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A Midsummer Night's Dream

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Shakespeare’s use of comedy in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Shakespeare creates comedy in his play “A Midsummer Night’s dream” through the different scenarios in the play that take place which all have at least an element of humour. He creates comedy in a number of ways and it makes the play humorous as a whole. However he uses dark comedy in several scenes of the play.
Through the lovers; Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, we see humour in the way they have love triangles. The fact that Hermia and Lysander are in love, but Demetrius chases after Hermia and Helena chases after Demetrius is humorous itself. Shakespeare’s use of comedy in the love triangles is a form of comical relief to a certain extent. This is because as tension builds up between the lovers, in act 3 scene 2 both Lysander and Demetrius fall in love with Helena because of the “Love in idleness”, which ends up in a big argument with Hermia. The fact that each character does not know why the males suddenly love Helena makes the scene, which is supposed to be serious, humorous. Shakespeare uses dark humour, however, because it is meant to be a sad and confusing experience for Hermia and Helena, though it is fiendishly comical.
Furthermore, Shakespeare’s use of comedy between the lovers is not over done, like the mechanicals. The fact that both Lysander and Demetrius loved Hermia before the fairies interfered with the love triangles, shows more of the dark humour. Lysander used to think of Hermia as his “gentle Hermia” but because of the fairies, he called her nasty things like a “dwarf”, “bead”, “minimus of hindering knot-grass made” in act 3 scene 2, and this is has an underlying sense of comedy because it describes Hermia since she is ‘small’, although it is nasty, making the humour dark. However this dark humour is only seen in a few scenes, because the type of humour throughout the play is

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