What fools these mortals be!

“Lord, What fools these mortals be!” Puck (Act III, Scene ii)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and most beloved comedies. It combines the names and places of ancient Athens with the costumes and mores of Elizabethan England. It is divided into two worlds (the real and the fantasy). The real world is the world of love frustrated, two young women forced into marriages with the wrong men. The four young people decide to flee Athens and seek their loves in freedom beyond the forest. However, the forest is the world of fantasy, ruled by Queen Titania and King Oberon. One source describes it this way:

Hermia and her lover Lysander decide to escape through the forest at night. Hermia informs her friend Helena, but Helena has recently been rejected by Demetrius and decides to win back his favour by revealing the plan to him. Demetrius, followed doggedly by Helena, chases Hermia. Hermia and Lysander, believing themselves safely out of reach, sleep in the woods.

Sound confusing? It’s meant to. This is a comedy of the beauty and the absurdity of love. (Kind of like Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit with laughs and without the waiting room.) It has a number of elements of “commedia del arte” a highly stylized Italian comedy style that relies heavily on sight gags. And to top it all off, it is “a play within a play within a play.”

Did I mention, this play, like Romeo and Juliet, is based on Greek myth, "Pyramus and Thysbe?" This myth is actually performed in the last act of this play on stage for the other characters. And, since the play ends with a wedding; Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote music to accompany this play two hundred years after it was written, wrote a wedding march for the three weddings at the end of the play. You guessed it! We use his wedding march today when the bride walks down the isle. And all because Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has some great and memorable lines:

The course of true love never did run smooth. (Lysander, Act I, Scene i)

And though she be but little, she is fierce. Helena (Act III, Scene ii)

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. Lovers, to bed, ’tis almost fairy time. Theseus ( Act V, Scene i)

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
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. Theseus, (Act V, Scene i)


And finally, the explanation that Puck (Robin Goodfellow) gives to the audience for all of the madness they have witnessed throughout the last five acts:

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 an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends. Puck (Act V, Scene i)