies during Elizabethan society, the society that this play was written in, Shakespeare goes against those notions. Shakespeare portrays fairies in a different light that allows him to use comedy as a technique to develop the play. Dreams were not only an element seen throughout the play but also an attribute that people of Elizabethan society had lots of beliefs on. In the play, elements such as fairies and dreams contribute to a prevalent technique seen throughout the entire play: comedy. By going against what Elizabethan society thought of on topics such as fairies and dreams, Shakespeare is able …show more content…

During Elizabethan society, almost everyone held strong, negative beliefs about fairies. Fairies were often seen as synonymous with the Devil and there were thought to wreak havoc in the lives of people (Oldridge, pg. 2) Of course, religion played a major role in the development of this belief but literature played a major role as well. Although literature associated fairies and the Devil with one another, they weren’t necessarily considered demons themselves. This could be because of all the texts that were written about fairies. One of the earliest works of literature in which fairies are portrayed as other-worldly creatures with bad intentions is a poem by Thomas Churchyard. In this poem, Churchyard tells of a dream he had in which he encounters a fairy queen and this fairy then leads him to a group of women. The women then begin to dance but this dancing turns into something sinister; the women tell the dreamer that God has abandoned him and then quickly retreat back into hell. While Churchyard isn’t a very recognizable author, his poetry was the very start of the negative views on fairies. By the late sixteenth century, many Christians believed that fairies were creatures filled with malice and the only way to get rid of them is to preach the word of God. It was this point that people began to see fairies as evil beings; they were seen as beings who wanted to corrupt people and to stray them from God. Because of literature that was similar in nature to Churchyard’s poetry in nature, Elizabethan culture saw fairies as evil and this was the environment in which Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fairies play a prominent role in the play and they are also the source of some confusion and dispute between the characters of the

Get Access