Ms. Quinson\'s Period 5 Blog 2008-09

Critical Lens Essay

Your Task: Write a critical lens essay in which you discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet and the above quotation. You must analyze the plays from the perspective of the statement that is provided for you in the “critical lens.” In your essay, be sure to:

• provide a valid interpretation of the statement
• agree or disagree with the statement as you have interpreted it
• support your opinion using specific references to both plays

Please type this assignment on the computer. Sign on under your name and password. Then open Word and type away!

Please save often onto your drive here on the network. When you are finished, please save your essay onto your web locker and turn it in to me on your web locker as well.

Remember to Save OFTEN! You don’t have to print your essay, but you do have to have it saved here, and turn it in on your weblocker in order to get credit!

Read the extract below, summarize it, explain what you think is the author’s most important point, and then explain why you do or do not agree with the author. Be sure, also, to comment on at least one other response in this thread.

E. K. CHAMBERS, Shakespeare: A Survey. London: Sidgwick, 1925.
[Bottom] is, with the possible exception of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the first of Shakespeare’s supreme comic creations.. .. From beginning to end of the play his absolute self-possession never for a moment fails him. He lords it over his fellow-actors, as though he, and not Quince, were poet and stage-manager in one; he accepts the amorous attentions of a queen with calm serenity as no more than might naturally have been expected; nor does he ever, either before or after his transformation, betray the slightest suspicion of the fact that he is after all only an ass.

Read the extract below, summarize it, explain what you think is the author’s most important point, and then explain why you do or do not agree with the author.    Be sure, also, to comment on at least one other response in this thread.

Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare and His Comedies. London: Methuen, 1957.

If one wished to describe the judgment which informs A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one might do so very simply: the play suggests that lovers, like lunatics, poets, and actors, have their own “truth” which is established as they see the beauty of their beloved, and that they are confident in this truth for, although it seems the “silliest stuff” to an outsider, to them it is quite reasonable; it also suggests that lovers, like actors, need, and sometimes ask for, our belief, and that this belief can only be given if we have the generosity and imagination to think “no worse of them than they of themselves.”

Discuss the dream imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  What is Shakespeare saying about dreams and their relationship to reality?

What mistake has happened? Why is Titania asking her fairies to wait on Bottom? What is Bottom dressed as? Why is this funny? What is Shakespeare saying about the folly of love?  How is this message different from or similar to his message about romantic love in Romeo and Juliet?

Shakespeare did not leave us explicit stage directions with his plays, but obviously, they are scripts to be performed, not merely academic texts to be read.  Think carefully not only about the words spoken in Act II, scene ii of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also about the staging thereof.  Write a response describing movements or stage directions you think would be appropriate for this scene.  Make sure you comment on at least one other classmates response in this thread as well.

Describe Oberon and Titania both physically and psychologically. What are they fighting about?   Do they remind of any other people or characters you have met either in real life or in books? 

Shakespeare treats many of the same ideas, themes, and motifs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he addressed in Romeo and Juliet.  What similarities do you see?  What differences or new lessons about love can we learn from this Shakespeare play, based on what we have read so far?