A Midsummer Night's Dream

• 1. Introduction

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  A Midsummer Night's Dream opens in Athens, four days before a wedding, with a father dragging his daughter before a duke and invoking a law that would see her put to death for refusing to marry the man he chose. That is the trigger. What follows is one of William Shakespeare's most performed plays, written somewhere between 1594 and 1596, in which three separate worlds collide in a moonlit forest: Athenian nobles tangled in law and love, working men trying to rehearse a play, and fairy royalty conducting their own bitter domestic war. The questions worth sitting with are these: how does a comedy about enchantment carry genuine arguments about power, identity, and gender? Why did critics spend two centuries arguing about whether this play should even be staged at all? And who, by the final curtain, is actually in charge?

• 2. Three Worlds, One Forest

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  Duke Theseus of Athens is preparing to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Egeus, a citizen, arrives furious that his daughter Hermia refuses to accept Demetrius as her husband. Theseus gives Hermia a stark choice: marry Demetrius, become a nun devoted to the goddess Diana, or face death under ancient Athenian law. Hermia and her chosen partner Lysander secretly plan to escape into the forest, heading for the house of Lysander's aunt. Hermia's friend Helena, who loves Demetrius, betrays the plan to him in hopes of winning back his attention. He pursues Hermia into the woods, with Helena following him.

  In the forest at the same time, six working men are rehearsing a play they will perform at the wedding: a weaver named Nick Bottom, a carpenter named Peter Quince who directs the rehearsal, a bellows-mender named Francis Flute, a joiner named Snug, a tinker named Tom Snout, and a tailor named Robin Starveling. Their play is titled "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe." Bottom immediately tries to claim every role for himself, offering to play Pyramus, Thisbe, and the Lion simultaneously. Quince insists Bottom can only play Pyramus, but Bottom would rather play a tyrant and recites lines from a character called Ercles to demonstrate. The meeting ends with Quince directing them all to reconvene at the Duke's oak.

  Simultaneously in the same forest, Oberon, King of the Fairies, and Titania, his Queen, are estranged. Titania has a young Indian changeling boy whom she refuses to give up to Oberon as his henchman, because the child's mother was one of Titania's worshippers. Oberon calls on his sprite Puck to retrieve a flower called "love-in-idleness", which turns from white to purple when struck by Cupid's arrow. Juice from this flower, applied to sleeping eyelids, makes the sleeper fall in love with the first living thing they see upon waking. Oberon intends to make Titania fall for some animal, so she will surrender the boy in shame. He also instructs Puck to use the juice on the young Athenian man he has observed cruelly rebuffing Helena.

• 3. Errors in the Dark

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  Puck never sees Demetrius before he finds a sleeping Athenian man and applies the love-juice to his eyes. The man is Lysander, not Demetrius. When Helena stumbles across the sleeping Lysander and wakes him, he immediately falls in love with her. Helena, assuming she is being mocked, runs away. Lysander chases her, leaving the sleeping Hermia alone. Hermia wakes from a nightmare in which a snake ate her heart, finds Lysander gone, and goes searching for him in the dark.

  Meanwhile, the rehearsal in the forest goes badly for Bottom. Puck, taking his name as a synonym for a jackass, transforms his head into that of a donkey. When Bottom returns for his next lines, the other workmen scatter in terror. Bottom, bewildered by their flight, begins singing to himself. Titania, whose eyes Oberon has already anointed with the flower juice, is awakened by the singing and falls immediately in love with the donkey-headed weaver. As the source puts it: "Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass." While she lavishes attention on Bottom, Oberon takes the changeling boy.

  Oberon discovers that Puck has charmed the wrong man, and Demetrius still pursues Hermia. He waits for Demetrius to fall asleep and applies the juice himself. When Demetrius wakes, he finds Helena arguing with Lysander, and falls instantly in love with her. Now both men declare love for Helena, who believes they are coordinating a cruel joke at her expense. Hermia finds Lysander and asks why he left her; he claims he never loved her. The four young Athenians descend into mutual accusations and then a physical confrontation. Oberon and Puck decide to end it: Puck mimics the voices of Lysander and Demetrius to prevent them fighting, leads them apart until they collapse with exhaustion, and administers an antidote to Lysander so that when the four wake, they will remember nothing and love the right partners. By morning, Egeus's power over the situation will be irrelevant.

• 4. Bottom's Dream

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  Released from the fairy spell, Titania is horrified. Oberon orders Puck to restore Bottom's human head. The fairies vanish, and Theseus arrives on an early morning hunt with Hippolyta. Finding the four lovers asleep in the clearing, Theseus wakes them. Since Demetrius no longer loves Hermia, Theseus overrules Egeus and arranges a triple wedding. The lovers tell Theseus what they experienced but cannot fully account for it. They agree it must have been a dream.

  Bottom wakes alone and attempts to describe an experience, in his words, "past the wit of man." He decides Peter Quince should write a ballad about the previous night, which he will call "Bottom's Dream", and he plans to sing it after the death of Thisbe at the end of their performance. He returns to Quince's house, where the other actors have been lamenting his disappearance. Quince insists that Bottom is the only man capable of playing Pyramus.

  In the final act, the mechanicals perform "Pyramus and Thisbe" before Theseus, Hippolyta, and the three couples. The performance is so inept that the audience laughs through it as though it were intentional comedy. Afterwards, Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the fairies enter to bless the household and its occupants. Puck closes the play by addressing the audience directly, suggesting that everything they witnessed might have been nothing more than a dream. That final suggestion, put in the mouth of the same sprite who caused every mistake in the forest, is one the play's critics would argue about for the next four centuries.

• 5. Sources and Dating

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  No one knows exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was first performed. The standard scholarly dating places it in 1595 or early 1596, based partly on topical references and partly on an allusion to Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion. According to Sukanta Chaudhuri, editor of the 2017 Arden edition, the only firm documentary evidence is its mention in Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, which appeared in 1598. Chaudhuri's investigation points to the play having been written for the wedding of either William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, to Elizabeth de Vere, or Thomas Berkeley to Elizabeth Carey. Titania's description of flooded fields and failed crops is read as a reference to actual weather conditions across England in the years 1594 to 1597 or 1598.

  The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on the 8th of October 1600 by the bookseller Thomas Fisher, who published the first quarto edition that same year. A second quarto was printed in 1619 by William Jaggard as part of what is known as the False Folio. The first known court performance occurred at Hampton Court on the 1st of January 1604, as a prelude to The Masque of Indian and China Knights.

  Shakespeare drew on several sources without adapting any single one directly. Ovid's Metamorphoses and Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" provided inspiration, and scholars have also proposed Aristophanes' classical comedy The Birds as a source: both Titania and a character in The Birds are awakened by a male with an animal head who sings two-stanza songs about birds. According to John Twyning, the plot of four lovers undergoing a trial in the woods was intended as a riff on a Middle High German poem called Der Busant. According to Dorothea Kehler, the writing period falls within a moment when Shakespeare had probably already completed Romeo and Juliet and was still working through ideas that would become The Merchant of Venice.

• 6. Four Centuries of Argument

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  Samuel Pepys saw the play on the 29th of September 1662 and called it "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life", though he conceded it had some good dancing and handsome women. He is the earliest known critic to write about it. John Dryden, writing in 1677, was more interested in the abstract question of whether fairies should appear in plays at all, and concluded that poets may depict things that derive from popular belief even if those things do not exist.

  The 18th century split. Charles Gildon praised the play's reflections and descriptions. Francis Gentleman, a Shakespeare admirer, called its plot "puerile" and found its incidents forced. Edmond Malone, writing later in the century, complained that the lower-class characters overshadow the aristocrats, and took this as evidence that the play must be an immature early work. His argument, as Dorothea Kehler later noted, derives more from the classism of his era than from any genuine literary criterion.

  The 19th century began to take the play seriously as a unified work. August Wilhelm Schlegel, writing in 1808, argued that the donkey's head is not a random transformation but reflects Bottom's actual nature, and that Pyramus and Thisbe functions as a burlesque of the Athenian lovers. William Hazlitt, in 1817, declared the play better as a text than as a staged production, a view shared by several of his contemporaries. Kehler suggests this says more about the quality of productions available to Hazlitt than about the play itself, since every staged version before the 1840s was an adaptation that departed substantially from Shakespeare's text.

  In 1840, Madame Vestris returned the play to the stage at Covent Garden with something close to the full original text, adding musical sequences and balletic dances. She played Oberon herself, and for the next seventy years Oberon and Puck were always played by women. 19th-century theatre turned the play into spectacle: casts that sometimes numbered nearly one hundred, elaborate forest sets, ballerina fairies with gauze wings, and the overture by Felix Mendelssohn used in every production throughout the period.

• 7. Staging the Dream

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  Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1911 London production featured mechanical birds twittering in beech trees, a simulated stream, fairies wearing battery-operated lighting, and live rabbits following trails of food across the stage. Max Reinhardt staged the play thirteen times between 1905 and 1934, introducing a revolving set. His most spectacular version was an outdoor production at the Hollywood Bowl in September 1934. The shell was removed and replaced with an actual forest, planted in tons of dirt hauled in for the occasion. A trestle was built from the hills to the stage, and the wedding procession crossed it with torches down the hillside. The cast included James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney.

  On the strength of that production, Warner Brothers signed Reinhardt to direct a filmed version. It was Hollywood's first Shakespeare film since Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford's Taming of the Shrew in 1929. Cagney played Bottom, in his only Shakespearean role. Victor Jory, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland reprised their Hollywood Bowl roles as Oberon, Puck, and Hermia respectively. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was brought from Austria to arrange Mendelssohn's music for the film. He drew not only on the Midsummer Night's Dream music but on several other Mendelssohn pieces. Korngold went on to a major Hollywood career after Nazi Germany annexed Austria and he remained in the United States.

  Harley Granville-Barker had already proposed a different approach in 1914. He reduced the cast, used Elizabethan folk music in place of Mendelssohn, replaced complex sets with patterned curtains, and portrayed the fairies as golden robotic insectoid creatures based on Cambodian idols. In 1970, Peter Brook staged the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a blank white box, with masculine fairies performing circus tricks on a trapeze. Brook also introduced the idea of double-casting Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania, as if the fairy world were a mirror image of the mortal one. Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, and Frances de la Tour were among the British actors in that production.

• 8. Themes the Scholars Fight Over

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  David Wiles of the University of London and Harold Bloom of Yale University both endorsed reading the play under the themes of Carnivalesque, Bacchanalia, and Saturnalia. Wiles, writing in 1993 and 1998, argued that the play was written for an aristocratic wedding and that audiences who saw it in public theatres afterward became vicarious participants in a celebration from which they were physically excluded.

  Louis Montrose, examining gender in the play, described the festive conclusion as depending on a process by which feminine pride and power in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and wilful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands. He connected the flower juice Oberon uses to symbolic ideas about female and male power, and noted that the Athenian law requiring a daughter to die for disobedience appears in the play as a relic that no longer serves.

  Maurice Hunt, former Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, argued that the blurring of individual identity is the axis around which the play's conflicts turn. The quarrel between Oberon and Titania, rooted in a failure to recognise each other, disturbs nature enough to endanger all the other lovers. Puck mistakes one pair of lovers for another because he cannot distinguish them. Victor Kiernan, a Marxist scholar, suggested that identities are not so much lost as blended into a kind of haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible, driven by the need for new social ties in a strange environment. Aesthetics scholar David Marshall extended this further by pointing to the mechanicals: a carpenter, a weaver, a bellows-mender, a joiner, a tinker, and a tailor, who, as he wrote, "Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered."

  Jan Kott, writing in 1964, saw the play very differently, emphasising violence and what he called unrepressed animalistic sexuality. In his reading, Lysander and Demetrius are verbally brutal lovers whose affections are interchangeable. The changeling boy is Oberon's sexual toy. The night in the forest liberates the Athenian lovers from social norms and lets them reveal their real selves, which is why, on returning to Athens, they are ashamed to speak of it. Kott's views were controversial, and critics lined up on both sides, but few ignored him. In 1991, the comic series The Sandman by Neil Gaiman won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for an issue in which Shakespeare performs the play before the real Oberon and Titania, with Shakespeare's son Hamnet appearing as the Indian boy. It was the first and only comic ever to win that award.