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Midsummer Night's Dream
to return to Athens in time for the interlude. The other three couples are happily united in matrimony. Only the interlude, the play within a play, has an element of tragic love, but even this ends in tragic mirth and lamentable comedy, which causes merriment and laughter rather than heartbreak and tears.
In this atmosphere of overpowering love, there is not much room for the development of minor themes. The sub-plot of the craftsmen deals somewhat with the "fall" of Bottom. Though his pride is temporarily punished, his story does not have a serious
moralistic tone. Bottom is really just a light-hearted diversion, and his short fall from grace is passed off, even by him, as a strange dream. This thought leads to the other minor theme, that life is sometimes like a dream and dreams are sometimes very life-like. Throughout the play, entitled as a dream, the characters wander in and out of both real and fantasy worlds.
The minor theme is that the course of true love never runs smoothly. This is seen when Hermia is forbidden to marry Lysander and when Demetrius deserts Helena.
Language and theatre. In the play we hear dialogue used
• for narration of "past" events,
• for description,
• and for comment.
But more importantly, it carries the action of the drama.
By narrating events, Shakespeare is able to shorten the time directly represented on stage while providing the audience with necessary background information. Good examples of this would be Puck's account to the fairy of his master's quarrel with Titania, or Titania's own account of how she came by the changeling child. Where a tale may be already known to most of the audience, the narration can be very brief, as in Theseus's "I wooed thee with my sword/And won thy love, doing thee injury". More immediate events not directly shown may also be narrated, as when Puck tells the audience he has gone through the forest "But Athenian found I none", or when Oberon tells Puck how he has met Titania, "Seeking sweet favours for this hateful fool" (Bottom) and that she has given up the child. Description, often with an element of narration, is essential to this play.
Description
Imagination is an important theme, and the playwright boldly initiates a debate about imagination in the latter part of the play. "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them", to which comes the retort that in watching Pyramus and Thisbe the "audience" must compensate for the defective imaginations of the "performers". In the Dream, as elsewhere, Shakespeare depends upon, but successfully excites, the audience's imagination. Things that cannot possibly be shown on stage are described vividly to us. These include:
• Oberon's celebrated "bank whereon the wild thyme blows"
• Lysander's and Hermia's description to Helena, in 1.1, of the moonlight and the wood;
• Helena's description in 3.2 of her [next page]