A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Theseus, Duke of Athens, impatiently awaits his wedding to Hippolyta, the Amazon Queen. Egeus enters with his daughter Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius, whom Egeus intends her to marry. She, however, loves Lysander, and appeals for the Duke’s judgement. He gives Hermia the choice of submitting to her father’s will, dying or going into a convent. She asks for time to consider, and flees with Lysander into the wood.

Helena, in love with Demetrius, tells him of Hermia’s flight. By night, he sets off in pursuit, and Helena follows him into the wood.

A company of artisans meets to rehearse the play “Pyramus and Thisbe” for the forthcoming wedding of Duke Theseus. The roles are allocated, and the players arrange to meet at midnight in the forest, to rehearse undisturbed.

Puck, Fairy King Oberon’s favourite sprite, discusses with a fairy from Queen Titania’s retinue the quarrel between the royal couple over a little Indian prince. Titania refuses to hand the boy over to Oberon, who swears vengeance. Oberon sends Puck to fetch a magic flower whose juice, if dropped on to a sleeper’s eyelids, will cause that person to fall in love with the first living creature glimpsed on waking. He intends to use this to punish Titania.

Having observed Helena pursuing her beloved Demetrius, who rejects her with insults, Oberon orders Puck to use the magic flower to turn the young Athenian’s love towards Helena.

Titania is sung to sleep by the fairies; Oberon squeezes the juice of the magic flower on to her eyelids.

Puck comes upon Lysander and Hermia, asleep, and mistaking Lysander for the heartless young Athenian, charms him with the flower.

Helena, abandoned by Demetrius, wakes Lysander, who immediately declares his love for her. Convinced he is mocking her, she runs away; Lysander follows her, leaving behind the sleeping Hermia, who wakes alone and sets off to find him.

The artisans are rehearsing in the wood. Puck, seeking mischief, gives the boastful weaver Bottom the head of an ass. Bottom inadvertently wakes the sleeping Titania, who promptly conceives a passion for him. She instructs the fairies to pamper him and to take him to her bower.

Oberon is delighted with the effect of his revenge on Titania. Hermia accuses Demetrius of having killed Lysander out of jealousy, and repudiates him. Realising that Puck has charmed the wrong Athenian, Oberon sprinkles the magic juice on the eyes of the sleeping Demetrius. Helena, pursued by the enamoured Lysander, wakes Demetrius, who now also declares passionate love for her. Hermia arrives, happy to find Lysander; but she is now rebuffed. Helena thinks they are all conspiring to mock her. Demetrius and Lysander intend to duel for Helena. Oberon orders Puck to put an end to the confusion with an antidote that will restore Lysander’s love for Hermia. The four lovers fall into a deep sleep.

Titania, besotted with the ass, has surrendered the young prince to Oberon.

While Titania is slumbering with Bottom in her arms, Oberon removes the spell, and on waking she is horrified by the monster she loved. As dawn breaks, the reconciled fairy couple disappears.

Out hunting, Theseus and Hippolyta, accompanied by Egeus, are astonished to find the supposed rivals peacefully asleep. The two couples wake, now suitably matched, and Theseus orders preparations to be made for the weddings of Hermia and Lysander, Demetrius and Helena, along with his own. When Bottom wakes, he thinks the events of the night were all a dream.

In the Duke’s palace, the three newly-wed couples look forward to the artisans’ performance: Pyramus and Thisbe are two lovers separated by a wall; they arrange to meet at night at Ninus’ tomb. There Thisbe flees from a lion, which tears up the veil she has dropped. Finding the veil, Pyramus thinks Thisbe is dead, and stabs himself. Thisbe returns to discover her beloved Pyramus dead, and also stabs herself.

Despite this high pathos, the wedding feast ends in general merriment. At midnight the fairies enter the palace and bless the sleeping couples.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare: The Tempest, IV, i

In Shakespeare's day, midsummer night (the night from 23 to 24 June) was always associated with folk customs, dance, superstition and magic. Humankind was afflicted with "midsummer madness", which deluded the overheated brain into mistaking illusion for reality. True, as Theseus mentions in Act IV, when the couples awaken from their enchanted sleep, the Dream is set on May Day, so Shakespeare seems to have intended the title to express a specific feeling – the midsummer suspension of the boundary between appearance and reality. To this magical day, he adds the magical place, the forest, where the luxuriant natural world and its rulers suspend the natural order of human civilisation, and chaos reigns. Shakespeare takes the inner order of this chaos as the structure of his drama: four levels of action, four groups of characters – the worldly rulers Theseus and Hippolyta, the fairy rulers Oberon and Titania, the couples and the mechanicals – are sent into disarray in a wood, and entangled until they become powerless marionettes of their own feelings and desires, with Puck, who loves nothing more than to create confusion, as the puppeteer.

Shakespeare has taken the models for his protagonists apparently at random, from his immense fund of sources: here Oberon, King of the Fairies, from Old Norse mythology, a relative of Alberich and Erlkönig, meets Titania, whose roots lie in matriarchates of Ancient Greek mythology. The beautiful Helen(a), on whose account Troy went up in flames, has become an unloved picture of misery, fought over by Demetrius, a Christian martyr, and Lysander who together with his beloved Hermia are probably related to the famous ill-starred lovers Hero and Leander. The "rude mechanicals", with a similarly tragic "Romeo and Juliet" story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, hold a distorting mirror up to their somewhat more serious fellow-players. Likewise, the quarrel between Oberon and Titania reflects the defeat of Hippolyta, the Amazon Queen, by Theseus, a story Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch.

This Theseus, initially representing civic order, ends by suspending the strict Athenian laws, helping love to victory over reason – which is the message of the play.

In his Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare – not only arguably the greatest dramatist but also a superlative master of form – also combines the most diverse styles of language and speech: the rulers speak in well-turned hexameters, occasionally rhymed; the lovers attempt the same, though sometimes stumbling over the rhythm (quite apart from the sentimental pathos of their protestations of love, which Shakespeare adapted from the inferior prose fiction of his time); the mechanicals speak in the vernacular, though their grammar is sadly wanting, and their tragedy is written in varying rhyme. In addition, the play is permeated with countless allusions, double meanings and associations – as for instance when Titania, a fragile fairy, falls in love with as ass – attributed in the Renaissance with enormous sexual powers – so that the distribution of forces is reversed. Shakespeare's audience – which for the Dream were from the court, since the play was probably written for the wedding of a noble – with guests of honour including the highly cultured Elizabeth I, would have known and recognised all these many layers of tesseræ and have interpreted them as intended. The Elizabethan dramatist could rely on the imagination of his audiences, since illusionistic stage-sets were unknown in the theatre of the time, emerging only as Shakespeare was writing his final works, including The Tempest. Thus his work also reflects the development of stage practice around the turn of the 16th to the 17th century.

Shakespearean audiences were accustomed to imagining settings as well as effects, such as enchantments, in the theatre, so at the beginning of a scene there was often someone who would describe the setting or draw attention to specific events. Thus when Oberon lists the flowers that grow where Titania sleeps ("I know a bank..."), the audience would really have felt transported into the wood; the attention drawn to Bottom's transformation into an ass, to his "sleek smooth head ... and large ears" indicates that the actor may not even have worn a disguise. In addition, the audience would have seen only men on the stage, female roles bring played by boys – which makes Flute's rendering of Thisbe somewhat bizarre, since the women in his audience, Hippolyta, Hermia and Helena, were also played by men representing "real" women.

Theatre audiences have changed greatly since the Renaissance. Illusionistic stage-sets soon appeared, along with spectacular effects and of course real, "divinely fair" women; all this sent allegory, multi-layering and stylisation – particularly productions of the Dream – increasingly into the background. The Shakespearean enchanted wood was of course a favourite setting of the Romantics, as Mendelssohn's wonderfully atmospheric incidental music illustrates, and Max Reinhardt, in his spectacular productions and his opulent screen adaptation, followed a kind of Romantic realism (with hundreds of real trees on the revolving stage) of which Shakespeare could certainly never even have dreamt. Only later – particularly striking in the 1970 Peter Brook production – came a return to a far simpler form of representation, which brings out the play's infinite number of facets more strongly than a concretised fairy-tale rendering. So what about the marionettes and the Dream? Doesn't everyone who is going to stage the play dream of having Puck fly – and then, so that he can just imagine it, is left with the actor standing on the ground? But what if he can work with beings whose element is just as much air as earth? What if he can put into practice here exactly what he has imagined, sitting in his studio dreaming up ideas for this marvellous play? Does he not then have to put aside all stylistic reservations and give in to the curious fascination of the marionettes – especially the Salzburg Marionettes – because these wooden characters who (according to Cocteau) do indeed have a soul, manage in some strange way to suspend any pomposity or over-seriousness? In full awareness, we succumbed to this temptation in order, once and for all – as in that legendary midsummer night – to realise a dream; and so, with the help of Mendelssohn, a romantic Midsummer Night's Dream was born, in a version with which we believe the little marionettes can best serve the great Shakespeare.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.
So, goodnight unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, 1