Unreality in A Midsummer Nights Dream - 1693 Words

Unreality in A Midsummer Nights Dream Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream is a play that encompasses three worlds: the romantic world of the aristocratic lovers, the workday world of the rude mechanicals, and the fairy world of Titania and Oberon. And while all three worlds tangle and intertwine during the course of the play, it is the fairy world that has the greatest impact, for both the lovers and the mechanicals are changed by their brush with the children of Pan. For those whose job it is to bring these worlds to life in the theatre -- directors, designers, actors -- the first questions that must be answered are: just what do the fairies look like, and how is their world different from ours? As our world has grown†¦show more content†¦This was a circus Dream. Brooks production cause enormous controversy and released an extraordinary amount of energy in the theatre world. His was a new interpretation of a play that had come to seem a fusty old Victorian Christmas card. Imaginations were piqued and creativity unleashed. This process had actually already begun several years earlier, with the publication of a book by Eastern European critic Jan Kott called Shakespeare Our Contemporary. By the second sentence of his essay on A Midsummer Nights Dream, Kott dynamited the traditions of the past century. Puck, Kott noted bluntly,is simply one of the names for the devil. Rejecting the image of Puck as just a playful dwarf from a German fairy tale, or even a poetic gremlin in the fashion of a romantic feà ©erie, he asserted Pucks twofold nature... that of Robin Goodfellow and that of the menacing devil Hobgoblin. Kott went on to insist that A Midsummer Nights Dream is the most erotic of Shakespeares plays, -- an idea almost unheard of until then -- and that it was a play that was truthful, brutal, and violent... The Dream had become part nightmare. This was an image for the 20th century, one where the fairy world was no longer an ideal projection of the lovers romantic fantasies, but rather the dark alter ego of the daytime world, Mr. Hyde to the lovers Dr. Jekyll. Soon other productions arose which explored the fairy world as theShow MoreRelatedA Midsummer Night s Dream By William Shakespeare1751 Words   |  8 Pages What types of dream really impress you in your life? Would that be funny dreams, weird dreams, scary dreams, risque dreams, dramatic dreams, life-changing dreams, and even lucid dream stories. As a matter of fact, people’s dreams can be a kind of illusion because dreams skew their daily life into confusion—people cannot recognize reality and unreality easily. Similarly, love not only is imaginative, but also can make people get confused just like dream. The comedicRead MoreRole of Supernatural in Shakespeares a Midsummer Nights Dream1547 Words   |  7 PagesWitches Brew and Fairy Dreams: A Genre Study of Shakespeares Use of the Supernatural (Penn State University, English 444.2: Spring 1998) by Fred Coppersmith Near the end of the opening scene of Macbeth, Shakespeares three Weird Sisters proclaim in unison that fair is foul, and foul is fair, providing us, as readers, with perhaps the best understanding of the plays theme and the tragic downfall of its central character. That this revelation -- this pronouncement that all is not well in ScotlandRead MoreEssay on Hyperbole and Illusion In A Midsummer Night’s Dream814 Words   |  4 PagesIn A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare makes heavy use of hyperbole, the twisting of reality into something greater than what it actually is, in both the dialogue and the ridiculous, larger-than-life nature of the situations that occur to provide a basis for the co nflict between reality and illusion, blurring the line that separates the two concepts. Before the symbolism of the woods and the land of fairies, the main sources of the conflict between reality and unreality, is intact, there are