Puck, trickster sprite and curator of chaos, delivers this monologue to bring A Midsummer Nights Dream to an end. Through this speech, peppered with a lexicon of dreamlike images, Puck has successfully denied the audience catharsis, through forcing upon the play an entirely new tone. Every ‘vision’, every ‘shadow’ - every touch of magic - is explained away by ‘slumber’. Thus, if one believes the ‘honest puck’, that the entire play has indeed been the fictitious outcome of a ‘slumber[ing]’ audience, one cannot ignore the metatheatrical undertones of this assumption. Metatheatre - through the breaking down and staring straight through the ‘fourth wall’ - not-so-subtly reminds the audience that what they are watching is fictitious, that the …show more content…
The title of the play itself sets this tone from the outset, that subconsciously, even before any obvious metatheatricality has occurred, the piece will be alternating between a fictional and a tangible reality – a fictional fantasy within a fictional piece. This unconventional playwriting is maintained throughout, and is particularly notable in the last act. When Peter Quince and his cohort are performing their play, other characters make artistic criticisms about their performance, noting how Quince ‘does not stand upon his points’, a reference to persistent malapropism -‘points’ being a euphemism for punctuation- and sloppy syntax within his delivery. This serves as another example of how Shakespeare breaks conventional boundaries, players criticising players on their delivery of a fictional play within a fictional play, ensures the tone is self aware and full of very sharp wit. Shakespeare finds a divide between the world of the play, a metatheatrical existence full of frivolous paradox, and the concrete world of reality, a world that exists to observe his fictional world, and succeeds to draw