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A Midsummer Night's Dream: the range of comedic devices Shakespeare has used to achieve humour in the play
Today’s audience may not see the humour that appealed to the Elizabethan audience Shakespeare was writing for. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t there and that doesn’t mean the play cannot be, or isn’t funny. The devices of humour Shakespeare did use include mistaken identity, slapstick comedy, and the sense of the ridiculous in human behaviour.
The mistaken identity and misplaced affection among the lovers is a major source of humour throughout the play as gradually Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander lose their dignity and become figures of ridicule. The constant shifting and changing of the relationships within the four of them is confusing and it is this confusion that naturally arises out of their tangled relationships that supports the idea that in the face of love’s power individual identity and personality count for little. Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste; wings and no eyes. Act 1, Scene 1. Shakespeare also shows us that in the face of love’s difficulties men regularly resort to aggression. Thou seest these lovers seek place to fight. Act 3, Scene 2. It is this that makes us laugh because it is on the same level of seriousness as Titania’s infatuation with Bottom.
Titania and Bottom’s short love affair is just one of the aspects directly linked to the humour, another is what we have learnt of Puck’s sense of fun. Puck is proud of his abilities and by and large the victims of his jokes are not permanently damaged as they tend to have little to no recollection of their dreamlike experiences. I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man ot say what dream it was. Act 4, Scene 1. Titania, for example, takes the joke involving her (How came these things to pass? Methought I was enamored of an ass. Act 4, Scene 1.) in good humour and appears more concerned about her reconciliation with Oberon. A visual joke also pops up here. Titania exclaims What angel awakes me from my flower bed? in relation to Nick Bottom who’s head becomes that of an ass, a clever anthropomorphism.
The mechanicals, though Athenian according to the play, are actually directly transposed from English life. Their names are all amusingly appropriate to their trades; Peter Quince: a carpenter; Francis Flute: a Bellows-mender; Tom Snout: a tinker; Robin Starveling: a carpenter; Sung: a joiner and of course Nick Bottom who is a weaver. The audience of the time would have been able to relate to these characters as many of them were carpenters, tinkers or weavers. Their humour, like Titania’s and the four young lovers, arises from their ignorance of the absurdities to which they sink. Some true love-love turned, and not a false turned true. Act 3, Scene 2 Our amusement also stems from the contrast between Quince and Bottom which ends up working like a comedic duo with a funny man (Bottom) and a straight man (Quince). Quince also has certain dramatic pretensions and the exasperation he [next page]