Mixture Of Tragedy And Comedy In A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare is known to have produced a lot of work. His plays are shared into four main sections which are histories, tragedies, comedies and romances. A Midsummer Night's Dream can be considered as a Comedy although it does have some elements of the tragedy's genre especially in the play within the play in Act V. So we are first going to study how tragedy and comedy are exploited throughout the first fourth act and then we will particularly focus on the fifht act, especially the play within the play.
The mixture of tragedy and comedy in a Midsummer Night's Dream is not instantly obvious. A first reading of this play gives us the impression to have read a delightful creation, full of events but by reading it once again we can see that there are a lot of tragic themes such as obedience, cruaulty, and conflicts. But in fact it is a comedy for us and not for the characters. They have a partial view of what happened to them: for example they cannot see the fairies. We laugh at the embarassment produced by those situations, I quote in Act II Scene 1 line 185-187 Oberon "But who comes here? I am invisible, And I will overhear their conference". Nevertheless we cannot say that we are laughing at characteres but at the human feelings in general; we are laughing at human passion. Because what is comic for us is not comic at all for the characters, we can see it with the law of athens which is going to kill Hermia if she does not obey his father
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