Movies - A Midsummer Night's Dream

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	Movies - A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare written sometime in the mid-1590s. It depicts the adventures of four young lovers and a group of amateur actors in a moonlit forest, and their interactions with the fairies who inhabit it. The play is considered to be a journey into fantasy and the surreal world. Today, the play is one of Shakespeare's most popular and is performed across the world.

Date and sources

It is not known exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was written or first performed, but it is assumed to be between 1594 and 1596. Some have theorized that the play might have been written for an aristocratic wedding; numerous such weddings took place in 1596, while others suggest it was written for the Queen to celebrate the feast day of St. John, but no concrete evidence exists to link the play with either of them. In either case, it would also have been performed at The Theatre, and, later, The Globe in London.

There is no known source for the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream, although individual elements can be traced to classical literature; for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the transformation of Bottom into an ass is descended from Apuleius' The Golden Ass; Shakespeare would have studied both texts at school. In addition, Shakespeare would have been working on Romeo and Juliet at about the same time that he wrote the Dream, and it is possible to see Pyramus and Thisbe as a comic reworking of the tragic play. A further, frequently ignored source, is The Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Character list

Puck or Robin Goodfellow
Oberon, King of Fairies
Titania, Queen of Fairies
Lysander, in love with Hermia
Demetrius, in love with Hermia
Hermia, in love with Lysander
Helena, in love with Demetrius
Egeus, father of Hermia
Theseus, Duke of Athens
Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and betrothed of Theseus
Nick Bottom
, weaver
Peter Quince
, carpenter
Francis Flute
, bellows-mender
Robin Starveling, tailor
Tom Snout
, tinker
Snug
, a joiner
Philostrate, Master of the Revels
Peaseblossom, fairy
Cobweb, fairy
Moth (sometimes rendered as 'Mote'), fairy
Mustardseed, fairy

Synopsis

The play features three interlocking plots, all of which are connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazonian Hippolyta. At the beginning, provoked by Hermia's refusal to marry Demetrius, Egeus, her father, invokes an ancient Athenian law whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death or lifelong chastity as a nun of Diana. Therefore, Hermia and Lysander, her lover, decide to elope to a nearby city. Hermia tells of the plan to her best friend Helena, who, having been recently rejected by Demetrius, decides to win back Demetrius's favor by revealing the plan to him. This results in a situation where Demetrius, followed doggedly by Helena, goes after Hermia, who, in turn, chases Lysander, from whom she became separated. The situation develops a comical twist typical in Shakespeare's plays when Hermia's two lovers temporarily turn against her in favor of Helena because of Puck's misapplied magical enchantment. The four pursue each other into the woods around the city all night, losing themselves in the dark and in the maze of their romantic entanglements.

Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his estranged wife, Titania, arrive in the same woods to attend the upcoming nuptial of the Duke and Hippolyta. Titania refuses to give her Indian page-boy to Oberon for use as his 'henchman' as the child's mother was one of Titania's followers who died in childbirth, and Oberon seeks to punish her for her disobedience. Oberon recruits the mischievous Puck (also called Hobgoblin and Robin Goodfellow) to help him. Puck is instructed to cause Demetrius to fall in love with Helena (Oberon overheard their argument), while Oberon is to get Titania to fall in love so as to calm her down so that she will give him the page-boy, by applying to 'the Athenian man' and the fairy queen a magical juice from a flower called "love-in-idleness" that makes the victim fall in love with the first living thing they see when they wake up (it is with this enchantment that Puck causes much mishap with the Athenian lovers).

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