Essay on Shakespeares Sources for A Midsummer Nights Dream

Shakespe atomic number 18s Sources for A Midsummer Nights Dream A Midsummer Nights Dream is one of Shakespeares most-performed plays a delightful comedy, yet full of enough potential tragedy to avoid becoming saccharine. Much of that tragic possibility comes from Shakespeares sources, as he terrificctly acknowledges in Act V. The entertainments Philostrate proposes, alone stories taken from Ovids Metamorphoses, show the unhappy endings all too likely to spring from tales like that of the four lovers of Shakespeares play, or the strife-torn fairy rulers. The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch with the harp (V.i.44-5) is the first of Philostrates suggestions, and the most blatant. Centaurs are almost an epitome of the dangerous fairy-world that underlies so much of Shakespeares play half-man, half-beast, they recall Bottoms similar, albeit more humorous, condition. lust and jealousy cause the undoing of the marriage feast, for the Centaurs theft of women provokes a battle. Thanks to the fairy intervention, all in Shakespeares play are happy with their spouses but how world power the wedding have been marred if Demetrius and Lysander both still loved Hermia? These are the forgeries of jealousy (II.i.81) cries Titania to Oberon, and their contention, likewise a result of lust and jealousy and remove nature, luckily enters the play only peripherally. Theseus law, and fairy medicine, overrules the lusty, animal side of love and prevents such violence from marring, indeed unmaking, the comedy. The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer Orpheus in their rage (V.i.48-9) is an alternate selection, but one just as significant. The mad Ciconian women (p.259) cry There is ... ... scene. The meta-drama overcomes the actual play, and what was tragic becomes tragical mirth, what was a dire warning to heed societys laws or fear the consequences is a gross entertainment and slapstick. Theseus laws have overcome the bloody , passionate side of love the man himself appears to have ceased his earlier, modern amours to settle down with a wife, Hippolyta, vigorous enough to match his own martial nature. Indeed, he discounts the entertainments as those which he has already heard or told -- they are old news to him, settled affairs, and he needs hear of them no more. The only reason Pyramus and Thisbe receives a hearing is its preposterous synopsis -- and equally odd presentation Shakespeare shows the alternate endings his play could all too easily have taken, to make us relish all the more the happy solution he and the characters have found.