A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Several of William Shakespeare’s plays are touted as among the best in the English language and in the Western literature. One of his critically acclaimed plays is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a romantic comedy. Through the years, this play had been widely performed all over the world.
Historians do not know for sure when this play was written. It was heavily speculated that this was written sometime between 1595 and 1596 for an aristocratic wedding, which was commonplace at that time. Some also speculated that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was written for the Queen of England as part of the celebration for the feast day of St. John.
The plot of this story centers on the escapades of four Athenian lovers, a band of amateur actors, and a fairy couple whose lives intermingled due to the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen. This play was originally set in the realm of Fairyland. It was noted that some of the elements of its plot and characters are based on earlier literature. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe, for example, which was performed by the amateur actors within the play, came from “Metamorphoses”, Ovid’s masterpiece. Similarly, Apuleius also based the transformation of Nick Bottom, one of the play’s characters, into an ass on “The Golden Ass”.
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