A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

For Bloom, Bottom, the humble weaver, is the key to the play, and more than just a bit of rustic comic relief.īut Bloom’s assertion that ‘love at first sight, exalted in Romeo and Juliet, is pictured here as calamity’, is only partially true. Bottom’s ‘rare vision’ of Titania invites our laughter, but it is sympathetic laughter: there is a sense that he has been emotionally as well as physically transformed by the night’s events. Our eyes can trick or deceive us we can ‘dote’ on someone but that is not the same as loving them in a deeper and more long-lasting way we create fantasies or, if you will, ‘dreams’ of our lovers which they can never live up to, and which put us at risk of a rude awakening further down the line.Īs so often in the work of Shakespeare, this simplistic interpretation just won’t stand up. Kermode also notes how many eyes there are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the words ‘eye’ and ‘eyes’ recur multiple times, and the gulf between illusion and reality is a key theme in the play.

In Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode analysed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the comic counterpart to the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet both plays date from the mid-1590s, and it may be that Shakespeare intentionally conceived of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a sort of inverse of the other play about ‘the course of true love’ (although that quotation comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is in Romeo and Juliet that the course of true love fails to run smooth all is worked out in the end in the Dream).

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare