A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Athens, the court of Duke Theseus, four days before his wedding to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. An angry father, Egeus, comes to the duke with a complaint against his daughter Hermia: he wants her to marry Demetrius, the man he has chosen; she wants Lysander, the man she loves. Theseus invokes the ancient Athenian law: by the duke’s wedding-day, Hermia must either obey her father, die for disobedience, or take a vow of perpetual chastity. Left alone, Hermia and Lysander resolve to elope; they will meet the next night in the wood outside Athens and flee to a wealthy aunt of Lysander’s, seven leagues away and beyond Athenian jurisdiction. Hermia’s friend Helena, who is hopelessly in love with Demetrius, learns of the plan and resolves to betray it to him — in the hope that he’ll at least follow her into the wood. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, six Athenian working men — the carpenter Quince, the weaver Bottom, the bellows-mender Flute, and others — meet to plan a play for the duke’s wedding: The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby. They agree to rehearse the next night, in the same wood, by moonlight.

That wood is the kingdom of the fairies. Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a changeling boy Titania refuses to give up. To punish her, Oberon sends his attendant Puck for a flower whose juice, dropped on a sleeping eye, makes the sleeper love the next living creature seen. Oberon plans to use it on Titania; pitying Helena, whom he overhears being scorned by Demetrius, he tells Puck to also anoint “the Athenian” he’ll find in the wood. Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius and anoints the wrong man; Lysander wakes, sees Helena, and abandons Hermia for her. Oberon, realising the error, drops the juice on Demetrius’s eyes too — with the result that both Athenian men now love Helena, who concludes they are mocking her; the two women, the closest of friends, fall to insult and threats of violence. The mechanicals, rehearsing nearby, are interrupted when Puck gives Bottom an ass’s head; the others flee in terror, and the “translated” Bottom is found by Titania (the love-juice now on her eyes), who falls instantly in love with him.

By moonset, Oberon has sorted it out. While Titania, in her flowery bower, fawns over Bottom, Oberon retrieves the changeling boy from her, and then releases her from the spell — she wakes appalled at her vision of having loved a beast. Puck removes the ass’s head from a sleeping Bottom, who wakes thinking he has had “a most rare vision.” Oberon’s antidote-flower restores Lysander to Hermia; Demetrius is left under the spell, but the spell now matches his earlier promise to Helena, and he wakes loving her again of his own free will. The four lovers, found in the wood by the duke’s hunting-party at dawn, give a confused account of the night; Theseus over-rules Egeus and decrees the two couples will be married alongside himself and Hippolyta that very day.

Back in Athens, the three couples take their wedding feast at the duke’s palace. The mechanicals are admitted to perform their play. Pyramus and Thisby, given the most catastrophically earnest staging the company can muster — the wall is played by a man, the moonshine by another, the lion by a third with a half-mask — is a sustained disaster that the assembled court applauds and gently mocks throughout. After the play, Theseus sends the couples to bed. The fairies enter the palace, bless the three marriage-beds against future trouble, and Puck delivers the play’s closing apology to the audience: if the play has offended, consider it a dream.

Written around 1595 — in the same productive stretch as Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Richard II — A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s earlier mature comedies, and the only play in the canon that mixes three social worlds (court, town, fairy) into a single plot. Its first surviving text is the First Quarto of 1600 (Q1), printed by Thomas Fisher; a second quarto (Q2) followed in 1619 and the First Folio (F1) in 1623, all very close to one another. The Globe edition reproduced here follows the conventional editorial settling of the small variants between Q1 and F1.

The play has long been thought to have been written for an aristocratic wedding — the play opens on the eve of one, ends with three more, and concludes with a fairy benediction of marriage-beds against future ill. Three candidate weddings have been proposed: the marriage of Elizabeth Vere to William Stanley, Earl of Derby, in January 1595; the marriage of Elizabeth Carey to Sir Thomas Berkeley in February 1596; the marriage of William Herbert and Anne Russell (less likely). None of the cases is conclusive. The play certainly could have been performed at any of them, and probably was. There is no need to assume it was commissioned for one — it would have transferred easily from a private household to the public theatre.

Shakespeare is not following a single source. The play is a deliberate composite of materials. The Theseus-Hippolyta frame comes from Plutarch’s Life of Theseus (in Thomas North’s 1579 English translation) and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. The Pyramus and Thisby play-within-the-play comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses IV (in Golding’s 1567 English translation, which Shakespeare knew well). The lovers’ quartet and the device of a love-juice that misfires draws on the broader European tradition of pastoral and Italian comedy. The fairies — Oberon, Titania, Puck, the changeling business — are a fusion of three things: late-medieval continental fairy-romance (Oberon goes back at least to the thirteenth-century chanson Huon of Bordeaux), classical mythology (Titania = Ovid’s name for Diana and her line), and English folk tradition (Robin Goodfellow, the household hobgoblin, is the Puck Shakespeare gives his stage-fairy name to). The mechanicals — the play’s most original invention — are not from any source at all. Quince, Bottom, Flute, Snug, Snout, Starveling are Shakespeare’s own.

The play’s Athens is a deliberately anachronistic Athens. Theseus is named from Plutarch and the action is set in legendary classical Greece — but the Athenians celebrate May Day, swear by the Virgin Mary, refer to vows on Diana’s altar that look more like Catholic nunneries than ancient temples, and field a working-class English carpenter named Peter Quince. The fairy court is similarly mixed: Oberon is named in French romance, Titania in Latin epic, Puck in English folk; the changeling boy is half from continental tradition and half from Reformation-era anti-fairy pamphlets. The composite is itself the point. The play is set in a constructed elsewhere, neither classical nor English, and the wood-outside-Athens is the geographic version of the same construction — a space the law does not reach, where identities are loosed and the rules of waking life are suspended.

The performance tradition is the longest of any Shakespeare comedy. Pepys saw it in 1662 and disliked it (“the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life”); the Victorians made it a vehicle for elaborate balletic stagings with Mendelssohn’s 1842 incidental music (still attached to it in popular imagination); Peter Brook’s 1970 RSC production, with its white box and trapezes, broke the Victorian convention decisively and reshaped how every subsequent director has approached the play. It is among the most frequently performed of all Shakespeare plays in English-speaking schools and outdoor summer festivals, partly because of its ensemble parts (no single role dominates) and partly because of its conjunction of stagecraft and weather: the play asks for a moonlit night in the woods, and most communities can find one.

Love’s irrationality. The play’s most direct subject. The course of true love never did run smooth, Lysander says in 1.1; the rest of the play is the proof. Demetrius loves Hermia, then Helena, then Hermia, then Helena. Lysander loves Hermia, then Helena, then Hermia. Titania, a queen, falls in love with a working-class weaver with an ass’s head. None of these reorderings has anything to do with the merits of the persons loved; they have to do with a flower-juice or, in the human cases, with whatever combination of attraction and rejection has captured the lover’s eye on a given evening. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, says Helena, framing the question the play takes seriously: how reliable is the faculty that pairs us off? The answer, sustained for five acts, is: not very.

Imagination and transformation. The verb translate — Helena’s wish in 1.1 to be “to you translated,” Bottom’s actual translation into a beast in Act III — runs under the whole play. Things become other things: a man becomes part-donkey; a fairy queen becomes a lover of donkeys; a lover’s eye becomes loyal to whichever last face it saw on waking; the wood becomes the lovers’ only safe space; Bottom’s sleep becomes “a most rare vision” he cannot account for. The play’s most quoted speech, Theseus’s “poet, lover, lunatic” passage at 5.1, makes the connection explicit: the imagination — the same imagination by which lovers and poets and madmen produce their objects — is what the whole night in the wood is about.

The wood as a counter-space. The play’s spatial structure is binary. Athens is the daylight world of fathers, dukes, laws, rehearsals, names; the wood is the night world of fairies, mistaken identities, love-juice, ass’s heads, Bottom’s vision. Almost everything the play takes seriously, it stages in the wood. The wood is where the four lovers reshuffle themselves; where the mechanicals rehearse; where Titania quarrels with Oberon over the changeling. By morning the wood’s effects are partly undone (Lysander returns to Hermia; Titania disowns her dream) and partly carried back to Athens (Demetrius now stably loves Helena; Bottom emerges with the rare-vision speech). The wood is what a place outside the law looks like.

The mechanicals and the question of social class. The play’s working-class characters are not figures of contempt. The mechanicals are amateurs taking on something difficult; they are treated, in the rehearsal and performance, with a particular kind of warmth Shakespeare reserved for very few of his comic figures. The court audience laughs at Pyramus and Thisby, but the laughter is qualified: Theseus’s “the best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” is one of the most generous statements about amateur effort in Renaissance drama. The play’s class structure is real — Quince and his men are admitted to the duke’s wedding as entertainers, not as guests — but the play, at its centre, declines to treat them with cruelty.

Marriage and the politics of consent. The play opens with a marriage no one is choosing freely: Hippolyta has been won by Theseus’s sword (his own admission, in his second speech of the play). It then sets in motion three other marriages, all under varying degrees of coercion or magical influence. Demetrius’s final pairing with Helena is, in some readings, the most troubling thing in the play: he is the only one of the four lovers who never has the love-juice removed from his eyes. By the end, the question the play has been asking — whether anyone is really choosing whom they love — is left unresolved, although wrapped in the festive form of a triple wedding and a fairy blessing.

The dream-frame and the play’s self-deflation. Puck’s closing speech invites the audience to think of the entire play, if it has offended, as a dream. Bottom’s waking speech (I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was) is the same gesture in miniature. The play continually invites itself to be doubted, dismissed, treated as a thing that happened in the night — while simultaneously taking each of its scenes seriously enough to make the audience care about them. The frame is the play’s argument about its own form: a comedy is what you get to discount as not real, and that’s also what gives it the freedom to say what realer plays can’t.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the play in which Shakespeare invented the kind of comic structure later generations would build on without quite matching. Three plots — a courtly frame, four young lovers in a wood, working-class amateurs attempting tragedy — are stitched together by a fourth layer of fairy magic, and the whole apparatus resolves into the play-within-the-play and a triple wedding. The form is so familiar that it is easy to forget how unprecedented it is. No other Renaissance comedy works like this.

Critically, the play has been read as the great early-modern dramatisation of the imagination — Theseus’s “poet, lover, lunatic” speech at 5.1 is probably the most-quoted account of imaginative perception in English before Coleridge. It has been read as a comedy of contracts and consents (Hippolyta’s ambiguous willingness; Hermia’s refusal; Demetrius’s eye-juice resolution). It has been read as a study of folk and class (the mechanicals as the working-class English material in an otherwise classical-and-courtly play). It has been read as a play about marriage and its costs (the festive surface; the harder structural questions underneath). And it has been read, particularly since the 1970s and Jan Kott’s influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary, as a darker erotic play than its reception had earlier admitted — the wood as a place of sexual menace as well as enchantment, Titania’s scene with Bottom as troubling rather than charming.

Its theatrical influence is hard to overstate. Pyramus and Thisby is one of the founding play-within-a-play setpieces in English (the others being Hamlet’s “Mousetrap” and The Tempest’s masque). Bottom is one of the very few Shakespearean roles that critics across centuries have agreed is great, and the part’s combination of bombast, sincere wonder, and self-confidence has been a touchstone for English comic acting since Robert Armin played him for the King’s Men. Mendelssohn’s music, Benjamin Britten’s 1960 opera, Balanchine’s ballet, Peter Brook’s 1970 production, Julie Taymor’s 2013 staging — the play’s afterlife in music, dance, and design is among the richest of any Shakespeare comedy.

The play has also been, in the last half-century, the most consistently teachable of the Shakespeare comedies. Its parts are well distributed across a class of student actors; its language is more accessible than that of Love’s Labour’s Lost or the late romances; its ensemble structure rewards collaborative direction rather than virtuoso solos. It is, by some distance, the Shakespeare play that the largest number of English-speaking people have actually performed in — in school halls, in college quads, in summer Shakespeare-in-the-park productions. That accessibility is part of its strength: the play wears lightly the formal and intellectual ambition that has kept it canonical for four hundred years.