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A Critical Analysis of A Midsummer Nights Dream
to A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The final act also serves to challenge the audience's notions about reality and imagination. Seeing the pathetic acting of the artisans, Theseus remarks that, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact" (5.1.7-8). By this he means that it is imagination which makes people crazy, but it is also the imagination which inspires people. Without imagination it would be much more difficult to enjoy a play, as evidenced by the farce of Pyramus and Thisbe, about which Hippolyta comments, "This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard." Theseus helps her overcome this problem by saying, "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them" (5.1.207,208). Thus, the imagination can solve all the problems.
Perhaps the most telling line of the last act is when Theseus asks, "How shall we find the concord of this discord?" (5.1.60). That is exactly what has happened in the play itself, namely there has been a resolution to the discord of the lovers in the initial scenes, which by the end has turned into concord.
The play is considered a comedy. The most famous character is the spirit, Puck. It is believed to have been written around the same time as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and shares many characteristics with that tragedy: a plot centering on rebellious young love, florid imagery in language that often feels more separate from the dramatic action than it does in Shakespeare's more mature works. Pyramus and Thisbe, the comical tragedy performed by the mechanicals at the end of Midsummer, bears an even closer resemblance to the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
The plot has several strands, and the relationship of Oberon, king of the fairies, and his estranged wife, Titania, is mirrored by that of Duke Theseus and his bride, Hippolyta, who are about to be married - to the extent that the parts of Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta are sometimes played by the same actors. Two young men, Lysander and Demetrius, are both in love with the same woman, Hermia; Hermia prefers Lysander, but her friend, Helena, is in love with Demetrius. Into the middle of this complex situation stumbles Bottom, a weaver and the leader of a group of common working men who intend to perform a play as part of the Duke's wedding celebrations. Oberon recruits Puck to help him regain Titania's devotion, but his simultaneous attempt to help the young lovers goes wrong, resulting in confusion. As usual with Shakespeare, the comedy has a bitter-sweet note, when Hermia's two lovers both, temporarily, turn against her.