A Midsummer Night S Dream Shakespeare S Syzygy Of Meaning

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best-loved of Shakespeare's plays, and certainly the one that children are likely to encounter first; its mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies meeting in a wood outside Athens has a magic of its own. Simple and engaging on the surface, it isnonetheless a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and its theatrical mastery. The fact that it is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays not to draw on a narrative source suggests the degree to which it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns.In his Introduction, defining the play in both the literary and theatrical traditions to which it belongs, Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows in the strange but enchanting amalgam hemakes of them. Both here and in the detailed commentary he draws freely upon the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.

Essay from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A, University of Massachusetts - Amherst (English Department), course: English 732 - Shakespeare, language: English, abstract: „A Midsummer Night ́s Dream and The Tempest, a play it prefigures in important ways, share the distinction of illustrating better than any other plays Shakespeare ́s device of juxtaposing extremes for the purpose of indicating a golden mean.“ Peter G. Philias remarks that Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that lives of seemingly incompatible contradictions: civilization and nature are juxtaposed in the confrontation of the court of Athens and the woods; man and woman are working against each other in the unequal parts of Theseus and Hippolyta, Oberon and Titania, and arch-conservative Egeus and his daughter Hermia. It seems consensual to state that – on the deep structure level – the contradiction between “doting”, the fixation of a lover on a partner who does not return the affections, and “cool reason” forms the common ground of these and several other antagonisms. But although I consent to this view, I would also like to deny the reduction of this play to a mere love story – a view expressed by Philias, who claims that had been Shakespeare’s intention „to comopse a play presenting sudden conflict between lovers as well as antithetical attitudes toward love.“ I am convinced that the contents of A Midsummer Night’s Dream go far beyond the topics of family conflict or interpersonal relationship. The basic conflict between reason and emotion can only become the departing point of the story because it triggers an underlying conflict between individual and society, respectively between individual and state. „Every Shakespearean character lives within a political regime governed laws and shaped by distinctive institutions. How a character lives acts and how he perceives his deeds is affected, sometimes crucially affected, by his participation in the corporate life of a city or realm.“ The aim of this paper is to demonstrate where the conflict lies between the individual and the state, respectively its institutions and the officials who represent them, and how it is solved so that the final scenes can indeed be regarded as the establishment of an ideal state of affairs – ideal in the sense of what Philias calls the “golden means”.

The works of this great English writer seem to be timeless – his books contain vital questions which are still relevant today just as they were in the XVI cen. The secret of the eternal youth of his books is in the characters who have not changed a bit. Each of us might recognize his or her contemporaries in Shakespeare’s characters.

This study traces the response to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" from Shakespeare's day to the present, including critics from Britain, Europe and America.

Differentiated book- It has a historical context with research of the time-A Midsummer Night's Dream, a comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, The purpose of realizing this historical context is to approach the understanding of a historical epoch from the elements provided by the text. Hence the importance of placing the document in context. It is necessary to unravel what its author or authors have said, how it has been said, when, why and where, always relating it to its historical moment.written around 1595-96 and published in 1600 in a fourth edition of the author's manuscript, in which there are some minor inconsistencies. The version published in the First Folio of 1623 was taken from a second fourth edition, with some reference to a textbook. One of the "big" or "in-between" comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its examination of love and its whims in several layers, has long been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays.Theseus, Duke of Athens, has conquered Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, and is about to marry her. Meanwhile, two lovers, Hermia and Lisandro, seek refuge in the forest near Athens when Hermia's father demands that she marry. Demetrius Hoping to win Demetrios favor,