A Midsummer Night’s Dream

AO2: Form and Structure

Critical view 1

Many genres are characterised by a particular shape of action. Most obvious, perhaps, is romantic comedy, which begins in discord and ends in accord […] The plots of many romantic comedies also briefly contain, and all suggest, a time of harmony before the disharmony. The feeling that there is a natural order of things to be returned to … Plays that work towards a happy final synthesis are said to have a comic structure.

• Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd: Studying Plays (2010)

Critical view 2

Beyond laughter and jesting, for both performers and audiences in the theatre, comedy exists as a narrative form or structure. This form is based on the expectation that the delightful temporary disorder of the tale will be resolved with reincorporation into normal society.• Penny Gay: The Cambridge Introduction to

Shakespeare’s Comedies (2008)

In very simple terms you could describe the basic phases of a dramatic comedy as:

• Harmony• Complication• Disorder or chaos• Resolution• Restoration

• a. A festival, carnival or party

• b. An argument• c. A marriage or marriages• d. A misunderstanding is

sorted out• e. A villainous character is

punished or expelled• f. A misunderstanding• g. A celebration• h. A legal order or decree

from someone in authority• i. Thwarted love• j. A journey to other spaces,

for example a forest or country house

• k. A journey back• l. A muddle• m. A character is recognised

for who he or she really is• n. A disguise is thrown off• o. A malicious trick• p. A character adopts a

disguise• q. Disruptive or rebellious

behaviour• r. Characters are reconciled• s. A new arrival• t. Someone challenges

authority• u. A separation

Applying the model

• We’re now going to watch a short, animated version of the play.

• See if you can identify the five different phases of this structural model.

• Mark them onto the bullet-pointed summary.

How well does A Midsummer Night’s Dream map on to the model? For example:• – does it follow, or deviate from the same basic

movement• – are the phases distributed equally, occupying

the same amount of dramatic time,• or do one or two of the phases dominate the

play?• What does this reveal to you about the shape

and movement of your play?

Plots, sub-plots, prologues and epilogues

• In thinking about the overall shape of the play, you may well have noticed that once you go beyond the big picture, the structure of a Shakespeare comedy can look very complex.

• The critic Susan Snyder comments that in a Shakespeare comedy:

Another decided preference is for the plural. Plotting is typically multiple, including frames and inductions as well as subsidiary actions, and tone often varies accordingly.

Some of the features of a play’s internal structure are:• – A sub-plot – a secondary plot which might mirror, reflect or comment upon the

themes of the main plot, possibly in a comic way. In some cases the action of the sub-plot also has a direct effect on the main plot.

• – Multiple plot lines – several parallel or interweaving plots.• – A prologue – before the play begins, a speech which might give some background

information, introduce the context for the action of the play, or even suggest that what you are about to see is a play.

• – An epilogue – a speech, rhyme or song, after the main action of the play has been concluded which might comment on the play, often with a character speaking directly to the audience. It can impose a sense of closure – which may sometimes feel at odds with the events at the end of the main play.

• – A frame – a prologue and epilogue can form a ‘frame’ to the main action, commenting on the events of the play, distancing it, breaking the illusion that this is real life by drawing attention to its construction.

• – Plays within plays – plays put on by characters, which might, like a sub-plot, comment on the main action of the play.

Which of these are present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Plenary: critical comments on structure

So we’ve experienced the discords of love and the discords of the forest and now we need to find concord; we need to put things back together. We need to get ready for the Shakespearean comedy’s happy ending. So I want to ask how happy are those endings? How satisfying do we find the end of a Shakespearean comedy? We might arrive somewhere at the end of a Shakespearean comedy that we’re not necessarily happy about, that there’s a kind of comic movement that brings us – usually – towards a wedding, that might, in a sense, feel slightly constraining, that might force us, perhaps, against our wishes, to tidy up, to clean up and to make concord of this discord. ‘Jack shall have Jill’ says Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘Nought shall go ill; the man shall have his mare again. And ‘All shall be well.’ On one level we can just be cheerful at that quote, we can leave the theatre thinking, great – ‘Jack shall have Jill’, ‘All shall be well.’ Wonderful. But there’s a kind of insistence too,in Puck’s ‘Jack shall have Jill.’ ‘Nought shall go ill.’ ‘All shall be well.’ ‘The man shall have his mare’ – a slightly problematic way of phrasing things. You feel that people, perhaps, are being forced or pushed – they shall do this – into those happy endings. And often, I think, we’re left with a kind of fault line, a crack, a little moment of discord, an uncertainty at the end of a Shakespearean comedy, that makes us question the completion and the unity and the harmony of the conclusion.• Dr Eric Langley: EMC interview (2012)

We might describe the standard comedy this way: there is some family tension; that tension is complicated almost to the point of catastrophe; the tension is resolved, almost always with marriage(s) and, often, with other kinds of familial reconciliation. At the conclusion of these plays, marriage is celebrated, as is the family as a whole, not just as a ‘personal’ event, but as a social occasion. In other words, marriage, in these typically complicated plots, is often entangled in social or moral considerations affecting society as a whole. Put briefly, we might say that comedy traces the movement from distress to happiness, from ‘bad’ to ‘good’.• The University of Vermont

http://www.uvm.edu/~lschnell/engs135/comedy.htm