Transcript A Midsummer Night`s Dream

A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
If you recall…
• In Romeo and Juliet,
Shakespeare made
love a crazed, druglike state, which led to
murder, suicide, and
exile.
Love in Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The play features
quarrelsome lovers who
fall in and out for small,
petty reasons
• The play shows “the
power of desire to take
over one’s vision and
one’s actions” (xiii).
• Lovers are
interchangeable
Mythological Background
• Theseus
• Hippolyta
– Founder of Athens, Greece
– Famous for defeating Minotaur
– Defeats Hippolyta in battle and
claims her as his wife
– Queen of Amazons, a
race of warrior-women
who reproduce with men
but then kill them
HERMIA
DEMETRIUS
HELENA
LYSANDER
Lovers’ Spats
The Nobles
Theseus and Hippolyta: he has captured her
and they prepare for their wedding
The Mortals
Lysander and Hermia: forbidden to be
together, they run away to elope
Demetrius and Helena: he no longer loves her
The Fairies
Oberon and Titania: quarrel over an Indian boy
Boy Girl Drama
Act I
Act III
Act IV
LYSANDER
HERMIA
DEMETRIUS
HELENA
LYSANDER
HERMIA
DEMETRIUS
HELENA
LYSANDER
HERMIA
DEMETRIUS
HELENA
HERMIA
●Defies father
and risks death
●Loves Lysander
●Short
BOTH
●Of equal beauty
●Lifelong friends
HELENA
●Insecure and
heartbroken
●Loves Demetrius
●Tall
The Athenian
Lovers
LYSANDER
●Boldly stands up
for his love to Egeus
●Makes plan to flee
to wealthy aunt’s
BOTH
●Love Hermia at
start of play
●Of equal wealth
and heredity
DEMETRIUS
●Flip-flops
●Insulting to Helena
●Favored by Egeus
“Pyramus and Thisbe”
A Play by Peter Quince
PLAYBILL
NICK BOTTOM THE WEAVER…………….………..……PYRAMUS
FRANCIS FLUTE THE BELLOWS-MENDER…..…….…THISBE
ROBIN STARVELING THE TAILOR……….…...…MOONSHINE
TOM SNOUT THE TINKER…………………………….…………WALL
SNUG THE JOINER……………………………………………………LION
PETER QUINCE………………………..…………..…………PROLOGUE
The Play
Within the Play
The play of “Pyramus
and Thisbe”… alludes…
to the tragic possibilities
of a conflict between
love and parental
opposition. A
Midsummer Night’s
Dream does not let its
audience forget that love
entails confusion and
danger as well as grace,
although it never entirely
separates these
contraries (Belsey 186).
The Formula
1) Controlling parents forbid young
lovers to be together
2) Love cannot be forbidden, so they
run away together to the woods
3) In a place of mystery, danger, and
confusion, the lovers are soon
separated by bizarre twists of fate
What Critics Are Saying
Selections from Catherine Belsey’s Essay
• “Bottom’s name, and his transformation…
[clarify] more than [they change] his identity”
(181).
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about
love. It proposes that love is a dream, or
perhaps a vision; that it is absurd, irrational, a
delusion” (182).
• “…the four lovers are virtually
indistinguishable. Romantic love is in this
sense oddly impersonal. Because of love’s
power to idealize, the object of desire seems
unique, even though in the event it turns out
that Hermia and Helena are interchangeable”
(183).
What Critics Are Saying
Selections from Catherine Belsey’s Essay
• “The play does not ignore the trace of violence that
exists within love when the other person fails to
conform to the lover’s idealized image” (185).
• “The plot leads up to the marriages of the lovers, but
it does not quite confirm the distinction we might
expect it to identify between true love on the one
hand and arbitrary passion induced by magic on the
other.” (189).
• “The Athenian court represents the world of
reconciliation and rationality, of social institutions
and communal order, while the wood outside
Athens is the location of night and bewildering
passions, a place of anarchy and anxiety, where
behavior becomes unpredictable and individual
identity is transformed” (189).