Comedy and the agency of the letter in a midsummer night's dream

This chapter gives a Lacanian reading of the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Part 1 looks at the structural Wiederholung underlying the comedy of the nocturnal world of the play, in the forests outside of Athens. Part 2 examines Puck's agency in light of Lacan's famous paper on "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious". We conclude with reflections on Lacan's gnomic comment that love is an essentially comic emotion, as this is reflected in the bard.