A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Four young Athenians run into the wood outside the city, each in love with the wrong person. A company of workmen go there to rehearse a play, and the king and queen of the fairies are quarrelling in the same trees. One flower, applied to the wrong eyelids, entangles all three parties before dawn sorts them out.
About the book
Written about 1595, A Midsummer Night’s Dream sets three worlds loose in the same wood on the same night. Four young Athenians run out of the city because Hermia’s father would rather see her dead than married to Lysander; a company of tradesmen go there to rehearse a play for the Duke’s wedding; and Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a child. Oberon’s servant Puck has a flower whose juice makes the sleeper love the first thing seen on waking, and he applies it to the wrong Athenian. By morning both young men love the wrong woman, the queen of the fairies has been in love with a weaver wearing an ass’s head, and everyone is returned to the right partner with no clear memory of it. The play is Shakespeare’s most performed comedy and his strangest about desire — which it presents as entirely arbitrary, and no less binding for that.
Characters
Hermia — Lover
Ordered by her father to marry Demetrius on pain of death, and in the wood by nightfall with Lysander.
Lysander — Lover
Hermia’s chosen suitor, who elopes with her and wakes up devoted to her closest friend.
Helena — Lover
In love with Demetrius, who cannot stand her, and unable to believe either man when both suddenly can.
Demetrius — Lover
Approved by Hermia’s father, pursuing her into the wood, and the one the flower is meant for.
Oberon — King of the fairies
Quarrelling with his queen over a changeling boy, and willing to humiliate her to win the argument.
Titania — Queen of the fairies
Whose refusal has thrown the seasons out of order, and who is made to dote on a weaver with an ass’s head.
Puck — Robin Goodfellow
Oberon’s servant and the play’s engine, who anoints the wrong eyes and is delighted by the result.
Bottom — Weaver
A weaver of magnificent confidence who wants to play every part, and gets the head he deserves.
About the author
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, born in Stratford-upon-Avon to a glovemaker and educated no further than the grammar school there. In London he became a sharer — a part-owner — in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and in the Globe theatre, which is what made him money; the plays were the company's stock rather than literature, and he took no part in printing them. Two fellow actors collected thirty-six of them in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death, and eighteen plays exist only because they did. He also wrote 154 sonnets.