A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play by William Shakespeare, which was believed to be written between 1590 and 1596. It depicts the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons. The adventures of four lively Athenian lovers and a group of actors are included, along with fairies that live in the forest in which most of the play is set. Act III is at the height of the excitement of this play, because Lysander has been affected by the fairy dust and no longer loves Hermia. Instead he is under the love spell for Helena. A passage in Act III, scene ii, lines 395-412 where a conversation between Puck and Oberon is going on, is a great example of Shakespeare's profound writing style. It holds many examples of figurative language, allusion, and sensory imagery.
Figurative language can be categorized into metaphors, similes, and personification. Metaphors and similes can be similar in the sense that they both compare two things to each other. The main difference is that a simile always uses two key words to compare the things, like and as. One of the lines near the end of the passage contains a simile. " I with the Morning's love have oft made sport, And like a forester, the grove may tread " (III, ii, 12-13). In this sentence the simile can be easily recognized by the key words, like a forester. The simile references a forester to make a comparison with the groves. Not only similes can be found in this passage, but metaphors too. An extended metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things that continues throughout a series of lines in a poem. In lines 4 through 9 an extended metaphor is used. The comparison is used between the ghosts and "damned spirits ", or those who committed suicide. Along with similes and metaphors, personification is also used in this passage. Personification is a figure of speech in which inanimate objects are endowed with human qualities or abilities.