Midsummer Nights Dream by Shakespeare - Book Report/Review Example

Love and revolt are the main motifs of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the bard’s funniest of all works. But A Midsummer Night’s Dream is different from other Shakespeare comedies, for the slight change of shade of the romantic content. .Shakespearean comedies are all romantic. The love is in abundance in these plays, with the courses of love always very rough having a lot of barriers. By the end of the play, barriers get removed, differences get resolved and love fulfills itself in marriage. The heroines of Shakespearean comedies are generally exaggerated or idealized .And their activities are generally out doors. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream too, love is not easy; there are full of obstacles. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander, one of the young romantic characters of the play. This statement by Lysander articulates one of the most important themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is the difficulty true love faces on the way. In this respect this play follows the same thematic pattern of other Shakespearean comedies. In spite of having so many romantic elements, the play is not a love story; a fact that provides scope for comedy .Shakespeare doesn’t allow the audience to get totally involved with the romantic theme as in a love story. He distances them from the romantic emotions of the characters which help the audience to laugh at the troubles and the torments of the lovers. The light hearted tone of the play doesn’t allow the audience to expect a happy ending. This saves all the tensions of uncertain love and adds up to the comic spirit of the play. The difference between this play and the other Shakespearean comedies is in the class nature of those who get entangled in the web of love. In plays like As You Like it and The Merchant of Venice the lovers are people of high esteem. They are very courageous too, so that they confront the huddles on the way head on and finally win. Their love is very fiery; the initiatives in love are taken by women more than men .But in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers are commoners, the rustic men and women of Athens speaking the language of reason and common sense without much poetry. The only lovers who can claim to be people of high esteem are Theseus and Hippolyta. But there is nothing fiery about their love as in the love of noble people in other Shakespearean comedies. Theseus is the Duke of Athens. The playwright poses the romance of these noble people only as a contrast and never puts it in the thematic centre of the play. Even this motif of love is multi dimensional In A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The love of the young Athenians is passionate. The love of the mature people like Theseus and Hippolyta is much more responsible. Social responsibilities and duties weigh over their love. The love of the fairies, like Titania and Oberon, the king and queen of the fairies is ephemeral with petty fights, punishments and easy reconciliations. But all these three types of love are equally unintelligent, lacking intellectual content as well as consistency. Shakespeare portrays love here as lawless and laughable. He reminds that love is inconstant. The difficulties in love faced by the four young Athenians, Hermia, Lysander, Elena and Demetrius are explored through the motif of imbalanced love. The romantic situations in which these characters find themselves in are interfered with disparities and inequalities. The love between them is imbalanced and asymmetrical. : Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius and Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helena. This situation of two men loving the same woman and another woman loved by none leads to a simple imbalance numerically. The fairy King Oberon intervenes through his chief favorite Puck in the situation, to correct this imbalance. But it further complicates things. Love fortunes get completely reversed by just accidental fancies. It is Puck w ho is applying love juice into the eyes of Leander wrongly, making him fall in love with Helena instead of Hermia. To correct the mistake done by Puck, Oberon himself applies the love juice into the eyes of Demetrius while he was sleeping. The first person he sees when he wakes up is Helena and he also falls in love with her. Helena gets confused when two men begin to utter endearing words to her. The imbalance still remains; only the characters are comically altered. Both the men are after Helena now and Hermia is love starved. To sharpen this imbalance Shakespeare brings in the idea of contrast and uses it as a basic block of construction of the whole play. The characters placed in opposition to each other, have contrasting traits too. Hermia is short where as Helena is tall. Puck is the player of pranks. Bottom is the victim of pranks. Titiana is as beautiful as a fairy, but her ass headed lover, Bottom is grotesquely ugly. Another contrast is between the artisans and the fairies. The artisans are earthy though clumsy .They are merrier too .The fairies are magical as well as graceful. These contrasts add on to the visual characteristics of the play. By juxtaposing contrasting differences, Shakespeare gives a unique visual atmosphere which is surreal, to the whole play. There is not even one scene where this strange contrast is not visually there. The love of the Athenians is in contrast with the love of the noble class, represented by Theseus and Hippolyta. Their love is not fiery. Their love is serious and responsible. Theseus who is to enforce laws and rules of the society can have only love with responsibility and reason. He has duties and even love is a part of his duty. He had a lot of love affairs earlier and his marriage with Hippolyta was more out of convenience than out of passion. He is not a man for folly and ignorance, because he has to respect law as he is the keeper of the law. Theseus and Hippolyta appear only in day light in the play, at the beginning and at the end .They disappear in the middle of Act 1 and reappear only in Act IV. They are absent in middle part of the play, which is dream like and is happening in the night, in the forest that too in the moon light. The contrast and its meaning are clear. Theseus and Hippolyta represent stability, brightness and order, in contrast to instability, uncertainty and darkness in which other romantic characters dwell, entangled and confused. This dream like part of the play gets over with the reappearance of Theseus and Hippolyta. The other romantic pair in the play is Titania and Oberon, the king and queen of the fairies. There love is revengeful. Oberon makes punk to apply the love juice on Titana to punish and take revenge on her for not parting with the changeling boy. Punk transforms Bottom into an ass headed being and then pours the love juice into the eyes of sleeping Titana. Thus she falls foolishly in love with the ass headed Bottom because the first thing she sees on opening her eyes from sleep is Bottom. Sometimes we are all ass headed fools in love! (Bottom, Quince and their fellows are very common people and rare comic characters of Shakespeare. These roles are often enacted on the stage by professional comedians and not by “straight” actors.) The element of the “love juice”, the juice of the purple flower which maids call “love- in- idleness”, introduced into the romantic tangles of Lysander, Hermia, Dometrius and Helena, is a great comment by the play Wright on the very process of “falling in love.” Love is shown here as fancy or illusion. All the romance, one boosts of, is arbitrary and whimsical. The love juice, used by the fairies bring in romantic havoc through out the play, in Acts two, three and four , making the situations of the young Athenian lovers confusing and chaotic. The same love juice is used to humiliate hilariously, the fairy queen Titana who is magically forced to fall in love with the ass headed Bottom. Thus the love juice becomes a symbol of the nature’s power which is often erratic and fickle and also unreasonable. Characters are pushed into inexplicable bizarre situations which they cannot resist but which become hilariously comical to the audience .Love juice also brings in an element of fairy magic into the whole romantic atmosphere. Love is supernaturally magical It is the wrong use of this magic that causes chaos in the romantic life. It is the same magic that retrieves the balance in the romance of the young Athenian resolving the tensions and clearing off the chaos finally. The blind child-God of love ( love is not only magical it is blind too ) Cupid playing his funny but cruel game among the lovers adds up not only to the comical effects to the play, but also makes romance more beyond the control of the lovers. One is tempted to recollect Shakespearian tragic lines from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. (4.1.36)”. Embedded deeply in every comedy is an element of tragedy. Love is not only magical, but is also dreamful. As suggested by the very title of the play, dreams become a significant thematic scheme of the play. The love juice is applied mostly when the characters are sleeping and they wake up dreamful into the wrong reality, leading to all the magically bizarre mishaps in the forest. Hyppolyta indicates the dominance of dreams in the play with her first words” Four days will quickly steep themselves in night/Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (1.1.7-8). Characters talk about dreams through out the play. Bottom is trying to explain away the strange thing that happened to him in his sleep, thus: “I have had a dream/ past the wit of man to say what dream it was. / Man is but an ass if he goes about to expound this dream.” (Act 4, Scene 1,201-203) At the end of the play Shakespeare tells the audience through Puck that if they found the happenings in the drama not credible enough and totally strange they have to imagine that they were sleeping and dreaming and not watching a play , and hence the name, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A lovely dream in a Midsummer Night is so harmless that none in the audience need get irritated with it. A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends in a sense of illusion which makes the play into an experience of a fantasy .One recollects again, another set of Shakespearean lines from The Tempest: “We are such stuff, as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep”. (Act four, Scene one, 156-58). Revolt against authority, especially parental authority, as well as against law of the land, is one of the important aspect of treating the major theme - romantic love- of the play. According to the Law of Athens, the parents have the right to decide on the marriage of their daughters. The daughter shall not disobey the command of the father in this respect. For such disobedience a father can put the daughter to death. Though this law was never put practiced, it was used as threat by fathers to the daughters.Hermia is threatened by this law by her father, the old man named Egeus who complaints of her disobedience to Theseus, when she refuses to marry Demetrius. Theseus, though a sympathetic and kind prince, cannot escape law. It is when Theseus threatens Hernia of death penalty or imprisonment in a nunnery for disobedience that she decides to elope with Lysander. It is this attempted elopement that takes them to the forest where everything goes upside down for them with the magic of the fairies. Shakespeare presents the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, to be performed at the marriage of Theseus with Hippolyta, as an interlude to underline the general parental attitude towards young lovers. Pyramus and Thisbe were also subject to parental anger for their romantic love. These lovers from the city of Babylon were forbidden by their parents from marrying because of the parental rivalry. They finally commit suicide. By referring to these lovers from the Roman mythology, Shakespeare indicates that he is not for the lovers to succumb to the parental pressures and commit suicide. He wants them to fight out for love, in spite of all the obstacles. That exactly is what the romantic pairs do finally in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in spite of all the magic the fairies play on them to push them into confusing comical situations As Stanley W. wells says, "A Midsummer Night’s Dream has retained for close on four centuries its power to entertain. Rather it is because this is a highly articulated structure, the product of a genius working with total mastery of his poetic and theatrical craft –a craft which was , of course, intimately bound up with the circumstances of age” (A Midsummer Night’s dream by William Shakespeare PP11) ================== Sources cited: 1) Wells.W Stanley, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, By William Shakespeare, The New Penguin Shakespeare, Penguin books, London, England, 1967. Read More