Resumo de A Midsummer Night?s Dream

A Midsummer Night?s Dream is one of Shakespeare?s early festive
comedies, written around 1595-6. Despite the many thematic references
to ?dreams? and the fantastic setting of the Athenian forest, the play
also contains a fair amount of commentary on Shakespeare?s contemporary
English world. The play?s title, for instance, refers to an English
holiday custom: on Midsummer Eve, or the night of the summer solstice
on June 23, English men and women would spend the night outdoors around
bonfires, telling supernatural tales of fairies and witchcraft. The
play not only suggests this holiday, but also refers to the rite of
May or maying ? a similar English tradition that took place on the
first night of May, when young men and women would engage in singing,
dancing (and possibly more amorous pursuits) in the woods outside their
towns. In other words, the play?s title and plot recall English
traditions in a way that suggests a combination of Halloween (Puck and
the fairies) and a big rave (with love-juice instead of Ecstasy). At
the time that the play was written, these traditions had come under
attack by the English Puritans, who thought that they were pagan
practices that gave the people too much opportunity for mischief. By
making the play have a happy ending after all its midsummer madness,
Shakespeare might seem to be defending such traditions against their
critics, suggesting that they are actually benign, or even desirable. It
is thought that Shakespeare wrote this play to be performed first at
the country house of a young nobleman, as part of his wedding
festivities. If this is true, A Midsummer Night?s Eve presents an
astonishingly complex set of self-referential scenes. When
Shakespeare?s company performed Act V, for instance, the noble men and
women in the first audience of the play would be watching other noble
men and women (Hippolyta, Theseus, Helena, Demetrius, Hermia, and
Lysander) doing on stage exactly what they themselves were doing in
real life: watching a play meant to entertain them at a wedding. One
of the guests at this noble wedding, according to the theory, was Queen
Elizabeth I of England ? and the play is full of references to her.
Both Hippolyta and Titania embody certain aspects of Elizabeth?s royal
mystique. Hippolyta, as the beautiful ?Amazon Queen,? recalls
Elizabeth?s reputation for military prowess, as well as her proud
refusal to take a husband. Perhaps the play?s notion of a marriage
between Hippolyta and Theseus was meant to refer to the League of
Amity signed between Elizabeth of England and the King of France at
the time that the play was written. Elizabeth also has much in common
with Titania, Queen of Fairies. Shakespeare represents Titania as a
great patroness of music, dancing, and the arts, as Elizabeth famously
attempted to be. Moreover, the very notion of a Fairy Queen refers
unmistakably to another famous work of the period, Edmund Spenser?s
epic, the Faerie Queene, intended as an elaborate celebration of
Elizabeth and her court. Shakespeare?s clearest allusion to
the royal member of his first audience, however, comes in Act II, Scene
1, when Oberon describes to Puck the fateful flower, love-in-idleness, that will produce the magic juice. According to the
Fairy King, one night in the woods Cupid, all armed, took aim at a fair vestal, thronèd by the west. His arrow missed, and pierced the
flower instead, while th?imperial vot?ress passèd on, / In maiden
meditation, fancy-free.? This is hardly a mere bit of poetic fancy, but
instead seems an elaborate compliment to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth
(vestal means virgin). Not only would Elizabeth avoid Cupid?s arrow
her entire life (she died proudly unmarried and without children), but
she also managed to escape a plotted assassination in 1594. When
Shakespeare was writing this play, then, a passage such as this once
would not only praise Elizabeth for her famous virginity, but would
also celebrate her recent miraculous escape from real physical harm.

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