A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596)

First written to be performed as part of a wedding festivity

before being adapted for the public theatre, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream shows Shakespeare moving towards an ideal of
romantic comedy, a play about love because the theme of love
appears in each scene.
The chosen fragment is part of Act V, scene 1, where we can see
a play-within-a-play, a meta-theatre, who is used to represent, in
condensed form, many of the important ideas and themes of the
main plot, as the separation of lovers, the dream of Bottom, etc.
This play-within-a-play allows Shakespeare to comment on the
nature of art and theater, primarily through the laborer's own
confused belief that the audience won't be able to distinguish
between fiction and reality.
The prologue shows us the characters, it does not keep the
suspense, and we can still predict the end of the story of the two
personages, Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus and Thisbe are lovers
who, facing opposition from their parents, elope, just as Hermia
and Lysander do. So even as the lovers and Theseus make fun of
the laborers' ridiculous performance, the audience, which is
watching the lovers watch the laborers' play, is aware that the
lovers had been just as absurd.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is highly dramatic, with
suicides and tragically wasted love (themes that Shakespeare
takes up in Romeo and Juliet as well), but Flute’s portrayal of the
maiden Thisbe as well as the melodramatic and nonsensical
language of the play strips the performance of any seriousness or
profound meaning. Because the craftsmen are such bumbling
actors, their performance satirizes the melodramatic Athenian
lovers and gives the play a purely joyful, comedic ending.
Pyramus and Thisbe face parental disapproval in the play-within-
a-play, just as Hermia and Lysander do; the theme of romantic
confusion enhanced by the darkness of night is rehashed, as
Pyramus mistakenly believes that Thisbe has been killed by the
lion, just as the Athenian lovers experience intense misery
because of the mix-ups caused by the fairies’ (to be more
specific, Puck’s) meddling. The craftsmen’s play is, therefore, a
kind of symbol for A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself: a story
involving powerful emotions that is made hilarious by its comical
presentation.
The “tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisby”
is at the same time a funny parody of the cruder kinds of drama
still popular in Shakespeare’s day, a vehicle for further
developing Bottom’s character and a means of establishing the
relation of the different social groups to each other.

Thisby (jucată de Fluieraș) și Pyramus (jucat de Poponeț) își șoptesc dragostea printr-o crăpătură
dintr-un zid (jucat de Botișor). Cei doi își dau întâlnire la mormântul lui Ninny, dar un leu (jucat de
Blându’) o atacă pe Thisby. Vine Pyramus care-i găsește eșarfa, bănuiește că a fost omorâtă și se
sinucide. Sosește Thisby care-l găsește pe Pyramus mort și se sinucide și ea. După piesă, la miezul
nopții, toată lumea merge la culcare, apoi apar zânele și dansează.
O…..O…. –invocative O is specific for tragedy

In teatrul elizabetan se zicea ca trebuie sa auzi piesa de teatru,

nnu sa o vezi eg: I see a voice not I hear

Acesta opera nu respecta standardul vremii : - foloseste rima ci

nu Blank verse, - foloseste excesiv figure de stil ca aliteratia,
repetitia aceluiasi cuvant, - contine greseli de logica, - nu
pastreaza suspansul, - actorii se prezinta, la fel si leul, - actorii
dialogheaza cu spectatorii

Of the century

- Aliteratie exagerata - Aliterația constă în repetarea consoanelor sau silabelor inițiale