“the Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth” Problem-Solving in a Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Changeling
I. Introduction Comparing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Middleton’s The Changeling seems to be a very unusual topic for the first sight. The earlier is a festive merry comedy and the latter is said to be a revenge tragedy, moreover, is claimed to be a later transformation of Shakespeare’s Othello. Certainly, if we look at the structure of The Changeling on the surface we see a plot of a conventional drama of revenge, but as we observe closer it becomes evident that The Changeling lacks some of the significant features a tragedy has to retain. As far as the situation is concerned the plot could turn out to be a comedy. After some conflict and misunderstanding Beatrice and Alsemero could get married and live happily ever after, as it happened to the two couples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In fact in the latter the basic situation was even more complicated, Hermia’s father knew that she wanted to marry Lysander and he opposed to it, but in The Changeling the lovers did not really have an objection from the ‘paternal’ side. What are the differences then? How could Shakespeare write his merriest comedy from a situation that turned out to be a cruel revenge tragedy for Middleton? The first part of he answer definitely lies in the different periods they lived in. The Elizabethan and Jacobean age, although they seem to retain little difference for us, hold numerous significant contrasts. Their world picture and understanding life differed in a lot, and so did their dramatists and audiences. Considering the title, characters and the structure of he plays we cannot see outstanding differences between them. Both the titles have comic connotations, suggesting a happy ending to the audience. As for the characters, The Changeling lacks the tragic hero and more importantly the Machiavellian malcontent, which was necessary for a revenge tragedy. What we find instead are simple, everyday individuals who find themselves in a peculiar situation which they cannot
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