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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM - William Shakespeare 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Shakespeare

PLOT SUMMARY 

Theseus, duke of Athens, after conquering the warrior Amazons in battle, is in turn conquered by the charms of their queen, Hippolyta, and they are now planning to marry. To speed the time until their wedding night, he orders amusements to be staged. In a spirit of loyalty, Bottom the weaver and other tradesmen decide to prepare a play for the duke and his bride.

The preparations are interrupted by Egeus, an Athenian, who brings his daughter, Hermia, and her two suitors before Theseus, entreating him to command Hermia to wed Demetrius. Hermia pleads to be allowed to marry the other suitor, the one she loves-Lysander. The duke orders her to obey her father under penalty of death or confinement in a convent. Hermia and Lysander bewail the harsh decree and secretly agree to meet in a wood nearby and flee to another country. They tell their plans to Helena, a jilted sweetheart of Demetrius, and she, to win back his love, goes straightway to inform him of the plan.

Meanwhile, in the forest, the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania are at odds. In spite, Oberon bids Puck procure a love-juice to pour upon Titania's eyelids when she is asleep, in order that she may love the first thing her waking eyes behold. Just then, Oberon sees Demetrius, who has sought out the trysting-place of Lysander and Hermia only to meet Helena, much to his distaste. The lady's distress at her lover's coldness softens the heart of Oberon, who bids Puck touch Demetrius's eyes also with the love-juice, for Helena's sake.

Meanwhile, Lysander and Hermia arrive, and Puck in error anoints Lysander's instead of Demetrius's eyes, so that Lysander, happening to awake just as the neglected Helena wanders by, falls in love with her-and abandons Hermia.

The same enchanted spot in the forest happens to be the place selected by Bottom and company for the final rehearsal of their play. The roguish Puck passes that way while they are rehearsing, and mischievously and magically crowns Bottom with an ass's head, whereupon the other players disperse terror-stricken. Then he brings Bottom to Titania; and, when she awakens, she gazes first upon the human-turned-to-an-ass and falls in love.

Meantime, the four lovers are greatly bewildered. Oberon finds that Puck has anointed the eyes of Lysander instead of those of Demetrius, so Oberon anoints Demetrius's eyes with another potion which breaks the spell. When Demetrius awakes, he sees his neglected Helena being wooed by Lysander. His own love for her returns, and he is ready to fight Lysander. Helena deems them both to he mocking her, and Hermia is dazed by the turn of affairs. The fairies interpose and prevent conflict by causing the four to wander about in the dark until they are tired and fall asleep. Puck repairs the blunder by anointing Lysander's eyes, in order to dispel the illusion caused by the love-juice. Thus, when they awake, all will be in order: Lysander will love Hermia, and Demetrius will love Helena.

Titania woos Bottom until Oberon, whose anger has abated, removes the spell from her eyes. Bottom is restored to his natural form, and he rejoins his comrades in Athens. Theseus, on an early morning hunting trip in the forest, discovers the four lovers. Explanations, follow; the duke relents and bestows Helena upon Demetrius and Hermia upon Lysander.

A wedding-feast for three couples instead of one only is spread in Duke Theseus's place. Bottom's players come to this feast to present the “comic” tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is performed in wondrous and hilarious fashion. After the company retires for the night, the fairies dance through the corridors on a mission of blessing and goodwill for the three wedded pairs

ACT BY ACT SUMMARY 

Act I

As Duke Theseus prepares for his marriage to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, he is interrupted by a courtier, Egeus. Egeus asks for the Duke to intervene in a dispute. His daughter, Hermia, will not agree to marry Demetrius (whom Egeus has chosen for her) because she loves a gentleman named Lysander. The Duke asks Hermia to be obedient to her father. He offers her one of two options: she must either die or accept a celibate life as a nun in Diana's templ

Naturally upset with the offer, Lysander and Hermia plan to elope and share their secret with Helena, Hermia's friend. Helena is desperately in love with Demetrius, who seems to have abandoned her in favour of Hermia. At night, Lysander and Hermia escape from Athens; but they soon lose their way in the woods. After Helena tells him of their intention to defy the law, Demetrius decides to follow the lovers into the woods. In turn, Helena follows Demetrius in the hope that he will give up on Hermia and choose her instead.  

Meanwhile, a group of working men are preparing a play of the tragic love-story of Pyramus and Thisbe to present before the Duke Theseus on his wedding day. Nick Bottom, the weaver, is to play the lover Pyramus, while Flute, the bellows-mender, begrudgingly agrees to play Thisbe. 

Act II

Nearby, Oberon - King of the Fairies—has recently quarrelled with his queen, Titania. She acquired a magical child from one of her waiting women, and now refuses to hand him over to Oberon to use as a page. Oberon begins to plot a way to get revenge on Titania for her disobedience. He sends his fairy servant, Puck, to fetch a purple flower with juice that makes people fall in love with the next creature they see.  

Afterwards, Oberon overhears Helena and Demetrius arguing in the forest. Oberon hears Demetrius mistreat Helena and tells Puck to anoint 'the Athenian', so Demetrius will fall in love with the first person that he sees. Puck mistakes the Athenian and puts the flower juice on the eyes of the sleeping Lysander. When he is woken by Helena, he immediately falls in love with her and rejects Hermia. When Demetrius rests, Oberon puts magic juice on his eyes, which makes him fall in love with Helena as well. 

Act III 

The workers' rehearsals in the wood are overheard by Puck, who plays a trick on them by giving Bottom an ass's head. After frightening the others away, Bottom is lured towards the sleeping Titania whom Oberon has anointed with Puck's magic flower juice. On waking, the fairy queen falls in love with the ass and entertains him with her fairies.  

Meanwhile, Demetrius and Lysander, still under the spell of the flower juice, pursue Helena. Hermia is jealous and confused about the lack of attention paid to her. Oberon and Puck watch the chaos, and Oberon commands Puck to put it right again. The lovers' arguments have tired them all out as they have chased one another through the woods. Puck eventually distracts the two men from their pursuit of Helena by impersonating their voices, and they get lost in the woods. The four lovers fall asleep, exhausted. Puck places restorative juice on Lysander's eyes.

Act IV

After an afternoon of being pampered by Titania's fairies, Bottom falls asleep beside her. Oberon restores Titania's sight and wakes her (thank goodness). After expressing her dismay at the sight of Bottom, she reconciles with Oberon, and she ends up giving him the little Indian prince for his page. Bottom's ass head is removed, and he returns to the city to rejoin his friends as they prepare to perform their play. The lovers are woken by Theseus and Hippolyta's hunting party. Lysander sees Hermia and falls in love with her once again. 

Act V

Happily reunited (Lysander with Hermia and Demetrius with Helena), they agree to share the Duke's wedding day. The play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is presented before the wedding guests. As the three couples retire to bed, Puck and the fairies return to bless the palace and its people.

THEMES

Love

The dominant theme in A Midsummer Night's Dream is love, a subject to which Shakespeare returns constantly in his comedies. Shakespeare explores how people tend to fall in love with those who appear beautiful to them. People we think we love at one time in our lives can later seem not only unattractive but even repellent. For a time, this attraction to beauty might appear to be love at its most intense, but one of the ideas of the play is that real love is much more than mere physical attraction.

At one level, the story of the four young Athenians asserts that although "The course of true love never did run smooth," true love triumphs in the end, bringing happiness and harmony. At another level, however, the audience is forced to consider what an apparently irrational and whimsical thing love is, at least when experienced between youngsters.

Marriage

A Midsummer Night's Dream asserts marriage as the true fulfillment of romantic love. All the damaged relationships have been sorted out at the end of Act IV, and Act V serves to celebrate the whole idea of marriage in a spirit of festive happiness.

The triple wedding at the end of Act IV marks the formal resolution of the romantic problems that have beset the two young couples from the beginning, when Egeus attempted to force his daughter to marry the man he had chosen to be her husband.

The mature and stable love of Theseus and Hippolyta is contrasted with the relationship of Oberon and Titania, whose squabbling has such a negative impact on the world around them. Only when the marriage of the fairy King and Queen is put right can there be peace in their kingdom and the world beyond it.

Appearance and Reality

Another of the play's main themes is one to which Shakespeare returns to again and again in his work: the difference between appearance and reality. The idea that things are not necessarily what they seem to be is at the heart of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in the very title itself.

A dream is not real, even though it seems so at the time we experience it. Shakespeare consciously creates the plays' dreamlike quality in a number of ways. Characters frequently fall asleep and wake having dreamed ("Methought a serpent ate my heart away"); having had magic worked upon them so that they are in a dreamlike state; or thinking that they have dreamed ("I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was"). Much of the play takes place at night, and there are references to moonlight, which changes the appearance of what it illuminates.

The difference between appearances and reality is also explored through the play-within-a-play, to particularly comic effect. The "rude mechanicals" completely fail to understand the magic of the theatre, which depends upon the audience being allowed to believe (for a time, at least) that what is being acted out in front of them is real.

When Snug the Joiner tells the stage audience that he is not really a lion and that they must not be afraid of him, we (and they) laugh at this stupidity, but we also laugh at ourselves — for we know that he is not just a joiner pretending to be a lion, but an actor pretending to be a joiner pretending to be a lion. Shakespeare seems to be saying, "We all know that this play isn't real, but you're still sitting there and believing it." That is a kind of magic too.

Order and Disorder

A Midsummer Night's Dream also deals with the theme of order and disorder. The order of Egeus' family is threatened because his daughter wishes to marry against his will; the social order to the state demands that a father's will should be enforced. When the city dwellers find themselves in the wood, away from their ordered and hierarchical society, order breaks down and relationships are fragmented. But this is comedy, and relationships are more happily rebuilt in the free atmosphere of the wood before the characters return to society.

Natural order — the order of Nature — is also broken and restored in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The row between the Fairy King and Queen results in the order of the seasons being disrupted:

The spring, the summer,

The chiding autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world

By their increase knows not which is which.

Only after Oberon and Titania's reconciliation can all this be put right. Without the restoration of natural order, the happiness of the play's ending could not be complete

Magic

The fairies’ magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Although the misuse of magic causes chaos, as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysander’s eyelids, magic ultimately resolves the play’s tensions by restoring love to balance among the quartet of Athenian youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his own ends, as when he reshapes Bottom’s head into that of an ass and recreates the voices of Lysander and Demetrius, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and gracelessness of the craftsmen’s attempt to stage their play.

Dreams

As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; they are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. Hippolyta’s first words in the play evidence the prevalence of dreams (“Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, / Four nights will quickly dream away the time”), and various characters mention dreams throughout (I.i.7–8). The theme of dreaming recurs predominantly when characters attempt to explain bizarre events in which these characters are involved: “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream,” Bottom says, unable to fathom the magical happenings that have affected him as anything but the result of slumber.

Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of course; he seeks to recreate this environment in the play through the intervention of the fairies in the magical forest. At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream. This sense of illusion and gauzy fragility is crucial to the atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as it helps render the play a fantastical experience rather than a heavy drama.

Jealousy

The theme of jealousy operates in both the human and fairy realms in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jealousy plays out most obviously among the quartet of Athenian lovers, who find themselves in an increasingly tangled knot of misaligned desire. Helena begins the play feeling jealous of Hermia, who has managed to snag not one but two suitors. Helena loves Demetrius, who in turn feels jealous of his rival for Hermia’s affections, Lysander. When misplaced fairy mischief leads Lysander into an amorous pursuit of Helena, the event drives Hermia into her own jealous rage. Jealousy also extends into the fairy realm, where it has caused a rift between the fairy king and queen. As we learn in Act II, King Oberon and Queen Titania both have eyes for their counterparts in the human realm, Theseus and Hippolyta. Titania accuses Oberon of stealing away with “the bouncing Amazon” (II.i.). Oberon accuses Titania of hypocrisy, since she also loves another: “How canst thou thus for shame, Titania, / Glance at my credit with Hippolyta, / Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?” (II.i.). This jealous rift incites Oberon to command Puck to fetch the magic flower that eventually causes so much chaos and confusion for the Athenian lovers

Mischief

In Midsummer, mischief is primarily associated with the forest and the fairies who reside there. Accordingly, the fairies of traditional British folklore are master mischief makers. The trickster fairy Puck (also known as Robin Goodfellow) is the play’s chief creator of mischief. Puck’s reputation as a troublemaker precedes him, as suggested in the first scene of Act II, where an unnamed fairy recognizes Puck and rhapsodizes about all the tricks Puck has played on unsuspecting humans. Although in the play Puck only retrieves and uses the magical flower at Oberon’s request, his mistakes in implementing Oberon’s plan have the most chaotic effects. Puck also makes mischief of his own accord, as when he transforms Bottom’s head into that of ass. Puck is also the only character who explicitly talks about his love of mischief. When in Act III he declares that “those things do best please me / That befall prepost’rously” (III.ii.), he effectively announces a personal philosophy of mischief and an appreciation for turning things on their head.

CHARACTERIZATION 

Oberon

Titania