Dissension In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Dissension from Imitation: Assessing René Girard’s “Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

One observation René Girard brings up is a presence of two plays, or types of play, under the name of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Girard leads into main misconception readers, critics, and the audience usually have when reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They believe that the play is one of Shakespeare’s weakest due to their insistence on any text they read or any object in their environment must make sense by leading to a clear, nonnegotiable end and so dismiss events that do not fit into their knowledge of reality. Meanwhile, Girard claims this prevents this group from seeing the motives behind the character’s war-like actions.

There is always a “model” text that is copied by its pursuer/worshipper (193). Rather than the perceived possessor of the model, the rivals desire this and not the other pursuer, though they believe so. This is the influence that one person may have over others, in that they have affiliated themselves with the desired object, the model, as he observes, “It is Othello’s heroic language, the real object of fascination for Desdemona rather than Othello himself” (193). This is the dynamic of violence that the lovers naturalize unthinkingly as they clash. Besides this, however, Girard seems to take on a crusading role in his

When they wake up the next morning, they find themselves reconciled, neatly arranged this time in well assorted couples. Good weather is back, everything is in order once more. Degree is restored. Theseus appears on the scene. He and his future wife hear an account of the midsummer night, and it is for the duke to pronounce the final word, to draw the official conclusion of the whole episode in response to a slightly anxious question asked by