A Midsummer Night’s Dream marks the transition from Shakespeare’s early comedies, where he can be seen honing his craft, to the period of his middle or “golden” comedies. It was probably first performed in 1595 (Wiggins, 2013: 299), and was first published in quarto in 1600; it also appeared in the First Folio of 1623. It is a masterpiece of construction and has justly been seen as one of Shakespeare’s most perfect plays. It may also be regarded as one of his lightest and brightest works, peopled by fairies and young lovers and “quick bright things” (1.1.149); yet even here we can see how comedy proceeds by invoking then vanquishing its opposite. Tragedy hovers nearby as Hermia is threatened with death or enforced chastity if she refuses to accept her father’s choice of suitor; the play-within-a-play of “Pyramus and Thisbe”, though comically performed, tells a tragic story of doomed young love which closely resembles Romeo and Juliet, a play of around the same date.

The plot skilfully interweaves several groups of characters. Theseus, Duke of Athens, is preparing to marry Hippolyta, the Amazon queen whom he has conquered in war. Egeus brings before the Duke his daughter Hermia, who refuses to marry Egeus’s candidate, Demetrius, because she is in love with Lysander. Theseus tells her that by law she must either obey her father, die, or become a nun. Left alone together, Hermia and Lysander plan to elope; they confide in Hermia’s friend Helena, who is in love with, but spurned by, Demetrius. Meanwhile, a group of “mechanicals”, or craftsmen, are rehearsing a play based on the Ovidian story of Pyramus and Thisbe to perform at court after the Duke’s wedding. Their director is Peter Quince, and their principal actor is Bottom, a weaver.

The scene shifts to the wood outside Athens by night, where Oberon and Titania, the Fairy King and Queen, are battling for possession of an Indian boy whom Titania has adopted. Oberon is served by a mischievous spirit named Robin Goodfellow, or Puck, whom he sends to fetch a love charm with which to wreak revenge on Titania. Meanwhile, the young Athenian lovers have all come to the wood in pursuit of one another, as have the mechanicals for their rehearsal. Havoc ensues as Robin dispenses the love charm to make Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with Helena and scorn Hermia, and to make Titania fall in love with Bottom, who now sports an ass’s head fixed on him as a joke by Robin.

As dawn draws near, Oberon and Robin restore Lysander and Titania to their normal states of mind and affection, though Demetrius remains uncured and in love with Helena. Theseus and Hippolyta, out hunting, encounter the waking young lovers; overruling his earlier verdict, Theseus proposes a multiple wedding, and the action returns to his palace. The mechanicals perform their play in disastrous but hilarious style, and as the newly married couples retire to bed, the fairies return to bestow a nuptial blessing.

There is a sharp contrast between the opening setting in Theseus’s palace, the abode of patriarchal authority and order, and the wood where the middle acts take place, a place of shifting identities, playful possibilities, and creative confusions. Demetrius punningly complains that he is “wood [mad] within this wood” (2.1.192), and the Athenian characters return home having undergone some kind of reconstruction in this unregulated natural space. This dramatic structure draws on the temporary freedoms of carnival and misrule: C. L. Barber in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy showed how not only Midsummer’s Eve, but also May Day, a festival frequently alluded to in the play, involved disruptive love-games among young people, and the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the urban as “may” or hawthorn blossoms were brought into town.

The play works variations on a general theme of change. It is one of Shakespeare’s most Ovidian plays, not only in the dramatisation of “Pyramus and Thisbe”, but also in its succession of metamorphoses: a flower, accidentally hit by Cupid’s arrow, turns from white to purple and becomes a love charm; a man becomes an ass. Love is shown to be both unstable, as the young lovers dizzyingly switch affections, and a transformative power, which can turn even an ass into a desirable partner. Dreams, magic, and the imagination coalesce as metamorphic forces.

Theseus’s reflection upon the young lovers’ report of their nocturnal experience begins from a sceptical position, but mutates in spite of itself into a celebration of both imagination and poetic creativity:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact. […]
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.
(5.1.4-8, 12-17)

This exhilarating expression of the poet’s creative powers was a radical statement in an era when the imagination was widely distrusted, and even defences of poetry tended to emphasise its moral, didactic potential (see Bates, Haskell, Rossky, Roychoudhury, and Sumillera). Following Theseus’s speech, the mechanicals’ performance fails largely through its over-literalism – the audience are reassured that the lion is not really a lion, Wall and Moonshine must be physically presented on stage – yet thereby accentuates how great a part imagination plays in successful drama. In these ways A Midsummer Night’s Dream resonates with other Shakespearean plays which contain inset dramas and reflect self-consciously upon the playwright’s art, such as Hamlet and The Tempest.

The presiding image of the play, aligned with the theme of change, is the moon. It is present from the opening lines, when Theseus and Hippolyta speak of waiting for a new moon for their wedding, through the middle nocturnal acts, to the final impersonation of the Man in the Moon by Starveling. Hosts of other lunar allusions and images could be cited. This can be explained by the moon’s multiple associations: with mutability, through its cyclical fluctuations; with love and dreams, as the presiding planet of night; with madness, or lunacy, like the crazed behaviour of the recipients of the love charm; with the occult and magic; and specifically with female powers. Indeed, in the 1590s the moon was a standard image for Elizabeth I in royal panegyric (the poetry of praise). It was popular largely because it combined the appearance of praise – Elizabeth as a radiant, divine virgin, like the moon-goddess Diana – with potential for covert criticism through the moon’s associations with supposed female fickleness and instability (see Hackett 1995). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the few Shakespearean works in which Elizabeth is overtly mentioned, and it is in her moon-goddess guise: she is the “fair vestal”, the “watery moon”, the “imperial votaress”, described in Oberon’s vision, whose impregnability to Cupid’s arrow causes it to fall instead on the flower which becomes the love charm (2.1.155-68). Her invulnerability to desire thereby brings about Titania’s enthralment to lust for an ass. This was also a period in which Elizabeth was associated with the figure of the Fairy Queen, in entertainments on her progresses and, prominently, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene(1590). Without making any reductive direct identification of Titania with Elizabeth, the new historicist critic Louis Montrose argued in 1983 in an influential article that A Midsummer Night’s Dream expressed topical Elizabethan cultural ambivalence toward female power, and a sense that it was more properly subjugated to male authority (as Titania to Oberon and Hippolyta to Theseus).

Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena all undergo transformation during the play from virginity to contented wifehood. Titania too is reformed from an insubordinate wife who has “forsworn [Oberon’s] bed and company” (2.1.62) to a loving and compliant partner, who takes her husband’s hands “new in amity” (4.1.86). Marriage is of course the conventional ending of comedy, but this play is exceptionally emphatic in its endorsement and celebration of harmonious matrimony. Another play of the same period in Shakespeare’s career, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1596) (date according to Wiggins: 320) experimentally evaded the conventional marriage-ending by postponing it into an uncertain future, such that “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Jill” (Shakespeare, 1998: 5.2.862-63.). In the Dream, on the contrary, “Jack shall have Jill, / Nought shall go ill, / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well” (3.2.461-3).

Yet this play’s final pairings satisfy female desires as well as patriarchal order, as Hermia and Helena get the husbands of their choice. Throughout the play these young women’s personalities are more distinct from each other than are those of Lysander and Demetrius, who seem bewilderingly interchangeable; and bonds of affection between women are strongly present in the play, even as they are challenged by imperatives to heterosexual coupling. Hippolyta is Queen of the Amazons; and when Helena reminds Hermia of how, during their “schooldays’ friendship, childhood innocence”, they “grew together / Like to a double cherry”, she echoes Titania’s lyrical reminiscence of her friendship with the Indian boy’s dead mother, with whom she “gossiped” on the shore and “laughed” at passing merchant vessels (3.2.202, 208-9; 2.1.123-37). Indeed, the impression of the Fairy Queen that may linger in spectators’ minds is not so much her successful taming by Oberon as her irresistible power (“I am a spirit of no common rate: / The summer still doth tend upon my state”, 3.1.148-9) and her sensuality (“Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. […] the female ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm”, 4.1.39, 42-3).

Besides Ovid, other sources for A Midsummer Night’s Dream include Plutarch’s Life of Theseus and Seneca’s Hippolytus (for the character and history of Theseus); Apuleius’s Golden Ass and the story of Balaam’s ass in the Bible (Numbers 22, for semi-human asses); Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (for the setting of Athens ruled by Theseus, and for competing male lovers); also Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (for another version of “Pyramus and Thisbe”); Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (for Robin Goodfellow); tales of erotic encounters with the Fairy Queen ranging from folklore to John Lyly’s recent courtly drama Endimion; the French romance Huon of Bordeaux and Robert Greene’s James IV (for Oberon); and Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night (a 1594 treatise on dreams and nocturnal apparitions). Unlike most of Shakespeare’s plays, each of which tends to have a single principal source, it offers instead an encyclopaedic, dazzlingly impressive, yet unobtrusive melding of diverse materials both high and low.

Since the early nineteenth century there has been speculation that the play was first performed at an actual aristocratic wedding celebration. The most likely occasion was the marriage of Elizabeth Carey, granddaughter of the patron of Shakespeare’s playing company, to Thomas Berkeley in February 1596 (Hackett, 2003: 338-42, 350). Several scholars have made a good case for this, based on textual details and astrological references within the play, but others fiercely dispute it, arguing that Shakespeare was principally a writer for the commercial stage (for more details of the case on both sides, see Hackett, 2009).

Over subsequent centuries performance styles have been extremely diverse (for a history of stage and screen productions of the play, see Williams, 1997). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a preference for lavish stagings with hordes of dancing fairies. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s version of 1900 and 1911 even included live rabbits frolicking in the stage wood. Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s spectacular and ornate film of 1935 may be seen as a product of this tradition. Authorisation for opulent realisation of the wood outside Athens may be found in the sensually detailed language of the play: as both David Young and Anne Barton noticed, characters have a tendency to make lists, accumulating heaps of illustrations of their ideas in order to summon them vividly to the imagination (Young, 1966: 81-85; Barton, 1997: 252-53). Egeus copiously catalogues the love-tokens with which Lysander has wooed Hermia (1.1.33-4); Hermia and Lysander in turn enumerate all the obstacles to young love (1.1.134-49); Oberon intones the names of all the flowers that “overcanopy” Titania’s bank (2.1.249-52); and so on. Nature, in particular, is not only profuse but also intricate and active: snakes are spotted, hedgehogs are thorny, long-legged spiders are weaving (2.2.9-10, 19-20).

However, as the mechanicals’ misguided literalism teaches us, we could find in all these details not an order-form for props but an inspiration to the imagination. Shakespeare, after all, would have worked with an almost bare stage. In 1816 William Hazlitt reviewed an overburdened operatic-style production of the play, and was dismayed by it; the following year he argued that the play was inevitably diminished by staging and should only ever be read, as poetry (Hazlitt, 1816: 44-45; Hazlitt, 1998: 157-58). Certainly the lyrical qualities of the text cannot be overstated; Oberon’s list of flowers is so much more than a mere list:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
(2.1.249-52)

There are numerous extended speeches like this which paint word-pictures, inviting us to conjure the scenes they describe in our minds: others include Titania’s descriptions of the inverted seasons and of her companionship with the Indian boy’s dead mother (2.1.81-117, 123-37). Such passages reflect Shakespeare’s grammar-school training in the rhetorical technique of enargeia, description so vivid that it recreates the scene in the imagination and arouses an emotional response. Here as in other works Shakespeare uses enargeia to create a compelling imaginary world which extends beyond the action on stage or the words on the page (Hutson, 2015: 2, 4, 58, 81-83.)

These evocative set-pieces have a dream-like quality within a play which is presented as a whole as a kind of dream, both in its title, and in Robin’s epilogue, which invites us to consider what we have seen as “No more yielding but a dream” (5.1.418). Elizabethan dream-theory, drawing on classical and medieval traditions, recognised different kind of dreams: they could be prophetic visions sent by God; or they could be produced by nothing more than indigestion; or they could be something in-between, a kind of mental indigestion as waking events were processed by “fantasy”, the most wayward aspect of the imagination. Yet the dreamer could never be certain to which of these categories any particular dream belonged. Presenting the play as a dream enables Shakespeare, through Robin, to send the audience away with a feeling that they have simply had fun in a world of fantasy, while also leaving them with a haunting sense of deeper meanings.

This sense that the play has dream-like latent layers has attracted post-Freudian interpreters of the play. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (first published in English in 1965), found at the core of the play a perverse eroticism emblematised by Titania’s bestial coupling with an ass (171-90). Peter Brook’s stage production of 1970, influenced by Kott, emphasised the priapic nature of the goings-on in the Fairy Queen’s bower (see Holland, 2016, and Selbourne, 1982). This was all an extreme departure from earlier views of the play as an innocent, light-hearted entertainment suitable for children. It was also a departure from opulent stagings: Brook’s production was set in an almost empty white box, thereby casting emphasis onto the work of the imagination. A further innovation, which has now become almost standard, was the doubling of the roles of Theseus and Hippolyta with those of Oberon and Titania. In psychoanalytic terms, the effect of this is to imply that the middle acts of the play are in a sense Theseus and Hippolyta’s dream: a working-through, in the nocturnal realm of the unconscious, by means of fantasy-personae, of the tensions between them which are evident in Act 1 Scene 1. Certainly when Hippolyta reappears on her wedding day she seems to have undergone some kind of conversion to wifely affection parallel to that of Titania. Even if we leave Freud out of it, the small number of the actors in Elizabethan playing companies makes it likely that the roles would have been doubled in Shakespeare’s own time, inviting the audience to draw comparisons between the two regal couples.

Critics have become increasingly aware of the presence of India in the play: the fairies have come “from the farthest steep of India” (2.1.69); the boy for whom Titania and Oberon compete is described as “stolen from an Indian king” (2.1.22); and his pregnant mother “gossiped” with Titania “in the spiced Indian air by night” (2.1.124). This language of exoticism and merchandise can be situated in relation to the early colonialism that would bring about the founding of the East India Company in 1600, just five years after the first performances of the play (see Hendricks, 1996: 37-60, and Singh, 2019: 73-8).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has also had particular global reach across the centuries as one of Shakespeare’s most widely performed and adapted plays. Notable recent versions have included Yang Jung-Ung’s 2003 adaptation incorporating elements of Korean folk-culture, and Tim Supple’s 2006 Indian production in which the cast spoke their lines in eight languages of the subcontinent, plus English. (On global productions and adaptations, see Chaudhuri, 2017: 22-38.) Other recent productions have experimented playfully with dynamics of gender and sexuality: in Emma Rice’s 2016 production at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Helena became male, giving added resonance to Demetrius’s return to his “natural taste” when he turns back from Hermia to Helenus (4.1.173); while in Nicholas Hytner’s 2019 production at the Bridge Theatre (also London), most of Titania’s and Oberon’s lines were exchanged in the middle acts, making Oberon (alter-ego of a particularly stiff, patriarchal Theseus) the one who surrendered euphorically to crazy love for Bottom. The play’s sense of magical possibilities continues to inspire creativity and to entrance audiences.

All references to the play are to William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Works Cited

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Citation: Hackett, Helen. "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 December 2002; last revised 05 November 2019. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7109, accessed 22 January 2025.]

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