A Midsummer Night’s Dream


Comedy and Tragedy

These plot synopses—of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, respectively—are very similar. Indeed, as dramatic forms, comedy and tragedy in general have certain elements in common, the most persistent being the struggles of a protagonist facing some trial or adversity (the Greek word agon, the root of protagonist, means “struggle”). The main difference between comedy and tragedy is the difference between fortune and fate. In comedy, surprising and often fantastical twists in the plot rescue the heroes from adverse circumstances beyond their control. Even though a play is a play, its outcome certain, we have the sense in comedy that anything can happen. Optimistic expectation is the norm. In tragedy, dread rather than expectation is the prevailing mood. The tragic protagonist seems driven toward their doom by the forces of fate. And whereas comedic heroes are beset by problems not of their own making, the tragic hero’s dilemma is always in some way the result of a choice or choices they have made. The comedic protagonist is a victim of circumstances imposed from without. The tragic hero is a victim of their own poor judgment.

Comedy and tragedy—and most Shakespearean plays—share also a tripartite structure consisting of the following:


Comedy

Comedy is U-shaped. An initial peace and stability are disrupted by some adverse circumstance, usually introduced by a blocking figure—an unsympathetic character whose selfish purpose upsets the harmonious balance. A descent into adversity follows (usually by way of a journey), the adversity is overcome, and harmony is restored.

Typical features of comedy that Shakespeare inherited from Classical-era playwrights include the following:

Traversing two worlds, Dream enacts an alternating, cooperative rhythm between civilized restraint on the one hand and natural exuberance and vitality on the other:

  City World  Green World
  Law and order  Laws eased; potential for confusion
  Monogamous marriage    Serial monogamy, Greenblatt’s “erotic mobility”
  Reason  Fancy (Imagination)
  Art  Nature
  Waking consciousness  Dreams and the subconscious

Also typical of comedy is the interweaving of two or more plots. There are four in Dream. Our introduction to these several plots is the protasis or “exposition” in which the principal characters are introduced and which is complete about halfway through 2.1. The four plots correspond to four character-clusters:


Other Notable Details

Both the second and third plots begin in the city world and move toward the green world—Lysander and Hermia to escape the “sharp Athenian law” (1.1.162), Bottom and the other artisans to rehearse their play. Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the Fairies, are already there.

Theseus and Hippolyta, the Duke and Duchess of Athens, never go to the green world. In fact, they disappear from the play until 4.1, where they confront the lovers returned from their evening’s wanderings.

The play’s catastrophe, from a comedic standpoint, occurs near the end of Act 4 (4.1.136-83), not in Act 5 where we might expect it to. The lovers’ desires are finally realized, but only because Duke Theseus now rules in favor of Hermia and Lysander and against Egeus, whereas the reverse had been true at the beginning of the play.


Act 5 and the Play-within-the-Play

As a comedy, Dream might have ended at 4.1; all the necessary elements are there. Act 5 thus becomes a kind of coda or addendum, in this case a celebratory expansion of the happy conclusion. The play has been called an epithalamium, a wedding poem—the Latin term means literally “at the bridal chamber”—because it is a celebration of married love. Indeed, the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude—a tragic story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and here a play-within-the-play—is staged in the final act as part of the festivities celebrating the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Shakespeare scholars have speculated that Dream itself was performed at a real wedding attended by an audience of English nobles that included Queen Elizabeth I. If this is true, then a tantalizing scenario presents itself. A noble audience watches a play (Shakespeare’s Dream) performed by their social inferiors (Shakespeare’s acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men). This play concludes with a long scene in which Athenian nobles (Theseus, Hippolyta, and the others) watch a play (Pyramus and Thisbe) performed by their social inferiors (Bottom and the artisans). Shakespeare’s noble audience would have seen mirrored on the stage a reflection of themselves watching a play—spectators spectated whilst beholding a theatrical spectacle:

  Elizabethan nobles (and the Queen Herself?)
watch		    Athenian nobles (Duke and Duchess of Athens)
watch
  Shakespeare’s troupe (socially inferior)
perform		    Bottom and his troupe (socially inferior)
perform
  A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a comedy)    Pyramus and Thisbe (a tragedy)

But this attractive historical circumstance, if true, only would have reinforced the (ambiguous) social commentary already contained within the play. This is most evident in a debate between Theseus and Hippolyta regarding the players’ social position and duty toward their superiors. Despite being informed of their ineptitude and the silliness of the play they would perform, the Duke insists that they and it will do just fine, arguing that “never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it,” to which Hippolyta responds, “I love not to see wretchedness o’ercharged, / And duty in his service perishing” (5.1.82-86). Hippolyta speaks as if she has seen this sort of thing before and does not like it—as if Theseus were suggesting it is okay to derive pleasure from the foolish spectacle of one’s social inferiors “perishing in their service” (i.e., performing badly). But Theseus’ reasons for welcoming the amateur troupe are more complex. Though he allows that watching them will be “Our sport” (5.1.90), he compares their bumbling to that of sophisticated “clerks” whose modesty and fearful duty are what matter, not their eloquence, which he calls “saucy and audacious” (5.1.90-103). In other words, if Bottom and crew perform poorly, it matters not so long as their hearts are in the right place—so long as they are loyal and devoted subjects properly fearful of their sovereign.

It is in light of this revealing commentary that we—or Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience—watch the performance that follows: actors, watched by an audience, playing the role of actors also watched by an audience. If she were there, what might Elizabeth have thought as she listened to the Athenian nobles ridicule Bottom and the other artisans? Would she have recalled and approved of Theseus’ earlier explanation—and perhaps have adopted his attitude toward Bottom’s troupe as her own toward Shakespeare’s? Or would she have found more compelling Hippolyta’s objection to a display of “duty perishing in his service”—and thus seen the Athenian nobles as lacking in charity toward their social inferiors? Or perhaps her response would have been more complex: finding herself identifying with Theseus’ concerns about sovereign authority, she might nevertheless have felt chastened by Hippolyta’s correction and seen in this royal woman a model of noblesse oblige—of generosity toward and sympathy for her social inferiors, her “subjects” (from the Latin subiectus, literally that which is “placed below”).


Sovereignty, Law, and Desire

Such considerations remind us that a Shakespearean comedy, though first and foremost a light entertainment, is never merely that. Another way in which Dream explores the authority of the sovereign in a hierarchical society is through Theseus’ handling of the conflict between Hermia’s desires and those of her father, Egeus. At the beginning of the play the Duke supports Egeus’ determination that his daughter must marry Demetrius rather than her true love, Lysander. As a ruler responsible for maintaining peace in the realm, he cannot overlook Egeus’ appeal to the law, the “ancient privilege of Athens” (1.1.41)—whatever the extent of his sympathy for the distraught Hermia. Indeed, as Egeus reminds Theseus, it is “according to our law” that the father may have his daughter put to death if she does not comply with his wishes. It is from this “sharp Athenian law” that she and Lysander escape to the woods (1.1.161-63).

Later, in the catastrophe scene, Theseus strangely reverses his decision. When Lysander admits having escaped to avoid the peril of the Athenian law, Egeus immediately cuts him off and appeals to the Duke to uphold the statute: “I beg the law, the law upon his head” (4.1.150-52). But hearing Demetrius explain that he no longer loves Hermia, Theseus proclaims, “Egeus, I will overbear your will” (4.1.176). Because he does not offer an explanation for this reversal, we can only speculate as to Theseus’ motives. Given comedy’s tendency to foreground women’s roles, it is necessary that a truly comedic outcome honor Hermia’s desires. Egeus, the meddling father figure, is effectively silenced. But can we really see this as a feminine triumph? The situation at both the beginning and end of the play could be described as two men against one—Egeus and Demetrius versus Lysander at the beginning (1.1), Demetrius and Lysander versus Egeus at the end (4.1). Theseus, like real English and European princes of the Renaissance, is not above the law; but he does have the authority to apply its dictates according to good judgment and reason. The circumstances having changed, he responds benevolently by serving the greater good. Though it is possible he was only waiting for an excuse to do right by Hermia, it is also likely that her fate would have been very different had not fortune and magic intervened to redirect Demetrius’ affections away from Hermia and toward Helena.


Dreaming the Human

Such magic seems wishful thinking when it comes to the realities of legal discourse and governance. But Theseus’ creative flexibility, his capacity for inventing a situational ethics on the fly, is not unlike the improvisational methods of his dramatic counterpart, Oberon. More temperamental and fickle than Duke Theseus, the Fairy King nevertheless shares with his human counterpart a desire both to assert his authority and to do right by his subjects. He insists on having the changeling child, the exotic Indian boy, to grace his royal court and thereby amplify its splendor; but he also works to ensure the happiness of the unfortunate Athenians who have stumbled into his kingdom. A crafty figure who plays with magical potions, he is also rational, deliberate, and methodical in his actions.

Unlike Oberon, Theseus is disinclined to acknowledge the more instinctive and mysterious aspects of his governing skill. No doubt he would find ridiculous the notion, expressed by Titania at 2.1.81-117, that what happens in the fairy world is consequential for the world of mortals. And responding to the strange tale of the lovers’ woodland wanderings, Theseus can only dismiss it as “More strange than true” (5.1.2). Yet, in one of the play’s greatest ironies, his denunciation of “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” is a highly creative and compelling description of the irrational forces he would deny:

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.
               (5.1.7-17)

Poetry and love—these are human indulgences that the functional bureaucrat would rather not acknowledge, so he lumps them together with mere madness. His wiser and more tolerant Duchess, Hippolyta, abducted Queen of the Amazons, is also reluctant to believe what Theseus calls “these fairy toys” (5.1.3):

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy,
But howsoever, strange and admirable
               (5.1.23-27)

Preferring the solid and tangible (“something of great constancy”) to the offspring of mere imagination (“fancy’s images”), Hippolyta in that final line insists that what appears to be wondrous (“strange and admirable”) is in fact rationally explicable. Of course, she knows nothing about the magic love juice and fairies—nor, therefore, that what seems strange and admirable is strange and admirable.

Exemplary of the play’s central theme, these ironies affirm a complementary rather than oppositional relationship between the rational and irrational. In this view, “great constancy” and “fancy’s images,” like Athens and the magical woods, are contiguous components of a single reality.

©Robert Whalen, 2025