A Midsummer Night's Dream

386 Words1 Page

Zhen Yao
COM 007/ Section A01
January 20, 2016
Reading Response to Midsummer night In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, it is proven that the statement “the course of true love never did run smooth” (I.i.134) is true, by using the three conflicts of love in the play. Firstly, Lysander and Hermia experience difficulties with their love because their love is forbidden by Hermia's father and the law because the law of Athens did not allow Hermia to marry Lysander unless Egeus, Hermia’s father, approved it. Egeus does not want Hermia to marry Lysander but instead of her true love, he want Hermia to marry Demetrius. Lysander and Hermia run away to the magic forest and they plan to escape to another country. Another difficulties

The Theme of True Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
742 Words | 2 Pages
...ities. Love is a long hard road and cannot be reached by taking a straight, clear-cut path. Even though throughout the scene Hermia and Lysander are in constant conflict, a resolution is eventually reached. Hermia and Lysander remain in love, proving that true love can prevail.
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William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
978 Words | 2 Pages
Humanity has struggled with the enormity of fate since the beginning of existence. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth demonstrate fate’s wicked nature where its collision with mortals results in absolute tragedy. However, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, fate assumes a lighter identity, a stark contrast to fate’s usually ugly face. This new role also demonstrates a new relationship between man and fate. Shakespeare’s use of dramatic irony illustrates the parallel between the mortal and immortal worlds to present the grave concept of fate in an unthreatening manner, thus enabling man to comprehend the inexplicable.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Dream Within a Dream
2100 Words | 5 Pages
Shakespeare anticipates the Freudian concept of the dream as egoistic wish-fulfillment through the chaotic and mimetic desires of his characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The play also utilizes a secondary meaning of the word "dream" - musicality - by tapping into theater's potential for sensory enchantment. Through this artificial recreation of the dream-state, Shakespeare integrates the audience, whom the solipsistic characters have run the risk of alienating, into the dream. Ultimately, the play refutes a psychoanalytic interpretation by reminding the observer that dreams, much like love, sometimes have "no bottom" (IV.i.209) and lack logical motivation.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
994 Words | 2 Pages
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most unforgettable plays about love written by William Shakespeare. The play includes the four main characters: Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena. Lysander and Demetrius, who fight for Hermia’s love, have anointed by Oberon, fairy king, and his servant, Puck, with a love-juice. This juice causes the four lovers to fall in or out of love with each other. Without knowing that their actions are controlled by the potion, the lovers are ironically convinced that they fall in love because of essential "reasons". A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its characters show the real meaning of true love and how the blindside of a real love makes people behave too unreasonably and foolishly. To portray how the state of love makes people act irrationally, Shakespeare uses satire, irony, and animal imagery in this play.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
1488 Words | 3 Pages
William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had married at the age of eighteen to a twenty-six year old woman named Anne Hathaway in 1582. He had a daughter named Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, his only son, died at age eleven. Shakespeare died in April 1616. Despite the fact that Shakespeare wrote some thirty-seven plays, owned part of his theatrical company, acted in plays, and retired a relatively wealthy man in the city of his birth, there is much we do not know about him (Jacobus, 167-169). One of the plays that Shakespeare wrote was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596) is an early comedy and one of Shakespeare’s most beloved works. It is also one of his most imaginative plays, introducing us to the world of fairies and the realm of dreams. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has attracted many great directors in modern times, although in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the play was adapted essentially as a vehicle for presenting the world of the fairies. It even became an opera in 1692 (Jacobus 169-170). In the fairy world is where everything comes together.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream Research Paper
1047 Words | 3 Pages
In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, love plays a huge role in the actions and consciences of many of the characters. Although the play is a comedy, it gives incite of Shakespeare’s view of women how they were treated during his time. Women usually had to marry men who they didn’t love and it was inevitable that women were to become solely dependent on men.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
1128 Words | 3 Pages
Hermia is told by her father not to marry Lysander but to marry Demetrius instead, a man she has no interest in. Lysander tells his paramour, “Ay me, for aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth: But it was different in blood” ("Complete Pelican Shakespeare" 260). Lysander tells his love that true love is never easy, and in all good love stories the lovers must battle for their love to achieve its rewards. This is common in love even today.... ...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream: he Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth
874 Words | 2 Pages
Both in Shakespeare’s times and in modern day, “the course of true love never did run smooth”(28) is an idea that proves itself again and again. Works Cited A Midsummer Night's Dream The Fault in Our Stars
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The Course of True Love Never Runs Smooth
1000 Words | 2 Pages
In the struggles of Hermia and Lysander to find a place where they can freely express their true love, it is evident that the course of something as scarce as true love always comes with obstacles. Lysander says: “How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? / How chance the roses there do fade so fast?” (1.1.130-131), showing that he and Hermia make a faithful couple truly showing their adoration for each other. However, Hermia’s father Egeus refuses to allow to these two lovers marry. This is the conflict Hermia faces: to disobey her father (and the Athenian law), or to mind her father’s will and allow this “edict in destiny” to lose course. “O hell, to choose love by another’s eyes!” (1.1.142), Hermia decides. Hermia chooses to follow the path her true love brings rather than to do what her father insists. In this example, complications manifest in the troubles with true love. In addition, even Titania and Oberon have difficulties
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Midsummer Nights Dream
2589 Words | 6 Pages
He explains to Hermia that if she goes against her father’s rules, by his words, she will be sentenced to death or sent to a convent (Act 1, Scene 1, Pages 4 and 5, Lines 30-34). He states, “For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself to fit your fancies to your father’s will; Or else the law of Athens yields you up,- which by no means we may extenuate,- to death, or to a vow of single life.” Hermia is so in love that she cannot make a reasonable decision, so she runs off into the imaginative woods with Lysander.
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Midsummer Night's Dream Contradictions Analysis
1006 Words | 3 Pages
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s dramas that explore how love can change people’s behavior. Love can make people get the best of them and also it can force them to act the worst. Lovers sometimes contradict themselves with different situations. Throughout William Shakespeare ‘s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is emphasized that love most of the times is illogic, childish and depends mainly upon looks and attractiveness or upon love potion that charm the eyes, but along the way there are certain contradictions in some of his characters’ behavior while expressing their love towards each other.
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The Relationship Dynamics Of A Midsummer Night's Dream
1353 Words | 3 Pages
The relationship between Demetrius and Hermia is problematic, in that Demetrius is seeking the affections of Hermia, while she is in love with Lysander. However, Hermia’s father approves of Demetrius and tries to force her to marry him, but Hermia refuses because of her love for Lysander (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.22-82). Lysander points out the flaw in the situation through this comment, “You have her father 's love, Demetrius –/Let me have Hermia 's. Do you marry him,” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.93-94). The second flawed relationship is between Lysander and Helena, as a result of an enchantment put on Lysander that made him fall in love with Helena. Helena does not want the affections of Lysander, but rather the love of Demetrius, and believes that Lysander is taunting her. In addition, this relationship creates tensions because Hermia is in love with Lysander (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2.109-140). Both relationships are not desirable due to a lack of mutual admiration and the creation of non-peaceful and unsatisfying
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Midsummer-Night's Dream
523 Words | 2 Pages
The play As You Like It by William Shakespeare starts with an opening, revealing all the conflicts that the characters would have to face sooner or later one after another right from the start. Nevertheless, like the other plays before this one, they have a number of similarities explained by Helen Gardner in the critical article “As You Like It: A Comedy of Discovery.” A pattern as described appeared to compare with one of Shakespeare’s previous plays “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” the beginning of the plays start with troubles and adversities then end in joy. Gardner certainly gives a feeling of the format of the play, however, what the focus will be is that whether or not “retreating from life in civilizations the only way people can reach self-actualization.” The conflicts set into place in the beginning of the play will come with its number of problems to deal with physically and mentally.
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Midsummer Night's Dream
584 Words | 2 Pages
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare is about a comical love entanglement. The play sets off with the first couple of Theseus and Hippolyta who are awaiting marriage through the course of the storyline. Subsequently, a maiden by the name of Hermia is being forced into marriage with Demetrius although she is in love with Lysander. Hermia’s best friend, Helena is in love with Demetrius, but he is insistent on marrying Hermia. After this, the royal fairy couple of Oberon and Titania are in a quarrel about who gets to keep the adopted child. Oberon grows frustrated with Titania’s views and employs Puck to take a magical juice that will make someone fall in love with whomever they see first, and spray it on the eyelids of Titania and Demetrius.
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Midsummer Night's Dream
1216 Words | 3 Pages
1. Based on the title, my initial impression was that it was going to be a romance play about two lovers that meet at night.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Theme of True Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream