As part of our Spring, Mischief, and the Pastoral series, we will explore three of Shakespeare’s most enchanting plays. In April, As You Like It invites us into the Forest of Arden, where exile sparks self-discovery and love blooms in the wild. May brings the playful chaos of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where lovers lose themselves—and society’s rules—in a magical forest. Finally, in June, The Winter’s Tale unfolds from tragedy to pastoral rebirth, as rustic life offers healing and renewal.
Across the landscape of these plays we’ll examine Shakespeare's clever use of the pastoral!
Maryama Antoine
### About the play
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.
### Synopsis
A story of order and disorder, reality and appearance and love and marriage. Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons are to be married and great celebrations are planned.
### Into the forest
Egeus brings his rebellious daughter Hermia in front of the Duke. Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius but Hermia refuses, because she's in love with Lysander. The Duke orders Hermia to obey her father or, according to Athenian law, she must face a death penalty or enter a convent.
Hermia and Lysander decide to elope that night. They confide in their friend Helena. However, she's secretly in love with Demetrius so, hoping to win his affection, she tells him of Hermia's plan. That night, all four lovers set out into the forest.
Meanwhile, a group of Athenian tradesmen (known as the Mechanicals), led by Peter Quince, are planning to perform a play in celebration of the Duke's wedding. They rehearse The Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in the same forest.
### Love at first sight
Elsewhere in the forest, the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania, argue over Titania's refusal to give up her page-boy to Oberon. He sends his servant Puck to find a magic plant to cast a spell on Titania.
The juice of the plant, when squeezed onto the eyes of someone asleep, causes them to fall in love with the first creature they see when they wake up. Oberon uses the juice on Titania as she sleeps in her bower.
Puck overhears the tradesmen rehearsing and magically transforms Bottom's head into that of an ass. The other men are terrifed and flee the forest. When Titania wakes, the first creature she sees is Bottom and she falls rapturously in love with him.
Helena chases Demetrius in the forest and their fighting disturbs Oberon. He tells Puck to use the magic plant on Demetrius too, so that he will fall in love with Helena. However Puck muddles up the two Athenian men and uses it on Lysander instead, who promptly falls in love with Helena. Both women are confused and Hermia furiously attacks her friend...
### Sources
Shakespeare took inspiration for this play from a rich and varied range of materials. The most significant source is Ovid'sMetamorphoses. Shakespeare would have read this long poem in its original Latin while a grammar school boy in Stratford-upon-Avon. Arthur Golding's English translation was published in 1567. This text contained the stories of Daphne and Apollo, Cupid's golden and leaden arrows, the battle of the Centaurs and, most importantly, Pyramus and Thisbe. Ovid's tale of the lovers was a popular subject, having already been treated by Chaucer in his Legend of Good Women, as well as by contemporaries of Shakespeare. The young lovers in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet face the same problems as Pyramus and Thisbe and of course are treated tragically not comically.
Chaucer also provided a source for the play's framework in the Knight's Tale of The Canterbury Tales, where Duke Theseus weds his Amazonian bride. Shakespeare also takes details from the account of Theseus's life in the first century Greek historian Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated in to English by Sir Thomas North in 1579. In Chaucer's tale, Theseus holds captive two noble prisoners who both fall in love with the same girl and escape to a wood where the inevitable quarrels and conflicts ensue.
