This five-act comedy in verse and prose by William Shakespeare was written around 1595 and performed around the same time; it was published in quarto in 1600 and in 1619, and in folio in 1623.
Shakespeare seems to have drawn on the most disparate sources for this drama: in The Discovery of Sorcery, by Reginald Scot (1538? -1599) he could have found the news around Robin Goodfellow, while the story of the transformation into a donkey goes back to Apuleius's Golden Ass, but could have taken it from Chaucer or Plutarch.
The Argument
Hermia, in love with Lisandro, refuses to marry Demetrius, thus contravening the wishes of Aegeus, her father. Demetrius, for her part, is loved by a friend of Hermia's, Elena, whom he has abandoned to marry Hermia. According to Athenian law, Duke Theseus gives Hermia four days to obey her paternal will, after which she must die.
Hermia and Lysander agree to secretly leave Athens and marry where the law cannot reach them. They plan to meet in a forest a few miles from the city. Hermia reveals the plan to Elena, who informs Demetrius of it. Demetrio follows Hermia into the forest and Elena follows Demetrio; so the four of them are in the woods that night.
Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, who dwell in the forest, have quarreled over a page. Oberon asks the pixie Puck, a symbol of the fickleness of love, to procure him a certain magical flower whose juice, poured into Titania's eyes while she sleeps, will make her fall in love with the first being he sees when he wakes up. Oberon hears Demetrio in the forest reproaching Elena for following him, and eager to reconcile them, he orders Puck to pour a little of that loving filter into Demetrio's eyes when Elena is next to him.
But Puck, taking Lisandro for Demetrio, gives him the filter, and since Elena is the first person Lisandro sees when he wakes up, he directs words of love to her; but he only manages to irritate her because he thinks that Lisandro is making fun of her. Oberon, discovering Puck's mistake, pours the juice into Demetrio's eyes, so that now there are two who are courting Elena. The two women fight as the men prepare to challenge each other for Elena.
Meanwhile, King Oberon has put the filter on Queen Titania's eyelids, and, waking her up, finds Bottom the weaver at her side with an ass's head instead of her own. Bottom, with a company of Athenian craftsmen, was in the woods rehearsing a drama to be performed to celebrate the marriage of Duke Theseus, and Puck had put the head of a donkey on him. Titania falls in love with Bottom as soon as she sees him, and she swears by him because of his beauty. They are surprised by Oberon, who pities Titania, and after retrieving her kidnapped page, rubs her wife's eyes with a herb that frees her from the spell.
Puck, by order of King Oberon, surrounds the human lovers and gathers them: while they sleep next to each other, he squeezes the herb that undoes the spell into their eyes, so that when they wake up they return to the loves of before. Duke Theseus and Hermia's father Aegeus are introduced; the runaways are pardoned and the couples are married. The drama ends with a scene of Pyramus and Thisbe recited grotesquely by Bottom and his companions for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.
Love and Fantasy
The various threads of the drama (the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the dispute between Oberon and Titania, the flight of the four lovers, and the representation of the artisans) are woven together in the most agile way in a sumptuous tapestry of lively colors on a background of a magical forest.
The classical world and the world of fairies merge as in a "triumph" of the late Renaissance: in the Oberon-Titania couple there is a reflection of the ancient dispute between Jupiter and Juno, and these two beings seem to participate in the serene beauty of the gods of Greece, while the pixie Puck belongs to the dark and mythical world of Nordic superstition.
The enchanting lightness of the elven world is in concert with human vicissitudes; even the movements and passions of lovers seem to unfold like dreamy arabesques, unfold in absurd difficulties and dissipate in enchantment like an elegant and abstruse dance governed by the whim of Love.
A joyous and absurd metamorphosis seizes even the humble artisans, who are not marginal puppets in the painting, but are wrapped in the same magical atmosphere; and Bottom, with the head of an ass, and the grotesque representation of Pyramus and Thisbe, does not seem so related to the classical world of Lucian of Samosata and Ovid as to the strange inventions and absurd ghosts of Hieronymus Bosch.
