A MidSummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William
Shakespeare in 1595/96. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of
Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons.
These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six
amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the
fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is
one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed
across the world.
It is unknown exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was
written or first performed, but on the basis of topical references and an
allusion to Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion, it is usually dated 1595 or early
1596. Some have theorised that the play might have been written for an
aristocratic wedding (for example that of Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley),
while others suggest that it was written for the Queen to celebrate the feast
day of St. John. No concrete evidence exists to support this theory. In any
case, it would have been performed at The Theatre and, later, The Globe. Though
it is not a translation or adaptation of an earlier work, various sources such
as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" served as
inspiration. According to John Twyning, the play's plot of four lovers
undergoing a trial in the woods was intended as a "riff" on Der
Busant, a Middle High German poem.
According to Dorothea Kehler, the writing period can be
placed between 1594 and 1596, which means that Shakespeare had probably already
completed Romeo and Juliet and had yet to start working on The Merchant of
Venice. The play belongs to the early-middle period of the author, when
Shakespeare devoted his attention to the lyricism of his works.
According to De Vere Family lore (which may or may not
actually be true), the wedding of Elizabeth De Vere to William Stanley, Sixth
Earl of Derby, on June 26, 1594, at the Court of Greenwich, and occurring in
the presence of Queen Elizabeth, this was the event to occasion Shakespeare's
first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The play consists of four interconnecting plots, connected by
a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen,
Hippolyta, which is set simultaneously in the woodland and in the realm of
Fairyland, under the light of the moon.
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