Shakespeare:A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By William Shakespeare

Summary

At his palace in Athens, Duke Theseus is hanging out with his bride-to-be, Hippolyta, the Amazon queen who was recently defeated by Theseus and his army. Theseus is VERY excited about getting hitched (in just four days) and spending his wedding night with Hippolyta. He promises her that getting married will a lot more fun than being conquered in battle. (Well, we sure hope so.)

Egeus, an Athenian citizen, arrives at Theseus's palace with a crisis. He's made plans for his daughter, Hermia, to marry Demetrius, but this other guy named Lysander has managed to steal his daughter's heart. Now Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius. Egeus is outraged and wants Theseus to give Hermia the death sentence for her disobedience, per Athenian law. (Yikes! Somebody needs to stop being such a control freak.)

Duke Theseus wants to be reasonable, so he advises Hermia to be a good girl and listen to her father. Hermia flat-out refuses, so Theseus gives her two alternative options: 1) accept the death penalty as punishment for disobedience, or 2) become a nun and remain a virgin forever. Hermia has four days to decide her fate. (Yep, that's Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding day. Weird.)

Demetrius and Lysander bicker over who should get to marry the lovely Hermia. Demetrius thinks he should have dibs because Hermia's dad likes him the best and has already given him permission to marry his daughter. Lysander argues that he should get Hermia because Hermia actually loves him. Plus, Demetrius has way too much baggage – he used to go steady with Hermia's friend Helena, who is still in love with Demetrius.

Secretly, Hermia and Lysander make plans to meet in the nearby wood. Once there, they'll run off to Lysander's aunt's house (which is outside of Athenian jurisdiction) and get married. Just as the couple decides to elope, Hermia's friend Helena trips in. Helena is a mess because she still loves Demetrius – she's crushed that he wants to marry Hermia. The young lovers assure Helena that she has nothing to worry about because they're planning to elope, which means that Demetrius will be single and ready to mingle.

After the happy couple leaves, Helena decides to squeal to Demetrius about Hermia and Lysander's plan to run away. That way, Demetrius is sure to follow the runaway lovers, and then Helena can follow Demetrius, which will be fun and cost her nothing but her dignity. With that, we have the makings of a romantic chase.

Meanwhile, a group of Athenian craftsmen (called "the Mechanicals") are preparing to perform a play for Theseus's upcoming wedding. The play will be the tragic tale of two young lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe (think Romeo and Juliet storyline). However, it's clear the Mechanicals are horrible actors and are clueless about how to stage a play. The group decides to practice the play in the wood.

Cut to the woods, where we meet Puck (a.k.a. Robin Goodfellow), a mischievous sprite known for the tricks he likes to play on women in the nearby village. This charismatic sprite serves Oberon, King of the Fairies. Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, and Oberon also show up; they're in a fight, which has turned the entire natural world upside down. (We're talking seriously bad weather that's caused flooding and famine, which is something Shakespeare's original audience dealt with in the 1590s.)

The source of the quarrel is a "lovely" Indian boy that Titania has been raising as a foster son. Oberon is jealous and wants the boy to be his personal page (errand boy). Oberon refuses to dance, revel, or otherwise engage with Titania until she agrees to give up the child. Titania flat-out refuses and says that she'll raise the boy as her own as a favor to the kid's dead mother, who was chummy with Titania back in India.

Oberon makes plans to enchant Titania that evening with a magic love "juice" that will make her fall in love with the first creature she sees. Oberon hopes that when Titania wakes up, she'll see a monstrous beast and fall in love. Hopefully, Titania will be so crazy in love that she'll lose interest in the little boy and hand him over to Oberon. Also, Titania will be totally humiliated.

That evening, Helena and Demetrius wander into the woods. Demetrius tries desperately to get rid of Helena. The problem is that Helena won't leave him alone because she wants to be his one true love. Watching Helena's pathetic display, Oberon declares that, before the pair leaves the forest, their roles will be reversed: Demetrius should be fawning over Helena. Mischief is afoot! Oberon leaves to enchant Titania with the love potion. He also instructs Puck to find this young man in Athenian clothes (traveling with a girl) and enchant the heck out of him. Little does Puck know that there is more than one young Athenian man in the woods tonight.

Elsewhere in the forest, Lysander and Hermia are lost. It's about time they went to bed, and Lysander suggests that they share a bed on the forest floor. Hermia isn't having it, and tells Lysander to lie a good distance from her. The two fall asleep.

Puck runs into the sleeping pair and, seeing that Lysander is a young man dressed in Athenian clothes, Puck dumps the love juice in his eyes. (Whoops.) Then Helena shows up and accidentally trips over the sleeping Lysander while pursuing Demetrius. Lysander wakes up, immediately declares his love for Helena, and follows her further into the woods.

Meanwhile, Hermia has slept through the love-juice dumping, the tripping and falling, and the declaring of love. When she wakes up and realizes Lysander is gone, she heads off into the woods in search of him, clueless that her boyfriend has fallen in love with her friend Helena.

As the four young lovers chase each other around the forest, the Athenian craftsmen (the Mechanicals) practice their play nearby. It's immediately clear that our crew of amateur actors is pretty incompetent, which amuses Puck, the mischievous sprite who is watching the rehearsal from the sidelines. Puck decides to play a joke on Bottom, one of the worst actors, by transforming the guy's head into that of a donkey.

Once Puck completes his little prank on Bottom, the Mechanicals are terrified of Bottom's donkey head and run away in horror. Bottom, who is oblivious to his transformation, declares that his friends are just trying "to make an ass" of him. (Hehe.) The commotion awakens Titania, who's been sleeping nearby and has been dosed with the magic love juice. She takes one look at Bottom and instantly falls in love.

Meanwhile, Oberon comes across Demetrius and Helena and dumps some love juice in Demetrius's eyes. Uh-oh. Trouble Alert! When Oberon finds out that Titania has fallen in love with an ass, he's thrilled. Then Demetrius and Hermia show up, though, and Oberon soon figures out that Puck sprinkled the love juice in the wrong Athenian's eyes. (Remember, Puck put the potion in Lysander's eyes instead of Demetrius's.)

Puck returns, leading Helena, who is followed by the lovesick Lysander. Demetrius wakes up and immediately declares Helena to be his goddess. Just in time, Hermia wanders in, lured by the sound of Lysander's voice. Now that the four are together, Lysander declares that he too is in love with Helena. (Poor Hermia. Before the four humans entered the woods, both men were in love with her and now Lysander and Demetrius are hot for Helena.) Helena thinks it's just a prank and begins to argue with Hermia. Then the boys fight some more over Helena and challenge each other to a game of fisticuffs. They run off to duke it out somewhere in the wood. Helena decides to take off before Hermia gets violent and scratches her eyes out or something. Hermia chases after her.

Puck and Oberon have been watching all of this. Oberon instructs Puck to cast a shadow over the night, so the feuding boys can't find each other. Once the boys are asleep, Puck is to apply the remedy for the love potion on Lysander's eyes, so that he will fall back in love with Hermia. The hope is that lovers wake up in happy pairs. Puck follows all of these instructions.

Meanwhile, Titania is still having fits of love over Bottom, who is happily being tended to by fairies and the Fairy Queen. Oberon, easily got the Indian boy from the love-crazed Titania earlier that evening. Now he sees Titania as pitiful, and reasons that its time to bring her back to her senses. He asks Puck to transform Bottom to his natural self as well. Oberon un-enchants Titania, and she awakens as if from a dream. Oberon points to donkey-faced Bottom beside her and promises to explain later.

The next morning, Theseus shows up in the woods with Hippolyta (his bride), Egeus (Hermia's dad), and a hunting party. Theseus discovers the four Athenian youths sleeping on the ground in the woods. He wakes them up and wonders what could've brought them all together. Lysander admits his plan to elope with Hermia, and Demetrius also explains that he's now in love with Helena. So both couples are happily in love and seem to have forgotten last night's events. Egeus demands that the death sentence be carried out, but Theseus overrides him, declaring that the youths will all be married alongside him and Hippolyta this evening.

After the older folks leave, the foursome talks about the previous night, admitting it was dreamlike. Bottom wakes up as the young lovers exit and speaks of the strange dream he had. He then hurries back to Athens, where he pleasantly surprises all the Mechanicals with his presence. By this time, the Duke and other couples have all been married, and it's about time for them to seek their celebratory entertainment. The Mechanicals get ready to perform their play.

The play begins. It is the well-known tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, two lovers separated by a wall. They speak through a hole in said wall, and decide to meet by moonlight at Ninus's tomb. Thisbe gets there early, but encounters a lion, which makes her run off, accidentally leaving her cape behind as a chew toy for the lion. Pyramus finds Thisbe's cape all torn and looking like a lion mauled it. He stabs himself, assuming his girl is dead. Thisbe then shows up and also chooses suicide. So everyone's dead, but the audience doesn't take it too seriously because it was so poorly performed. Following the entertainment, Theseus wishes the couples to bed.

Puck returns to the stage to talk about the scary things of night, and to sweep the doorstep, promising the couples will be happy and the house protected. He ends the play by saying that if you feel the play (A Midsummer Night's Dream) was absurd, you need only applaud and imagine the whole thing was a dream.

THEMES

Love

Above all else, A Midsummer Night's Dream explores the nature of romantic love.  Its conclusion?  The pursuit of love has the capacity to make us irrational and foolish.  In the play, magic love juice causes characters to fall erratically in and out of love as they chase each other around the woods, where a Fairy Queen literally falls in love with a jackass.  By literalizing the familiar cliché that "the course of true love never did run smooth," Shakespeare suggests that love really is an obstacle course that turns us all into madmen.

Art and Culture

Throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream, a humble group of Athenian craftsmen (the Mechanicals) practice a play they hope to stage at Theseus's wedding celebration.  The play is Pyramus and Thisbe and its performance takes up nearly all of Act 5, Scene 1, where the craftsmen comically bumble their way through what's supposed to be a classic tragedy.  By focusing so much attention on this play-within-the-play, Shakespeare has ample time to reflect on his own art and to ask the following questions: What is it that makes good theater?  Can anyone be an actor?  What kind of person is an ideal audience member? Can uneducated commoners appreciate art?  The answers to these questions can vary, but, for the most part, the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe functions as a parody of bad theater and reminds us that being a stage actor is craft that requires intellect and its own set of skills.  

Transformation

Transformation is a very big deal in this play, which isn't so surprising because one of Shakespeare's main literary sources is Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the third act of A Midsummer's Night Dream, Puck uses magic to turn Bottom's head into that of an ass (a.k.a. donkey).  Although this is the most obvious example of transformation, it's just one of many.  Throughout the play, characters undergo physical and emotional changes – they fall in and out of love and change their minds about their friendships and the world in which they live.  The natural world of the play is also subject to transformation – night turns into day, darkness turns to light, the moon waxes and wanes, and so on. 

Gender

Like many Shakespearean comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, for example), A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes gender tensions that arise from complicated familial and romantic relationships.  When the play opens, a young woman fights her father for the right to choose her own spouse, a duke is set to marry a woman he recently conquered in battle, and the King and Queen of Fairies are at war with each other, enacting a battle of the sexes so intense that it disrupts the natural world.  Throughout the play, Shakespeare also questions some stereotypes about traditional gender roles when it comes to romance.  Whereas men are usually expected to be aggressive while women remain passive and docile, A Midsummer Night's Dream shows us that this isn't always the case.

Versions of Reality

With so many subplots in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and so many intersections between people from different worlds, there's got to be some way to account for the different ways they each perceive reality.  Dreams serve as a way to explain away plot holes or add a gauzy mystery, but the different versions of reality also extend to perspectives.  In Lysander's book, if you don't have to fight for it, it isn't true love.  Puck sees the mortal world as full of fools, and Theseus is certain fairies aren't real.  These differing perspectives are central to the play, revealing that each man envisions his reality according to his circumstances.

Foolishness and Folly

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, so it's going to have its fair share of slapstick humor. It's obviously funny to watch a man with a donkey's head wander around on stage, but it's a different kind of humor than when Egeus gets absurdly mad at his daughter and decides to have her killed.  Really, it all ends up being two sides of the same coin – nothing, not even murder and death, is taken seriously here.  Misunderstanding is as central to the play as any other element of plot.  Finally, as the play is really about love, you can't avoid embarrassing foolishness.  We all know that.

Man and the Natural World

Part of the strength of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that we're not always sure where humans and the natural world, as two separate elements, fall in relation to each other. Sometimes humans are part of the natural world, and complemented by it, like women becoming fertile with the midsummer fest, or crops that agree with seasons to put food on the table.  Other times the natural world seems alien to man because he has separated himself from it – especially with his urban life. Some Athenian workers want to rehearse a play in the woods to escape the city distractions, but all the sprite Puck needs to do to frighten them from their wits is to pretend he's a regular woodland creature or element – a fire, hound, or bear.  Even at the end of their tough evening, the four young lovers, who have a lot to escape, decide to go back to Athens.  Regardless of all the drama in the city, their courtly beds are no doubt better than this dirty forest floor.  In this way, the natural world is an escape for man, but it's also a reminder of how good man has it in his other home.

The Supernatural

Magic is the delightful thread that runs through the tapestry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Magic is about the supernatural elements of the mythic and fairy world (like Cupid's arrows on a starry night), but it's also a simpler, more natural force. There's the magic of love, the magic of the morning dew, and even the magic of poetry and art.

The play stresses perspective so much that it eventually eggs the reader on to see the world as a different place through each of the characters' eyes.  Each character has his or her own perspective, and so experiences the magic differently.  Bottom finds his wondrous dreams to be magical, while the lovers, arguably the most impacted by magic, are totally oblivious to it. Titania finds magic in her love of a little boy, and Oberon embraces the magic of the supernatural elements in the seemingly natural world.  Magic is certainly in the eye of the beholder.

 

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Love Juice

In Act 2, Scene 1, Puck fetches a pansy (a.k.a. "Cupid's flower") so that Oberon can use its magic juice to make his victims fall head over heels in love. Here's how Oberon describes it: 

The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees (2.1.8)

The stuff actually works and it wreaks havoc on several characters. After Oberon drops the love juice in sleeping Titania's eyes (2.2), the Fairy Queen wakes up and falls in love with an "ass" (3.1.1). Puck also squeezes the love potion in Lysander's eyes and, when he wakes up and sees Helena, Lysander forgets all about his girlfriend and becomes fixated on Helena. This goes on and on until Oberon and Puck take pity on their hapless victims and whip out an antidote, which is the "juice" of a different kind of flower – "Dian's bud" (2.1, 3.2, 4.1). The love juice is a lot like Love Potion Number 9.

Why does this matter? Well, the juice's fast-acting power seems to mimic what often happens in real life. As every hormone-driven teenager knows, love can be unpredictable and inexplicable. Falling in love often happens in an instant, without warning, and falling out of love can happen just as fast. We talk about this more in "Themes: Love."

Roses

Speaking of flowers, did you notice the way Theseus refers to lifelong chastity as "withering on the virgin thorn"? Well, we did and we think it's worth investigating. Check out what Theseus says to Hermia after informing her that she has only two options if she refuses to marry Demetrius: death or a nunnery:

But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness. (1.1.7)

Basically, Theseus says that being a nun has its advantages and all (blessedness), but being a virgin is like being a flower blossom...that eventually withers and dies on a thorny rosebush. On the other hand, he suggests that a woman who gets married and has sex (and kids) is like a rose that's been "distill'd," or used to make some yummy-smelling perfume. In other words, Theseus thinks Hermia's life (and beauty) will be wasted if she becomes a nun, but, if she marries Demetrius and becomes a mother, her beauty will live on a lot longer (in her kids).

If you're a fan of Shakespeare's sonnets, Theseus's advice to Hermia probably sounds familiar. That's because it's pretty much the same advice the "Poet" gives to the "Youth" about getting married and having kids in Shakespeare's Sonnet 2 and Sonnet 4.

History Snack: Theseus's notion that virginity should only be a temporary state of being for young women is a typical 16th-century Protestant idea. As we know, unlike the Catholic Church, they broke away from, Protestants didn't think women should become nuns. (In 1538, King Henry VIII began the dissolution of all the monasteries and convents in England.) Instead, they thought girls should remain chaste until they got married, during which time they should give up their V-cards and remain faithful to their husbands. (By the way, Shakespeare's own "Virgin" Queen Elizabeth I defied this idea when she refused to marry and Shakespeare even makes a little joke about it in the play.)

Midsummer's Eve and May Day

The title suggests an atmosphere of fantasy, whimsy, and imagination, which is a pretty accurate description of the magical wood where characters experience events that seem more like a dream than reality. Poor Bottom can't even begin to describe what's happened to him in the wood: "I have had a most rare / vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what / dream it was" (4.1.9).

Shakespeare also knows that, after watching the play, we, the audience, might also experience some uncertainty about the difference between reality and illusion. (This is why Puck invites us to think of the play as a nothing more than a "dream" during the Epilogue.

The title is also pretty obvious shout-out to Midsummer's Eve (June 23), or the summer solstice. Elizabethans would have heard this title and thought "party time!" In Shakespeare's day, Midsummer's Eve was all about celebrating fertility (not just the successful planting and harvesting of crops, but also the kind of fertility associated with dating and marriage). It was an excuse to party outdoors and the holiday involved dancing, drinking, and collecting medicinal herbs. For a lot of partiers, Midsummer's Eve was also supposed to be a time of mystery and magic, when spirits ran around causing mischief, and teenage girls had dreams about the guys they'd eventually fall in love with and marry.

Our point? Shakespeare's title captures the festive vibe of the play and even enacts some of its rituals.

While we're on the subject of festivities, we should point out that Shakespeare also works some May Day festivities into his play. Remember when Theseus stumbles upon the sleeping Athenian youths in Act 4, Scene 1? He thinks they're passed out on the ground because they got up early and went into the wood to "observe / The rite of May" (4.1.3). (Note: The rites of May – games, festivities, etc. – were performed throughout May and June, not just on May 1.) "Maying" involved going into the woods in the early morning to gather up blooming tree branches (for decoration) and putting up "Maypoles" to dance around. In the play, Lysander mentions that he once met Hermia and Helena in the wood to "do observance to a morn of May" (1.1.8). May Day revelers also celebrated with big feasts and even elected a "Lord of Misrule" to preside over the festivities.

The Moon

We can't emphasize enough how important the Moon is in A Midsummer Night's Dream – its image shows up all over the place. We're guessing that's why three of the planet Uranus's moons are named for characters in this play – Titania (the largest), Oberon, and Puck.

The Moon and Time

When we first hear about it in the play, the moon is used to mark the passage of time. In Theseus's opening speech, he complains that time is passing too slowly and he blames the moon because he has to wait four whole days for his wedding night:

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. (1.1.1)

The Moon and Chastity

In other words, impatient Theseus really wants to sleep with his bride-to-be and so he accuses the moon of "wan[ing]" too slowly. It's fitting that Theseus blames the moon for his loveless nights – in Elizabethan popular culture and classical mythology, the moon is often called Diana (a.k.a. Artemis), the ancient virgin goddess, which means the moon is associated with chastity.

There are tons of references to this moon/virgin goddess connection in the play. When Theseus warns Hermia about becoming a nun, he warns her that it's no fun "To live a barren sister all your life / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon" (1.1.17).

Remember how Oberon describes the time that Cupid's arrow accidentally hit the pansy and turned it into a magic, love-juice producing flower (2.1.8)? Well, Cupid's arrow was originally aimed at a "fair vestal throned by the west" (a.k.a. Shakespeare's very own virgin Queen Elizabeth I). Oberon tells us that Cupid's "fiery shaft" got lost in "the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon" and missed its original target. (We hope Queen Elizabeth found Shakespeare's little joke as amusing as we did.)

The Moon and the Lovers' Erratic Behavior

Even though the moon is often associated with virginity, it's also linked to sexual desire. Egeus tells us that Lysander has often serenaded Hermia "by moonlight" (1.1.2) and Shakespeare reminds us over and over again that, when the lovers chase each other around in the woods, the action occurs "in the moonlight."

There's also a sense that that the moon is partially responsible for the lovers' erratic behavior. Because the moon has different phases and it "waxes and wanes," Elizabethans thought of it as fickle and inconstant. (Remember from Romeo and Juliet: "Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon"?) The moon's fickleness reflects the lovers' tendency to fall in and out of love like a bunch of madmen. At one point, Theseus declares that that "[t]he lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact" (5.1.1). As we know, the term "lunatic" comes from the word "lunar," which means "of the moon."

The Moon in Pyramus and Thisbe

Last, but not least, Shakespeare manages to turn the moon into a joke about the use of theater props. During rehearsals for Pyramus and Thisbe, Peter Quince worries about whether or not the moon will shine during the night of the performance, because Pyramus and Thisbe are supposed to "meet by moonlight" (3.1.4). The Mechanicals resolve the issue by making the Man on the Moon a character (performed by Starveling) in the play. During the Mechanicals' bumbling performance of the play-within-the-play, Starveling holds up a lantern and declares, "This lantern doth the horned moon [re]present" (5.1.1), which is both ridiculous and amusing.

Dramatic Irony

You probably noticed how we, the audience, have a lot more information about what's happening on stage than the characters do. Case in point: throughout the play, we know the fairies use magic to play pranks and to make the bewildered characters fall in and out of love, but the lovers have no idea what's happened to them. This is a classic case of "dramatic irony" (when the audience knows more than the characters do so that the characters' words and actions have a different meaning for us than they do for the characters on stage). It's a technique Shakespeare uses for comedic effects throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Let's look closely at another example from the play. In Act 3, Scene 1, Bottom's head is transformed into that of an "ass" (a.k.a. donkey). Bottom doesn't know what's happened to him, so he's really confused when his pals flip out and run away in fear. Bottom thinks he's being punked and, when he's left alone on stage, he complains to us: "I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me, to / fright me, if they could" (3.1.16). Of course, when Bottom accuses his friends of trying to "make an ass" of him, it's funny to us because we know something that Bottom doesn't – he literally has been made into an ass. (Also, his name, "Bottom," becomes very fitting.)