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Portrait of A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare · Comedies

A Midsummer Night's Dream

c. 1595–96

Comedy — no single source; Ovid, Chaucer and Apuleius woven together

Four young Athenians flee into a wood outside the city, where the quarrelling fairy king and queen, a mischievous sprite and a troupe of amateur actors rehearsing a play for the duke's wedding all collide. A love-juice squeezed on sleeping eyelids scrambles every affection before dawn restores order, and the whole tangle is sent home as a dream. It is Shakespeare's most performed comedy and the source of some of his most quoted lines.

How to spot them

  • ▸A wood outside Athens, on the eve of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta
  • ▸A quarrel between the fairy king and queen over a changeling Indian boy blights the weather
  • ▸A weaver is given an ass's head and the fairy queen wakes and adores him
  • ▸The mechanicals' ludicrous play-within-a-play of Pyramus and Thisbe, with Wall and Moonshine
  • ▸An epilogue apologising for 'shadows' and offering the whole thing as a dream

Scenes, characters & lines

'The course of true love never did run smooth'

Lysander to Hermia in the opening scene, consoling her over her father's choice of husband

'Lord, what fools these mortals be!'

Robin Goodfellow to Oberon, watching the lovers' confusion in the wood

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows'

Oberon describes where Titania sleeps, and plans to anoint her eyes

A weaver wakes with an ass's head and a fairy queen in love with him

Bottom, 'translated' by Robin, is doted on by Titania and fed by Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed

Amateur actors play Wall and Moonshine in a tragedy of a lion and a mulberry tree

Quince's company perform Pyramus and Thisbe for the wedding celebrations

The changeling Indian boy two rulers quarrel over

Oberon and Titania's dispute, which has disordered the seasons

'If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended'

Robin's epilogue, offering the audience the excuse of a dream

Key ideas

  • Three worlds — court, fairy and artisan — run in parallel and are braided together by the wood, each commenting on the others' idea of love and of art
  • The play repeatedly frames itself as unreliable: lunatic, lover and poet are 'of imagination all compact', and the ending asks to be taken for a dream

Quick-fire facts

  • •First printed in quarto in 1600; grouped with the comedies in the First Folio of 1623
  • •Probably written for an aristocratic wedding, though no particular marriage has ever been proved
  • •The Pyramus and Thisbe story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses; Theseus and Hippolyta from Chaucer's Knight's Tale; the ass's head from Apuleius' The Golden Ass
  • •Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck, is a figure from English folklore rather than classical myth
  • •Mendelssohn wrote a concert overture in 1826 and incidental music in 1842, which supplied the Wedding March
  • •Benjamin Britten's opera of 1960 sets Shakespeare's own text, cut by roughly half
  • •Peter Brook's 1970 RSC production, staged in a white box with trapezes, is among the most famous Shakespeare productions of the 20th century
  • •Doubling Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania is a common modern staging choice

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources