A Midsummer Night's Dream

First performed in the mid-1590s, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy of love, illusion and enchantment, in which the boundaries between waking life and the dream world grow delightfully uncertain. In an enchanted wood outside Athens, four young lovers become entangled in shifting affections, while the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania quarrel over a changeling child, drawing the mischievous Puck into their dispute. Meanwhile, a company of amateur actors rehearses a play for the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, with increasingly absurd results. As magic unsettles reason and desire refuses to follow its appointed course, Shakespeare brings together courtly ceremony, romantic confusion and earthy theatrical humour.

Among Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, the play moves effortlessly between the human and the supernatural, exploring the capricious nature of love, the imaginative power of theatre and the uneasy relationship between order and freedom. Its moonlit forest becomes a place where social distinctions dissolve, identities shift and the impossible briefly seems entirely natural. Beneath its lightness lies a subtle understanding of how desire can transform our perception of the world, while its play-within-a-play gently celebrates the ingenuity and folly of theatrical performance itself. Centuries after its first appearance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enduring expression of Shakespeare’s inventive genius, equally at home on the stage, on the page and in the imagination.

From the book

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

On A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream