Theme Of Catcher In A Midsummer Night's Dream

WHEN A SPLIT-PERSONALITY DISORDER COMES IN HANDY William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that is set in Athens, containing characters with English names, and half of the story takes place in a forest filled with fairies. There is no single grounding to this story as it contains multiple narratives and through this, it questions the singularity of any entity. The characters of Puck/Robin Goodfellow and Francis Flute who plays Thisbe in Pyramus and Thisbe are foils to the search for a true identity, a theme that is revisited often in the play. One of the most noticeable features of both Puck and Francis Flute are the way they deliver their speeches. Flute’s speech is fragmented and involves a lot of questions and broken sentences:

Puck is portrayed as a character that is not careful enough while administering the love potion to the humans but who, on the other hand, does not mean any harm to the humans, even though he never apologises for his antics. The side of Robin Goodfellow also comes across in this scene because he is simply obeying Oberon’s orders: “On whose eyes I might approve / This flower’s force in stirring love.” (2.2.74-75). His speech is filled with visual imagery and puns on “eyes” which brings around the question of whether Puck really pays attention to detail. That he mistakes Demetrius for Lysander and comes to conclusions rather fast leads into whether he is also true to either facade of his character at any point in the play. The pun on “eye” comes into play here because it could be an indicator of Puck’s search within himself to discover his true identity. Since Oberon and Titania also play the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta respectively, Puck is the only purely magical being who has an important role in the play. So while Oberon and Titania have to deal with their human counterparts, Puck’s dual personality is set apart as something unique, though his other name Robin Goodfellow does sound ordinary and human. “Through the forest I have gone” (2.2.72) then

It heightens the magical quality, especially when Puck says “Through the forest I have gone” (2.2.72) because it sounds like the beginning of a story and appropriately so because this leads to all the action in the successive scenes of the play. Shakespeare gives Puck the freedom to freely transition between iambic and trochaic meters in his speeches and this is reflected in his nature of being a