A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Context & Background

Date, Text and the Wedding Question

Nobody knows exactly when A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written. The one hard fact is that Francis Meres, a schoolmaster compiling a survey of English writers in 1598, listed it among Shakespeare’s comedies, so it existed by then. Most editors put it in 1595 or 1596, alongside Romeo and Juliet, whose Mercutio has his own speech about a tiny fairy queen and whose tragic lovers are the workmen’s Pyramus and Thisbe played straight. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register in October 1600 and printed the same year by Richard Bradock for Thomas Fisher, a good quarto that is the basis of every modern text; a second quarto of 1619 was falsely dated 1600, and the Folio of 1623 added stage directions from a theatre copy.

The play ends with three weddings and a fairy blessing of the marriage beds, and it has long been supposed that it was written for a real one – a noble wedding at which the Queen was present, with the court watching a play about a duke’s wedding that ends in a blessing on the house. Two candidates are usually named: the marriage of William Stanley, Earl of Derby, to Elizabeth de Vere in January 1595, and that of Thomas Berkeley to Elizabeth Carey in February 1596. The hypothesis is attractive and unproven. The 1600 title page says the play had been acted publicly, and everything in it works on a bare public stage. The safest position is the one the evidence supports: possibly written for a wedding, certainly written for the theatre.

Exam tip: Say "possibly" and mean it. An essay that asserts the play was written for the Berkeley wedding is making a claim no document backs; an essay that explains why scholars have wanted it to be true – the triple marriage, the blessing, the compliment to the Queen – and then shows how the play works without it is doing context properly. The wedding hypothesis is most useful as a way into order and chaos: the play moves from a court to a wood and back to a court, and ends by blessing the institution it began by questioning.

Chaucer, Plutarch, Ovid and Apuleius: The Books Behind the Play

There is no source for the plot, which is rare in Shakespeare, but the play is built from other people’s books. Theseus and Hippolyta come from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the first of the Canterbury Tales, which opens with Duke Theseus returning to Athens with his conquered Amazon bride and goes on to tell of two young men in love with the same woman, a fight in a wood, and a May morning; Shakespeare took the frame and the season and gave the lovers a happier ending. Plutarch’s life of Theseus, in North’s translation, supplied the duke’s less creditable past, which Oberon throws at Titania in Act 2: the women he "ravished" and abandoned, "With Ariadne and Antiopa". The Theseus of the play is a settled ruler on the eve of his wedding, but the play makes sure we know what he was.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Golding’s translation, gave Shakespeare the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from its fourth book, the same source he used for Romeo and Juliet, and here he tells it twice: once as tragedy, in the lovers' flight into the wood, and once as farce, in the workmen’s play. Titania’s name is a name Ovid gives to Diana, goddess of the moon and of chastity, which suits a fairy queen who has "forsworn his bed and company". And behind Bottom's transformation stands Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, translated by Adlington in 1566, in which a man turned into a donkey is made love to by a wealthy woman and finally restored by a goddess. Shakespeare keeps the ass and the lady and takes out the sex, or leaves it to the audience.

Exam tip: Treat the sources as choices, not furniture. Shakespeare had Ovid’s tragic Pyramus in front of him and chose to give the story to a weaver and a bellows-mender; he had Plutarch’s philandering Theseus and chose to let Oberon mention it once and the duke never answer. An essay on love and folly or art and theatre that can say what the play does with a source – stages it, mocks it, quietly contradicts it – is doing contextual analysis rather than listing influences.

Fairies, Robin Goodfellow and the Folk Calendar

The fairies of the play are Shakespeare’s invention, but their raw material was not. Robin Goodfellow was a household spirit of English folk belief, the hobgoblin who soured the milk, misled travellers and did the chores for a bowl of cream. Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a sceptic’s attack on the witch trials, describes exactly this creature and says that grandmothers' maids used to set a bowl of milk out for him – and adds that nobody fears him any more. The fairy who meets Puck in Act 2 recites the same folklore: he is the "Hobgoblin" and "sweet Puck" who frights the maidens and misleads night-wanderers. Samuel Johnson, in 1765, noted that fairies "were much in fashion" in Shakespeare’s time, that common tradition had made them familiar and Spenser’s Faerie Queene had made them great; Shakespeare’s contribution was to make them small, and to give them a court with a king, a queen and a quarrel.

The play’s calendar is a festival calendar. Midsummer Eve was the night for bonfires, love-divination and the belief that spirits walked; May Day was the morning young people went into the woods before dawn to gather greenery, which is what Theseus assumes the lovers were doing when he finds them. The play borrows the licence of both. Titania’s great speech in Act 2 on the drowned fields, the rotted corn and the "nine men’s morris" filled with mud has often been read against the disastrously wet summers of 1594, 1595 and 1596, when the harvests failed across England; Johnson preferred to hear in it an imitation of Ovid’s grieving Ceres. Both may be true. What the speech establishes is that the fairies are not decoration: when their king and queen quarrel, the weather breaks.

Exam tip: Notice that the play protects its fairies from the witch-hunters. Oberon insists "But we are spirits of another sort", who can walk in daylight and mean no harm; the play ends with a blessing, not a curse; and the one dark thing they do, taking a child, is turned into a story about a dead friend. An essay on magic and illusion that sets Scot’s sceptical Robin beside the play’s benevolent one can argue that Shakespeare is staging folklore at the moment it stopped being believed.

Fathers, Daughters and the Virgin Queen

The law Theseus explains to Hermia in the first scene – obey your father, or die, or become a nun – was not the law of Elizabethan England, and the audience knew it. What England had was the ordinary power of fathers over daughters: a marriage without parental consent was a scandal, a daughter was expected to be shaped by her father’s wishes, and Egeus’s claim, "As she is mine, I may dispose of her", would have sounded harsh but not foreign. Shakespeare invented the death penalty to make the principle visible. Theseus’s image of the daughter as "a form in wax", which the father may keep or melt, is the patriarchal household stated as clearly as anywhere in the period, and the play then spends four acts undoing it.

Over all this stands a woman no father could dispose of. Elizabeth I was in her sixties when the play was new, had refused every suitor for the whole of her reign, and was celebrated in verse as Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon. Oberon’s story of the flower in Act 2 describes Cupid aiming "At a fair vestal throned by the west" and missing: the arrow is quenched in the moon’s chaste beams, and "the imperial votaress passed on", untouched. Almost every reader since the eighteenth century has taken the vestal to be the Queen, and the compliment is a careful one. Louis Montrose, in a much-cited essay of 1983, drew out its irony: the Queen’s freedom from love is what makes the flower that subjects everyone else, and the play written for a woman who ruled without a husband ends by putting every other woman under one. Hippolyta, the conquered Amazon, and Titania, the drugged queen, are the play’s two other images of female power, and both are brought to heel.

Exam tip: Read the play’s women against the woman in the audience. The strongest essays on gender and patriarchy or control and rebellion do not simply say the play is patriarchal; they show that it knows it is, by putting the one figure exempt from its magic outside the story, in the person of the Queen, and by giving Hippolyta’s silences and Titania’s lost quarrel more weight than the festive ending admits.

Players, Workmen and the Play's Afterlife

The company that first played it was new. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were formed in 1594, when the plague closed the London theatres for nearly two years and the surviving companies were reorganised; Shakespeare was a sharer from the start, and this is one of the first plays he wrote for them. Its women were played by boys, which is the joke behind Flute’s protest, "let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming", and behind Quince’s assurance that Thisbe may be played in a mask. The workmen themselves are a portrait of amateur theatre as Elizabethans knew it: the craft-guild players of the old mystery cycles, still performing in some towns within living memory, and the tradesmen who got up shows for a royal visit. Philostrate’s description of them as "Hard-handed men that work in Athens here" is a London description of Athenian mechanicals. A professional company mocking amateurs is one thing; the play goes further, and lets Theseus say that "The best in this kind are but shadows", professionals included.

The play’s later history is a history of what the stage could do with fairies. Samuel Pepys, seeing it in 1662, called it "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life", though he admitted the dancing was good. For a century and a half it was performed in pieces: Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy-Queen (1692) used it as a frame for music, and David Garrick’s The Fairies (1755) cut the workmen altogether. The nineteenth century restored the text and added Mendelssohn, whose overture of 1826, written at seventeen, and incidental music of 1842, including the Wedding March, defined the play for generations; Hazlitt, reviewing a spectacular revival in 1816, complained that "Poetry and the stage do not agree well together" and that fairies six feet high were not credible. The twentieth century answered him. Max Reinhardt’s 1935 Hollywood film cast James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, and Peter Brook’s RSC production of 1970 threw out the gauze and the moonlight for a white box, trapezes and adult fairies, and read the play, after the Polish critic Jan Kott, as a study of desire rather than a fairy tale.

Exam tip: Use the stage history to date your reading. A Victorian production and Brook’s are both "the play", and an examiner rewards a student who knows that reading Bottom’s night with Titania as innocent whimsy and reading it as an erotic nightmare are both interpretive choices with a history. Linking Theseus’s "shadows" speech to the boy actors, the craft-guild players and the play’s own self-mockery turns a point about art and theatre into a point about the theatre the play was written for.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Context – Frequently Asked Questions