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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...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Most of the duping that goes on in the play is the result of doping, that is, putting love potions into characters' eyes so they fall in love with the first person they see. It is part of the zany...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In terms of the plot, the fairies prompt the chaotic love square that dominates the play. When the four Athenian youths come into the forest they become subject to the operations of Oberon and...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Through the ups and downs in the romantic relationship between Hermia and Lysander, William Shakespeare shows how important true love is. Hermia is not a dutiful daughter, as she defies her father...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
There are many elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream that fit into genres outside of comedy. While it is technically considered a comedy because it ends with a marriage, the play's fantastic...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In act 1, Duke Theseus directs Hermia to marry Demetrius. He has her father Egeus’s permission, but Hermia and Lysander are in love. The duke says she must marry the man of her father’s choosing,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Humans and fairies (immortals) are understood generally to run on separate tracks, but in the play, the two worlds collide with each other. First, we are told that the fighting between Titania and...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
One of Shakespeare's themes in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the lunacy of love. Love is blind, love is foolish, love is fickle (unreliable); in sum, love is a form of insanity. These versions of...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
On the surface it might look like Shakespeare is supporting the idea that submission to patriarchy is necessary to social harmony. Yes, Hipployta, who doesn't have much choice, has caved on the...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hippolyta is the audience member of the four who appears the least entertained by the play the mechanicals put on. From the start, when Theseus picks this group from the list of possibilities, she...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
There is only one scene in act 5 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it serves as the conclusion to the play. The conflicts have been resolved between the characters. We see the three...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Demetrius shows insensitivity to other people's needs, doggedness in pursuing his desires, and a tendency to flip-flop in love. As the play opens, Demetrius has prevailed upon Hermia's father to...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The instructions that Oberon gives to Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, are in act 2, scene 1, starting around line 225. Prior to these lines, Oberon has asked Puck, a rather naughty fairy, to...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
We first encounter the love potion in act II, scene I of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oberon tells Puck to fetch the purple flower with magical properties. If the flower's liquid is dropped on...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
This sounds like a fun, creative assignment! While creative assignments allow for you to be imaginative, we must also remember to keep our answers rooted in the text. That being said, let's...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
LYSANDER. The course of true love never did run smooth... (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.136) With this line, Shakespeare succinctly summarizes the course of true love for nearly all the lovers...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Although many of William Shakespeare’s plays are set in distant lands or ancient times, in many respects they are very much about the Elizabethan society in which Shakespeare lived and worked....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In the play, William Shakespeare carefully distinguishes between genuine love and infatuation. Real love will triumph in the end, while the indulgent, obsessive qualities of infatuation make it...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Nick Bottom serves as one of the most comical figures in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In many ways, he is a classic example of the comic fool. His actions and words are ridiculous, but he does not...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Please note: The post contains numerous questions. The eNotes Homework Help policy allows for one question per post. This answer primarily addresses the first question. In act IV of A Midsummer...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
We can offer guidance on how to proceed with your analysis, but eNotes does not permit its writers to do students' homework assignments for them. Titania, the queen of the fairies, would be an...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Pastoral literature idealizes life in nature, specifically the life of a shepherd out tending his sheep in the pastor. Pastoral literature typically speaks of love, death, and various social...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Lysander calls Demetrius inconstant—or unfaithful, to use a more modern word—because he quickly dumped Helena in favor of her friend, Hermia. Lysander's deeply unhappy about this, not just because...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Some critics argue, although it is hard to confirm, that we can understand the title of A Midsummer Night's Dream in context of the play's events if we know that the Elizabethans still only...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Okay, character traits: Theseus - Noble, formal of speech, passionate under his noble exterior, an intellectual, and basically kind Hippolyta - Also noble, however a virtual captive of Theseus from...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Allow me to start off by saying that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the best ensemble shows in Shakespeare’s canon. Questions about the most “important” character are a bit strange, since the...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
This "shrewd and knavish sprite" does indeed drive many of the incidents and outcomes of the plot of A Midsummer's Night Dream. In fact, he may even be considered the most important character in...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In storytelling, there are three kinds of irony: dramatic, verbal, and situational. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows more about a situation than the characters in the story do. Verbal...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In the broadest sense, William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy. It contains elements of a classic Shakespearean comedy, including lovers who must overcome problems to be...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, get into an almighty quarrel over a changeling boy from India that Titania has in her possession. Oberon wants the boy for himself, but...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, six skilled laborers in the city of Athens—the "rude mechanicals," as Puck calls them (3.2.10)—first appear in the play. The "rude...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Fairies in Elizabethan times were thought of to be bad spirits who played tricks on people and were responsibile for disease, illness and misfortune. We see this attitude mirrored in the character...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The first important consideration is the format of this assignment. A police report would focus on the evidence, summarizing the factual elements of this "case": descriptions, times of day, claims,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The literary devices used by Shakespeare throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream includes notable examples of witty, clever wordplay in the form of puns, malapropisms, and oxymorons. The "rude...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
A malapropism is the incorrect use of a word, often in an idiomatic expression, whereby the incorrect word sounds very similar to the intended, correct word. For example, in Shakespeare's Much Ado...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The three phrases here all involve malapropisms, or similar mistakes about the meanings of words, leading to pronouncements which are nonsensical or unintentionally near the mark. A pure...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Bottom's transformation helps to further portray Shakespeare's central theme that human beings are fools.The reason behind Puck's choice to transform Bottom's head into a donkey's head is to point...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Throughout the play, Shakespeare uses all three types of irony. Verbal irony occurs when words mean the opposite of what is intended. In the quote below, Bottom speaks with unintentional verbal...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The role of the mechanicals is to support two of Shakespeare's central themes in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The two themes are the foolishness of mankind and reality vs. illusion.We especially see...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Literary devices provide a freshness to literature that embellishes meaning and expression and enjoyment. 1. In the opening of the play A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus, the Duke of Athens,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In act 5, scene 1, Theseus makes a pompous speech in which he expresses skepticism at old legends and fairy tales, or "antique fables" and "fairy toys" as he calls them. He then goes on to lump...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Because of the multiple plot line nature of the play, it is difficult to pick out a "most" important scene. Every scene in each act is dedicated to a different plot line which all gets tied...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Duke Frederick exiles his niece Rosalind from his court. Rosalind's cousin Celia decides that they should go to the forest where Rosalind's father, Duke Senior, has...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck is a fairy character. He is introduced to the play in the first scene of act 2 and is described as a "shrewd and knavish sprite." From this initial description,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The world of Athens and the world of the fairies mirror each other as monarchies. Both Theseus and Oberon are wise, if patriarchal, rulers. Each has a strong consort (or soon-to-be consort)....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The answer to your question on how the characters of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, come to be engaged in William Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream may...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
According to Stephen Follows, A Midsummer Night's Dream has been adapted for film twenty times. In addition, it has been adapted into ballets, operas, and musicals. The play was adapted into a...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius due to a misunderstanding with the orders he receives from Oberon. In act 1, scene 2, Puck is sent to retrieve “Love in Idleness,” the purple flower which can...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 3, scene 2, Hermia runs away from Demetrius in fury, accusing him of having killed Lysander. Demetrius says that there is no point in his “following her in this...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Lysander and Hermia had been told by Theseus that they are forbidden to marry each other because Egeus, Hermia's father, has decided she must marry Demetrius. Hermia is in love with Lysander, but...
