Worlds Collide in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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

In the 1935 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the last soliloquy helps bring together the varied themes of the play itself, not to mention the unique and distinctive stylistic choices as dictated by Dieterle and Reinhardt. Although the production is somewhat limited by the technology of its time, the film is still largely successful in its depictions of sight and sound. The secret world of the fairies, in particular, almost plays like a sort of extended ballet; a grand odyssey of weirdness spearheaded by the dark and domineering Oberon, the bright and bubbly Titania, and by Puck, whose extended presence carries over to the end.

The audience is seated, the lights dim, and all of a sudden, through wild anticipation, the music cues as a notification that the show is about to begin. Theater is a creative outlet for the soul to paint a picture towards showcasing a short story. This past weekend, I attended a play at Crabpot Players Theater to observe a parody of one of Shakespeare’s most famous pieces, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As a whole the play was fairly decent, but there were a few minor issues that held the piece back. It is officially time to analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly.

If there was no such thing as sympathy, empathy, or love in our world, it would be a hard place to live. If there was no hard law or reason in our world, it would be a crazy place to live. Neither of these worlds would be anybody’s first choice as a home - it's just common sense take away either of these two fundamental aspects of life, and everything is immediately chaos. In fact, it is only in a world such as ours, where legal and human emotion work together, that we are happy. In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare recognizes this truth and uses the two settings to represent the city of Athens as law, order, civility, and judgment, while the woods represent chaos, incivility, dreams, and love.

Love is a term used daily in one’s life. Many categorize love in many forms. These forms differ from one-another such as the difference between love for food and love for one’s spouse. However, in the play; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, love takes different forms than the ones experienced in reality. One can classify the different types of love used in this play into three different categories; true love, love produced by cupid’s flower, and the state of lust.

William Shakespeare starts with a seemingly unresolvable conflict in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The main characters are lovers who are either unrequited in their love or hassled by the love of another. These lovers are inevitably paired. How does Shakespeare make this happen? He creates many subplots that, before long, are all snarled up into a chaotic knot. So, what actions does Shakespeare take to resolve these new quandaries? He ends up trusting a single key entity with his comedy. It’s only then that he introduces a special character into his world: a mischievous fairy whom is known by the name of Puck. Puck is the catalyst for all these subplots and, indeed, for the entirety of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Try to take Puck

7. One theme of the play is that "things are not as they seem". What action takes place that night that is also not as it seems?

One of love’s most prominent characteristics is its ability to engulf the human mind in floods of pure emotion. In the short term, love is often associated with phrases such as hearts “skipping a beat” or “butterflies” in one’s stomach. As an act of intuition and instinct, love can have immediate physiological and psychological effects. As a result, love’s psychosomatic manifestations often lead their bewitched to direct as many efforts as possible toward winning another’s heart. With regard to this motif of physical and emotional infatuation, Shakespeare argues, being in love causes us to become inconsistent and to allow ourselves to be buffeted by the wild waves of our ever-changing desires. In the play,

Have you ever heard a quote that really stood out to you. And then you went and told you friends that quote and they liked it. And they told people who told other people and then everyone liked. Eventually, you know with all the social media programs these days, its going to end up on facebook or instagram and even more people are going to find out about it. Thats one way a quote can become famous but another way is if it is in a popular movie or book. In this case it is from one of Shakespeare's finest and most known, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the quote “the course of true love never did run smoothly” applies to the different people in the book: the first couple is Hermia and Lysander, Second Demetrius and Helena, and finally Pyramus and Thisbe.

Love is such an abstract and intangible thing, yet it is something that everyone longs for. In Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the difficulty of love is explored through the obstacles that characters have to face while pursuing their loved ones. Those characters that are in love in the play were conflicted with troubles; however, the obstacles of love do not seem to stop them from being infatuated with each other. The concept of true love is examined throughout this play. By creating obstacles using authority and a higher power, Shakespeare examines the power of love. Through Hermia and Lysander’s loving words, it is reasonable to conclude that love conquers all if you believe in it.

All of these circumstances at night together show the watchers and or the readers of the play that there is a lot of unknowns in the story and the play leaves it up to the imaginativeness to build

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often read as a dramatization of the incompatibility of “reason and love” (III.i. 127), yet many critics pay little attention to how Shakespeare manages to draw his audience into meditating on these notions independently (Burke 116). The play is as much about the conflict between passion and reason concerning love, as it is a warning against attempting to understand love rationally. Similarly, trying to understand the play by reason alone results in an impoverished reading of the play as a whole – it is much better suited to the kind of emotive, arbitrary understanding that is characteristic of dreams. Puck apologises directly to us, the audience,

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander of love’s complications in an exchange with Hermia (Shakespeare I.i.136). Although the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly deals with the difficulty of romance, it is not considered a true love story like Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, as he unfolds the story, intentionally distances the audience from the emotions of the characters so he can caricature the anguish and burdens endured by the lovers. Through his masterful use of figurative language, Shakespeare examines the theme of the capricious and irrational nature of love.

Many people go through chaotic experiences in their lives, however, how one restores order to their chaos is most important. In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, due to simultaneous appearances of chaos throughout the play, it leaves the audience speculating about the order yet to come, thus, developing/strengthening the play’s plot. The various occurrences of order and chaos within the play include the arguments between Titania and Oberon, the unstable love circle between four lovers and the bizarre relationship between Titania and Bottom.

The audience is left in as much ambiguity as felt throughout the performance, appropriately ending the play in a puzzling state of confusion. The theme of night activities and sleep-runs are found throughout the play. The majority of the plot takes place at night, even the rehearsal for the farcical play. All the mishaps occur during the midnight hours and the confusion is not cleared up until the next morning when the four lovers are discovered.