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A Midsummer Night's Dream: the range of comedic devices Shakespeare has used to achieve humour in the play
he has with his leading man is also amusing. An I may hide my face, let me play Thisbe too. Let me play the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. Act 2, Scene 2. Their enthusiasm for the play they are working on is humorous as we know in real life they would have little chance of being chosen by the king and his guests. The fact that they are selected and, more so, appreciated, points to a darker side to the comedy Shakespeare has included: we are laughing, mostly, at their ignorance and incompetence. The play performed by the tradesmen, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe, the title of which is a contradiction; you can’t have a tragic comedy, is ludicrously inappropriate for a wedding reception, of course what makes it such a huge success is the actors comic attempts to produce a serious drama. Textually, technically and technologically it’s a spectacular failure, the mechanicals unwittingly produce a masterpiece of burlesque.
A feature of the play is the extent in which the characters are sometimes audience figures, the newlyweds watch the Mechanicals’ play in Act 5, Oberon watches Demetrius’ discourtesy to Helena in Act 2, Puck watches the mechanicals’ rehearse in Act 3 and Oberon and Puck witness Titania’s dotage on Bottom in Act 4. By organizing the play so that there is the opportunity for an internal audience Shakespeare is able to give voice, through the characters, to a sense of the ridiculous in human behaviour. We, as the audience, end up not only laughing at what we se, but also what the characters say about what they have seen. A play there is...hard-handed men that work in Athens here, and we will here it. Act 5, Scene 1. In this form the comic possibilities are greatly increased. The play within a play is essentially funny all in itself, but, when placed in context, with an internal audience, it becomes much funnier. Much of the mood of concord and harmony that pervades the final act of the play derives from the fact that the two audiences, the real one and the dramatic one, are drawn closer because of their shared experience of watching Pyramus and Thisbe.
The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is not what happens in the bulk of the play, it is the ending. In both forms of theatre the characters are ridiculed beyond belief, a tragedy ends when all the characters are dead, a comedy ends on the complete opposite end of the scale with everybody getting married and living happily ever after.
Therefore it is shown that Shakespeare used cases of mistaken identity, slapstick comedy and ridicule to achieve humour in the play A Midsummer Might’s Dream.