Shakespeare anticipates the Freudian concept of the dream as the fulfillment of selfish desires through the chaotic and mimetic desires of his characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The show also uses a secondary meaning of the word "dream" - musicality - exploiting the theatre's potential for sensory enchantment. Through this artificial recreation of the dream state, Shakespeare integrates the audience, whom the solipsistic characters ran the risk of alienating, into the dream. Ultimately, the work refutes a psychoanalytic interpretation by reminding the observer that dreams, just like love, sometimes "have no bottom" (IV.i.209) and lack logical motivation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay If the dreamer's goal is always wish fulfillment, disguised or not, as Freud claims, then the four lovers fit his theory perfectly. Shakespeare plays with the fickleness of desire through Oberon's flower of "love in idleness", a symbol of dissolute purity: "First, milky white; now, purple with love's wound" (II.i.167). Puck's casual "implantation" of the juice into the lovers' eyes creates a system of indiscriminate desire attachments. The gaze becomes the sole agent of desire, but it is a manipulated gaze that destroys reasoning - as Oberon cheerfully notes, Titania may not even relegate herself to her own species: "The next thing she will see when she wakes - / Let it be the lion, bear , O wolf, O bull, / On the scheming monkey, or on the busy monkey – / She will pursue him with the soul of love” (II.i.179-182). Laura Mulvey addresses the phallocentric roots of the gaze in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": "Woman is therefore found in patriarchal culture as a signifier of the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of the woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not creator of meaning." Titania and Oberon's spat over the shape-shifting child follows Mulvey's second point about the male fear of castration and its relation to the gaze: "Woman's function in the formation of the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: first, she symbolizes the threat of castration with its real absence of the penis and secondly thus educates his child to the symbolic." According to Mulvey, Titania "turns her son into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis" and Oberon snatches the symbolic phallus from her to maintain his status as "the Name of the Father and the Law." The tense and offensive greetings between Oberon and Titania are an example of this; Oberon refers to her as "proud Titania" (II.i.60), a possible phallic pun on the obsolete meaning of "proud" as "sensually excited; "swollen", lascivious" (OED, 8) , and Titania returns favor with the more direct "jealous Oberon" (II.i.61). Shakespeare apparently resists Mulvey's explanation by also giving Titania, and the other women, the power of the gaze, albeit to a less dominant effect. As Helen laments, "We cannot fight for love as men can; / We should be wooed, and we were not made to woo" (II.i.241-242). Titania confuses the gaze, which makes her "eye fascinated by" Bottom's "form" (III.i.123), with the deeper admiration that love provokes: "And your beautiful virtue, the strength of virtue must it move me / At first sight say, to swear, that I love you” (III.i.124-125). maternal instinctsand affectionate even under the spell of his manipulated gaze, implying a certain constancy in his desire: "Come, sit on this flowery bed, / While I your lovely cheeks grow shy, / And I hold musky roses in your smooth head and smooth, / And kiss thy fair and large ears, my sweet joy" (IV.i.1-4). Although the entire play is peppered with references to flowers, Titania's insistence on decorating her surrogate child with musky roses bifurcates her love instinct, suggesting that it derives from both the eros of sensual musk and the purity of white roses. More conventional forms of mimetic desire show themselves in Helena's questioning of the artifice of Hermia's hold on Demetrius: "Oh, teach me how you look and with what art / You control the movement of Demetrius' heart" (Ii192-193 ). As the generally self-deprecating Helena admits, her inability to entice Demetrius has little to do with her looks: "To Athens I am considered as beautiful as she is. / But what can I say? Demetrius thinks otherwise. / He will not know what everyone but him will they know" (I.ii.227). Love, and especially seduction, has little to do "with the eyes, but with the mind" (I.ii.234), and the edifying power of the imagination can elevate someone's physical and spiritual wealth: " Base and base things, that hold no quantity, / Love may transpose into form and dignity” (I.ii.232-233). Shakespeare's inverted sentence construction repeats the process by which a person invents substance from nothing Mimetic desire, which operates in a system of artificiality and blindness and retains only traces of the original desire, seems more like an attempt at self-validation through the eyes of another person. Indeed, Shakespeare exploits this selfish impulse of the dream on the word "eye". Helena attributes Hermia's magnetism to the brightness and celestial charm of her eyes: "For she has blessed and attractive eyes. / How is it that her eyes are so bright? ? / Which evil and dissembling glass of mine / Made me compare with the spherical eye of Hermia!" (II.ii.97-98, 104-105) His dissimulating glass leads to a distortion of self-image that results in self-loathing: "I am your spaniel, and, Demtrius, / The more you beat me, I will flatter myself over you” (II.i.204-205). Demetrius, under the spell of love juice, later reverses the judgment of Helen's eyes in a passage that exaggerates the ideal over the real and continues the trope of brightness/whiteness as a reflexive and selfish medium through the imagery of snow: O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! To what, my love, will I compare your eye? The crystal is muddy. Oh, how your lips grow ripe in the spectacle, those kissing, inviting cherries! That pure, frozen white - the snow of high Taurus blown by the east wind - turns into a crow when you raise your hand. Oh, let me kissThis princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!(III.ii.138-145)Titania's substitute love for Bottom, for which even he must admit he has "little reason" (III.i. 126), is slightly mocked in a shy Shakespearean play on words. In his order to Bottom, he begins by commanding submission and emphasizing his high rank: "Out of this wood wish not to go. / You will remain here, whether you will or not. / I am a spirit of no common rank: / L 'summer still tends to my state" (III.i.134-137). What is not apparent to the audience member but only to the reader is that its first seven lines form an acrostic that reads: "OTIT-An-IA" (the fifthline includes both ?a' and ?n'). While this cannot be passed off as a mere coincidence, together with his selfish speech it resembles an onanistic ode. But the ode, one of the most sonorous forms of poetry, meets part of the secondary definition of "dream": "The sound of a musical instrument; music, minstrel, melody; noise, sound" (OED, 2). The language of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is as melodic as any other play Shakespeare produced, and the words often self-consciously reproduce the thematic material, as when Oberon alliteratively and internally rhythmically recalls: Thou rememberest that once I I sat on a promontory, and heard a mermaid on the back of a dolphin utter a breath so sweet and harmonious that the troubled sea became civil to her songAnd certain stars leaped madly from their spheresTo hear the music of the sea maiden? (II .i.148-154)The slight phonic dissonance between word pairs like "from /once" and "on/ to promontory", along with the delayed rhyme of "heard" and "siren" and the more conventional but still alliteration technically proficient of the "s" throughout the piece, produce to our ears an instrumental arrangement equal to the beauty of the music of the maid of the sea. The speech ends appropriately with a question, so as to underline the actor's vocal progression from the basis of the memory to the elevation of the question. The relationship between dreams and music is explored elsewhere; Lysander associates the mutability of love with the brevity of sound and image, which merge in the dream: "Making it momentary as a sound, / Quick as a shadow, brief as any dream" (Ii143-144). Music – “such music as enchants sleep” (IV.i.80), as Titania defines it – explicitly encourages sleep and protects the dreamer, as the fairies sing in chorus to the lying Titania: “Philomela with melody, / Sing in our sweet lullaby; / Lullaby, lullaby; Titania later satisfies Bottom's "reasonably good musical ear" (IV.i.26) with rural music which, as Norton notes "continues throughout the next dialogue, rather than a separate dialogue." The layering of background music over the lovers' subsequent dialogue, which juxtaposes Titania's declarations of affection with Bottom's appetitive appeals, exemplifies Shakespeare's expertise on dramaturgy inducing a similar range of emotions in the audience. Only Titania's words produce pathos; coupled with that of Bottom, bathroom; and the addition of music is enchanting. This fascinating mode of storytelling is what elevates "A Midsummer Night's Dream" beyond simple farce. Nothing in the play can be taken at face value - not because of deception, but because of the mysticism that envelops everything, as Hermia observes: "I seem to see these things with a half-closed eye, / When everything seems double" (IV .i.186 -187). Demetrius agrees that consciousness has been indistinguishable from unconsciousness: "It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream" (IV.i.189-190). Surprisingly, it is Bottom who has the "deepest" thoughts about the adventures, as he acknowledges his inability to understand them: "I dreamed a dream beyond the wit of man to tell what/dream it was. Man is nothing but would be an ass if he started explaining this / dream" (IV.i.200-202). His stammering attempts to grasp the ineffable concept lead him to enlist a writer to put his dream on paper: "I thought I was - there's no man who can say what. / I thought I was, and I thought I had - but l 'man is nothing but / a patched fool if he will offer to say what I thought I had? / I'll make Peter Quince write / a ballad of this dream It will be called "Bottom's Dream", / for it has no bottom" (IV.i. 202). -204, 207-209). Bottom, the ham of the acting crew, is -.