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Can you give an example of a paradox and alliteration in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream?
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In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a paradox is found in Bottom's line, "You were best to call them generally, man by man," which contradicts itself by suggesting to call people both generally and individually. As for alliteration, Bottom's speech includes excessive alliteration in lines like "The raging rocks / And shivering shocks," which highlights bad poetry. Oberon also uses alliteration in "Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight" with repeated "d" sounds.
A paradox refers to when a phrase or phenomenon seems to contradict. Shakespeare makes use of several paradoxical statements for humorous effect in his comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. The bumbling, self-important character Bottom, who believes he is a genius actor, speaks several of them over the course of the play, seemingly without realizing that he has contradicted himself. You can find an example of this in his very first line in act 1, scene 2, when he tells his director, Peter Quince:
You were best to call them generally, man by man,
according to the scrip.
This advice is paradoxical because telling Quince to call them generally, or all at once, is the exact opposite of telling him to call them man by man, or one at a time. It seems likely that Bottom has mixed up his words—one of his comic tendencies—and meant to say "individually."
The...
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play that Bottom and his company of rude mechanicals are working on is a paradox in itself, described as "a most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death" when it should be impossible for it to be both at once.
Alliteration is a literary device in which multiple words in succession begin with the same consonant sound. There are many examples of this throughout the play, but here are a few you could work with.
One is again from the first scene of the rude mechanicals:
The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates;
And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish Fates.
This is Bottom reciting from the play they are planning to put on. The excessive alliteration found in each individual line is meant to signal to the audience that this is bad poetry that Shakespeare is actually making fun of.
A few slightly more serious examples can be found in act 2, scene 1, in the fairy king Oberon's speech instructing Puck on where to find Titania. The lines "Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight" and "Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in" both contain alliteration, with d sounds and w sounds respectively.