Forest In A Midsummer Night's Dream

776 Words4 Pages

Dreams are wild, magical, and mysterious. The majority of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream is spent in a heavily wooded forest full of fairies and irrational young lovers, creating a night only fallible as a dream. The story contains a royal wedding about to take place and the young lovers Hermia and Lysander provoked to eloping because Hermia’s father will only let her marry Demetrius. Hermia’s best friend Helena, who loves Demetrius, tells Demetrius Hermia and Lysander’s plot to escape to the forest nearby so that she may follow him. Local townsmen also decide to meet in the forest to rehearse for a play to be performed at the royal wedding. After Shakespeare adds in the fairies and magic, this night in the forest becomes something the people involved can only believe to be dream. Using the dense forest, magical beings, and irrational young love, Shakespeare creates a night that makes the audience feel as if they had witnessed a wild dream.
Shakespeare uses the forest to make the night dream-like. To start off, the forest is so large that Lysander loses his way. This traps the four young Athenians there for the rest of the night. The forest’s darkness …show more content…

The dark, dense, and mysterious forest scenery creates a dreamlike setting for the nights events and characters. The fairies interactions with one another and interference with the Athenians also adds to this fairy-tale dream. The townsmen and the young lovers affected by the spell and potions believe the night’s events are too strange to be true. Surely a lowly Athenian could not have been doted on by a fairy queen while bearing a donkey head. Besides, a dream seems the only possible explanation for Lysander to not love Hermia and for Demetrius to not love Helena. In the case of this midsummer’s night, it seems that the events can only be explained as a