"A midsummer night's dream" by William Shakespeare

Gliederung

• William Shakespeare: The author and his times
• The plot
• Theseus
• Hippolyta
• Hermia
• Lysander
• Helena
• Demetrius
• Obernon
• Titania
• Puck
• Bottom
• Quince, Snug, Flute, Snout and Starvelling
• Setting
• Themes
• 1. True and false love
• 2. Seeing and being blind
• 3. Waking and dreaming
• 4. Reality and illusion
• 5. Reason and imagination
• 6. Change and transformation
• Style
• Elizabethan English
• Mobility of word classes
• Changes in word meaning
• Vocabulary loss
• Pronouns
• Prepositions
• Multiple negation
• Point of view
• Form and structure
• The five act structure
• Sources
• The globe theater
• Lines 1-127
• Lines 128-251
• Act I, Scene II
• Lines 1-59
• Lines 60-187
• Lines 188-268
• Lines 1-83
• Lines 84-156
• Lines 1-114
• Lines 115-201
• Lines 1-121
• Lines 122-277
• Lines 278-400
• Lines 401-463
• Lines 1-104
• Lines 105-222
• Act IV, Scene II
• Lines 1-107
• Lines 108-218
• Lines 219-372
• Lines 373-440
• The play
• Characterization
• The end of the play
• Shakespeare's poetic speeches
• Bottom's "vision"
• The Airies
• The Comedy of language

William Shakespeare: The author and his times

As we might expect from the range and vitality of Shakespeare's writing, Elizabethan England was an exciting and changing place. Though we know little of Shakespeare's own life, we know much about his world. For England, the sixteenth century was a period of growth and exploration, contributing to a renaissance in cultural and economic life. Under the reigns of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and James I (1603- 1625), London became one of the artistic and mercantile centers of Europe. We can still see the beauty of its half-timbered houses, its bridge-towers and churches. But above all, the literature of the period continues to excite the minds of readers, offering great riches of imagination and language.

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the English language was changing and growing. Dictionaries had not yet solidified spelling and meaning, and sometimes Elizabethan poetry seems to be possessed of a great unrefined power. Poets and playwrights - among them Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, as well as Shakespeare - reveled in the riches of this emerging language and created a brilliant new drama.

It is well to remember that in Shakespeare's time theater was a popular pastime (something like movies are today), attended by both commonfolk and royalty. It was not merely the province of an intellectual few. Folk traditions of ballad and song, as well as the Christian miracle and mystery plays, had accustomed the people to poetic drama, its speeches cast in rhyme and meter. And the Elizabethan theater highlighted the spoken word. It used few stage properties and almost no scenery. Its outdoor circular theaters surrounded a bare apron-shaped stage. The characters came and left at a fast pace, and what they said indicated who and where they were. The Elizabethan audience was attentive to the spoken word. A playwright might as easily present his ideas and actions in the form of poetic images or narrative speeches, for the theater was a place in which the ear, not merely the eye, was dazzled. And this was the kind of environment especially well suited for William Shakespeare.

You will see in A Midsummer Night's Dream how appropriate this poetic method

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