A Midsummer Night's Dream Parody Analysis

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play written by the English playwright William Shakespeare on 1590-1596. Shakespeare's plays are known to revolve on 3 genres- comedy, tragedy, and history. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a tale that combines the genres of comedy, fantasy, and romance, which are the play’s ingredient to make it significant even until today. The writing style of the play is also deemed very impressive during the time of his people and also to us today. Aside from its genres and writing style, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is widely known for its use of parody and impersonation towards Shakespeare’s own works or to famous stories during his time.

“A parody is the imitation of a created work. A parody is not necessarily intended to ridicule, but it often does.” (Maeve Maddox, 2009) A Midsummer Night’s Dream is famous for including a ‘play within a play’ in its script. In the story, the characters ‘Mechanicals’ perform a play of Pyramus and Thisbe on a makeshift stage for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding. Similar to a parody is a travesty, but the difference is while parody is intentionally funny, travesty is unintentionally so. The Pyramus and Thisbe play is intended to be serious, but the …show more content…
Looking outside the script and just by watching the play, one would say that this is a travesty since the Pyramus and Thisbe play was not intended to be funny. But as