A Midsummer Nights Dream Shakespeare's treatment of illusion and reality in the play

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A Midsummer Nights Dream

Write about Shakespeare’s treatment of illusion and reality in the play.

A Midsummer Nights Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare, it is a play about lovers and includes madness, mayhem, magic and illusion.  The title tells us of the inevitable confusion to come, as in Elizabethan times ‘A Midsummer Night’   was a festival linked with mayhem and chaos, and the fact it is a ‘dream’ conjures up ideas of illusion and fantasy.

The play has two settings, Athens which represents reality, order and daylight and the woods, the world of the fairies, which symbolize illusion, magic, and a place of darkness.

There are three main groups of characters the courtiers, the workmen and the fairies whose actions form four different plots within the play.

  1. The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta
  2. The love affairs between Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and Helena
  3. The workmen’s play, its planning, rehearsal and performance
  4. The quarrel between Oberon and Titania

   

A Midsummer Nights Dream itself is an illusion, and to enjoy it you must temporarily suspend reality.

Love is an important theme in the play, whether it is true love or induced by magic; it inhibits people’s ability to distinguish what is real or simply an illusion.

The play begins in Athens, with the preparations for the forthcoming marriage of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta Queen of the Amazons. The use of these characters at the beginning of the play gives it a real sense of importance. Egeus enters with a complaint against his daughter Hermia; she refuses to wed Demetrius who has her father’s consent to marry her, but Hermia is in love with Lysander.

Egeus believes his daughter could not possibly truly love Lysander, of her own free will and that ‘with cunning hast thou filched my daughter’s heart’. Egeus refers to the love as induced by magic, and believes Lysander and his gifts charmed her ‘Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung’, ‘with feigning voice verses of feigning love’, the word ‘feigning’ also implies the love is false. ‘This man hath bewitched the bosom of my child’. This speech introduces the idea that people’s feelings can be induced by magic, poetry and moonlight so they cannot tell the difference between illusion and reality.

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The young lovers decide to elope and arrange to meet each other in the woods.  Hermia confides in her childhood friend, Helena of her and Lysander’s intentions.

Helena is envious of Demetrius’s feelings for Hermia, and even though Hermia tries to put Helena’s mind at rest that she has no feelings for Demetrius, she is still jealous.

Helena’s soliloquy of unrequited love, is an important scene in the play as she speaks of  ‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity’, ‘Love can transpose to form and dignity’. She is explaining how the power of love, can transform what we ...

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Here's what a teacher thought of this essay

The writer has presented a range relevant of ideas related to the question of illusion and reality in the play. However, the effectiveness of the essay is reduced by its rambling structure. The reader is not guided through, and shown how the writer's ideas are relevant to the question .There are digressions into mere 'story-telling'. What is needed here is more thought at the planning stage. A more structured plan might focus on the following sections: 1. Love - reality or illusion with reference to the four lovers and Titania/Bottom. 2. The fairies and the importance of dreams/visions/magic in the play. 3. How the mechanicals' play explicitly foregrounds the creating of illusions in dramatic productions. 4. How the language of the play consistently reflects its concern with illusions and realities. In addition, poor punctuation undermines the essay's effectiveness.