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Does Shakespeare Use Turning Things Upside Down In A Midsummer Night's Dream

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Peculiar Love
What would William Shakespeare, or anyone’s scripts, be like without comedy? Comedy is used throughout literature to add an intriguing element to the content. Shakespeare uses multiple types of comedy including mistaken identities, intertwining plots, suspension of natural laws, turning things upside down, the element of marriage, and language. Shakespeare used his imagination and various types of comedy to keep an audience entertained, especially turning things upside down in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses turning things upside down to add new and twisting elements of plot to the literature, and assisting readers in deepening their understanding of the theme, plot, and characters of the play .
Turning things upside …show more content…

In the first act, Lysander and Hermia told Helena their plans to depart to the forest and elope since her father, Egeus, demands she marries Demetrius. Demetrius is in love with Hermia, while Helena is in love with him. Helena states to herself:
I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight:
Then to the wood will he to-morrow night
Pursue her; and for this intelligence
If I have thanks, it is a dear expense:
But herein mean I to enrich my pain,
To have his sight thither and back again (1.1.252-257). Hermia is proposing that she will tell Demetrius that Helena is running away tomorrow night and he will run after her. If he is grateful that she does this, it will be worth her pain in helping him pursue her. Helena telling Demetrius about Lysander and Hermia is a comedy of turning things upside down because a woman is chasing a man and his favor for her. In the Elizabethan era, it is the men who do the

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