Lysander follows soon after trying to pursue Helena. Demetrius then wakes up and falls in love with Helena, so that both men are telling her how much they love her. After having no one love her earlier in the play, Helena is outraged by this unexplainable change in their feelings. Then the men try to convince each other to go back to Hermia, whom they both wanted to marry in act 1.
Hermia comes to find Lysander saying that he wants nothing to do with her because he loves Helena. Incredibly hurt, Hermia does not understand why her love no longer wants to marry her even more confused by his insults as to her small stature.
The men decide they should fight to see who deserves Helena and they leave. When Hermia is along with Helena, she tries to seek answers from her friend, but Helena trusts no one any longer and leaves her. Oberon and Puck witness this debacle, and Oberon knows they need to set things right. He decides to cause a fog to come so that the four Athenians will lose track of each other. The group disperses, agreeing to meet in the woods the following night to rehearse their play.
The three main groups of characters are all vastly different from one another, and the styles, moods, and structures of their respective subplots also differ. Where the young lovers are graceful and well spoken—almost comically well suited to their roles as melodramatically passionate youths—the craftsmen often fumble their words and could not be less well suited for acting.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is highly dramatic, with suicides and tragically wasted love themes that Shakespeare takes up in Romeo and Juliet as well. Badly suited to their task and inexperienced, although endlessly well meaning, the craftsmen are sympathetic figures even when the audience laughs at them—a fact made explicit in Act V, when Theseus makes fun of their play even as he honors their effort.
For example, the play-within-the-play, "Pyramus and Thisbe," presents a story of misguided lovers, continuing the overall drama's obsession with love and, in particular, with the often crooked course of love, which, as Lysander proclaimed in the previous scene, never runs true.
Both recount the tragic fate of true lovers who kill themselves finding their mistresses seemingly dead. Pyramus kills himself when he thinks that Thisbe has been devoured by a lion, just as Romeo stabs himself after finding Juliet seemingly dead in the tomb of the Capulets. This tragic theme does not necessarily seem appropriate in a play that was supposedly written to be performed at a wedding celebration, but the tragedy here is tempered with mirth.
The inept attempts of the players transform Pyramus and Thisbe's sad story into a burlesque. Although Dream obviously makes reference to Pyramus and Thisbe and to numerous mythological stories, its plot is not based, like most of Shakespeare's other plays, on one particular primary source. Because the play was most likely written for a wedding celebration, that occasion provided all the authority the play required. Bottom is often considered to be one of the most exuberant characters in Shakespeare's work.
Although his egotism and lack of self-reflection have been criticized, Bottom's vitality makes him a favorite with theater-goers. In this scene, for example, his willingness to play any and all roles in the play shows his fearlessness, his eagerness to become a leader. Bottom's attractiveness lies not only in his often asinine personality, but in his clumsy command of language. Bottom's language is often paradoxical, as when he claims he would speak in a "monstrous little voice" if he had the role of Thisbe: Can a voice be simultaneously monstrous and little?
Somehow the audience believes that Bottom could achieve such a feat. In addition to paradox, Bottom's speech is also full of malapropisms incorrect usages of words : For example, he claims that he will "aggravate" his voice when he plays the role of the gentle lion when he really means "mitigate" or lower it. Similarly, he encourages the other players to rehearse "most obscenely," when he probably wants their practice to be "seemly.
To some, the misguided attempts of these lower-class actors could be viewed as "obscene" rather than seemly, and in his role as lion, Bottom would most likely be aggravating! Although Bottom is the locus of comedy in the play — he's a traditional Shakespearean clown — he also draws the audience's attention to serious themes, such as the relationship between reality and imagination. In preparing for the performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe," Bottom continually draws his fellow players' attention back to the question of the audience's gullibility: Will the ladies be upset when Pyramus kills himself; will they realize that the lion is not a lion but an actor?
To remedy the first problem, Bottom asks Quince to write a prologue, explaining Pyramus is not really dead, and that Pyramus is not, in fact, Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver.
In this instance, Bottom focuses the audience's attention on the difficulty of differentiating reality and perception; his solution suggests his belief that the players' acting will be too convincing, that they will fully realize the goal of theater. Similarly, to keep the ladies from being afraid of the lion, he suggests the actor playing the lion show half of his face and explain that he's really a man, not an animal.
This belief in the power of theater extends to his solutions for bringing moonshine and a wall into the play. In creating a wall for the set, he believes covering a man with plaster and some loam will sufficiently convince an audience.
Always ready to be surprised, to accept the world's wonder, Bottom believes his audience will be equally susceptible to the powers of art. Bottom's openness to the world's oddities extends to his visit to the fairy realm, which could be viewed as simply another fantasy, much like the theater.
0コメント