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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shakespeare's Loveliest Comedy, October 8, 2000
By A Customer
In a Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's loveliest comedy, the world of four lovers collides in a magical woods one night during midsummer with hilarious results. Pandemonium reigns and misunderstandings abound; nothing is as it seems, or should be, and that is what makes this play so perfect.In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's extraordinary talent for creating poetry that is unrivaled is effective in both establishing character and demonstrating the theme. The characters of this play all speak in poetic form with the exception of the English rustics who speak in prose. This helps to place the fairies and the lovers on a higher and more transcendental plane that the artisans. The artisans, as a result, become even more comical and serve to heighten the misunderstandings of love. The poetry of Shakespeare's genius also helps to clarify the play^s theme of the extreme confusion and blinding power of love. The rhythmic words help to create a magical setting while the rhyming scheme serves to portray the confusion each character feels while under the power of love. Those who think that love is only a blissful dream, will find that Shakespeare, in this play of clever intrigue, shows also that love can be a place of extreme confusion. As the audience ponders the revelry they have just seen on stage, Puck steps forth to conclude the confusion: If we shadows have offended/ Think but this, and all is mended/ That you have but slumbered here/ While these visions did appear/ And this weak and idle theme/ No more yielding than a dream. The audience is left in as much ambiguity as it felt throughout the performance; the play appropriately ends in a puzzling state of confusion. The majority of events is this play take place during the night, even the rehearsal for the farcical play-within-a-play. All of the mishaps occur during the nighttime hours and the confusion is not cleared up until the next morning when the four lovers are discovered. This setting of night allows the audience to drift into the idea that the entire play could well have been nothing more than a fantastic dream. Sleep in another theme that threads its way throughout the play. All of the mishaps and mistakes occur through the guise of sleep. One of the major influences of sleep is that it allows Puck and Oberon to make use of the magic love flower whose power is only effective if its intended victim is fast asleep. The flower, however, causes an hilarious love triangle that is not set straight until Oberon once again finds all of the confused lovers asleep. When they are discovered the next morning and asked to explain their crazy night, the only explanation that can be given is that it was all a dream. There seems to be no other way for Shakespeare to end this riotous entanglement of lovers, mythological beings, fairies and artisans but to explain it as a dream. Throughout the play, with its nighttime atmosphere and frequent occurrences of sleep, the dreamy state of the characters is passed on to the audience. The play itself is still in an inconclusive state when the characters leave the stage and many questions remain in the mind of the audience. Puck's closing monologue, however, explains that puzzlement is the appropriate emotion to be felt during the course of the play. Puck then goes on to persuade the audience that the only logical explanation for the ambiguity of the play, itself, is that, just as the characters themselves experienced, the audience has just awakened from a comical and fantastic dream.
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