Midsummer Nights Dream Setting
Explore the significance of setting in a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The implementation of ‘the forests wild’ could ultimately be a depiction of the story of Genesis; reflecting knowledge in the direction of the sore lovers who so desperately seek to gain each other’s infinite company despite the prohibitions of society and reality. In Genesis 2.5 when, ‘The LORD God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it up and keep it’ is incredibly reminiscent of the careful displacement of the youth within the novel from their common Athenian surroundings where ‘the laws of Athens yields you up’ into the ‘woods’ where magic is ubiquitous. Having entered the arms of mother nature much like Adam and Eve within the Bible, The four Athenian lovers tempt societal norms and disobey the commands of those wise with age by themselves meddling with the ‘forbidden fruits’ of life. This factor is reflected within the transition of Hermia’s disposition whereby ‘her obedience’ turned ‘to stubborn harshness’ in light of her attitude towards her patriarchal father, Igeus. The woods being the land of fantasy, allows for imagination and endless desires to run riot in every form of expression hence subverting the typically repressive nature of society and consequently incurring great outrage and punishment. Such characteristics of the woods in this way helps to symbolize the breakdown of societal ideology as well as the deconstruction of hierarchy as the typically repressed protagonists are able to explore and develop their own identities independently from their repressors – those with higher authority in accordance to status. Further, by manipulating the setting to infer a Christian allegory, Shakespeare has been effective in dramatizing the severity of ignorance towards religious morality and reinforces the boundaries and jurisdictions that religion imposed.
Shakespeare further manipulates the setting within the novel in order to amplify aspects of folly. The isolation
The implementation of ‘the forests wild’ could ultimately be a depiction of the story of Genesis; reflecting knowledge in the direction of the sore lovers who so desperately seek to gain each other’s infinite company despite the prohibitions of society and reality. In Genesis 2.5 when, ‘The LORD God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it up and keep it’ is incredibly reminiscent of the careful displacement of the youth within the novel from their common Athenian surroundings where ‘the laws of Athens yields you up’ into the ‘woods’ where magic is ubiquitous. Having entered the arms of mother nature much like Adam and Eve within the Bible, The four Athenian lovers tempt societal norms and disobey the commands of those wise with age by themselves meddling with the ‘forbidden fruits’ of life. This factor is reflected within the transition of Hermia’s disposition whereby ‘her obedience’ turned ‘to stubborn harshness’ in light of her attitude towards her patriarchal father, Igeus. The woods being the land of fantasy, allows for imagination and endless desires to run riot in every form of expression hence subverting the typically repressive nature of society and consequently incurring great outrage and punishment. Such characteristics of the woods in this way helps to symbolize the breakdown of societal ideology as well as the deconstruction of hierarchy as the typically repressed protagonists are able to explore and develop their own identities independently from their repressors – those with higher authority in accordance to status. Further, by manipulating the setting to infer a Christian allegory, Shakespeare has been effective in dramatizing the severity of ignorance towards religious morality and reinforces the boundaries and jurisdictions that religion imposed.
Shakespeare further manipulates the setting within the novel in order to amplify aspects of folly. The isolation