A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

PLOT
 EXPOSITION
 The Duke of Athens, Theseus and the Amazon Queen, Hippolyta are preparing
for their wedding.
 RISING ACTION
 Lysander and Hermia are in love and want to get married. However, Egeus wants
her to marry Demetrius. Hermia insists of marrying with Lysander. Therefore,
Egeus goes to Theseus to force Hermia to marry Demetrius or else she would get
penalty of Athenian law. Theseus warns Hermia to follow her father and consider
her choice. Despite the possible consequences, Hermia and Lysander plan to run
away from Athens. Helena who hears their plan, betrays Hermia by telling
Demetrius about their plan to regain his love. Demetrius decides to follow them
into the woods and Helena follows him. In the same woods, the king of fairy,
Oberon and the fairy queen, Titania are in feud over an Indian boy. Seeking
revenge, Oberon orders another fairy, Puck, to find the magical flower to make
the love potion which will cause Titania to fall in love with the first thing she sees
after waking. He also sees Demetrius acting rudely to Helena, and Puck is
ordered to put the potion in Demetrius’s eyes. Elsewhere in the forest, a group of
craftsmen rehearses their play “Pyramus and Thisbe” which they will perform at
Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding.
 CLIMAX
 Puck decides to fool around and transforms the head of one of the craftsmen,
Bottom into that of an ass and this causes all of his friends run away. When
Titania wakes up, she sees Bottom and falls in love with him. After that, Puck
leaves on his journey to put the potion on Demetrius. However, he mistakenly
places the love potion on Lysander which makes him falls in love with Helena
when he sees her at the moment he wakes up. Later, Puck realizes his mistakes.
 Oberon tries to fix the situation by putting the potion in Demetrius’s eyes. As a
result, Lysander and Demetrius end up in love with Helena, who believes that
they are making fun of her, and this makes Hermia jealous and challenges Helena
to fight. The men also nearly do fight over Helena’s love, but Puck confuses them
by mimicking their voices and leading them all over the densely fogged woods
until the young Athenians feel exhausted and fall asleep.
 FALLING ACTION
 Once they collapsed, Puck enchants Lysander with the flower once again so that
when he awakes and sees Hermia, he will be back in love with her again. The
next day, Theseus and Hippolyta find the sleeping couples and take them back to
Athens to be married. Oberon obtains the Indian boy and decides to release
Titania from the spell. Puck also returns Bottom’s head to that of a human. At
Peter Quince’s house, the craftsmen are having a meeting about whether they stop
the play, at that moment Bottom enters and declares that the play must go on. In
the castle, the lovers watch Bottom and his friends perform their play, a fumbling
and hilarious version of the story Pyramus and Thisbe.
 DENOUEMENT
 After the play, the lovers go to bed. Then, Oberon and Titania enter the palace
followed by their fairies. Singing and dancing, they bless the marriages of the
three couples with a protective charm and then disappear. Only Puck remains, to
ask the audience for its forgiveness and approval and to urge them to remember
the play as though it had all been a dream.

THEME
1. LOVE
 “The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander.
 Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius,
Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helena - imbalance in which two men love the
same woman
 Oberon’s coveting of Titania’s Indian boy outweighs his love for her - put the
 love juice on Titania and makes her falls in love with ass-headed Nick Bottom
 Shakespeare suggests that we are all fickle and irrational creatures when it comes
to love.
2. ART AND CULTURE
 A humble group of Athenian craftsman practice a play-within-a-play (Pyramus
and Thisbe) that they hope to stage at Theseus’s wedding celebration.
 The craftsman comically play their characters in the classic tragedy.
 The play suggests that acting is a craft that requires intelligence, education and
skill.
 The play-within-a-play allows Shakespeare to explore the nature of his own art
3. TRANSFORMATION
 Puck uses magic to turn Bottom’s head into a donkey’s head
 The supernatural power of love potion - characters undergo physical and
emotional changes, fall in and out of love
 Misuse of magic causes chaos - Lysander is transformed to be in love with
Helena
 Titania and bottom - Love can transform even the smartest person into a blind
fool.
4. GENDER
 More specifically, both the fairies and mortals deal with an attempt by male
authority figures to control women.
 Theseus and Hippolyta - a love built upon a man asserting power over a woman
 Oberon creates the love juice in attempt to control his disobedient wife, Titania
 Egeus, Hermia’s father, seeks to control his daughter’s marriage
 Love can take a terrible toll on same-sex friendship (causes the man to duel and
brings the women almost to blows as well)

CHARACTERS
a. Puck -  Also known as Robin Goodfellow, Puck is Oberon’s jester, a
mischievous fairy who delights in playing pranks on mortals. Though A
Midsummer Night’s Dream divides its action between several groups of
 characters, Puck is the closest thing the play has to a protagonist. His enchanting,
mischievous spirit pervades the atmosphere, and his antics are responsible for
many of the complications that propel the other main plots: he mistakes the
young Athenians, applying the love potion to Lysander instead of Demetrius,
thereby causing chaos within the group of young lovers; he also transforms
Bottom’s head into that of an ass.
b. Oberon -  The king of the fairies, Oberon is initially at odds with his wife,
Titania, because she refuses to relinquish control of a young Indian prince whom
he wants for a knight. Oberon’s desire for revenge on Titania leads him to send
Puck to obtain the love-potion flower that creates so much of the play’s confusion
and farce.
c. Titania -  The beautiful queen of the fairies, Titania resists the attempts of her
husband, Oberon, to make a knight of the young Indian prince that she has been
given. Titania’s brief, potion-induced love for Nick Bottom, whose head Puck has
transformed into that of an ass, yields the play’s foremost example of the contrast
motif.
d. Lysander -  A young man of Athens, in love with Hermia. Lysander’s
relationship with Hermia invokes the theme of love’s difficulty: he cannot marry
her openly because Egeus, her father, wishes her to wed Demetrius; when
Lysander and Hermia run away into the forest, Lysander becomes the victim of
misapplied magic and wakes up in love with Helena.
e. Demetrius -  A young man of Athens, initially in love with Hermia and
ultimately in love with Helena. Demetrius’s obstinate pursuit of Hermia throws
love out of balance among the quartet of Athenian youths and precludes a
symmetrical two-couple arrangement.
f. Hermia -  Egeus’s daughter, a young woman of Athens. Hermia is in love with
Lysander and is a childhood friend of Helena. As a result of the fairies’ mischief
with Oberon’s love potion, both Lysander and Demetrius suddenly fall in love
with Helena. Self-conscious about her short stature, Hermia suspects that Helena
has wooed the men with her height. By morning, however, Puck has sorted
matters out with the love potion, and Lysander’s love for Hermia is restored.
g. Helena -  A young woman of Athens, in love with Demetrius. Demetrius and
Helena were once betrothed, but when Demetrius met Helena’s friend Hermia, he
fell in love with her and abandoned Helena. Lacking confidence in her looks,
Helena thinks that Demetrius and Lysander are mocking her when Puck’ mischief
causes them to fall in love with her.
h. Egeus -  Hermia’s father, who brings a complaint against his daughter to
Theseus: Egeus has given Demetrius permission to marry Hermia, but Hermia, in
love with Lysander, refuses to marry Demetrius. Egeus’s severe insistence that
Hermia either respect his wishes or be held accountable to Athenian law places
him squarely outside the whimsical dream realm of the forest.
i. Theseus -  The heroic duke of Athens, engaged to Hippolyta. Theseus represents
power and order throughout the play. He appears only at the beginning and end of
the story, removed from the dreamlike events of the forest.
j. Hippolyta -  The legendary queen of the Amazons, engaged to Theseus. Like
Theseus, she symbolizes order.
k. Nick Bottom -  The overconfident weaver chosen to play Pyramus in the
craftsmen’s play for Theseus’s marriage celebration. Bottom is full of advice and
self-confidence but frequently makes silly mistakes and misuses language. His
simultaneous nonchalance about the beautiful Titania’s sudden love for him and
unawareness of the fact that Puck has transformed his head into that of an ass
mark the pinnacle of his foolish arrogance.
l. Peter Quince -  A carpenter and the nominal leader of the craftsmen’s attempt to
put on a play for Theseus’s marriage celebration. Quince is often shoved aside by
the abundantly confident Bottom. During the craftsmen’s play, Quince plays the
Prologue.
m. Francis Flute -  The bellows-mender chosen to play Thisbe in the craftsmen’s
play for Theseus’s marriage celebration. Forced to play a young girl in love, the
bearded craftsman determines to speak his lines in a high, squeaky voice.
n. Robin Starveling -  The tailor chosen to play Thisbe’s mother in the craftsmen’s
play for Theseus’s marriage celebration. He ends up playing the part of
Moonshine.
o. Tom Snout -  The tinker chosen to play Pyramus’s father in the craftsmen’s play
for Theseus’s marriage celebration. He ends up playing the part of Wall, dividing
the two lovers.
p. Snug -  The joiner chosen to play the lion in the craftsmen’s play for Theseus’s
marriage celebration. Snug worries that his roaring will frighten the ladies in the
audience.
q. Philostrate -  Theseus’s Master of the Revels, responsible for organizing the
entertainment for the duke’s marriage celebration.
r. Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed -  The fairies ordered by
Titania to attend to Bottom after she falls in love with him.

Setting

Athens in Antiquity; A Wood Outside of Athens; Midsummer

The play begins in (ancient) Athens, where Duke Theseus and Hippolyta are
preparing for an elaborate wedding. Despite the upcoming nuptials and festivities that
surround a nobleman's marriage, Athens is also a place for law and order. Here, a
father can demand the death penalty for a disobedient daughter who refuses to marry
the man of his choosing (1.1). 
It's no wonder, then, that the young Athenian lovers hightail it into the enchanted
wood, where fairies reign over a gorgeous and lush natural world of magic, wonder,
and mischief. The wood is the perfect space for the suspension of man-made rules:
Bottom, a lowly workman, can cavort with the Queen of the Fairies; the Athenian
lovers can fight and love as lovers do; and, most importantly, fairy magic (not the rule
of law) can reign supreme.
Still, the human characters can't make a permanent home in the wood and so they all
return to Athens in the end. Once everyone is back at Theseus's pad in Act 5, the
setting looks less like an ancient Greek palace than an Elizabethan nobleman's estate.
After their elaborate wedding, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta enjoy the kind of courtly
entertainments that Elizabethan nobles and royals would have experienced.
We also want to talk about the time of year during which the action of the play is
supposed to take place. Like we've said before, the play's title suggests that things go
down some time around Midsummer's Eve. 

TONE

When we talk about "tone," we're referring to the author's and/or the play's attitude

toward its subject matter.

At the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the tone is pretty dark, wouldn't
you say? After all, Hermia faces the death penalty or life as a nun if she doesn't obey
her father and marry the man of his choosing. This suggests a bleak outlook, don't you
think?
Still, this darkness quickly gives way to a lighthearted tone that reveals Shakespeare's
sense of humor about the pitfalls of love. Case in point: When the young lovers (some
of whom have been drugged by Oberon's magic love potion) go chasing each other
around the wood, falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat (or the drop of some
magic love juice),Shakespeare pokes fun at how erratic and foolish we can all be
when it comes to romance. Just ask Titania, who falls head-over-heels in love with a
(literal) jackass. 
SYMBOLS

1．Theseus and Hippolyta

Theseus and Hippolyta bookend A Midsummer Night’s Dream, appearing in the

daylight at both the beginning and the end of the play’s main action. They disappear,
however, for the duration of the action, leaving in the middle of Act I, scene i and not
reappearing until Act IV, as the sun is coming up to end the magical night in the
forest. Shakespeare uses Theseus and Hippolyta, the ruler of Athens and his warrior
bride, to represent order and stability, to contrast with the uncertainty, instability, and
darkness of most of the play. Whereas an important element of the dream realm is that
one is not in control of one’s environment, Theseus and Hippolyta are always entirely
in control of theirs. Their reappearance in the daylight of Act IV to hear Theseus’s
hounds signifies the end of the dream state of the previous night and a return to
rationality.

2．The Love Potion

The love potion is made from the juice of a flower that was struck with one of
Cupid’s misfired arrows; it is used by the fairies to wreak romantic havoc throughout
Acts II, III, and IV. Because the meddling fairies are careless with the love potion, the
situation of the young Athenian lovers becomes increasingly chaotic and confusing
(Demetrius and Lysander are magically compelled to transfer their love from Hermia
to Helena), and Titania is hilariously humiliated (she is magically compelled to fall
deeply in love with the ass-headed Bottom). The love potion thus becomes a symbol
of the unreasoning, fickle, erratic, and undeniably powerful nature of love, which can
lead to inexplicable and bizarre behavior and cannot be resisted.

3．The Craftsmen’s Play

The play-within-a-play that takes up most of Act V, scene i is used to represent, in

condensed form, many of the important ideas and themes of the main plot. Because
the craftsmen are such bumbling actors, their performance satirizes the melodramatic
Athenian lovers and gives the play a purely joyful, comedic ending. Pyramus and
Thisbe face parental disapproval in the play-within-a-play, just as Hermia and
Lysander do; the theme of romantic confusion enhanced by the darkness of night is
rehashed, as Pyramus mistakenly believes that Thisbe has been killed by the lion, just
as the Athenian lovers experience intense misery because of the mix-ups caused by
the fairies’ meddling. The craftsmen’s play is, therefore, a kind of symbol for A
Midsummer Night’s Dream itself: a story involving powerful emotions that is made
hilarious by its comical presentation.

4．Night
The night symbolizes darkness and a state of blindness. It symbolizes mischief and
madness, fairies and magic. The night forest provides a setting for dangerous and
daring acts such as Hermia and Lysander’s plan to escape Athens. The lovers plan to
execute their plan and meet at “deep midnight” (Act I, Scene 1, 223). Shakespeare
also refers to Phoebe, or Diana, who is the Roman goddess of the moon and of
transformation, especially the unseen and mysterious ones in the darkness.
“Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold/ her silver visage in the watery glass . . .”
(Act I, Scene 1, 209-213).

5．The Moon

The moon, which has been said all throughout the play to affect human behaviour, is
the only source of light at night which allows the lovers the see each other.
Shakespeare associates the moon with love. In the opening scene of the play, Theseus
is anxious to get married to Hippolyta. He complains “four happy days bring in/
Another moon: but O, methinks how slow/ This old moon wanes! She lingers my
desires/ Like to a step-dame” (Act 1, Scene 1, 2-5). Shakespeare also compares the
moon to a bow, and Cupid, the Roman god of love, carries a bow to shoot arrows of
love. “And then the moon, like to a silver bow/ New bent in heaven, shall behold the
night/ Of our solemnities”(Act I, Scene 1, 9-11).

IMAGERY

Shakespeare uses imagery to emphasize the significance of the sense of sight and its
relation to love; the language of love relies heavily on sight imagery. Helena claims
that real love has little to do with the eyes and that the gaze of the mind gives love its
true shape, but even in making this assertion Helena is forced to rely on sight
imagery: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,/ And therefore is winged
Cupid blind” (Act I, Scene 1, 234-235). Helena uses sight imagery in her resolution to
get Demetrius back. Demetrius’ gaze becomes shorthand for Demetrius’ love. “But
herein mean I to enrich my pain,/ To have his sight thither and back again.” (Act I,
Scene 1, 250-251). Helena complains that Demetrius fell in love with Hermia upon
looking into her. “Setting eyes” on someone is associated with falling in love. To look
on or at someone is the most common expression for falling in love with a new
person, or for spending time with the one you already love. “For ere Demetrius looked
on Hermia’s eyne,/ He hailed down oaths that he was only mine” (Act I, Scene 1, 242-
243). Hermia also uses sight imagery as she fortifies herself and Lysander against the
ordeal of separation: “we must starve our sight/ From lovers’ food, till tomorrow deep
midnight.” (Act 1, Scene 1, 222-223). Furthermore, Oberon’s love juice is
appropriately applied to the eyes.

LITERARY DEVICES
SIMILE
“she lingers my desires,/Like to a step-dame or a dowager/ Long withering out a
young man revenue” (Act 1 Scene 1 Line 4-6)
“with drooping fog as black as Acheron” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 368)
METAPHOR
“But earthlier happy is the rose distilled/Than that which, withering on the virgin
thom/Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness” (Act 1 Scene 1 Line 76-78)
“Follow? Nay I’ll go with thee, cheek by jowl” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 349)
“Your eyes are lodestars” (Act 1 Scene 1 Line 183)
“To whom you are but as a form in wax/By him imprinted and within his power/ To
leave the figure or disfigure it.” (Act 1 Scene 1 Line 49-51)
ALLITERATION
“I follow’d fast, but faster did he fly” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 416)
ALLUSION
“And in the shape of Corin sat all day,/Playing on pipes of corn and versing love To
amorous Phillida”(Act 2 Scene 1 Line 52-52)
“And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 380)
“Til o’er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 364)
“Jack shall have Jill” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 461)
PERSONIFICATION
“And then the moon, Like a silver bow new-bent in heaven, shall behold the night of
our solemnities” (Act 1 Scene 1 Line 8-10)
“Turn melancholy forth to funerals;/ The pale companion is not for our pomp” (Act 1
Scene 1 Line 14-15)
“And sleep, that sometimes shut up sorrow’s eye” (Act 3 Scene 2 Line 435)
REPETITION
“How low am I, thou painted may pole? Speak! How low am I? I am not yet so low”
(Act 3 Scene 2 Line 296-297)
“Call you me fair? That fair again unsay. Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!
(Act 1 Scene 1 Line 181-182)
IRONY
Situational - “And, which is more than all these boasts can be,/I am beloved of
beauteous Hermia”(Act 1 Scene 1 Line 103-104)