Fairies and flowers, magic and mischief... A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's best-known and best-loved plays. This fantastical comedy, written in 1595, is perfect for summertime and its fast-paced humour and magic make it popular with children. But look below the surface and we find that The Dream (as it’s often called) is in fact a highly complex and sexual play.

A wedding in Athens

There are three main storylines that come together in a woodland world where magic turns everything upside down. First, Theseus, Duke of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta, an Amazon queen whom he’s taken captive. A group of six workmen form a very amateur acting group known as ‘The Mechanicals’ and prepare to perform their own version of Ovid’s story Pyramus and Thisbe as entertainment at the wedding. The ‘actors’ meet in the woods to rehearse their play.

Unlucky in love

Meanwhile, four young people, Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, are having romantic problems. Hermia and Lysander are in love, but Hermia’s father insists that she must marry Demetrius. Helena loves Demetrius but Demetrius loves Hermia. Lysander and Hermia run away together into the woods and the other two follow.

Fairy mischief

The third storyline adds the magic. Oberon, king of the fairies, who lives in the woods, tells his mischievous fairy-servant Puck to collect a special flower to use as a love potion. When the juice of the flower touches someone’s eyes, they will fall in love with the first person they see. Puck uses the potion on various characters and causes chaos. Both Lysander and Demetrius fall in love with Helena, rejecting Hermia and leaving the two women confused and angry. Titania, the beautiful queen of the fairies, falls in love with Bottom, the stupidest member of The Mechanicals. Titania and Bottom make an especially strange couple because, thanks to Puck’s mischievous magic, Bottom now has the head of an ass!

Just a dream?

Plenty of comedy and sexual suggestion comes out of how the characters behave with each other while under the power of the love potion. But, by the end of the play, the potion has been used again to make sure that everyone falls in love with the correct partner. The characters believe that the strange events they experienced while under the potion’s power must have been just a dream. For example, Bottom wakes up having spent the night with the beautiful fairy queen, Titania, and says “I have had a most rare vision. I had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” The play questions what’s real and what’s dreamed, what’s natural and what’s magic. In fact, Puck ends the play telling the audience that perhaps we too have dreamed everything we’ve just seen on stage: “You have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.”

423 A Midsummer's Night Dream

The English woods

Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream is supposedly set near Athens, there’s no doubt that the woods where the action takes place are much more English than Greek. Shakespeare uses the names of lots of typically English wild flowers and herbs in his descriptions, including thyme, cowslips, violets, woodbine and musk-roses. The love potion itself that Oberon tells Puck to go and collect is a wild pansy. By including so much botanical detail, not only does Shakespeare create some beautiful, poetic descriptions, he also gives a sense of the woods being a place full of natural life, growth and fertility. 

A play-within-the-play

During A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the six Mechanicals write, rehearse, and perform a play based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although the scenes with the Mechanicals are very funny, Pyramus and Thisbe is in fact the tragic tale of two lovers who are not allowed to marry and end up committing suicide. The same story inspired Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, which he was writing at the same time as The Dream. 

Different interpretations

The original audiences watching in the late 1500s would have understood the sexual connotations of the script (of which there are many.) By contrast, productions of the play in the Victorian era tended to minimise these sexual elements and instead depicted the woods as an innocent place of fairy magic.