Sometimes in our lives reality can seem like a dream come true, in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," by William Shakespeare, to the characters, their dreams are reality. Shakespeare focuses on comic love scenes to portray dreams within reality and reality within dreams. The funniest part of this play seems to be when Puck, the trickster, keeps mixing up the people who he is assigned to put the love juice on. Even when he did put the love juice into the right people's eyes, they still fell in love with the wrong people!
This play takes you to a fantasy world where fairies live and pixie dust is real and where anything is possible. In this world, dreams become reality and reality is eluded as a dream. The first act gives us a look at our first conflict. Her father Egeus betroths Hermia to Demetrius. Hermia is in love with Lysander because, as her father describes it, Lysander has "by moonlight....
English: "Midsummer Nights Dream Act IV Scene I--A...
Washington Allston's 1818 painting Hermia and Hele...
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. Fro...interchanged love tokens with my child." (Act I, scene i) Egeus is angry that his daughter would go against his wishes so he presents his case to the king of Athens, Theseus. According to the law of Athens, death should be the sentence if you go against your father's wishes. "By the next new moon," (Act I, scene i) she must make her decision, death or a life with Demetrius. Lysander and Hermia, of course upset by this news, plan to leave Athens and marry in another land, "I have a widow aunt.... from Athens is her house remote seven leagues; there, gentle Hermia, may I marry thee, and to that place the sharp Athenian law cannot pursue us." (Act I, scene i) They plan to meet the next night in the woods.
Another funny section in...