Creative and Visionary Imagination LLCE

UNIT 1

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Introduction
This document tackles the role of imagination in William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. It will focus on two aspects: first, on Shakespeare’s exploration of theatre as an artifact
conceived and received through imagination; and secondly on the importance that magic has in the
Shakespearean imagination.

I. Summary of the play1

Organised in patterns of collision and dissolution

II. What is a comedy?

In Poetics (4th century B.C), Aristotle counters comedy to tragedy by saying that it deals in an
amusing way with ordinary characters in rather everyday situation. Later on, Italian poet Dante Alhigieri
(14th century) describes comedy as one that usually begins with harshness but ends happily.

Comedies are primarily concerned with humans as social beings, rather than as private persons, and
that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist’s purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect
its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. In comedy, common errors of life
are represented in the most ridiculous and scornful way.

1. Shakespeare and comedy2.

The two major writers of comedy between the 1590s and the 1630s in the Elizabethan and Jacobean
eras were William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The first wrote every kind of comedy except from
satire and Jonson hardly wrote anything that was not satirical. In this document we will only focus on
Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s early experiments were The Comedy of Errors (1590), based on Plautus’ plays, The
Taming of the Shrew (1594), which is a farcical comedy written mostly in prose) and two romantic
comedies: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The previous were followed by other romantic comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As
You Like it or The Tempest, although the later incorporated sad and bitter episodes. The playwright also
explored other forms of comedy such as the farce in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the comedy of
manners in Much Ado about Nothing, whose main topic is the behavior and deportment of men and
women living under specific social codes. Much Ado is particularly important for the development of the
genre as it is The Taming, since both of them give priority to prose over verse.

.
III. A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a reflection on drama.
1
As summarized in Jonathan Bate’s and Erik Rasmussen’s William Shakespeare: Complete Works. The Royal
Shakespeare Company, 2007.
2
Definition taken from J.A Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Penguin Reference
Books, 1991.

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 Creative and Visionary Imagination
LLCE UNIT 1

In the analysis of the play, we will focus on Act 3, Scene I. In this scene there is a group of “rude
mechanicals” led by Peter Quince and Bottom the Weaver, rehearsing the play of Pyramus and Thisbe,
which will be performed in front of the Duke of Athens during his wedding. During the rehearsal they
ponder on the difficulties of putting up a play and pleasing the audience. Being quite inexpert on the
rules of drama, and more precisely on the principle of “willingly suspending disbelief”, they explain the
devices they will turn to in order to respect the setting and “not to frighten the ladies”

In so doing, they unveil the artifice of drama, its make-belief nature, and expose the necessity of
using imagination not only as creator, but also as part of the audience. This is reinforced by Puck’s
lines, that

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 Creative and Visionary Imagination LLCE
UNIT 1

Conclusion
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