Midsummer Night's Dream is a play in which Shakespeare expressed a very interisting idea regarding everyone's lives. What is it? Is it love? No, I am not going to explain what is love for Shakespeare as we have talked a looooot about it while reviewing R&J. I will tell you some ideas I have about how Shakespeare related the concepts of LIFE and DREAM.
First of all, I will like to present to you a quote:In these words we are introduced to a perception of life that tells us we do not really exist because life is a dream and we are only part of the imagination, but.... Whose imagination? I will leave the question open as I cannot think about an answer right now.
Shakespeare, through Puck, shows us the spirit of the play, as the title is not only related to the time in which the action takes places, but it immerses us in the world of dreams. So that, we should think of life as a dream in which everything is possible, even the impossible -as Demetrius finally fell in love with Helena, something that at the beginning of the play we may think as irrational as he claims to be deeply in love with fair Hermia, or the Queen of the fairies falling in love with an ass- I think that Shakespeare is inviting us to dream and in that way we may accomplish something we never thought possible.
There is a famous singer -no longer with us, but worldwide known- that in a way agrees with Shakespeare ideas, this singer is John Lennon who said "I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?" and who knows... the door is always open to these kind of thoughts because nobody can prove it.
The theme of dreams and life connected has been worked in literature by an Spanish author named Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who wrote
"What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion.
a shadow, a fiction,
and the greatest good is mean;
for all life is a dream,
and dreams themselves are only dreams." (Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream)In this quote we can see that Calderón in a way agreed to Shakespeare thought about life being a dream presented in MND by Puck which makes us reflect on what is life for real. Are we living a life-long dream? What the author expressed profoundly was that dreams are only dreams, nothing else.
So, through Puck's last words the audience of MND questions their experience of life, the play was supposed to be a magical dream that the characters encountered in a night of summer, not any but the summer's equinox (the moon is related to magic experiences too). In chapter V, epilogue, we end up questioning about our own lives being a dream... as Puck says we just shared these people's magical dream, that ended in their real lives.
Edgard Allan Poe once said, "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream" so I invite you to think about this: You do not get harmed, hurted, or die in a dream -I mean for real- so that live taking risks in order to make your dreams your reality, live everyday without thinking about the negative side because at the end of the day what really matters is if your days are becoming true.
So, LET'S LIVE YOUR DREAM!
by a not-that-inspire Antonella Castro.
P.S. I hope you like it!
References:
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Comedy of A Midsummer-night's Dream. Ed, William. J, Rolfe. New York: American Book Company, 1903.
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. Life is a dream. London: Saville and Edwards Printers, 1856.
My dear Antonella,
ResponderEliminarThe last part of your post is really cheerful. I really liked your post, and I do tally with your idea that we need to follow our dreams to make them true. I think that if we, people, can think about something, we can reach it without any problem. That is why, we need to have faith that it is on our hand our destiny, and that it is up to us to have a successful one.