A Midsummer Night's Dream - Theme Identification

A detailed Summary of A Midsummer Night's Dream - Theme Identification

Men Dominating Women - Looking back at Romeo and Juliet and other Shakespeare plays, I find that men winning the hearts of women by defeating them is a common occurrence. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus states "Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword," (I, i) implying that Theseus won the love of Hippolyta by defeating her. Adding to this is the struggle of Hermia from her father, Egeus's, will, because she does not want to marry Demetrious for she loves Lysander. And then both the men are chasing Hermia, trying to win her over. Even in Much Ado About Nothing, the male figures had much power, especially in making decisions for the ladies.

Conflict Between Father and Daughter - Again powered by other Shakespeare plays is the constant disagreement of a daughter with their ruling father's decisions. Here, Hermia does not want to marry Demetrious like her father is commanding her to. She wants to go with Lysander because she loves him. You hear of this first in Act 1, and then you never see Theseus again until Act 5 when all becomes well. Shakespeare writes many plays with this theme, so one might infer that he is trying to stand up for fem

The Thin Line Between Love and Hate - Proven by Lysander and Demetrious so quickly changing their heart's desire from girl to girl. Even though this was caused by Puck's 'drugs,' it still resembled the confusion and weakness of love.

Dreams - Even the title of the play puts the eeriness and confusion of dreams into perspective. All throughout the show, odd occurrences are explained by characters merely as dreams. For instance, when the two main couples wake up at the end they blame the weird things that had just happened to be a dream they shared, and when Bottom woke up after being turned into a donkey and having the fairy queen fall in love with him he called it a 'most rare vision.' (IV, I) Also, when Titania woke from her slumber, she blamed the feelings she remembered having for the ass-version of Bottom as a dream. Puck's last monologue deepened the questioning of dreams even further by saying, 'if you don't like what you have just seen, just think of it as a dream.' Such questions are aroused as, 'what is reality?' and, 'was something really a dream or not?'

Supernatural - Shakespeare used the world of fairies in this show to explain the cause of outrageous and impossible happenings. Simply having the world of fairies was a way out thing by our eyes, but people at the time were blaming fairies for coming and taking children and doing evil things. They were commonly viewed as evil spirits. However, Shakespeare in this play portrayed them simply as curious and mischievous, and almost completely harmless and with true intents. If it weren't for the magic of the fairies, many bad things could have happened with

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Approximate Word count = 1104
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English