Analysis Of A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare
Author of thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets, William Shakespeare has been known to us as one of the most influential writers of English literature. Written in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare gave birth to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is still considered to have been his most strangest and delightful creation yet. The play reveals to us the magnitude of his imagination and originality. Contrary to many of his other plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t seem to have been stemmed from any particular source, though some believe it was written for and performed at a private aristocratic wedding with Queen Elizabeth I in attendance. Some critics have even speculated that it was Shakespeare’s light hearted and silly version of Romeo and Juliet. However, no evidence has ever been found to prove either theory.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream title page of the first quarto was published in 1600, stating that the play ‘hath been sundry times publicly acted’ by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare’s creation sends you on an imaginative voyage from a world of social conflict into a whimsical realm, ending in the return of reality that has itself been partly altered by the experience of the journey. Each of the four main plots, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, includes one or more pairs of lovers whose happiness has been aggravated by misunderstanding or parental disapproval. Shakespeare draws from various sources in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, such as integrating English country fairy lore and the Greeks mythological gods and goddesses.
The entire play is constructed around groups of opposites and doubles, leaving two opposing staging traditions to debate over the dramatic qualities of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, being either l...

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...erminology and keeping with seventeenth-century dramatic conventions, the play itself had been slightly modernized. Eliminating some of the popular scenes from the original play, Purcell focuses mainly on Oberon's wife, Titania. The Fairy-Queen shows Purcell’s complete mastery of the powerful English style of Baroque counterpoint, as well as displaying his absorption of Italian influences.
The English tradition of semi-opera, to which The Fairy-Queen belongs, demanded that most of the music within the play be introduced through the agency of supernatural beings. Written in the form most popular with the audiences of its day, The Fairy-Queen transcended its time with substantial accompanying music, and an extended masque in between each of its five acts. Purcell's style is often so astonishingly direct that society can easily overlook its complexities and subtlety.