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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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A Midsummer Night's Dream

William shakespeare.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Midsummer: Introduction

Midsummer: plot summary, midsummer: detailed summary & analysis, midsummer: themes, midsummer: quotes, midsummer: characters, midsummer: symbols, midsummer: literary devices, midsummer: quizzes, midsummer: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

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• Full Title: A Midsummer Night's Dream
• When Written: Early to mid 1590s
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1600 (though it was first performed earlier, probably between 1594-96).
• Literary Period: The Renaissance (1500 - 1660)
• Genre: Comic drama
• Setting: The city of Athens and the forest just outside, in some distant, ancient time when it was ruled by the mythological hero Theseus.

Extra Credit for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare or Not? There are some who believe Shakespeare wasn't educated enough to write the plays attributed to him. The most common anti-Shakespeare theory is that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a front man because aristocrats were not supposed to write plays. Yet the evidence supporting Shakespeare's authorship far outweighs any evidence against. So until further notice, Shakespeare is still the most influential writer in the English language.

A Midsummer Night's Parallel. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around the same time he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream . In A Midsummer Night's Dream , Shakespeare mocks tragic love stories through the escapades of the lovers in the forests and the ridiculous version of Pyramus and Thisbe (a tragic romance from Ovid's Metamorphoses ) that Bottom and his company perform. So at the same time Shakespeare was writing the greatest love story ever told, he was also mocking the conventions of such love stories. It's almost as if Shakespeare was saying, "Yeah, it's tired, it's old, and I can still do it better than anyone else ever could."

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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.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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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Introductions to essays about Puck in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

I can write a well-structured introduction for an essay about the character of Puck in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

Lesson details

Key learning points.

• Introductions can follow a three part structure moving from the general to the specific.
• The first sentence of an introduction could be a general statement about the text.
• The second sentence of the introduction could be a general statement about the given character or theme.
• The final sentence of your introduction could be your thesis.

Common misconception

Introductions are the same as thesis statements.

An introduction includes a thesis statement. However, an introduction should include a more general statement about the text, as well as a more general statement about the given character or theme as well as the thesis.

Capricious - impulsive, reckless, changeable

Thesis - an idea you develop and maintain throughout an essay

General idea - an idea that is not tied to a particular detail

Specific idea - an idea that is tied to a particular detail

Supernatural - things that can’t be explained by the laws of nature

You need access to a copy of William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

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• Depiction or discussion of peer pressure or bullying

Supervision

Adult supervision recommended

This content is © Oak National Academy Limited ( 2024 ), licensed on Open Government Licence version 3.0 except where otherwise stated. See Oak's terms & conditions (Collection 2).

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream , comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare , written about 1595–96 and published in 1600 in a quarto edition from the author’s manuscript, in which there are some minor inconsistencies. The version published in the First Folio of 1623 was taken from a second quarto edition, with some reference to a promptbook. One of the “great” or “middle” comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , with its multilayered examination of love and its vagaries, has long been one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays.

Theseus, duke of Athens , has conquered Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, and is about to wed her. Meanwhile, two lovers, Hermia and Lysander, seek refuge in the forest near Athens when Hermia’s father demands that she marry Demetrius. Hoping to win Demetrius’s favour, Helena tells him their whereabouts and follows him to the forest, where he goes in search of Hermia. The forest is also full of fairies who have come for the duke’s wedding. Oberon , the king of the fairies, quarrels with his queen, Titania , and bids his mischievous servant Puck to drop magic juice into her eyes as she sleeps; his intent is to punish her for her disobedience by causing her to fall hopelessly in love with whatever person or creature she happens to see when she awakes. Noting that the human lovers in the forest are also at odds, he orders Puck to drop the love juice into Demetrius’s eyes so that Demetrius’s one-time affection for Helena will be restored. Because the two young Athenian men look much alike, however, Puck mistakenly administers the love juice to Lysander , who then happens to see Helena when he awakes. He falls hopelessly in love with her. Now both young men are in love with Helena and neither with the poor deserted Hermia. This situation does not make Helena any happier, though. She comes to the conclusion that they are all making fun of her. Hermia and Helena fall out over this contretemps, while the young men have become fierce and even would-be murderous rivals of one another for Helena. All is at sixes and sevens.

In the same woods a group of artisans are rehearsing an entertainment for the duke’s wedding. Ever playful, Puck gives one of the “mechanicals,” Nick Bottom , an ass’s head; when Titania awakens, she falls in love with Bottom. After much general confusion and comic misunderstanding, Oberon’s magic restores Titania and the four lovers to their original states. The duke invites the two couples to join him and Hippolyta in a triple wedding. The wedding celebration features Bottom’s troupe in a comically inept performance of their play, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe , which turns out to be a parody of the perilous encounters the various lovers have experienced in the forest and somehow managed to survive.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare’s entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s plays and poems .

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Essays on A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream is a timeless comedy that has been the subject of study and analysis for centuries. As a student, choosing the right essay topic is crucial to crafting a compelling and well-researched paper. In this guide, we will discuss the importance of choosing the right topic and provide a detailed list of recommended essay topics, divided by category.

Choosing the right essay topic is crucial for several reasons. First, it allows you to explore themes, characters, and literary devices in the play. Second, a well-chosen topic can make your essay more engaging for both you and your audience. Finally, it allows you to showcase your analytical and critical thinking skills.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When choosing a topic for your A Midsummer Night's Dream essay, consider your interests and the aspects of the play that resonate with you. Think about the themes, characters, and literary elements that you find most compelling. Additionally, consider the scope of your assignment and choose a topic that allows for in-depth analysis within the given parameters.

Recommended Essay Topics

• The role of love and its different manifestations in the play
• The theme of magic and its significance in the plot
• The contrast between reality and illusion in the play
• The theme of order and disorder in the play
• The portrayal of gender dynamics and power in the play
• The theme of dreams and their implications in the play
• An analysis of the character of Puck and his role in the play
• The transformation of Bottom and its significance in the play
• An exploration of the complexities of the relationship between Hermia and Helena
• The portrayal of Theseus and Hippolyta as rulers and lovers
• The character of Oberon and his influence on the events of the play
• Discuss the character of Puck and his role in the play
• Analyze the character of Titania and her relationship with Oberon
• Compare and contrast the different lovers in the play
• Explore the motivations and actions of the characters in the play
• Examine the role of the mechanicals in the play

Literary Elements

• An analysis of the use of imagery and symbolism in the play
• The role of the supernatural in driving the plot forward
• An exploration of the use of language and wordplay in the play
• The significance of the play within a play structure in A Midsummer Night's Dream
• An examination of the use of comedy and its impact on the audience

Comparative Topics

• Comparing the theme of love in A Midsummer Night's Dream with another Shakespearean play
• An analysis of the portrayal of women in A Midsummer Night's Dream and another work of literature
• Comparing the use of supernatural elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream and another play or novel
• An exploration of the role of the fool or comedic character in A Midsummer Night's Dream and another play
• Comparing the themes of reality and illusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream with another work of literature

Love and Relationships

• Discuss the theme of love in A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Compare and contrast the different relationships in the play
• Explore the concept of unrequited love in the play
• Analyze the role of magic in influencing the characters' love lives
• Examine the portrayal of gender roles and relationships in the play

Magic and Fantasy

• Discuss the significance of the fairy world in the play
• Analyze the role of magic in shaping the events of the play
• Compare and contrast the use of magic by different characters
• Explore the theme of illusion and reality in the play
• Examine the portrayal of supernatural elements in the play

Conflict and Resolution

• Discuss the conflicts that arise in the play and how they are resolved
• Analyze the role of misunderstandings and mistaken identities in the play
• Compare and contrast the different types of conflicts in the play
• Explore the theme of reconciliation in A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Examine the role of comedy in resolving conflicts in the play

Social and Historical Context

• Discuss the portrayal of class and social hierarchy in the play
• Analyze the influence of Greek mythology on the play
• Compare and contrast the societal norms of the time with the events of the play
• Explore the role of the supernatural in Elizabethan England
• Examine the portrayal of love and marriage in the play

The Theme of Vision and Sight in a Midsummer Night's Dream

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The Depiction of The Nature and Forms of Love in a Midsummer Night's Dream

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Exploration of The Nature of Love in a Midsummer Night's Dream

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The Ecofeminist Layer of a Midsummer Night's Dream

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c. 1595 or 1596, by William Shakespeare

The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue.

The main themes and motifs of the play are: lovers' bliss, carnivalesque, love, problem with time, loss of individual identity, ambiguous sexuality, and feminism.

Theseus, Puck, Oberon, Titania, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, Helena, Egeus, Philostrate, Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, Francis Flute, Tom Snout, Snug

Though it is not a translation or adaptation of an earlier work, various sources such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" served as inspiration. Aristophanes' classical Greek comedy The Birds (also set in the countryside near Athens) has been proposed as a source due to the fact that both Procne and Titania are awakened by male characters (Hoopoe and Bottom the Weaver) who have animal heads and who sing two-stanza songs about birds.

One of the “great” or “middle” comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its multilayered examination of love and its vagaries, has long been one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays.

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” “Though she be but little, she is fierce!” “The course of true love never did run smooth.” “And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”

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A Midsummer’s Night Dream Essay

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Introduction

Setting and context, literary styles, works cited.

This is a play that was written by renowned playwright, William Shakespeare, in a period believed to in the late 16 th century. A Midsummer’s Night Dream illustrates happenings based on the marriage of Theseus, and Hippolyta.

These happenings include the adventures of four youthful Athenian lovers and a number of amateur actors, who are controlled by the fairies that live in the forest in which most of the scenes occur. This is one of Shakespeare’s most popular literary plays and has been adapted and performed in many theatres across the globe.

A Midsummer’s Night Dream is thought to have been written around 1590 and 1596. The play is set in ancient Athens and comprises three interlocking plots, ultimately joined at the Duke’s wedding ceremony. The other two plots are situated in the woods, and in the fairyland.

The play draws on a myriad of cultures and mythologies from the Athenian society, for example, Theseus is loosely associated with a Greek hero with a similar name, and the play mentions a number of Greek gods and goddesses. The play also borrows from the English fairy lore, the example of which is Puck, whose character was common in 16 th century fables, the craftsmen were also common in London theatres.

Theseus – He is the Duke of Athens and is getting ready to marry Hippolyta at the beginning of the play.

Hippolyta – She is the queen of the Amazons and is Theseus’ fiancée.

Lysander – He is Hermia’s lover and in the end of the play, the two marry.

Demetrius – He loves Hermia, but she does not love him back. He previously loved Helena but ditched her when he met Hermia. In the woods, Puck uses the magical flower juice to make Demetrius love Helena, and the two marry together with the duke.

Helena – Is treated meanly by Demetrius, her former lover, and she does many things to win back his love. With Puck’s help, she wins him and the two eventually marry.

Oberon – Is the fairies’ king. He is fighting with Titania over the young Indian boy, he instructs Puck to use the magical flower juice on her and he succeeds in having the boy. He also assists Helen in her quest to win back Demetrius’ love.

Titania – She is Oberon’s wife and they have an argument over the custody of the Indian boy. She releases the boy under Puck’s spell after which the spell is lifted and the couple is united again.

Puck – He is used by Oberon to influence both his wife and Demetrius using the magical flower juice.

Nick Bottom- He is a craftsman and is a member of cast team rehearsing the play Pyramus and Thisbe in the woods. Titania falls in love with him momentarily while she was under the influence of Puck’s spell.

Egeus is Hermia’s father.

Philostrate is the man in charge of entertainment during Theseus’ wedding.

Peter Quince is a carpenter and directs the group that performs a play at the wedding.

Francis Flute is a bellows-mender and is part of the Pyramus and Thisbe cast.

Tom Snout , Snug and Robin Starveling are also members of the Pyramus and Thisbe cast

Peaseblossom , Cobweb , Moth , and Mustardseed are fairies.

The play illustrates the dark side of love and how finding it can be difficult. Lysander says “the course of true love never did run smooth”, stressing this important theme (Huke and Perkins, 1981).

Although the play focuses on the conflicts arising out of love, or the lack of it, it is not actually a love story and instead, it distances us from the emotions of love in order to mock the torments and pain of those in love. The fairies also joke about love by confusing the lovers through the use of a magical flower juice, thereby implying how winning a person’s love can be difficult, except through magical powers.

Love’s difficulty is frequently explored through misplaced love, in this instance, it is shown through the four youthful Athenians: Hermia, Demetrius, Helena, and Lysander. Hermia is in love with Lysander, Lysander is also in love with Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius but he does not love her back, and instead, loves Hermia. The love scene creates a complex web of misplaced love as Helena and Demetrius’ love are misplaced.

The situation is only reversed by Puck while the two lovers are in the woods. We encounter a similar situation between Titania and Oberon. The latter’s coveting of the young Indian prince exceeds his love for the former, and this makes him to place a spell on her, which leads to her being in love with ass-headed Nick Bottom.

Magic and Dreams

The play is about dreams, evidenced by both the title, the events in the play, and in the final act when Puck informs the audience that the play might be nothing but a dream. The play exposes the often illogical and magical nature of dreams. The magic is illustrated through the idea of transformation, both personal and in general terms.

For instance, Helena wishes she would be ‘changed’ to Hermia, but, more generally, she mentions that love ‘changes’ everything it falls upon. While the play is set in mid summer, there are numerous references to May Day. For instance, Helena and Hermia are apparently doing “observance of a morn in May” (Shakespeare, 2008).

A Midsummer’s Night Dream presents several instances of symbolism. The craftsmen’s play in Act V represents the main plot, but in an abridged form. The act of the craftsmen satirizes the theatrical Athenian lovers and gives the play an enjoyable, comedic end. Prymus and Thisbe experience parental condemnation in their pursuit of love, similar to Hermia and Lysander. Romantic confusion as exhibited by the young Athenian lovers is also exhibited in the play as Pyramus wrongly believes that Thisbe has been killed by a lion.

The magical flower juice that acts as a love potion creates confusion in Acts II, III, and IV. The fairies are not careful in their handling of the potion and this causes a chaotic situation in Demetrius and Lysander turn their love to Helena, almost leading to a physical confrontation while Titania amusingly humiliated. The flower juice represents the illogical, erratic, and unquestionably powerful nature of love, which can lead to weird acts that are inexplicable.

The concept of contrast is a major feature in A Midsummer’s Night Dream . The whole play is based on groups with opposite attributes, and almost all characters have their opposites. Helena is tall, Hermia is short; Puck plays jokes, Bottom is the casualty; and Titania is beautiful while Bottom is ugly. Besides, the three main categories of characters contrast significantly: the fairies are graceful and magical while the craftsmen are ungainly and simple; the craftsmen are cheerful, while the lovers are always serious.

Huke, Ivan and Perkins, Derek. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Literature Revision Notes and Examples . Celtic Revision Aids. 1981.

Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 4th Compact Ed., Edgar V. Richards. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2008. 1099-1152.

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An Introduction to This Text: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first printed in 1600 as a quarto. Then in 1619 someone slightly edited a copy of the 1600 quarto, adding a few stage directions and, perhaps, supplying some obvious verbal corrections, to make it the basis of a second quarto edition of the play. A copy of this 1619 quarto was, in turn, annotated and used as printer’s copy for the First Folio text published in 1623. Again both stage directions and a few words of dialogue were affected. Chief among the changes introduced into the Folio text was the substitution of Egeus for Philostrate in Act 5, scene 1 . Some scholars think that whoever annotated the 1619 text before it was reprinted in the Folio must have referred to a manuscript of the play that had actually been used in the theater, but this conjecture rests on the most slender evidence.

The present edition is based directly on the earliest quarto of 1600. 1 For the convenience of the reader, we have modernized the punctuation and the spelling of the quarto. Sometimes we go so far as to modernize certain old forms of words; for example, when a means “he,” we change it to he; we change mo to more and ye to you. But it has not been our editorial practice in any of the plays to modernize some words that sound distinctly different from modern forms. For example, when the early printed texts read sith or apricocks or porpentine, we have not modernized to since, apricots, porcupine. When the forms an, and , or and if appear instead of the modern form if, we have reduced and to an but have not changed any of these forms to their modern equivalent, if. We also modernize and, where necessary, correct passages in foreign languages, unless an error in the early printed text can be reasonably explained as a joke.

Whenever we change the wording of the First Quarto or add anything to its stage directions, we mark the change by enclosing it in superior half-brackets ( ⌜   ⌝ ). We want our readers to be immediately aware when we have intervened. (Only when we correct an obvious typographical error in the First Quarto does the change not get marked.) Whenever we change the First Quarto’s wording or change its punctuation so that meaning changes, we list the change in the textual notes , even if all we have done is fix an obvious error.

We, like a great many editors before us, regularize a number of the proper names. For example, more often than not, the character Robin Goodfellow enters and speaks (according to the stage directions and speech prefixes) under this, his proper name. Sometimes, however, he appears under the name “Puck.” He is, as he himself tells us, a puck or a hobgoblin. Most editors since Nicholas Rowe in 1709 have used the name “Puck” for Robin throughout their editions, but we choose, instead, to employ the proper name “Robin Goodfellow” throughout this edition. Sometimes Nick Bottom, the weaver, is referred to as “Clown” in stage directions and speech prefixes; again we use his proper name throughout. Finally, the workers who rehearse and stage a play for Theseus and Hippolyta are often designated in the speech prefixes by the names of their roles rather than by their proper names; e.g., Bottom speaks as “Pyramus,” his role. In our speech prefixes we supply both the name of the character and the name of his role. We expand the often severely abbreviated forms of names used as speech headings in early printed texts into the full names of the characters. Variations in the speech headings of the early printed texts are recorded in the textual notes.

This edition differs from many earlier ones in its efforts to aid the reader in imagining the play as a performance rather than as a series of fictional events. Thus stage directions are written with reference to the stage. For example, in Act 3, scene 1 , when the workers are rehearsing their play, they want to know if the moon will shine the night that they hope to perform it. In the fiction of the play, they consult an almanac to find out, and some editors print a stage direction of the form “Quince consults an almanac .” However, in staging the play, no actor need use an almanac itself; any book of reasonable size will do as a hand prop. And so, writing stage directions from the perspective of the stage, we print “Quince takes out a book.” Whenever it is reasonably certain, in our view, that a speech is accompanied by a particular action, we provide a stage direction describing the action. (Occasional exceptions to this rule occur when the action is so obvious that to add a stage direction would insult the reader.) Stage directions for the entrance of characters in mid-scene are, with rare exceptions, placed so that they immediately precede the characters’ participation in the scene, even though these entrances may appear somewhat earlier in the early printed texts. Whenever we move a stage direction, we record this change in the textual notes. Latin stage directions (e.g., Exeunt ) are translated into English (e.g., They exit ).

In the present edition, as well, we mark with a dash any change of address within a speech, unless a stage direction intervenes. When the -ed ending of a word is to be pronounced, we mark it with an accent.

Like editors for the past two centuries, we display metrically linked lines in the following way:

However, when there are a number of short verse-lines that can be linked in more than one way, we do not, with rare exceptions, indent any of them.

• We have also consulted the computerized text of the First Quarto provided by the Text Archive of the Oxford University Computing Centre, to which we are grateful.

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