This
section serves as a summary of the key themes of the play that could come up as
essay questions. I haven't included thematic quotes just yet, they will be separate posts so that they are organised more clearly.
Love’s
Difficulty
The motif
of love out of balance – an asymmetrical love among the four Athenians.
The play has
strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is based on a quest
for internal balance.
Imbalance
arises out of Oberon’s coveting of Titania’s Indian boy outweighing his love
for her.
Later
Titania & Bottom represent an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania =
beautiful and graceful, Bottom = clumsy and grotesque.
Magic
Shakespeare
uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love and to create a
surreal world.
Magic
despite causing chaos ultimately resolves the play’s conflicts.
The ease of
Puck’s magic contrasts the labouriousness of the craftsmen’s attempt to stage a
play.
Dreams
Dreams are
linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. The theme is introduced
in Hippolyta’s first lines evidencing the prevalence of dreams. Shakespeare
is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, he seeks to recreate a
timeless and impossible environment in the play through the intervention of the
fairies.
The sense
of illusion and gauzy frailty is crucial to Midsummer, it renders the play as a
fantastical experience rather than a heavy drama.
By calling their experiences "dreams", the lovers and Bottom allow these experiences to exist as they are without explanation or understanding. Near the end of the play, Theseus brushes off the lovers' tale of their mishaps in the forest, condemning the imagination of all lovers, madmen and poets as untruths and full of illusion. But he overlooks the fact that it was reason set down in Athenian law that caused these problems, and the "dream" within the forest resolved them. The play suggests that imagination and dreams are as useful as imagination, and can create truths that transcend reason's limits.
By calling their experiences "dreams", the lovers and Bottom allow these experiences to exist as they are without explanation or understanding. Near the end of the play, Theseus brushes off the lovers' tale of their mishaps in the forest, condemning the imagination of all lovers, madmen and poets as untruths and full of illusion. But he overlooks the fact that it was reason set down in Athenian law that caused these problems, and the "dream" within the forest resolved them. The play suggests that imagination and dreams are as useful as imagination, and can create truths that transcend reason's limits.
Contrast
The idea of
contrast is a building block of the play. E.g. Helena is tall, Hermia is short,
Titania is beautiful, Bottom is grotesque.
The three
main groups of characters contrast powerfully with one another: fairies =
graceful and magical, craftsmen = clumsy and earthly, craftsmen = merry, lovers
= overly serious.
The juxtaposition
of extraordinary differences (Titania weaving flowers into Bottom’s hair) is
the most important characteristic of the surreal atmosphere.
Love
Love is a theme typical of Shakespeare's comedies; he explores the process of falling in love with those who appear beautiful to them. But as time passes, these people seem unattractive, or even repellent. For a short period, this attraction seems to be love at its most intense, but in AMND, love is much more than simply physical attraction.
Despite "The course of true love never did run smooth", the ending is one of harmony. But at the same time, the audience is forced to consider the irrationality of whimsical love, at least among youngsters.
AMND is not a romance, in which the audience get caught up in a romantic affair. Rather, it is a comedy; it is clear from the outset that the play is comedic and will have a happy ending, as opposed to overcoming the audience with the passion of love. It invites the audience to laugh at how love makes people blind, foolish, fickle and desperate. Passion threatens to ruin friendships, turn men against men and women against women, or throw the natural order in turmoil.
Love is a force that characters cannot control, in the case of the love potion that makes people slaves to love. But AMND ends happily, three marriages are blessed by the reconciled fairy king and queen. While AMND makes fun of the effects of love, it still reinforces the importance of love, its beauty and timeless relevance.
David Bevington: The play represents the dark side of love. The fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and applying love potion to Titania's eyes, forcing her to fall in love with an ass. In the forest, the couples are beset by problems. Hermia and Lysander are met by Puck, who provides comic relief confounding the lovers. But serious themes are alluded to. Hippolyta and Theseus watch the play about the tragic lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy it and laugh at it. Helena and Demetrius are oblivious to the dark side of their love, totally unaware of what may have come of the events in the forest.
Marriage
The institution of marriage is viewed as the true fulfillment of love. By the end of Act IV, the damaged relationships are resolved, and the following act celebrates marriage in festive spirit.
The mature and stable love of Theseus and Hippolyta contrasts with the volatile and unstable coupling of Titania and Oberon, whose squabbling has a negative impact on the balance of nature in the fairy world. Through the marriage of the fairy king and queen, things can be put right and peace runs throughout their kingdom and the world beyond it.
Appearance and Reality
The idea that things are not necessarily as they seem is a key feature of the play itself, as well as its title.
A dream is not real, despite it seeming real as we experience it. Shakespeare consciously creates a dreamlike quality to the play to highlight this.
This theme is also conveyed through the adoption of a play-within-a-play structure, and this is with comic effect. The mechanicals neglect the magic of the theater in that they need to convince the audience that what is being acted out in front of them is real.
Order & Disorder
The theme of order and disorder is explored in AMND: Egeus' family order is disrupted as Hermia wishes to marry against his will; against the social order of the state that demands her father's will be upheld. The forest is distanced from their ordered city life and hierarchical society, there is a breakdown of order as relationships are fragmented.
But due to the comedic genre of the play, these relationships are rebuilt in the free atmosphere of the forest, before returning to a reformed, but remaining ordered society.
Natural order is also disrupted because of the quarrel between the fairy king and queen. It is only after their reconciliation that this can be put right. Without the restoration of natural order, the play's happy ending could not be completed.
The Moon
In case you didn't notice, there are LOTS of references to the moon throughout AMND, it is referred to three times within the first nine lines of the play! This serves many purposes:
- To create the atmosphere of night. Shakespeare's plays were typically performed in daylight, and so the sense of darkness had to come from his audience's imagination, due to there being no means of "dimming" the light
- To create a dreamlike atmosphere. Familiar things look different in the moonlight; quite literally in a different light.
- The moon is a reminder of the passage of time, and that things, like all phases, must change.
- The more educated of Shakespeare's audiences would have understood the mythological importance of the moon. The moon-goddesses Luna and Diana were associated with chastity and fertility, these qualities were united in marriage, which the play celebrates.
Sight
There are also many references to seeing, eyes, and sight. They serve a double purpose; the repetition reminds the audience of the difference between how things look and what they are (theme of appearance vs reality); and that love is blind and in the eye of the beholder.
Play within a Play
This structure is reflected through the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, which serves three important functions in the larger scale of the actual play.
1. The mechanicals' mistakes and misunderstandings introduce a strand of farce.
2. It allows Shakespeare to comment on the nature of contemporary theater, primarily within the mechanicals' wrong expectations that the audience won't be able to distinguish between fiction and reality.
3. Pyramus and Thisbe parodies AMND; they're lovers who, facing opposition from their parents, seek to elope, just like Hermia and Lysander. So even as the lovers watch the play and ridicule it, the audience knows that they have been just as absurd.
But this is not the only play within a play, there is a subtler one. Oberon is a playwright who seeks to "write" a comedy in which Helena gets her love, Lysander and Hermia stay together, Titania learns her lesson in wifely obedience, and all conflicts are reconciled through marriage and resolution. Like how the mechanicals' play is transformed from earnest drama to comical farce, so does Oberon's when Puck puts the love potion on the wrong Athenian man's eyes. While the mechanicals' farcical performance suggests the limits of the theater, Oberon's play, which rewrote the same lives of the mortals who mock the mechanicals, suggests that theater really has a magic that defies reality.
Men and Women
The relationship between men and women echoes in the mortal and supernatural worlds, both deal with attempts by male authority figures to control women. Theseus and Hippolyta's relationship is based on a man asserting power over a woman. Oberon uses the love potion to control his disobedient wife. Egeus seeks to control his daughter's marriage. Although the play ends happily, the love on display is one in which the women have accepted the role subservient to men. An Elizabethan society would have generally accepted that men are head of the household and the king is the head of society.
The play also suggests that love can take a nasty toll on same-sex friendships, Helena betrays Hermia for love even before they've reached the forest. Once they're in the forest, the men challenge each other to duels while the women almost come to blows with each other.
Loss of Individual Identity
Maurice Hunt: the blurring of the identities of fantasy of reality in the play make possible "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play." Shakespeare prepares the audiences' minds to accept the fantastic reality of the fairy world and its happenings, which also seems to be the axis around which the conflicts of the play occur.
Hunt suggests that it's the breaking down of individual identities that leads to central conflict. The brawl between Titania and Oberon is based on a lack of recognition for each other, and drives the rest of the drama and makes it dangerous for the lovers to come together amidst the disturbance of Nature caused by their dispute. The failure to distinct and identify leads Puck to mistake one set of lovers for the other, placing the love potion on Lysander rather than Demetrius.
Victor Kiernan: the Marxist scholar and historian writes that it is for the greater sake of love that this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters suffer accordingly. "It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to have dubious effects on its acolytes." Identities are not so much lost as they are blended together to create a haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and practical ties between characters as a means of coping within the strange world of the forest, even in relationships as diverse and unrealistic as the brief relationship between Titania and Bottom. "It was a tidal force of this social need that lent energy to relationships."
David Marshall: points that the loss of identity is played out in the description of the mechanicals and their assumption of other identities. "Two construct or put together. two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent. broken or sundered."
This loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinion on love and marriage. Furthermore, the mechanicals understand this theme as they take on roles in Pyramus and Thisbe.
"To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part." Each character, particularly among the lovers, has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater group or pairing. A desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what quietly moves the events of the play, the primary source of motivation and reflected in the mood and scenery.
Ambiguous Sexuality
Douglas E. Green: (In his essay "Preposterous Pleasures: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream) explores possible alternative sexuality that he finds within the text of the play, in juxtaposition to contemporary proscribed social mores of culture. His essay "does not seek to rewrite AMND as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations'...moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespeare comedy."
He does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represents a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "the discontents of civilisation", which while resolved in the ending do not resolve so neatly in life. "Sodomitical elements...homoeroticism...lesbianism...and even compulsory heterosexuality" in the story must be considered in the context of the "culture of early modern England" as a commentary on "aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order."
These ideas of ambiguous sexuality and gender conflict are also explored by Shirley Garner and William W. E. Sights, albeit all the characters would have been played by males.
Feminism
Male dominance is a thematic element of AMND. Lysander and Hermia escape to the woods for a night where they don't fall under the laws of Theseus and Egeus. Upon their arrival in Athens, the couples are married. Marriage is seen as a social achievement for women whereas men can go on and do great things and gain societal recognition.
Louis Montrose: (in his article "The Imperial Votaress") draws attention to male and female gender roles and norms present in comedy in connection to Elizabethan culture. "[on the triple wedding] The festive conclusion in AMND depends on the success of a process by which the feminine pride and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and wilful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands." The consummation of marriage is how power over a woman changes hands from father to husband.
A connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn; the love potion can be seen as symbolising menstrual blood as well as the sexual blood shed by virgins. While blood as a symbol of menstruation is representative of a woman's power, blood as a symbol of the first sexual encounter represents a man's power over a woman.
Leonard Tennenhouse: the problem in AMND is a problem of "authority gone archaic." The Athenian law requiring the daughter to die if she doesn't submit to her father's will is outdated. There is a patriarchal rule of Theseus in Athens and of Oberon in the carnivalistic fairy world. The disorder of the Green World completely opposes the City World of Athens. The events of the four lovers and Bottom's dream represent the chaos that contrasts with Theseus' political order, but he does not punish the lovers for their disobedience. By forgiving the lovers, Theseus makes a distinction between patriarchal law (Egeus) and that of the monarch (Theseus), creating two different voices of authority.
This reflects Elizabeth I, when monarchs were seen as having two bodies: the body natural and the body politic. Elizabeth I's succession itself represented the voice of the patriarch as well as the voice of a monarch: her father's will that stated the crown should pass on to her and that she was the daughter of a king. The challenge to patriarchal rule in AMND mirrors what was occuring in Elizabethan times.
And that is the themes and motives of A Midsummer Night's Dream finally covered! I'll be posting thematic quotes for each section at a later date, otherwise this post would have gone on forever. But for now I would suggest creating mind maps of the ideas explored in each theme, and add quotes to each idea when I get around to uploading them.
Love
Love is a theme typical of Shakespeare's comedies; he explores the process of falling in love with those who appear beautiful to them. But as time passes, these people seem unattractive, or even repellent. For a short period, this attraction seems to be love at its most intense, but in AMND, love is much more than simply physical attraction.
Despite "The course of true love never did run smooth", the ending is one of harmony. But at the same time, the audience is forced to consider the irrationality of whimsical love, at least among youngsters.
AMND is not a romance, in which the audience get caught up in a romantic affair. Rather, it is a comedy; it is clear from the outset that the play is comedic and will have a happy ending, as opposed to overcoming the audience with the passion of love. It invites the audience to laugh at how love makes people blind, foolish, fickle and desperate. Passion threatens to ruin friendships, turn men against men and women against women, or throw the natural order in turmoil.
Love is a force that characters cannot control, in the case of the love potion that makes people slaves to love. But AMND ends happily, three marriages are blessed by the reconciled fairy king and queen. While AMND makes fun of the effects of love, it still reinforces the importance of love, its beauty and timeless relevance.
David Bevington: The play represents the dark side of love. The fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and applying love potion to Titania's eyes, forcing her to fall in love with an ass. In the forest, the couples are beset by problems. Hermia and Lysander are met by Puck, who provides comic relief confounding the lovers. But serious themes are alluded to. Hippolyta and Theseus watch the play about the tragic lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy it and laugh at it. Helena and Demetrius are oblivious to the dark side of their love, totally unaware of what may have come of the events in the forest.
Marriage
The institution of marriage is viewed as the true fulfillment of love. By the end of Act IV, the damaged relationships are resolved, and the following act celebrates marriage in festive spirit.
The mature and stable love of Theseus and Hippolyta contrasts with the volatile and unstable coupling of Titania and Oberon, whose squabbling has a negative impact on the balance of nature in the fairy world. Through the marriage of the fairy king and queen, things can be put right and peace runs throughout their kingdom and the world beyond it.
Appearance and Reality
The idea that things are not necessarily as they seem is a key feature of the play itself, as well as its title.
A dream is not real, despite it seeming real as we experience it. Shakespeare consciously creates a dreamlike quality to the play to highlight this.
This theme is also conveyed through the adoption of a play-within-a-play structure, and this is with comic effect. The mechanicals neglect the magic of the theater in that they need to convince the audience that what is being acted out in front of them is real.
Order & Disorder
The theme of order and disorder is explored in AMND: Egeus' family order is disrupted as Hermia wishes to marry against his will; against the social order of the state that demands her father's will be upheld. The forest is distanced from their ordered city life and hierarchical society, there is a breakdown of order as relationships are fragmented.
But due to the comedic genre of the play, these relationships are rebuilt in the free atmosphere of the forest, before returning to a reformed, but remaining ordered society.
Natural order is also disrupted because of the quarrel between the fairy king and queen. It is only after their reconciliation that this can be put right. Without the restoration of natural order, the play's happy ending could not be completed.
The Moon
In case you didn't notice, there are LOTS of references to the moon throughout AMND, it is referred to three times within the first nine lines of the play! This serves many purposes:
- To create the atmosphere of night. Shakespeare's plays were typically performed in daylight, and so the sense of darkness had to come from his audience's imagination, due to there being no means of "dimming" the light
- To create a dreamlike atmosphere. Familiar things look different in the moonlight; quite literally in a different light.
- The moon is a reminder of the passage of time, and that things, like all phases, must change.
- The more educated of Shakespeare's audiences would have understood the mythological importance of the moon. The moon-goddesses Luna and Diana were associated with chastity and fertility, these qualities were united in marriage, which the play celebrates.
Sight
There are also many references to seeing, eyes, and sight. They serve a double purpose; the repetition reminds the audience of the difference between how things look and what they are (theme of appearance vs reality); and that love is blind and in the eye of the beholder.
Play within a Play
This structure is reflected through the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, which serves three important functions in the larger scale of the actual play.
1. The mechanicals' mistakes and misunderstandings introduce a strand of farce.
2. It allows Shakespeare to comment on the nature of contemporary theater, primarily within the mechanicals' wrong expectations that the audience won't be able to distinguish between fiction and reality.
3. Pyramus and Thisbe parodies AMND; they're lovers who, facing opposition from their parents, seek to elope, just like Hermia and Lysander. So even as the lovers watch the play and ridicule it, the audience knows that they have been just as absurd.
But this is not the only play within a play, there is a subtler one. Oberon is a playwright who seeks to "write" a comedy in which Helena gets her love, Lysander and Hermia stay together, Titania learns her lesson in wifely obedience, and all conflicts are reconciled through marriage and resolution. Like how the mechanicals' play is transformed from earnest drama to comical farce, so does Oberon's when Puck puts the love potion on the wrong Athenian man's eyes. While the mechanicals' farcical performance suggests the limits of the theater, Oberon's play, which rewrote the same lives of the mortals who mock the mechanicals, suggests that theater really has a magic that defies reality.
Men and Women
The relationship between men and women echoes in the mortal and supernatural worlds, both deal with attempts by male authority figures to control women. Theseus and Hippolyta's relationship is based on a man asserting power over a woman. Oberon uses the love potion to control his disobedient wife. Egeus seeks to control his daughter's marriage. Although the play ends happily, the love on display is one in which the women have accepted the role subservient to men. An Elizabethan society would have generally accepted that men are head of the household and the king is the head of society.
The play also suggests that love can take a nasty toll on same-sex friendships, Helena betrays Hermia for love even before they've reached the forest. Once they're in the forest, the men challenge each other to duels while the women almost come to blows with each other.
Loss of Individual Identity
Maurice Hunt: the blurring of the identities of fantasy of reality in the play make possible "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play." Shakespeare prepares the audiences' minds to accept the fantastic reality of the fairy world and its happenings, which also seems to be the axis around which the conflicts of the play occur.
Hunt suggests that it's the breaking down of individual identities that leads to central conflict. The brawl between Titania and Oberon is based on a lack of recognition for each other, and drives the rest of the drama and makes it dangerous for the lovers to come together amidst the disturbance of Nature caused by their dispute. The failure to distinct and identify leads Puck to mistake one set of lovers for the other, placing the love potion on Lysander rather than Demetrius.
Victor Kiernan: the Marxist scholar and historian writes that it is for the greater sake of love that this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters suffer accordingly. "It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to have dubious effects on its acolytes." Identities are not so much lost as they are blended together to create a haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and practical ties between characters as a means of coping within the strange world of the forest, even in relationships as diverse and unrealistic as the brief relationship between Titania and Bottom. "It was a tidal force of this social need that lent energy to relationships."
David Marshall: points that the loss of identity is played out in the description of the mechanicals and their assumption of other identities. "Two construct or put together. two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent. broken or sundered."
This loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinion on love and marriage. Furthermore, the mechanicals understand this theme as they take on roles in Pyramus and Thisbe.
"To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part." Each character, particularly among the lovers, has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater group or pairing. A desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what quietly moves the events of the play, the primary source of motivation and reflected in the mood and scenery.
Ambiguous Sexuality
Douglas E. Green: (In his essay "Preposterous Pleasures: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream) explores possible alternative sexuality that he finds within the text of the play, in juxtaposition to contemporary proscribed social mores of culture. His essay "does not seek to rewrite AMND as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations'...moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespeare comedy."
He does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represents a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "the discontents of civilisation", which while resolved in the ending do not resolve so neatly in life. "Sodomitical elements...homoeroticism...lesbianism...and even compulsory heterosexuality" in the story must be considered in the context of the "culture of early modern England" as a commentary on "aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order."
These ideas of ambiguous sexuality and gender conflict are also explored by Shirley Garner and William W. E. Sights, albeit all the characters would have been played by males.
Feminism
Male dominance is a thematic element of AMND. Lysander and Hermia escape to the woods for a night where they don't fall under the laws of Theseus and Egeus. Upon their arrival in Athens, the couples are married. Marriage is seen as a social achievement for women whereas men can go on and do great things and gain societal recognition.
Louis Montrose: (in his article "The Imperial Votaress") draws attention to male and female gender roles and norms present in comedy in connection to Elizabethan culture. "[on the triple wedding] The festive conclusion in AMND depends on the success of a process by which the feminine pride and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and wilful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands." The consummation of marriage is how power over a woman changes hands from father to husband.
A connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn; the love potion can be seen as symbolising menstrual blood as well as the sexual blood shed by virgins. While blood as a symbol of menstruation is representative of a woman's power, blood as a symbol of the first sexual encounter represents a man's power over a woman.
Leonard Tennenhouse: the problem in AMND is a problem of "authority gone archaic." The Athenian law requiring the daughter to die if she doesn't submit to her father's will is outdated. There is a patriarchal rule of Theseus in Athens and of Oberon in the carnivalistic fairy world. The disorder of the Green World completely opposes the City World of Athens. The events of the four lovers and Bottom's dream represent the chaos that contrasts with Theseus' political order, but he does not punish the lovers for their disobedience. By forgiving the lovers, Theseus makes a distinction between patriarchal law (Egeus) and that of the monarch (Theseus), creating two different voices of authority.
This reflects Elizabeth I, when monarchs were seen as having two bodies: the body natural and the body politic. Elizabeth I's succession itself represented the voice of the patriarch as well as the voice of a monarch: her father's will that stated the crown should pass on to her and that she was the daughter of a king. The challenge to patriarchal rule in AMND mirrors what was occuring in Elizabethan times.
And that is the themes and motives of A Midsummer Night's Dream finally covered! I'll be posting thematic quotes for each section at a later date, otherwise this post would have gone on forever. But for now I would suggest creating mind maps of the ideas explored in each theme, and add quotes to each idea when I get around to uploading them.
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