Short answers, pulled from the story.
A Midsummer Night's Dream was written between 1594 and 1596, with scholars most often dating it to 1595 or early 1596. The only firm documentary evidence for its date is its mention in Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, which appeared in 1598.
A Midsummer Night's Dream follows three interwoven plots set against the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and Hippolyta. Four young Athenians flee into a forest to escape a forced marriage, a group of six working men rehearse a play there, and fairy royals Oberon and Titania fight over a changeling boy. Oberon's sprite Puck applies a love-potion flower juice to the wrong eyes, causing comic chaos before order is restored and all three pairs wed.
The main characters include Theseus (Duke of Athens), his fiancee Hippolyta, four Athenian lovers (Hermia, Lysander, Helena, Demetrius), the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania, the mischievous sprite Puck, and the mechanicals led by carpenter Peter Quince and weaver Nick Bottom.
Major themes include the dark and irrational nature of love, the loss of individual identity, gender roles and patriarchal authority, and the tension between imagination and reason. Scholars have also debated themes of carnivalesque disorder, ambiguous sexuality, and the relationship between dream and reality.
The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on the 8th of October 1600 by bookseller Thomas Fisher, who published the first quarto edition that same year. A second quarto followed in 1619, and the play next appeared in the First Folio of 1623.
Shakespeare drew on Ovid's Metamorphoses and Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" as inspirations. Scholars have also proposed Aristophanes' The Birds and the Middle High German poem Der Busant as sources. The play is not a translation or adaptation of any single earlier work.