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Alliteration
Explanation and Analysis:
In Act 5, Scene 1, Quince and the other players perform at the triple wedding. The recently betrothed lovers—Hippolyta and Theseus, Demetrius and Helena, and Lysander and Hermia—are gathered to witness the spectacle of the player’s performance. As he recites the prologue to the humorous play, Quince uses alliteration to expand upon the violence to follow. He says:
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.
Quince uses repeated /b/ sounds in this passage, but he also repeats the words themselves. The repetition of these violent images—which are accentuated by his use of the same hard consonants—parodies his speech. He sounds foolish as he tries to express the seriousness of the character Pyramus’s suicide. His recitation of the prologue makes it clear that the performance to follow will be just as nonsensical and silly as its opening language.
This use of alliteration serves both to make the players and their performance comical, but also to reference the purported seriousness of the lovers’ plight. The lovers have been subject to the meddling of the fairy world, and the results have been disastrous. Now that A Midsummer Night's Dream is nearly over, and the characters are happily united, this performance about Pyramus and Thisbe parallels their struggle against the obstacles that kept them apart. The performance therefore makes light of the lovers’ earlier conflict and allows them to laugh at their previous hardship. This alliteration is just one example of how their conflicts are exaggerated and parodied to comedic effect.
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