Faires and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream

The purpose of this research is to examine William Shakespeare's use of fairies and magic in his play "A Midsummer Night's Dream." A sketch of the pre-Shakespearean history of fairies will be followed by an exploration of their structural and dramatic role in the play.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is Shakespeare's purest and most lyrical comedy. Potential issues of conflict, such as politics, marital discord and power seeking, so predominant in later plays, are here merely the temporary devices that serve to shuffle forward the gossamer lightness of the action. In fact, the play has only a passing touch with reality of any kind, dwelling instead almost its entire airy length in a kind of fitful dream

of love and illusion. It is this dialogue between love and illusion, bracketed by the rational reassurances of Theseus, ruler of Athens, which informs the play, and which gives to it the ethereal quality, which sets it apart from Shakespeare's other comedies. Here is a dream, presided over by invisible forces of mischief and goodwill, in which lovers experience all the vicissitudes of the tenuous relation between love and reason.

This unsure relation of what Egeus call "duty and desire" (I, i, 127) forms a central concern of the play. It is pointed up from the outset when Hermia's father appeals to Thesus to overrule his daughter's emotion in the name of the laws of the state (Fisher 308). Reluctantly, the Duke of Athens agrees, and commands Hermia to marry the love-struck Deme

hical and local references. (The fairies) are a curious mixture of wood spirits and househol gods, pagan dieties and Local pixies. They inhabit the environs of Athens . . . but they are clearly . . . detectably English in character and habit (Young 26). For the most part, they "ere derived by Shakespeare from Lyly's "Endimion", but embued by him with a pure lightness and a positive operation whose invisible presence enables us to view with irony fully seven of the play's nine scenes (Brooks, Ed. Introduction to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" cx). In every case but one, when Puck anoints the wrong Athenian, the fairies have the advantage over the mortals whom they observe, and whose behavior they influence. These fairies control not only the actions of men, but the elements as well, and the quarrel between their rulers causes storms and disturbances in Nature. These discordant effects of fantasy out of balance are analogous to the discord, which Theseus' bloodless dictate has threatened, and the suggestion is that only a blending of the two can achieve real peace and order. It is in this spirit that Shakespeare has so woven together classical and Elizabethan strains in his characters. Potentially in each, the inhabitants of the

Category: Literature - F