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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The comically tragic play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream is presented as a condensed form of the important themes and ideas of Shakespeare's play itself. Further, the bumbling...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The main difference between the 1935 and 1999 love scenes involving Bottom and Titania is that the latter involved demonstrations of overt sexuality. In the 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare's play,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The rising action in a dramatic narrative is the combination of events that occur after the exposition and ultimately lead to the play's climax. The rising action intensifies the plot and lends...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Act 1 is basically called the exposition because it establishes the setting for the play and provides background information about the principal characters. The exposition also gives us a...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is about love, dreams, and perceptions of reality (and, by extension, perceptions of the fantastical). These ideas manifest themselves in a variety of ways:...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare portrays love as mad, magical, and difficult. Theseus and Hippolyta are engaged, Oberon and Titania are married, and Lysander and Hermia wish to elope. Meanwhile, Demetrius pursues...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In the first act of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia gives a brief description of the forest in order to tell Helena where she and Lysander will meet on the night they elope. She...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
I personally believe Hermia is right to disobey her father's commands, as doing so constitutes a rebellion against oppressive patriarchal laws. In the world of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
A critical appreciation is performed by the reader or audience after reading some form of literature or watching a play. The reader evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the experienced form...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
This play teaches us you can’t force someone to love someone else. This is a general issue in the play. Egeus tries to choose a spouse for his daughter against her wishes. In another situation,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
One could certainly say that Bottom is a fool in A Midsummer Night's Dream, especially since he seems relatively oblivious to the reality of his situation throughout the play. For example, Bottom...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
There are many different types of love represented in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and certainly more than three. However, in this answer, I'll focus on the types of love that I find to...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Part of the fun of writing a literary analysis is choosing the approach you wish to take. You could choose a reader response analysis, discussing your impressions of the work, a feminist critique,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much has been made of the power/gender dynamics in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and for good reason: the play largely relies on the interlocking relationships between couples, many of...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Pyramus and Thisbe are characters in the play the craftsmen are performing. The characters of Pyrmaus and Thisbe (or Thisby), are characters from the Roman poem Metamorphoses by Ovid. Their story...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon orders Puck to give Titania a love potion that will make her fall in love with the first thing she sees. Unfortunately for Titania, the first...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The rude mechanicals' play, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe, is based on a Babylonian myth depicting separated lovers. In Shakespeare's version, Pyramus and...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Act 4, Scene 1 in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the audience is treated to the hilarious spectacle of Bottom (still with his donkey's head) living large with Titania and her attendant...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hippolyta is the queen of the Amazons, and she is about to marry Theseus as the play opens. Though the Amazons were a race of warrior women, Hippolyta seems boringly tame. In the first scene of the...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Duke Theseus most significantly influences the lives of the four Athenian lovers, Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius.In the opening scene, Duke...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In this section, Helena laments that Demetrius's love has turned from her to Hermia and then discusses love's attributes in general. Shakespeare has her use personification: in an extended...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Helena says that love can trick you into seeing beauty where it does not exist. Helena is upset about the circumstances surrounding her relationship with Demetrius, and the fact that Hermia’s...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Oberon is the king of the fairies, and Titania is the queen of the fairies. They are very aware of the mortal world around them, because they know that Theseus and Hippolyta are getting married....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream satirizes pastoral literature. Pastoral literature, very popular in Shakespeare's day, presents rustic, urban life as ideal and city life as corrupt. Yet,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare uses magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream to allow characters to act upon revenge as well as to allow characters to create unity. In both cases, magic is used to reveal truth about human...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In a Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon is the King of the fairies, who is able to disguise himself as a human being. In some ways he bridges the world of humans and the fairy world. Oberon's...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The play's title refers to the dreamlike qualities of romance. It also refers to the yearning to escape the mundane or troublesome qualities of marriage that are portrayed in Titania and Oberon's...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Oberon, king of the fairies, who at the beginning of the play was estranged from Titania, queen of the fairies, was described as jealous by Puck. Puck met with a fairy in a section of the forest...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The term hero is often used synonymously with the term protagonist. A protagonist is the main character in the story who undergoes change by resolving the conflict the protagonist faces. While...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Egeus is Hermia’s father. He wants her to marry Demetrius, but she is more interested in Lysander. Egeus brings Hermia before Theseus, who rules that she has to do what her father wants, under...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The play within a play, presented by the workmen in celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding, pokes fun at dramatic traditions in a few ways. Shakespeare appears to be milking the most comedy...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The answer to this question is not straightforward, because every staging of the play is different. Some productions are quite spare and minimalistic, using only a bare stage and a small collection...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck changes Bottom's head into that of a donkey's in Act 3, scene 1. When Bottom approaches his friends in the forest, they think that the monster has...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Acts 2 and 3 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream are generally known to contain the most elements of drama since these are the acts in which the climax and resolution occur. In addition,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Tone is a somewhat subjective topic when referring to plays. Certainly tone can be found in language, but theatrical texts also derive a great deal of tone from the specific elements of production....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Helena is jealous of Hermia because she thinks Demetrius likes her, and Helena likes him. Helena is jealous of Hermia because she is interested in Demetrius, the man that Helena’s father Egeus...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Act 1 Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in the house of Peter Quince, one of the six "mechanicals". He is the author and director of the play-within-a-play. His name suggests that he...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Below, you'll find some examples of a monologue, a soliloquy, and an aside in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Monologue: At its simplest, a monologue is an individual speech delivered by...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In act 3, scene 2, of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Demetrius speaks the line in question after having been affected by Puck's magic flower and upon waking and seeing Helena in a new...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, while Puck uses his own magic on Bottom to give him the head of a donkey, Puck actually only uses the love juice of the flower on one person throughout...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
According to Shakespeare's stage directions, Act 1, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in Quince's house in Athens. If we were to set our production of the play in the city of Athens in...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Peter Quince is one of the "rude mechanicals" in A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the craftspeople who seek to put on an impressive, tragic play for Theseus' marriage to Hippolyta. Quince is the...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
"Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (III.ii.114-115). Puck says that mortals are fools, but the fairies demonstrate many of the same flaws as humans. Both...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Act I, Scene II of A Midsummer's Night Dream opens at Quince's house. Peter Quince is an amateur actor who is seeking to organize a group of other actors for a play. Quince holds the script for...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Peter Quince and the other characters who put on the play Pyramus and Thisbe for the duke are all local citizens of Athens. They are average craftsmen from the town who are akin to a local...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Peter Quince is the writer and director of the Athenian men's production of "Pyramus and Thisbe." He is logical and intelligent, but he must also be patient because he has to deal with Nick...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Events become zany in Act III, the high point of the play's comedy, as love potions enter in and mix-ups occur. A little magic on the part of Puck puts an ass's head on Bottom, and a love potion...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Egeus is Hermia's father and they have what might today be termed intergenerational conflict. Egeus believes he has the paternal right to tell Hermia who to marry and wants her to marry Demetrius....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Puck is usually shown as a boy, young man, or teenager, with no beard. He has no wings, and is clothed in materials that look like they came from the forest. Puck is portrayed as a boy because...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Puck calling mortals fools is ironic because he is the one causing them to act foolish and because the fairies Titania and Oberon also act very foolish. There are a couple of reasons that Pucks’s...