A Midsummer Night’s Dream A comedy by William Shakespeare

A play about Romance & Frustrated love Magic Madness Mistaken identity

About the play Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream toward the beginning of his career. The play describes the comic misadventures of two pairs of lovers who become lost in the dark woods and fall under the power of fairies.

Midsummer Night… Thought to be one of the nights of the year when sprites were especially powerful. People also believed that flowers gathered on Midsummer Night could work magic. Midsummer night was a time when people dreamed of their true loves and sometimes went insane.

Classical meets Shakespeare Plot based on the “classical” Greek/Roman model -- Grumpy old father blocks love affair of young man and woman. Complications arise, confusion follows and finally, the lovers are united. Shakespeare sets his play in Athens and moves it outside, adding the English concept of Midsummer Night.

The style = blank verse Fairly new in the 1500’s Follows a flexible rhythmic pattern consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable Example: Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; four nights will quickly dream away the time; (Act I; Scene I)

A play-within-a-play This play-within-a-play features clumsy writing, poor staging, cheap costumes and awful acting. It allows us to laugh at human nature and see interaction between actors and audience

Pyramus & Thisbe 1 Pyramus and Thisbe, in classical mythology, youth and maiden of Babylon, whose parents opposed their marriage. Their homes adjoined, and they conversed through a crevice in the dividing wall. On a night when they had arranged to meet at the tomb of Ninus, Thisbe, who was the first at the trysting place, was frightened by a lion with jaws bloody from its prey.

Pyramus & Thisbe 2 As she fled, she dropped her mantle, which was seized by the lion. When Pyramus came, the torn and bloody mantle convinced him that she had been slain. He killed himself, and Thisbe, returning, took her own life with his sword. The white fruit of a mulberry tree that stood at the trysting place was dyed red with Pyramus' blood, and the fruit was ever after the color of blood. (

It’s not just a comedy, difficult questions are also posed. What is love? How and why do people fall in and out of love? How is love related to questions of identity - both of the lover and the beloved? Are lovers in control of themselves and their destinies? Which is more real, the daylight world of reason and law or the nighttime world of passion and chaos?