Shakespeare anticipates the Freudian concept of dreaming as the fulfillment of a selfish wish through the chaotic and mimetic desires of his characters in “A Night's Dream summer ". The play also uses a secondary meaning of the word “dream” – musicality – by exploiting the theater’s potential for sensory enchantment. Through this artificial recreation of the dream state, Shakespeare integrates into the dream the audience that the solipsistic characters have taken the risk of alienating. Ultimately, the play refutes a psychoanalytic interpretation by reminding the observer that dreams, like love, sometimes have “no substance” (IV.i.209) and lack logical motivation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay If the dreamer's goal is always the fulfillment of a wish, masked or not, as Freud argues, then the four lovers fit his theory perfectly. Shakespeare plays with the inconstancy of desire through the flower of Oberon's “love in idleness”, a symbol of debauched purity: “Before, white as milk; now, violet from the wound of love” (II.i.167). Puck's random "planting" of the juice in the lovers' eyes sets up a system of blind desire attachments. The gaze becomes the sole agent of desire, but it is a manipulated gaze that destroys reasoning - as Oberon cheerfully notes, Titania cannot even relegate herself to her own species: "The next thing she looks at when she wakes - / Whether on the lion, or bear, or wolf, or bull, / On an intrusive monkey, or on a busy monkey - / She will pursue him with the soul of love" (II.i.179-182 ). Laura Mulvey addresses the phallocentric roots of the gaze in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “The woman then appears in patriarchal culture as a signifier of the masculine other, linked by a symbolic order in which the man can live out his fantasies and his obsessions thanks to linguistic mastery. by imposing them on the silent image of the woman always attached to her place as bearer of meaning and not creator of meaning. » Titania and Oberon's quarrel over the changeling child follows Mulvey's second point about the male fear of castration and its relationship to the gaze: "The function of woman in the formation of the patriarchal unconscious is double: she first symbolizes the threat of castration by her real absence of a penis and then she thus raises her child in the symbolic." According to Mulvey, Titania "transforms her child into a signifier of her own desire to possess a penis", and Oberon tears off the symbolic phallus to retain his status as "Name of the Father and the Law". The tense and insulting greetings between Oberon and Titania are an example; Oberon describes her as “the proud Titania” (II.i.60), with a possible phallic pun on the obsolete meaning of “proud” as “Sensually excited; “swollen,” lascivious” (OED, 8), and Titania returns. the favor of the more direct “jealous Oberon” (II.i.61). Shakespeare apparently resists Mulvey's explanation by also granting Titania and the other women the power of the gaze, although to less dominant effect. As Helena laments, “We cannot fight for love as men can; / We should be wooed, and we were not made to woo” (II.i.241-242). Titania confuses the gaze, which makes her "eye captivated by the "form" of Bottom (III.i.123), with the deeper admiration that love provokes: "And thy fair virtue, the strength of thy virtue m 'necessarily moves / At first sight, to say, to swear, I love you' (III.i.124-125). His desire is not simply mimetic; it is a product of puppetry. Yet,she never renounces her maternal and adored instincts, even under the spell of his manipulated gaze, which implies a certain constancy in her desire: “Come and sit on this flowered bed, / While your lovely cheeks are shy, / And remain musk roses in your smooth and elegant head, / And kiss your beautiful and large ears, my sweet joy” (IV.i.1-4). Although the entire room is peppered with references to flowers, Titania's insistence on decorating her ersatz child with musk roses bifurcates her amorous instinct, suggesting that it comes from both the eros of sensual musk and the purity of white roses. More conventional forms of mimetic desire show in Helena's questioning the artifice of Hermia's control over Demetrius: "Oh, teach me what you look like and with what art / You influence the movement of Demetrius' heart » (II192-193). As the usually self-deprecating Helena concedes, her failure to seduce Demetrius has little to do with her appearance: "Thanks to Athens, I am considered as beautiful as she is." / But what about it? Demetrius doesn't think so. / He won't know what. everyone but him knows it” (I.ii.227). Love, and especially seduction, has little to do "with the eyes, but with the mind" (I.ii.234), and the edifying power of the imagination can elevate the physical stock and spiritual of someone: “Low and vile things, having no value”. quantity, / Love can be transposed into form and dignity” (I.ii.232-233). Shakespeare's inverted sentence construction repeats the process by which a person invents a substance from nothing. Mimetic desire, which operates within a system of artificiality and blindness and retains only traces of the original desire, is more like an attempt at self-validation through the eyes of another person. Indeed, Shakespeare exploits this selfish impulse of the dream by playing on the word “eye”. The eye has two additional and related functions beyond the channeling of the gaze: as a play on words on the personal pronoun and as a reflective surface in which the viewer can glory in his or her own image while being pinned by the supernatural force of the glance. Helena attributes Hermia's magnetism to the brilliance and celestial appeal of her eyes: "For she has blessed and attractive eyes. / How did her eyes become so bright?? / What wicked and concealed glass of my / Made me compare with the spherical eye of Hermia! (II.ii.97-98, 104-105) His concealed glass leads to a distortion of self-image that results in self-loathing: "I am your spaniel, and, Demtrius, / The more you beat me , I will flatter you. on you” (II.i.204-205). Demetrius, under the spell of love juice, later reverses the judgment of Helena's eyes in a passage that exaggerates the ideal over the real and continues the trope of brightness/whiteness as a reflective and selfish medium to through the imagery of snow: O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! To what, my love, shall I compare your eye? The crystal is muddy. Oh, how your ripe lips on display, these kissing cherries, grow tempting! This pure, frozen white – the snow of high Taurus, fanned by the east wind – turns into a raven When you raise your hand. O, let me kissThis pure white princess, this seal of happiness! (III.ii.138-145) Titania's surrogate love for Bottom, for which even he must admit she has "little reason" (III.i.126), is lightly mocked in a play on words shy of Shakespeare. In her order to Bottom, she begins by imposing submission and emphasizing her high rank: “Do not desire to leave this wood. / You will stay here, whether you like it or not. / I am a spirit without common rank: / Summer still weighs on my state” (III.i.134-137). Which is not obvious to an audience member butonly for the reader is that its first seven lines form an acrostic that reads: "OTIT-An-IA" (the fifth line includes both ?a' and ?n'). Although this cannot be presented as a mere coincidence, in conjunction with his egotistical speech, it does indeed seem like an onanist ode. But the ode, one of the most sonorous forms of poetry, partly meets the secondary definition of “dream”: “The sound of a musical instrument; music, minstrelsy, melody; noise, sound” (OED, 2). The language of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is as melodic as any play Shakespeare produced, and often the words consciously reproduce the thematic material, as when Oberon remembers in an alliterative, internally rhythmic manner : Do you remember once that I sat on a promontory, and I heard a mermaid on the back of a dolphin uttering a breath so sweet and harmonious that the rough sea became civil to her songAnd certain stars sprang madly from their spheresTo hear the music of the maid of the sea?(II.i.148-154)The slight phonic dissonance between pairs of words such as "since/once" and "on/a promontory", coupled with the delayed rhymes of "heard" and "mermaid" and the more conventional but still technically adroit alliteration of "s", produce in our ears an instrumental arrangement equal to the beauty of the music of the maid of the sea. The speech ends aptly on an interrogative question, so as to emphasize to the actor the vocal progression from the basis of the memory to the raising of the question. The relationship between dreams and music is explored in depth elsewhere; Lysander associates the inconstancy of love with the brevity of sound and image, which merge in the dream: “Making it momentary like a sound, / Swift as a shadow, short as any dream” (Ii143 -144). The music – “such music as Charmeth Sleep” (IV.i.80), as Titania defines it – explicitly encourages sleep and protects the dreamer, as the fairies sing in chorus to the recumbent Titania: “Philomel with melody, / Sings in our sweet lullaby; / Lullaby, lullaby, lullaby; / Never do harm / Neither charm nor charm / Come our beautiful night, with lullaby” (II.ii.13-19). Titania later satisfies Bottom's "good, reasonable musical ear" (IV.i.26) with rural music which, as Norton notes "continues during the following dialogue, rather than a separate dialogue". The overlay of background music over the ensuing dialogue between the lovers, which juxtaposes Titania's declarations of affection with Bottom's appetitive appeals, illustrates Shakespeare's expertise in dramaturgy which induces a similar range of emotions among the public. Titania's words alone produce pathos; coupled with Bottom's, bathos; and the addition of music arouses enchantment. This spellbinding mode of storytelling is what elevates “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” beyond mere farce. Nothing in the play can be taken literally - not because of deception, but because of the mysticism that envelops everything, as Hermia observes: "It seems to me that I see these things with one half-open eye , / When everything seems double” (IV.i.186). -187). Demetrius recognizes that consciousness is indistinct from unconsciousness: “It seems to me / That nevertheless we sleep, we dream” (IV.i.189-190). Surprisingly, it is Bottom who has the most "deep" thoughts about the adventures, to the extent that he recognizes his inability to understand them: "I have dreamed a dream beyond the mind of man to tell me what I was dreaming of. Man is nothing but an ass if he begins to explain this/dream" (IV.i.200-202). His stuttering attempts to grasp this ineffable concept push him to call on a writer to put his -.