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Essay Comparing A Midsummer Night's Dream And The Princess Bride

Decent Essays

The play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare and the film The Princess Bride directed and co-produced by Rob Reiner share unlikely literary parallels. As Catherine Belsy states in an essay “A Midsummer Night’s dream…proposes that love is a dream, or perhaps a vision; that is absurd, irrational a delusion, or, perhaps, on the other hand, a transfiguration; that it is doomed to be momentary, and that it constitutes at the same time the proper foundation for a lifelong marriage” (A Modern Prospective 182). The Princess Bride the movie is an encapsulation of the main themes of true love and the fantastical elements that surround it. The Princess Bride the story the young boy’s grandfather tells him is simply a storybook, like a fairytale …show more content…

She has such blind trust in her lover that nothing will come between them. In the end they ride off into the sunset on white horses which add to the fantastical elements because it is an example of over-the-top romanticism.
Shakespeare’s message helps audiences understand the film on a deeper level because the archetypes found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are universal and identifiable in every century with written histories. Such archetypes are the journey, the valley, forests and the color red. Westley goes on his own adventures in search of money to bring home to Buttercup, then his journey changes so he has to fight to be with her again as she is engaged to the prince.
Helena represents the scorned woman referencing the color red similar to when Buttercup wears a red dress when she runs off and gets captured by transients. Red represents the (typically female) character’s burdening the other characters with her mere existence. Also, Hermia and Lysander plan to run into the forest to escape the law, similar to Westley and Buttercup’s descent into the Fire Swamp to escape Prince Humperdinck’s

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