A Midsummer Night's Dream - Preface

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A Midsummer Night's Dream sends four young lovers into a wood outside the city, where the fairies are quarrelling and a bottle of love-juice is about to be applied to the wrong eyelids. By morning nobody is in love with the person they arrived with, and nobody can quite explain how it happened. Hermia has been ordered to marry a man she does not want, so she runs, and Lysander runs with her, and Demetrius and Helena follow. In the same wood Oberon and Titania are fighting over a stolen boy, Puck is sent for a flower that makes people dote on whatever they see first, and a group of tradesmen are rehearsing a play with far more enthusiasm than skill. The three worlds collide, repeatedly. Shakespeare wrote it in the mid-1590s and it has barely left the stage since. The plot works like a machine, the verse is unusually musical, and the structure invites every generation to redecorate the wood in its own image without touching the mechanism underneath. The comedy is broad and the enchantment is genuine. Bottom's transformation and the tradesmen's version of Pyramus and Thisbe get the biggest laughs, but a darker current runs through the play: desire here is arbitrary, imposed from outside, and impossible to argue with, and the lovers are not obviously better off at the end than they were at the start. It suits audiences of almost any age, including people meeting Shakespeare for the first time. It works best live, where a room laughing together at a badly acted death scene is doing exactly what the play was built to make it do.