A Midsummer Night's Dream As A Comedy Analysis

Early Greek comedy was strongly contrasted to grandeur and gravity of the tragedy. Aristophanes, the Grand Master of Comedy, used different types of humor in his work, including farce, jokes with sexual connotation, satire and literary parody. Unlike tragedy, the storyline does not originate from traditional mythological heritage or legends, but is the product of the creative imagination of the writer, main topics including political and social satire. Over the centuries comedy was moving away from those topics, focusing on family issues - the nature of relationships and love complications in particular. Such a universal theme was destined to survive - indeed, it was traveling from Greece via Roman Empire, the rebirth of classical themes in

In this comedy, the complexity of dramatic plot was brought to virtuosity. It is composed of four interlaced stories about the wedding of the Athenian duke Theseus and the Amazon Queen Hippolyta, experiences of young Athenian lovers Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, fight between the fairy king Oberon and Queen Titania over a changeling child, and preparation of an amateur play about Pyramus and Thisbe (as well as the tragic love between Pyramus and Thisbe – the very content of this "drama within drama”). All these stories are interconnected in a seemingly easy and straightforward sequence of events by the omnipresent motive of love, which in one form or another, exhilarated or serene, comical or tragical, uplifting or down-to-earth, pervades the whole

Although it has been a subject of numerous critics and analyses, A Midnight Summer Dream is almost impossible to be critically analyzed, its beauty is omnipresent and can’t be overseen. It is a comedy of love, as Benedetto Croce indicates (Kennedy, 1999, p.386-387). William Hazlitt (1845) wrote „The reading of this play is like wandering in a groove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe sweetness-like odors thrown from beds of flowers” (p.87).

“In a play constructed along Shakespeare's lines (or nowadays in movie, novel, or short story) outward actions and their resulting incidents do indeed flow from the inward goals of character, but such goals are neither always in harmony with each other, nor with outward behaviour. Insofar as there are discrepancies characters become complex, of the kind that Forster calls "round," much more like ourselves or the people we know!” (Oatley, 2006,