A Midsummer Night's Dream has seven major themes, and they all pass through one wood on one night. love and folly is the play's subject: Helena's discovery that "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind", and four lovers whose affections can be moved by a drop of juice. magic and illusion is the mechanism, a flower called "love-in-idleness" and a fairy who can put "I'll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes". dreams and reality is what the mortals call the night afterwards, and what Puck invites the audience to call the whole play. order vs chaos is the play's shape: lawful Athens, a wood where the seasons and the lovers come apart, and a return with everyone sorted. control and rebellion is its contests of will, a father against a daughter and a fairy king against his queen. gender and patriarchy is who wins those contests, and who falls silent afterwards. And art and theatre is the workmen's play, the duke's theory of shadows, and Shakespeare looking at his own craft.

The seven guides below share a spine: a Theme Profile, four close-read sections each anchored by a verse pair from the play file with its modern verse translation, a critic's pull-quote, four Key Quotes with analysis, Key Takeaways, and seven study questions with verified critic citations.

As a disorder of the eyes. Helena says so in the first scene, before any fairy has touched anyone: "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind", which is why Cupid is painted blind. The rest of the play proves her right. Lysander, anointed by mistake, wakes loving Helena and finds a whole philosophy of ripeness to explain why; Titania dotes on a weaver with an ass's head and tells him he is as wise as he is beautiful; Demetrius discovers that his love for Hermia has melted like snow and cannot say what power did it. None of them is pretending. The flower moves love without changing its sincerity, and turns the old love into loathing on the way.

The play's picture of love as folly is not a cruel one. Helena, who asks to be treated as Demetrius's "I am your spaniel", is laughed at and then rewarded; Titania, humiliated, is released with a blessing; and Bottom, the one mortal loved without being enchanted, observes mildly that "reason and love keep little company together now-a-days". Catherine Belsey, in her 1993 essay for the Folger edition, drew the conclusion the play seems to invite: because the lovers are so hard to tell apart, romantic love in this play is "oddly impersonal". Lysander's warning that "The course of true love never did run smooth" turns out to be the plot.

The theme ends with three weddings, one of them made by a spell that is never lifted. Whether that is a happy ending or a joke about all marriages is the question the play leaves with the audience. See Love and Folly for the full analysis.

The magic is a flower. Oberon tells Puck how Cupid once aimed at a virgin queen and missed, and how the arrow fell on a white blossom that turned purple; its juice makes any sleeper love the first creature they see. That is the whole apparatus, and it works only on the eyes. Lysander wakes with his intelligence intact and uses it to argue that reason, not magic, has changed his mind; the one physical transformation in the play, Bottom's ass's head, is wasted on the one man it cannot change inside. "Thou art translated", says Quince, and Bottom is carried across into another shape without noticing.

The play is careful about what kind of magic this is. When Puck warns that dawn will send the damned spirits back to their graves, Oberon answers that "we are spirits of another sort", walkers of the morning as well as the night, and the counter-charm he speaks over Titania is a blessing. William Hazlitt, in 1817, found the fairies beyond morality altogether: with Oberon and his fairies, he wrote, we are launched into the empire of the butterflies. The magic has no programme. It is mischief with a king's resources, and its limits are the limits of a joke.

Every spell but one is undone. Demetrius goes to the altar with the juice still on his eyes, and the play treats his marriage like the others. See Magic and Illusion for the full analysis.

Almost nothing in it that is called a dream is one. Hermia's nightmare in the wood, "Methought a serpent eat my heart away", is the only real dream in the play, and it tells the truth: her lover is being bewitched a few yards away as she sleeps. Everything else the characters call a dream actually happened. Oberon plans it that way, ordering that the lovers wake to remember the night only as a dream; Titania is told she dreamed and never learns otherwise; the four lovers agree to recount their dreams on the way home and are married.

Bottom is the exception, and the play's deepest voice on the subject. He wakes knowing something happened, "I have had a most rare vision", and cannot say what; his garbled St Paul, with every sense attached to the wrong organ, is the most honest account of the night anyone gives. Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), built his reading on the distinction: the play is like a dream without being one, and its characters use the word to make the night bearable.

The question is argued out on the wedding night between Theseus, who explains that "The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact" and believes none of it, and Hippolyta, who answers that four matching stories grow "to something of great constancy". He does not reply. Then Puck offers the audience the same choice: "That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear". See Dreams and Reality for the full analysis.

From a city with a law for everything to a wood with none, and back. Athens in Act 1 has a rule for a disobedient daughter, and Theseus enforces it courteously; the lovers run for the wood, and the wood is where the play happens. Before they arrive, Titania has already described disorder at full scale, a quarrel between the fairy king and queen that has flooded the rivers, rotted the corn and left "the mazed world" unable to tell the seasons apart.

The night's confusion is managed. Puck leads the rivals in circles, counts the sleepers, lays them out in pairs and speaks the country proverb over them: "Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill". Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), called this the "green world" pattern, the comedy moving out of the normal world into a place of metamorphosis and returning with its resolution achieved; C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959), traced the same shape in the May game, out of the town into the grove and back.

Order returns with a hunt at dawn and a duke who overrules the law he could not bend in Act 1, without explanation. When Theseus asks of the workmen's play how to find "the concord of this discord", he is describing his own day: discord resolved by the man in charge, and completed after midnight by fairies he does not believe in. See Order vs Chaos for the full analysis.

Everyone with power in the play is disobeyed. Egeus is defied by Hermia, who wishes aloud that "I would my father looked but with my eyes" and chooses death or a convent over the husband he picked; Theseus tells her that "To you your father should be as a god" and gives her four days. Oberon asks Titania "am not I thy lord" and is refused the changeling boy. Demetrius orders Helena away and she follows him anyway. Puck is given one careful instruction and gets it wrong. Even Quince cannot cast his play without Bottom asking for every part.

None of the rebellions is answered by argument. Titania is drugged and robbed while helpless; Hermia's defiance changes nothing until Demetrius, enchanted, withdraws his claim and Theseus announces "Egeus, I will overbear your will"; Helena wins her man by a spell she never learns of. Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), read the play's ending as the bringing of "willful daughters" and "unruly wives" under the control of lords and husbands, and the text supports him in one plain way: the rebels win only when the rulers change their minds.

The last authority in the play belongs to a fairy king the duke does not believe in, and the last word to a servant asking the audience for their hands. See Control and Rebellion for the full analysis.

That a woman belongs to the man who made her until she belongs to the man he gives her to. Egeus states it as property law, "As she is mine, I may dispose of her"; Theseus states it as poetry, the daughter as wax printed by her father; and the duke himself won his bride in war, "I wooed thee with my sword", as he tells Hippolyta in the play's fourth speech. She does not reply. Helena, abandoned in the wood, names the rule of courtship and breaks it in the same breath: "We should be wood and were not made to woo".

The fairy court repeats the pattern at full volume. Oberon drugs his queen into loving a beast, takes the boy she was keeping for a dead friend, and dances with her afterwards without telling her. Montrose (1983) read the whole festive ending as the subduing of the play's women, warriors, mothers, wives and daughters alike; Shirley Nelson Garner, in 1981, read it as the breaking of bonds between women, Titania's with the votaress and Hermia's with Helena, so that each can be paired with a man.

The play's own evidence is the fifth act, in which Hermia and Helena say nothing at all and Hippolyta, the conquered Amazon, twice gets the better of her husband. Whether the play endorses the order it shows or quietly indicts it is the question every production answers for itself. See Gender and Patriarchy for the full analysis.

Because it lets Shakespeare show his own art from the outside. The workmen do not trust illusion: afraid of frightening the ladies, they have the lion explain he is only Snug, the wall name the tinker inside it, and Bottom announce that Pyramus is really Bottom. Quince delivers his prologue with every stop in the wrong place, so that "This fellow doth not stand upon points", as Theseus puts it, and the court heckles every line. The audience of A Midsummer Night's Dream, meanwhile, has accepted a bare stage as a wood and boys as fairy queens for three acts without a word of explanation.

Theseus supplies the theory. Defending the workmen to Hippolyta, he says that "The best in this kind are but shadows" and the worst no worse if imagination amend them, an hour after explaining that imagination shows nothing true and that the poet merely gives airy nothing "A local habitation and a name". Hippolyta answers that the imagination must then be his and not the actors', and he changes the subject. David P. Young, in Something of Great Constancy (1966), read Pyramus and Thisbe as a mirror in which the court can watch its own night, lovers defying parents and mistaking a cloak for a corpse, without recognising it.

The play ends with an actor. "If we shadows have offended", says Puck, and offers the audience the choice the workmen never trusted theirs with: believe the shadows, or call it a dream. See Art and Theatre for the full analysis.