A Midsummer Night's Dream Summary: Four Lovers, Six Actors and a Wood Full of Fairies
What it is about
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy Shakespeare wrote between 1594 and 1596. It is set in Athens and in the woodland beyond it, and almost all of the action happens by moonlight. Several plots run at once, and all of them hang off a single fixed point: the approaching wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.
The play opens with the couple four days from the ceremony. Theseus is impatient at the wait. Hippolyta tells him the time will pass like a dream. They are interrupted by Egeus, an Athenian who wants the law enforced against his own daughter. Hermia loves Lysander. Her father has arranged for her to marry Demetrius, and he invokes an ancient Athenian law under which a daughter who refuses her father's choice of husband can be put to death. Theseus offers Hermia a third option, a life of chastity as a nun serving the goddess Diana. She refuses that too. She and Lysander plan to slip away to the house of his aunt, outside the reach of Athenian law.
Hermia tells the plan to her closest friend, Helena, who is hopelessly in love with Demetrius. He left her for Hermia and shows her nothing but contempt. Hoping to win some scrap of his gratitude, Helena passes the secret on. Demetrius goes into the wood after Hermia, and Helena goes after Demetrius. Four young people, two of whom do not want to be followed, are now loose in the trees.
At the same time a group of six Athenian tradesmen, led by the carpenter Peter Quince, are preparing a play to perform at the Duke's wedding. Their chosen piece is "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe". They too go into the wood, to rehearse where nobody can see them.
The wood is not empty. Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, have come to Athens for the wedding, and they are at war with each other over an Indian changeling boy. Titania keeps the child because his mother was one of her worshippers. Oberon wants him as his henchman. To force her hand, Oberon sends his sprite Robin Goodfellow, known as Puck, to fetch a flower called love-in-idleness, whose juice makes a sleeper fall in love with the first living thing seen on waking. He means to use it on Titania. He also, having watched Demetrius insult Helena, orders Puck to use it on the young Athenian man. Puck has never seen either Athenian before. He finds the wrong one.
The main characters
Theseus and Hippolyta frame the play and represent order, law and daylight. Hermia and Lysander are the lovers who defy that law. Helena and Demetrius are the mismatched pair whose misery drives much of the comedy. Egeus is the immovable father.
Oberon and Titania mirror the royal couple in the fairy world, estranged where Theseus and Hippolyta are about to marry. Puck is Oberon's "shrewd and knavish sprite", the agent of nearly every mistake in the play. Among the actors, Nick Bottom the weaver is the standout: cast as Pyramus, he immediately wants to play Thisbe and the Lion as well, and would rather be a tyrant anyway. Quince spends most of the scene talking him down. Snug, who asks for the Lion because he is "slow of study", is told the role is "nothing but roaring".
The themes
Love in this play is not reasonable and barely chooses its own object. The flower juice simply makes visible what the opening scene already shows: Demetrius loved Helena, then switched to Hermia, for no stated reason. Magic only speeds up what desire does anyway.
Dreaming is the play's other engine. Hippolyta says the days will pass like a dream in the first scene, Hermia dreams of a snake eating her heart, and the whole central section takes place at night in a wood where nobody can trust what they have seen. Identity goes soft in the dark. People are mistaken for one another, affections flip, and the question of who belongs to whom is settled by accident.
Underneath sits a plainer argument about authority. A father, a duke and a fairy king all try to make other people obey. The wood undoes all three of them for a night.
How it ends
The structure is circular. Everything that goes wrong in the wood is set up to be unwound before the wedding day, and the six tradesmen finally get to perform Pyramus and Thisbe in front of the court. Oberon states his plan plainly in Act 2: the charm can be lifted with another herb once Titania has surrendered the changeling boy. The pleasure of the play is watching how far the confusion travels before it is reversed.
Why it still matters
It is one of Shakespeare's most popular and most widely performed plays. Part of that is practical. It is funny, it is short on cruelty, and the three worlds of court, wood and workshop give a director room to do almost anything. Part of it is the writing about love, which is sharper than the comic surface suggests. The lovers are not punished for their foolishness, they are forgiven for it, and the play treats a night of complete confusion as something people can wake from and carry on.
