Thursday, July 24, 2014

Other than the difficulty of love, what is one other major theme in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?

How about the theme of translation and transformation? The play is full of the idea that things change, that things change from one thing into another.


"Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated", Quince shouts to him after he's been transformed into a donkey by Puck. And, here's Helena, saying she wants to be transformed into Hermia in Act 1, Scene 1:



Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I'd give to be to you translated.



And in Helena's soliloquy, she argues that



Things base and vile, folding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.



The play makes this argument quite clear. The flower "love-in-idleness" transforms lover into hater, hater into lover, and eventually, lover back into what they were before. Love transforms.


The mechanicals play-within-a-play also depends on acting, which itself is a sort of transformation: one person (Bottom) becoming (Pyramus). Is there a moment, as is often claimed, at the end of the play where Flute believably becomes Thisbe?


Moreover, many directors (beginning with Brook in 1970) have decided that the play translates Theseus and Hippolyta into Oberon and Titania, and Philostrate into Puck. Perhaps the whole play is a sort of transformation...

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