EVALUATING

Analyzing

Reviews from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night's_Dream

·      David Bevington argues that the play represents the dark side of love. He writes that the fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titania's eyes, forcing her to fall in love with an ass

·      Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, writes of the blurring of the identities of fantasy and reality in the play that make possible "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play".

·      Victor Kiernan, a Marxist scholar and historian, writes that it is for the greater sake of love that this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters are made to suffer accordingly: "It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to have dubious effects on its acolytes"

·      David Marshall, an aesthetics scholar and English Professor at the University of California – Santa Barbara, takes this theme to an even further conclusion, pointing out that the loss of identity is especially played out in the description of the mechanicals their assumption of other identities. In describing the occupations of the acting troupe, he writes, "Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered". In Marshall's opinion, this loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which Marshall points out may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinions on love and marriage.

·      There is a dispute over the scenario of the play as it is cited at first by Theseus that "four happy days bring in another moon", the wood episode then takes place at a night of no moon, but Lysander asserts that there will be so much light in the very night they will escape that dew on the grass will be shining like liquid pearls. Also, in the next scene Quince states that they will rehearse in moonlight, which creates a real confusion. It is possible that the Moon set during the night allowing Lysander to escape in the moonlight and for the actors to rehearse, then for the wood episode to occur without moonlight. Theseus's statement can mean four days until the next month.

OUR OPINION:

     When we began to watch the movie Mid-Summer Night Dream, I’m sad to say we weren’t that thrilled. While we watched it, the Shakespearean language of the era started to make sense. Although we did not understand a large majority of what we heard it made sense to us. We understood when people were fighting or when Shakespeare was trying to be funny. As we watched the movie you couldn’t not ask your self, “Why wont someone just translate it to the slang we use today?”. You come to the conclusion in your mind that taking that away would ruin the history and poeticnis of the play. I think we its astonishing how Shakespeare plays were written hundreds of years ago but to this day we still read them and practice them and even preform them. There are parts of history that can’t be taken away. As much as the world we know today changes every second there are some things that will always be part of our culture.