Compare Emma and MidsummerNight's Dream

More than a century between the English writers, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare has similar techniques in catching the readers’ interest. Obstacles are usually used by writers to stall or delay the occurrence of events. In the romantic literary works Emma by Jane Austen and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, the writers keep the readers’ interest by creating obstacles for the lovers to overcome through plot devices.
Austen creates a boundary by society and characters forbidding the love between the couple that they have to overcome. The English society during the early 1800s was very critical of matches made between lovers. (Weldon 36) Mrs. Churchill an upper class English woman refused her grandson, Frank Churchill to marry anyone below his station. This was never an obstacle until Frank met Jane Fairfax, an orphan raised Colonel Campbell, a man of middle-class stature. Despite disapproval from his grandmother, a secret engagement occurred betwe...