A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare - Essay Example

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is still so popular today because it revels in the irrationality of human emotions. In a modern society, we are bombardedby facts that are provided for us by science. If you can’t prove it, then it doesn’t exist. This is a very useful way to think for the development of technology or creating a new medicine, but it is not how people really operate. When matters of the heart are concerned, people are incredibly irrational. This play has been described as silly and of little substance.

That is a very shallow, constructivist approach in thinking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What this play really taps into is the crazy, mixed-up emotions that make us all human. Who hasn’t, in the days when we were young, gone to bed seemingly in love with one person only to awake the next day and find strong emotions in our hearts for someone else? This is irrational, but being irrational and silly has its place within each of us. Few people will admit to being so linear and scientific as to deny their lack of rational control when it comes to love.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is so popular because it reminds us all of those days when we could be irrational and fantastic without feeling the least bit foolish. Like all good literature, I believe the play’s appeal also lies in the characters. Reading the play allows me to see a bit of my own silliness in the situations the characters find themselves. The fantasy of fairies and love potions and enchanted forests is so engrained in our culture that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is exactly the antidote many of need for the sterile scientific world in which we currently live.