A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM CONCEPTS SEEN IN ANCIENT GREEK MYTHOLOGY & SOCIOHISTORY Comedy; Use of chorus Greek concept

t GREEK VALUES IMMODERATION/REASON-LACK OF REASON, FATE, TRAGEDY Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet. Are of imagination all compact Appearances are deceiving. Again and againthanks in part to Puckish pranksreality wears a deceptive mask.

REFERENCES TO GODS
Diana (1. 1. 94): Roman name of Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt. Cupid (1. 1. 175): Roman name for the Greek god of love, Eros, who shot arrows at humans to wound them with love. Venus (1. 1. 177): Roman name for the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. She was the mother of Cupid. Dido (1. 1. 179): Dido is not referred to by name but by the designation Carthage queen, meaning she was the queen of the North African country of Carthage. She appears in Virgils great epic poem, The Aeneid. Dido falls desperately in love with The Aeneids main character, Aeneas, after he stops in Carthage on his way from Troy to Italy. But after he abandons her, she kills herself by falling on a sword. At sea on his ship, Aeneas can see Carthage glowing with the flames of Didos funeral pyre. Aeneas (1. 1. 180): See Dido, above. Ariadne (2. 1. 84): Daughter of King Minos of Crete. She gave Theseus a thread that enabled him to find his way out of the labyrinth, a maze constructed to house the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Neptune (2. 1. 131): Roman name of Poseidon, god of the sea. Apollo and Daphne (2. 1. 239): Apollogod of poetry, music, medicine, and the sunpursued the nymph Daphne, daughter of a river god. After she prayed for a way to escape Apollo, her father changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo later used the leaves of the laurel in wreaths with which victors of various contests were crowned. Hercules (4. 1.98): Greek demigod known for his feats of strength. Cadmus (4. 1.98): Son of the king of Phoenicia and founder of the Greek city of Thebes. Jove (5. 1. 181): One of two Roman names for Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods. The other Roman name is Jupiter.

ROMEO & JULIET

Shakespeare had the creative audacity to present the story of Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy in the same class as the tragedies of Ancient Greece. For openers, while Romeo and Juliet are scions of noble families, they are not royals. Given the age-long limitation of tragedy to the affairs of kings and queens, the notion that two upper-middle class youths could serve as the protagonist of a tragedy was outlandish to Elizabethan audiences. As the Prince says in the plays concluding couplet: "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo" (V.iii.309-310). The story is, in fact, sad; but in this, it manifests two further innovations. First, when Elizabethan audiences saw two young lovers on stage in opposition to resistant parents (usually fathers), they customarily assumed that love would triumph in a happy ending. In a sense, love does triumph, and there is a restoration of civil harmony in the play's final scene; but Romeo and Juliet, despite the youth of its title characters, ends badly. At the same time, while both characters have adolescent shortcomings, neither (nor both) of them have a classical tragic flaw. Their demise is the outcome of circumstance and Fortune. By way of addition, Romeo and Juliet is an experimental play in that it embodies forms and techniques that had not been used by playwrights in the past. The inclusion of two choral sonnets before Act I and Act II and, even more stunningly, of Romeo and Juliet's jointly composed sonnet in Act I, scene v (92-105) is a technical innovation with a supreme purpose. It sets Romeo and Juliet apart from a generally prosaic world, for the language that they exchange between each other possesses a lyrical quality that is noticeable (and deliberately) of a higher order than the rest of the play's text. As will be discussed further under the heading of Time, not only did Shakespeare telescope and compress events, Romeo and Juliet is self-consciously designed with a pace of events that takes on momentum as the lives of the lovers careen toward catastrophe.
The hero and heroine of a Tragedy will also at some point in the action defy authority, including the authority of the gods. This state of mind an exalted sort of pride is called Hubris, and creates in the audience a thrill of admiration mixed with concern. When Romeo shouts: Then I defy you stars! he is well on his hubristic way. Juliet only defies the authority of her parents, which in this case perhaps needs to be done, but nevertheless brings danger to all concerned. In a Tragedy, the hero or heroine often realizes, too late, how he or she has contributed to the fatal outcome. This acknowledgment is called Anagnorisis. Sometimes this moment of insight comes to a character other than the hero or heroine, and sometimes it comes only to the audience, which finally sees where all the pieces fit in. In Romeo and Juliet, it is the Friar who accepts and publicly acknowledges his part in the tragic outcome. He meant well by marrying Romeo to Juliet, but most certainly exceeded his authority when he performed this ceremony for a thirteen year old girl without her parents knowledge and

consent. His deception of Juliets parents continued when he gave Juliet a dangerous drug that mimicked death. And at the very end, when he might have stayed with Juliet in the tomb until she was persuaded to leave with him, he lost his nerve and fled. While watching a Tragedy, the audience feels apprehension, pity and fear. Apprehension is for the characters as they unknowingly rush towards their doom; pity is for the hero and heroines increasing isolation and pain; and a shudder of fear is for ourselves as we bear witness to the fragility of happiness and the ease with which disaster might come even to us. However, at the end of a Tragedy, when the worst has happened, and the hero and heroine have accepted their fate, the audience is drained of all emotion and feels calm. This emptying of painful emotion including the fears and anxieties the audience brought into the theatre - is called Catharsis, and explains why the ancient Greeks considered Tragedy to be a kind of therapy, beneficial to the audiences mental health. Olbos, the heros happy beginning, Hubris, the heros insolent pride, Phthonis, the jealousy of the gods, Ate, the gods warning the hero ignores and Nemesis, the vengeance of the god upon the hero. Moral of Story reflects Ancient Greek ideals; strong emotions such as love and hate are unreasonable and cause ultimatum; tragedy.