William Shakespeare · c. 1595
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is the most formally complex of his comedies. Four parallel plot-strands — the Athenian court, the lovers' quarrels, the fairy sovereigns, the rude mechanicals — intertwine, exchange characters, and finally converge on a single wedding feast. The play is also one of Shakespeare's most thematically rich investigations of the gap between waking and dream, art and life, reason and desire. To read it well is to follow how the four plots illuminate each other.
The four plot-lines run in parallel:
Each plot interferes with the others. The fairies meddle with the lovers. Bottom is transformed and ends up briefly married to Titania. The mechanicals stage their play at the wedding feast that closes the frame. Shakespeare's structural control of four simultaneous plots — each moving toward the single final scene — is one of the play's signature achievements.
Almost every important action of the play happens in the wood outside Athens. The wood is the play's symbolic space — a place where the rules of Athens (paternal authority, the law that would marry Hermia against her will, the social hierarchy that keeps lovers in line) are suspended. In the wood, identities are unstable, lovers swap partners, queens love asses, kings hide behind trees. The wood is Shakespeare's recurring symbol of comic possibility: the space outside the city's order where transformation becomes possible.
The play returns its characters to Athens once the wood has done its work. The wood is not a permanent home; it is the laboratory where the social problems are reconfigured.
The four lovers — Hermia, Helena, Lysander, Demetrius — are written as foils to each other, deliberately interchangeable. Hermia is short, dark, Helena tall, fair. Lysander and Demetrius are nearly indistinguishable young Athenian men. The play makes a small philosophical point: in matters of romantic preference, the particulars matter much less than we tell ourselves they do. The fairies' magic doesn't violate the lovers' nature; it just reshuffles preferences that were never as firmly grounded as the lovers thought.
Bottom the weaver is the play's great comic character and the figure who moves most freely between the four plots. Given an ass's head by Puck, he becomes the lover of Titania, queen of the fairies. Bottom's response to his metamorphosis — he takes it in stride, asking only for hay and a haircut — is the play's argument about the dignity of the ordinary. He is not flustered by being changed into an ass. He is not flustered by being loved by a fairy queen. The play's hierarchy (court > mortal > tradesman) is undone by Bottom's complete equanimity at every level.
Bottom's word for his transformation is "translation" ("Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated"). The word is doing serious work: translation in Shakespeare meant moving something from one form into another, which is what the play does to all its characters in turn.
The mechanicals' production of Pyramus and Thisbe at the closing wedding feast is one of Shakespeare's most careful examples of mise en abyme — a small version of the play embedded inside it. Pyramus and Thisbe is the source story of Romeo and Juliet — young lovers from feuding families who die for love. The mechanicals butcher the tragic material into farce. The court laughs at it.
The joke is not just at the workers' expense. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around the same time as Dream; the embedded comedy is, in part, a wry comment on his own serious treatment of the same plot. The play is meta-aware in ways scholars are still working through.
The play's most quoted speech is Theseus's on imagination in Act 5:
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact…
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes…
The speech is Theseus's, but it functions as Shakespeare's quiet self-commentary. The play has just shown all four kinds of imagination — the lunatic's (Bottom transformed), the lover's (the swapped affections), the poet's (the mechanicals' play), and the playwright's (the entire frame). Theseus dismisses these as the same kind of unreliable production. The play has shown them to be the engine of everything that matters.
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