Dreams and Reality
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How the play uses the idea of a dream: as the lovers’ excuse for a night they cannot explain, as Bottom’s name for something that really happened, as Theseus’s dismissal and Hippolyta’s defence, and finally as Puck’s offer to the audience.
- Key Characters: Bottom, Hermia, Theseus, Hippolyta, Puck, Titania, Demetrius.
- The Core Tension: Almost nothing in the play that is called a dream is one. The night in the wood happened; the characters call it a dream because that is the only way to go home. The audience, who saw it all, is asked at the end to do the same.
- Key Manifestations: Hippolyta’s four nights that will "dream away the time" (A1S1); Hermia’s serpent, the play’s only real dream (A2S2); Oberon’s plan that the lovers will remember the night "as a dream" (A3S2); the lovers waking and Titania’s "visions" (A4S1); Bottom’s Dream (A4S1); Theseus on lunatics, lovers and poets, and Hippolyta’s reply (A5S1); Puck’s epilogue (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear."
(Act 5, Scene 1) - The Outcome: The lovers agree to call the night a dream and are married; Titania is told she dreamed; Bottom knows better and cannot say so. Puck ends by inviting the audience to treat the play itself as a dream, and the question of what was real is handed to them.
What a Dream Was Here
There is one real dream in the play, and it tells the truth. Hermia, asleep beside Lysander in the wood, wakes crying for help against a serpent that was eating her heart while he sat smiling.
Original
Ay me, for pity! What a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear:
Methought a serpent eat my heart away,
And you sat smiling at his cruel pray.
(Hermia, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For pity’s sake! What awful dream was here!
Lysander, see I’m shaking out of fear:
I thought a serpent ate my heart away,
Whilst you were laughing as it ate its prey.
At that moment Lysander is a few yards away, bewitched, telling Helena that he loves her. The dream knows what Hermia does not. It has been produced by her sleeping mind at the exact instant her lover was being taken from her, and its serpent is the one Oberon mentioned when he described the bank where Titania sleeps: the snake that throws her enamelled skin. The wood has a serpent in it, and the serpent is love.
Everything else the characters will call a dream is something that happened. Hermia’s is the exception, and the play puts it first so that the audience will know the difference. The theme of love and folly is what the dream is about; the theme of dreams is what the play does with it.
The Fierce Vexation of a Dream
The word "dream" enters the plot as a plan. When Oberon gives Puck the herb that will restore Lysander, he explains what the lovers are to think when they wake.
Original
When they next wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision,
And back to Athens shall the lovers wend,
With league whose date till death shall never end.
(Oberon, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So, when they wake up, all of this confusion
Will seem a dream-like, meaningless illusion.
These lovers back to Athens then will start,
And love each other until death do part.
The night is to seem a dream so that the lovers can go back to Athens and be married. Oberon says the same of Bottom: he is to wake with the others and think no more of the night’s accidents "but as the fierce vexation of a dream". The fairies are not only undoing their magic; they are arranging how it will be remembered.
It works. In the morning Demetrius says the night’s events seem small and far off, like mountains turned to clouds; Hermia sees double; Helena has found Demetrius like a jewel that is hers and not hers; and Demetrius asks whether they are awake. They decide they must be, because the duke was there, and agree to tell each other their dreams on the way home. The theme of magic and illusion covers its tracks by renaming itself, and the lovers are grateful.
Bottom's Dream
One mortal refuses the arrangement, or rather cannot manage it. Bottom wakes alone in the wood, calls for his cue, and tries to say what happened to him.
Original
I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, – and methought I had, – but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.
(Bottom, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve had a dream beyond the ability of man to say what the dream was: a man would be an ass if he goes around elaborating on this dream. I thought I was… there is no one who can tell me what I thought I was. I thought I was… I thought I had… but a man would be a jester if he tried to say what I thought I had.
Three times he begins and three times he stops, because what he was and had cannot be said. He then garbles St Paul, with every sense attached to the wrong organ, resolves to have Quince write it up as a ballad called Bottom’s Dream because it has no bottom, and goes home. It is comic because Bottom is inarticulate, and moving because he is inarticulate about something real. He was there. The lovers only dreamed.
Bottom is the one character who uses the word "dream" for an experience he knows was not one, and his failure to describe it is the play’s most honest account of the night. Everyone else explains. The weaver alone admits it was past the wit of man.
Cool Reason and Great Constancy
On the wedding night the question is argued out between the play’s two most rational people. Hippolyta says the lovers’ story is strange. Theseus says it is not true, and explains why in the most famous speech in the play: lovers, madmen and poets all have imaginations that see more than reason can, devils in the dark, beauty in a plain face, a bear in a bush.
Original
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.
(Hippolyta, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But all the tales the lovers told of last night,
And as their stories all were told the same,
It seems it must be true, and not a dream,
And this is strengthened by each common story,
Despite how strange and dumbfounding it is.
Hippolyta’s answer is the case for the defence. Four people tell the same story, and four minds changed in the same way are evidence, not fancy; the story "grows to something of great constancy". Theseus does not reply. He announces the lovers and calls for a play.
The exchange is the play’s last word on its own reality, and it gives the last argument to the character who saw least of the wood. Hippolyta was not there, does not believe in fairies and has no stake in the lovers; she simply listens better than her husband. The theme of art and theatre is bound up with this scene, because Theseus, denying imagination, describes the poet’s eye in verse only a poet could write, and then sits down to watch a play.
"But, however much A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘like a dream’, it is not one. It contains only one description of something that may unequivocally be taken to be a dream, one ‘real’ dream, Hermia’s dream of the serpent"
— Peter Holland, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford Shakespeare), 1994
Key Quotes on Dreams and Reality
Quote 1
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time...
(Hippolyta, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Four days will soon dissolve into the night;
Four nights will soon evaporate as dreams...
Quote Analysis: Hippolyta’s first speech, and the play’s first use of its title word. Theseus has complained that the old moon is slow; Hippolyta answers that four nights will dream away the time, and the phrase makes the night not an obstacle but a dreaming. It is a small moment, and it sets the play’s terms: whatever happens between this scene and the wedding will happen at night, and will be remembered as a dream. The Amazon, who never enters the wood, names it before anyone else.
My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.
(Titania, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My Oberon! What things I have just seen!
I thought I was besotted with a donkey.
Quote Analysis: Titania waking from the spell. She thinks she dreamed, and Oberon lets her; "There lies your love," he says, and she sees Bottom asleep at her feet and is revolted. Her "visions" happened. She was drugged, humiliated and robbed of the boy while enchanted, and the word "dream" is the way her husband arranges for her not to know it. She asks twice how it came about and is told to wait. Of all the play’s dreamers, Titania is the only one who was wronged, and the only one never told.
Are you sure
That we are awake? It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream. Do not you think
The duke was here, and bid us follow him?
(Demetrius, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Are you sure
That we’re awake? Because it seems to me
That we are sleeping, dreaming. Don’t you think
The duke was here, and ordered us to follow?
Quote Analysis: Demetrius, in the morning, asking the question the play keeps asking. The other three reassure him: Hermia adds her father, Helena adds Hippolyta, Lysander adds the temple, and Demetrius concludes they must be awake. It is a comic exchange with a serious floor under it. Demetrius is the one lover who has not woken up, because the juice is still on his eyes, and he is the one who most wants to be sure that he has. The proof they settle on, that the duke was real, is the proof of a dream: the dreamer never doubts the duke.
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 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.
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
All share a spirited imagination:
One of them sees more devils than hell holds,
And that’s the lunatic; the lover, frantic,
Thinks dusky faces sweet like Helen of Troy;
The poet always looks around the place,
And stares up at the sky, then back to earth,
And as they see things with imagination
That are not real, the poet starts to write
And gives to fancies that are made of nothing,
A name and somewhere that they might exist.
Quote Analysis: Theseus’s diagnosis of imagination, and the lines most often quoted out of the play. He means them as a dismissal: the lover sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt, the poet gives airy nothing a name, and neither should be believed. But the description is so exact and so admiring that it reads as praise, and it has been taken as Shakespeare’s own account of his art ever since. The irony is that Theseus is a shape given to airy nothing by a poet’s pen, and the poet has given him the best lines.
Key Takeaways
- One Real Dream: Hermia's serpent is the only true dream in the play, and it tells her what is happening to Lysander.
- A Dream by Arrangement: Oberon plans that the lovers will remember the night as a dream; the word is the fairies' way of covering their tracks.
- Bottom Knows Better: Bottom alone calls his night a dream while knowing it was not, and his failure to describe it is the play's most honest speech.
- Reason Loses the Argument: Theseus explains the night away; Hippolyta answers that four matching stories are evidence, and he does not reply.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is the play itself meant to be a dream?
The title says so, the epilogue offers it, and the play spends five acts complicating the offer. Puck’s last speech gives the audience a choice:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream.
(Puck, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If we ghosts have caused offence,
Think of this as recompense:
You’ve been merely sleeping here
While these visions did appear.
And this poor and silly tale
Was merely just a dreamy veil.
If the play displeased you, pretend you slept through it. The word "shadows" is Oberon’s for his fairies and Theseus’s for actors, and Puck is both, so the offer folds the fairy world and the theatre into one dream and hands it to the house.
Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), argued that the play is "like a dream" without being one, and that "Robin even gives the whole audience the option of considering the entire play as a dream in his epilogue"; the obligation on the audience, he suggested, is to treat the play as a benevolent and true prophetic dream rather than a delusion. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), described the structure of Shakespearean comedy as a movement from the normal world into a "green world" and back, and noted that the green world "has analogies, not only to the fertile world of ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own desires." C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), read the whole night as "a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination". The three agree that the dream is the play’s method. What the epilogue adds is that the audience must decide whether to accept it, and the handclap Puck asks for is the decision.
What does Hermia’s dream of the serpent mean?
It is the play’s only dream in the strict sense, and the only one that tells the truth. Everything else called a dream, Titania’s night with Bottom, the lovers’ muddle, Bottom’s vision, really happened. Hermia’s did not, and it is exact: a serpent eats her heart while Lysander smiles, at the moment Lysander is being bewitched a few yards away. She wakes to find him gone:
Lysander! What, removed? Lysander! Lord!
What, out of hearing? Gone? No sound, no word?
Alack, where are you? Speak, an if you hear;
Speak, of all loves! I swoon almost with fear.
No? Then I well perceive you all not nigh
Either death or you I'll find immediately.
(Hermia, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Lysander! Have you left? Lysander! Lord!
What, can’t you hear me? Left without a word?
Oh no, where are you? Speak up if you hear;
Speak up! I’m almost fainting out of fear.
No word? It seems to me that you’re not nigh:
I’ll either find you soon, or else I’ll die.
Peter Holland (1994) built his reading of the play on the distinction: it "contains only one description of something that may unequivocally be taken to be a dream, one ‘real’ dream, Hermia’s dream of the serpent", and everyone else uses the word to explain away what they cannot face. Marjorie Garber, in Dream in Shakespeare (1974), read the serpent dream as the clearest case in the play of a dream truer than waking life. The serpent is an old emblem of treachery and of sexual betrayal, and it connects Hermia to Oberon’s description of Titania’s bank, where "the snake throws her enamelled skin". The wood, for all its flowers, has a serpent in it. Hermia is the one character whose sleeping mind sees it, and the play never lets her tell anyone.
Why do the lovers agree to call the night a dream?
Because Oberon has arranged for them to, and because it is the only way home. Oberon tells Puck that when the lovers wake the night’s derision "shall seem a dream and fruitless vision", and when they do wake, the duke is standing over them and there is a wedding to get to. Demetrius’s first words are about distance:
These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.
(Demetrius, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All that’s occurred seems small and indistinct,
Like mountains in the distance look like clouds.
None of them can explain the night and none of them tries very hard. They confirm that the duke was real, agree to recount their dreams on the way, and go. Demetrius, who is still enchanted, has the most to explain and produces the most polished explanation: a childhood betrothal to Helena, and a love for Hermia that melted like snow.
Peter Holland (1994) pointed out that almost nothing in the play that is called a dream is one: the lovers’ night happened, and the word is what they use to make it bearable. C. L. Barber (1959) read the forgetting more kindly, as the end of a holiday: the release of the night gives way to the clarification of the morning, and the lovers return to a society that now has room for them. David P. Young, in Something of Great Constancy (1966), described a play in which "the familiar categories by which we judge experience waver, alter, merge, and separate again before our eyes", and the lovers’ morning is where the categories settle. It is worth noticing who benefits. The men forget what they said; the women, who were awake for all of it, say nothing in Act 5. The theme of gender and patriarchy is folded into the dream, and the dream is kinder to the husbands.
What does Bottom’s Dream mean?
Bottom wakes alone, tries to describe the night, and fails. What he manages is a scrambled version of St Paul, with every sense attached to the wrong organ:
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
(Bottom, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The eyes of man haven’t heard, the ears of man haven’t seen, a man’s hand never tasted, his tongue never felt, nor his heart has revealed, what my dream was.
The source is 1 Corinthians 2:9, which Shakespeare’s audience heard in church in the Bishops’ Bible, on the things God has prepared for those who love him, which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor the heart of man conceived. Bottom has replaced the mysteries of God with a night in a fairy’s bower, and the muddled senses are the point: he has been somewhere the senses do not reach.
Frank Kermode, in an essay on the mature comedies (1961), treated the speech as the centre of the play, a comic statement about a love that is blind and yet sees more than reason can. Marjorie Garber (1974) read the Pauline echo as the play’s way of giving Bottom’s experience a weight he cannot articulate. David P. Young (1966) titled a chapter of his study "Bottom’s Dream" and made the speech his key to the play. Northrop Frye, in A Natural Perspective (1965), went so far as to suggest that Bottom, with what Puck calls his fool’s eyes, may have seen into the heart of comedy itself. The joke of the title is that a dream with no bottom is bottomless and the dreamer is Bottom. The seriousness is that he alone of the mortals was actually there, and he alone admits that what he saw was past the wit of man to say.
What does Theseus mean by "the lunatic, the lover and the poet"?
That the lovers imagined the whole thing. Hippolyta has called their story strange; Theseus calls it imagination and lists the three kinds of people who have too much of it. The speech ends with the plainest example he can find:
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
These people have such strong imagination,
That every time that they are feeling happy,
They think some other force has brought them joy;
Or, when at night they start feeling afraid,
They think a bush is actually a bear!
It is a sceptic’s creed, delivered by a character in a play whose audience has seen the fairies, thirty lines before Puck comes on with a broom.
R. W. Dent, in an essay on imagination in the play for Shakespeare Quarterly (1964), argued that Theseus is not the play’s spokesman but one of its subjects: his denial of imagination is as one-sided as the lovers’ surrender to it, and the play’s real position lies between them. Anne Barton, in an essay for Shakespeare Survey (1971), observed how oddly qualified Theseus’s confident speech is by everything around it. Catherine Belsey, in her 1993 essay for the Folger edition, put the audience’s position directly: having seen the fairies, "we are therefore in no position to share his entirely rational dismissal of lovers, along with lunatics and poets". None of this makes the speech less beautiful. It makes it a character’s speech rather than the author’s. Theseus describes the poet’s eye rolling from heaven to earth in verse only a poet could write, and dismisses as fantasy a night the audience has just watched.
How does Hippolyta answer him, and who wins?
Briefly, and she does. Hippolyta has called the lovers’ story strange, and Theseus has dismissed it before she can finish the thought:
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
(Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
More strange than true: I never have believed
Old folklore nor these made-up fairy tales.
When his speech on lunatics, lovers and poets is over, Hippolyta points out that four people imagined the same night, and that agreement is evidence: the story "grows to something of great constancy". The phrase names a story that holds because four witnesses tell it alike, and David P. Young took the phrase as the title of his 1966 study of the play because it states the play’s own claim for itself: strange, and true. Theseus does not reply. He announces the lovers and changes the subject.
The exchange gives the play’s final word on its reality to the character who saw least of it, and that is the point. Hippolyta was not in the wood, does not believe in fairies, and reaches the audience’s position by reasoning alone. Catherine Belsey (1993) noted that the audience cannot share Theseus’s dismissal because they have seen what he denies; Hippolyta arrives at the same scepticism about his scepticism from the evidence. It is the one argument the duke loses in the play, and he loses it by not answering. The theme of control and rebellion is nearby: the conquered Amazon, silent through most of the play, wins its last debate.
Does anyone in the play know what was real?
The audience does, and nobody else entirely. The fairies know what they did but not what it felt like. The lovers felt it and have agreed to forget. Titania was wronged and is never told. Theseus denies it happened and goes to bed in a house the fairies are about to bless. Bottom knows that something happened and cannot say what, which may be the nearest anyone comes.
Peter Holland (1994) observed that "nearly a third of all Shakespeare’s usages of the word ‘dream’ occur in only three plays, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream", and in this one the word is almost always a way of not knowing. Catherine Belsey (1993) noted that "by handing over the conclusion to the fairies, the play displaces the apparent closure, the celebration of restored identity": the mortals think the play ended with the wedding, and it did not. The fairies come after, and then Puck comes after them.
That is the play’s answer, and it is not an evasion. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about people who cannot tell the difference between what happened to them and what they dreamed, watched by an audience who can, and then invited to doubt it. The last line asks for the audience’s hands, and the applause is the one thing in the theatre that is certainly real. The theme of art and theatre closes the question the theme of dreams opened: the play was a vision, the vision was made by shadows, and the shadows want to be friends.
