A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written by William

Shakespeare in approximately 1595.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a romantic comedy which portrays

the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of

amateur actors in a moonlit forest, and their interactions

with the fairies who inhabit it.

Comedy - in simple terms means that the play will end happily

Romantic comedy is usually based on a mix-up in events or

identities. Shakespeare’s comedies often move towards tragedies (a death or lack of of resolution) but are resolved in

the nick of time.

Comedy – despair to happiness

Tragedy – happiness to despair

Shakespeare’s comedies often end with a wedding.

THE PLOT• The comedy presents three

interconnecting plots, connecting by the wedding between Theseus, duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, queen of Amazons.

• Hermia loves Lysander and he loves her. At the same time Helena, Hermia's friend, loves Demetrius but he doesn't love her but Hermia.

• Hermia's father wants his daughter marry Demetrius; if Hermia disobeys her father, she must become a nun for the rest of her life.

• Hermia and Lysander escape in the wood where they will be able to marry secretly. In the same time Demetrius is informed of Hermia and Lysander's escape and he follows them, so Helena follows him.

• Meantime, in the wood, six men of Athens meet in secret to rehearse a paly for the duke's wedding. It was the most lamentable commedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe. The protagonist in Nick Bottom.

• Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the elves, and his wife Titania queen of the fairies, come in the same forest to participate in the upcoming wedding. Oberon wants to use the Indian servant of Titania to make him his knight, but Titania does not want , and he squeezes the juice on the eyes of the crimson flower of Cupid, who falls in love with the first person you see when you wake up.

• Oberon asks Puck to help him. Also Oberon, after seeing Demetrius and Helena lost in the wood, orders Puck to squeeze the magic juice on Demetrius' eyes, so he'll fall in love with Helena. But by mistake Puck squeezes the juice on Lysander's eyes who when he wakes up, sees Helena and falls in love with her.

• But Puck transforms Bottom's head into a donkey's one.. Titania falls in love with Bottom, in its wake, because of the potion's effects.

• Oberon obtains the indian child and then Puck brings everything back to normal: Bottom has his human head and the four young lovers are two couples, Demetrius with Helena and Lysander with Hermia, after a magic fog.

• Theseus finds them in the wood the next day. After Bottom's returns, at the wedding the craftmen play the comedy.

• At the end of the story, Puck suggests to the audience that what they just experienced might be nothing but a dream!

Video

Characters

THE LOVERS• Theseus

• The Duke of Athens, who is admired by the people. He is a noble warrior; after defeating Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, he decides to marry her. Their wedding is to take place in four days.

• Hippolyta

• The queen of the Amazons. She was defeated by Theseus and is now betrothed to him.

• Hermia

• The daughter of Egeus who is in love with Lysander. She refuses to marry Demetrius, the youth chosen by her father; as a result, she faces the death penalty, per an ancient Athenian law.

• Lysander

• The Athenian youth who is in love with and marries Hermia.

• Demetrius

• The man chosen by Egeus to marry his daughter, Hermia. He had been in love with Helena, but has now shifted his attention to Hermia. In the end gives up his claim on Hermia and marries Helena.

• Helena

• Hermia's friend, who was once loved by Demetrius. In spite of his desertion of her, she continues to love him and is married to him at the end of the play.

• Egeus

• The father of Hermia. He is an obstinate old man who insists that his daughter should either marry Demetrius or face death. He finally relents and allows Hermia to marry Lysander.

• Oberon• The King of the fairies. In his

attempt to teach Titania a lesson, he causes the confusion that contributes a great deal to the dramatic action of the play.

• Titania• The fairy queen who has quarreled

with Oberon over a changeling boy. She is put under a magic spell by Oberon and falls in love with Nick Bottom.

• Puck or Robin Good Fellow• Oberon's attendant and a

mischievous spirit who is given to pranks.

• Peace Blossom, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseed

• The fairies that attend Titania.

THE FAIRIES

THE ACTORS• Nick Bottom• A weaver by profession. He is

harmlessly conceited and believes that he could play all roles in any drama. It is rather ironic that he is made to wear an ass's head during the play.

• In the interlude presented on the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, he plays Pyramus.

• Peter Quince• A carpenter who organizes the

interlude and reads its prologue.• Francis Flute• A bellows mender who plays Thisbe

in the interlude.• Tom Snout• A tinker who is the wall in the

interlude.• Snug• A joiner who is the lion in the

interlude.• Starveling• A tailor who plays Moonshine in the

interlude.

• The action is first set in Medieval Athens, where Theseus is referred to by the medieval title of "Duke" and not as King. His forthcoming marriage with Hippolyta sets the merry mood of the play. Later the action shifts to the woods nearby Athens, which is inhabited by fairies and their King Oberon and Queen Titania. It is an appropriate setting for a play where fairies and mortals jostle with each other like in a dream.

SETTING

THEMES

• The love

• Art and Culture

• Transformation

• Gender

• Version of reality

• Supernatural

THE LOVE

• A Midsummer Night's Dream explores the nature of romantic love. The pursuit of love has the capacity to make us irrational and foolish. In the play, magic love juice causes characters to fall erratically in and out of love as they chase each other around the woods, where a Fairy Queen literally falls in love with a jackass. By literalizing the familiar cliché that "the course of true love never did run smooth," Shakespeare suggests that love really is an obstacle course that turns us all into madmen.

ART AND CULTURE• A group of Athenian craftsmen

practice a play they hope to stage at Theseus wedding celebration. The play is Pyramus and Thisbe where the craftsmen comically bumble their way through what's supposed to be a classic tragedy. By focusing so much attention on this play-within-the-play, Shakespeare has ample time to reflect on his own art and to ask the following questions: What is it that makes good theater? Can anyone be an actor? What kind of person is an ideal audience member? Can uneducated commoners appreciate art?

• The performance of Pyramus and Thisbe functions as a parody of bad theater and reminds us that being a stage actor is craft that requires intellect and its own set of skills.

TRANSFORMATION• Transformation is a very

big feature in this play because one of Shakespeare's main literary sources is Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the third act of A Midsummer's Night Dream, Puck uses magic to turn Bottom's head into that of an ass. This is the most obvious example of transformation but in the play, characters undergo physical and emotional changes – they fall in and out of love and change their minds about their friendships and the world in which they live. The natural world of the play is also subject to transformation – night turns into day, darkness turns to light, the moon waxes and wanes.

Chagall- A middsumer night’s dream

GENDER

• A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes gender tensions that born from complicated familial and romantic relationships. When the play opens, a young woman fights her father to choose her own man, a duke is set to marry a woman he recently conquered in battle, and the King and Queen of Fairies are at war with each other, enacting a battle of the sexes so intense that it upset the natural world. Throughout the play, Shakespeare also questions some stereotypes about traditional gender roles. While men are usually aggressive and women are passive and docile, A Midsummer Night's Dream shows us that this isn't always true.

VERISION OF REALITY• Dreams serve as a

way to explain plot holes or add mystery. In Lysander's book, if you don't have to fight for it, it isn't true love. Puck sees the mortal world as full of fools, and Theseus is certain fairies aren't real. Each man envisions his reality according to his circumstances.

SUPERNATURAL

• In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare has created a fantastical world of fairies and magic. The fairies and their magic are the engine of the plot: Oberon's love juice , Puck's mistakes with transformation of Bottom's head into an ass's head , and Puck's magic fog. And in the face of this magic, mortal dilemmas such as the laws of Athens fall away.

SOURCE

• http://pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMidsummer03.asp (Character and setting)

• http://www.shmoop.com/midsummer-nights-dream/themes.html (Themes)

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