A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Review

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the play that confirms Shakespeare was doing something no one had done before — not just writing well, but constructing dramatic architectures of unusual ambition. Three worlds coexist in it: the Athenian court where Hermia defies her father and the law; the fairy realm where Oberon and Titania fight over a changeling boy; and the workshop of Bottom the weaver, where artisans rehearse a tragedy about Pyramus and Thisbe. These worlds should not cohere. They cohere completely.

The forest scenes, in which Puck applies love potion to the wrong sleeping Athenian and the four lovers end up chasing each other in a knot of desire and rejection, are as funny as anything in the canon — but the comedy has a slightly unsettling edge. Love here is not romantic destiny; it is a chemical accident, a trick of the eyes, indifferent to its object. Titania falls in love with a man who has been given a donkey’s head. The four lovers shift their allegiances overnight. The play does not resolve this unsettling premise so much as it allows the enchantment to lift and everyone to gratefully forget.

Bottom is the play’s secret moral centre. Where the lovers are unmade by the forest, Bottom is perfectly at home in it. His equanimity in the face of the impossible — he accepts being loved by the Queen of the Fairies with cheerful, bovine good grace — is one of Shakespeare’s great comic strokes. The play closes with Puck’s address to the audience: if we were offended, we only dreamed it. It is the lightest of exits from a play that has been, underneath its lightness, rather searching.

This Folger Shakespeare Library edition provides authoritative text with full glosses and performance annotations.

Reviewed edition: Folger Shakespeare Library / Simon & Schuster (ISBN 0743477561)

The Three Worlds and How They Work

The play’s formal achievement is the management of three distinct dramatic registers that coexist without collision. The Athenian court world is governed by law and authority: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius on pain of death, and the Duke Theseus upholds this demand, because the law permits it and he is the law. The fairy realm — Oberon, Titania, Puck — operates outside law entirely, according to whim, power, and magical accident. The mechanicals’ world — Bottom, Quince, Flute, and the rest — is governed by the desire to please and by complete ignorance of everything they are attempting. These three worlds interpenetrate in the forest outside Athens, and their comic interactions generate the play’s action.

What prevents this from being merely structural cleverness is the thematic coherence underlying the three-world structure. Each world represents a different relationship to the irrational. The court world tries to suppress the irrational through law, with the result that the law is both harsh and clearly insufficient — Hermia simply refuses to obey. The fairy world IS the irrational — capricious, powerful, indifferent to human welfare. The mechanicals are too oblivious to encounter the irrational as a problem; Bottom accepts being loved by the Fairy Queen with perfect bovine serenity because he lacks the self-awareness that would make it alarming.

The Play’s Date, Sources, and Performance History

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written around 1595-1596 and is believed to have been composed for a specific occasion — possibly an aristocratic wedding, possibly a court entertainment — though the specific occasion remains unidentified. Its sources are multiple and eclectic: the Theseus and Hippolyta frame draws on Plutarch and Chaucer; the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the fairy mythology is drawn from English folk tradition and Spenser. Shakespeare synthesized these disparate sources into something with no exact precedent.

The play has been among the most consistently performed of Shakespeare’s works since the Restoration. Its stage history includes David Garrick’s eighteenth-century versions, which significantly modified the text; Henry Purcell’s operatic adaptation The Fairy-Queen (1692); Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music (1842), including the famous wedding march, which has accompanied millions of real weddings; Peter Brook’s radical 1970 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which used a white box set and trapeze artists and transformed the play’s theatrical possibilities; and Benjamin Britten’s 1960 opera, which is among the finest operatic adaptations of any Shakespeare play.

Love as Enchantment

The play’s philosophical argument — developed in the forest scenes and articulated directly by Lysander and Helena — is that love is not a rational choice but an enchantment that descends without reason and can be redirected at will. The love potion makes this literal: Lysander and Demetrius do not choose to transfer their affections; the choice is made for them by an accident of sleeping. But Shakespeare’s implication is that the potion only makes visible what love is always doing: the lovers chose their original objects no more rationally than they choose their enchanted ones. The potion is a mechanism that makes the arbitrary nature of desire available to comic examination.

Helena articulates this most directly: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” This is not cynicism — the play is not arguing that love is worthless. It is arguing that love cannot be grounded in the rational assessment of the beloved’s qualities, because that is not how it works. The four lovers, once unenchanted and reconciled, are not a rebuke to the forest’s chaos but its beneficiaries: they end where they should, but they got there by accident.

Bottom’s Dream

Bottom’s experience of the fairy world — being loved by Titania, attended by her fairies, transformed and untransformed — is the play’s comic and philosophical summit. When he wakes, he attempts to describe what he has dreamed and finds that he cannot: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” He quotes scripture — misquoting it, but the allusion is real — and concludes that it shall be “Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.” The joke is also the argument: the experience of the genuinely extraordinary is beyond the ordinary tools of language and reason, and what Bottom has been through in the fairy realm is, in its impossible way, as real as anything that happened in Athens.