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A Midsummer Night's Dream
This quote is important for a couple of reasons. First, it is an example of a heroic (or rhyming) couplet--two lines of poetry that have end rhyme. As for the meaning, the quote is important...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
What this quote from A Midsummer's Night Dream means is that when a person falls in love, they will see the beloved as beautiful whether or not that person is beautiful to the rest of the world. If...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Puck changes Bottom's head into that of an "ass" or a donkey head. Puck does this as a prank because he enjoys playing tricks on mortals and fairies alike. The transformation is...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
This quote is from Act 3, sc. 1 and it is spoken by Bottom to Titania. Puck, seeing that Bottom was acting like a fool, turns Bottom's head into the head of a donkey. Titania has fallen...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In act Two scene one, Oberon and Titania are fighting about Titania’s refusing to relinquish the changeling (a child secretly exchanged for another in infancy). She brought the child from India....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
I guess you can paraphrase Puck's final soliloquy that ends the play as follows: If the actors and events that you have seen have upset you, I recommend that you imagine it was all a dream and that...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Act III Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the craftsmen enter the woods in order to rehearse their play. After Bottom warns Quince that he will need two separate prologues, one for the men...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
eNotes editors can only answer one question at a time; others must be posted separately. In Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus comments that love and imagination are similar. He...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Theseus doesn't believe them, and thinks that their imaginations have quite a lot to do with it. Theseus contradicts Hippolyta's opinion that the lovers' stories are "strange", by telling her More...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Titania tells Oberon that his petty jealousy of the Indian boy and their awful fight has basically turned the world upside down, wreaking havoc.She tells Oberon that he is responsible for making...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Puck speaks the final words at the end of the play in an attempt to make amends with the audience and apologize for the fairies' behavior during the performance. He asks that, "If we shadows...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
We see a couple of different puns spoken by the mechanicals. One pun is seen in Act 3, Scene 1 after Puck has changed Bottom's head into the head of a donkey. Bottom speaks one pun in the phrase...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Helena tells Demetrius that Hermia and Lysander have run away because she hopes that he will change his mind and fall for her. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a simple story, really. Hermia and...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The issues of gender in William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, are centered around issues of gender roles and power relationships. They can be investigated in terms of the...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
One of Hermia's personality traits is that she is very self-assertive; she is strong and very independently minded, lacking any fear of expressing her opinion. We see her demonstrate this trait in...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Personification is a literary device that gives human qualities or characteristics to inanimate objects, ideas, animals, or abstractions. It's a popular form of figurative language, and so it...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Act 3, sc. 1, Puck (Robin Goodfellow) decides, when he watches the tradesmen and Bottom practicing their play, that they are foolish and Bottom is especially a fool. Puck calls them "...hempen...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Act 3, Scene 2, Helena accuses Hermia of conspiring with both Lysander and Demetrius in mocking her. In other words, Helena does not believe that either Lysander or Demetrius are being sincere...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon sees how much Helena loves Demetrius. Oberon instructs Puck (his fairy henchman) to seek out a flower in a place they once visited. While Puck...
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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
One reason the forest is an important setting in A Midsummer Night's Dream is that the forest creates a dark, wild, mysterious atmosphere in which the magical elements of Shakespeare's plot can be...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Theseus calls for his master of ceremonies to inform him what entertainments are available for them as a part of wedding feast activities. Philostrate, the master of ceremonies, first offers a...
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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 his comedies, Shakespeare examines another theme, love, and all the various ways that it manifests in the human experience. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, he uses another thematic proposition,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hermia and Helena are described as opposites of one another. They are both beautiful, but in different ways: Helena is seen as tall, thin, and fair of skin, and Hermia is seen as voluptuous and has...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
King Oberon and Queen Titania enter the play in Act II, Scene 1. When we first see them, they are quarreling. Robin Goodfellow (aka Puck) tells us why. He says that they are fighting because...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Egeus bring his daughter, Hermia, to Theseus because she refuses to marry the man that her father wants her to marry, Demetrius. Instead, Hermia has fallen in love with Lysander and wants to marry...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
I believe that the climax of the play comes in Act III, Scene 2, when the four lovers are at the height of their confusion. Both Demetrius and Lysander are pursuing Helena, and both Helena and...
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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
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
Lysander and Hermia represent a couple who is physically devoted to each other but is also not the strongest of couples. We see their weaknesses as a couple when they encounter obstacles, such as...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The forest symbolizes first and most broadly an alternative to the rational and ordered life of the city. It is a place where dreams, passions, and magic rule things, and where we lose our...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The most obvious similarity between the two in A Midsummer's Night Dream is that they are both fighting for the love of Hermia. They are both also citizens of Athens who have some degree of wealth...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Helena is angry with Hermia because Helena loves Demetrius, but Demetrius, in the beginning of the play, loves Helena. In Act 1, sc. 1, Helena says that Hermia is beautiful and has a sweet voice -...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Puck puts the juice of the flower into Lysander's eyes on accident. Puck is a servant of Oberon, the king of the fairies. Oberon is in a fight with his wife Titania over who gets to keep a certain...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Some would say that A Midsummer Night's Dream doesn't have a "true" climax, as every problem that all the characters have been dealing with throughout the entire play are resolved in Act IV by...
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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
Helena is very obviously a desperate woman. Having once given herself to Demetrius, she cannot get over the fact that he no longer loves her and does whatever she can to rectify the situation. She...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
I'm not sure plays - particularly plays as complicated as Shakespeare's - ever have a "main moral". The play is about all sorts of things: dreams, sex, acting, fairies and spirits, magic,...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Lysander’s plan is to run away with Hermia to his aunt’s house, where they can be married beyond the reach of Theseus and Egeus. Hermia wants to marry Lysander, and he wants to marry her. Hermia’s...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, Titania is the queen of the fairies, married to King Oberon. Titania helps set the main action of the play in motion. She has a changeling (a...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Props are any small objects that are used by actors in a play to help them tell the story, which exclude the set design. If we were to use as few props as possible with minimal set design, there...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Irony can be found in a couple of different places in Act 4 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, especially situational and dramatic irony.In situational irony, the reader or audience is surprised by the...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
According to the play, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Hippolyta and Theseus met in battle. In Act 1, sc. 1, Theseus says to Hipployta, "...I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thee doing thee...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
One word that is repeated excessively in act 5 is “strange.” This emphasizes the bizarre and silly nature of the events of the play. It is one of the first words spoken in this scene. Hippolyta...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The five characters who wake up in this Act are the four Athenian lovers and Bottom, who are all quite amazed at how they find themselves in the forest and have immense difficulty to explain the...
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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
To me, dreams are important in the play, but I do not think they actually affect the outcome. Instead, I would say that the dreams emphasize the meaning of play. The whole play is meant to be...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Ah, a great line. This selection means that lovers are like crazy people. Both of them have "seething brains" (a lot of weirdness in their minds, so much so that it seems like they are bubbling)....
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
In the hilarious play within the play presented in Act 5 of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, confusions abound, including the following: Many examples of the use of wrong word...
