MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Midsummer Night's Dream



Midsummer Night's Dream

If one is a scrupulous reader and also he have read most works of Shakespeare, it is not hard for him to find that two themes present in many of Shakespeare's plays. That are the struggle of men to dominate women and the conflict between father and daughter, and it are those two themes that form a large part of the dramatic content of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In the first act both themes of tension appear, when Theseus remarks that he has won Hippolyta by defeating her, "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword" (1.1.16), and the conflict between Egeus and his daughter, Hermia, also turns up adding to this war of the genders are Lysander and Demetrius who are both wooing Hermia away from her father.

Recalling Romeo and Juliet, Theseus offers Hermia the choice of the nunnery or death. As always in Shakespeare (note Juliet), this is not a practicable way for a young pretty woman. Hermia therefore decides to run away rather than face the certainty of death. It is therefore necessary to realize that A Midsummer Night's Dream is quite a play about one finding oneself in order to be free from these authoritative and sexual conflicts.

A remarkable aspect of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that it contains a play within a play, which at first masks the very real events, yet later they will reveal an immense (although funny) plot to the reader that what will happen in A Midsummer Night's Dream in the form of their Pyramus and Thisbe play. A great many scholars insist that the play not only indicate a tragedy that might have occurred if the fairies had not intervened the four leading characters' affairs, but also comment on the nature of reality and the theater. Nick Bottom, afraid the lion will frighten the ladies, get them to write a prologue in which the lion is revealed as only being an actor. Adding to this, Pyramus must further provide a commentary in which he informs the audience that he is not really committing suicide, but is only acting.

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. Elizabethan times were not so far removed from the medieval past that actors lived with impunity, regardless of their roles. The ...