A Midsummer Night's Dream — themes & analysis

The four lovers begin the play with their affections fixed. Hermia loves Lysander. Lysander loves Hermia. Demetrius loves Hermia (against her will). Helena loves Demetrius (against his). By morning the men have been redirected twice and the women wounded by both turns. The play is structurally an argument about love — but the argument is conducted through choreography rather than speech. Watch where the love-juice falls; watch who chases whom across the stage; watch which couplings are still standing at sunrise.

Shakespeare's deepest provocation is that Demetrius leaves the wood still under the spell. Oberon never lifts the enchantment from him. The Athenian court treats his renewed love for Helena as restored to its proper object, even though the audience knows it is exactly the same magic Oberon imposed on Titania for laughs. The play does not flag this as a problem. It just lets you notice. The same chemical that makes a fairy queen love a donkey makes a young man love the woman he had been spurning a day earlier — and the second case is celebrated with a wedding.

Helena, before any of the magic begins, gives the play its dryest line on the subject: "love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." She means it about Demetrius's preference for Hermia over her. By the end of the night the line has been demonstrated four times over. Love is what the mind decides to do with whoever happens to be in front of it when the eyes open. Shakespeare's Athenian lovers, made to fall in and out of it on a schedule, are not insulted by the device. They are revealed by it.

Modern readers raised on dating apps and the language of "compatibility" recognize the territory immediately. The play does not despair of love — it ends in three weddings and Oberon's blessing — but it refuses to pretend romantic certainty is anything other than a pleasant kind of weather. "The course of true love never did run smooth," Lysander says, in the play's most-quoted line on the subject, before he himself has been redirected by a flower. He is right, and he is about to prove it.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the lovers introduced), Scene 4 (Lysander redirected), Scene 6 (the lovers' quarrel), Scene 7 (Demetrius left enchanted).

Athens in the play is rule. Theseus's first scene presents an Athenian law that gives a father the power to choose his daughter's husband, with death or the convent as her alternatives if she refuses. The duke states the law plainly. He does not propose to overrule it. Hermia is given four days to decide. The city is not a place of cruelty exactly — Theseus is patient, even kindly — but its order has the shape of coercion underneath the courtesy.

The wood is the opposite. Lovers run there to escape the law; fairies inhabit it; rules invert. Almost everything that matters in the play happens in the wood — the lovers' rearrangement, Bottom's translation, Titania's enchantment, the resolution of the fairy quarrel — and almost nothing in the city is the same on the morning after, even if the characters cannot quite say what changed. When Theseus rides into the wood at dawn to hunt and finds the four lovers asleep on the ground, he simply overrules Egeus and announces the weddings will happen alongside his own. The law has not been changed. The wood has changed it for him.

Shakespeare establishes a permanent geography here that English literature has used ever since: the wood is where the city's order is suspended and the changes happen that the city cannot perform itself. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and its forest meeting between Hester and Dimmesdale, the moors of Wuthering Heights, the heath of King Lear, the campsite in any number of contemporary coming-of-age novels — they all owe something to the topography Shakespeare laid down here.

What the play also suggests, quietly, is that the wood and the city are not really separate. The fairies live close enough to Athens to attend the wedding. Titania's opening speech in the wood is about how the lovers' quarrel between Oberon and herself has thrown the human seasons into disorder — fogs in the rivers, blighted corn, "hoary-headed frosts" falling on roses. The two worlds bleed into each other. What happens in the wood does not stay there.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the Athenian law), Scene 3 (the wood's disorder), Scene 7 (Theseus overrules Egeus), Scene 9 (fairies bless the city).

The six Athenian tradesmen — Bottom the weaver, Quince the carpenter, Flute the bellows-mender, Snug the joiner, Snout the tinker, Starveling the tailor — are some of Shakespeare's funniest creations and the source of one of his deepest interests. They take their hopeless play with absolute seriousness. They worry whether the lion will frighten the ladies and propose a prologue assuring the audience it is only Snug the joiner inside a costume. They worry whether moonlight can be staged and consider bringing in a lantern to represent the moon. They worry about the wall and finally let one of their number play it, holding up his fingers to make a chink for the lovers to whisper through.

Bottom is the engine of the troupe. He wants to play every part — Pyramus, Thisbe, the lion, all of them — and would do them all with conviction. Quince has to manage him. The audition scenes in Act 1, Scene 2 and the rehearsal in Act 3, Scene 1 are pure comedy of vocation: men who do their day jobs well attempting an art they have no equipment for, and refusing to let the lack of equipment stop them. The comedy is never cruel. Shakespeare loves them.

The aristocrats in the audience at Theseus's wedding are not always so generous. Hippolyta, in particular, finds the performance painful: "this is the silliest stuff that ever I heard." Theseus answers her with one of the play's quietest pieces of grace: "the best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." The lines are easy to miss. They are also Shakespeare's defense of his entire trade. A play is only ever shadows on a wall; the audience does the rest of the work; condescension toward the players is condescension toward the form itself.

Ordinary people taking art seriously, against the condescension of those who think they know better — Shakespeare returns to this pattern across his career, and Midsummer is its purest version. The mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe is also a parody of Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare had written or was writing in the same period. The same plot — secret lovers, a wall, a death by misunderstanding — played for tears in one play and for laughs in this one. He could see the joke in his own materials.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (casting the play), Scene 5 (rehearsal interrupted), Scene 8 (Bottom returns), Scene 9 (Pyramus and Thisbe performed).

The play's title is also its argument. What happened in the wood was a dream — or it was real and is being treated as a dream so that ordinary life can resume. Shakespeare keeps the question open. The four lovers wake at dawn on the forest floor and cannot quite remember why they are there. "These things seem small and undistinguishable, like far-off mountains turned into clouds," Demetrius says. They walk back to Athens convinced something significant occurred and unable to describe it.

Bottom is the exception. He alone remembers — or thinks he does — and his waking speech is one of the quietest, strangest passages in all of Shakespeare. "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was." He tries to describe it and fails. "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was." The lines garble St. Paul on purpose — Paul says the eye has not seen what God has prepared; Bottom mixes up the senses entirely — and the garbling is itself the point. The vision is real. The instruments for reporting it are not equal to the task.

Puck closes the play with the same offer to the audience. "If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended — that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream, gentles, do not reprehend." The whole performance, Puck suggests, was a dream you had for two hours. You can take it as nothing or as everything; the play does not insist.

What is being suggested is something that the play of Bottom and Titania has already demonstrated: that the line between real experience and dream is not where ordinary daylight thinking puts it. A man who has spent the night with the queen of the fairies in a half-donkey's body is not lying when he says he has had a vision. The Dream takes its title's claim seriously. The vision is real. The wood is real. What is uncertain is whether anything in Athens is.

Where to follow it: Scene 6 (Puck makes the night a dream), Scene 7 (the lovers wake), Scene 8 (Bottom's vision), Scene 9 (Puck's epilogue).

Pyramus and Thisbe — the mechanicals' play — is the most extended scene of theatre-watching in Shakespeare. Five hundred lines of a wedding audience watching an amateur tragedy and commenting on it. Shakespeare uses the scene to think out loud about what theatre is for, what audiences owe performers, and how condescension toward a form damages everyone in it.

The mechanicals' anxieties before the performance are revealing. They worry the lion will frighten the ladies. They worry that bringing a sword on stage will be too violent. They worry whether moonlight is stageable. Each anxiety is the wrong question — they have not understood that the audience already knows it is theatre and will fill in what is missing — and the comedy comes partly from watching them solve problems that do not exist. But Shakespeare also lets you see the integrity of the impulse. They take the responsibility of performing seriously. They want the audience not to be misled. They are bad theorists of theatre because they care.

The aristocratic audience does not care, and the play knows it. Theseus, Hippolyta, Demetrius, Lysander spend the performance making jokes at the expense of the players. The jokes are sometimes funny. They are also socially loaded — the educated aristocrats showing each other off at the expense of working men who cannot fight back. Theseus's defense ("the best in this kind are but shadows") is mild, almost embarrassed. He is trying to recall his guests to courtesy without scolding them.

The whole sequence is also Shakespeare's thinking on his own trade. The Globe was a public theatre playing to an audience that mixed aristocrats in galleries with working men and women in the pit. He had professional reasons to be careful with the question of who got to laugh at whom. Pyramus and Thisbe is his most generous statement about it. The audience that needs theatre is not the audience that comes already convinced of its own taste. It is the audience that lets the imagination do the work the players cannot do alone.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (casting and concerns), Scene 5 (rehearsal), Scene 8 (the play preserved), Scene 9 (Pyramus and Thisbe).