Magic and Illusion
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How the fairies’ magic works, where the love-in-idleness flower came from, what it does to the people it touches, and why the play keeps reminding us that its own illusions are made of the same stuff.
- Key Characters: Oberon, Puck, Titania, Bottom, Lysander, Demetrius.
- The Core Tension: The magic in the wood can change what people love but not who they are. It works only on the sleeping and the unwary, and the one creature who is physically transformed by it is the one it changes least.
- Key Manifestations: Puck’s tricks on villagers (A2S1); the story of Cupid’s arrow and the purple flower (A2S1); the juice on Titania’s eyes and on the wrong Athenian (A2S2); Bottom’s ass’s head and the rout of the workmen (A3S1); Puck’s borrowed voices in the fog and the counter-charm (A3S2); Dian’s bud and Titania’s release (A4S1); the fairies’ blessing and Puck’s epilogue (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."
(Act 2, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Every spell is reversed except one. Titania is released, Lysander restored, Bottom given back his head; Demetrius keeps the juice on his eyes, and the fairies bless the house of a duke who does not believe in them.
A Little Western Flower
The play’s magic has an origin story, and Oberon tells it. He once watched Cupid take aim at a virgin queen enthroned in the west; the arrow was quenched in the moon’s chaste beams and the queen passed on untouched; but Oberon marked where the bolt fell.
Original
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
(Oberon, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But I remembered where the arrow fell;
It fell upon a flower to the west,
Once white, but now turned purple, scarred by love;
Which virgins now call ‘love-in-idleness’.
The flower was white and is now purple, wounded by love, and its juice makes any sleeper dote on the first live creature they see. That is the whole apparatus. There are no incantations, no spirits raised, no bargains with the dark; there is a plant, and an accident, and a king who knows where it grows. The imperial votaress is almost certainly Elizabeth, and the compliment is pointed: the Queen is the one woman in the play whom Cupid cannot touch, and everybody else gets the flower.
Oberon sends Puck for it and Puck promises to circle the earth in forty minutes. The scale of the fairies’ power is enormous and its instrument is tiny, which is the play’s first joke about magic and its most serious point. The theme of love and folly in this play is a drop of juice.
Churl, Upon Thy Eyes I Throw
The magic is applied in the dark to people who are asleep, and the play makes a small ceremony of each application. Oberon squeezes the flower on Titania’s eyelids with a rhyming charm about lions, bears and boars. Puck, sent to anoint a scornful Athenian, finds Lysander asleep beside Hermia and does the same.
Original
Churl, upon thy eyes I throw
All the power this charm doth owe.
When thou wakest, let love forbid
Sleep his seat on thy eyelid:
So awake when I am gone;
For I must now to Oberon.
(Puck, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Upon your eyes, and with this motion,
Goes the power of this potion.
When you wake, love won’t permit
To let you sleep again one bit.
And so, wake up when I am gone;
For I must go to Oberon.
He has the wrong man, and the wrong man wakes, sees Helena, and loves her. Puck’s spell is a nursery rhyme with a hex in it; the short lines and heavy rhymes mark it as fairy speech, quite different from the pentameter the mortals use, and the audience learns to hear the register change whenever magic is being done. Oberon’s charm on Demetrius, an act later, is in the same metre and a kinder tone: the woman is to shine like Venus and the man is to beg.
What the spells share is a limit. They work on the eyes, and only on the eyes. Lysander wakes with his intelligence intact and uses it to prove that reason, not magic, has changed his mind. The flower cannot make anyone stupid, brave or good. It can only change what they are looking at, and the play, which is about looking, thinks that is enough.
Thou Art Translated
The one physical transformation in the play is done for a laugh. Puck finds the workmen rehearsing near Titania’s bower, picks out the most self-important of them, and fits Bottom with an ass’s head. His report to Oberon is precise about the choice and delighted with the result.
Original
The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,
Who Pyramus presented, in their sport
Forsook his scene and entered in a brake
When I did him at this advantage take,
An ass's nole I fixed on his head...
(Puck, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The biggest fool within that bunch of twits,
Who’s playing Pyramus within their skits,
Retreated from his scene into a bush
Where I did take my chance and on him push
A donkey’s head, which I firmly applied.
Quince’s word for what has happened is "translated", and it is the right one. Bottom has been carried across into another shape without being changed inside it. He has the same voice, the same confidence and the same good manners with the head as without, plus a new itch and a taste for hay. When Titania wakes and loves him, he observes mildly that she has no reason to, and asks the way out of the wood.
That is the play’s deepest joke about magic. Its most spectacular effect is wasted on the one man it cannot alter, and the fairy queen, who is not transformed at all, is the one who loses herself. The theme of dreams and reality is where the play files the difference: Bottom wakes knowing something happened, and cannot say what; Titania wakes and is told she dreamed.
Spirits of Another Sort
The play is careful about what kind of magic this is. When Puck warns that dawn is near and that ghosts and damned spirits must hurry back to their graves, Oberon draws a line between his fairies and them.
Original
But we are spirits of another sort:
I with the morning's love have oft made sport,
And, like a forester, the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.
(Oberon, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But we are spirits made a different way:
For often I’ve enjoyed the break of day,
And, like a woodman, through the trees I wander
Until the red horizon, glowing yonder,
Forms sunbeams on the ocean to behold,
And turns the salt-green water into gold.
Oberon can walk the wood at sunrise and has often done it. The fairies belong to the morning as well as the night, and the description of the sun turning the sea to gold is offered as proof. Whatever has been done in the dark, it is not witchcraft, and the audience, which in the 1590s took witchcraft seriously, is reassured before the play asks it to accept a fairy blessing on a Christian marriage bed.
The reassurance matters because the magic has been, at moments, ugly. A husband has drugged his wife into loving a beast; a servant has driven two young men through briars in the dark; a queen has been robbed while enchanted. The theme of order and chaos needs the fairies to be benevolent by the end, and Oberon’s speech is where the play decides they are. The counter-charm that follows, Dian’s bud over Cupid’s flower, is spoken as a blessing, and every spell but one is undone.
"The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817
Key Quotes on Magic and Illusion
Quote 1
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight...
(Oberon, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I know a grassy bank where wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
And luscious honeysuckle offers shade,
Whilst roses share the sweet bouquet they’ve made.
And there, sometimes, Titania sleeps at night,
Lulled by the flowers dancing with delight...
Quote Analysis: Oberon describing the place where Titania sleeps. The lines are among the most quoted in Shakespeare, and it is worth remembering what they are for: he is telling Puck where to find his wife so that he can drug her. The beauty of the description and the meanness of the purpose sit side by side without apology, and that is the play’s method with magic throughout. Notice how the bank is built up flower by flower until the verse is over-canopied. Magic in this play grows; it is not conjured.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep;
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.
(Titania, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’m not just any spirit, quite benign;
The summer waits upon each whim of mine;
And I do love you: therefore, come with me;
My fairies will all serve you faithfully,
And from the sea, fetch gems and precious metals
And sing while you’re asleep on flattened petals;
And I’ll remove your foul mortality
So that you’ll be a spirit, just like me.
Quote Analysis: Titania promising Bottom a transformation of his own. Summer waits on her; she will give him fairies, jewels and music; and she will purge his mortal grossness until he moves like a spirit of the air. It is the most ambitious spell proposed in the play, and it is never cast. Bottom stays exactly as gross as he was, eats his oats and falls asleep. The fairy queen’s magic, at its most generous, is defeated by a weaver who simply does not want it.
I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier:
Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.
(Puck, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll follow you and lead you folk around,
Through bushes, hedges, thickets and a bog:
Sometimes I’ll be a horse, sometimes a hound,
A headless bear, a fire, sometimes a hog;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.
Quote Analysis: Puck chasing the terrified workmen through the wood. The speech is a list of shapes, horse, hound, hog, headless bear, fire, and the verse gallops to keep up. This is the freedom of the fairy world set against the plodding literalness of the men who need a man to play Wall and another to carry a lantern for Moonshine. Puck is a shape-changer in a play whose mortals cannot even imagine a lion without an explanation. The two kinds of theatre, the magical and the mechanical, are colliding in one thicket.
Be as thou wast wont to be;
See as thou wast wont to see:
Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower
Hath such force and blessed power.
(Oberon, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Go back to how you used to be
And see things like you used to see:
Diana’s sap beats Cupid’s flower
With more force and holy power.
Quote Analysis: The counter-charm that frees Titania. Dian’s bud, the herb of chastity, cancels Cupid’s flower, and the balance of the two plants is the play’s whole moral economy in four lines: desire and restraint, each with its own remedy. Oberon speaks it as a blessing, and it is the first tender thing he has said to his wife. The magic that humiliated her is the magic that restores her, and the play does not pretend the two are different. It only changes the tone.
Key Takeaways
- A Flower, Not a Spell Book: The whole apparatus of the play's magic is a plant wounded by Cupid's arrow, and a king who knows where it grows.
- It Works on the Eyes: The juice changes what a sleeper loves and nothing else; Lysander keeps his reason and uses it to defend the spell.
- The Untransformed Ass: Bottom's head is the play's one physical transformation, and it is wasted on the one man it cannot change inside.
- Spirits of Another Sort: Oberon insists the fairies are not damned spirits; the play needs them benevolent before they bless the marriage bed.
Study Questions and Analysis
Where does the love-in-idleness flower come from?
From a miss. Oberon tells Puck that he once saw Cupid, flying between the moon and the earth, take aim at a virgin queen and loose an arrow that should have pierced a hundred thousand hearts. The moon’s beams quenched it, and the queen passed on:
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
(Oberon, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To leave the royal virgin unaffected,
To ponder her virginity unswayed.
The arrow fell on a white flower and turned it purple, and the flower’s juice now does what the arrow could not. Love-in-idleness is the country name for the pansy, and the play’s magic is, at bottom, a hedgerow weed.
The "fair vestal throned by the west" is almost certainly Elizabeth I, and Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), noticed the shape of the myth: the Queen escapes love, and the instrument of her escape becomes the instrument of everyone else’s subjection. "Thus, ironically," he wrote, "the vestal’s very freedom from fancy guarantees the subjections of others." Sukanta Chaudhuri, in the Arden third series edition (2017), calls the passage Oberon’s unmissable compliment to the Queen. The compliment is that Elizabeth alone is beyond the play’s magic. The joke, if it is one, is that the play she may have watched is full of women who are not.
What can the fairies’ magic actually do?
Less than it seems. The play’s fairies can travel at impossible speed, become invisible, change shape, mimic voices, raise fog, put mortals to sleep and wake them, and change what a sleeper loves. What they cannot do is change anyone’s nature. Puck’s account of his own powers is a list of practical jokes:
And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.
(Puck, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And sometimes I hide in a lady’s bowl,
Disguised as a crab-apple, hidden deep,
And when she drinks, up to her lips I peep,
And on her wrinkled neck, I spill her ale.
A crab-apple in a bowl, a stool pulled from under an old woman: the tricks are small, physical and funny. The fairy king’s magic is grander only in its object. He can make his queen love an ass, but he cannot make her stop wanting the changeling boy; he has to take the boy while she is distracted.
Samuel Johnson (1765) observed that fairies in Shakespeare’s time "were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser’s poem had made them great", and the play draws on both: Puck is the hobgoblin of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), whom "your grandams maides" fed with bowls of milk, and Oberon and Titania are the sovereigns of a court. William Hazlitt (1817) drew the line that matters: "Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists; but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies." The magic in this play has no moral programme. It is an appetite for mischief with a king’s resources, and its limits are the limits of a joke.
Is the magic in the play good or evil?
The play works hard to make it neither. Its worst act is a husband drugging his wife into loving a beast, and the play lets us see him enjoy it; its kindest act is the rescue of Helena, whom Oberon has no reason to help. The same flower does both, and the same king who planned the humiliation is the one who, watching it, begins to regret it:
Her dotage now I do begin to pity:
For, meeting her of late behind the wood,
Seeking sweet favours from this hateful fool...
(Oberon, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’m starting to feel pity for her fondness,
For recently I met her in the wood
As she was picking flowers for this dumbass...
The pity is real and it arrives after the victory. Oberon takes the boy first and lifts the spell second, and the counter-charm he then speaks, Dian’s bud over Cupid’s flower, is a blessing. He is neither a witch nor a saint but a power, and the play is interested in what power does when it is crossed.
Critics have found the balance differently. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), read the wood as a place of nightmare in which the magic strips the lovers of their manners and shows them what they want; for Kott the flower is a truth serum. C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), read the same magic as the play’s holiday machinery, the "release" that leads to "clarification", with the fairies as the spirits of a May game rather than agents of anything dark. Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), suggested that the audience is obliged to treat the whole play as a benevolent dream, and the fairies’ last act, blessing the bride-beds against moles, hare lips and scars, is where that benevolence is finally established. The theme of order and chaos needs the magic to be good by the end, and the play arranges it, without quite denying what came before.
Why is Bottom the only mortal physically transformed?
Because he is the only one who does not need to be. The lovers are changed by having their eyes anointed; Bottom is changed by having a head put on him, and the difference is exact. The lovers’ magic works from inside and they do not know it is there; Bottom’s works from outside and everyone can see it but him. When Snout tells him he is changed, he assumes it is a joke at his expense:
What do you see? You see an asshead of your own, do you?
(Bottom, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What do you see? You see you’ve got an asshead of your own, don’t you?
The pun is the play’s: to make an ass of someone is exactly what has been done, and Bottom cannot see it because it is his own head. Behind the joke lies Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, translated by William Adlington in 1566, in which a man turned into a donkey is loved by a woman, and Shakespeare seems to have known it.
Samuel Johnson (1765) suggested drily that "Bottom was perhaps the head of a rival house, and is therefore honoured with an Ass’s head." Jan Kott (1964) read the animal as an emblem of sexual potency rather than stupidity. William Hazlitt (1817) was struck by the stage problem: "Bottom’s head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage, it is an ass’s head, and nothing more." All three notice the same thing from different sides. The play’s one visible piece of magic is a costume, and the man wearing it is unchanged. That is either a limit on the fairies’ power or a compliment to Bottom, and the play, which gives him its deepest speech about the limits of understanding, seems to mean the second.
What is the connection between magic and theatre in the play?
They are made of the same materials, and the play keeps saying so. Puck watching the workmen rehearse decides to be "an auditor; an actor too, perhaps"; Oberon calls his fairies "shadows", which is Theseus’s word for actors; and when Puck closes the play he uses the word for the whole company:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
(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.
The audience has watched men on a bare afternoon stage become fairies, a wood and a queen, with no more apparatus than Oberon’s flower. The play’s magic is a metaphor for its own method, and the epilogue makes the metaphor explicit: what you have seen was a vision, and you may call it a dream.
William Hazlitt (1817) thought the connection was the reason the play could not be staged: "The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime", because "Poetry and the stage do not agree well together"; fairies six feet high, he said, are incredible. He was reviewing a Covent Garden spectacle, and the modern theatre has proved him wrong by going the other way. Peter Brook’s 1970 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company played the magic in a white box with trapezes and spinning plates, the tricks done in plain sight, and the fairies’ power was the actors’ skill. David P. Young, in Something of Great Constancy (1966), contrasted the fairies’ magic with the workmen’s theatre, in which nothing can be presented without being explained; the mechanicals, he wrote, "are far too ambitious in their dramatic metaphors". The theme of art and theatre is the other side of this one. The fairies make illusions the audience accepts without explanation; the workmen explain every illusion until it fails; and the play is both at once.
Why does Oberon say the fairies are "spirits of another sort"?
Because Puck has just described the alternative. Warning that dawn is coming, Puck says that ghosts and the spirits of the damned, buried at crossroads and in rivers, are already hurrying back to their wormy beds for fear the day will see their shame:
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They wilfully themselves exile from light
And must for aye consort with black-browed night.
(Puck, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For fear the day might see how they behave,
They choose to hide themselves out of the light
And must remain forever in the night.
Oberon’s reply is that his fairies are not like that. He walks the groves at sunrise and has watched the sea turn gold. The exchange separates the play’s magic from the world of witchcraft and damnation that an Elizabethan audience would otherwise have supplied.
The distinction is doing real work. Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which Shakespeare drew on for Puck, was a sceptic’s book, written to argue that most witchcraft was fraud and most fairies nursery bugbears; Scot lists "Robin good-fellowe" among the things of which "we are afraid of our owne shadowes". Shakespeare takes the bugbear and makes him a courtier, and then has his king explain, at the exact moment the play’s magic has been at its darkest, that it belongs to the light. Samuel Johnson (1765) puzzled over why the play is called a midsummer night’s dream "when he so carefully informs us that it happened on the night preceding May day", and the answer may be the same: midsummer night was the night of fairies and enchantments in English folklore, and the title tells the audience what kind of magic to expect before it tells them when. The theme of control and rebellion is not far off. Oberon is claiming, on the fairies’ behalf, the right to rule the night without being judged by it.
Is any of the magic left running at the end?
One spell. Titania is released with Dian’s bud; Lysander is restored by Puck’s herb; Bottom has his head removed. Demetrius was anointed by Oberon on purpose, to love Helena, and nobody takes the juice off his eyes. He goes to the altar enchanted and explains his change of heart to the duke as a sickness he has recovered from.
Catherine Belsey, in her essay for the Folger edition (1993), made the observation that has become standard: "Demetrius still has the love-juice on his eyes, and yet the play gives no indication of a difference between this marriage and the others." The play could have had Puck undo it in a line, and chose not to. Either Shakespeare forgot, which is possible, or the point is that the audience cannot tell an enchanted love from a natural one, and neither can Demetrius.
There is also the blessing. The fairies enter the palace at midnight, after the mortals have gone to bed, and Oberon leads them through every chamber consecrating the marriages with field-dew and promising children without mole, hare lip or scar. It is the last magic in the play and the first that everyone would want. Theseus, who explained an hour earlier that fairies are the invention of seething brains, sleeps through it. The theme of dreams and reality closes on that picture: the sceptic asleep in a house full of the spirits he does not believe in, and Puck stepping forward to tell the audience they may not believe in them either.
