magic in a midsummer night's dream essay

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The Concepts of Myth, Magic and Madness in a Midsummer Night's Dream

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 0 )

Nothing by Shakespeare before A Midsummer Night’s Dream is its equal and in some respects nothing by him afterwards surpasses it. It is his first undoubted masterpiece, with-out flaws, and one of his dozen or so plays of overwhelming originality and power.

—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is William Shakespeare’s first comic masterpiece and remains one his most beloved and performed plays. It seems reasonable to claim that on any fine night during the summer at an outdoor theater somewhere in the world an audience is being treated to the magic of the play. It is easy, however, to overlook through familiarity what a radically original and experimental play this is. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the triumph of Shakespeare’s early play-writing career, a drama of such marked inventiveness and visionary reach that its first audiences must have only marveled at what could possibly come next from this extraordinary playwright. In it Shakespeare changed the paradigm of stage comedy that he had inherited from the Greeks and the Romans by dizzyingly multiplying his plot lines and by bringing the irrational and absurd illusions of romantic love center stage. He established human passion and gender relations as comedy’s prime subject, transforming such fundamental concepts as love, courtship, and marriage that have persisted in our culture ever since. If that is not enough A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes use of its romantic intrigue, supernatural setting, and rustic foolery to pose essential questions about the relationship between art and life, appearance and reality, truth and illusion, dreams and the waking world that anticipate the self-referential agenda of such avant-garde, metadramatists as Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Stoppard. A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents a kind of declaration of liberation for the stage, in which, after its example, nothing seems either off limits or impossible. In the play Theseus, the duke of Athens, after hearing the lovers’ strange story of what happened to them in the forest famously interprets their incredible account by linking the lovers with the lunatic and the poet:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy: Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream similarly gives a “local habitation and a name” on stage for what madness, love, and the poet’s imagination can conjure.

Shakespeare first made his theatrical reputation in the early 1590s with his Henry VI plays, with the historical chronicle genre that he pioneered. His early tragedies— Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet —and comedies— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour’s Lost —all show the playwright working within the dramatic conventions that he inherited from classical, medieval, and English folk sources. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare goes beyond imitation to discover a distinctive voice and manner that would add a new dramatic species. After A Midsummer Night’s Dream there was Old Comedy, New Comedy, and now Shakespearean comedy, a synthesis of both. To explain the origin and manner of A Midsummer Night’s Dream scholars have long relied on a speculative story so apt and evocative that it must be believed, even though there is no hard evidence to support it. Thought to have been written in the winter of 1593–94 to be performed at an aristocratic wedding attended by Queen Elizabeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream therefore resembles the Renaissance masque, a fanciful mixture of allegorical and mythological enactments, music, dance, elegant costumes, and elaborate theatrical effects to entertain at banquets celebrating betrothals, weddings, and seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night. In the words of Theseus at his own nuptial fete, the masque served “To wear away this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time.” We do know from the title page of its initial publication in the First Quarto of 1600 that the play “hath been sundry times publikely acted” by Shakespeare’s company, but the notion that it had served as a wedding entertainment establishes the delightful fun-house mirroring of an actual wed-ding party first watching a play that included a wedding party watching a play. Such an appropriate scrambling of reality and illusion reflects the source of the humor and wonder of A Midsummer Night’s Dream .

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of just three plays out of Shakespeare’s 39 (the other two are Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest ) for which the play-wright did not rely on a central primary source. Instead Shakespeare assembled elements from classical sources, romantic narratives, and English folk materials, along with details of ordinary Elizabethan life to juggle and juxtapose four different imaginative realms, each with its own distinctive social and literary conventions and language. Each is linked by analogy to the theme of love and its obstacles. The first is the classically derived court world of Theseus, duke of Athens, who has first conquered Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, then won her heart, and now eagerly (and impatiently) anticipates their wedding. Their impending nuptials prompt the arrival of emissaries from the natural world, the king and queen of the fairies—Oberon and Titania—to bless their union, as well as a collection of “rude mechanicals”—Bottom, Quince, Flute, Starveling, Snout, and Snug—to devise a theatrical performance as entertainment at the Duke’s wedding celebration. To the world of the Athenian court, the alternate supernatural court world of the fairies, and the realistic sphere of the Athenian artisans, Shakespeare overlaps a fourth center of interest in the young lovers Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius. Shakespeare mixes the dignified blank verse of Theseus and Hippolyta with the rhymed iambic speeches of the lovers, the rhymed tetrameter of the fairies, and the wonder-fully earthy prose of the rustics into a virtuoso’s performance of polyphonic verbal effects, the greatest Shakespeare, or any other dramatist, had yet sup-plied for the stage.

The complications commence when Hermia’s father, Egeus, objects to his daughter’s unsanctioned preference for Lysander over Demetrius, whom Egeus has selected for her. Egeus invokes Athenian law mandating death or celibacy for a maid’s refusal to abide by parental authority in the choice of a mate. Parental objection to the choice of young lovers was a standard plot device of Greek New Comedy and the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence that Shakespeare inherited. To the obstacles placed in the lovers’ paths Shakespeare adds his own variation of the earlier Aristophanic Old Comedy’s break with the normalcy of everyday life by having his lovers escape into the forest. Critic Northrup Frye has called this symbolic setting of magical regeneration and vitality the “green world.” Here the lovers are tested and allowed the freedom and new possibilities to gain fulfillment and harmony denied them in the civilized world, in which duty dominates desire and obligation to parental authority and the law overrules self-interest and the heart’s promptings. Critic C. L. Barber has identified in such a departure from the norm a “Saturnalian Pattern” in Shakespearean comedy in which the lovers’ exile from the civilized to the primitive supplies the festive release that characterized the earliest forms of comic drama. Barber argues:

Once Shakespeare finds his own distinctive voice, he is more Aristophanic than any other great English dramatist, despite the fact that the accepted educated models and theories when he started to write were Terentian and Plautine. The Old Comedy cast of his work results from his participation in native saturnalian traditions of the popular theater and the popular holidays. . . . He used the resources of a sophisticated theater to express, in his idyllic comedies and in his clowns’ ironic misrule, the experience of moving to humorous understanding through saturnalian release.

Named for the summer solstice festival, when it was said that a maid could glimpse the man she would marry, A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates access to the uncanny and the breakup of all normal rules and social barriers to display human nature in the grips of elemental passions and the subconscious. The lovers in their moonlit, natural setting, at the mercy of the fairies, act out their deepest desires and hostilities in a full display of the power and absurdity of love both to change reality and to redeem it.

Hermia elopes with Lysander, pursued by Demetrius, who in turn is followed by Helena, whom he spurns. They enter a supernatural realm also beset by marital discord, jealousy, and rivalry. Oberon commands his servant Puck to place the juice of a flower once hit by Cupid’s dart in the eyes of the sleeping Titania to cause her to fall in love with the first creature she sees on awakening to help gain for Oberon the changeling boy Titania has refused to yield to him. Oberon, pitying Helena her rejection by Demetrius, also orders Puck to place some of the drops in Demetrius’s eyes so that he will be charmed into love with the woman who dotes on him. Instead Puck comes upon Lysander and Hermia as they sleep, mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and pours the charm into the wrong eyes so that Lysander falls in love with Helena when she wakes him. Meanwhile Bottom and his companions have retreated to the woods to rehearse a dramatization of the mythological story of Pyramus and Thisbe, another set of star-crossed lovers. Puck gives the exuberant Bottom the head of an ass, and he becomes the first thing the charmed Titania sees on waking. Through the agency of the change of location from court to forest and from daylight to moonlight, with its attendant capacity for magical transformation, the play mounts a witty and uproarious display of the irrationality of love and its victims who see the world through the distorting lens of desire, in which certainty of affection is fleeting and a lover with the head of an ass can cause a queen to forgo her senses and her dignity. As Bottom aptly observes, “reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.” From the perspectives of the fairies the lovers’ absolute claims and earnest rationalizations of such a will-of-the-wisp as love makes them absurd. The tangled mixture of passion, jealousy, rancor, and violence that beset the young lovers after Puck imperfectly corrects his mistake, causing both Lysander and Demetrius to pursue the once spurned Helena, more than justifies Puck’s observation, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

By act 4 day returns, and the disorder of the night proves as fleeting and as insubstantial as a dream. After the four lovers are awakened by Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus, who are hunting in the woods, Lysander again loves Hermia, and Demetrius, still under the power of the potion, gives up his claim to her in favor of Helena. Theseus overrules Egeus’s objections and his own former strict adherence to Athenian law and gives both couples permission to marry that day, along with himself and Hippolyta. Having gained the change-ling boy from Titania, Oberon releases her from her spell. Puck removes the donkey’s head from Bottom, who awakes to wonder at his strange dream:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. . . . I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be call’d “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom.

The only mortal allowed to see the fairies, Bottom is also the only character not threatened or diminished by the alternative fantasy realm he passes through. He freely accepts what he does not understand, considering it more suitable for the delight of art in a future ballad than to be analyzed or reduced by reason. Bottom coexists easily and honestly in the dual world of reality and illusion, maintaining his core identity and integrity even through his trans-formation, from man to ass, to fairy queen’s paramour, to ordinary man again. Called by Harold Bloom “Shakespeare’s most engaging character before Falstaff,” Bottom is the play’s human anchor and affirmation of the joyful acceptance of all the contradictions that the play has sent his way.

With the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, Bottom’s reunion with his colleagues, and three Athenian weddings, the plot complications are all happily resolved, and act 5 shifts the emphasis from the potentially destructive vagaries of love to a celebration of marriage to crown and contain human desire. Shakespeare’s final sleight of hand and delightful invention, however, is the play within the play, the “tedious and brief” and “very tragical mirth” of the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe by Bottom and his players. In a drama fueled by the complications between appearance and reality this hilariously incompetent burlesque by the play’s rustic clowns impersonating tragic lovers appropriately comments on the play that has preceded it. The drama of Pyramus and Thisbe involves another set of lovers who face parental objections and similarly seek relief in nature, but their adventure goes tragically awry. However, just as Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius avoid through the stage-managing of the fairies a potentially tragic fate from their ordeal in the wood, so is the tragic fate of Pyramus and Thisbe transformed to comedy by the ineptitude of Bottom’s company. The play within the play becomes a pointed microcosm for A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole in its conversion of potential tragedy to curative comedy. The newlyweds, who mock the absurdity of Pyramus and Thisbe , fail to make the connection with their own absurd encounter with love and their chance rescue from its anguish, but the actual audience should not. In Shakespeare’s comprehensive comic vision we both laugh at the ridiculousness of others while recognizing ourselves in their dilemmas. Shakespeare’s final point about the inseparability of reality and illusion is scored by having the fairy world coexist with the Athenian court at the play’s conclusion, decreasing the gap between fact and fancy and invading actuality itself by giving the final words to Puck, who addresses the audience directly:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumb’red here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream.

Like the newlyweds who view a drama that calls attention to its illusion and its “tragical mirth,” the audience is here reminded of the similar blending of reality and dream, the comic and the tragic in the world beyond the stage. Puck serves as Shakespeare’s magician’s assistant, demonstrating that substance and shadow on stage replicate both the illusion of the dramatist’s art and the essence of human life in our own continual interplay of reality, dreams, and desire.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oxford Lecture by Prof. Emma Smith

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Ebook PDF (5 MB)

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human PDF (7 MB)

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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A Midsummer Night's Dream

Myth, magic and midsummer madness jonet mackenzie.

In a fine example of Shakespearean irony, scholars have suggested that A Midsummer Night's Dream was originally written as entertainment for an aristocratic wedding. The Lord Chamberlain's Players provided the noble bride and groom, the ultimate symbol of harmony and true love, with a delightful comedy about gender conflict, transformed emotions, myth, and magic. Shakespeare avoids the social conventions of the civilized world by introducing a 'green world' ( Introduction, MND, 808) where the fairies rule. It is within this metaphysical world, and its associated suspended disbelief, that he calls on the fancy of myth and magic as a means of exploring the idiosyncrasies behind human behavior. More importantly, it is only through accepting the possibility of Puck's love juice or the power of Cupid's arrow that we can understand and forgive the intolerable behavior between Demetrius, Lysander and their scorned lovers.

As each man changes his affections from one woman to the other, he flings brutal verbal insults toward his past love. These irrational and undeserved rebukes build a relationship of 'engagement and detachment' with the audience, which is critical to the mechanics of the comedy. Audience...

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Importance of Magic in a Midsummer Night's Dream

Oliver Newland

Task:   Discuss the importance of magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

English Coursework

Magic is probably the main theme in A Midsummer Nights Dream. It plays a

vital and extensive role in each story – line. Each time Shakespeare uses magic, there is an important – if subtle – consequence. Shakespeare explores many aspects

of magic, including how it causes problems and how it solves them. Magic is

often used by Shakespeare to support and implement the comedic sections

of the play.

Before I explore the importance of magic in the play, I must explore magic itself,

as it means different things to different people and to different cultures. Magic is

defined in the dictionary as “Any art that invokes supernatural powers”. However,

to other people and the majority of religions, magic is an evil force within the world, practiced by sinners and wrong – doers. This seems

to be the main view of the society Shakespeare lived in. However, nowadays

magic is generally not believed in. This seems to be Shakespeare’s point of view;

this can be seen by his use of magic to create a comedic and mischievous - though certainly not evil- atmosphere throughout the play. In this way, Shakespeare

could be seen as a writer ahead of his time.

The effects of magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have been influenced

by the social attitude of the Elizabethan era. During Elizabethan times magic – unlike today – was widely believed in. It was considered a crime to practise magic and

was an offence punishable by law. People (usually single women) were executed if they were suspected of committing this “crime”.  I think that this may have

influenced Shakespeare to make magic have such a dramatic and often catastrophic effect. An example of the disastrous effects of magic is when Robin Goodfellow pours the love potion in the wrong man’s eye, causing him to fall in love with

This is a preview of the whole essay

another woman. This shows us that magic often has devastating and consequential effects, which affect the play as a whole. It also insinuates that magic might

 be a devious, if not evil, force.

Magic plays a large and indispensable part in the play’s main plot, with the lovers. Magic is actually used to structure the main story – line. This can be seen where Oberon says: “A sweet lady is in love/ With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes -/ But do it when the next thing he espies/ May be the lady…” This shows us that magic is an extremely significant theme throughout the play. There would have been no main plot, had Robin Goodfellow not anointed the wrong man’s eye with the love potion.

Magic also plays an essential part in many of the subplots. This can be seen

where Bottom’s head is turned into that of an ass. Titania is then made to love him through magic. This suggests that magic is crucial to make the play the comedy

that it is. These subplots can seem slightly insignificant and trivial at times, however, they all merge to create a gripping and interesting story.

Magic is also used to solve or correct the problems at the end of the play. This can

be seen where Shakespeare writes “… Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill: / The man shall have his mare again and all shall be well...” This can also be seen in

Puck’s final speech, for example “… Think but this and all is mended…”  The lovers are all as they were – except Demetrius who now loves Helena (though this is a

good thing); Bottom’s head is restored etc. These, when combined form

the resolution/conclusion of the play. Without the use of magic, normality would not have been restored. The play would not have had a proper ending. This supports

 my opinion that magic plays a fundamental and imperative part in the play.

Magic is also used to make the lovers happy. Demetrius is made to fall in love

with Helena. Consequently, Hermia can marry Lysander, with whom she is in love. This also makes up a critical part of the conclusion – another main role.

Magic affects the environmental setting in the play. This can be seen when

Titania says “…Therefore the winds, piping to us in void/As in revenge for having sucked up the sea…” This shows us that the whole of nature has been set off – balance by a mere argument between the rulers of the fairies. This shows

us the intensity and extent to which magic influences the setting and design of the play.

The name of the play, itself suggests the importance of magic. The reference

 to “midsummer” at first does not seem significant to the story. Why, then,

did Shakespeare include it in the title? The reference to “midsummer” is actually

an inconspicuous clue of the events in the play. Midsummer is widely considered

to be a time of magic and mystery. Such tales of fortune personified walking on Earth support this. The fact that this play is set in midsummer contributes to

the mysterious effect created by Shakespeare. This seems to be a direct and

deliberate indication of magic, before you have even read the first word.

Another hint of the content of A Midsummer Night’s Dream  is the use of the word “dream”. Dreams are also widely considered to be a magical aspect of life. They are often interpreted and read by those who believe in magic. This, again, seems to suggest that magic will play a crucial role in the play.

Even the word “night” could be interpreted as a reference to magic. Often –

especially in older writings – magic plays a more vital role during the night,

i.e. the hours of darkness. This is another obvious hint of magic, situated by Shakespeare before the play begins. This further reference to magic implements the role of magic as a theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and highlights its criticality

to the story as a whole.  

In fact, Shakespeare actually seems to personify magic. After all, what is Puck? A mischievous being of magic that invokes supernatural events. This again is evidence of the importance of magic. Puck is often the character to inflict magic upon others resulting in a catastrophic yet comedic effect. Without the use of Puck’s magic, the lovers would not have ended up falling in love with the wrong people, and as this is the main storyline in A Midsummer Night’s Dream I think this is one of the most significant roles that magic plays and proves its necessity to the play.

Magic, is therefore a significant factor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . It is

woven into most of the subplots and plays an extremely important role in the main plot. In my opinion, it would have been impossible for Shakespeare to have written this play without including magic. Therefore, magic is almost definitely the

most important and essential theme of the A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Shakespeare impresses this significance on us using all of the story – lines in the play. It

affects nature, physical appearance and even the mind. Magic is used both

positively and negatively throughout the story. It is often the cause of problems,

 but ultimately it solves them.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

After their surreal night of magic and mayhem in the forest, both the lovers and Bottom describe what happened to them as a "dream." They use the word "dream" to describe their experiences, because they wouldn't otherwise be able to understand the bizarre and irrational things that they remember happening to them in the forest. By calling their experiences dreams, Bottom and the lovers allow those experiences to exist as they are, without need for explanation or understanding. As Bottom says: "I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream"(IV.i.200-201). In a famous speech near the end of the play, Duke Theseus brushes off the lovers' tale of their night in the forest, and goes so far as to condemn the imagination of all lovers, madmen, and poets as full of illusion and untruths. But Theseus's argument overlooks that it is reason, as set down in the law of Athens, that caused all the problems to begin with. And it was the "dream" within the forest that solved those problems. Through this contrast, the play seems to be suggesting that dreams and imagination are as useful as reason, and can sometimes create truths that transcend reason's limits.

Dreams ThemeTracker

Dreams Quotes in A Midsummer Night's Dream