A Midsummer Night's Dream Themes

Above all else, A Midsummer Night's Dream explores the nature of romantic love.  Its conclusion?  The pursuit of love has the capacity to make us irrational, foolish idiots. In the play,...

Throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream, a humble group of Athenian craftsmen (the Mechanicals) go all Inception on us and practice a play-within-the-play that they hope to stage at Theseus's we...

Transformation is a very big deal in this play, which isn't so surprising because one of Shakespeare's main literary sources of inspiration is Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the third act of A Midsummer...

Like many Shakespearean comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, for example), A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes gender tensions that arise from complicated familial and romantic relationships. ...

With so many different subplots in A Midsummer Night's Dream, we get a front-row seat to experience all the different ways each character perceives reality.  First, there are all the dream se...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, so it's going to have its fair share of slapstick humor—we've got a man with a donkey's head wandering around on stage for crying out loud. There's also a...

Part of the strength of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that we're not always sure where humans and the natural world—as two separate elements—fall in relation to each other. Sometimes humans...

Magic is the delightful thread that runs through the tapestry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Magic is about the supernatural elements of the mythic and fairy world (like Cupid's arrows on a starry...