Midsummer Night's e-paper

Midsummer Night's E-paper

Go to critic Anne Barton Closing paragraph

    Although there are many critical approaches to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just as there are with any work, I feel the mythological approach is the criticism that fits the atmosphere of the play the best. Mythology seems to leap out at us with every turn of the page and every break into a new scene. We begin the play in a courtyard where there is an argument between Egeus and Hermia. The courtyard represents paradise, innocence, or unspoiled beauty, which is similar to what a garden represents in mythological criticism. In the courtyard we do not necessarily see paradise but we could look at the theme of innocence. Even though Hermia is “at war” with Egues and her father about who she should marry, we see an innocent and pure love between her and Lysander. Within all this anger we see a couple sharing an unconditional love for one another who want nothing more than to be together. We see Lysander propose the unthinkable to Hermia on page 10 ll 156-168. He suggests they run away to his aunt’s house where they will be able to be together since they cannot be together under “the sharp Athenian law.” Once the scene is set for their departure from Athens, we are taken to a new character, Puck. In this play Puck represents what mythological criticism calls the trickster. The trickster usually represents the opposite of what the wise old man would because of his closeness with the shadow archetype. There is however a positive side to the trickster in which he may serve as a healing function through his transformational influence. Puck does find it amusing to pull practical jokes on people but he is the one who has everyone fall in love with the right people at the end of the play so we can have a happy ending. We see Puck at the top of his tricks when he turns bottom into an ass so as to make a fool out of Titania when she falls in love with him. Once this is done Puck just sits back to watch the show. Of course he has also messed up the magic love potion he has put on Lysander instead of Demetrius. He has mistakenly placed the flower on the back of the eyes of Lysander so he will fall in love with Helena, instead of placing it on Demetrius’s eyes so he will fall in love with Helena. Even though Puck thinks this arrangement is better then the one Oberon has chosen he must fix the situation so the right boy is in love with the right girl. Puck’s distaste is expressed in act III, scene ii, with the line, “I go, I go; look how I go, / Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.” With this line we can feel Puck’s annoyance in having to fix what he thought was right.
    According to Jan Kott who is the author of an article titled The Bottom Translation, the ass is one of the main actors in processions, comic rituals, and holiday revels. By Puck putting an ass’s head on bottom’s, it was a theatrical repetition of mockeries and jokes of the Feast of Fools. In Bottom‘s metamorphosis and in his encounters with Titania, not only do high and low and poetry and farce meet, but so do two theatrical traditions: the masque and the court entertainment meet the carnival world turned upside-down. The other popular character in most discourses in cupid. The cupid in A Midsummer Nights Dream, who appears eight times, has a different name and a different language than most cupids on stage would. The cupid in this poem is “Anglicised” or translated, is Puck. This is represented in the play by Puck having to rub the love potion flower on the back of the young lover’s eyes. Instead of their being only one young couple to contend with, there is two.

Go to to of page
      Another popular critic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Anne Barton. The article I am using of hers is titled The Synthesizing Impulse of A Midsummer Nights Dream. Barton’s essay focuses on the characters of the play and the literary and historical traditions it links together. The play not only knits together a number of different historical times and places, literary traditions, character types, and modes of thought, but it manifests itself in the play’s unusual variety of meters and verse forms. A preoccupation with the idea of imagination and with some of its products-dreams, the illusion of love, and poetry, is the central to the comedy. The last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is concerned principally with the relationship between are and life, dreams and the waking world. We see this thought illustrated with the play that is presented in the last act. The actors are trying to show the “wellborn“, that the working class can also feel love for one another and have tragedy in their love tales. The only way they are able to actually tell them this is to act it out in a play. In the terms of the plot, this act is unnecessary. The plot of the lovers trying to get together and be happy with the right one is a wrapped up in act four. Shakespeare seemed to have developed this fifth act to take place beyond the normal, plot defined boundaries of the comedy.

Go to top of page
    The controversial question as to weather the play was supposed to all be a dream seems to draw my attention the most. We are not told it is a possibility the play was all a dream until Puck’s final speech. In his speech he says, “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have slumb’red here / While these visions did appear..../ So good night unto you all / Give me your hands, if we be friends, / and Robin shall restore amends.” Because of the one line, “So good night unto you all,“ I have a hard time believing Shakespeare really wanted us to believe this was all a dream. Most people dream at night, when they have been sleeping. When we wake up from a dream we are usually told “good morning” not good night. If this play was supposed to be a dream, the line should have been “so good morning unto you all.” By having this be the line the audience could walk out of the theater wondering if they really did just go to sleep and they should be feeling refreshed now because they just had a wonderful sleep with a wonderful dream.

Go to top of page

Home page Mid-summer nights paper OSHA Annotated bibliography's Term Project introduction
More info on A Midsummer Night's Dream

URL of this page: http://www.cocc.edu/wr316ca/tamic/epaper.htm