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After A Midsummer Night’s Dream there was Old Comedy, New Comedy, and now Shakespearean comedy, a synthesis of both. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare goes beyond imitation to discover a distinctive voice and manner that would add a new dramatic species. His early tragedies- Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet-and comedies- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost-all show the playwright working within the dramatic conventions that he inherited from classical, medieval, and English folk sources. Shakespeare first made his theatrical reputation in the early 1590s with his Henry VI plays, with the historical chronicle genre that he pioneered. Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingĪ Midsummer Night’s Dream similarly gives a “local habitation and a name” on stage for what madness, love, and the poet’s imagination can conjure. The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,ĭoth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, In the play Theseus, the duke of Athens, after hearing the lovers’ strange story of what happened to them in the forest famously interprets their incredible account by linking the lovers with the lunatic and the poet: A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents a kind of declaration of liberation for the stage, in which, after its example, nothing seems either off limits or impossible. If that is not enough A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes use of its romantic intrigue, supernatural setting, and rustic foolery to pose essential questions about the relationship between art and life, appearance and reality, truth and illusion, dreams and the waking world that anticipate the self-referential agenda of such avant-garde, metadramatists as Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Stoppard. He established human passion and gender relations as comedy’s prime subject, transforming such fundamental concepts as love, courtship, and marriage that have persisted in our culture ever since. In it Shakespeare changed the paradigm of stage comedy that he had inherited from the Greeks and the Romans by dizzyingly multiplying his plot lines and by bringing the irrational and absurd illusions of romantic love center stage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the triumph of Shakespeare’s early play-writing career, a drama of such marked inventiveness and visionary reach that its first audiences must have only marveled at what could possibly come next from this extraordinary playwright. It is easy, however, to overlook through familiarity what a radically original and experimental play this is. It seems reasonable to claim that on any fine night during the summer at an outdoor theater somewhere in the world an audience is being treated to the magic of the play. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the HumanĪ Midsummer Night’s Dream is William Shakespeare’s first comic masterpiece and remains one his most beloved and performed plays. It is his first undoubted masterpiece, with-out flaws, and one of his dozen or so plays of overwhelming originality and power. Nothing by Shakespeare before A Midsummer Night’s Dream is its equal and in some respects nothing by him afterwards surpasses it. Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream