Where Puck is the Real Hero

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just to be clear--3 stars indicates how much I liked reading it. I'm not scoring Shakespeare or making any claims about this play's overall worth.

To me, it's amusing, but not that much fun.

Like everyone, I've absorbed bits and pieces of this story, catching a minute here and there of various productions on cable, seeing references in other books, and so on--and I kinda thought, based on that, that there would be more to it than there was. Nope. It's a very silly plot. Essentially, the fairies mess up everyone's love relationship--and then they fix it. After that, we watch the characters make fun of a lame play (within the play) performed by some workmen.

I get it, though, in a way. In its time, it might have killed. Mostly it's harmless fun with a happy ending, and it includes the finest Elizabethan equivalent of special effects, allowing common people to see and imagine fairies interacting with humans. That part is pure spectacle, and in a time and place where visual storytelling was limited, it was the most convincing and captivating available. It would have been pretty fun, I think.

But to a modern reader, there's not much plot. Not much of an arc. Except for Puck when he fixes his mistake, nobody in the story encounters a conflict that they work toward eliminating. We might have seen Helena woo Demetrius back with kindness or beautiful singing or some kind of trickery, but no. She complains and fusses, but that doesn't succeed at all. Likewise, the other complications that arise are not addressed by the characters themselves. Bottom's head of an ass, Titania's infatuation, and the weird love rectangle of Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius are all solved through deus ex machina. Or Puck ex machina. Nobody had to defeat Puck in a battle of wits to make him solve their problems; nobody captured him and forced him to do it. He just... did it.

Conflict solved. [Brushes hands.]

Anyway, not a great plot. On the plus side, it's pretty comprehensible, IMO. Depending on the staging, it still might be fun. Maybe I'll finally watch the movie.

View all my reviews