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[Course Title] A Midsummer's Night's Dream Analysis of its Comedy A Midsummer Nights Dream was written in a highly creative period in Shakespeare's career, when he was moving away from the shallow plots that characterized his earlier drama and discovering his more mature style. The opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream leads the audience to expect an ordinary comedy plot. On one level it is a traditional comedy, destined for courtly audiences and their modern successors; but, underneath, mimetic desire holds sway, responsible not only for the delirium and frenzy of the midsummer night but also for all the mythical themes which reign supreme at the upper level. This is a highly intellectual, highly speculative comedy, like Love's Labour's Lost not the refashioning of a previously-treated story or play but an original invention.
Through his basic comic structure of initial privation or perversity, comic device both deceptive and remedial, knots of errors and final recognitions, Shakespeare has achieved not only a benign resolution to the dialectic of folly and wisdom, but a complex and witty exploration of the infirmities and frailties and deficiencies and possibilities of the imaginative faculty itself. "Festive" is a word that describes not only the atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream but also its structure. In comedy, too, inversions of authority are risked only to be corrected in the end. Worldly authority is first taken to task for its excesses; then it is reestablished under a still higher, natural authority that guarantees its proper use. A Midsummer Night's Dream is concerned principally, and even somewhat self-consciously, with the relationship between art and life, dreams and the waking world.
In terms of plot, this fifth act is superfluous. Almost all the business of the comedy has been concluded at the end of act 4: the error of Titania's vision put right and she herself reconciled with Oberon, Hermit paired off happily with Lysander and Helena with Demetrius. Theseus has not only overruled the objections of old Eyes, but insisted upon associating these marriages with his own: "Away with us to Athens. Three and three / We " ll hold a feast in great solemnity" (4. 1. 184 - 85). This couplet has the authentic ring of a comedy conclusion. Only one expectation generated by the action remains unfulfilled: the presentation of the Pyramus and This play before the Duke and his bride.
Out of this single remaining bit of material, Shakespeare constructs a fifth act which seems, in effect, to take place beyond the normal, plot-defined boundaries of comedy. Shakespeare is making fun of us, of course. He seems intent on proving that you can say almost anything in a play as long as you provide the audience with the habitual props of comedy, the conventional expressions of "true love, " even in minimal amounts, adding, of course, a ferocious father figure or two to satisfy the eternal Freudian in us. The point is not to take sides in the debate about whether the play can be represented but to recognize how seriously the play addresses and is addressed by the specter of moonshine. Let us return to the terms and the scene of Hazlitt's double simile: "Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. " Readers and spectators have agreed that this moonshine can be seen as a figure for all that is shining, magical, and dream-like in A Midsummer Night's Dream, even if they have disagreed about how it reflects upon Shakespeare's enterprise of picturing on the stage a night-world of visions and imaginary characters. The mechanical's have been seen as placing both too much and too little faith in theatrical illusions (hence their fears about the audience's belief in lions and walls).
Their comedy lies partly in their liberalization of what should remain figured and figurative. But we need to see that this liberalization becomes a figure for the dilemma of the play, a dilemma that critics try to figure out in terms of figurative language. To embody fancy and to personate moonshine are like trying to paint a simile, to map out or spell out what cannot be pictured as such; and a figure cannot be figured in this sense without becoming literalized or lost. This play retains the three parts of a normal comedy: a first part in which an absurd, unpleasant or irrational situation is set up; a second part of confused identity and personal complications; a third part in which the plot gives a shake and twist and everything comes right in the end.
In non farcical realms laughable ignorance or inadequacy tends to be only an episode, as in the acting of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ignorance is hardly a satisfying comic theme in itself; it needs to be conjoined with other human qualities that enlarge the human scope and there is the incongruity of unmatched emotions, as in the medley of un reciprocated loves in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Comedy accepts life and human nature: sometimes with a light heart, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, sometimes sadly as in some other plays, but always with the good sense that comes from clear vision and understanding.
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