A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Criticism

  • Overviews

    Wolfgang Clemens, in the first excerpt, provides a general introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream, identifying and analyzing the play's historical background, language, themes, dramatic structure, characterization, and literary significance. In the second excerpt, Jack Vaughn characterizes the comedy as an eminently poetic work, discussing Shakespeare's language, with particular attention to eye imagery, such as the blindness of love.

  • Gender and Sex Roles

    Describing A Midsummer Night's Dream as similar to a fertility rite, Shirley Garner, in the first excerpt, discusses the sexual, psychological, and social implications of Shakespeare's comedy. More than a simple celebration of erotic love, the play, Garner maintains, reflects certain attitudes characteristic of male-dominated societies. In the second selection, Jan Kott asserts that A Midsummer Night's Dream is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays.

  • Between Fantasy and Reality

    In the first excerpt, George A. Bonnard's principal thesis is that the worlds, fantastic and mundane, represented in the play, exist apart from each other, never meeting at any given point. In the second excerpt, Allardyce Nicoll asserts that the play clearly reflects the poet's serious preoccupation with dreams and reality. In the final excerpt, David Richman discusses Shakespeare's effective introduction of wonder into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Language, the critic explains, is instrumental in creating wonderment, and the characters from the supernatural world identify themselves by their peculiar rhetorical devices and speech mannerisms.

  • Language and Poetry

    The immense expanses created by Shakespeare's extraordinary poetic imagination, Mark Van Doren asserts in this selection, are vast enough to house the fairy realms and the world of ordinary reality, including all the peculiar manifestations of either place.

  • Mythological Background

    In the first excerpt, Northrop Frye traces the literary sources of Shakespeare's play, with particular emphasis on Classical—Greek and Roman—and early Elizabethan comedy. In the second excerpt, Frances Yates discusses the origins of Shakespeare's fairy world, arguing that the "Elizabethan fairies are not ... manifestations of folk or popular tradition."

  • Bottom

    J.B. Priestly, in this excerpt, identifies Bottom as "the most substantial figure" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, describing him as earthy, quick-witted, and emphasizing his ability to laugh at the inhabitants of the fairy world.

  • The Lovers

    In this excerpt, Frederick Boas considers the various groups of lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, arguing that Shakespeare's characterization of the couples is more whimsical than serious.