Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 24

MODERN AGE

SPRING 2016

discernible reason, despises Lysander. When Theseus, dour patriarch that he is, decides in favor of the father's power, the two lovers flee at dusk into the forest pursued not only by Demetrius but
also by Helena, Hermia's girlhood friend who once had Demetrius's love until he abandoned her in favor of Hermia.
The King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, are holding court in this wood and also waging their own marital battles.
Oberon's jester Puck has been sent to fetch a love potion so that
the King might use it on his obstreperous Queen, but the mischievous elf is not content until he also intervenes in the affairs of
the mortal lovers. After a series of confusions and misadventures
brought about by Puck's repeated use of the potion, at dawn the
lovers awaken with Lysander and Hermia back in love with one
another and Demetrius's affection returned to Helena. When a
hunting party led by Theseus finds them, he overrules Egeus, and
a triple wedding ensues.
Such is the frothy, farcical business of the first four acts. Act 5
consists of the entertainment held in honor of the marriages-a
thoroughly inept performance of a play within the play, Pyramis
and Thisbe, based on Ovid's quasi-tragic tale of thwarted lovers
who both end up committing suicide when their attempt to
escape unrelenting parents goes awry. The play is put on by a
group of Athenian tradesmen (a joiner, a weaver, a cobbler, and
so on), and Shakespeare makes it as farcical as possible and displays the aristocratic newlyweds in the audience mocking the
foolishness of the performance.
Thus Shakespeare anticipates Cervantes's metafiction with
metadrama: the audience has just witnessed the noble characters who deride the performance of the "mechanicals" acting out
their own roles in Shakespeare's play with absurd ineptitude, and
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover1
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover2
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Contents
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 2
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Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover3
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/isi/modernage_2018winter
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