"A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakespeare.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is just one of Shakespeare's many masterpieces. Even though we are not reading it in class, I found it necessary to conduct my analysis on this piece. Many have found its structure confusing, so I have set out to make sense of it all. I will provide you with a basic plot overview, the characters in the play, and finally I will generalize a theme that is set throughout most of the play.
Plot and Structure.
There are several emotional conflicts throughout the play, many of them involving love. The other plot / conflict would have to be the recreation of a masterpiece to be played before the king (thought out by Bottom and his "company"). The main conflict is complex, and pretty much bases itself on one thing, how to get everyone to live "happily ever after" after all of this mayhem goes around. The certain catastrophes involved add humor to the whole predicament, and none of the characters is more humorous to these predicaments than Puck (Robin Goodfellow), who I have chosen as the protagonist.
Puck is most simply categorized as a nymph or fairy. "It" causes this entire ruckus, and actually finds it to be quite appealing to its taste. If it were not for Puck's adventurous ways, the story would not come together at the end (all the problems are solved and we truly do get our happy conclusion). However, before everything is settled, there are crises at every corner you turn, making for a very comedic piece.
The play makes its structure around the unluckiness of Puck, and all it took for Puck was one mistake to screw everything up royally. Each incident from that initial mistake took its own course, growing naturally from the preceding event and all together, the events flowed into each other. All of the occurrences are used to initiate the storyline further, but the occurrences seem very unlikely to happen in some cases (a beautiful woman falling in love with "an ass".