A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Wild and its Relation To Civilized Law
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream there are many interesting topics that could be explained. One of the best of these is the impression of “the wild” also known as the wilderness. The wilderness has many key parts in order for the play to work correctly. Some of these include how the law of the castle correlates with the uncleanly, and truthful ways of “the wild”. The wilderness as it is depicted in the book is an unclean and unlawful place. This makes it a superb location to escape the grasping hold of the castle and all of it’s cleanliness and picturesque beauty.
The play begins with some important decisions needed to be made. Hermia, daughter of Egeus wants to marry
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As the story unrolls Helena, and Demetrius love each other, while Hermia and Lysander feel the same way about one another. Theseus realizes that all is well and against Egeus’s will he letts the lovers remain with each other. Here are his own words, “Egeus, i will overbear your will; for in this temple, by and by, with us these couples shall eternally be knit” (4.1.174-176). This part of the play brings them out of “the wild” and back to the castle where all is excellent. The story shows a considerable difference in the transition from wilderness to the court yard. While in the wilderness everything seemed to go wrong. They always seemed lost, confused, and taken away from the truth. The truth being the law of the land. Then once they enter the courtyard everything changes and nothing but truth and love come out of the four lovers.
Overall A Midsummer Night's dream shows us the interesting topic of “the wild”. The wilderness has a lot of key parts in the play which show us how it correlates with the clean and lawful court yard. Even though the woods was a great escape for the couples, they could not make it last, and by going back to the truth everything was satisfactory
Both the play's humans and fairies try to shape love into forms that are advantageous not to the lovers, but to the leaders. Egeus insists that Hermia submit to Demetrius or die; Hippolyta must ...
Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream juxtaposes the patriarchal world of justice, rule, and order, contextualized as Theseus’ Athens, with the youthful, rebellious universe of Oberon’s woods. In the last lines of the play, Robin Goodfellow (Puck), one of several maliciously-inclined forest fairies, attempts to reconcile these opposites by suggesting to a potentially offended audience that the “immoral” events having occurred in these woods would simply have taken part in a dream. In contrast to the other characters of the play who either emblematize each side of the binary (fairies as the “woods” and older humans as “Athens”), or assert both extremes at different periods in time (young Athenians), Puck embodies the liminal space
Shakespeare presents the fairies as powerful creatures, controlling the wild and enchanted forest. Vivid nature imagery within the forest establishes these fairies’ control of the natural world and the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are far removed from their archetypal vision of naivety and innocence. In Act 2 Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’...
Four days before the wedding of the noble Duke, Theseus, and the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, Demetrius won the favor of Egeus to marry his daughter, Hermia, despite her profound love for another man, known as Lysander. Additionally, Hermia’s close friend, Helena, was desperate to gain Demetrius’s attention romantically. Hoping to escape her father’s enforced marriage,
In act five, scene one, Theseus gives a speech to Hippolyta regarding the foolish dreams Helena, Lysander, Demetrius, and Hermia just had. Before this, Helena, Lysander, Demetrius and Hermia all wake up cloudy and confused about being anointed by the flower and falling in love with the wrong person. Lysander and Hermia recount their plan of escaping and the forest as well as Helena who chose to follow them into the forest. Egeus refuses to allow Lysander’s love for Hermia, but Theseus rules against Egeus allowing Lysander and Hermia and Demetrius and Helena to marry. Before the wedding Theseus talks to Hippolyta about the confusing stories of these dazed lovers. Theseus believes these people have overactive imaginations and dismisses what they say as foolish.
As the play opens, the reader is told the setting and basis of the play and this is that the Duke, Theseus, is going to marry the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, in five days time. Also Shakespeare also tells of most the characters in the play to set up who will be in the play. In the beginning of the play Hermia is brought to the Duke by her father Egeus to be judged, but this brings upon a problem considering that Hermia is already in love with Lysander despite her fathers disapproval. Egeus wants Hermia to marry Demetrius and if she does not she will die unless she wants her whole life to be lived by one of a virgin. From this Hermia decide to run away to the woods outside of Athens where they can be happy.
Throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, it becomes clear that there are two main settings that will host the major events of the play. As the play progresses, the drastic differences between Athens and the forest become clearer and clearer: Athens represents an orderly, hierarchical society where the law is strictly enforced and unchanged, while the forest represents a dream-like fantasy land that distorts the reality once known by those who enter. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare creates these two environments with characteristics that immensely contrast each other; the differences play a key role in producing the interactions that are
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of William Shakespeare’s few comedies that really gets the comedic interest of is readers. A fairytale story of four teenagers, who found themselves in a magical forest, two of whom plan to run off and start a new life together, the other two on a search for love. At the same time a fairy king and queen are battling each other. A mischievous fairy named Puck is charged with turning the queens lover against her using a magic potion, and this leads to a series of events for our young lovers, as well as anyone else stuck in the forest.
The exposition is Theseus and Hippolyta are planning for their wedding. They are both of noble blood and very rich, and all is swell. The rising action is that Hermia is in love with Lysander but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. Egeus wants Theseus to force Hermia to marry Demetrius. He doesn't agree with Egeus's logic but tells Hermia to follow her father's orders anyway. Even though she faces possible death by not marrying Demetrius, she and Lysander run away to elope. Meanwhile Helena, who is in love with Demetrius tells him about Hermia and Lysander running away. Demetrius follows them and Helena follows after Demetrius. Demetrius does not like Helena and is mad when she tags along. The fairy Queen Titania and the fairy King Oberon
A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays magic through many places in the text. Magic is a key component to the plot of the story. Magic can make a problem disappear, or it can intensify the problem. There are many reasons magic is powerful, but one of the main ones is because not everyone understands it. Magic in one way or another affects everyone in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the perspective with which each character views magic is different. The power of magic is something that is hard to understand, even those who use magic often cannot fully understand magic because in many ways it is irrational and inexplicable.
he exposition of the story is when Hermia and Lysander are in love and want to be married, but Hermia's father, Egeus, wants her to marry Demetrius. Egeus goes to Theseus to force Hermia and Demetrius marriage, and Theseus warns Hermia to follow his orders. Hermia and Lysander run away to be married, despite Theseus’s warning. They plan to meet in the fairy woods. Helena, Hermia’s best friends, is in love with Demetrius, and tells Demetrius about Hermia and Lysander plan to runaway and get married. Demetrius follows them, while Helena follows Demetrius to try to get his love back. Oberon the king, and Titania the queen of the fairies are in a quarrel over a boy. The rising action is when, Oberon orders Puck, another fairy, to help in get revenge on Titanias by putting a love potion in Titanias' eyes that’ll cause her to fall in love with the first thing she sees after
Hermia has been promised to Demetrius by her father; however she is unwilling to marry him as she is in love with Lysander. We are introduced to this theme when they visit Thesus, the figure of authority in the play, who makes it clear that women are not to have their own identity, but instead are to be ‘a form in wax’ (I.i.49), meaning that women are to exist without existing. Women were not allowed to gain an education, or have jobs of importance. This shows that Thesus (Duke of Athens) doesn’t believe that women show have power. However, in the forest, Hermia exerts her dominance over Lysander as she insists that he ‘lie further off’ (II.ii.43) so she can keep her virginity as she is less likely to be tempted into having sex with him. At the time a woman who had lost her virginity before she was married, especially to someone whom she was not betrothed, was a social sinner
People marry to increase their property and to secure its inheritance. Wise parents, who may dispose of their children in marriage, will of course try to avoid matches which the contracting parties find intolerable, but there are limits to this. On the other hand, children have a duty of obedience. And the husband Egeus proposes for Hermia is by no means unattractive; his chief defect is that he is not Lysander, whom Hermia loves, perhaps intemperately. The play shows how the ideal relationship is that in which the affections and the reasonable mind are both in harmony.
The fantastical woods contrast with the order of the Athenian law, and Elizabethan values of the time are polarised throughout the narrative, such as Helena’s feeling ugly even though she is tall and fair. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is thus not solely a comedic meditation on the nature of the origin or meaning of love, it also cautions against trying to rationalise the message of the play. Puck, who by his very nature cannot exist in a rational society, propels the action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is a manifestation of mischief and the unpredictability of nature, which governs not only the fantastical woods outside of Athens, but also the Athenians themselves when it comes to love. Yet, it is Puck, and thus nature, which rectifies the imbalance of the lovers at the beginning of the play....
According to social order in ancient time, it demands that daughter should obey her father’s will. Egeus' family order is threatened because his daughter Hermia wants to marry Lysander when he wants her to marry Demetrius. According to social order in ancient time, it demands that daughter should obey her father’s will in Act 1 scene 1 Line 65-78: