The Relation of a Midsummer Night’s Dream to Romeo and Juliet

1. * What, historically, have been Apple’s competitive advantages? Apple’s mission is to make products that were cutting edge, designed beautifully, and easy to use. They have been able to keep this competitive advantage not only by relying on its own proprietary designs but also by refusing to license their hardware to third parties. They tend to be a leader in new technologies such as the first desktop solution, mp3 player, and touch screen cell phone. Jobs believed deeply in focus while the previous CEOs sought to broaden Apple’s products. Apple had one of the narrowest product lines of any company of comparable size. Jobs also believed in extreme practices of secrecy, “closed door policy” in which key cards accessed only certain areas and dummy positions for new hires until they could be trusted. Jobs wanted Apple to be a cultural force.

2. * How sustainable is Apple’s competitive position in PCs, MP3 players, and smartphones? PCs: Looking back on how the PC industry developed, Apple was the original innovator, but they became overshadowed by IBM and Microsoft who would sell their rights to manufactures who could make a cheaper and almost comparable device to Apple. As we have seen in the past few years, Apple has been able to cash in on developing new technologies before anyone else has. Jobs’ idea of creating a digital hub allows him to monopolize the consumers experience because all devices such as the iPod and iPad, which are highly sought after, can only be used if you purchase add-on through Apples store. Apple also has made their PC’s more compatible with other PC’s by working with Microsoft and providing the capability to use applications such as Microsoft Office, which is the most widely used creation software. They also cooperated with Intel which allowed them to make their computers faster and more energy efficient. I believe that Apple’s competitive position is sustainable as long as they continue to come up with products that are cutting edge and customers are forced to buy them first from Apple if they want to get their hands on the latest and greatest technologies.

MP3 players: When apple came out with the iPod in 2001 they secured a position in the MP3 market that no other competitor could match. The quality and capability of the iPod surpassed that of its competitors and Apple soon came out with new generations that out performed its previous model. By 2010 Apple held more than 70% of the MP3 market. Apple also introduced iTunes which allows users to purchase and save their music in any computer they choose and download to any Apple product. This is the largest music catalog available and is the catalyst to get customers to buy Apple products. They make hardly any money on the music, but people will purchase the Apple products to have the whole experience. Considering these facts and the reality that Apple has developed other products such as the iPhone and iPad which allow you to use the same music interface and store, they will continue to be the leader in MP3 players.

Smartphone: With the problems that were created for Apple with the availability of free listening on sites like Pandora and Spotify, Apple had to figure out how to get customers to still use iTunes. With the invention of the iPhone in 2007, there were able to not only partly address that issue, but also introduce a product into the industry that was completely different and could offer capabilities that no other phone could. Even with all this to offer there were some draw backs. The first iPhone model was limited to a single network that did not always have the best service, bad battery life, and did not support flash technology. They were able to capture over 14% of the smart phone market and introduced the Apple App Store which would bring in even more revenue and benefits to customers which would convince them to buy the iPhone. Overall people still continue to purchase the iPhone and there seems to be a sort of “following” for Apple created products, so I do not think that Apple will have a problem with maintaining a position in the smart phone market. 3. What are Apple’s long-term prospects for the iPad?

The iPad was designed to be a middle ground between the smart phone and laptop. Some thought that the iPad would be a replacement for the Kindle fire but that was never Jobs intention. Eventually Jobs thought that the iPad would kill the laptop market but my personal opinion is that it never will. The capabilities and design of the iPad does not always provide the same experience that a laptop does, so only time will tell where the iPad goes. 4. What advice would you offer the new CEO Tim Cook?

* Global expansion—-like open more stores worldwide
* For iPhone—open phones to every carrier
* Develop its one-to-one apple program
* Pursue stronger strategic alliances with software companies

Various parallels in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream tend to support the theory that the two plays are closely related. It is the purpose of this paper to show that wherever parallels exist, the relationship is probably from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Romeo and Juliet. A close analysis of the spirit of the two plays, and of the different attitudes towards love and life that they present, leads us to the conclusion that A Midsummer

Night’s Dream is the natural reaction of Shakespeare’s mind from Romeo and Juliet.

It will be unnecessary in this paper to present all the evidence bearing on the dates of composition of the two plays. There can be little doubt that the first version of Romeo and Juliet appeared about 1591. The date of the first version of the Dream is more problematical. The only bit of external evidence is the mention of the play in Francis Meres’s2 Palladis Tamiain 1598, but the strongest bit of internal evidence-the supposed reference to the death of Robert Greene, in Act v, I, 52-3:

The thrice three Muses mourning for the death Of Learning, late deceased in beggary would fix the date at 1592-3.

Assuming, then, that the Dream was written soon, perhaps immediately, after Romeo and Juliet, let us see if a comparative study of the two plays will not support our hypothesis.

Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth, turn melancholy forth to funerals says Theseus in the first scene of the Dream, and later in the first scene of Act v:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.

These two speeches of Theseus, to whom Shakespeare has given much of his own clear eyed serenity and benignity, are, it seems to me, significant manifestations of the poet’s own mental attitude when he created the Dream. He has just finished a passionate, romantic tragedy of love; in this tragedy he has been led into somewhat excessive emotionalism-certainly more so than in any other play-his hero-lover has at times been “unseemly woman in a seeming man, and ill-beseeming beast in seeming both”; “cool reason,” serenity and poise have had no effect upon the “seething brain” of the lover. Now Shakespeare’s own brain is not normally a seething one, he “blood and judgment are well commingled”; true, he is not a Friar Laurence nor even a Theseus, but neither is he a Romeo. And now as he looks at his tragedy of love, what impression does make upon him?

Be it remembered that we are now dealing with the young man, Shakespeare, not with the man who, out of the storm and stress of his soul, evolved a Hamlet, and Othello, a Lear, or a Macbeth, but with the joyous, exuberant, deep-souled, clear-eyed poet of the early comedies. Is it not natural that to him, far more than to anyone else, the emotionalism and sentimentalism of his tragedy should seem a trifle exaggerated and ridiculous, and the tragic fate of the lovers morbidly gloomy? And so, shaking himself free of romantic ideals of love, he somewhat quizzically allies lovers, lunatics, and poets; shows us in Theseus and Hippolyta the calm and serene love of middle age; represents the young, romantic lovers (the men, at least) as taking themselves very seriously, but in reality being ruled entirely by he fairies, one minute suffering agonies of love for one woman, the next for another; love a mere madness, entirely under the control of the fairies (be it noted that the magic juice has permanent effect upon Demetrius); and at the beginning of the play strikes the keynote of it all:

Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth, turn melancholy forth.

The similarities between the situation at the beginning of the Dream and the main situation in Romeo and Juliet are obvious, and it seems far more probable that Shakespeare borrowed and condensed material from Romeo and Juliet, for mere mechanical purposes here, than that he developed a great tragic plot from this simple situation in which he does not seem to have been particularly interested. Detailed comparison of the two situations, giving support to this theory, follows.

Lysander is accused by Egeus, the father of his lady, Hermia, of making love much in Romeo”s manner this man hath bewitch’d the bosom of my child:

Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rimes, And interchanged love-tokens with my child: Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung4 Egeus is not unlike Capulet, and makes similar speeches, less brutal to be sure, for brutality would not sort with the nimble mirth of this comedy, but no less tyrannical. Compare, for example, Capulet’s words to Juliet (III.v.193-4) with Egeus’s to Hermia (I.i.42-4)

Capulet: An you be mine, I”ll give you to my friend An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets. and Egeus: As she is mine, I may dispose of her:

Which shall be either to this gentleman or to her death.

When Lysander and Hermia are left alone they indulge in a long and somewhat artificial complaint of love. Lysander would seem to have been reading Romeo and Juliet, or at least some similar tale, for he says:

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,  Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth and then (the first in the series of hindrances in the course of true love and evidently a reminiscence of Romeo and Juliet): for either it was different in blood.

Lysander proceeds, still keeping Romeo and Juliet in mind, and borrowing a very effective simile form Juliet:

Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; Brief as the lightning in thcollied night, That, ion a spleen, unflods both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’ The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.

Compare with this Romeo and Juliet,II.ii.117-120:

I have no joy of this contract tonight

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,

Too like the lighting, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say ‘It lightens.’

The only thing in Romeo and Juliet which seems to me clearly to be borrowed from the Dream is Mercutio’s description of Queen Mab. It has the exquisite delicacy and daintiness of the descriptive passages of the Dream, but it is not an integral part of Romeo and Juliet, and there is no particular reason why, in this play, Shakespeare should be thinking of fairies or fairy-land. Moreover, if he had already conceived and created Queen Mab when he wrote the Dream, would he not probably have made some reference to her in the fairy scenes of the latter? This is by no means, however, an unsurmountable difficulty in the establishment of our main thesis, for the first edition of Romeo and Juliet was published after the composition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the very episodic nature of the Queen Mab speech makes it quite possible that it was a late addition.

“The tedious, brief scene of Pyramus and Thisbe” is, I think, unquestionably a burlesque not only of the romantic tragedy of love in general, but of Romeo and Juliet in particular. The two catastrophes are almost identical, and it seems hardly probable that any dramatist would write his burlesque first and his serious play afterward. May it not be, also that “Wall” and “Moon” are the resultof Shakespeare’s own difficulties in presenting on the stage the great Balcony-scene in Romeo and Juliet?

There are many similarities of style and expression in the two plays which have no bearing upon our main point. For example, Helena’s description of love and its workings, at the end of Act I, sc.i, is in the same tone as Romeo’s definition of love (I.i.196-200); Hermia’s vow to Lysander (I.i.169-178, particularly 169-72) is an echo of Mercutio’s conjuration of Romeo (II.i.17-21); Bottom’s “O grim-looked night” (V.i.171-3) and the Nurse’s “O woeful day” (IV.v.49-54) are cut from the same piece. Another rather curious comparison, which is of no significance except as it illustrates a kind of youthful cleverness, is that of Quince’s prologue (V.i.108-117) where by refusing to “stand upon points” he says the exact opposite of what he means, and Juliet’s conscious and less artistic equivocation and ambiguity in her conversation with her mother about Tybalt and Romeo (III.v.84-103).

ENDNOTES

1. Brooke, Stopford. (1832-1916) Author of On Ten Plays of Shakespeare, which includes criticism and interpretation of William Shakespeare.

2. Francis Meres. Author of Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury, published in 1598.

3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream(I.i.13-14).

4. A Midsummer Night’s DreamA Midsummer Night’s Dream (I.i.132-4).

6. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I.i.141-9).