ABSTRACT
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was probably written during the same two years as Romeo and Juliet and offers another exploration of the themes of love and marriage, a comedy to match the tragedy. Scholars suggest that the two plays were often performed close on each others’ heels. Subsequent to the scientific revolution, psychoanalysis has tried to reclaim these “irrational” spaces for rational understanding, seeing in the representations of dreams, and within play in the psychoanalysis of children, traces of an inner world of experience that was in early modern times less sharply demarcated from the “real world”. The battle between Oberon and Titania has much more hanging on it than the everyday family events it chronicles, for the falling-out of the Fairy King and Queen affects the lives of all the mortals in the enchanted wood. The entrancing beauty of Titania and her fairies is counterposed to the good-hearted and friendly amazement of Bottom.
