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Comparative Study - A Midsummer Night's Dream


Ronald F. Miller, author of the critical essay, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of Things," also allegorises the fairies, but relates them to humans; "When the fairies come on stage [] their status is immediately called into question. Puck's first extended speech is full of what C.L Barber calls 'a conscious double vision:' 'The plain implication of the lines, though Puck speaks them, is that the Puck does not really exist-that he is a figment of the naive imagination, projected to motivate the little accidents of household live," (255).
             So, the influence of the fairies on the lives of humans is, according to this model, an allegory. However, according to Michael Taylor the fairies do not merely function in the play as an explanatory phenomenon for the human world and natural occurrences, but as characters equal in existence to the lovers. He elucidates this in the light of Titania's speech in act two, scene one in which she recites the effects her fight with Oberon has on the climate: "The function of such an extended treatment of the climate's inconsistency is to remind us that the effects of Titania's and Oberon's bickering are not confined to the metaphysical world. Their quarrel causes hardships in a world that is more real than fairy-land [] As a result of flooding, the corn has rotten, the fold stands empty, and only the crows are well-fed as they have surfeited on the flocks of sheep smitten with disease: this is the world of reality," (264).
             William E. Slights points out an inconsistency in this explanation: "Extending the indeterminacy of Titania's account of the grief caused by the struggle for custody of the changeling boy is the fact that no one else in the play seems to notice any bad weather. However much the Athenian lovers quarrel, not so much as a cloud emerges on their horizons," (264).
            


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