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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 0 )

Nothing by Shakespeare before A Midsummer Night’s Dream is its equal and in some respects nothing by him afterwards surpasses it. It is his first undoubted masterpiece, with-out flaws, and one of his dozen or so plays of overwhelming originality and power.

—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is William Shakespeare’s first comic masterpiece and remains one his most beloved and performed plays. It seems reasonable to claim that on any fine night during the summer at an outdoor theater somewhere in the world an audience is being treated to the magic of the play. It is easy, however, to overlook through familiarity what a radically original and experimental play this is. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the triumph of Shakespeare’s early play-writing career, a drama of such marked inventiveness and visionary reach that its first audiences must have only marveled at what could possibly come next from this extraordinary playwright. In it Shakespeare changed the paradigm of stage comedy that he had inherited from the Greeks and the Romans by dizzyingly multiplying his plot lines and by bringing the irrational and absurd illusions of romantic love center stage. He established human passion and gender relations as comedy’s prime subject, transforming such fundamental concepts as love, courtship, and marriage that have persisted in our culture ever since. If that is not enough A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes use of its romantic intrigue, supernatural setting, and rustic foolery to pose essential questions about the relationship between art and life, appearance and reality, truth and illusion, dreams and the waking world that anticipate the self-referential agenda of such avant-garde, metadramatists as Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Stoppard. A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents a kind of declaration of liberation for the stage, in which, after its example, nothing seems either off limits or impossible. In the play Theseus, the duke of Athens, after hearing the lovers’ strange story of what happened to them in the forest famously interprets their incredible account by linking the lovers with the lunatic and the poet:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy: Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream similarly gives a “local habitation and a name” on stage for what madness, love, and the poet’s imagination can conjure.

Shakespeare first made his theatrical reputation in the early 1590s with his Henry VI plays, with the historical chronicle genre that he pioneered. His early tragedies— Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet —and comedies— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost —all show the playwright working within the dramatic conventions that he inherited from classical, medieval, and English folk sources. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare goes beyond imitation to discover a distinctive voice and manner that would add a new dramatic species. After A Midsummer Night’s Dream there was Old Comedy, New Comedy, and now Shakespearean comedy, a synthesis of both. To explain the origin and manner of A Midsummer Night’s Dream scholars have long relied on a speculative story so apt and evocative that it must be believed, even though there is no hard evidence to support it. Thought to have been written in the winter of 1593–94 to be performed at an aristocratic wedding attended by Queen Elizabeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream therefore resembles the Renaissance masque, a fanciful mixture of allegorical and mythological enactments, music, dance, elegant costumes, and elaborate theatrical effects to entertain at banquets celebrating betrothals, weddings, and seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night. In the words of Theseus at his own nuptial fete, the masque served “To wear away this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time.” We do know from the title page of its initial publication in the First Quarto of 1600 that the play “hath been sundry times publikely acted” by Shakespeare’s company, but the notion that it had served as a wedding entertainment establishes the delightful fun-house mirroring of an actual wed-ding party first watching a play that included a wedding party watching a play. Such an appropriate scrambling of reality and illusion reflects the source of the humor and wonder of A Midsummer Night’s Dream .

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of just three plays out of Shakespeare’s 39 (the other two are Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest ) for which the play-wright did not rely on a central primary source. Instead Shakespeare assembled elements from classical sources, romantic narratives, and English folk materials, along with details of ordinary Elizabethan life to juggle and juxtapose four different imaginative realms, each with its own distinctive social and literary conventions and language. Each is linked by analogy to the theme of love and its obstacles. The first is the classically derived court world of Theseus, duke of Athens, who has first conquered Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, then won her heart, and now eagerly (and impatiently) anticipates their wedding. Their impending nuptials prompt the arrival of emissaries from the natural world, the king and queen of the fairies—Oberon and Titania—to bless their union, as well as a collection of “rude mechanicals”—Bottom, Quince, Flute, Starveling, Snout, and Snug—to devise a theatrical performance as entertainment at the Duke’s wedding celebration. To the world of the Athenian court, the alternate supernatural court world of the fairies, and the realistic sphere of the Athenian artisans, Shakespeare overlaps a fourth center of interest in the young lovers Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius. Shakespeare mixes the dignified blank verse of Theseus and Hippolyta with the rhymed iambic speeches of the lovers, the rhymed tetrameter of the fairies, and the wonder-fully earthy prose of the rustics into a virtuoso’s performance of polyphonic verbal effects, the greatest Shakespeare, or any other dramatist, had yet sup-plied for the stage.

The complications commence when Hermia’s father, Egeus, objects to his daughter’s unsanctioned preference for Lysander over Demetrius, whom Egeus has selected for her. Egeus invokes Athenian law mandating death or celibacy for a maid’s refusal to abide by parental authority in the choice of a mate. Parental objection to the choice of young lovers was a standard plot device of Greek New Comedy and the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence that Shakespeare inherited. To the obstacles placed in the lovers’ paths Shakespeare adds his own variation of the earlier Aristophanic Old Comedy’s break with the normalcy of everyday life by having his lovers escape into the forest. Critic Northrup Frye has called this symbolic setting of magical regeneration and vitality the “green world.” Here the lovers are tested and allowed the freedom and new possibilities to gain fulfillment and harmony denied them in the civilized world, in which duty dominates desire and obligation to parental authority and the law overrules self-interest and the heart’s promptings. Critic C. L. Barber has identified in such a departure from the norm a “Saturnalian Pattern” in Shakespearean comedy in which the lovers’ exile from the civilized to the primitive supplies the festive release that characterized the earliest forms of comic drama. Barber argues:

Once Shakespeare finds his own distinctive voice, he is more Aristophanic than any other great English dramatist, despite the fact that the accepted educated models and theories when he started to write were Terentian and Plautine. The Old Comedy cast of his work results from his participation in native saturnalian traditions of the popular theater and the popular holidays. . . . He used the resources of a sophisticated theater to express, in his idyllic comedies and in his clowns’ ironic misrule, the experience of moving to humorous understanding through saturnalian release.

Named for the summer solstice festival, when it was said that a maid could glimpse the man she would marry, A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates access to the uncanny and the breakup of all normal rules and social barriers to display human nature in the grips of elemental passions and the subconscious. The lovers in their moonlit, natural setting, at the mercy of the fairies, act out their deepest desires and hostilities in a full display of the power and absurdity of love both to change reality and to redeem it.

Hermia elopes with Lysander, pursued by Demetrius, who in turn is followed by Helena, whom he spurns. They enter a supernatural realm also beset by marital discord, jealousy, and rivalry. Oberon commands his servant Puck to place the juice of a flower once hit by Cupid’s dart in the eyes of the sleeping Titania to cause her to fall in love with the first creature she sees on awakening to help gain for Oberon the changeling boy Titania has refused to yield to him. Oberon, pitying Helena her rejection by Demetrius, also orders Puck to place some of the drops in Demetrius’s eyes so that he will be charmed into love with the woman who dotes on him. Instead Puck comes upon Lysander and Hermia as they sleep, mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and pours the charm into the wrong eyes so that Lysander falls in love with Helena when she wakes him. Meanwhile Bottom and his companions have retreated to the woods to rehearse a dramatization of the mythological story of Pyramus and Thisbe, another set of star-crossed lovers. Puck gives the exuberant Bottom the head of an ass, and he becomes the first thing the charmed Titania sees on waking. Through the agency of the change of location from court to forest and from daylight to moonlight, with its attendant capacity for magical transformation, the play mounts a witty and uproarious display of the irrationality of love and its victims who see the world through the distorting lens of desire, in which certainty of affection is fleeting and a lover with the head of an ass can cause a queen to forgo her senses and her dignity. As Bottom aptly observes, “reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.” From the perspectives of the fairies the lovers’ absolute claims and earnest rationalizations of such a will-of-the-wisp as love makes them absurd. The tangled mixture of passion, jealousy, rancor, and violence that beset the young lovers after Puck imperfectly corrects his mistake, causing both Lysander and Demetrius to pursue the once spurned Helena, more than justifies Puck’s observation, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

By act 4 day returns, and the disorder of the night proves as fleeting and as insubstantial as a dream. After the four lovers are awakened by Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus, who are hunting in the woods, Lysander again loves Hermia, and Demetrius, still under the power of the potion, gives up his claim to her in favor of Helena. Theseus overrules Egeus’s objections and his own former strict adherence to Athenian law and gives both couples permission to marry that day, along with himself and Hippolyta. Having gained the change-ling boy from Titania, Oberon releases her from her spell. Puck removes the donkey’s head from Bottom, who awakes to wonder at his strange dream:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. . . . I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be call’d “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom.

The only mortal allowed to see the fairies, Bottom is also the only character not threatened or diminished by the alternative fantasy realm he passes through. He freely accepts what he does not understand, considering it more suitable for the delight of art in a future ballad than to be analyzed or reduced by reason. Bottom coexists easily and honestly in the dual world of reality and illusion, maintaining his core identity and integrity even through his trans-formation, from man to ass, to fairy queen’s paramour, to ordinary man again. Called by Harold Bloom “Shakespeare’s most engaging character before Falstaff,” Bottom is the play’s human anchor and affirmation of the joyful acceptance of all the contradictions that the play has sent his way.

With the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, Bottom’s reunion with his colleagues, and three Athenian weddings, the plot complications are all happily resolved, and act 5 shifts the emphasis from the potentially destructive vagaries of love to a celebration of marriage to crown and contain human desire. Shakespeare’s final sleight of hand and delightful invention, however, is the play within the play, the “tedious and brief” and “very tragical mirth” of the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe by Bottom and his players. In a drama fueled by the complications between appearance and reality this hilariously incompetent burlesque by the play’s rustic clowns impersonating tragic lovers appropriately comments on the play that has preceded it. The drama of Pyramus and Thisbe involves another set of lovers who face parental objections and similarly seek relief in nature, but their adventure goes tragically awry. However, just as Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius avoid through the stage-managing of the fairies a potentially tragic fate from their ordeal in the wood, so is the tragic fate of Pyramus and Thisbe transformed to comedy by the ineptitude of Bottom’s company. The play within the play becomes a pointed microcosm for A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole in its conversion of potential tragedy to curative comedy. The newlyweds, who mock the absurdity of Pyramus and Thisbe , fail to make the connection with their own absurd encounter with love and their chance rescue from its anguish, but the actual audience should not. In Shakespeare’s comprehensive comic vision we both laugh at the ridiculousness of others while recognizing ourselves in their dilemmas. Shakespeare’s final point about the inseparability of reality and illusion is scored by having the fairy world coexist with the Athenian court at the play’s conclusion, decreasing the gap between fact and fancy and invading actuality itself by giving the final words to Puck, who addresses the audience directly:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumb’red here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream.

Like the newlyweds who view a drama that calls attention to its illusion and its “tragical mirth,” the audience is here reminded of the similar blending of reality and dream, the comic and the tragic in the world beyond the stage. Puck serves as Shakespeare’s magician’s assistant, demonstrating that substance and shadow on stage replicate both the illusion of the dramatist’s art and the essence of human life in our own continual interplay of reality, dreams, and desire.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oxford Lecture by Prof. Emma Smith

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Ebook PDF (5 MB)

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human PDF (7 MB)

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The diarist Samuel Pepys wasn’t a fan of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Seeing a performance of the play in 1662, he wrote in his diary that it was ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’ (though he adds that he liked the dancing, as well as the ‘handsome women’ he saw, ‘which was all my pleasure’).

Despite Pepys’ lack of enthusiasm (for the play itself, anyway), A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular comedies. Before we offer some analysis of this play of magic and romance, it might be worth recapping the plot.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream : short plot summary

Theseus, the Duke of Athens, is getting ready to marry Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, the race of female warriors from Greek mythology. Meanwhile, another planned marriage, between Hermia and Demetrius has been upset by the fact that another man, Lysander, has supposedly bewitched Hermia into loving him instead of her betrothed. Because Hermia’s father, Egeus, wants his daughter to marry Demetrius, Theseus (as Duke) orders Hermia to marry Demetrius or else enter a nunnery and take no husband.

Faced with this rather unappealing choice, Hermia decides to elope with her beloved, Lysander. Hermia confides this plan to her friend Helena, but Helena blabs it to Demetrius (whom Helena wants to marry herself).

Meanwhile, a group of manual workers, each with their own trade (Nick Bottom the weaver, Peter Quince the carpenter, Francis Flute the bellows-mender, etc.), meet to rehearse a play, based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Greek mythology, which they will be performing as the entertainment at Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Oberon, King of the Fairies, tasks the mischievous sprite, Puck or Robin Goodfellow, to go and find the juice of a magic plant which has a peculiar quality: when sprinkled on the eyes of a sleeping person, they will wake up and fall for the first person they see.

Oberon, to convince his wife, Queen Titania to dote on their changeling child, sprinkles the juice on her eyes. Oberon tells Puck to do the same to Demetrius’ eyes so he will wake up and fall for Helena rather than Hermia. However, Puck accidentally sprinkles the plant on the wrong man, administering it to Lysander’s eyes instead of Demetrius’!

To amuse himself, Puck uses his magic to give Bottom the weaver an ass’s head in place of his human head, and when Titania wakes up she sees him and dotes on him, sending for her fairy attendants (Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed, and Moth) to wait upon Bottom. Oberon has tried to correct Puck’s mix-up with Demetrius and Lysander by sprinkling Demetrius’ eyes with the magic juice, with the result that both men now love the same woman: Helena!

They all, thankfully, fall asleep, and while they snooze, Oberon uses his fairy magic to release them all from their various love-spells, and everyone ends up fancying the right person: Lysander is with Hermia, Demetrius with Helena, and Bottom has his proper head back. They all go to Athens for the royal wedding, and the workers perform their play about Pyramus and Thisbe.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream : analysis

As Harold Bloom pointed out in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human , four worlds essentially come together and interact with each other in A Midsummer Night’s Dream : the world of classical myth (represented by Theseus and Hippolyta), the world of ‘modern’ lovers (Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander), the fairy world (Oberon, Titania, and Puck), and the rustic world of ‘mechanicals’ or labourers (Bottom, Quince, and the others).

But instead of these four worlds being kept distinct, the boundaries between them are transgressed, most famously when Titania, the Fairy Queen (perhaps recalling Queen Elizabeth I herself, whom Edmund Spenser had recently immortalised as such in his 1590s poem The Faerie Queene ) falls for the lowly Bottom, whose head has been replaced by that of an ass.

In Shakespeare’s Language , Frank Kermode analysed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the comic counterpart to the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet ; both plays date from the mid-1590s, and it may be that Shakespeare intentionally conceived of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a sort of inverse of the other play about ‘the course of true love’ (although that quotation comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream , it is in Romeo and Juliet that the course of true love fails to run smooth; all is worked out in the end in the Dream ).

Kermode also notes how many eyes there are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream : the words ‘eye’ and ‘eyes’ recur multiple times, and the gulf between illusion and reality is a key theme in the play. Our eyes can trick or deceive us; we can ‘dote’ on someone but that is not the same as loving them in a deeper and more long-lasting way; we create fantasies or, if you will, ‘dreams’ of our lovers which they can never live up to, and which put us at risk of a rude awakening further down the line.

Helena’s famously line, ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’, sums up the main ‘message’ of the play: that wanton love (lust, passing desire) is not true love, which is about more than superficial attraction or ‘looks’. The fact that the juice which makes people fall in ‘love’ with the next person they see when they wake up is from a flower called ‘love-in-idleness’ is a clue: for ‘idleness’ here, Kermode directs us to ‘wantonness’, which is what ‘idleness’ means in this connection.

From this, we might conclude that A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents the triumph of rational, lasting love over the pleasures of illusory love of attraction. But this overlooks the extent to which Shakespeare, the man of the theatre, loved illusion, and repeatedly vaunted its virtues in his work.

And Bottom’s transformation, whereby he ends up with the head of an ass, complicates any reductive analysis of the play which sees it as calling illusory love ‘bad’ and the other kind ‘good’.

As so often in the work of Shakespeare, this simplistic interpretation just won’t stand up. Bottom’s ‘rare vision’ of Titania invites our laughter, but it is sympathetic laughter: there is a sense that he has been emotionally as well as physically transformed by the night’s events. For Bloom, Bottom, the humble weaver, is the key to the play, and more than just a bit of rustic comic relief.

But Bloom’s assertion that ‘love at first sight, exalted in Romeo and Juliet , is pictured here as calamity’, is only partially true. Whilst the couples ultimately get paired off as we expect them to, Titania and Bottom’s moment together transcends comedic farce, and suggests that they have both been forever altered by the experience – not least because they don’t usually come into contact with each other (workman and queen, mortal and fairy).

For one, it is while she is under the spell of Bottom’s … unconventional looks that Titania agrees to give up the changeling boy to her husband, who wants to make the child his page.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains a popular play, and is often staged. In 1911, Herbert Beerbohm Tree staged a celebrated production which included live rabbits on stage. Indeed, there have been a number of ambitious productions of the play: Charles Kean’s 1856 production at the Princess’s Theatre featured 90 tutu-wearing sprites as part of the finale. Also appearing in the show was an eight-year-old Ellen Terry, playing the role of Puck.

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3 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Great reminder of a great play (sorry Pepys)! Another interesting note about how the 4 worlds connect and disconnect. As I recall, Demetrius never gets the juice removed and hence stays in love with Helena. If so, the enchantment that Demetrius carries is the lynchpin that holds the worlds — and the happy ending — together. The world of imagination may seem like an escape from the world of reality, but as often happens in Shakespeare, that “frivolous” world of imagination effects a crucial transformation of reality.

also hear BBC ‘In their Time’ (Bragg) discussion on ’12th Night’- 40 minutes of interesting discussion by three experts.

• Pingback: Sunday Post – 21st June, 2020 #Brainfluffbookblog #SundayPost | Brainfluff

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A midsummer night’s dream.

Rotimi Agbabiaka (Oberon), Jacob Ming-Trent (Bottom), and Sabrina Lynne Sawyer (Fairy) in  A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Folger Theatre, 2022. Photo: Brittany Diliberto.

Introduction to the play

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Shakespeare stages the workings of love. Theseus and Hippolyta, about to marry, are figures from mythology. In the woods outside Theseus’s Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves out into couples—but not before they form first one love triangle, and then another.

Also in the woods, the king and queen of fairyland, Oberon and Titania, battle over custody of an orphan boy; Oberon uses magic to make Titania fall in love with a weaver named Bottom, whose head is temporarily transformed into that of a donkey by a hobgoblin or “puck,” Robin Goodfellow. Finally, Bottom and his companions ineptly stage the tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe.”

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A midsummer night’s dream.

Learn more about the play, its language, and its history from the experts behind our edition.

About Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream An introduction to the plot, themes, and characters in the play

Quotes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Reading Shakespeare’s Language A guide for understanding Shakespeare’s words, sentences, and wordplay

An Introduction to This Text A description of the publishing history of the play and our editors’ approach to this edition

Textual Notes A record of the variants in the early printings of this text

A Modern Perspective An essay by Catherine Belsey

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Shakespeare’s Life An essay about Shakespeare and the time in which he lived

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The Publication of Shakespeare’s Plays An essay about how Shakespeare’s plays were published

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first printed in 1600 as a quarto (Q1). In 1619, a new quarto of the play was published (Q2) based on Q1 but with some additional stage directions and some small corretions to the text. That text, in turn, was the basis for the 1623 First Folio (F1) with, again, some minor changes, including the substitution of Egeus for Philostrate in the final scene of the play. Most modern editions, like the Folger editions, are based on the Q1 text. See more primary sources related to A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Shakespeare Documented

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A Midsummer Night's Dream

Synopsis and plot overview of shakespeare's a midsummer night's dream.

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TL;DR (may contain spoilers): People get lost in the woods. Puck manipulates their romantic affections and (in one case) anatomical head-shape. They put on a play.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Summary

Four Athenians run away to the forest only to have Puck the fairy make both of the boys fall in love with the same girl. The four run through the forest pursuing each other while Puck helps his master play a trick on the fairy queen. In the end, Puck reverses the magic, and the two couples reconcile and marry.

More detail: 3 minute read

As Duke Theseus prepares for his marriage to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, he is interrupted by a courtier, Egeus. Egeus asks for the Duke to intervene in a dispute. His daughter, Hermia, will not agree to marry Demetrius (whom Egeus has chosen for her) because she loves a gentleman named Lysander. The Duke asks Hermia to be obedient to her father. He offers her one of two options: she must either die or accept a celibate life as a nun in Diana's temple. 

Naturally upset with the offer, Lysander and Hermia plan to elope and share their secret with Helena, Hermia's friend. Helena is desperately in love with Demetrius, who seems to have abandoned her in favour of Hermia. At night, Lysander and Hermia escape from Athens; but they soon lose their way in the woods. After Helena tells him of their intention to defy the law, Demetrius decides to follow the lovers into the woods. In turn, Helena follows Demetrius in the hope that he will give up on Hermia and choose her instead.  

Meanwhile, a group of working men are preparing a play of the tragic love-story of Pyramus and Thisbe to present before the Duke Theseus on his wedding day. Nick Bottom, the weaver, is to play the lover Pyramus, while Flute, the bellows-mender, begrudgingly agrees to play Thisbe. 

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. — A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1 Scene 1

Nearby, Oberon - King of the Fairies—has recently quarrelled with his queen, Titania. She acquired a magical child from one of her waiting women, and now refuses to hand him over to Oberon to use as a page. Oberon begins to plot a way to get revenge on Titania for her disobedience. He sends his fairy servant, Puck, to fetch a purple flower with juice that makes people fall in love with the next creature they see.  

Afterwards, Oberon overhears Helena and Demetrius arguing in the forest. Oberon hears Demetrius mistreat Helena and tells Puck to anoint 'the Athenian', so Demetrius will fall in love with the first person that he sees. Puck mistakes the Athenian and puts the flower juice on the eyes of the sleeping Lysander. When he is woken by Helena, he immediately falls in love with her and rejects Hermia. When Demetrius rests, Oberon puts magic juice on his eyes, which makes him fall in love with Helena as well. 

Want to test your knowledge? Have a go at our multiple choice A Midsummer Night's Dream Quiz

The workers' rehearsals in the wood are overheard by Puck, who plays a trick on them by giving Bottom an ass's head. After frightening the others away, Bottom is lured towards the sleeping Titania whom Oberon has anointed with Puck's magic flower juice. On waking, the fairy queen falls in love with the ass and entertains him with her fairies.  

The course of true love never did run smooth. — A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1 Scene 1

Meanwhile, Demetrius and Lysander, still under the spell of the flower juice, pursue Helena. Hermia is jealous and confused about the lack of attention paid to her. Oberon and Puck watch the chaos, and Oberon commands Puck to put it right again. The lovers' arguments have tired them all out as they have chased one another through the woods. Puck eventually distracts the two men from their pursuit of Helena by impersonating their voices, and they get lost in the woods. The four lovers fall asleep, exhausted. Puck places restorative juice on Lysander's eyes.

After an afternoon of being pampered by Titania's fairies, Bottom falls asleep beside her. Oberon restores Titania's sight and wakes her (thank goodness). After expressing her dismay at the sight of Bottom, she reconciles with Oberon, and she ends up giving him the little Indian prince for his page. Bottom's ass head is removed, and he returns to the city to rejoin his friends as they prepare to perform their play. The lovers are woken by Theseus and Hippolyta's hunting party. Lysander sees Hermia and falls in love with her once again. 

Happily reunited (Lysander with Hermia and Demetrius with Helena), they agree to share the Duke's wedding day. The play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is presented before the wedding guests. As the three couples retire to bed, Puck and the fairies return to bless the palace and its people.

Lord, what fools these mortals be! — A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1 Scene 1

For additional reading, see our blogs on A Midsummer Night's Dream

Discover poetic love lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream and other plays by visiting Shakespeare Quotes on Love

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A Midsummer Night's Dream

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In the palace in ancient Athens, Duke Theseus and his fiancé Hippolyta are planning their wedding festivities when Egeus , an Athenian nobleman, arrives. Egeus has with him his daughter, Hermia , and two men, Lysander and Demetrius . Egeus wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, but Hermia loves Lysander. Egeus asks Theseus to uphold Athenian law, which forces a woman to marry the man her father chooses or be executed. Lysander points out that Demetrius is an inconstant lover, who had until recently loved Hermia's childhood friend Helena before falling for Hermia, but Theseus says he must uphold the law, and exits. Lysander and Hermia decide to elope by escaping into the forest outside Athens. They tell only Helena of their plans, but she tells Demetrius in order to try to regain his love.

Elsewhere in Athens, a group of manual laborers discuss a play, Pyramus and Thisbe that they hope to perform at the Duke's wedding. Bottom , a weaver with many ridiculous opinions about acting, gets the part of Pyramus. The group agrees to rehearse in the forest outside Athens. Meanwhile, in the forest, Oberon , the king of the Fairies, is fighting with his queen, Titania , over possession of a beautiful Indian changeling boy. Oberon decides to punish his wife for refusing to obey him. He sends his servant, Robin Goodfellow , a mischievous fairy also known as Puck, to bring him the love-in-idleness flower. The magical juice from this flower causes a person (or fairy) to fall in love with the first thing he or she sees. Just then, Oberon sees Helena following Demetrius through the forest and hears him threaten to abandon her. Oberon decides to make Demetrius love Helena and tells Puck to put the love juice on the eyes of the man in Athenian clothes. Oberon then sneaks up to the sleeping Titania and drops the potion on her eyes.

As all this is going on, Lysander and Hermia get lost in the forest, and find a place to sleep, apart, for the night. Puck sees Lysander's Athenian clothes, and puts the love juice on his eyelids. Nearby, Demetrius finally abandons Helena. Lysander wakes, sees Helena, and falls in love. Helena thinks Lysander is mocking her with his declarations of love, and stalks off. Lysander follows. A moment later, Hermia wakes up. Shocked that Lysander would abandon her, she goes to search for him.

The laborers rehearse their play in the forest, close to where Titania sleeps. They can't remember their lines or cues, amusing Puck, who's watching them. Puck transforms Bottom's head into the head of an ass; the other laborers, terrified, run away. Not knowing what's happened, and thinking his friends ran away as a joke, Bottom sings to show he isn't frightened. His song wakes up Titania. She falls instantly in love.

Oberon is pleased with Puck's work, until he discovers that Puck put the love juice in Lysander's rather than Demetrius's eyes. He sends Puck to bring Helena to Demetrius, and puts the love potion in Demetrius's eyes. Helena arrives, followed by Lysander. Demetrius wakes, and falls in love. Both men argue over who deserves Helena, while she now thinks they're both mocking her. Hermia then shows up, and is furious that Lysander is now wooing Helena. Soon Hermia and Helena are on the verge of fighting. When the men go off to duel in the forest, Helena runs. Hermia chases her. Oberon sends Puck out to make sure no one hurts each other. Puck uses his trickery to get them all to fall asleep in the same small glade, and then puts the love juice on Lysander's eyelids so he'll love Hermia again. Titania, meanwhile, is still doting on Bottom, and has given Oberon the changeling. While she sleeps, Oberon removes the spell, and Puck removes Bottom's ass-head.

On a hunting expedition in the forest, Theseus, Hippolyta and Egeus encounter the four sleeping lovers. When Lysander admits that he and Hermia were eloping, Egeus insists that the law be brought down on their heads. But Theseus sees that Lysander now loves Hermia while Demetrius loves Helena, and says the four lovers can marry at his wedding. At the same time, Bottom returns to Athens just as the laborers were starting to despair they wouldn't be able to perform their play because they had no Pyramus.

As entertainment after the wedding, the Duke chooses to watch the laborer's play. It is terrible and ridiculous, but the Duke and lovers enjoy making fun of it. After the three married couples go to bed, the Fairies enter and bless the marriages.

Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Essay

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Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a play that reveals the connection between reality and the dream state. There are numerous major themes in the play that link a person’s mind to dreams. The surreal and unconscious world is closely tied with person’s psychology through the nature of the mind, thoughts and emotions, love, rationality, achievements and manifestation of dreams through real life.

This is done for a purpose, as to show how much unity there is between the different states of the mind, and what the person experiences in dreams can be the “wanted” reality that is dreamt of while being awake.

The very first theme that the audience is introduced with is love and obedience. Hermia and Lysander are in love with each other but Hermia’s father does not approve of the union and so, they decide to run away (Shakespeare, 15).

The issue of a person’s own wants and needs is contrasted with the responsibility to parents and their wishes. In the end, every person must decide for themselves what they have to do with their life because it is their own. The psychological battle between the responsibility that Hermia owes to her father and the love for Lysander, make her chose love, as it in no way decreases the love and respect she has for her father.

Person’s feelings and more specifically, love are what define life and emotional state of a person. In such a situation, an individual chooses the lesser of two evils by listening to the heart and feeling what must be done. Even though a person is considered to be a rational creature, everything is directed by feelings and the greater the feeling is, the more rational pull there is to the object of affection.

It is clear that Hermia cannot live without Lysander and considers him much closer than her father. A philosophical point of view would argue that Hermia’s father has lived his life the way he wanted and made his own choice of having a child, supposing that the child would have their own life and choose whatever they find best for themselves.

No one has the right to deprive a child of their life and choices because they also deserve the chance to live the way they want and think is right. An important question is where do feelings and rationality come from. It could be supposed that it is biological with the involvement of genes or more specifically, the information that is passed on through generations. If most of the ancestors were interested in literature or mathematics, then the person is likely to follow the same route.

This suggests that the more someone knows or tries, in different aspects of knowledge, sciences and information, the better choice they will have in selecting something of liking. But even though a lot of people share DNA and genetic information varies insignificantly, there are still individuals who are unique and original in a lot of ways (Pálsson, 22). This means that biology is not the only thing that makes up a person, it is something much deeper.

But one thing for certain, is that people first receive an impulse, a feeling that appears which cannot be sourced by the conscious mind. The next step is a person reacting on the feeling by the use of rationality and reason. The play is distinctly separated into three realities—the real which is logical, the one that is filled with feelings and the dream world. The play which is being practiced by the villagers is put into the content to create a perspective between the play that people experience in life and on stage.

The fairies represent the dream world where anything is possible and people can be ruled by magical forces. The real world is shown as unfair and cruel to people, even those who are in love. The connection is made apparent to remind the audience that rationality, feeling and dreaming about or for something, are all united in a person and serve as mind’s tools to find the meaning of life.

A deeper philosophical look will question love and where it comes from. It is not clear why someone loves something or someone. It is obvious that love makes a person to be with another person, see them prosper and do anything possible to give a hand in all beginnings (Velasquez, 475).

It is an unexplained feeling that does not come from rational thinking, quite the opposite, it is sometimes irrational. People often fall in love with someone who is opposite of them or someone their rational mind does not like. Shakespeare’s play makes an evident illustration of the opposites and love.

It is seen when Hermia and Helen converse about their love, Hermia says: “The more I hate, the more he follows me” to which Helen responds, “The more I love, the more he hateth me” (Shakespeare, 14). The mysterious force of love is unexplained when someone has strong affection towards a person but does not receive the same feeling back. Sometimes, the state of being in love is cherished for the pure fact of love existing.

A person likes being in love, the emotions and thoughts that come around when they feel affection towards another human being. In reality, a person does not have full control of their emotions, and thoughts lead out of feelings and unexplainable affections that a person has. But, as history has shown, love is much needed in the world and can be thought of as one of the most important feelings there are.

Shakespeare’s plays are filled with feelings and emotions for a particular reason. This is to show how much time and life love takes up and what is the real moving force of all that happens in the world. Strong feelings of love and hate have been proven to cause the same chemical reaction in the brain; the only thing opposite to love and hate is neutrality, nothing taking place. This means that love and hate are very close and this is another major theme of Shakespeare’s play.

But love does not necessarily have to be towards a person. People can love objects outside the self, some individuals love power, money and other objects but primarily, they have great and selfish love for themselves which nonetheless, proves the fact that love rules the world.

People can also love concepts and ideas, as a scientist who is ruled by a formula or theorem. One thing for sure is that love was not created by people but it is given to humanity to enjoy and understand its importance. The play illustrates that love is very close to a person’s wishes and dreams and this leads into another theme of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” which is the dream state.

Throughout the play there is much opposition between reality and the dream world which are two opposite realms of life. It is evident that sleep is a much needed life process and before, people have thought that the brain shuts down during sleep. Presently, it is known that the brain stays very active and the dream states are sometimes, fully experienced, just as much as the real world. In a dream, a person does not use eyes to see or ears to hear.

The physical stimuli that are associated with feelings of hot or cold, hard or soft, pain and pleasure are not received by regular senses. The brain’s comprehension is the same in a dream, as it is during awoken state and people do see and feel the environment as real, in their dreams. The fairies from the play can be thought of as a bridge into the real world from the surreal one. When Titania talks to Oberon, their dialogue can be representative of the two states, the real and the dream one:

“But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs, which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents” (Shakespeare, 26).

When Titania mentions that he has “disturbed” their “sport”, this can be seen as the confusion that dreams sometimes cause to the person’s rational thinking and understanding of the world. Oberon is portrayed as a dream that upsets a person’s rationality, as if he summons the winds and the fog that make reasoning murky and float away like the rivers out of their shores.

This is a clear link to the rest of the play and the real world, when a person is so much confused by the reality of the dream, they believe it to be true. Dreams are a direct link to something people cannot fully understand. Why do people dream and is it possible that the dream world is relatively as real as the world that people see when they are awake? Since dreams do exist, there must be a reason for them to be and so, often, people can find sense in their dreams, long forgotten and lost understanding of the past, present or future.

But also, dreams serve as a place where person’s wishes and goals come true. If someone has hardships in their life and is unable to achieve something, the brain manifests these wants into a projection that is seen in the dream. The intricate mechanism of the mind that makes this happen must have a direct link between person’s wants from reality and individual’s state in dream.

There are even numerous accounts when future predictions are made in the sleep and thus, it becomes clear that dreams and reality are closely connected (Westmoreland, 640). Some might go as far as to think that mental projections made in the sleep will become real, through person’s desires. The play makes a clear indication that the two worlds collide and the wishes that each person has could come true.

In his play, Shakespeare has shown that he was a great thinker and understood human nature. The connection between dreams and reality is sometimes barely visible and people lose track of where they are at a certain point in life but love and hate stay the same in both places.

Works Cited

Palsson, Gisli. Anthropology and the New Genetics. New York, United States: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Minneapolis, United States: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC., 2007. Print.

Velasquez, Manuel. Philosophy: A Text With Readings . Boston, United States: Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.

Westmoreland, Perry. Ancient Greek Beliefs . San Ysidro, United States: Lee And Vance Publishing Co, 2007. Print.

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/shakespeares-midsummer-nights-dream/.

1. IvyPanda . "Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/shakespeares-midsummer-nights-dream/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/shakespeares-midsummer-nights-dream/.