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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 0 )

Nothing by Shakespeare before A Midsummer Night’s Dream is its equal and in some respects nothing by him afterwards surpasses it. It is his first undoubted masterpiece, with-out flaws, and one of his dozen or so plays of overwhelming originality and power.

—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is William Shakespeare’s first comic masterpiece and remains one his most beloved and performed plays. It seems reasonable to claim that on any fine night during the summer at an outdoor theater somewhere in the world an audience is being treated to the magic of the play. It is easy, however, to overlook through familiarity what a radically original and experimental play this is. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the triumph of Shakespeare’s early play-writing career, a drama of such marked inventiveness and visionary reach that its first audiences must have only marveled at what could possibly come next from this extraordinary playwright. In it Shakespeare changed the paradigm of stage comedy that he had inherited from the Greeks and the Romans by dizzyingly multiplying his plot lines and by bringing the irrational and absurd illusions of romantic love center stage. He established human passion and gender relations as comedy’s prime subject, transforming such fundamental concepts as love, courtship, and marriage that have persisted in our culture ever since. If that is not enough A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes use of its romantic intrigue, supernatural setting, and rustic foolery to pose essential questions about the relationship between art and life, appearance and reality, truth and illusion, dreams and the waking world that anticipate the self-referential agenda of such avant-garde, metadramatists as Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Stoppard. A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents a kind of declaration of liberation for the stage, in which, after its example, nothing seems either off limits or impossible. In the play Theseus, the duke of Athens, after hearing the lovers’ strange story of what happened to them in the forest famously interprets their incredible account by linking the lovers with the lunatic and the poet:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy: Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream similarly gives a “local habitation and a name” on stage for what madness, love, and the poet’s imagination can conjure.

Shakespeare first made his theatrical reputation in the early 1590s with his Henry VI plays, with the historical chronicle genre that he pioneered. His early tragedies— Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet —and comedies— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost —all show the playwright working within the dramatic conventions that he inherited from classical, medieval, and English folk sources. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare goes beyond imitation to discover a distinctive voice and manner that would add a new dramatic species. After A Midsummer Night’s Dream there was Old Comedy, New Comedy, and now Shakespearean comedy, a synthesis of both. To explain the origin and manner of A Midsummer Night’s Dream scholars have long relied on a speculative story so apt and evocative that it must be believed, even though there is no hard evidence to support it. Thought to have been written in the winter of 1593–94 to be performed at an aristocratic wedding attended by Queen Elizabeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream therefore resembles the Renaissance masque, a fanciful mixture of allegorical and mythological enactments, music, dance, elegant costumes, and elaborate theatrical effects to entertain at banquets celebrating betrothals, weddings, and seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night. In the words of Theseus at his own nuptial fete, the masque served “To wear away this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time.” We do know from the title page of its initial publication in the First Quarto of 1600 that the play “hath been sundry times publikely acted” by Shakespeare’s company, but the notion that it had served as a wedding entertainment establishes the delightful fun-house mirroring of an actual wed-ding party first watching a play that included a wedding party watching a play. Such an appropriate scrambling of reality and illusion reflects the source of the humor and wonder of A Midsummer Night’s Dream .

A Midsummer Night's Dream Guide

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of just three plays out of Shakespeare’s 39 (the other two are Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest ) for which the play-wright did not rely on a central primary source. Instead Shakespeare assembled elements from classical sources, romantic narratives, and English folk materials, along with details of ordinary Elizabethan life to juggle and juxtapose four different imaginative realms, each with its own distinctive social and literary conventions and language. Each is linked by analogy to the theme of love and its obstacles. The first is the classically derived court world of Theseus, duke of Athens, who has first conquered Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, then won her heart, and now eagerly (and impatiently) anticipates their wedding. Their impending nuptials prompt the arrival of emissaries from the natural world, the king and queen of the fairies—Oberon and Titania—to bless their union, as well as a collection of “rude mechanicals”—Bottom, Quince, Flute, Starveling, Snout, and Snug—to devise a theatrical performance as entertainment at the Duke’s wedding celebration. To the world of the Athenian court, the alternate supernatural court world of the fairies, and the realistic sphere of the Athenian artisans, Shakespeare overlaps a fourth center of interest in the young lovers Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius. Shakespeare mixes the dignified blank verse of Theseus and Hippolyta with the rhymed iambic speeches of the lovers, the rhymed tetrameter of the fairies, and the wonder-fully earthy prose of the rustics into a virtuoso’s performance of polyphonic verbal effects, the greatest Shakespeare, or any other dramatist, had yet sup-plied for the stage.

The complications commence when Hermia’s father, Egeus, objects to his daughter’s unsanctioned preference for Lysander over Demetrius, whom Egeus has selected for her. Egeus invokes Athenian law mandating death or celibacy for a maid’s refusal to abide by parental authority in the choice of a mate. Parental objection to the choice of young lovers was a standard plot device of Greek New Comedy and the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence that Shakespeare inherited. To the obstacles placed in the lovers’ paths Shakespeare adds his own variation of the earlier Aristophanic Old Comedy’s break with the normalcy of everyday life by having his lovers escape into the forest. Critic Northrup Frye has called this symbolic setting of magical regeneration and vitality the “green world.” Here the lovers are tested and allowed the freedom and new possibilities to gain fulfillment and harmony denied them in the civilized world, in which duty dominates desire and obligation to parental authority and the law overrules self-interest and the heart’s promptings. Critic C. L. Barber has identified in such a departure from the norm a “Saturnalian Pattern” in Shakespearean comedy in which the lovers’ exile from the civilized to the primitive supplies the festive release that characterized the earliest forms of comic drama. Barber argues:

Once Shakespeare finds his own distinctive voice, he is more Aristophanic than any other great English dramatist, despite the fact that the accepted educated models and theories when he started to write were Terentian and Plautine. The Old Comedy cast of his work results from his participation in native saturnalian traditions of the popular theater and the popular holidays. . . . He used the resources of a sophisticated theater to express, in his idyllic comedies and in his clowns’ ironic misrule, the experience of moving to humorous understanding through saturnalian release.

Named for the summer solstice festival, when it was said that a maid could glimpse the man she would marry, A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates access to the uncanny and the breakup of all normal rules and social barriers to display human nature in the grips of elemental passions and the subconscious. The lovers in their moonlit, natural setting, at the mercy of the fairies, act out their deepest desires and hostilities in a full display of the power and absurdity of love both to change reality and to redeem it.

Hermia elopes with Lysander, pursued by Demetrius, who in turn is followed by Helena, whom he spurns. They enter a supernatural realm also beset by marital discord, jealousy, and rivalry. Oberon commands his servant Puck to place the juice of a flower once hit by Cupid’s dart in the eyes of the sleeping Titania to cause her to fall in love with the first creature she sees on awakening to help gain for Oberon the changeling boy Titania has refused to yield to him. Oberon, pitying Helena her rejection by Demetrius, also orders Puck to place some of the drops in Demetrius’s eyes so that he will be charmed into love with the woman who dotes on him. Instead Puck comes upon Lysander and Hermia as they sleep, mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and pours the charm into the wrong eyes so that Lysander falls in love with Helena when she wakes him. Meanwhile Bottom and his companions have retreated to the woods to rehearse a dramatization of the mythological story of Pyramus and Thisbe, another set of star-crossed lovers. Puck gives the exuberant Bottom the head of an ass, and he becomes the first thing the charmed Titania sees on waking. Through the agency of the change of location from court to forest and from daylight to moonlight, with its attendant capacity for magical transformation, the play mounts a witty and uproarious display of the irrationality of love and its victims who see the world through the distorting lens of desire, in which certainty of affection is fleeting and a lover with the head of an ass can cause a queen to forgo her senses and her dignity. As Bottom aptly observes, “reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.” From the perspectives of the fairies the lovers’ absolute claims and earnest rationalizations of such a will-of-the-wisp as love makes them absurd. The tangled mixture of passion, jealousy, rancor, and violence that beset the young lovers after Puck imperfectly corrects his mistake, causing both Lysander and Demetrius to pursue the once spurned Helena, more than justifies Puck’s observation, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

By act 4 day returns, and the disorder of the night proves as fleeting and as insubstantial as a dream. After the four lovers are awakened by Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus, who are hunting in the woods, Lysander again loves Hermia, and Demetrius, still under the power of the potion, gives up his claim to her in favor of Helena. Theseus overrules Egeus’s objections and his own former strict adherence to Athenian law and gives both couples permission to marry that day, along with himself and Hippolyta. Having gained the change-ling boy from Titania, Oberon releases her from her spell. Puck removes the donkey’s head from Bottom, who awakes to wonder at his strange dream:

I have had a most rare vision. 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. . . . I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be call’d “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom.

The only mortal allowed to see the fairies, Bottom is also the only character not threatened or diminished by the alternative fantasy realm he passes through. He freely accepts what he does not understand, considering it more suitable for the delight of art in a future ballad than to be analyzed or reduced by reason. Bottom coexists easily and honestly in the dual world of reality and illusion, maintaining his core identity and integrity even through his trans-formation, from man to ass, to fairy queen’s paramour, to ordinary man again. Called by Harold Bloom “Shakespeare’s most engaging character before Falstaff,” Bottom is the play’s human anchor and affirmation of the joyful acceptance of all the contradictions that the play has sent his way.

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With the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, Bottom’s reunion with his colleagues, and three Athenian weddings, the plot complications are all happily resolved, and act 5 shifts the emphasis from the potentially destructive vagaries of love to a celebration of marriage to crown and contain human desire. Shakespeare’s final sleight of hand and delightful invention, however, is the play within the play, the “tedious and brief” and “very tragical mirth” of the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe by Bottom and his players. In a drama fueled by the complications between appearance and reality this hilariously incompetent burlesque by the play’s rustic clowns impersonating tragic lovers appropriately comments on the play that has preceded it. The drama of Pyramus and Thisbe involves another set of lovers who face parental objections and similarly seek relief in nature, but their adventure goes tragically awry. However, just as Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius avoid through the stage-managing of the fairies a potentially tragic fate from their ordeal in the wood, so is the tragic fate of Pyramus and Thisbe transformed to comedy by the ineptitude of Bottom’s company. The play within the play becomes a pointed microcosm for A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole in its conversion of potential tragedy to curative comedy. The newlyweds, who mock the absurdity of Pyramus and Thisbe , fail to make the connection with their own absurd encounter with love and their chance rescue from its anguish, but the actual audience should not. In Shakespeare’s comprehensive comic vision we both laugh at the ridiculousness of others while recognizing ourselves in their dilemmas. Shakespeare’s final point about the inseparability of reality and illusion is scored by having the fairy world coexist with the Athenian court at the play’s conclusion, decreasing the gap between fact and fancy and invading actuality itself by giving the final words to Puck, who addresses the audience directly:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumb’red here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream.

Like the newlyweds who view a drama that calls attention to its illusion and its “tragical mirth,” the audience is here reminded of the similar blending of reality and dream, the comic and the tragic in the world beyond the stage. Puck serves as Shakespeare’s magician’s assistant, demonstrating that substance and shadow on stage replicate both the illusion of the dramatist’s art and the essence of human life in our own continual interplay of reality, dreams, and desire.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oxford Lecture by Prof. Emma Smith

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Ebook PDF (5 MB)

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human PDF (7 MB)

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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Essay Questions, Thesis Statements and Ideas for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Essay Questions, Thesis Statements and Ideas for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Assessment and revision

elaine253

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21 August 2018

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thesis statement for midsummer night's dream

15 A Midsummer Night’s Dream critical thinking essay question cards, indicative content and marking sheets. Best for A Level or extending GCSE students, or any curriculum ages 14+. All resources are printable and editable. Each has a challenging and engaging central essay question, with the remainder of the page given over to a number of thought provoking and sophisticated thesis statements or ideas which students can extend to form a complete essay. Questions focus on: love, power, characterization, the influence of setting, narrative methods, justice and morality, reality and illusion, the conventions of Shakespearen comedy, argument and conflict, plays and acting roles, rebellion and dissent, transformation and personal identity, the value a society places on free will, the consequences of argument and conflict, the interplay of states of order and chaos. Essay focuses are concerned with enabling comment on the human condition and the structures of the world around us. Samuel Pepys’ Review Essay Task: a highly engaging essay task asking students to respond to a 17th century negative review of the play. The task is presented in a 4 page hand out which provides step by step tuition in how to form sophisticated, convincing response ideas, source textual evidence and write engaging, analytical and perceptive paragraphs. An additional 2 page resource consists of exemplar paragraphs and a short essay are provided with a list of useful vocabulary and perceptive ideas for students to adapt and use. This is available in 2 alternative formats for teacher choice. A graphic organiser to assist students in forming specific, complex ideas is included as are two Marking Rubrics.

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thesis statement for midsummer night's dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream

William shakespeare, everything you need for every book you read..

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A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about love. All of its action—from the escapades of Lysander , Demetrius , Hermia , and Helena in the forest, to the argument between Oberon and Titania , to the play about two lovelorn youths that Bottom and his friends perform at Duke Theseus's marriage to Hippolyta—are motivated by love. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a romance, in which the audience gets caught up in a passionate love affair between two characters. It's a comedy, and because it's clear from the outset that it's a comedy and that all will turn out happily, rather than try to overcome the audience with the exquisite and overwhelming passion of love, A Midsummer Night's Dream invites the audience to laugh at the way the passion of love can make people blind, foolish, inconstant, and desperate. At various times, the power and passion of love threatens to destroy friendships, turn men against men and women against women, and through the argument between Oberon and Titania throws nature itself into turmoil.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream , love is a force that characters cannot control, a point amplified by workings of the love potion, which literally makes people slaves to love. And yet, A Midsummer Night's Dream ends happily, with three marriages blessed by the reconciled fairy King and Queen. So even as A Midsummer Night's Dream makes fun of love's effects on both men and women and points out that when it comes to love there's nothing really new to say, its happy ending reaffirms loves importance, beauty, and timeless relevance.

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Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay

Introduction.

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the carnival elements in the play are widely discussed topics in the literary world. One of the notable writers who did a deep evaluation on the carnival elements in Shakespeare is Bakhtin. Critics observe that it is this element, which makes the play distinct from other plays of Shakespeare. The play can be said to fall in the category of light comedy. It colorfully portrays an episode from the adventurous night of romantic lovers in a forest ruled by fairies.

The tragic and the comic elements in the play have also been subjected to severe criticism in the same manner as the carnival elements. One can see the play moving in between a tragedy and a comedy and this can be regarded as the cause for modern critical scrutiny. It was the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin who coined the term ‘carnival’.

Historically, the carnival is a festival related to the Feast of the Circumcision. Bakhtin attributes some special significance to the carnival when he regards it as a symbol of collectivity. He considers it as the unity of the people which is different from the unity found in political or socioeconomic organizations. One of the main features of the carnival as Bakhtin sees it is its equality, that is, there is all-around unity, though the participants belong to different social, political, and racial classes. One can find a kind of free and familiar contact that exists among the people who are united in the carnival.

As there are no class barriers between the people, Bakhtin finds that the lower section of the society rises on par with the higher. When one attends a carnival, one is aware of the space and time which brings to them the thought of collectivity. While analyzing the opinion of Bakhtin, one feels that when people get together in the carnival, they are united not only in dress and appearance but also they are renewed both mentally and physically. Simultaneously, one’s mental, sensual, and material, unities too go up. The paper is an attempt to evaluate the carnival elements in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Bakhtin introduces the term carnival which denotes not merely a mass of people but who have gathered in such a way that confronts the political or socio-economic systems. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play with the characteristics of a romantic comedy. At the end of the play, Shakespeare introduces a new form of political authority. Here one can see that the dramatist portrays the term as an inevitable part of ancient culture.

Various critics point out that even when the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy they have identified the shadows of a darker undertone in it. Here Shakespeare portrays the interlude between Bottom and Titania in a new way, which, contradicts the conventional pattern. In his book entitled ‘ Power on Display’, Leonard Tennenhouse shares his views about the social system in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The author remarks, “This form of an authority constitutes an improvement over the punitive power he threatened to exercise at the play’s opening.” (Tennenhouse 1986, p. 74).

When analyzing the gradual development of the plot of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream one can see the elements of carnival. The association of judicial law and patriarchal power pave the way for a new political atmosphere.

Various critical studies prove that ambiguous sexuality is an important theme in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The love affair between Tatiana and Bottom leads the audience into the world of a new aesthetic experience. The crisis of young lovers in the second and third acts of the play gives a new form of storyline. The performance of young lovers in this play provides a sign of revolution against the existing system of authority. Here Shakespeare portrays his characters as the exponents of carnival culture. One of the major social changes reported in the time of carnival and festival is the deterioration of male domination in society. Looking at Bakhtin’s concepts about carnival one can find the love scenes in the woods and Bottom’s dream are the finest examples.

A sense of collectivity can be seen in these scenes. Readers can find appropriate examples of social change in the play. The life of four lovers in the woods and Bottom’s dreams gives a world of social chaos and that is entirely different from Theseus’ authority. The ending part of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents the mood of carnival. Through the characters of Theseus, Hermia, and Lysander the dramatist shows the gradual change of woman’s status and consummation of marriage in society. Julie Sanders’ book named Novel Shakespeares contains some salient information. The author shares his view like “These elements of carnival provide their intersections, structural and stylistic, with the paradigms of Shakespearean comedy and criticism, as we shall see later.” (Sanders 2001, p. 21).

Julie Sanders says that the elements of carnival in Shakespearean plays have their intersections, structural and stylistic features and these are highly related to the characteristics of typical Shakespearean comedies. Shakespeare presents the character Oberon in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The way Shakespeare portrays carnival elements in the play “ A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

As a romantic comedy, Shakespeare is A midsummer Night’s Dream constitutes different features of comedy. Carnival provides celebrations and gatherings. Colorful costumes and masks are essential features of a carnival. The character of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a supernatural figure with the head of a donkey. Shakespeare introduces the elements of carnival in his play in a way of revolution. The role of Titania as an unruly woman, Puck’s dealings that contribute to the disorder, feelings, and responses of the young lovers are the violating forces. The play begins with an atmosphere that constitutes the patriarchal authority but it ends with a revolution. Shakespeare introduces the character Oberon as a symbol of an alternation. Through the dialogues of Oberon, a reader can understand a sign of questioning or a sound of revolution. Act III of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives Oberon’s words:

Oberon: “This is thy negligence: still thou mistakes,

Or else commit thy knaveries willfully.” (Shakespeare, Richardson & Messel 1957, p.81).

The revolution against the Athenian authority is revealed here in the words of Oberon. Another aspect of this revolution is the attitude of two suitors Demetrius and Lysander. The fight between these two people creates striking scenes in the play. The female characters of the play Hermia, Heena, and Titania succeed in finding their own identity in a patriarchal society. The disobedience of Hermia and Titania provides signs of revolution and both of them face the after-effects courageously. Studies prove that Bakhtin introduces carnival as a symbol of change. The mask is related to the pleasure of change and recreation.

In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a reader can see Bottom’s metamorphoses, disobedience of the female characters like Titania, and the dream world of young lovers presented as the violation of existing boundaries and conservative ideologies. The elements of carnival in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream provide a particular interface of reality and romance. Egeus’s silence in Act IV, scene I of the play presents the way that indicates consent or a kind of withdrawal from Athenian norms and regulations. Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin says: “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal.” (Bakhtin, & Iswolsky1984, p.10).

In Bakhtin’s views about carnival, the characters of young lovers, fairy queen Titania and the mythical character Bottom stand for the establishment of a new custom.

When concluding, one can infer that the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream is expressive of the carnival elements at a higher degree. Rival elements in the play intensify its actions and the same causes for the dramatic appeal of the play. A close analysis of the play reveals that the carnival in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is revolutionary than conservative or subversive. One feels the revolutionary aspects in the play when one looks at the brave or the revolutionary attempts of Hermia to cross the command of his father as well as the law of Athens.

Hermia’s decision to marry according to her wishes and her elopement shake the keystone of the existing belief of the Athenians and Theseus as a father and a conservative king. One can evaluate the play following the principles of feminism as it best suits with the stubborn mentality of Titania when she bravely faces the threat from her husband. Both Titania and Hermia express their boldness in questioning the male chauvinism and select their own way, disregarding all other aspects like the existing social customs, which deny the moral and the legal rights of women, and builds up a magnificent world as their own. Titania-Bottom episode is the other example that challenges the existing social conventions.

Titania’s decision to follow Bottom and the respect that she shows to him, more than the one shown to her husband, are self revelatory of her attempt to affirm the feminist view of life. It is a revolution in the sense that a total change is visible in the attitude of the women characters of the play who disobey their male counterparts and select their own way which they think as befitting their status as women. An overall change is also visible in the appearance of the characters, especially their costumes and mask.

The changing of the mask and costume are symbolic of the imminent change in the cultural and socio-economic traditions of Athens. When the play ends, one feels the changing face of Athenian social atmosphere with the advent of a new political system. The new phase marks the consummation of women after realizing the bitterness of the male chauvinist society. To conclude, one can say that the carnival element mentioned the play is revolutionary and it helps to raise the play to a level that challenges the male dominated society.

Bakhtin, M M & Iswolsky, H 1984, Rabelais and his world , Indian University Press. Web.

Sanders, J 2001, Novel Shakespeares: twentieth-century women novelists and appropriation . Web.

Shakespeare, W, Richardson, R & Messel, O 1957, A midsummer night’s dreams: Oberon , Plain Label Books. Web.

Tennenhouse, L 1986, Power on display , Routledge. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, November 3). Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. https://ivypanda.com/essays/carnival-in-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream/

"Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream." IvyPanda , 3 Nov. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/carnival-in-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream'. 3 November.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream." November 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/carnival-in-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream/.

1. IvyPanda . "Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream." November 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/carnival-in-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream." November 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/carnival-in-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream/.

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    A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Shakespeare's most beloved comedies, is generally thought of as a sparkling romantic farce. However, while the play is lovely and comic, it also has a strong trace of darkness and cruelty, a sinister underside that is inextricable from its amorous themes. Midsummer may end with a series of happy weddings ...

  3. 86 A Midsummer Night's Dream Essay Topics & Examples

    Marriage in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The main theme of the play revolves around the marriage between Thesus, the Duke of Athens, and the Queen of Amazons called Hippolyta, as well as the events that surround the married couple. We will write. a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts.

  4. Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Essay

    Exclusively available on IvyPanda. Updated: Dec 19th, 2023. Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a play that reveals the connection between reality and the dream state. There are numerous major themes in the play that link a person's mind to dreams. The surreal and unconscious world is closely tied with person's psychology ...

  5. Analysis of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

    A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of just three plays out of Shakespeare's 39 (the other two are Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest) for which the play-wright did not rely on a central primary source.Instead Shakespeare assembled elements from classical sources, romantic narratives, and English folk materials, along with details of ordinary Elizabethan life to juggle and juxtapose ...

  6. A Midsummer Night's Dream: Suggested Essay Topics

    3. What role do Theseus and Hippolyta play in A Midsummer Night's Dream? What is the significance of the fact that they are absent from the play's main action? 4. It has been argued that the characters of the Athenian lovers are not particularly differentiated from one another—that Hermia is quite like Helena (even down to her name) and ...

  7. A Midsummer Night's Dream Suggested Essay Topics

    Act V, Scene 1. Suggested Essay Topics. 1. Theseus likens, "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in his explanation to Hippolyta of why he thinks the lovers are recounting a fantasy rather ...

  8. Essay Questions, Thesis Statements and Ideas for A Midsummer Night's Dream

    zip, 400.25 KB. 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream critical thinking essay question cards, indicative content and marking sheets. Best for A Level or extending GCSE students, or any curriculum ages 14+. All resources are printable and editable. Each has a challenging and engaging central essay question, with the remainder of the page given over to ...

  9. PDF A Midsummer Night's Dream

    I. Thesis Statement: The characters in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream are successful, after many trials and tribulations, in acquiring their desired relationships. II. Hermia and Lysander A. Must go to Athens with Egeus for Duke Theseus' decision.

  10. A Midsummer Night's Dream: Themes

    Love's Difficulty "The course of true love never did run smooth," comments Lysander, articulating one of A Midsummer Night's Dream's most important themes—that of the difficulty of love (I.i.134).Though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story; it distances the ...

  11. Thesis Statement For A Midsummer Night's Dream

    What Is The Thesis Statement Of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thesis: In A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare demonstrates two opposite worlds: one is world of law, rules and strict hierarchy and another is world of freedom, magic, lawlessness and disorder - which world is correct one? 998 Words; 4 Pages;

  12. Midsummer Night's Dream Thesis

    1541 Words7 Pages. THESIS STATEMENT In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare modeled the relationships between Hermia and Egeus, Titania and Oberon, and Theseus and Hippolyta after the Elizabethan hierarchy, yet challenged the traditional gender roles through his dominant female characters. PURPOSE STATEMENT Through critical analysis ...

  13. A Midsummer Night's Dream

    A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta.One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding.

  14. What Is The Thesis Statement Of A Midsummer Night's Dream

    Open Document. Thesis: In A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare demonstrates two opposite worlds: one is world of law, rules and strict hierarchy and another is world of freedom, magic, lawlessness and disorder - which world is correct one? Introduction Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the most popular play.

  15. A Midsummer Night's Dream Themes

    A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play containing other plays. The most obvious example is the laborers' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, and their inept production serves three important functions in the larger structure of the larger play.First, the laborer's mistakes and misunderstandings introduce a strand of farce to the comedy of the larger play.

  16. Love Theme in A Midsummer Night's Dream

    A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about love. All of its action—from the escapades of Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena in the forest, to the argument between Oberon and Titania, to the play about two lovelorn youths that Bottom and his friends perform at Duke Theseus's marriage to Hippolyta—are motivated by love. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a romance, in which the ...

  17. Carnival in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Essay

    The character of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream is a supernatural figure with the head of a donkey. Shakespeare introduces the elements of carnival in his play in a way of revolution. The role of Titania as an unruly woman, Puck's dealings that contribute to the disorder, feelings, and responses of the young lovers are the violating ...

  18. Midsummer Nights Dream Thesis Statements

    Midsummer Nights Dream Thesis Statements - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site.

  19. PDF A queer reading of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

    In this thesis, I will ask the question of how Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream lends itself to queer interpretation and, consequently, queer adaptation. This ... Midsummer Night's Dream as a similar place, it represents vice in the form of "sensual . 8 delights, in which sinners lose themselves until aided by some ...

  20. A Midsummer Night's Dream Deception Essay

    A Midsummer Night's Dream Deception Essay. Even though the texts, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakespeare and "The Princess and the Puma" by O. Henry, were written in different periods, they share a common theme of deception. A Midsummer Night's Dream surrounds the love and chaos of lovers Hermia and Lysander who try to get ...

  21. midsummer nights dream thesis statement .pdf

    Ridita Malik Prof. Harold A. Veeser Intro to Literary study 11/10/2018 Thesis statement (Act 5) Midsummer nights dream is one of the notable works of William Shakespeare. This play is about the construction of love and its phases. It is also an analysis of play on the play. At the beginning of the play, we can see that the whole of Athens was preparing for the big celebration of Theseus and ...

  22. Theseus Character Analysis in A Midsummer Night's Dream

    Theseus. As the duke of Athens, Theseus is the play's central patriarchal figure. The audience gets a glimpse of Theseus's patriarchal nature in the very first lines of the play, where he compares his forthcoming marriage to Hippolyta to a long-awaited inheritance. The comparison Theseus makes between marriage and wealth reveals his ideas ...