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Midsummer Night's Dream
her "school-days' friendship" with Hermia, with its repeated images of "union in partition",
• and Puck's description of night terrors at the end of the play ("Now the hungry lion roars/And the wolf behowls the moon") contrasted with the security of those in Theseus's house ("...not a mouse/Shall disturb this hallow'd house").
A sense of the fairies' magical power and of exoticism is established in references to remote places ("the farthest steppe of India" or "the spiced Indian air") or Puck's ability to circle the earth in "forty minutes" (much less on stage). The wood, too, is exotic and ambiguous: it is beautiful but dangerous. The description of these things contrasts with the more homely and familiar elements: the native English flowers and herbs, and the folk traditions reflected in Puck's account of his mischief.
Often narration and description are mixed. This is true of the example cited above of Titania's account of the "votaress" of her order, as well as of her account of the disruption in the natural world caused by her quarrel with Oberon. Oberon, in his account of the "fair vestal, throned by the west" also mixes narration with descriptive detail, as does Puck when he explains to his master how "Titania wak'd and straightway loved an ass". The frequent references to the wood and the moon instruct us to keep thinking of what we cannot directly see, while a line such as "weeds of Athens he doth wear" explains Puck's mistaking Lysander for Demetrius. What the playwright conveys here is not sartorial information but the nature of Puck's error. Lysander could be wearing any style of clothing and we will accept what Puck says.
This play is a comedy. Shakespeare first informs the audience of the (very serious) problems of the young lovers, and of the fairy king and queen, counterpointed by the less serious (to us) problems of the mechanicals in presenting their "play". By bringing the different groups of characters together in the wood, the author is able to show how the characters become more confused, before Puck, at the end of Act 3 separates the young lovers, the antidote to the love-in-idleness juice is given to Lysander, and in 4.1 Titania is also "cured" before the lovers are found by Theseus, and Bottom wakes with a hazy recollection of his "dream" (which may be no less articulate than the lovers' attempts to recall what has happened in the wood).
Most of Act 5 is superfluous to the main plot, but indispensable as comic comment on the potential for tragedy in the love of passionate young couples. Act 5 is not just an epilogue, however: the action of the three principal fairies in blessing the newly-weds, and the children to be conceived is a necessary conclusion to the misunderstandings which have gone before. Here, as in Theseus' kindly advice to Hermia in 1.1 ("Know of your youth, examine well your blood..."), in Titania's long exposition of the results of her quarrel with Oberon (2.1) and [next page]