قصة الكتاب :
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play in five acts that was written by William Shakespeare and first performed in the year 1596. It was published in 1600 in a quarto edition and is one of Shakespeare’s most loved and enjoyed plays. The plot is a comic fantasy where the characters belong both to the familiar human world and the fantasy world of fairies. The story lightly deals with the themes of love, both true and imagined, jealousy and marriage. The interplay of both worlds adds to the magical element of make believe that the readers/viewers are forced to believe in and engage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also labelled a comedy of errors, where slapstick and chaos contribute to the humour. It is divided into four plots and uses a play-within-a-play approach.\r\n
\r\nMost the story is set in the midst of a forest outside Athens, where the four main lovers come from. There are three groups of characters in the story. These include i) the human lovers viz. Demetrius, Helena, Hermia and Lysander ii) the fairies viz. Titania, Oberon, Puck and iii) the human actors Nick Bottom and Peter Quince. We witness all three groups of people in the story experience a similar sequence of events – a problem to start with, which gets worse through magic but ends up sorting itself out. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is mainly a story about love. In this story, love is displayed as a force that the characters cannot control, that gets worsened with the effects of the love potion that makes them literally slaves to the emotion. The act of ‘love at first sight’ is explored rather comically in the story but is also insightful. By bringing in the make-believe world that confuses the characters about who they are in love with and eliminating its effects to bring clarity in the end, Shakespeare also sends a message. That of understanding the difference between what’s real and what’s not when we talk of true love.\r\n
\r\nIn most Shakespearean dramas, there exists a very distinct setting. However, in this play Shakespeare mixes two very different mythological worlds, one that of pre-classical Greece and the other the world of the fairies, and make them talk to and engage with each other. What results is a unique and colourful plot, full of surprises, set in an ambiguous world that gives the entire story a dream-like feeling and its audience a dream-like experience. It has been widely performed across the world.\r\n