A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an enchanting play about love and enchantment. In it we enter a fairy woodland world of moonlight and magic.
The first humans to arrive in this wooded world are four lovers. They are followed by Bottom and his friends, who have gone there to rehearse a play in secrecy.
The lovers have cause for unhappiness, as do the fairy king and queen. Seeking to help the lovers with a magic potion, Oberon only finds things made worse. He also uses the magic juice on Titania - and when Bottom is given the head of a donkey, she falls in love with him.
Light and fantastical on the surface, the play has darker currents. It moves between the fairy world and our own, illusion and reality, love and hate. In the end, of course, order is restored, harmony prevails and the play concludes with a comic tour de force as Bottom and his friends perform their own drama.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of few plays whose plot Shakespeare conceived himself. It is rightly regarded as his first comic masterpiece.
