Chapter 10 A Midsummer Night's Dream Answers
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WORKSHEET 10: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
QUESTIONS
1. The play has some important ramifications. To begin with, the events that take place in Acts II and III in woodland and summer moonlight give the play its name. As we can see, the world of magic and the world of the dreams are very important and they belong to a mixture of magic and reality that appears through the whole play. Since the events which happen in the moonlight are just a dream, just part of the magic world far from the real world, the play takes that dream to show that imagination is also shown in the story because as Shakespeare wanted to clarify, is that a world just with imagination is absurd, but a world without it, is insane.
As a second ramification, the play is …show more content…
named after two old-aged festivals of the summer season: The May Day and the Midsummer Eve, a time to madness in which everybody was supposed to dream.
2. The central plot motif is the wedding of Theseus, king of Athens and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazonas. The story begins with the wedding, and then it has different subplots which are differently connected inside the story and which lead to the famous play within the play. Therefore, the plot is structured as a big tree with little branches, all of them connected. The wedding is like a framework and the realistic issue of the story and the play starts and ends with it because it is reality, not just imagination. In this way, the structure is revealing as it is highlighting that the real issue is at the beginning and the end, and events happening in the middle of the story are just fantasy. In other words, all the magic and transformations are nothing when stability and harmony come back.
3. Theseus represents the law and the authority, real issues, and so does his world. As we can see, the forest represents freedom, the place where lovers can follow their instincts, fantasies, imagination. The forest is the place of the irrational, where faeries live and were savagery resides. For that reason, Athens is an antithesis of the forest. Athens is the real world, where the rules are followed, where the conventions exist for some reasons and where there is no place for fantasies.
Here, for instance, we are able to see how Athens looks like. It is a real city where real laws cannot be broken, where men have the power and the figure of the father is the only one able to take the final decisions.
4. Women are presented in the play as inferior beings having no rights to decide for themselves and linked to the will of men.
As an example, we have the story of Hermia, who is in love with Lysander. His father, however, decides that Hermia will not take Lysander as husband, but Demetrius. Hermia is just a possession or his father, who represents the law.
Furthermore, within the fairies world, we can see the plot of Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. Titania is the one haunted because her husband so decided and that proves, once again, the superiority of the men in the play.
5. The fairies have the role of the magic elements. They are the responsible to give the play a magic touch. The story of Oberon and Titania is presented as a variation of the main theme. The world of the fairies is far away from the world of mortals. As we have said before, Athens is the place for the law, for the sense and the reason. However, the wood, place of the fairies, is the place for the irrational. In the darkness of the night no one can see what the rest are doing, so it is the time when lovers unleash their passion and savagery appears. The whole scene is presented as a dream and the fairies contribute to that: they are the physical representation of the irrational and they are really important because they turn the intentions of the characters upside down. They are responsible for the confusion and the chaos and it contrasts a lot with the final stage of harmony and order. In that way, Shakespeare use of imagery is quite useful, as everything is represented with a big mysticism, which unleashes the idea of a dream and a fantasy.
Nonetheless, both places share some features. For instance, both worlds have a king who rules over the rest: Oberon and Theseus and both kingdoms are imperfect. If at some point we think the world of the fairies is perfect, we are wrong. The fairies commit mistakes; they err, just like the humans.
6. Shakespeare is using this dramatic irony a tool to increase the intensity of the dramatic situation. In this form of irony, the words and actions of the characters show the real situation and the spectators are fully aware of what is happening. In this case, viewers are even more aware of the characters themselves. For instance, viewers can see the fairies but they are invisible for the rest of the dramatis personae. One more example is the case of Oberon. Theoretically, he is supposed to be omniscient but he does not know about the effects of the mistakes of Puck. To round it, we can say that the purpose is giving the spectators more power, more knowledge than the characters in order to introduce them a little bit more in the play.
7. The final of the play represents a return to reasoning. We move from midnight to daylight, from the wood to the city, from Oberon’s land to Theseus kingdom.
The expectations about the wedding arise but the decision of marriage has a completely new meaning because they have already awakened from a dream and they are experiencing the back to the reality, to the rational.
In general terms, we can allow that a kind of balance is attained because we have experienced a half of imagination and a half of reality. Moreover, despite all the chaos and disorder, we have returned to the harmony.
We can say that the wedding is always present but there is a kind of break in acts II and III introducing that former disorder and the movement from the realm of Oberon to the realms of Theseus is a symbolic resurrection in which we go back to the beginning and we reach the harmony once and for all.
Moreover, one possible ramification would be a parody of Elizabethan drama and the whole life of theatre, as Shakespeare uses the grotesque at the end of the play.
8. Lionel Abel described the metatheatre as a reflecting comedy and tragedy, at the same time, where the audience can laugh at the protagonist while feeling empathetic simultaneously and that is what we find here.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe carry out the play within the play and its use is none other than creating a satirical parody in order to bring the conventions to the screen so everybody could criticize them. In other words, Shakespeare is using this resource to transform the audience into witnesses. We find a relation between acting and seeing and love and theatre, which is suggesting that both lovers and actors need to believe in their truth and their imagination.
We have what is called interplay: the theatre audience is watching the actors watching the movie and with this grotesque (the exaggerating massive death in the stage) comes the inversion of roles in which the actors can watch themselves when the play is over and there is an awareness that the entire drama has been a play.
9. Bottom is the character who unites both worlds. He is a really enthusiastic actor and he is never a spectator. On the other hand, Puck is the bridge between the events that take place and the audience and he is the one who foils Bottom and transforms him into a donkey. We can say that Bottom is a victim of the magic and Puck is the origin of it so there is a struggle between reality and magic.
We can say that they epitomize opposite roles as everyone present contrary features. Bottom is presented as a hero, because Titania has fallen in love with him, while Puck is just presented as a magical creature committing mistakes.
In conclusion, we can determine that both characters show the fight between actors, represented by Bottom, and audience, represented by …show more content…
Puck.
ESSAY
In this part of the work, we are going to focus on a specific feature of the play: the play within the play. By analyzing this particular feature, we will be able to summarize the main themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and understand in a better way the meaning of this Shakespearean drama.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe carry out the play within the play creating a satirical parody in order to bring the conventions to the screen so everybody could criticize them being witnesses of what is happening and, as far as this fact is concerned, it is showing the reality of the work.
The main themes of the play are the fights between dreams and reality, between magic and love and thanks to the play within the play, author's expectations are met and we have a visual representation of that struggle. There is also a relation between seeing and acting that increases this idea.
If we deepen, we will find that the parody comes in the shape of a flashback so the lovers become the audience and watch a parody of their own experiences. There is an inversion of roles, and this inversion is the representation of the audience vs. actors’ issue.
On the other hand, the mixture of comedy and tragedy that Shakespeare executes, lead to a transformation from pain to comic, from sorrow to cheerfulness, and this is once again showing the power of the imagination and the fantasy that is present in the
play.
Finally, the play within the play also summarizes the issue of love: there is a kind of meditation of love in which the play suggests that lovers and actors need to believe in the truth, so in general terms, we can determine that the play within the play presents all the themes that have been discussed during the whole play.
WORKSHEET 10: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
QUESTIONS
1. The play has some important ramifications. To begin with, the events that take place in Acts II and III in woodland and summer moonlight give the play its name. As we can see, the world of magic and the world of the dreams are very important and they belong to a mixture of magic and reality that appears through the whole play. Since the events which happen in the moonlight are just a dream, just part of the magic world far from the real world, the play takes that dream to show that imagination is also shown in the story because as Shakespeare wanted to clarify, is that a world just with imagination is absurd, but a world without it, is insane.
As a second ramification, the play is …show more content…
named after two old-aged festivals of the summer season: The May Day and the Midsummer Eve, a time to madness in which everybody was supposed to dream.
2. The central plot motif is the wedding of Theseus, king of Athens and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazonas. The story begins with the wedding, and then it has different subplots which are differently connected inside the story and which lead to the famous play within the play. Therefore, the plot is structured as a big tree with little branches, all of them connected. The wedding is like a framework and the realistic issue of the story and the play starts and ends with it because it is reality, not just imagination. In this way, the structure is revealing as it is highlighting that the real issue is at the beginning and the end, and events happening in the middle of the story are just fantasy. In other words, all the magic and transformations are nothing when stability and harmony come back.
3. Theseus represents the law and the authority, real issues, and so does his world. As we can see, the forest represents freedom, the place where lovers can follow their instincts, fantasies, imagination. The forest is the place of the irrational, where faeries live and were savagery resides. For that reason, Athens is an antithesis of the forest. Athens is the real world, where the rules are followed, where the conventions exist for some reasons and where there is no place for fantasies.
Here, for instance, we are able to see how Athens looks like. It is a real city where real laws cannot be broken, where men have the power and the figure of the father is the only one able to take the final decisions.
4. Women are presented in the play as inferior beings having no rights to decide for themselves and linked to the will of men.
As an example, we have the story of Hermia, who is in love with Lysander. His father, however, decides that Hermia will not take Lysander as husband, but Demetrius. Hermia is just a possession or his father, who represents the law.
Furthermore, within the fairies world, we can see the plot of Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. Titania is the one haunted because her husband so decided and that proves, once again, the superiority of the men in the play.
5. The fairies have the role of the magic elements. They are the responsible to give the play a magic touch. The story of Oberon and Titania is presented as a variation of the main theme. The world of the fairies is far away from the world of mortals. As we have said before, Athens is the place for the law, for the sense and the reason. However, the wood, place of the fairies, is the place for the irrational. In the darkness of the night no one can see what the rest are doing, so it is the time when lovers unleash their passion and savagery appears. The whole scene is presented as a dream and the fairies contribute to that: they are the physical representation of the irrational and they are really important because they turn the intentions of the characters upside down. They are responsible for the confusion and the chaos and it contrasts a lot with the final stage of harmony and order. In that way, Shakespeare use of imagery is quite useful, as everything is represented with a big mysticism, which unleashes the idea of a dream and a fantasy.
Nonetheless, both places share some features. For instance, both worlds have a king who rules over the rest: Oberon and Theseus and both kingdoms are imperfect. If at some point we think the world of the fairies is perfect, we are wrong. The fairies commit mistakes; they err, just like the humans.
6. Shakespeare is using this dramatic irony a tool to increase the intensity of the dramatic situation. In this form of irony, the words and actions of the characters show the real situation and the spectators are fully aware of what is happening. In this case, viewers are even more aware of the characters themselves. For instance, viewers can see the fairies but they are invisible for the rest of the dramatis personae. One more example is the case of Oberon. Theoretically, he is supposed to be omniscient but he does not know about the effects of the mistakes of Puck. To round it, we can say that the purpose is giving the spectators more power, more knowledge than the characters in order to introduce them a little bit more in the play.
7. The final of the play represents a return to reasoning. We move from midnight to daylight, from the wood to the city, from Oberon’s land to Theseus kingdom.
The expectations about the wedding arise but the decision of marriage has a completely new meaning because they have already awakened from a dream and they are experiencing the back to the reality, to the rational.
In general terms, we can allow that a kind of balance is attained because we have experienced a half of imagination and a half of reality. Moreover, despite all the chaos and disorder, we have returned to the harmony.
We can say that the wedding is always present but there is a kind of break in acts II and III introducing that former disorder and the movement from the realm of Oberon to the realms of Theseus is a symbolic resurrection in which we go back to the beginning and we reach the harmony once and for all.
Moreover, one possible ramification would be a parody of Elizabethan drama and the whole life of theatre, as Shakespeare uses the grotesque at the end of the play.
8. Lionel Abel described the metatheatre as a reflecting comedy and tragedy, at the same time, where the audience can laugh at the protagonist while feeling empathetic simultaneously and that is what we find here.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe carry out the play within the play and its use is none other than creating a satirical parody in order to bring the conventions to the screen so everybody could criticize them. In other words, Shakespeare is using this resource to transform the audience into witnesses. We find a relation between acting and seeing and love and theatre, which is suggesting that both lovers and actors need to believe in their truth and their imagination.
We have what is called interplay: the theatre audience is watching the actors watching the movie and with this grotesque (the exaggerating massive death in the stage) comes the inversion of roles in which the actors can watch themselves when the play is over and there is an awareness that the entire drama has been a play.
9. Bottom is the character who unites both worlds. He is a really enthusiastic actor and he is never a spectator. On the other hand, Puck is the bridge between the events that take place and the audience and he is the one who foils Bottom and transforms him into a donkey. We can say that Bottom is a victim of the magic and Puck is the origin of it so there is a struggle between reality and magic.
We can say that they epitomize opposite roles as everyone present contrary features. Bottom is presented as a hero, because Titania has fallen in love with him, while Puck is just presented as a magical creature committing mistakes.
In conclusion, we can determine that both characters show the fight between actors, represented by Bottom, and audience, represented by …show more content…
Puck.
ESSAY
In this part of the work, we are going to focus on a specific feature of the play: the play within the play. By analyzing this particular feature, we will be able to summarize the main themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and understand in a better way the meaning of this Shakespearean drama.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe carry out the play within the play creating a satirical parody in order to bring the conventions to the screen so everybody could criticize them being witnesses of what is happening and, as far as this fact is concerned, it is showing the reality of the work.
The main themes of the play are the fights between dreams and reality, between magic and love and thanks to the play within the play, author's expectations are met and we have a visual representation of that struggle. There is also a relation between seeing and acting that increases this idea.
If we deepen, we will find that the parody comes in the shape of a flashback so the lovers become the audience and watch a parody of their own experiences. There is an inversion of roles, and this inversion is the representation of the audience vs. actors’ issue.
On the other hand, the mixture of comedy and tragedy that Shakespeare executes, lead to a transformation from pain to comic, from sorrow to cheerfulness, and this is once again showing the power of the imagination and the fantasy that is present in the
play.
Finally, the play within the play also summarizes the issue of love: there is a kind of meditation of love in which the play suggests that lovers and actors need to believe in the truth, so in general terms, we can determine that the play within the play presents all the themes that have been discussed during the whole play.