A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Play in Focus

MUSTARD According to Elizabethan lore, mustard supposedly contained a devil in its seed. Shakespeare was probably recalling this lore when he named one of Titania's fairy attendants "Mustardseed."

by William Shakespeare

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The Play in Focus

The plot. The opening act of A Midsummer Night's Dream presents the primary plot of the work. As the curtain rises, the audience finds Theseus, the Duke of Athens, anxiously awaiting his marriage to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. A conflict is quickly revealed when Egeus, an Athenian citizen, beseeches Theseus to reprimand his daughter Hermia. The distraught father explains that, although the girl has been betrothed to a young man named Demetrius, she wishes to marry Lysander. While both men seek her hand in marriage, the choice of a husband does not rest with Hermia, but with her father.

After listening to Hermia's father, Theseus commands that Hermia choose to marry Demetrius, join a cloister of nuns, or be put to death. The young girl, though, decides to elope with Lysander and reveals the plan to Helena, her best friend. Helena, however, is in love with Demetrius. She plots to tell him of his fiancée's planned elopement with Lysander in hopes of winning his favor.

The following scene finds a group of Athenians, "the mechanicals," practicing a play they wish to perform for the court at the event of Theseus's marriage. The skit is based on the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, but in the bumbling hands of these actors the drama becomes a comedy. This glimpse of the mechanicals establishes them as comic characters whose antics will affect the course of the play.

Hermia and Lysander, meanwhile, escape into an area of woods that houses a community of fairies. Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, reign here. Because of a domestic dispute, Oberon plots with his attendant Puck to play a trick on Titania by placing in her eyes the juice of a "western flower." This juice makes those who have been exposed to it fall in love with the first person he or she sees. But Oberon and Puck also overhear an argument between Helena and Demetrius. She has told him of Hermia's betrayal, but instead of shunning Hermia as Helena had hoped, Demetrius is determined to find the couple and stop the elopement. Oberon feels pity for Helena and asks Puck to place the flower juice in Demetrius's eyes so that he might fall in love with Helena.

Oberon drugs Titania with the flower's juice. Afterward, Puck comes across the mechanicals as they practice their performance. The mischievous Puck alters one of the actors, Bottom, so that he possesses the head of an ass. Titania awakens and promptly falls in love with the "ass," who is then treated like royalty.

The attempt to drug Demetrius fails, however. Puck makes the mistake of dropping the potion into Lysander's eyes. Oberon realizes that an error was made and drops the juice into the eyes of Demetrius, creating a situation where both Demetrius and Lysander now love Helena instead of Hermia. When the four youths again fall asleep, Puck remedies the mix-up by squeezing an antidote into Lysander's eyes. The lovesick fairy queen Titania receives a remedy as well.

After awakening, Titania tells Oberon of a dream she had in which she was "enamored of an ass." The young Athenians stir, and it becomes clear that they too appear to believe that the romantic events of the recent past were only dreams. Because Demetrius was never remedied of his love for Helena, the two couples appeal to Theseus to take back his previous ultimatum that Hermia should marry Demetrius. The king consents, and the couples plan for their weddings. Not only will Theseus be wed to Hippolyta, but also Lysander to Hermia, and Demetrius to Helena.

At the same time, Bottom awakens from his ass-like state, believing that he too has had a fantastic dream. He quickly finds the other mechanicals to practice the play they are to perform at the approaching wedding feast. The final act of the play presents this performance to both the Athenian court and to Shakespeare's audience.

The romantic comedy of the Athenian youths. A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with the promise of a happy ending. Theseus complains that the slow moon "lingers [his] desires" (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream 1.1.4) to wed Hippolyta. From the onset, the expectation of a union between the individuals is apparent. It is this trust in a satisfactory conclusion that Shakespeare's audience bears in mind when confronted with the troubles facing Hermia and Helena. Perhaps due to the unmarried status of their queen, Elizabeth I, playgoers in Shakespeare's time did not wish to see female characters in a play remain unloved. As one author explains, audiences were "loathe to see the charm of an attractive heroine 'withering on a virgin throne'" (Holzknecht, p. 181).

In addition, Elizabethan audiences would not accept a romantic comedy in which all couples were not happily matched by the close of the curtain. Shakespeare hints to his audience early in the drama that they need not worry. Helena remarks in the opening scene of the play that "through Athens I am thought as fair as she [Hermia]" (Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.227). Her suggestion of equality instills in the viewer a desire for both girls to marry their respective loves.

Sad Helena and distressed Hermia are eventually transformed into "lovers full of joy and mirth" (Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.27), but the passage toward this happy destination is not direct or entirely natural. The play concludes with Demetrius still under the influence of the magical flower nectar. In order for the union between this character and Helena to work, he must remain under the spell of this power. Demetrius remarks, upon returning to the palace, "Are you sure / that we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep we dream" (Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.189-91). He is, indeed, the only character who does still sleep. The audience's quest for a union of all the young lovers, though, as well as its ability to immerse itself in the fanciful plot, allow Shakespeare to employ the nectar as an effective matchmaking tool. After all, his Elizabethan audience's primary desire was to see a happy ending.

Because of the centrality of the wedding theme, it is possible that Shakespeare composed the play with a specific marriage in mind-perhaps the marriage of Elizabeth Carey and Thomas Berkeley on February 19, 1596. The bride's father was Lord Chamberlain, the patron who owned Shakespeare's production company.

Sources. Shakespeare borrowed from Roman poet Ovid's work Metamorphoses when he created A Midsummer Night's Dream. The setting, theme, and several characters in Shakespeare's drama were influenced by the Roman poem. Study of classic literature was a central element in the education of a young English male of Shakespeare's era, and Ovid's work was widely studied at the time.

Metamorphoses is a collection of more than two hundred Greek myths and legends. Included are elements such as the character of Theseus, the Pyramus and Thisbe myth, and concepts of physical transformation. Shakespeare's character Bottom, for example, is given the ears of an ass, a fate also suffered by the fabled King Midas in Ovid's work. In drawing on Metamorphoses, Shakespeare used a significant work. The collection has been called "the most important source of mythical lore for all writers since Ovid's time" (Goold in Ovid, p. xii).

Shakespeare was also influenced by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Some 150 years earlier, Chaucer had told a story quite similar to A Midsummer Night's Dream in "The Knight's Tale," one of the verse narratives in his book Canterbury Tales (also covered in Literature and Its Times). Shakespeare used Chaucer's general plot as well as several character names.

"The Knight's Tale"	A Midsummer Night's Dream
Theseus-Duke of Athens	Theseus-Duke of Athens
Hippolyta-Amazon Queen	Hippolyta-Amazon Queen
Palamon and Arcite-young knights	Demetrius and Lysander-male youths
Emily-female love interest	Hermia-female love interest
Egeus-Theseus's father	Egeus-Hermia's father
Philostrate-Arcite's alias	Philostrate-palace official

The cast of fairies can also be traced to several sources. When Henry VIII converted his nation from Catholicism earlier in the sixteenth century, he eased a fear among England's citizens that a person might be labeled a heretic (a rebel against Catholic teachings) on the basis of statements that person made or the stories he or she told. This in turn allowed for a surge in fairy stories. Many English households blamed minor mishaps or lost possessions on the work of fairy magic.

In old English society the name Robin Good-fellow, or Puck, represented the figure of a mischievous spirit. He belonged to the second of four fairy classes: (1) trooping fairies, (2) hobgoblins, (3) mermaids, and (4) giants, monsters, or hags. Although hobgoblins could sometimes be endowed with evil traits, Shakespeare's Puck retains the merry jesting qualities found in most ballads, legends, and dramas of the time. A similar character is found, for example, in Ben Jonson's Love Restored, produced in 1616. Prior to the sixteenth century, fairies were considered to be of average or above-average human stature. The small size of later English fairies can be directly attributed to the inventions of Shakespeare. Quickly adopted by other writers, this notion of miniature size eventually developed into national folklore.