1Love as madness
The play's most quoted speech belongs to Theseus: 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.' The plot proves him right. Lysander loves Hermia, then Helena, then Hermia again, purely by what lands on his eyelids. Demetrius insults Helena one night and calls life 'harmony' the next morning, and his spell is never even removed. Titania, a goddess-like queen, embraces a weaver with a donkey's head. Nobody falls in love for a reason; they fall in love and invent reasons after. The comedy's cruelty is the point: affection is arbitrary, and the beloved's qualities matter less than the timing of a flower's juice.
Characters:HermiaLysanderHelenaDemetriusTitaniaTheseus
2Law versus desire
Athens opens the play as a place where a father can sentence his daughter to death for choosing the wrong man, and Theseus backs him: marry Demetrius, die, or enter a nunnery. The wood, a mile outside town, is where Athenian law stops working, which is exactly why Lysander picks it for the elopement. In the forest, desire runs wild and gets sorted by fairies instead of magistrates. When dawn comes, Theseus simply overrides Egeus and marries everyone off. The play's answer to unjust law is not reform but escape, enchantment, and a duke in a generous mood.
Characters:LysanderDemetriusTheseusEgeus
3Nature out of joint
Titania's speech in the wood is the play's strangest move: a domestic dispute between immortals floods rivers, rots 'the green corn,' and makes 'the spring, the summer, / The childing autumn, angry winter' wear the wrong clothes. The fairy couple are not decoration; they are the machinery of fertility, and their marital spat starves the human world. When they reconcile, the seasons presumably right themselves. Shakespeare ties the private to the planetary: a quarrel over one stolen boy becomes 'this same progeny of evils,' and weather becomes a symptom of a marriage.
Characters:Titania
4Theater about theater
The workmen's Pyramus and Thisbe is a tragedy played for laughs, and the aristocrats' mockery of it is the play's mirror: we are watching an audience watch an audience. Theseus's line that 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them' hands the power of judgment to the spectator. Bottom's garbled St. Paul soliloquy makes the same claim from below: his dream 'past the wit of man to say' is the play itself, unreportable. Puck's epilogue then collapses the frame entirely, asking us to admit we only 'slumber'd here.'
Characters:Nick BottomPuckTheseus
5Dreams and waking
Four lovers wake in the wood unsure whether what happened to them was real, and Demetrius decides it was, in some sense, since everything now seems 'harmony.' Bottom's 'most rare vision' insists the experience exceeds language. The play treats the night in the forest as a dream the waking world agrees to keep: the enchantments are not undone so much as ratified by daylight. Puck's epilogue extends the bargain to us, suggesting the whole evening was our slumber, and that applause is the antidote that lets everyone go home.
Characters:DemetriusNick BottomPuck