A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's more ambitious and fantastical plays. With over-arching plotlines, many interesting characters, magic, and odd creatures, Shakespeare really put a lot of imagination and hard work into ensuring A Midsummer Night's Dream could work as a play. The play has a few different themes going on at once, including but not necessarily limited to the idiocy of humanity and fiction versus reality. Scene III.1 embodies the two themes of the play, while also allowing Shakespeare the avenue to represent the arduous task of play-writing, while mocking those who feel they can make easy money doing something he excels at. The scene is quite important as it begins the introduction of the laborers/actors, who are effectively the idiots of the play, but also the idiots of humanity, who try to essentially fail at presenting a well thought out and …show more content…
Shakespeare uses the scene (as well as the various other scenes with the “actors”), in a similar way that he uses the introduction set-up/play in Taming of the Shrew, the play acts as a comparison to the actual play itself, providing a bit more of a straightforward theme. Of course, in A Midsummer Night's Dream the play is built into the play itself, which Shakespeare has done many times. This time however, the difference with the play and the actors is that they are completely incapable of putting on a good show. They blend in their own reality of what a show should contain, simplifying it down for the audience in an assumption that the audience; essentially the women in the audience; would need it that way. The players assume the viewers are not clever enough; and too fearful; to understand a man dressed as a lion is not a lion. The men themselves worry that the lion will cause mass