A Midsummer Night'sDream

The primer · part oneWhat actually happens

About four minutes to read. This is the whole play, no Shakespeare required.

Athens. Duke Theseus is about to marry Hippolyta, and a furious old man named Egeus barges in with a complaint: his daughter Hermia refuses to marry the man he picked, Demetrius. She wants Lysander. Under Athenian law, the Duke tells her, she obeys her father, enters a convent, or dies. He gives her four days to decide.

Hermia and Lysander decide to run. They tell Hermia's best friend Helena — who is hopelessly, humiliatingly in love with Demetrius — and Helena promptly tells Demetrius, hoping for a scrap of gratitude. So all four end up in the woods outside the city on the same night: two eloping, one hunting them, one chasing him.

The woods belong to the fairies, and the fairies are having a domestic. Oberon and Titania, king and queen, are fighting over custody of a boy, and their quarrel has thrown the seasons out of joint. Oberon sends his servant Puck for a magic flower whose juice makes a sleeper fall in love with the first living thing they see on waking. He plans to dose Titania and humiliate her. Seeing Helena get abused by Demetrius, he also tells Puck to dose "the Athenian man" so Demetrius will love her back.

Puck doses the wrong Athenian. Lysander wakes, sees Helena, and drops Hermia instantly. Oberon tries to fix it by dosing Demetrius himself — who also wakes to Helena. Now both men adore the woman neither wanted an hour ago, Helena is certain all three friends are running a cruel prank on her, and she and Hermia, friends since childhood, tear each other apart over it. The men go off to fight a duel.

Elsewhere in the same wood, six Athenian tradesmen — the "mechanicals" — are rehearsing a terrible play to perform at the Duke's wedding. Puck, for fun, gives their leading man Bottom the head of a donkey. His friends flee screaming. Bottom, oblivious, sings to keep his spirits up — and wakes Titania, who is besotted on sight and spends the night pampering a confused weaver with a donkey's head while her fairies feed him.

Having got what he wanted from Titania, Oberon relents. Puck fogs the wood, exhausts the duelling men, and lays all four lovers down in one clearing. The spells come off Titania and Lysander. At dawn the hunting party finds the four asleep in the grass; Demetrius announces he loves Helena now; Theseus overrules Egeus, and all three couples marry that day. The mechanicals perform their play, which is gloriously, catastrophically bad, and the court heckles them throughout. The fairies bless the house. Puck steps forward and tells the audience that if they didn't like any of it, they can simply decide they were asleep.

The primer · part twoWhy this one, why forever

Written around 1595, and never really out of season since.

• He made it up. Shakespeare almost always borrowed his plots — from histories, Italian novellas, older plays. Midsummer is one of the very few where the main story appears to be his own invention. He salvaged pieces (Theseus and Hippolyta from Chaucer, the Pyramus and Thisbe story from Ovid, a man-turned-donkey from a Roman novel) but the machine he builds out of them is original.
• It is probably a wedding present. Scholars have long suspected it was written for an aristocratic wedding — the whole play builds toward three marriages and ends with fairies blessing the bedchambers. Which is part of why it works so well as a date.
• The Wedding March is from this play. Mendelssohn wrote an overture for it at seventeen, then a full score in 1842. The march everyone walks out of a wedding to was written for the moment these three couples marry in Act 5. Your wife will enjoy that one.
• Puck is older than Shakespeare. Robin Goodfellow was an existing figure of English folklore — a household spirit, sometimes a devil, by the 1590s a prankster. Shakespeare gave him the personality that stuck, and every mischievous sprite since is downstream of this.
• It is a play about how ridiculous plays are. The mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe is theatre's first great parody of bad theatre — actors who explain the plot before performing it, a man playing a wall, another playing moonlight, a lion who reassures the ladies he isn't real. It's still funny four centuries later, which is a strange thing for a joke to survive.
• Directors love it because it can be anything. Fairies as Victorian children, as punks, as circus acrobats. Peter Brook's 1970 staging put it in a white box with trapezes and is still argued about as the most influential Shakespeare production of the last century. Nobody stages this play the same way twice.
• It was built for a night like tonight. The play is set outdoors, at night, in a wood, in midsummer — and it keeps talking about the moon. Performed in a park at dusk, half the scenery is real. This is not a play that's been moved outside; it's a play finally in the right room.

The primer · part threeThings worth noticing

Structure to hang onto, plus five things you can say afterwards that aren't "that was fun."

Three worlds, one wood

The play runs on three groups that don't belong to each other: the court (Athens, daylight, law, order), the fairies (the wood, night, appetite, no rules), and the workmen (rehearsing, hopeless, entirely sincere). The whole play is those three colliding in the dark and then untangling by morning. If you lose the thread, just ask which group you're watching — the answer is usually obvious from the costumes.

Athens is rigid, the wood is not

Watch how the language changes. In Athens people speak in tight rhyming couplets and formal verse; in the wood the verse loosens, the fairies sing, and the workmen speak flat prose. You don't have to catch the words to hear it happening.

There is a dark seam under the comedy

The play opens with a father asking the state to execute his daughter for choosing her own husband. Theseus won Hippolyta in a war before he wooed her, and says so. Oberon drugs his wife and arranges for her to be sexually humiliated in order to win an argument, and she never learns what he did. The comedy is genuinely funny and this is also all true; good productions let you feel both. That tension is most of what there is to talk about at dinner.

Five things to say afterwards

• Demetrius is never cured. Lysander's spell gets removed; Titania's gets removed; Bottom's gets removed. Demetrius is left enchanted, on purpose, and marries Helena that way. The tidy happy ending has one chemical asterisk on it, and Shakespeare puts it there deliberately.
• Bottom is the only human who actually meets the fairies — face to face, for a whole night — and he's the one person incapable of describing it. He wakes up and gets his own senses tangled trying. The play's most profound experience happens to its silliest character.
• The workmen are performing a bad version of Romeo and Juliet. Two lovers, kept apart by their families, who both die by their own hands over a misunderstanding. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around the same time as this. He is mocking his own material, in public, on purpose.
• Titania blames the weather on her marriage. She has a long speech in Act 2 about ruined harvests, drowned fields and confused seasons — all because she and Oberon are fighting. England had genuinely disastrous wet summers in the mid-1590s, and the first audiences would have heard their own miserable year described from the stage.
• Puck's last speech puts you in the play. He tells the audience that if the show offended them, they should think of it as a dream they've just had. It's a joke, and it's also the play quietly arguing that watching a play and dreaming are the same activity.

The primer · part fourLines you'll hear, in plain English

You already know two or three of these. You just didn't know they were from here.

Cheat sheet · who's whoSixteen people, four groups

Learn the four lovers and you're fine. Everyone else announces themselves.

Cheat sheet · running orderScene by scene

Skim before it starts. Glance at it in the interval. Don't read it in the dark during the show — you'll miss the good bits.

Cheat sheet · emergencyIf you lose the thread

Cheat sheet · word listThe words that trip people up

Twenty words do most of the damage. Learn these and the fog thins considerably.

anon

in a moment / coming right up

ere

before

wherefore

why (not "where")

hie

hurry

marry

well! / indeed (a filler word)

an / and

if

but

only

fair

beautiful

gentle

noble, well-born

sirrah

"buddy" — said to an inferior

morrow

morning

methinks

I think

would

wish (as in "I would he were gone")

dote

adore obsessively, past all sense

translated

transformed, changed shape

changeling

a child swapped or stolen by fairies

rude

rough, unskilled (not impolite)

mechanicals

manual workers

nuptial

wedding

wood

forest — but also "mad," which is a pun Shakespeare uses on purpose in Act 2

fond

foolish, as much as affectionate

shadows

actors (and also spirits) — key to Puck's last speech

Before you goTen minutes of clips

Watch the first two and you'll recognise the two biggest moments live.

Links go to YouTube and were live when this was put together — if one has moved, searching the clip title usually finds it.