1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare

2. If you recall…
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare made love a crazed, drug-like state, which led to murder, suicide, and exile.

3. Love in Midsummer Night’s Dream
The play features quarrelsome lovers who fall in and out for small, petty reasons
THESEUS: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact” Act V Sc. 1.

4. Mythological Background
Theseus
Founder of Athens, Greece
Famous for defeating Minotaur
Defeats Hippolyta in battle and claims her as his wife
Hippolyta
Queen of Amazons, a race of warrior-women who reproduce with men but then kill them

5. HERMIA
DEMETRIUS
LYSANDER
HELENA

6. Mythological Background
OBERON:
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”
Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once.
HIPPOLYA:
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear
With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding, for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

7. Interchangeable Lovers
LYSANDER:
HELENA:
I am, my lord, as well derived as he, As well possessed. My love is more than his; My fortunes every way as fairly ranked (If not with vantage) as Demetrius’
How happy some o’er other some can be! Through Athens I am thought as fair as she. But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so. He will not know what all but he do know.

8. Lovers’ Spats
The Nobles Theseus and Hippolyta: he has captured her and they prepare for their wedding The Mortals Lysander and Hermia: forbidden to be together, they run away to elope Demetrius and Helena: he no longer loves her The Fairies Oberon and Titania: quarrel over an Indian boy

9. Puck is a spirit cheerfully amoral, free because never in love and always more amused even than amusing… Free of love, Puck becomes an agent of the irrational element in love.”
—Harold Bloom

10. Act I Act III Act IV Boy Girl Drama LYSANDER HERMIA DEMETRIUS HELENA

11. Going Around In Circles Act 3 Scene 2
Lysander
Helena
Demetrius
Hermia

12. The Athenian Lovers HERMIA ●Defies father and risks death
●Loves Lysander
●Short, dark
HELENA
●Insecure and heartbroken
●Loves Demetrius
●Tall , fair
BOTH
●Of equal beauty
●Lifelong friends
The Athenian Lovers
LYSANDER
●Defies Theseus and Egeus
for love
●Has wealthy aunt
BOTH
●Love Hermia at start of play
●Of equal wealth and heredity
DEMETRIUS
●Flip-flops
●Insulting to Helena
●Favored
by Egeus

13. “Pyramus and Thisbe” A Play by Peter Quince
PLAYBILL NICK BOTTOM THE WEAVER…………….………..……PYRAMUS FRANCIS FLUTE THE BELLOWS-MENDER…..…….…THISBE ROBIN STARVELING THE TAILOR……….…...…MOONSHINE TOM SNOUT THE TINKER…………………………….…………WALL SNUG THE JOINER……………………………………………………LION PETER QUINCE………………………..…………..…………PROLOGUE

14. The Play Within the Play
The play of “Pyramus and Thisbe”… alludes… to the tragic possibilities of a conflict between love and parental opposition. A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not let its audience forget that love entails confusion and danger as well as grace, although it never entirely separates these contraries (Belsey 186).
The Formula
Controlling parents forbid young lovers to be together
Love cannot be forbidden, so they run away together to the woods
In a place of mystery, danger, and confusion, the lovers are soon separated by bizarre twists of fate

15. Act V Reader/ Audience Oberon, Titania, Puck The Athenians
Bottom and Actors

16. What Critics Are Saying Selections from Catherine Belsey’s Essay
“Bottom’s name, and his transformation… [clarify] more than [they change] his identity” (181).
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about love. It proposes that love is a dream, or perhaps a vision; that it is absurd, irrational, a delusion” (182).

17. What Critics Are Saying
“…the four lovers are virtually indistinguishable. Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal. Because of love’s power to idealize, the object of desire seems unique, even though in the event it turns out that Hermia and Helena are interchangeable” (183).
“The play does not ignore the trace of violence that exists within love when the other person fails to conform to the lover’s idealized image” (185).

18. What Critics Are Saying
“The plot leads up to the marriages of the lovers, but it does not quite confirm the distinction we might expect it to identify between true love on the one hand and arbitrary passion induced by magic on the other.” (189).
“The Athenian court represents the world of reconciliation and rationality, of social institutions and communal order, while the wood outside Athens is the location of night and bewildering passions, a place of anarchy and anxiety, where behavior becomes unpredictable and individual identity is transformed” (189).