(6) A Midsummer Night’s Dream

So, this one I have already read, as have many of you I am guessing. This play is popular…and for good reason: it’s good, really good, and maybe even great. I found it to be a much different (better) experience to reading Love’s Labor’s Lost. Although these two plays share many similarities (they are both comedies, they are thought to be written around the same time, and they both lack any single source material), I found A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be so much more…enjoyable, on many levels. Maybe it was the mostly strong, linear plot, maybe it was the familiarity, or maybe it’s just better. Who knows? But I feel like I’m back on track and in the groove with this one.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another Shakespeare play about the fickle, crazy ways of love (like The Two Gentlemen of Verona).  I liked how this theme winds and rolls about. This play, perhaps, is nothing more than a complex exploration of the intricate sensibilities of Love (capital “L”) and its many, many possibilities. However, for me this theme was overshadowed by another. As the title implies, it can also be taken as an elaborate and exacting exploration of the Imagination (capital “I”), specifically through the concept of dreams and their uncanny ability to suspend reality or create new realities.

The dream is central to this tale, and the idea is tossed about in so many cool and surprising ways, all the way up to the very end, that I am once again quite impressed by the art of it. Ultimately, he seems to get to the question of reality itself, but not in a cliché way (…life is but a dream), but in a novel, twisted, and just kind of really deep way. I love the final lines by Puck and have vowed to memorize them, because I think they are so great. In case you have forgotten, they go like this:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

I just love that.