Instructions
Please choose any ONE of the following questions and write an essay
Make sure to check for grammar and organization, and give direct quotes from the text and the film.
1. Write an essay describing the structure of the play that moves from the external world of the city, daylight, reason, and waking time to the internal world of the woods, unreason, night, sleep, and dream time. When everybody returns from the center of the circle to the periphery, harsh patriarchal rules and rigid notions get softened and all ends in matrimonial merriment. How does this circular structure support the theme of the play?
2. Act V opens with one of the most famous of Shakespeare’s lines spoken by Theseus: “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,/Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend/More than cool reason ever comprehends./The lunatic, the lover and the poet/Are of imagination all compact….” Thinking about the play as a whole and focusing on the meaning of this section, write about the relationship between madness, imagination, love, and poetry.
3. Why does Shakespeare give the last lines to Puck? Is this impish/mischievous Puck a kind of “poet”/ “creator”/ “god”/ “director” of a film who gives all of us “airy nothings” shapes, local habitations, and names to play temporarily on the stage of life and vanish? Thinking about life, reality, sleep, and dreams write an essay examining how the play blurs the lines between them.
4. Write an essay about the two sets of Athenian lovers and show how the play gently pokes fun at the idea of love, its immaturity, and vacillations even when the playwright seems to support the individual right to assert one’s freedom to choose one’s mate.