A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare's comedy of lovers lost in an enchanted wood, bewitched by fairy quarrels and rehearsing rustics.

Specifications & Metrics

author

William Shakespeare

type

Comedy

era

Elizabethan (c. 1595–1596)

language

Early Modern English

setting

Athens and an enchanted forest

source text

Classical sources (Apuleius, Plutarch) and English fairy lore

acts

5 acts

Relative Scale in Plays

Core Principles & Analysis

• Written in the mid-1590s, joining four plot strands from Greek legend and English fairy lore.
• The mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe play parodies tragic romance inside comedy.
• It is among the most staged and adapted of all Shakespeare's comedies.

Sources

• Wikipedia: A Midsummer Night's Dream