Oberon, the jungle king of spirits, loves to possess an adopted child,but Titania, his Queen, won’t let the boy go out of her sight. A quareel ensues between Oberon and Titania over the child. In the process oberon casts a spell upon Titania through the spirit puck, according to which Titania when she wakes up would fall in love with the object her eyes contact first – be it a beast or a demon.

Meanwhile , some village artisans are preparing a play in the jungle, which they would like to present at the wedding of Theseus, the duke of athens with Hypolita. puck out of sheer mischief turns one of the folk actors into an ass. Now Titania on waking up notices Bottom the ass fisrt and promptly falls in love with him. Later Oberon removes his spell from Titania and puck undoes the prank he had played with bottom. Finally the rustic players present at the Duke’s wedding their play – “pyramus and thisby” , much to the merriment of the court and of the audience in general.

This play was the adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Nights’ Dream”. All of Shakespeare was translated in almost all the major Indian languages during the 19th and early 20th centuriesies. But it was difficult to identify the play as belonging to Shakespeare at least in the parsi theatre translations in urdu. The names of characters were altered, the story was frequently distorted, and the plots used with both freely translated and improvised dialogues, Blank verse was not even introduced in Urdu and Hindi in thosese days.
Often the dialogue in prose had ryhmed words at the end of sentences to produce an effect. This manner of writing determined a style which verged on declamation and high flown demagogy and often down right sham. on the other hand, the more recent translations are by and large prosaic and in some cases excessively crude and half digested. Even translations in verse sometimes carry a lilt that is characteristic of over-sentimental poetry. Thus, they take the text farther away from the Shakespeare ethos.

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