Author Question: How do the four sets of lovers, in their respective plotlines, contribute tothe plays romantic ... (Read 46 times)

bcretired · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

How do the four sets of lovers, in their respective plotlines, contribute tothe plays romantic comedy?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

How does the play use sleep and dream as a central theme?

What will be an ideal response?

nital · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

Theseus and Hippolyta: Theseus appears to have won Hippolytas love despite having defeated her in battle. Pay attention to their scenes together, especially as he is called upon to mediate in the conflict between Egeus and Hermia (I.i.1126), the morning hunt scene (IV.i.94177), and their important exchange in V.i. on fantasy and real experience, reason, and imagination. (Hippolytas something of great constancy at V.i.26 comes close to expressing our sense of the ultimate coherence and plausibility of what Theseus would dismiss as antique fables or fairy toys. Watching the play, we have actually seen how the airy nothing of the fairy world has been given a local habitation and a name in the midsummer nights confusions and unraveling.) A less obvious theme of the play is the growing sympathy between the two former enemies. They set a moral example of proper marital love for all the other couples.

The Young Lovers: The romantic nature of the young aristocrats is both central and obviousthey are the new generation who are about to enter their procreative period. Their health and happiness suggests the future fate of the city. The younger aristocratic lovers, in their patterned encounters of pursuit and avoidance, also illustrate well one of the most famous principles of comedy, what the French philosopher Henri Bergson called the mechanical encrusted on the living, when the human being (capable beyond all creatures of adapting flexibly to changing circumstances) behaves more like a thing or machine in rote reflex. The automatism of the inconstant, aberrant men in their sudden about-faces is a rich source of comedy: What fools these mortals be.

The Artisans (including both Bottoms translation and the play-within-a-play): Bottoms romance with Titania provides a parodic version of the aristocratic romances. It also offers subtle commentary on the social order of the play. Bottoms sudden elevation in social status and his democratic union with the fairy queen leaves him totally unfazed; he regards it as his natural right. The love tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe burlesques the tragic potential of the rendezvous of star-crossed lovers like Hermia and Lysander.

Oberon and Titania: These elemental nature gods have upset the balance of nature through their marital quarrels. Their reconciliation dance sets the stage for the final acts royal wedding in Athens and the mechanicals wedding performance.

Answer to Question 2

In sleep our fantasy perceives the wider truths of human experienceboth dark and transcendent denied to it when we are awake. However, the nights accidents befalling the lovers are not the fierce vexation of a dream (IV.i.60). The fierce passions unleashed by the love juice are endured and safely subdued. The murderous jealousy that erupts into dangerous swordplay is disarmed by Oberon and Puck. The rivalry that threatened the double cherry on one stem of Hermia and Helenas girlhood friendship is banished with the dawn that sees them sleeping side by side in the woods. Titania is disabused of her folly with no apparent injury to her dignity. Bottom is restored to his friends trailing clouds of glory (a most rare vision IV.i.191203) with no lasting resentment of class differences that would bar him from the bed of a mortal queen. He takes the gift of transitory joy as his due. Indeed, he addresses Theseus as an equal when he breaks character to correct the Dukes apparent confusion over the role of Wall (V.i.178180). Of the lovers seeming dream and fruitless vision, the lasting fruit will be unions whose date till death shall never end (III.2.371373). Midsummer folly exorcises and dispels the potential dangers of excessive passion.