Waking from their dream in the woods, the lovers cannot remember how they ended up together. Lysander cannot say where he is, showing the inadequacy of language to capture the magical experiences of the woods, just as Demetrius cannot understand what power melted his love for Hermia. Like love itself, the events of the previous evening occurred in a magical zone beyond the realm of human speech or of human understanding. Although Oberon told Puck to erase all their memories of the previous evening, the lovers retain some recollection of their night in the forest.
And the love spell is never removed from Demetrius' eyes, emphasizing that the walls separating reality and imagination, sleep and waking mesh to create a new version of reality. Demetrius is the sole character in the play who is punished, so it seems that hard-heartedness is the only unacceptable fault. The true lovers are rewarded, including Helena, who gets her man.
In describing his newly rekindled love for Helena, Demetrius uses much the same language Lysander used in Act III, Scene 1, again emphasizing the similarities between the two lovers. Like Lysander, Demetrius sees his love for Hermia as a remnant of childhood, an "idle gaud" he must discard as he enters adulthood.
Similarly, his love for Helena resides primarily in his eyes, of which she is the "object and pleasure" He adds the imagery of disease to Lysander's formula: His love of Hermia was a sickness that caused him to lose his appetite for his natural food. Now his true appetite, Helena, has been regained. His language shows the hunger, the lust, that underlies and accompanies romantic relationships.
Yet Helena is aware of the discrepancy in Demetrius' character, claiming he is her own, but not her own. Love is so much like a dream that she cannot believe in its reality, nor can any of the other lovers.
Waking from his adventures in the fairy realm, Bottom also has trouble differentiating reality and illusion. In a moment of wisdom, Bottom realizes that his dream is past the "wit of man to say what dream it was" ; as the lovers discovered earlier in this scene, dreams and visions are often untellable. Indeed, Bottom believes men are asses if they try to explain this dream — not every event of life is amenable to rational explanation, and some things exist most fully in the realm of the imagination.
According to Bottom, such visionary experiences cannot be comprehended by any of the human senses: not eyes, not ears, not hands, not tongues, not hearts. Only art, literature, can capture these magical, visionary experiences, so Bottom will have Peter Quince write a ballad about his night with the fairies. Bottom decides to title this piece "Bottom's Dream" because it has no bottom — all literature and art are bottomless, in that their meaning cannot be quantified, cannot be understood solely through the mechanisms of reason or logic.
Logging out You've been inactive for a while, logging you out in a few seconds I'm Still Here! W hy's T his F unny? The tradesmen meet in the woods to rehearse. Robin Goodfellow reports to Oberon about Titania and Bottom. When Demetrius enters wooing Hermia, Oberon discovers that Robin has anointed….
Oberon, watching them, tells Robin that Titania has given…. You can get your own copy of this text to keep. Download it to get the same great text as on this site, or purchase a full copy to get the text, plus explanatory notes, illustrations, and more. Synopsis: Titania and her attendants pamper Bottom, who falls asleep with her. Puck speaks a charm over Bottom to restore his normal head, and he follows after his master.
They are startled to find the Athenian youths sleeping in the glade. They wake them and demand their story, which the youths are only partly able to recall—to them, the previous night seems as insubstantial as a dream. All that is clear to them is that Demetrius and Helena love each other, as do Lysander and Hermia.
Theseus orders them to follow him to the temple for a great wedding feast. As they leave, Bottom wakes. He says that he has had a wondrous dream and that he will have Peter Quince write a ballad of his dream to perform at the end of their play. The first three serve respectively to introduce the characters, establish the comic situation, and develop the comedy; Act IV ends the conflict and leads to the happy ending in Act V.
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