A midsummer night's dream
6172 mots
25 pages
MIDSUMMERNIGHT’S DREAMAN INTRODUCTION
For a French student, mentioning any of the great plays of the classical tradition brings up their strong dependence upon the famous rule of the three unities : a play should consist of a single action or plot, unfolding in one day in a single place. Unity of action, unity of time, unity of place. When we study a play by Shakespeare – or any other playwright in the English tradition, we should bear in mind that it works according to principles that are poles apart from the classical rules: the meaning of a play, and the pleasure we derive from it, on the contrary, rest upon the interaction between two or even more plots – e.g. a public plot and a private plot, a high-life plot with a romantic atmosphere and a low-life plot with its comic or farcical elements, etc. – with an abrupt alternation of scenes set in different places at different times, with a time-scheme that is hardly ever the time of clocks and calendars, with parallel plots not always unfolding at the same speed and yet, so to speak, miraculously starting and ending simultaneously.
Most often, we may expect to find at least two plots in a play by Shakespeare, the main plot, and an minor plot or parallel plot, as we can see in Twelfth Night, with its ‘high-life plot’ (Orsino/Olivia/Viola/Sebastian) and its ‘low-life plot’ (Sir Toby et al. + Malvolio), As You Like It with its private, romantic plot (itself divided into several strands) and its public plot of usurpation, announcing the double (if at least double!) plot in Hamlet including a public and a private plots in which in one case Hamlet is the Prince seeking revenge on the usurper ‘King’ Claudius and spied upon by the Chancellor Polonius, and on the other hand, Hamlet is a fatherless son whose mother has married his uncle and who is in love with Polonius’ daughter Ophelia. It is the same character, but there are two plots; we might add another dual situation, in which Hamlet is the victim of a