A Midsummer Night's Dream: AS & A2 York Notes

"A Midsummer Night’s Dream" is a comedy by William Shakespeare, written during the late sixteenth century when he was perfecting his skill at writing in this genre. He employs a three-part structure, and weaves three stories together. Much of the comedy is created by the ways the worlds come together and the way the audience know what is going on when they don’t that makes it funny. The craftsmen are the most amusing characters. An Elizabethan audience expected a comedy to involve conflict, sometimes between a father and his daughter. Egeus might be seen as a stock character of comedy: he is determined to control his daughter’s choice of a husband. This is a bit like Portia’s father in "The Merchant of Venice" who controls his daughter’s choice from beyond the grave. The play also meets the audience’s expectations in that it follows a familiar pattern for comedy in that things go wrong, ridiculous complications arise and in the end everything works out fine.

During Elizabethan times, love was taken seriously, and this creates comedy in the play because the audience would be surprised by the way it is treated as a foolish thing in "A Midsummer Night’s Dream". For example we see Titania, queen of the fairies, fall in love with Bottom. In some performances Bottom has been shown wearing a complete ass’s head and in others, he wears donkey’s ears and uses voice to make donkey noises. There is also comedy in the fact that this beautiful queen falls in love with a ‘monster’. Some critics, such as Jan Kott, have interpreted this relationship as evidence of Shakespeare’s sexual desires, though this is a bit extreme really. The comedy is more about a queen falling in love with a donkey and that is foolish. This example of farce to create comedy is also seen in the ridiculous situation whereby both Demetrius and Lysander are in pursuit of Helena.

Dramatic irony is also used to great effect in the play. For example, Helena complains about being ‘ugly’ and then a few minutes later, Lysander wakes up and proclaims her beauty. The audience ‘knows’ more than the performers throughout the play and this highlights the theme of illusion. The craftsmen in particular offer comedy in the way that they mix up their words. Quince, for example, confuses ‘paramour’ and ‘paragon’. The craftsmen are also the only characters to speak in prose, which shows their place in the social hierarchy. The audience is encouraged to laugh at them for their foolishness.

In performance the craftsmen are often presented as slapstick characters. In a recent performance by the Sell a Door theatre company, Tommy Aslett presented an energetic ‘Bottom’ described in The Stage as a ‘masterclass of slapstick vigour’ with ‘the audience convulsing with laughter at his well-meaning buffoonery’. It is often the case that the business on stage brings out pantomime in the craftsmen. One further point is that Shakespeare emphasises the comedy of the play with the contrast of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. Like Romeo and Juliet, the lovers in this play end up taking their own lives, but it is ‘make-believe’ of course which means the audience know it’s not real.