Essays on a Midsummer Night's Dream

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare plays with ideas of sight and reality. Sight, eyes, and the gaze become crucial themes in this seemingly light-hearted play. They appear constantly in the language of all of the characters, beyond the obvious role in the power...

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the concept of love and relationships are certainly at the forefront of the play. However, if one delves a bit further into the story, elements such as violence, death, and pain, which all strongly contrast with love, exist in...

Can the ocean be considered a lover? Is it possible for someone to find a strong infatuation with the rolling waves and the smell of salt water? Does the sea have the capacity to love someone? Looking out into the waters, the female character in...

In a fine example of Shakespearean irony, scholars have suggested that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was originally written as entertainment for an aristocratic wedding. The Lord Chamberlain’s Players provided the noble bride and groom, the ultimate symbol of harmony and true love, with a delightful...

Considered one of William Shakespeare’s greatest plays, A Midsummer Nights Dream reads like a fantastical, imaginative tale; however, its poetic lines contain a message of love, reality, and chance that are not usually present in works of such kind. All characters in the play are...

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of an imagination all compact” (Act 5, Scene 1, Lines 7-8). This quote by Theseus encompasses the notion of love as being an illusion, a product of the imagination. Love is equated with lunacy and poetry, both...

The character Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is most often associated with the mischievous little hobgoblin fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even before Shakespeare’s interpretation of Puck though, the little imp had been one of the most popular characters in English folklore. Puck appears...

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a journey through the three phases of a Shakespearean festive comedy. The audience is taken from unhappiness to confusion to finally reunion. Anything is possible in this story and the reader must engage in verisimilitude in order to...

If there was no such thing as sympathy, empathy, or love in our world, it would be a hard place to live. If there was no hard law or reason in our world, it would be a crazy place to live. Neither of these worlds...

According to Simon Estok, ecofeminism is defined as the paternalistic society driving a wedge between society and culture. In addition, it consists of the connection between the dominating of nature and the exploitation of women. Estok, as well as many others, have taken the time...

A Midnight Summer’s Dream is exceptional in that it features more than just one story unfolding at once. Although the quartet of lovers and the fairy world is often the focus of the play, the rude mechanicals and their attempts to produce a play of...

Most readers associate William Shakespeare with classic iambic pentameter, but Shakespeare’s plays often consist of many different writing styles. According to Kim Ballard, “A mix of these two compositional forms is unusual in much of literature, but commonplace in the plays of Shakespeare and other...

As critic Ronald Miller so eloquently declared, “The complex and subtle intellectuality of Shakespeare’s comic art was never better illustrated than by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, in particular, by Shakespeare’s employment of the fairies in that play” (Miller 486). It may be added that...

There is a saying that floats around modern society that all of human race is familiar with. This saying “Happy Wife Happy Life” is based around societal norms that portrays; if your female partner is happy (with anything really) the male in the relationship has...

Dreams, we all have them. Whether they be about the love of our life or our greatest fear, when we fall asleep, we lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and fiction. It’s why we actually feel like we’re falling off a building...

The play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” written by William Shakespeare, is full of many wonderful and humorous scenes and themes throughout the play including ideas like real vs. fake love, gender power, and real vs. imaginary life. Act 3 in this play definitely has a...

In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare represents four types of love: forced love, parental love, romantic love and complicated love. At the beginning of the play, we see a forced love between Theseus and Hippolytus, queens of the Amazons. Theseus...

When James Joyce was a teenager, a friend asked him if he had ever been in love. He answered, “How would I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love – A poet must always write about a past...

The success of the narrative arc of both Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone and Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream heavily rely on character interactions with the natural world. In each play respectively, the protagonists must purpose and negotiate elements of nature to achieve their particular objective....