A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the balance between order and chaos. At the beginning of the play, the lives of the characters are out of balance and disordered. This disorder manifests in the circumstances of the young Athenians, whose complicated situation is chaotic at best. Demetrius and Lysander both love Hermia, who refuses to marry Demetrius as her father wishes. Demetrius and Egeus turn to Theseus to bring order to the chaotic situation, but they leave unsatisfied. Hermia and Lysander decide to escape the boundaries of Athenian law and marry outside of the social order. They need to leave the city and its rules to celebrate their love. With two men and two women, a clear resolution presents itself. Hermia can marry Lysander and Helena can marry Demetrius. However, this orderly solution will only emerge after magical intervention. The play begins with the four young Athenians out of balance, forcing them to step outside of the rules of regular society to achieve their happiness.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy in both the traditional sense—it ends happily and in marriage—and the contemporary sense. The play uses farce, thrusting absurd and exaggerated characters into ridiculous situations. The laborers and their play, Puck and his mischief, and the rivalry between Oberon and Titania are all farcical to some degree, but the serious tone of the young Athenian nobles makes them prime candidates for comical situations. Helena’s self-conscious and introspective nature blinds her to practical realities, as she believes the best way to make Demetrius love her is to help him marry Hermia. Likewise, Demetrius claims that he loves Hermia, but he is willing to see her executed or sent to a nunnery rather than allow her to marry the man she loves. Meanwhile, Lysander’s arrogance leads him to conceive of himself as a great romantic hero. His plan to elope with Hermia suggests that he is more interested in being the hero than keeping Hermia safe. Each of these characters is deluded to some degree, and when they leave the ordered city of Athens and step into the magical, chaotic world of the fairies, their delusions become ripe comedic material.

The young nobles’ self-importance contrasts with the buffoonery of the laborers performing the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. However, the laborers are equally deluded. The men want to perform a play for Theseus’s wedding, but they cannot act. The loudest and most deluded of them all is Bottom, who is a terrible actor but insists that he is the perfect choice for every role. Like the nobles, the comedy of the laborers stems from their self-deception. But while the stakes of the nobles’ adventures are high (Hermia risks death, for example), the laborers merely trick themselves into believing that they face similar problems; they irrationally worry that their terrible portrayal of a lion might scare the women in the audience and lead to their own executions. The absurdity of this situation manifests in the contrasts between the men’s actual acting ability and their confidence, as well as the low stakes of reality and the high stakes that they imagine.

This technique of contrast continues to expose the farcical, absurd nature of delusion throughout the rest of the play. The nobles, the laborers, and everyone else are deluded to some degree, and this delusion results in chaos. At the same time, the play will ultimately suggest that a certain amount of fantasy is not only inevitable but necessary in daily life.