A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

By William Shakespeare

A midsummer night’s dream is a comedy where lovers are confused, women and men try to impose their views on each other and magic is the thread that leads from a troubled start to a happy ending (through moments of absolute chaos).

You can find many websites to help you analyse this play. We suggest you these two:

In Sparknotes you’ll find:

An animation video with a fantastic summary of the play:

A translation into contemporary everyday English (NO FEAR SHAKESPEARE - MSND) A complete studio guide including summaries and analysis. For instance, these are

the “Themes, Symbols, & Motifs” included:

Themes Symbols Motifs

Love’s Difficulty Magic

Dreams

Contrast

Theseus and Hippolyta

The Love Potion

The Craftsmen’s Play

In Schmoop you’ll find:

Videos and analysis materials in a very funny and colloquial style. But mind you!, sometimes Schmoop looses some depth (mainly in the videos) because of that.

Check the video:

But the analysis is really deep! Check the items’ list:

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory – Setting – Genre – Tone - Writing Style - What’s up with the title? - What's up with the ending? - Plot Analysis - Booker's Seven Basic Plots

Analysis - Three Act Plot Analysis – Trivia - Steaminess Rating - Allusions

For instance, these are the items in Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory:

Love Juice Roses Midsummer's Eve and May Day Pyramus and Thisbe The Moon Dramatic Irony

A MISDUMMER’S NIGHT DREAM

Philosophical topics

Waking or dreaming: Reality as a problem (Descartes)

How can we tell if what we see is real? What we call ‘reality’ might be false images that someone puts in our eyes, as it happens when we are dreaming but we think our dream is real.

Augustine of Hippo – Experienced lucidity in dreams – 415 Shakespeare – ‘A midsummer night’s dream’ – ca 1600 Calderon – ‘Life is a dream’ (1636/7) Descartes – Discourse on the Method (1637)

The Apollonian and Dionysian (Nietzsche)

F. Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) explained the Greek tragedy (and our own lives) as the mixture of two principles: the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

Search the web for information on them and summon it up in a chart. Relate them to other topics (Conscience and the unconscious and Light and Darkness).

Freedom vs. Destiny (Stoics)

Is freedom real or false? Are our lives directed by spirits or gods, while we think we are acting freely?

Are we, as Epictetus (the Stoic philosopher) said, ‘actors in a play’ – we can play our part nicely, but we cannot choose it?

The play within the play

This happens often in Shakespeare’s plays – Search the web for titles. It’s an important theme in itself, because theatre is Shakespeare’s world and he uses

his knowledge to create hilarious situations. But it is also important as an allegory of the topic Freedom vs. Destiny.

Male and Female

There are several oppositions between male and female characters in AMND: Hippolyta – Theseus Hermia – Aegeus Titania – Oberon

1. Find information on Theseus’s myth: How did he meet Hippolyta? Was she willing to marry

him? Ganymede: the quarrel between Oberon and Titania is similar to the

quarrel between Zeus and Hera. 2. Explain the conflicts the way they are shown in AMND. How are they finally

solved? 3. What image is given of woman and man in each case?

Conscience and the unconscious (Freud)

S. Freud developed a therapy for neurosis called psychoanalysis around 1900. He said that people’s actions are often difficult to understand because they are caused by a part of our mind that we are unaware of, which he called the unconscious.

The unconscious is usually hidden but sometimes comes through our conscience to cause strange behaviours such as when we make a meaningful mistake or forget something.

Dreams are produced by the unconscious. In them we revise parts of our life disguised as symbols and we enjoy pleasures that are forbidden in conscious life. We also may solve some emotional problems that reason can’t handle when we are awake.

Explain AMND as an allegory of the way emotional problems are solved in dreams (300 years before psychoanalysis!).

Light and Darkness

Light is a symbol of reason since Plato’s ‘allegory of the cave’ (ca. 380 BC). In AMND, daylight is the moment of the clear mind, reason, law, and darkness is the moment of confusion, passion, chaos.

But, contrary to what Plato said, the characters cannot solve their problems through reason: they need dark powers, night and dreams to deal with them.

Go through the chapters of AMND and explain what happens in daylight and what happens in darkness, whether the conflicts get better or worse and when are they finally solved.