A Midsummer Night’s Dream was probably written by William Shakespeare in 1595-1596, but it was published on 1600. So, we can say that this is one of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies. Its main theme is love, as it is the main topic in all Shakespeare’s comedies. The play talks about the troubles that two couples of young people have when they are trying to escape from the rules of the city. The play deals with the conflict between an authoritarian patriarchal society (parental oppression by Egeus and aristocratic oppression by the Theseus) and the young people.

This comedy mingles fantastic elements with natural elements, as we can clearly distinguish in the development of the plot in the woods, where some fantastic creatures appear on scene. The word dream included in the title makes the audience believe that anything can happen, as magic. Magic makes wishes come true, and that’s what anybody wants.

Another fictional aspect in the very beginning of the play is the appearance of Hippolyta (an Amazon), who is going to marry Theseus, duke of Athens. This marriage functions as a frame for the rest of the play.

The action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place in the ancient Greece, a far away place in distance and in time for the English audience of the 17^th century. As we have already seen in class, this helps to understand some of the passages of the play, which could be difficult to understand if Shakespeare would have set the scene in England. The structure of the play is, as Hallam says: “consisting as it does of three, if not four, actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity, of Shakespeare, as much as in any play he has written”. (Hallan)

Now we are going to pay attention to the character that I have chosen to analyse: Lysander. As we can read from Kehler, “Demetrius and Lysander are reduced to their essential absurdity, and both of them are given so little distinctive characterization”. Although Lysander is not developed in an extensive way during the play, we can analyse certain points of this character.

He is a courtly character who is in love with Hermia, Egeus’ daughter. Hermia is also in love with him, but Egeus wants her daughter to marry Demetrius. According to Hermia, Lysander is as worthy as Demetrius (as we can read in the first scene of the play) and there is no reason to choose a man she doesn’t feel attracted to. So, we see how Hermia is forced to “choose love by another’s eyes” (act I, scene 1). Theseus forces Hermia to choose between obeying her father and marrying Demetrius or living the rest of her life in virginity. Theseus also warns Hermia that Egeus has created her, so patriarchal power becomes crucial at this point, where Theseus word is law and Egeus will is absolute (Kehler).

We can also understand that Egeus offers Demetrius to her daughter as a sign of a good relationship between them. We are becoming aware that men, at Elizabethan time, were undisputed by women, and they had to accept any order by them. In the play, as we have said above, Hermia is going to reveal against men’s power, but through running away from the ones that want her to obey them.

There is a way to face her father’s opinion, but a very different one is the one that we can read in King Lear: while in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hermia confronts her father directly and runs away from him, in King Lear Cordelia’s silence makes her father turn crazy.

            At this moment, Lysander shows his temperance and decides to talk to Hermia and tell her his plan: they will go away and elope from the city to the forest, where the law doesn’t take effect. Here we can see the contrast between a rule-governed urban world in the city of Athens and the freedom of the woods, where we can see a free space which is a fairy world. In these woods we will see how a series of fantastic characters make the situation between the four young characters change.

            The main change in Lysander’s life will be his enchantment and his new situation: now he is magically in love with Helena, another Athenian girl who is in love with Demetrius. But Demetrius is also enchanted and his love to Hermia will change to Helena. This series of actions take place in a very attractive way to the audience, and the speed and the interest of the action increases in these passages. That night in which everything happens is what justifies the title of the comedy.

            What we see in these scenes is that Lysander changes completely his attitude to Hermia. He is not only in love with Helena, but he also rejects and hates his previous girl, Hermia. While in the beginning of the play we see a desperate Lysander who fights for his relation with the Egeus' daughter, now we see a new character that faces Hermia and clearly insults her, by labelling her as a “cat”, “vile thing”, “dwarf”, “minimus” and “acorn”. We have to bear in mind that this is a momentary situation and this is not product of Lysander’s conscience, it is product of Puck’s magic. From my point of view, there is a thing to remark: when everything turns to normality and Lysander recovers his feelings to Hermia, she doesn’t look annoyed. I think that this has to be understood by the audience as a convention for comedies.

When Lysander returns to his “true love” (Hermia), we see something that is common in Shakespearian comedies: “the men fluctuate before finally settling down to a constant attachment such as the heroines exhibit from the start” (Kehler). What we understand at this point of the play is that the origin of love never lies in reason; at the beginning we see how Egeus and Theseus want to impose a husband on Hermia, and now we see that love has changed with the help of magic, which is relevant in the scenes that take place in the woods, as well as for other things that we are not going to deal with in this essay, but that are very important in the development of the comedy.

Lysander’s relationship  with Demetrius isn’t bad at the beginning of the play, and although both of them want to marry Hermia, they don’t fight each other. That situation was set in the very beginning of the play, but we see a contrast between this situation and the moment in which the two men are prepared to fight for Helena’s love in the woods.

Egeus says directly to Lysander in the first scene of the play that he isn’t good enough to marry his daughter, and that he has enchanted her with songs and flowers. We can’t see the evolution of this relation between Hermia’s father and his beloved at the end of the comedy, because they don’t interact with each other since the beginning of the play and until the last scene.

            The marriage between Theseus and Hippolyta functions, as we have said above, as a frame for the play, because in the beginning we see the preparation of the wedding and at the end we assist to the celebration of it. At this moment we can attend a very comic play-within-the-play called Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the mechanicals during the duke’s marriage, and that includes a representation of the Greek myth that we have just mentioned (Hazlitt). Like Hermia and Lysander, Pyramus and Thisbe run off to the woods in the night, hoping to escape from the obstacles that want to finish with their true love. As some scholars say, we can ask ourselves if Shakespeare wrote this play to be performed in a wedding celebration (Jarvis).

            Pyramus and Thisbe has also been compared with Romeo and Juliet for its resemblance of an impossible love that wants to become true (Kehler), but from my point of view it has directly to do with the story that we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that has Hermia and Lysander as main characters.

The geniality shown once more by Shakespeare must be also interpreted by asking ourselves how his company and himself could set on stage this play, full of connotations, and how the Elizabethan audience could understand the essence of this comedy at The Globe, at the same time that they should be amazed by the eloquent language used by the most famous playwright of English literature and probably of world literature.

As a summary, we can say that this comedy opposes reality to fantasy, a ruled world to a non-ruled world, and basically it contrasts how the laws of the city dominates us and how the freedom of the woods makes us free, which paradoxically are really near to the city in the play. We can assist to a fight in which young people have been persecuted by an established order, that is totally opposed to the order that they want.

From my point of view, this can be interpreted as the beginning of a new era set by youth, and we can see a place where old traditions are being forgotten. It is the development from an old world to a new world. As we have already seen in class, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, in a way, “the exaltation of human values (in this case love) that were recovered in the Renaissance” (Forés).

CONSULTED  SOURCES:

-A Midsummer Night's Dream (an Early Festive Comedy), www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/midsummer/. Webpage consulted on March 2007.

-Forés, Vicente. Shakespeare in Performance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, April 19^th 2007. Universitat de València.

-Hallan, The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, vol. 13. ed. Alfred Bates. London: Historical Publishing Company, 1906.

-Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. London: ed. C.H. Reynell, 1978.

-Jarvis, Faye. Exploring the theme of Appearance and Reality in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, http://www.coursework.info/GCSE/English_Literature/Drama/By_Author/William_Shakespeare/A_Midsummer_Night's_Dream. Webpage consulted on March 2007.

-Kehler, Dorothea et alii. Critical Essays on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Routledge. London, 1998.

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