Excellent point! That may be why it’s an audience favorite. It’s a fantasy, not bogged down in intricate political alliances. And who doesn’t like a tale involving wizards and sorcery?
It’s also a bit like Bottom and the Mechanicals (awesome band name there, no?) in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where they’re always breaking the fourth wall to reassure the perhaps less robust audience members that it’s all just pretend.
Indeed! That play doubled the idea of theatricality in life. The human couples laugh at the mechanicals’ play acting out romantic tragedy, but they’ve been the unwitting actors playing out the scenes staged by Oberon and Titania, whose meddling produces the ‘true love’ the humans experience. I hadn’t made that connection until I read your comment. Thanks!
I love this reading. I wonder if the fact that most of the story is sequel, as it were, makes this a particularly accessible play for newcomers to Shakespeare? It’s a complicated stew of characters and plots, but also, if one misses a line or two the plot such as it is, still intact. Thanks for that!
Excellent point! That may be why it’s an audience favorite. It’s a fantasy, not bogged down in intricate political alliances. And who doesn’t like a tale involving wizards and sorcery?
It’s also a bit like Bottom and the Mechanicals (awesome band name there, no?) in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where they’re always breaking the fourth wall to reassure the perhaps less robust audience members that it’s all just pretend.
Indeed! That play doubled the idea of theatricality in life. The human couples laugh at the mechanicals’ play acting out romantic tragedy, but they’ve been the unwitting actors playing out the scenes staged by Oberon and Titania, whose meddling produces the ‘true love’ the humans experience. I hadn’t made that connection until I read your comment. Thanks!
I love this reading. I wonder if the fact that most of the story is sequel, as it were, makes this a particularly accessible play for newcomers to Shakespeare? It’s a complicated stew of characters and plots, but also, if one misses a line or two the plot such as it is, still intact. Thanks for that!