Role Of Fairies In A Midsummer Night's Dream
CLASSIFICATION Fairy characters are very important figures in Shakespeare’s comedy. Inhabitants of the play’s fairy world call themselves spirits, ghosts, or shadows, what makes their kind unclear and hard to define. The fairies of A Midsummer Night 's Dream are seen to be what Oberon calls them: " spirits of another sort." However, Shakespeare 's fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream match the category of trooping fairies. They seem to be elemental creatures, nature ones. The most frequent type of fairy around the world – forest fairies. They inhabit a moonlight forest were they love, fight, play and helpfully sort the poor young lovers out before sending them off, back to their own civilized world. Shakespeare’s fairies are night creatures and leave the outer world at sunrise: “And we fairies, that do run, / From the presence of the sun, / Following darkness like a dream” (Act V, scene I). Nocturnal hours traditionally were the ones …show more content…
The emphasizing of those features strongly influenced the image of the fairy tribe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it stays in a contradiction to fairy folk tradition in England. In folk tales beauty wasn’t presented as characteristic feature of fairy people. They were usually described as either similar to humans or weird deformed creatures.
In tradition numerous members of the fairy race were marked by certain abnormalities of their bodies – such as having one nostril, cow tails, or deer 's hooves. The ugliness of their children was the main cause of their custom of kidnapping human offspring. In some legends they were beautiful from the front, but hollow in the back. Most of them were rather personifications of imperfection. The delightful ones usually had evil intentions, so good appearance didn’t come together with kindness like Shakespeare tries to present in his
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