A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Study Guide

The play was written probably about 1594 and was published first in 1600 in a quarto. A second edition appeared in 1619 (and falsely dated 1600). It is printed among the Comedies in the 1623 folio. It does not have a single source; Shakespeare would have known about Theseus from Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch's Lives and also from Chaucer's "Knight's Tale". The Pyramus and Thisbe story was well known, but Shakespeare probably read it in Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Though apparently often played in by Shakespeare's company (the quarto say that that it was "sundry times publicly acted"), it achieved its greatest popularity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

1. Look carefully at the first scene; what do we learn about Theseus'understanding of love? about Egeus'? How did Theseus meet Hipployta? What is the relationship of the scene's presentation of issues of power and patriarchy to their appearance in notionally more "serious" plays?

2. In the nineteenth-century the fairies became tiny, diaphanous  sprites, but fairies in the Elizabethan imagination were usually far more threatening. How does the play understand the fairy world?

3. What is the basis of the tension between Oberon and Titania?

4. The play interweaves four plots. How do these multiple plots reflect on one another?

5. The play is, of course, called a "dream". What is the epistemological status of dreams and dreaming in the play?

6. This is one of the comedies that has two contrasting settings: the urban space of Athens and the wood outside it. Some critics have seen this kind of pastoral alternative as a "green world", which liberates people from the normative assumptions of everyday life. How does the wood function in this play?

7.What are we to make of Titania's love of Bottom (and Bottom’s experience loving the Fairy Queen). Is this grotesque or transformative?

8. Think about "Pyramus and Thisbe". Why is this the play that Shakespeare gives the mechanicals to perform?

9. How reassuring is the ending? Does all indeed grow into "something of great constancy"?

10. How does the play raise significant issues about the very act of playing?