A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is the easiest Shakespeare play to enjoy and the hardest to stop thinking about. On the surface it is a romantic comedy about four young lovers who get lost in an enchanted forest, a fairy king and queen fighting over a boy, and a group of working-class Athenians rehearsing a terrible play for the duke's wedding. On the other surface, it is a sustained philosophical argument about the relationship between love, imagination, and reality — and about what theater itself is doing when it puts impossible things onstage.

Shakespeare wrote it around 1595-1596, probably for a private aristocratic wedding (though this is disputed). The play is organized around a single question that it asks from multiple angles: is there a difference between loving someone and being enchanted by them? The four young lovers are enchanted by Puck's love-juice and love the wrong people; Titania is enchanted and loves Bottom (who has been given a donkey's head); the mechanicals' play-within-the-play attempts sincerity and produces comedy; the audience watches the whole thing with a perspective the characters don't have. At the end, we are not sure the enchantment has been fully lifted.

What Midsummer does that the tragedies don't is make its philosophical argument through comedy. The lovers' suffering is genuine inside the play but ridiculous from outside it. Puck's "Lord, what fools these mortals be" names our perspective but doesn't end the argument — because Puck himself is not human, and the play hasn't decided whether his outside view is the correct one.

Puck (Robin Goodfellow) is the play's motor: he makes the errors, he corrects them (partially), he frames the whole action from outside. His perspective — amused, fundamentally indifferent to human suffering, delighted by chaos — is presented as both clarifying and insufficient. He is not the play's moral center, even though he speaks its most quoted line.

Titania and Oberon conduct a marital dispute that has been causing weather chaos across the mortal world. Their fight over the "little changeling boy" is the play's strangest element — the boy is never explained, and Titania's account of his dead mother is the most beautiful and unexpected speech in the play.

Bottom is Shakespeare's most fully realized comic character. He is confident, generous, unself-conscious, and completely oblivious to the enchantment being placed on him. His experience of being loved by Titania is treated with more dignity than it appears: he doesn't exploit it, he doesn't panic, he accepts it with the equanimity of someone who has never doubted he deserves love. His confused memory of "a most rare vision" after waking is the play's most philosophically resonant moment.

Helena and Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius are deliberately less individuated than Shakespeare's other protagonists — they are types within a type. This is a formal choice: the play is arguing that the lovers' interchangeability is the point, not a failure of characterization.

No. 1 · Titania's account of the changeling boy's mother (Act II, Scene 1). In the middle of a quarrel with Oberon, Titania describes her friendship with the boy's mother — a human woman, now dead, who sailed the seas with her while pregnant, laughing at ships whose sails swelled like her belly. It is the play's most unexpected passage, intimate and melancholy in the middle of a comedy. It makes Titania's love for the boy comprehensible and complicates our sense of Oberon's demand.

No. 2 · Pyramus and Thisbe (Act V, Scene 1). The mechanicals perform their play for the court. It is deliberately terrible: they explain the moon, they bring a man to play a wall with a chink in it, the actor playing the lion assures the ladies he is not actually a lion. The audience onstage laughs; Theseus and Hippolyta comment; the mechanicals perform with complete sincerity. The scene is a meditation on what theater does when it fails — and how failure and sincerity can achieve something that technical competence can't. Bottom's Pyramus is genuinely moving.

No. 3 · Bottom's dream (Act IV, Scene 1). Bottom wakes from his enchanted night with Titania and tries to remember what happened. He can't, and the failure of language to hold the experience is given as a kind of quotation from St. Paul ("the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen"). Shakespeare is comparing the experience of enchantment to the experience of divine vision — and using Bottom, the play's comic figure, to do it. This is the play's strangest and most serious move.

Film: Peter Hall's 1968 film with Judi Dench as Titania is the classic screen version. The 1999 film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett is more accessible but less interesting. The RSC's 2016 production with live music, available on film, is extraordinary.

Read this if you are… A first-time Shakespeare reader who wants comedy before tragedy. Anyone who wants to think about love, illusion, and theater. Readers who enjoy plays that are aware of themselves as plays — Midsummer is the most meta-theatrical of Shakespeare's comedies. Anyone who has seen a production and found themselves curious about what the text is doing beneath the obvious story.

Skip it if you are… Looking for psychological depth in the protagonists — the four lovers are deliberately schematic. If you want Shakespeare's emotional register at its most intense, the tragedies are a better choice. The play's themes require some patience with complexity for something that looks simple.

Read the play in a single sitting if possible — it's the shortest of the comedies and the structure only makes sense whole. The three plots (Athens/Fairies/Mechanicals) don't interact as much as they mirror each other, and seeing all three simultaneously is part of the experience.

Pay attention to what the different characters can't see. The four lovers can't see Puck or the fairies. The mechanicals can't see Titania enchanted. Theseus and Hippolyta can't see what happened in the forest (or choose not to). The play is partly a map of who has access to what perspective.

Watching a production is almost required — the magic is theatrical, not readerly. This is one of the Shakespeare plays most dependent on what bodies and music and space can do.

• Ovid — Metamorphoses (8 CE). The source for Pyramus and Thisbe and a general influence on the play's interest in transformation, enchantment, and the instability of form. Shakespeare's Rome was Ovidian at its core.
• C.S. Lewis — The Allegory of Love (1936). Lewis's account of the medieval tradition of courtly love and how it shaped English literature. Provides the intellectual history behind the play's treatment of love as both comic and serious subject.

1. The enchantment resolves at the end of Act IV, but Demetrius still loves Helena through Puck's magic — the potion was never removed. Does the play treat this as a problem? Should it?
2. Theseus dismisses the lovers' account of the forest as the product of imagination ("the lunatic, the lover, and the poet"). Hippolyta disagrees. Who has the more accurate reading of what has happened?
3. Bottom's "rare vision" is given the language of religious experience. Is the play suggesting that Bottom has genuinely experienced something, or is it mocking him for thinking so?
4. The play-within-the-play (Pyramus and Thisbe) fails technically but succeeds in some other way. What does the audience's response — laughter followed by something more — tell us about what theater is actually doing?
5. Titania's love for Bottom is produced by enchantment, but the play gives it unusual dignity. Is there a way to read their relationship that isn't simply comic?
6. The forest operates as an inversion of the Athenian court — different rules, different hierarchies, different rationality. By the end of the play, how much of the court's order has been restored, and how much has been changed?