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Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy by William Shakespeare, written in the mid-1590s. Most of the action takes place in a forest just outside ancient Athens, and it has both human and fairy characters.
Titania, the fairy queen, has just woken up in the forest, and sees Nick Bottom, who has the head of a donkey.
19th-century illustration of Bottom and Titania. Image credit: ""A Midsummer Night's Dream" Nomination" by Thomas Nast is in the public domain.

Characters overview

There are three main groups of characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
  1. The four human lovers: Demetrius, Helena, Hermia, and Lysander.
  2. The fairies, including Titania, the fairy queen; Oberon, the fairy king; and Puck, Oberon’s personal assistant fairy.
  3. The human actors, including Nick Bottom (aka Bottom) and Peter Quince; these characters are also known as “the mechanicals” in reference to their day jobs: carpenter, joiner, etc.

Plot overview

We won’t give you the full plot rundown here—these are just the highlights of what happens to the three main character groups.
One key thing to keep in mind is that all three groups experience a similar chain of events: first, a problem of some kind; then the problem is made worse in the forest through magic and confusion; but ultimately, the problem gets sorted out in the forest too.

The actors (or “mechanicals”)

Bottom, Quince, and friends are rehearsing a play to perform at Theseus’s wedding (Theseus is the Duke of Athens). They’re comically bad actors, and Bottom—lead actor and foolish fellow—has lots of ideas about how things should be “improved”, which gets on the nerves of director, Peter Quince.
The actors go into the forest to rehearse, where they’re spotted by the mischievous fairy, Puck. Puck decides to have some fun by tormenting them, giving Bottom the head of a donkey (or “ass”) and chasing the others off. Alone in the forest, Bottom meets fairy queen Titania, who’s been put under a magic spell that makes her fall in love with him, despite his strange appearance. She showers him with praise, songs, and food, before the spell is broken and Puck changes Bottom back to normal.
Bottom finds his friends again just in time to do the show at Theseus’s wedding, where their hilariously incompetent performance of a tragedy is a big hit with all the wedding guests.

The fairies

Oberon and Titania, the king and queen, have had a falling-out. To get back at Titania, Oberon gives the sleeping queen a magic potion to make her fall in love with the first creature she sees when she wakes up. This ends up being the human, Nick Bottom, to whom Puck has given the head of a donkey (see above). Later, Oberon and Puck put everything back to normal: breaking the spell on Titania and giving Bottom his regular head back.

The four human lovers

In short, it’s a “love square” (like a love triangle, but with four people). At the beginning of the play, Hermia and Lysander are together, but Hermia’s dad says she has to marry Demetrius instead. Meanwhile, Demetrius’s ex, Helena, is still in love with him. Hermia and Lysander escape to the forest so they can stay together, and Demetrius and Helena follow them.
In the forest, a combination of magic, confusion, and farce takes place, but eventually they come out happy and coupled up: Hermia and Lysander still together, and Demetrius and Helena back together. Then they all have a triple wedding at the end of the play, along with Duke Theseus and his bride Hippolyta.

Source text: Ovid's Metamorphoses

As far as we know, most of the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's own. But he did draw on Ovid's Metamorphoses for the play performed by Bottom, Quince, and the other mechanicals. Ovid was a Roman poet who lived between 43 BCE and 17/18 CE.
Statue of the poet, Ovid. His left arm is crossed over body, holding a book; his right arm is raised up towards his tilted head, with his chin resting on his right fist.
Statue of Ovid in Constanţa, Romania. Image credit: "Constanta - Ovid-Platz - Statue des Ovid" by HaSt is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0
In Metamorphoses, Pyramus and Thisbe are two young lovers in the city of Babylon who cannot marry due to a feud between their families. As chance would have it, Pyramus and Thisbe live in connected houses, and they are able to whisper their love for each other through a crack in a wall.
One night, they arrange to meet near Ninus' tomb under a mulberry tree. But, when Thisbe arrives, Pyramus is not there. When she sees a lion with a bloody mouth, she assumes the worst and flees, leaving behind her veil.
Pyramus arrives to find a tattered veil and the bloodied lion. He immediately assumes that Thisbe is dead. In despair, Pyramus kills himself by falling on his sword, his blood splashing on the mulberry tree. Pyramus' blood stains the white mulberry fruit, turning it dark.
Thisbe returns, eager to tell Pyramus what had happened to her, but she finds Pyramus' dead body under the shade of the mulberry tree. Distraught, she takes her own life, again staining the fruit of the mulberry tree. In the end, the gods forever change the color of the mulberry fruit into the stained color to honor the lovers.

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