I've already covered the performance of Romeo and Juliet found within Hot Fuzz, but that was clearly intended for comic effect. The performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream that is featured towards the end of Dead Poets Society is far more poignant and bittersweet:
For those unfamiliar with the film (if there are such people in the world), Robert Sean Leonard's character Neil Perry desperately wishes to be an actor, but is told firmly by his father that he will be enrolling at Harvard to study medicine. Despite being expressly forbidden from doing so, Neil successfully auditions for the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Discovering Neil's secret, his father attends the performance, his emotions implacable. As the cast take their bows, Neil smiles proudly, with both him and the audience expecting the skill he displayed during the play to have moved his father to the point of being permitted to pursue a career as an actor. This is not the case, however, and the film departs from this expected narrative when Neil's father decides to enroll his son in military school to instill discipline in him. Unable to cope with the life his father wants for him, Neil commits suicide.
Director Peter Weir's depiction of A Midsummer Night's Dream in his film is indicative of how powerful Shakespeare can be at its best: wondrous, mysterious, playful and heartfelt. It is no surprise that Neil falls so deeply in love with acting through performing in the play, as it presents an entirely different world from his prim and proper prep school and the life of medical study that lies in his future. Ultimately, however, this fantasy becomes so important to him that he decides that he'd rather not live at all if he cannot achieve it.
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