Shakespeare, a Midsummer Nights Dream

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How does Shakespeare use A Midsummer Night’s Dream to illustrate how love makes us do foolish things? A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare illustrates how love makes characters behave foolishly as well as revealing their folly through their dialogue, which creates the humour in the play. Shakespeare creates the sense that love (or infatuation) is an overriding emotion that controls how people themselves and others, thus making them blind to their imperfections. In Act 1 Scene 1, Hermia’s love for Lysander is so strong that she foolishly disobeys her father’s orders and agrees to elope with Lysander, in the hope that this will solve their problem; Egeus wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, not to fall in love with Lysander. Hermia states that Egeus, “That he hath turned a heaven unto a hell”, the use of juxtaposition of “heaven” and “hell” shows Hermia’s contrasting ideas of the court, because it can be paradise where they live and eat well but hell where they cannot act against the law and express their love . Also, Hermia’s character is showing her rebellious side, suggesting that she will do anything for love, even defying Egeus, her father and Theseus’ orders, which was to become a nun or be a virgin; this is subverting the norms of society in Shakespeare's time, women in that era were seen as vulnerable and submissive, which Hermia’s characters opposes to this stereotypical perception of women. Hermia elopes into the woods and this prepares the audience for the complication as she is entering the green world, because the green world is a place where characters can do anything and is without limits as the green world is full of unruliness and subversion. However, it is only temporary, and the characters will have to go back to where they came from. A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows the typical structure of a dramatic comedy because it contains the tripartite

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