Dreams

One of A Midsummer's Night Dream" most intriguing mythological perspectives is the play within a play within a play--and who knows, within a play, within a play, within a play. This device makes us question where fantasy ends and reality begins. Are we mortals not just on display for another divine audience? Puck's final speech breaks open the audience-actor divide even further. He says directly to the viewers, "If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended--that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear" (Act V.1, lines 415-18). The introduction asks whether "'shadows refers to the fairies or the actors? [...] Is the audience being addressed by 'Puck' or by the performer who has just finished enacting Puck? We have consented, for the previous two hours, to accept the stage action as reality, shadow as substance,. Can we be sure that the world we have agreed to think of as real is anything more than a platform constructed for heavenly mirth? Where does the stage end and the world begin?" (Complete Pelican Shakesp. pg. 255). The lines become blurred. The four levels (the mechanicals being the lowest) start to collapse into each other, and the world of dreaming and waking become skewed; it is entropy, the morph to chaos.

The wood is a place of magic, mystery, and love, ungoverned by patriarchy. There are no boundaries, no dividers, no lines, or fences, or roads, there is only the faeries. Titania, the mother goddess, and Oberon (presumably the dying-and-rising spirit), rule here. Every tree, every flower, every bush, shrub, and mushroom (especially the mushroom) is in its place--not a place defined by man, a perfect location just the same. The wood is holistic. A sense of the unconstrained cosmos, and that is why the bulk of the action is the forest.