A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
By William Shakespeare
“Love looks not with thine eyes, but with thine mind,
Therefore is win'd Cupid painted blind.”
-Helena-
This comedy of the great William Shakespeare is not a love comedy story at the very first time I read it. Though the play had romantic elements still it is not a love story at the first instance. Why is that so? First, love itself brought the troubles in romance. We can see it on how Oberon sent Puck for a mission. Because of wanting for a child, Oberon ordered the fairy Puck to obtain a flower from Cupid that causes on to love the first person a person sees. Oberon planed to give it to Titania, so she will love a vile thing and give him the child. We can also see how the forbidden love of Hermia and Lysander brought rage to the story as the characters of Helena and Demetrius came along the scene. Different pairings were made in the story and it is really a comical one. Second reason why this story for me is not actually a love story is that the great author William Shakespeare distanced the reader from the emotions of the characters in order to bring out the sufferings and ambiguities of love. He really didn’t focused or gave so much attention on the emotions of the characters. He shifted or rumbled the partners or the pairings to make the story really interesting and funny and of course to show the struggles of lovers.
The tone of the play is so lighthearted that I never doubted that things will end happily. Instead of sweet love story, I saw a rough flow of romance as the story goes on. The characters experienced a never ending shift of lover done because of magic. I also saw the love imbalance between the four Athenians- Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius. Hermia was in love with Lysander while Lysander was in love with Hermia too. Demetrius was engaged and loved Hermia while Helena loved him. This pairings were imbalance and too unfair for Helena. Hermia received two admirers while Helena left no one. This is a simple numeric imbalance in which two men love the same woman, leaving one woman with too many suitors and one with too few. But it was too unfair for Demetrius since the one he loved didn’t want to marry him. As the story goes on, the shifting of pairings occurred with the great contribution of Puck a.k.a. Hobgoblin or Robin Goodfellow, a servant of Oberon. Because of Puck’s mistake Lysander was the one who received the flower potion and got in love to Helena who awaken him from sleep. Demetrius also received the magic and happened to be in love with Helena too. In this case, the two admirers were shifted from Hermia and Helena. In the end of the play , the pairings was resolved and managed to be balanced when Lysander was brought in Hermia’ s arms while Demetrius was with Helena. The traditional happy ending was then achieved. Somewhat similarly, in the relationship between Titania and Oberon, an imbalance arises out of the fact that Oberon’s coveting of Titania’s Indian boy outweighs his love for her. Later, Titania’s passion for the ass-headed Bottom represents an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania is beautiful and graceful, while Bottom is clumsy and grotesque. In this, it also showed the contrast between Titania and Bottom. It somewhat illustrated the humiliation of Titania. But inspite of this, the power of love was prevalent. Although the four Athenians had this confusion to the one they loved because of magic and mistake of Puck still love managed to escape them from slumber and eventually balance the mutual relationship between the four of them. Also in Titania and Oberon, that although their appearance were really a big contrast still love through the helped of the potion managed to bind them even it was a dream. And with all of these things in the story, it simply showed how great Bard, as what his colleagues called him, really is.
It was also shown here in this novel the struggle of men to dominate women and the conflict between father and daughter in which it contributed to the dramatic content. In the first act both forms of tension appear, when Theseus remarks that he has won Hippolyta by defeating her, "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword" and via the conflict between Egeus and Hermia. Adding to this war of the sexes are Lysander and Demetrius in which both wooing Hermia away from her father.
It is therefore necessary to realize that A Midsummer Night's Dream is really a play about finding oneself in order to be free of these authoritative and sexual conflicts. The forest therefore quickly emerged as the location where all of these struggles was resolved. Hermia tried to seek her freedom from Egeus in the woods, which connotes a battle against arranged marriages and for passionate love. The buffoons, in the form of the artisans, added an undercurrent of comedy which at first masked the very real events unfolding on the stage. Yet at the end they provided a terrifying or somewhat funny vision of what will happen in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in the form of their Pyramus and Thisbe play.
A remarkable aspect of this work by Shakespeare is that it contains a play within a play. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe serves to not only show the tragedy that might have occurred if the fairies had not intervened, but also to comment on the nature of reality versus theater. This play within a play is therefore used by Shakespeare to make a subtle point about theater, namely the fact that it is only acting.
In the story, magic played a great role here. Fairies’ magic brought the confusion in the story and really dominated even the emotions of the characters. Magic created the fantastic atmosphere in which the story flowed not just with comical romance. Shakespeare used magic to show both the supernatural power of love which was represented or symbolized in the love concoction and to create a dreamlike world. The great thing about this is that magic was the one who brought hilarious tension in the story but magic was also the cause of restoring back the pandemonium into order and balanced the love of the four Athenians- Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius.
It was shown in the dialogue between Helena and Demetrius that the woods were a place to be feared, and also are a place to lose virginity. As Demetrius warns, "You do impeach your modesty too much, To leave the city and commit yourself into the hands of one that loves you not; To trust the opportunity of night and the ill counsel of a desert place, With the rich worth of your virginity". Thus the forest can be emblematically read as a sort of trial for the characters, a phase they must pass through in order to reach maturity.
Hermia's serpent serves as a sign of the monsters which were in the woods. This plays into the fact that the woods were not only a place which the characters must escape from, but were also a place of imagination. Hermia's fear of her dream, in which the monster and the danger were only imagined, was meant to show the readers that the danger in a play is only imagined by the audience; neither the play nor Hermia's dream are real.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was entitled by William Shakespeare like this because of the presence of dream in every sequence of the story. Even in the characters’ dialogues, dream was prevalent. Dream was the way in which the characters tried to explained or reminisced the uproarious things happened to them brought by magic itself. They thought that what happened to them were all brought by a nightmare from deep slumber. At the end of the play, Puck extended the idea of dreams to the readers , saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream. In this sense, the play was rendered not as a profound tragedy but rather as a implausible experience.
I also noticed the presence of Theseus and Hippolyta in which they just shown only in the beginning and end of the story. During the actual scenes and the start of commotion after the middle part of scene 1 the couple already left the picture. Therefore, these two persona signifies for something. As we all know Theseus and Hippolyta in Greek Mythology were both great rulers of Athens and the warrior women Amazonas. They were both known for leading their constituents in order and stability. So these two leaders who happened to be couple here in A Midsummer Night’s Dream used by Shakespeare to signify that order was achieved in the beginning part and in the end but not throughout the story. During the actual action of the play where these couple disappeared, tension, uncertainty, dimness and unsteadiness emerged throughout the play. These whole scenes provide a large picture of dream in which a person doesn’t have control with. When stability and order was attained, Hippolyta and Theseus appeared which signifies the control over dream and bringing the end of the dream state and thus returning to the proper context.
One of the most noticeable and entertaining characters in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream was the presence of the fairies. Titania, Oberon, Puck, and the attendant fairies all affected the human beings in the woods, and provided glimpses into the fairy realm. Fairies here were not just a fantasy people lived in dreams but rather lived in the reality. They brought the fantastic and comical element of the story which made the novel alive and really exciting.
One of the fairies and the main shifter of the whole scenes in the story play was the mischievous, quick-witted Puck itself. Maybe he was the most important character in the story. Because of his magic in which he used to transform Bottom’s head into that of an ass and an unfortunate mistake in identifying a particular person which was shown when he smeared the love potion on Lysander’s eyelids instead of Demetrius’s, chaos started to create in the scene. Because of Puck’s presence, the atmosphere of the play became lively and really filled with hilarity. Puck itself had some contrast in his attitude in which he was a good-hearted jester of Oberon yet vulnerable in making tricks in which one of the his prank victim was Bottom. He was a fairy who supposed to be beautiful yet Puck is often portrayed as somewhat bizarre looking. Indeed, another fairy mentions that some call Puck a “hobgoblin,” a term whose connotations are decidedly less glamorous than those of fairy. Puck a.k.a. Robin Goodfellow is indeed the main character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream of the great William Shakespeare.
Another important character in the story is Bottom. From his first introduction, Bottom is presented as courageous and outgoing. He is confident in his ability to play any, even all, roles in "Pyramus and Thisbe." For example, he says his performance of Pyramus will cause the audience to cry a stormload of tears. As the audience realizes, this confidence is misplaced, and Bottom is little more than a swaggering fool — indeed, an ass, as Puck's prank makes apparent. Bottom's language adds to his comic appeal. For example, he claims that if he performed the role of Thisbe, he would speak her lines in a "monstrous little voice," an obviously contradictory statement. Then he would "aggravate" his voice if he played the lion's role so that the ladies in the audience would not be frightened; once again, Bottom's word choices show his silliness, while adding a comic element to the play. Similarly, rather than worry about his acting performance, Bottom wonders which beard would be most effective for the role of Pyramus. Although Bottom is the locus of comedy in the play, he also draws the audience's attention to serious themes, such as the relationship between reality and imagination. In preparing for the performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe," Bottom continually draws his fellow players' attention back to the question of the audience's gullibility: Will the ladies be upset when Pyramus kills himself; will they realize that the lion is not a lion but an actor? To remedy the first problem, Bottom asks Quince to write a prologue, explaining Pyramus is not really dead, and that Pyramus is not, in fact, Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. In this instance, Bottom focuses the audience's attention on the difficulty of differentiating reality and perception; his solution suggests his belief that the players' acting will be too convincing, that they will fully realize the goal of theater. Similarly, to keep the ladies from being afraid of the lion, he suggests the actor playing the lion show half of his face and explain that he's really a man, not an animal. This belief in the power of theater extends to his solutions for bringing moonshine and a wall into the play. In creating a wall for the set, he believes covering a man with plaster and some loam will sufficiently convince an audience. Always ready to be surprised, to accept the world's wonder, Bottom believes his audience will be equally susceptible to the powers of art.
Actually, all of the other characters contributed to the story but these two characters- Puck and Bottom really stroke me the most. They both materialized the concept of dream and imagination to reality. They were both contributors of funny elements in the story - Puck as the prank maker and Bottom as the prank victim.
In a nutshell, as I relate A Midsummer Night's Dream in reality, one thing came into my mind. I should not look for a grand metaphysical theory or a system of right living in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The great William Shakespeare’s work mirrors human experience.
We will probably not meet Puck and his supernatural companions when we go into the woods. But when we fall in love, or go crazy, or do creative writing, or fall asleep and dream, we enter the realm of the imagination. This happens even when we choose, as Theseus did, to look beyond performance at intention. Even if we pride ourselves, as Lysander did, on being rational, there are important facets of our humanity that are both non-rational and beyond our control. "A Midsummer Night's Dream"celebrates this essential fact of life.
“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.”
-Bottom-