Anything written by William Shakespeare is very confusing, but always an interesting read. Particularly confusing is his famous comedic play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This story is very confusing (Almost to the point of being soporific, and vapid. ); starting with the title, and going to the last word! After reading this play, the reader is more confused about what happened within its unwieldy covers than before he started! This book receives a red light due to these characteristics. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is just that, a dream, or is it? There are three main plots in the play.
The first and the most exercised plotline was that of four lovers who cannot seem to find the correct mate between them. Throughout the play the characters’ loves and hates are switched around numerous times while they are in fairyland, a place that they accidentally wandered into while traveling in the woods. The second plotline is that of the Fairy Queen and King. The Queen does not pay enough attention to the King, and he becomes jealous of a little servant boy of hers, whom she loves very much and is of importance to the king. The last and most comedic plotline is of four actors who are attempting to put on a play.
They mix up lines, roles, and words of their play in many ways and cause much laughter. The main theme of this play is how love can confuse people and make us do strange, stupid, or sometimes dangerous things for love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream receives a red light. This is not because it is a bad read, on the contrary, it has many good points. One of these good points is the way that the author makes his characters talk and socialize in a very realistic and authentic way. Another good quality is that the book is very funny in places. The worst about this play is how it was very hard to understand.
The character’s names were hard to pronounce and remember. There are many unnecessary characters, who make the book only more confusing. Another bad thing about this book is that little or no description of the scene is given, and the reader has no idea where the action is happening. Lastly, the characters are quite underdeveloped. They do not seem to have any direction or plans that they have for themselves, and this makes them seem fake and hollow. This book is very unique and different from most books that one would read on a regular basis. First of all, it is written as a play, which is unusual for readers in modern times.
Next, the way that the people talk is Elizabethan and hard to follow. It rhymes in strange ways in places, using contractions of words to create rhyming schemes. The book gives no description of local scenery, and this makes it harder to understand. Lastly, this play is very different from another one of Shakespeare’s most famous works, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet is a tragic story of how two lovers are torn apart, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a funny story of how love makes people crazy. All in all, William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a romantic comedy that is very, very hard to follow.
This book reverberates of confusion, and its logic is amorphous. It was a very good try on Shakespeare’s part, but he needed to put a little more effort into it. Perhaps Shakespeare was not as sedulous and erudite as some history and English teachers would like students to think. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream was to be graded on a curve against some of Shakespeare’s other works, it would be graded somewhere around a 40%. This book should not be one to rush out and buy, but it is one that should be read, or at least given a chance. This is a good book to borrow from a friend to read.
