One of the first things I thought of when I finished A Midsummer Night's Dream was its predictability. Shakespeare's dream vision represents the typical love story in which lovers must overcome obstacles before their relationships balance out in a logical, happy way. Although I occasionally tire of these cliche love stories, they generally bring a sense of enlightenment and thoughtful happiness to my life.

     I mostly like this play more than a lot of Shakespeare's others because of its genre--comedy. Frankly, it's amusing and entertaining. His history plays occasionally portray amusing situations or characters, like Falstaff, but this play is much more comedic throughout. The first situation to truly entertain me was the scene in which Oberon achieves his revenge on Titania and causes her to fall in love with Bottom, whose head Puck has turned into an ass. Not only is Titania's love for a donkey amusing, but Shakespeare's play on the word "ass" and the name "Bottom" is clearly hilarious.

      My first thought when reading the scene about the play that the commoners put on for the nobles was to relate it to Romeo and Juliet. To Shakespeare, the act of suicide for the sorrow of losing a lover seems to be one of the most romantic kinds of love for him. Also, Shakespeare seems to encourage many kinds of love--even love as a result of magic, as with Demetrius and Helena. He encourages marriage based on mutual love rather than law, as proven with Hermia's defiance fo her father's demands and her eventual wedding vows. Still, even though Shakespeare condones the eventual success in the pursuit of a lover, he includes many obstacles for the lovers to overcome. This theme of love and its difficulty is recurrent throughout his plays, especially A Midsummer Night's Dream. The characters must overcome the love potion and Puck's practical jokes to marry the characters they truly love. Oberon's love for the small Indian boy is not enough for him to take the boy away from Titannia. Similarlly, within the commoners' play, Pyramus and Thisbe face their parents' feud, which keeps them apart, and the wall, which physically keeps them apart and represents the obstacle that lovers must sometimes defeat to be together.