To what extent is the mechanicals' performance of Pyramus’s and Thisby a success?

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Helen Calvert 10K

Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay

To what extent is the mechanicals' performance of Pyramus’s and Thisby a success?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a romantic comedy written by William Shakespeare.  The confusing love story involves four young adults, Helena, Lysander, Demetrius, and Hermia.  The story becomes entangled when a fairy called Puck mistakenly applied  a love potion to the wrong pair of lovers. At the start of the play, Egeus is making his daughter Hermia, marry Demetrius.  Demetrius loves Hermia, but it is Hermia  and Lysander who are deeply in love.  Egeus forbids Hermia to marry Lysander so they elope and get lost in the woods.  

Demetrius hears that his love Hermia, has eloped with Lysander, and follows them.  Helena, who is infatuated with Demetrius, is chasing him.  

All the lovers are now in the woods, and Puck makes his mischief.  When the love potion is rubbed onto sleeping eyelids, when the person awakes, they fall passionately in love with the first living being that they see.  

This is where it becomes confusing...

Oberon, the King of the Fairies instructed Puck, to rub the potion onto Demetrius’ eyes so that he would fall in love with Helena.  Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrus, so that when Lysander awoke and saw Helena, who he now has fallen in love with.  Puck still wants Demetrius to fall in love with Helena, so he wipes the love potion on Demetrius’ eyes as well.  This results in both men loving Helena.    Helena thinks they are both playing a cruel trick on her, because she believes that she is ugly.  

Meanwhile in the garden, the actors (a group of average normal everyday locals) are rehearsing for the play, which they hope, will be chosen to be performed at the wedding.  Puck is feeling mischievous and turns one of the actors, Bottom, into an ass.   Bottom runs into the woods where nobody can see him.  Oberon has placed Titania, the Queen of the fairies under the same love spell, and she awakes to find Bottom, as an ass, and falls in love with him.  

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Oberon discovers the mistake that Puck had made and sends Puck to find a new potion that will make things happen as they were to.  As a result of this second love spell, Lysander and Hermia are in love again, Demetrius and Helena fall in love, and so do Oberon and Titania.   The four young lovers share their weddings with Hyppoleta and Theus, the counts of the land.  It is at these wedding celebrations that the play Pyramus and Thisbe is chosen to be performed.

Pyramus and Thisbe is a romantic tragedy, or a tedious brief scene ...

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