by Jessica Meme

Created on: December 03, 2008

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, suggested by "The Knight's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written around 1594 to 1596. It portrays the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, their interactions with the Duke and Duchess of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta, and with the fairies who inhabit a moonlit forest. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world. It's a comedy about love, love that is bound up in magic and ritual, a highly erotic fertility rite that is full of mishap and danger but still has a happy ending. Described as a celebration about what constitutes a couple, it explores fear and the relationship between love and imagination. The characters we meet in the play are derived from ancient literary sources and courtly romance. Shakespeare, has used an eclectic mixture of half-classical-half-medieval myth, folklore, tradition, blended regality, festival, magic and popular tradition, to express the metamorphosis in the human condition, that of love to marriage. Although portrayed as a dream, there is a dark undercurrent to the play that suggests this is possibly a nightmare. There are implications of rape, hints of violence and death threats. Indeed, it has been described as "a most truthful and brutal violent play." The emphasis is on the liberation of the human condition and how it is potentially destructive. The darker side of human nature is portrayed through sex, love and comedy. The play shows what can happen when the perceived structure of the outer world breaks down and how separateness and stability of identity are lost. The link between love, imagination, and reason, are keys to the main theme of transformation and change. As its title suggests, this is a play about dreams, and their often illogical, magical, and sensual character. Midsummer's Night is a time of craziness, of mirth and magic. The major bone of contention in Dream is sex. Some critics argue that the play moves from the chaos of lust to the social order of marriage. Others argue that it challenges social hierarchies and explores the complexity of gender and desire. Whatever the case, Shakespeare's dialogue contains unsettling views of relationships. The erotic elements of the Dream, however, were virtually unexplored onstage until the last thirty years. The representation of sexuality within A Midsummer Night's Dream, while extraordinarily varied throughout the years, has always presented a challenge to each production. Shakespeare's text, with its ambiguous exploration of love, lends itself to many interpretations, but productions that explore both the moonlight and shadow of the forest offer the richest understanding of the Dream.

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