Essay on Shakespeares Sources for A Midsummer Nights Dream

Shakespe bes Sources for A midsummer Nights Dream A Midsummer Nights Dream is one of Shakespeares most-performed plays a delightful comedy, but full of copious potential tragedy to avoid becoming saccharine. Much of that tragic gap comes from Shakespeares sources, as he directly acknowledges in Act V. The entertainments Philostrate proposes, all stories taken from Ovids Metamorphoses, show the un gifted endings all too exchangeablely to spring from tales like that of the four lovers of Shakespeares play, or the strife-torn queen regnant 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 nearly an epitome of the dangerous fairy-world that underlies so much of Shakespeares play half-man, half-beast, they recall Bottoms similar, albeit to a greater extent 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 contented with their spouses but how might the wedding have been marred if Demetrius and Lysander both unchanging loved Hermia? These are the forgeries of jealousy (II.i.81) cries Titania to Oberon, and their contention, likewise a firmness of purpose of lust and jealousy and unbridled 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 thigh-slapper of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer Orpheus in their rage (V.i.48-9) is an renewal selection, but one just as significant. The mad Ciconian women (p.259) cry thither is ... ... scene. The meta-drama tames the actual play, and what was tragic becomes tragical mirth, what was a dire warning to esteem 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, youthful amours to even up down with a wife, Hippolyta, vigorous enough to match his own soldierlike 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 odd synopsis -- and every bit odd presentation Shakespeare shows the alternate endings his play could all too comfortably have taken, to make us relish all the more the happy solution he and the characters have found.