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A Midsummer Night's Dream Essay

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In William Shakespeare’s famous play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta plan to marry in four days. Lysander and Hermia run away to elope so she can avoid her father’s pick for her, Demetrius. He follows them and is followed by Helena. Oberon, the fairy king, squeezes a magical potion onto his wife Titania’s eyes so that he may have the baby currently in her care for his court, and she will fall in love with the first living creature she sees. However, Puck causes some extra mischief by mixing up the lovers, wreaking havoc on a local theater troupe, and giving Bottom, one of the actors, a donkey’s head. All of these magical happenings are explained away as if they were only dreams. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the dream theme acts as a dramatic convention to explain the fantastical in such cases as Bottom’s physical transformation, the lovers’ emotional transformations, and even the audience’s perception of the events as referenced in Puck’s epilogue. It is a simple fact of life that magic does not exist. Even the mortal characters in the play did not seem to believe in magic. For example, when Bottom’s head is transformed to a donkey’s in Act III, he is not sure what to think. He did not even …show more content…

Of course, the audience recognizes that the play is fiction and that magic is not really being used. It is just an accepted part of theater. Even so, Puck tells the audience in lines 406-409 of Act V, Scene i, “If we shadows have offended,/Think but this, and all is mended:/That you have but slumbered here/While these visions did appear. . . .” He also goes on to say that the events that have transpired mean no more than a dream does, and that the audience should not be angry with the characters or actors if they treat the play as such. With the added convention, Shakespeare was likely trying to avoid backlash from the audience. Thus, the dream theme is used as a bit of extra

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