"The course of true love never did run smooth. " This, one of the most famous lines from Shakespeare's romantic comedy, A Mid Summer Night's Dream, no truer words have been spoken as Shakespeare leads the audience through a story of fantasies and misunderstandings. The story follows these lines and they act almost as a foreshadow. The lovers are forced to endure many twists, unseen turns and wild scenarios, all successfully integrated into the story with the playwrights use of magic and enchantment. This is the story of two young Athenian lovers, Theseus and Hippolyta. The main characters live in a moonlit forest, complete with fairies.
[...] The name Lysander is taken from ancient Greece, where the character was a warlord. Similarly, Hippolyta was the Queen of the Amazons and Theseus was the Duke of Athens. The concept of love struggling to escape is also very mythical. In both mediums, the characters are confused by love, love acts as a fog and when under its spell, the characters act without reason, completely fueled by emotion.[2] As many characters in the tales of Greek mythology loose themselves because of outside influence, the same is true for A Midsummer Night's Dream. [...]
[...] As Theseus ponders, lunatic, the lover and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact the madman, the lover, all as frantic.[4]” As this story very clearly shows, logic is lost when a person is in love and reason cannot be reasoned. The reader is forced to decide what is real, what is a tool of storytelling and how are these characters affected by what they perceive to be real but could just as easily be figments? Thus, the use of magic is an important tool for the story's progression, but it is just as valuable on an analytical level. [...]
[...] This can be taken, on a grander scale, to note that when in love, one looses his sense of individuality, becoming part of something greater than the self. The final act reinforces how deeply emotion and enchantment were intertwined in the minds of the lovelorn characters. In this case, love was not transparent. There were layers of understanding, as feelings were impacted and portrayed through magical elements. Existentially, Puck ponders in the final scene, we shadows have offended,/Think but this, and all is mended,/That you have but slumbered here/While these visions did appear.[3]” His words accurately pull together the imaginative qualities present throughout the play. [...]
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