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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 Modern Perspective: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Catherine Belsey

When Bottom wakes up, near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , after spending a night of love with the queen of the fairies, this formerly masterful and garrulous figure is suddenly very nearly inarticulate. What could he say that would do justice to the experience? “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” ( 4.1.214 –17). Bottom’s name, and his transformation—an event that clarifies more than it changes his identity—invite the audience to associate him with the least poetic aspects of life, and yet, even as an ass, Bottom has been touched by something special but mysterious, a power that he finds unusually hard to define. In quest of a way of talking about what has happened to him, Bottom reaches for the language of the Bible, St. Paul’s account of the future glory that God has prepared for human beings (1 Corinthians 2.9), though of course, being Bottom, he gets it wrong: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” ( 4.1.220 –24). In the end he concludes that the solution is for Peter Quince to write a ballad of his dream. Evidently only the lyricism of popular poetry seems to Bottom adequate to define the experience of love.

We do not have Peter Quince’s ballad, but—if we assume that Quince wrote “Pyramus and Thisbe,” in which Bottom plays the romantic hero—we do have his play, and we also have Shakespeare’s play, which is its setting. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about love. It proposes that love is a dream, or perhaps a vision; that it is absurd, irrational, a delusion, or, perhaps, on the other hand, a transfiguration; that it is doomed to be momentary (“So quick bright things come to confusion” [ 1.1.151 ]), and that it constitutes at the same time the proper foundation for lifelong marriage. Possibly Bottom is right, the play suggests, not to pin down anything so multiple, not to encapsulate love in a neat definition that would encourage us to measure our own and other people’s experience and find it normal or abnormal, mature or immature, wise or foolish. The play’s device, on the contrary, is to dramatize the plurality of love by characterizing it differently in a range of distinct voices.

As soon as Hermia and Lysander are left alone together on the stage for the first time, they discuss their predicament in a series of elegant and elaborate exchanges:

How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale?

How chance the roses there do fade so fast?

Belike for want of rain, which I could well

Beteem them from the tempest of mine eyes.

( 1.1.130 –33)

Since the lovers and the audience have both heard Theseus tell Hermia that she must die or go into a convent if she refuses to marry another man, it is hardly necessary for Lysander to ask why she is pale, or for her to tell him that she thinks she might be going to cry. But the poetic image of the roses in her cheeks legitimates the conceit that follows: the roses are short of water, which Hermia is about to supply. The exchange has the effect of distancing the threat to Hermia, and putting before the audience instead what is delicate, lyrical, and witty in romance. Lysander’s next utterance explains the way all four lovers tend to talk to each other:

Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,

Could ever hear by tale or history . . .

( 1.1.134 –35)

How else, after all, do people learn to talk about love in the first instance, except by reading love stories? No wonder the four lovers are virtually indistinguishable. Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal. Because of love’s power to idealize, the object of desire seems unique, even though in the event it turns out that Hermia and Helena are interchangeable. But the ways of idealizing, of investing the other person with the special beauty or magnetism that justifies desire, are drawn in the first place from the culture in which people learn about love.

Meanwhile Theseus, we are to understand, in contrast to the young lovers, has been around. The stories of his many loves and betrayals would have been well known, at least to those members of the audience who had been to school, and Oberon alludes to them in the course of his quarrel with Titania ( 2.1.81 –83). Theseus himself talks quite differently about love:

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in

Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow

This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires

Like to a stepdame or a dowager

Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

( 1.1.1 –6)

Theseus acknowledges that he has desires, and they are urgent and imperative. He is impatient with the moon, that conventional poetic symbol of romance, and the comparison he invokes is anything but lyrical. The moon that is delaying his marriage is like an old woman who refuses to die and so prevents her young heir from getting his hands on his inheritance. Paradoxically, the love that is voiced by Theseus seems more insistent to the degree that it is more prosaic, literally more like prose, since the speech rhythms do not coincide with the line endings, but run directly across them. The Amazon Hippolyta, whose comments so often counterpoint those of Theseus, immediately supplies the missing romance by reinvesting with its customary lyricism “the moon, like to a silver bow / New-bent in heaven” ( 1.1.9 –10). 1

The young lovers perfectly reproduce the conventional idealizing imagery of the period:

O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!

To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?

Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show

Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!

That pure congealèd white, high Taurus’ snow,

Fanned with the eastern wind, turns to a crow

When thou hold’st up thy hand.

( 3.2.140 –46)

Eyes like crystals, lips like cherries, hands white as snow—this is engaging to the degree that it is lyrical. It is also delightfully absurd, when we bear in mind that it is the instant effect of Robin Goodfellow’s love-juice, and represents a vision of Helena that Demetrius was quite unable to see before his sight was bewitched. But as Helena herself explains earlier in the play, love does not necessarily see what is there:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity.

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

( 1.1.238 –41)

Helena’s words might equally constitute a commentary on Titania’s first response to Bottom braying in his ass’s head: “What angel wakes me from my flow’ry bed?” ( 3.1.131 ). The fairy queen’s temporary devotion to a donkey is the play’s clearest and funniest indication of love’s arbitrary nature.

One reason why the lovers seem comic is that their changes of preference do not appear arbitrary to them. As Lysander solemnly explains to his new love, Helena, “The will of man is by his reason swayed, / And reason says you are the worthier maid” ( 2.2.122 –23). The element of absurdity is compounded when we recognize (though they do not) a parody of their idealizing vision in Thisbe’s lament for the dead Pyramus:

                These lily lips,

                This cherry nose,

             These yellow cowslip cheeks

                Are gone, are gone!

                Lovers, make moan;

             His eyes were green as leeks.

( 5.1.347 –52)

The king and queen of the fairies are old (or, rather, ageless) married lovers, and they are quarreling. The play does not ignore the trace of violence that exists within love when the other person fails to conform to the lover’s idealized image. The quarrel between Oberon and Titania has upset the proper sequence of the seasons, which is a serious problem in a society based on agriculture, though it is hard for the audience to feel great anxiety about this when the fairies quarrel so musically:

These are the forgeries of jealousy;

And never, since the middle summer’s spring,

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beachèd margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,

But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

( 2.1.84 –90)

The brawls are not mentioned until the verse has quite distracted us from the substance of the quarrel through its evocation of imaginary landscapes, so lacking in specific detail that they seem the settings of half-remembered legends and tales of adventure. No wonder Oberon and Titania are finally reconciled. In a similar way, lyricism and comedy distance the passionate quarrels between Demetrius and Lysander, Hermia and Helena. Conversely, if the play of “Pyramus and Thisbe” evokes tears of laughter rather than sorrow ( 5.1.73 –74), it alludes, nevertheless, to the tragic possibilities of a conflict between love and parental opposition. A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not let its audience forget that love entails confusion and danger as well as grace, although it never entirely separates these contraries.

None of the distinct voices in the play—romantic, lyrical, or urgent—seems to exhaust the character of love; none of them can be identified with “true” love as opposed to false. Nor does any of them summarize the nature of love; and when Theseus tries to do so, what he says seems quite inadequate. “I never may believe,” he insists, “These antique fables, nor these fairy toys” ( 5.1.2 –3). “Antique” implies both “ancient” and “antic” (theatrical), and ironically Theseus himself is both. He is a fictional hero of classical legend and a figure on a stage in the most theatrical of plays. As for the fairy stories he repudiates, we have seen them enacted in the course of the play, and we are therefore in no position to share his entirely rational dismissal of lovers, along with lunatics and poets ( 5.1.7 ). Hippolyta seems more to the point when she answers him, but she is considerably less than specific. The separate stories of the night, she affirms, grow “to something of great constancy [consistency], / But, howsoever, strange and admirable [eliciting wonder]” ( 5.1.27 –28). In talking about love, as perhaps in love itself, there is commonly a sense of a quality that cannot be made present, cannot be presented, or represented. In the most exhaustive analysis, the most effusive declaration, or the most lyrical poem, something slips away, and it is that elusiveness that sustains desire itself, as well as the desire to talk about it.

And this, perhaps, is a clue to the nature of the pleasure A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers its audience. It constructs for the spectators something of the desire it also puts on display. In one sense comedy produces the wishes it then goes on to fulfill. The play invites us to sympathize with the young lovers. In consequence, we want Hermia to marry the man she loves, in spite of the opposition of her ridiculous father, who supposes that serenades and love tokens are forms of witchcraft. And we want Helena to be happy with Demetrius in spite of his initial rejection of her love. The enigma that enlists the desire of the audience centers on whether the play will bring about the happy ending we hope for, and if so, how. The pleasure of this dramatic form is familiar from Roman comedy to Neil Simon, and its familiarity is precisely part of the enjoyment we are invited to experience.

But A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not always do exactly what we might expect, and in this way it keeps its audience guessing, continually reoffering itself in the process as an object of our desire. The play begins with the longing of Theseus and Hippolyta to consummate their love, and the action that follows occupies the intervening space, so that at the end of Act 5 the newly married lovers go off to bed together. Desire constitutes the frame of the play itself. In the meantime, Theseus dispatches the master of the revels, who is responsible for entertainment at court, in search of “merriments” and “reveling” ( 1.1.13 , 20 ), and at once an old man comes in with his daughter and her two rival suitors. Egeus is appropriately stagy (“Stand forth, Demetrius . . . Stand forth, Lysander” [ 1.1.25 , 27 ]), and the audience might be expected to recognize the pattern of Roman comedy, familiar from the plays of Plautus and Terence and widely imitated in Elizabethan drama. The conventional poetry and the extravagance of the lovers intensifies the sense that we are watching the first of the revels that Theseus has sent for, a play within a play.

But Roman comedy does not characteristically include fairies, and it is the mischief-making Robin Goodfellow, a supernatural figure from English folklore, who largely motivates the plot of this inset play. The genres are mixed, with the effect that the audience is never quite sure whether the conventions in operation at any specific moment are those of comedy or folktale. At the same time, Robin Goodfellow (Puck) both is and is not a native English replica of the blind, irrational, overhasty, and Continental Cupid that Helena describes. The play teases the audience with glimpses of familiar forms and figures, and then deflects our attention onto something unexpected. In consequence, the delight it invites the spectators to experience is entirely distinct from the comfortable feeling of recognition other plays rely on.

The plot leads up to the marriages of the lovers, but it does not quite confirm the distinction we might expect it to identify between true love on the one hand and arbitrary passion induced by magic on the other. Demetrius still has the love-juice on his eyes, and yet the play gives no indication of a difference between this marriage and the others. If marriage is a serious social institution, it seems to rest on a remarkably precarious base. But the imperatives of fiction require that the comedy of love end in marriage, and Demetrius marries the partner he has when the action comes to a stop.

If the story leads up to marriage, however, it does not quite end there. Many critical accounts of the play depend on an opposition between its two locations, the house of Theseus in Athens and the wildwood under the control of the fairies. The Athenian court represents the world of reconciliation and rationality, of social institutions and communal order, while the wood outside Athens is the location of night and bewildering passions, a place of anarchy and anxiety, where behavior becomes unpredictable and individual identity is transformed. On this reading, the fairies, who are by no means the sugary creatures of Victorian fantasy, represent the quintessence of all that is turbulent and uncontrolled in human experience, and in particular the traces of instability and violence that inhabit desire.

At the end of the play, however, when the couples, now properly distributed and legitimately married, have gone to bed, the fairies come in from the wood and take possession of the palace: “Through the house give glimmering light, / By the dead and drowsy fire . . .” ( 5.1.408 –9). Though their purpose, we are to understand, is benevolent, they also bring with them the uncanny resonances of the dreamworld that seemed to have been left behind in the wood:

          . . . we fairies, that do run

              By the triple Hecate’s team

          From the presence of the sun,

              Following darkness like a dream,

          Now are frolic.

( 5.1.400 –4)

Hecate is the queen of the night, and the team the fairies run with are the dragons who draw her chariot. Their unexpected presence within the house, therefore, implies the invasion of elements of the turbulent, the magical, and the unearthly into the social and domestic proprieties of marriage.

How could it be otherwise? This is, after all, a wedding night. But by handing over the conclusion to the fairies, the play displaces the apparent closure, the celebration of restored identity and the return to community it has duly delivered. Instead, it goes on to re-create what is most mysterious and elusive in the world it has portrayed, and gives the stage back to the representatives of all that is unaccountable and still unrecounted in the experience of love. In this way A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers to leave its audience in a state of mind that bears some resemblance to Bottom’s when he wakes up from his dream: exalted, perhaps, but a little less assured, less confident, and altogether less knowing than before.

• It is possible, of course, that the new-bent bow is not merely lyrical. As an Amazon, Hippolyta would have carried a bow as a weapon against Theseus and his army. See James Calderwood’s “ A Midsummer Night’s Dream : Anamorphism and Theseus’ Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 409–30, esp. p. 413, for a discussion of Elizabethan attitudes toward Amazons.

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A Midsummer Nights Dream

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• DOI: 10.2307/2871824
• Corpus ID: 21212008

A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage

• Published 1 June 1957

22 Citations

Reading shakespeare's cupid, adonis in fairyland: the hazards of boyhood in a midsummer night’s dream, shakespeare and impure aesthetics: the case of a midsummer night's dream, a speculative political allegory in a midsummer night's dream, reflexive dwelling:: the body as representation of wall, “use me but as your spaniel”: feminism, queer theory, and early modern sexualities, who needs men titania’s world and shakespeare’s argument for marriage in a midsummer night’s dream, the masque of hymen in as you like it, the figure of the changeling : gender conflict in a midsummer night's dream, 달과 변신 : 『한여름 밤의 꿈』에 재현된 여성의 성과 정치, 2 references, on the imagination, related papers.

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86 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics & Examples

🏆 best a midsummer night’s dream essay topics & examples, 📌 easy a midsummer night’s dream essay questions & titles, 🔖 interesting a midsummer night’s dream essay topics to write about.

• William Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” This paper examines romantic love as the source of joy and fulfillment in “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Love is the source of pain and suffering in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
• Marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream The main theme of the play revolves around the marriage between Thesus, the Duke of Athens, and the Queen of Amazons called Hippolyta, as well as the events that surround the married couple.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Character Analysis of Helena Through My Eyes She narrates how being in the forest to sway his love is more of a drama and effect that she needs to beg him to love her.
• Puck’s Character in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare The essay delves on the power of Puck to change the love interests of the two parties. In the timeless Shakespearean masterpiece, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Puck is the most important and dynamic character in […]
• The Feminine Power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Considering the Elizabethan times much was expected from women in terms of respect and submissiveness to the men in that society, such that a daughter going to an extent of going against a fathers choice […]
• Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Psychological View As a fact, based on the way the author strategically presents various characters, psychological critics have suggested that some characters in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be seen as representations of the ego, the […]
• Parental Issues in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Reading the Science of Law Into a Cautious Tale About the Return Into the Lapse of Nature When Literature Meets Jurisdiction: The Mother, the Father and the Child As it has been mentioned above, the play incorporates the elements of a moral dilemma concerning who the parent of a child should be […]
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Play and 1999 Reproduction The film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although based on the play of the same name by Shakespeare, adopts a different approach to the storyline.
• Carnival in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the carnival elements in the play are widely discussed topics in the literary world. When analyzing the gradual development of the plot of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream […]
• Ovid as a Source for Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” Not only the figures of Pyramus and Thisbe were borrowed by Shakespeare from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” to create protagonists for his famous “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, but the English genius was also parodying both manner and […]
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare: Act II, Scene I Analysis Act II, Scene I opens with Puck and the Fairy discussing the schism recently erupted between the power couple of Shakespeare’s fantasy world: Oberon, the king of the fairies and Titania, the queen of the […]
• Shakespeare’s Play A Midsummer Night’s Dream The synthesis of old and new traditions in play writing contributes to the development of new genres that Shakespeare makes use of to reflect the historic and cultural context of his epoch.
• “Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Felix Mendelssohn The Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream is a seminal piece composed by Felix Mendelssohn in the 19th century. This term refers to a format in which the composition itself is not designed to be […]
• The Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream In spite of the fact that the film is based on the play appropriately, and Shakespeare’s words are followed strictly, there are some details which are added to adapt the play to the director’s vision […]
• A Midsummer’s Night Dream Theseus- He is the Duke of Athens and is getting ready to marry Hippolyta at the beginning of the play. Lysander- He is Hermia’s lover and in the end of the play, the two marry.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare One of the brightest examples of such change among all the characters is Helena, one of the four young lovers of the story.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Play of Dreaming The author of the discussed article analyzes the role and meaning of dreams in one of the most prominent Shakespeare’s plays by referring to the psychological theories of dreaming.
• Ritual Performances in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare uses this dream theme to bring out the comic nature of his play and ensure that the unusual happenings in the comedy serve to entertain the audience as opposed to depressing it.
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare The actors created compelling and relatable portrayals of the characters and their motivations for the audience, which made the play simpler to comprehend during the performance. The portrayal of Puck as a cunning and naughty […]
• Exploring Irony in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Trifles’ That is, it is the application of a character’s image in one line to represent another. Wright’s instability, which is evident through her sewing, leads the women and the audience to believe that Mrs.
• The Play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” William Shakespeare These cases explicate the fact that the institution of marriage is one of the contexts in which the rights of women are gravely abused in patriarchal societies. Women in patriarchal societies are also deprived of […]
• Magic in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare What fascinated me about A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the Shakespeare’s portrayal of life on the verge of the real world and the world of magic and dreams in the forest with fairies.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Play by William Shakespeare The scene divulges the heightened parody presented by Shakespeare where there is bafflement and confusion among the young lovers. The scene sets the stage for confusion in and bickering among the young friends.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Angels in America Hence, the similarities and differences depicted in the two plays in terms of plot, general structure and the way the issues are brought up.
• Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 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.
• Athenian Woods in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Comparison of the Theme of Female Conformity in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Othello”
• True Love and Unrequited Love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Social Disruption and the Supernatural in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Setting the Stage for Comedy in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Masculine and Feminine in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Image of the Forest in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Customs of Marriage and the Rights of Women in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Supernatural Element in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Destabilizing the Social Norms Between Men and Women in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Reason and Love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Men of Rule in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Music as an Important Feature of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Theme of Love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare
• The Supernatural in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• An Ecological Interpretation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Shakespeare’s Presentation of Relationships in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• What Makes “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” a Comedy
• Passion in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare
• The Grim Side of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Transition of Reality Into Ideality in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Two Critical Perspectives of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Power of Magic in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Jealousy, Desperation, and Intervention
• Love Is Evil: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Williams Shakespeare
• Differences and Similarities in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Winter’s Tale”
• The Relation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to “Romeo and Juliet”
• Elizabethan Love and Marriage Customs Reflected in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Imagination and Transformation in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Romanticism and Realism in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: How Concepts and Values Are Destabilized
• Examples of Inversion in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Role of Theseus and Hippolyta in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Comedy and Tragedy in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Parallel Plots in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a Means of Holding Four Very Different Groups Together
• The Oddly Dreamlike Quality of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Puck and Bottom: The Artist as Interpreter in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Gender Stereotypes in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Analysis of the “Happy Ending” of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Major Comedic Elements of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Place Between Human and Fey in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Moon as a Symbol in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Puck’s Motivation and Depiction in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Internal Danger and the External Perils Which Afflict Shakespeare’s Lovers In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Exposition in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Themes and Supporting Images in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Male Dominance and Female Oppression in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Hyperbole and Illusion in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• William Shakespeare’s Comic Technique in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Embodiment of Humanism in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Themes of Uncertainty and Doubt in “Hamlet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Multiple Marriages
• Problem-Solving in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Changeling”
• Staging a Historically Accurate Production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Patriarchy and Gender Roles in King Lear and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Women Powerless in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Comparison and Contrast Between Helena and Hermia in a “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Influence of Ovid’s Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe on Presentation of Young Lovers in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• The Melodic Tune In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
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"86 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 21 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/a-midsummer-nights-dream-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '86 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics & Examples'. 21 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "86 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics & Examples." February 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/a-midsummer-nights-dream-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "86 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics & Examples." February 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/a-midsummer-nights-dream-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "86 A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics & Examples." February 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/a-midsummer-nights-dream-essay-examples/.