Shakespeare’s most popular play, A Midsummer Night’s dream, is a romantic comedy that features young lovers that fall deeply in and out of love in a brief period of time. This play is unique because it demonstrates tragedy and comedy at the same time. The comedy not only provides amusement and laughter but also helps ease tension between characters. In the play, A “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, William Shakespeare produces a comedy through foolish characters and mistaken identities.…
“That’s the way of the world… for every man that is faithful to his true love, a million end up running after a different lover.” (pg. 91) Shakespeare uses the comedy of Midsummer’s Night Dream to show the many complexities of love. For example, Egeus wants his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, but she is in love with Lysander and him with her. Meanwhile Helena is in love with Demetrius, who obviously does not feel the same about her. Even the play that the rude mechanicals put on for Theseus is based around the humor and complexities of love.…
1. What do you see, hear, and notice for the setting of the play? What Greek and Elizabethan references are present?…
Shakespeare portrays the confusion between Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius by using the fairies and the ideas of dreams and magic so the reader cannot tell what is reality and what is fantasy. It is at this point in the play when the fairies are brought into the play as the mischievous 'Puck' causes mayhem between the four Athenians. The confusion is caused when Oberon sees Helena constantly doting over Demetrius despite Demetrius's love for Hermia, he then sends Puck to fetch a magical flower to put on the eyes of Demetrius so that he would wake and set eyes on Helena and fall in love with her, but this all goes wrong when he places the flower on Lysander's eyes and he is woken by Helena, consequently falling in love with Helena and…
The conflict between relations of love is developed further as Helena's love for Demetrius is not returned to her but to her best friend Hermia. Shakespeare shows how the platonic love between Helena and Hermia suffers due to Helena's obsessive love towards Lysander and Hermia's romantic love for Lysander.…
Helena loves Demetrius but he is in love with Hermia but Hermia is in love with Lysander. Oberon tells Puck, his servant, to create a love potion and squeeze it into Demetrius’ eyes so he stops being rude to Helena and falls madly in love with her. Puck instead sprinkles love potion in Lysander and Robin sprinkled it in Demetrius’ eyes while resting and when they awoke they both saw Helena and fell in love with her. This fiasco causes a misunderstanding between Helena and Hermia. Helena believes that both Demetrius and Lysander and Hermia are playing a cruel trick on her and Hermia swears Helena as stolen her beloved Lysander from her. When the audience knows more about the other characters than they do is what makes this play a comedic one and after Hermia tried to attack Helena made the reader have an urge to keep reading and intrigued because it can relate to everyday life. Shakespeare’s diction allowed the reader to see the emotions both Helena and Hermia had on their faces. He emphasized the theme of the night and how the main characters are so infatuated with one’s look or appearance…
Starting on Act 1, tensions and problems already begin to introduce themselves. It all begins with love and war. With the audience wanting Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena to be separated lovers, the author places both Demetrius and Lysander to love Hermia instead of Helena. I consider this unbalanced love with a happy ending. The reason why I say this is because Shakespeare creates a dramatic feel and role to the play in the beginning. By establishing a dramatic sense of feel for the audience as an introduction and concluding it with a happy ending, Shakespeare knows that all would go well. He begins with Demetrius breaking up with Helena for Hermia. Lysander on the other hand, also falls in love for Hermia. From here both men fought for one woman, leaving Helena out like she meant nothing.…
As Lysander says, "The course of true love never did run smooth." Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream is portrayed as complicated and difficult, yet Shakespeare does it in a way that is humorous and lighthearted. In this play love often brings out the worst in people, yet in the end it's what brings everyone back together. Love has the ability to spellbind people as Shakespeare represents symbolically through Puck's actions, and we see how intensely complicated it can be when it nearly tears apart Hermia's family and causes argument between the four main human characters. The four types of love, forced love, parental love, romantic love and complicated love permeate all aspects of life in this play and we see the awesome power it has over human emotion, psychology, and behavior.…
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a tale involving the manipulation of love and the way love works itself out between various sets of people. It tells the story of characters that encounter chaotic situations of real love and also love that was controlled for the benefit of others. The characters caught up in the "love scandal"� are Oberon, Titania, Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena. All these characters were involved in the different triangles of love presented in the story. The main theme in A Midsummer Nights Dream is the manipulation of love and how occasionally it takes time get the path of love on the right track.…
An earlier play entitled, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, by William Shakespeare, is a comedy outlining the destinies of two bothered couples. Shakespeare tactically demonstrates the love of two Athens individuals, Lysander and Hermia. The conflict is, Hermia’s father is against the marriage of the two and insists upon marriage with a man named Demetrius. However, the already complicated situation becomes more complex when Hermia discovers that Helena, a deep-rooted friend, is in love with Demetrius. My initial interest of the play arose during the introduction of this conflict.…
Love seems to consume the lovers, and makes them lose their rational mind. As Freud said “you are always mad when you are in love” and this is strongly shown in the play as love seems to rule the lovers heads and leads to mad decisions. For instance Helena has a perfect opportunity as Hermia is planning to elope with Lysander, leaving Demetrius for her. However her insane love for Demetrius means that she acts entirely irrationally by telling Demetrius “of fair Hermia’s flight”. This idea is also shown in the dream that Hermia has in the woods, the madness of love is portrayed through the imagery of the serpent eating her heart “Methought a serpent ate my heart away” (2, 2,155). Although the idea of a snake eating a human’s heart is absurd, within that image is the harsh reality of the fact Hermia will be heart broken when she realises Lysander no longer loves her, and this is hinted to by the following line “And you sat smiling at his cruel pray” (2, 2, 156) said by Hermia as she tries to explain…
The play “A Midsummer Night 's Dream”, by William Shakespeare and the film version directed by Michael Hoffman relate to the same plot, but were created over four centuries apart. Shakespeare’s play was written in 1593-1594 while Hoffman’s film was produced in 1999. The play and movie used love as the main theme with clever literature and magic. Even though both the play and the movie had identical structure, such as characters and plot, Shakespeare’s play was transformed in Hoffman 's movie in order to appeal to the modern audience.…
Fate plays an exceptional part in the play. An example of fate throughout the play would be the love potion that the fairies use on the characters. Puck, otherwise known as Robin Goodfellow, was commanded by Oberon to put the love potion in the Athenian lovers' eyes. First, Oberon tells Puck to put the potion in Demetrius's eyes. He tells Puck that he will know who Demetrius is by the "Athenian garments" he wore. Puck obeys Oberon and goes off in search of Demetrius. Puck then stumbles upon Lysander. Mistaking that Lysander was Demetrius, Puck puts the love juice in Lysander's eyes instead. This is when all the chaos starts to occur. When Lysander awakes, the first person that he sees is Helena, causing him to fall deeply in love with her. Lysander then says to Helena, "Content with Hermia? No! I do repent/ The tedious minutes I with her have spent." (2.2.117-18) Fate cannot be foretold and the effect it has cannot actually be controlled. Although Lysander did not truly love Helena, the love potion had an effect on him, thus making him fall passionately in love with Helena. Because of Puck, true love that Hermia and Lysander shared was turned, and not a false turned true. Puck replies that those are the rules of fate. In a way, it was fate that the…
“If we wanted to think about the device in psychological terms, we could see the nested worlds, and double characters as representing the conscious (Theseus and the court), the unconscious (Oberon and the fairies), and the world of art, dream, and fantasy (Peter Quince and the “actors”; “Bottom’s Dream”) that mediates between them.” – Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, 221-222…
This play proves that young readers can learn about the treatment of women in that era. Young men and women can learn about true love and forced love. Man’s actions toward women can affect them in so many ways. The examples prove men treats the women as property and as objects in this era. A woman had no power to choose the life she leads. Men manipulated those women for good and bad reasons. Shakespeare did this to add drama into the romance. Shakespeare is showing that love is not easy and no one can choose whom a person love. Sometimes a person has to make a sacrifice for the ones they love, for their family, friends, or partner for life. According, to Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing: The Background of A Midsummer Night’s Dream textbook, “…romantic comedy also encourages the viewers to accept an forgive human faults and…