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Fairy William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream
A fairy (also fay, fae, fair folk; from faery, faerie, "realm of the fays") is a type of mythical being or legendary creature in European folklore, a form of spirit, often described as metaphysical, supernatural, or preternatural.

Etymology 

According to Thomas Keightley, the word "fairy" derives from the Latin fata, and is from the Old French form faerie, describing "enchantment". Other forms are the Italian fata, and the Provençal "fada". In old French romance, "fee" was a woman skilled in magic, and who knew the power and virtue of words, of stones, and of herbs.[http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/sft/sft07.htm Kready, Laura. A Study of Fairy Tales, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1916]

Faie became Modern English fay. Faierie became fairy, but with that spelling now almost exclusively referring to one of the legendary people, with the same meaning as fay. The word "fairy" was used to in represent an illusion, or enchantment; the land of the Faes; collectively the inhabitants thereof; or an individual such as a fairy knight.

To the word faie was added the suffix -erie (Modern English -(e)ry), used to express either a place where something is found (fishery, nunnery) or a trade or typical activity engaged in (cookery, thievery). In later usage it generally applied to any kind of quality or activity associated with a particular type of person, as in English knavery, roguery, wizardry. In the sense "land where fairies dwell", the distinctive and archaic spellings Faery and Faerie are often used.

The latinate fay is not to be confused with the unrelated (Germanic)  fey, meaning "fated to die". 

Various folkloristic traditions refer to them euphemistically, by names such as wee folk, good folk, people of peace, fair folk (Welsh tylwyth teg), etc. 

Historical development 

Sometimes the term fairy is used to describe any magical creature, including goblins or gnomes: at other times, the term describes only a specific type of more ethereal creature or sprite.  The concept of "fairy" in the narrow sense is unique to English folklore, conflating Germanic elves with influences from Celtic and Romance (French) folklores, and later made "diminutive" according to the tastes of Victorian era "fairy tales" for children.

Fairies have their historical origin in the conflation of Celtic (Breton, Welsh) traditions in the Middle French  medieval romances. Fairie was in origin used adjectivally, meaning "enchanted" (as in fairie knight, fairie queene), but was used as a name for "enchanted" creatures from as early as the Late Middle English period. In English literature of the Elizabethan era, elves became conflated with the fairies of Romance culture, so that the two terms began to be used interchangeably.

The Victorian and Edwardian eras saw an increase in interest in fairies. The Celtic Revival viewed them as part of Ireland's cultural heritage. Carole Silvers and others suggest that the fascination of English antiquarians arose from a reaction to greater industrialization, and loss of folkways. 

Description 

Fairies are generally described as human in appearance and having magical powers. Diminutive fairies of one kind or another have been recorded for centuries, but occur alongside the human-sized beings; these have been depicted as ranging in size from very tiny up to the size of a human child.  Even with these small fairies, however, their small size may be magically assumed rather than constant.  Some fairies though normally quite small were able to dilate their figures to imitate humans.  On Orkney they were described as short in stature, dressed in dark grey, and sometimes seen in armour. 

Wings, while common in Victorian and later artwork of fairies, are very rare in the folklore; even very small fairies flew with magic, sometimes flying on ragwort stems or the backs of birds.  Nowadays, fairies are often depicted with ordinary insect wings or butterfly wings. In some folklore, fairies have green eyes. Some depictions of fairies either have them wearing some sort of footwear and other depictions of fairies are always barefoot.

Origin 

The early modern fairies do not have any single origin, representing a conflation of disparate elements of folk belief, influenced by literature and speculation.Their origins are less clear in the folklore, being variously dead, or some form of demon, or a species completely independent of humans or angels.  The folkloristic or mythological elements combine Celtic, Germanic and Greco-Roman elements. Folklorists have suggested that their actual origin lies in religious beliefs that lost currency with the advent of Christianity.  These explanations are not necessarily incompatible, and they may be traceable to multiple sources.

Christian mythology 

One Christian belief held that fairies were a class of "demoted" angels.  One popular story described how, when the angels revolted, God ordered the gates of heaven shut: those still in heaven remained angels, those in hell became demons, and those caught in between became fairies.  Others suggested that the fairies, not being good enough, had been thrown out of heaven, but they were not evil enough for hell.  This may explain the tradition that they had to pay a "teind" or tithe to hell: as fallen angels, though not quite devils, they could be seen as subjects of the devil.  For a similar concept in Persian mythology, see Peri.

Demoted pagan deities 

Another incorrect theory is that the fairies were originally worshiped as minor goddesses, such as nymphs or tree spirits,   but with the coming of Christianity, they lived on, in a dwindled state of power, in folk belief. In this particular time, fairies were reputed by the church as being 'evil' beings. Many beings who are described as deities in older tales are described as "fairies" in invented VIctorian writings. Victorian inventions of mythology, which accounted for all gods as metaphors for natural events that had come to be taken literally, explained them as metaphors for the night sky and stars.  This entire Victorian view has been debunked and refuted and is now considered by scholars an antiquated and incorrect view. 

Yet another belief was that the fairies were demons entirely.  This belief became much more popular with the growth of Puritanism.  The hobgoblin, once a friendly household spirit, became a wicked goblin.  Dealing with fairies was in some cases considered a form of witchcraft and punished as such in this era.  Disassociating himself from such evils may be why Oberon, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, carefully observed that neither he nor his court feared the church bells. 

Spirits of the dead 

One popular belief was that they were the dead.  This noted that many common points of belief, such as the same legends being told of ghosts and fairies, the sídhe in actuality being burial mounds, it being dangerous to eat food in both Fairyland and Hades, and both the dead and fairies living underground.  Diane Purkiss observes an equating of fairies with the untimely dead who left "unfinished lives".  One tale recounted a man caught by the fairies, who found that whenever he looked steadily at one, the fairy was a dead neighbor of his.  This was among the most common beliefs expressed by those who believed in fairies, although many of the informants would express the belief with some doubts. 

A hidden people 

At one time it was a common belief was that fairy folklore evolved from folk memories of a prehistoric race. It was suggested that newcomers drove out the original inhabitants, and the memories of this defeated, hidden people developed into the fairy beliefs we have today. Proponents of this theory claimed to find support in the tradition that of cold iron as a charm against the fairies, which was viewed as a cultural memory of invaders with iron weapons displacing inhabitants had only flint and were therefore easily defeated. Some 19th-century archaeologists thought they had found underground rooms in the Orkney islands resembling the Elfland in Childe Rowland.  However the idea of a fallen vanquished race in hiding has fallen out of favour with scholars.

In popular folklore, flint arrowheads from the Stone Age were attributed to the fairies as "elf-shot".  Their green clothing and underground homes were credited to their need to hide and camouflage themselves from hostile humans, and their use of magic a necessary skill for combating those with superior weaponry. In Victorian beliefs of evolution, cannibalism among "ogres" was attributed to memories of more savage races, still practicing it alongside "superior" races that had abandoned it. 

Elementals 

Another belief is that the fairies were an intelligent species, distinct from humans and angels.  In alchemy in particular they were regarded as elementals, such as gnomes and sylphs, as described by Paracelsus.  This is uncommon in folklore, but accounts describing the fairies as "spirits of the air" have been found.  The belief in their angelic nature was common in Theosophist circles. 

Tuatha Dé Danann 

The Tuath(a) Dé Danann are a race of supernaturally-gifted people in Irish mythology. They are thought to represent the main deities of pre-Christian Gaelic Ireland.  Many of the Irish tales of the Tuatha Dé Danann refer to these beings as fairies, though in more ancient times they were regarded as goddesses and gods. The Tuatha Dé Danann were spoken of as having come from islands in the north of the world or, in other sources, from the sky. After being defeated in a series of battles with other otherworldly beings, and then by the ancestors of the current Irish people, they were said to have withdrawn to the sídhe (fairy mounds), where they lived on in popular imagination as "fairies."

They are associated with several Otherworld realms including Mag Mell (the Pleasant Plain), Emain Ablach (the Fortress of Apples or the Land of Promise or the Isle of Women), and Tir na nÓg (the Land of Youth).

Aos Sí 

The aos sí is the Irish term for a supernatural race in Irish and Scottish, comparable to the fairies or elves. They are variously said to be ancestors, the spirits of nature, or goddesses and gods.Evans Wentz, W. Y. (1966, 1990) [http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/ The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries]. Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe Humanities Press ISBN 0-901072-51-6 A common theme found among the Celtic nations describes a race of diminutive people who had been driven into hiding by invading humans. In old Celtic fairy lore the Aos Sí (fairy folk) are immortals living in the ancient barrows and cairns. The Irish banshee (Irish Gaelic bean sí or Scottish Gaelic bean shìth, which both mean "woman of the fairy mound") is sometimes described as a ghost. 

In the 1691 The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Reverend Robert Kirk, minister of the Parish of Aberfoyle, Stirling, Scotland, wrote:

These Siths or Fairies they call Sleagh Maith or the Good People...are said to be of middle nature between Man and Angel, as were Daemons thought to be of old; of intelligent fluidous Spirits, and light changeable bodies (lyke those called Astral) somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud, and best seen in twilight. These bodies be so pliable through the sublety of Spirits that agitate them, that they can make them appear or disappear at pleasure 

Characteristics 

Much of the folklore about fairies revolves around protection from their malice, by such means as cold iron or charms of rowan and herbs, or avoiding offense by shunning locations known to be theirs.  Some pranks ascribed to them, such as tangling the hair of sleepers into "Elf-locks", stealing small items or leading a traveler astray, are generally harmless. But far more dangerous behaviors were also attributed to fairies. Any form of sudden death might stem from a fairy kidnapping, with the apparent corpse being a wooden stand-in with the appearance of the kidnapped person. Consumption (tuberculosis) was sometimes blamed on the fairies forcing young men and women to dance at revels every night, causing them to waste away from lack of rest.  Rowan trees are considered sacred to the fairies. 

Classifications 

In Scottish folklore, fairies are divided into the Seelie Court, the more beneficently inclined (but still dangerous) fairies, and the Unseelie Court, the malicious fairies. While the fairies from the Seelie court enjoyed playing pranks on humans they were usually harmless affairs, compared to the Unseelie court that enjoyed bringing harm to humans as entertainment.

Trooping fairies refer to fairies who appear in groups and might form settlements. In this definition, fairy is usually understood in a wider sense, as the term can also include various kinds of mythical creatures mainly of Celtic origin; however, the term might also be used for similar beings such as dwarves or elves from Germanic folklore. These are opposed to solitary fairies, who do not live or associate with others of their kind. 

Changelings 

A considerable amount of lore about fairies revolves around changelings, fairy children left in the place of stolen human babies.  In particular, folklore describes how to prevent the fairies from stealing babies and substituting changelings, and abducting older people as well.   The theme of the swapped child is common in medieval literature and reflects concern over infants thought to be afflicted with unexplained diseases, disorders, or developmental disabilities. In pre-industrial Europe a peasant family's subsistence frequently depended upon the productive labor of each member, and a person who was a permanent drain on the family's scarce resources could pose a threat to the survival of the entire family.

Protective charms 

In terms of protective charms, wearing clothing inside out,  church bells, St. John's wort, and four-leaf clovers are regarded as effective. In Newfoundland folklore, the most popular type of fairy protection is bread, varying from stale bread to hard tack or a slice of fresh home-made bread. Bread is associated with the home and the hearth, as well as with industry and the taming of nature, and as such, seems to be disliked by some types of fairies. On the other hand, in much of the Celtic folklore, baked goods are a traditional offering to the folk, as are cream and butter. “The prototype of food, and therefore a symbol of life, bread was one of the commonest protections against fairies. Before going out into a fairy-haunted place, it was customary to put a piece of dry bread in one’s pocket.”  In County Wexford, Ireland, in 1882, it was reported that “if an infant is carried out after dark a piece of bread is wrapped in its bib or dress, and this protects it from any witchcraft or evil.” 

Bells also have an ambiguous role; while they protect against fairies, the fairies riding on horseback — such as the fairy queen — often have bells on their harness. This may be a distinguishing trait between the Seelie Court from the Unseelie Court, such that fairies use them to protect themselves from more wicked members of their race.  Another ambiguous piece of folklore revolves about poultry: a cock's crow drove away fairies, but other tales recount fairies keeping poultry. 

While many fairies will confuse travelers on the path, the will o' the wisp can be avoided by not following it. Certain locations, known to be haunts of fairies, are to be avoided; C. S. Lewis reported hearing of a cottage more feared for its reported fairies than its reported ghost.  In particular, digging in fairy hills was unwise. Paths that the fairies travel are also wise to avoid. Home-owners have knocked corners from houses because the corner blocked the fairy path,  and cottages have been built with the front and back doors in line, so that the owners could, in need, leave them both open and let the fairies troop through all night.  Locations such as fairy forts were left undisturbed; even cutting brush on fairy forts was reputed to be the death of those who performed the act.  Fairy trees, such as thorn trees, were dangerous to chop down; one such tree was left alone in Scotland, though it prevented a road being widened for seventy years. 

Other actions were believed to offend fairies. Brownies were known to be driven off by being given clothing, though some folktales recounted that they were offended by inferior quality of the garments given, and others merely stated it, some even recounting that the brownie was delighted with the gift and left with it.  Other brownies left households or farms because they heard a complaint, or a compliment.  People who saw the fairies were advised not to look closely, because they resented infringements on their privacy.  The need to not offend them could lead to problems: one farmer found that fairies threshed his corn, but the threshing continued after all his corn was gone, and he concluded that they were stealing from his neighbors, leaving him the choice between offending them, dangerous in itself, and profiting by the theft. 

Millers were thought by the Scots to be "no canny", owing to their ability to control the forces of nature, such as fire in the kiln, water in the burn, and for being able to set machinery a-whirring. Superstitious communities sometimes believed that the miller must be in league with the fairies. In Scotland fairies were often mischievous and to be feared. No one dared to set foot in the mill or kiln at night as it was known that the fairies brought their corn to be milled after dark. So long as the locals believed this then the miller could sleep secure in the knowledge that his stores were not being robbed. John Fraser, the miller of Whitehill claimed to have hidden and watched the fairies trying unsuccessfully to work the mill. He said he decided to come out of hiding and help them, upon which one of the fairy women gave him a gowpen (double handful of meal) and told him to put it in his empty girnal (store), saying that the store would remain full for a long time, no matter how much he took out. 

It is also believed that to know the name of a particular fairy could summon it to you and force it to do your bidding. The name could be used as an insult towards the fairy in question, but it could also rather contradictorily be used to grant powers and gifts to the user.

Before the advent of modern medicine many physiological conditions were untreatable and when children were born with abnormalities it was common to blame the fairies. 

Legends 

Sometimes fairies are described as assuming the guise of an animal.  In Scotland it was peculiar to the Fairy women to assume the shape of deer; while witches became mice, hares, cats, gulls, or black sheep. In the "The Legend of Knocksheogowna", in order to frighten a farmer who pastured his herd on fairy ground, a Fairy Queen took on the appearance of a great horse, with the wings of an eagle, and a tail like a dragon, hissing loud and spitting fire. Then she would changed into a little man lame of a leg, with a bull's head, and a lambent flame playing round it. 

In the 19th-century child ballad "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight", the elf-knight is a Bluebeard figure, and Isabel must trick and kill him to preserve her life.  Child ballad "Tam Lin" reveals that the title character, though living among the fairies and having fairy powers, was in fact an "earthly knight" and though his life was pleasant now, he feared that the fairies would pay him as their teind (tithe) to hell.

"Sir Orfeo" tells how Sir Orfeo's wife was kidnapped by the King of Faerie and only by trickery and excellent harping ability was he able to win her back. "Sir Degare" narrates the tale of a woman overcome by her fairy lover, who in later versions of the story is unmasked as a mortal. "Thomas the Rhymer" shows Thomas escaping with less difficulty, but he spends seven years in Elfland.  Oisín is harmed not by his stay in Faerie but by his return; when he dismounts, the three centuries that have passed catch up with him, reducing him to an aged man.  King Herla (O.E. "Herla cyning"), originally a guise of Woden but later Christianised as a king in a tale by Walter Map, was said, by Map, to have visited a dwarf's underground mansion and returned three centuries later; although only some of his men crumbled to dust on dismounting, Herla and his men who did not dismount were trapped on horseback, this being one account of the origin of the Wild Hunt of European folklore.  

A common feature of the fairies is the use of magic to disguise appearance. Fairy gold is notoriously unreliable, appearing as gold when paid but soon thereafter revealing itself to be leaves, gorse blossoms, gingerbread cakes, or a variety of other comparatively worthless things. 

These illusions are also implicit in the tales of fairy ointment. Many tales from Northern Europe   tell of a mortal woman summoned to attend a fairy birth — sometimes attending a mortal, kidnapped woman's childbed. Invariably, the woman is given something for the child's eyes, usually an ointment; through mischance, or sometimes curiosity, she uses it on one or both of her own eyes. At that point, she sees where she is; one midwife realizes that she was not attending a great lady in a fine house but her own runaway maid-servant in a wretched cave. She escapes without making her ability known but sooner or later betrays that she can see the fairies. She is invariably blinded in that eye or in both if she used the ointment on both. 

There have been claims by people in the past, like William Blake, to have seen fairy funerals. Allan Cunningham in his Lives of Eminent British Painters records that William Blake claimed to have seen a fairy funeral. "'Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, madam?' said Blake to a lady who happened to sit next to him. 'Never, sir!' said the lady. 'I have,' said Blake, 'but not before last night.' And he went on to tell how, in his garden, he had seen 'a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared." They are believed to be an omen of death.

Literature 

The word "fairy" was used to describe an individual inhabitant of Faerie before the time of Chaucer.

Fairies appeared in medieval romances as one of the beings that a knight errant might encounter. A fairy lady appeared to Sir Launfal and demanded his love; like the fairy bride of ordinary folklore, she imposed a prohibition on him that in time he violated. Sir Orfeo's wife was carried off by the King of Faerie. Huon of Bordeaux is aided by King Oberon.  These fairy characters dwindled in number as the medieval era progressed; the figures became wizards and enchantresses. 

The oldest fairies on record in England were first described by the historian Gervase of Tilbury in the 13th century.

Morgan le Fay, whose connection to the realm of Faerie is implied in her name, in Le Morte d'Arthur is a woman whose magic powers stem from study.  While somewhat diminished with time, fairies never completely vanished from the tradition. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late tale, but the Green Knight himself is an otherworldly being. Edmund Spenser featured fairies in The Faerie Queene.  In many works of fiction, fairies are freely mixed with the nymphs and satyrs of classical tradition,  while in others (e.g., Lamia), they were seen as displacing the Classical beings. 15th-century poet and monk John Lydgate wrote that King Arthur was crowned in "the land of the fairy" and taken in his death by four fairy queens, to Avalon, where he lies under a "fairy hill", until he is needed again. 

Fairies appear as significant characters in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, which is set simultaneously in the woodland and in the realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon  and in which a disturbance of nature caused by a fairy dispute creates tension underlying the plot and informing the actions of the characters. According to Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, the blurring of the identities of fantasy and reality makes possible “that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play”. 

Shakespeare's contemporary, Michael Drayton, features fairies in his Nimphidia; from these stem Alexander Pope's sylphs of The Rape of the Lock, and in the mid-17th century, précieuses took up the oral tradition of such tales to write fairy tales; Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term contes de fée ("fairy tale").  While the tales told by the précieuses included many fairies, they were less common in other countries' tales; indeed, the Brothers Grimm included fairies in their first edition but decided this was not authentically German and altered the language in later editions, changing each Fee ("fairy") to an enchantress or wise woman.  J. R. R. Tolkien described these tales as taking place in the land of Faerie.  Additionally, not all folktales that feature fairies are generally categorized as fairy tales.

The modern depiction of fairies was shaped in the literature of Romanticism during the Victorian era. Writers such as Walter Scott and James Hogg were inspired by folklore which featured fairies, such as the Border ballads. This era saw an increase in the popularity of collecting of fairy folklore and an increase in the creation of original works with fairy characters.  In Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Puck holds to scorn the moralizing fairies of other Victorian works.  The period also saw a revival of older themes in fantasy literature, such as C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, which, while featuring many such classical beings as fauns and dryads, mingles them freely with hags, giants, and other creatures of the folkloric fairy tradition.  Victorian flower fairies were popularized in part by Queen Mary’s keen interest in fairy art and by British illustrator and poet Cicely Mary Barker's series of eight books published in 1923 through 1948. Imagery of fairies in literature became prettier and smaller as time progressed.  Andrew Lang, complaining of "the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms" in the introduction to The Lilac Fairy Book, observed that "These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed." 

A story of the origin of fairies appears in a chapter about Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie's 1902 novel The Little White Bird, and was incorporated into his later works about the character. Barrie wrote, "When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies."  Fairies are seen in Neverland, in Peter and Wendy, the novel version of J. M. Barrie's famous Peter Pan stories, published in 1911, and its character Tinker Bell has become a pop culture icon. When Peter Pan is guarding Wendy from pirates, the story says, "After a time he fell asleep, and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on their way home from an orgy. Any of the other boys obstructing the fairy path at night they would have mischiefed, but they just tweaked Peter's nose and passed on." 

In art 

Images of fairies have appeared as illustrations, often in books of fairy tales, as well as in photographic-based media and sculpture. Some artists known for their depictions of fairies include Cicely Mary Barker, Arthur Rackham, Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Amy Brown, David Delamare, Meredith Dillman, Jasmine Becket-Griffith, Warwick Goble, Kylie InGold, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, Myrea Pettit, Florence Harrison, Suza Scalora, Nene Thomas, Gustave Doré, Rebecca Guay and Greta James.

The Fairy Doors of Ann Arbor, MI are small doors installed into local buildings. Local children believe these are the front doors of fairy houses, and in some cases, small furniture, dishes, and various other things can be seen beyond the doors.

The Victorian era was particularly noted for fairy paintings. The Victorian painter Richard Dadd created paintings of fairy-folk with a sinister and malign tone. Other Victorian artists who depicted fairies include John Atkinson Grimshaw, Joseph Noel Paton, John Anster Fitzgerald and Daniel Maclise.  Interest in fairy-themed art enjoyed a brief renaissance following the publication of the Cottingley Fairies photographs in 1917 and a number of artists turned to painting fairy themes.

Cottingley Fairies 

The Cottingley Fairies photographs in 1917 (revealed by the "photographers" in 1981 to have been faked) were originally publicized by Theosophists, many of whom believed them to be real. In the teachings of Theosophy, Devas, the equivalent of angels, are believed to help to guide the operation of the processes of nature such as the process of evolution and the growth of plants. Smaller, less important, evolutionarily undeveloped minor angels are called nature spirits, elementals, and fairies. 

E. L. Gardner likened fairies to butterflies, but whose function was to provide an essential link between the energy of the sun and plants in order to stimulate growth. "That growth of a plant which we regard as the customary and inevitable result of associating the three factors of sun, seed, and soil would never take place if the fairy builders were absent."[http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/cof/cof11.htm Doyle, Arthur Conan. "The Theosophic View of Fairies", The Coming of the Fairies, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1922] He described them as having "...no clean-cut shape normally, and one can only describe them as small, hazy, and somewhat luminous clouds of colour with a brighter spark-like nucleus." William Shakespeare (;  26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English :poet, :playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.; ; . He is often called England's national poet, and the "Bard of Avon".  His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. 

Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, which has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, and religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. 

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.  His early plays were primarily comedies and histories, and these are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, however, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time".The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Sixteenth/Early Seventeenth Century, Volume B, 2012, pg. 1168 

In the 20th and 21st centuries, his works have been repeatedly adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular, and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Life

Early life

William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.  He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.  This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616.  He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son. 

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,  a free school chartered in 1553,  about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,  and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors. 

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.  The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,  and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.  Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.  Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596. 

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the "complaints bill" of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589.  Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".  Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.  Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.  John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.  Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will.  Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area. 

London and theatrical career

It is not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.  By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit:

... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. 

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words,; . but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the so-called "university wits").  The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene's target. As used here, Johannes Factotum ("Jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius". 

Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare's work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s, to just before Greene's remarks.  After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.  After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King's Men. 

In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man,  and in 1597 he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford. 

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.  Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).  The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.  The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played.  In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.  In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.  Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,  though scholars doubt the sources of that information. 

Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.  He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.  By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear. 

Later years and death

Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death".. He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers' petition in 1635 Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men "placed men players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.". However it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609. The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610),  which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time.  Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614. In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v. Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.  In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;  and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.  After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.  His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,  who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. 

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.  He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in "perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted",   not an impossible scenario, since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon/From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room." 

He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,  and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death. 
Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family. 

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna  under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body".  The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.  The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.  Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically.  He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.  Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance. 

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.  The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008: 

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be  man  spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he  moves my bones. 

(Modern spelling: Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, / To dig the dust enclosed here. / Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.)

Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.  In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published. 

Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.  

Plays

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career.  Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however,  and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest period.  His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,  dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.  The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.  The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.  Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,  the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors. 

Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.  A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.  Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.  The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,  the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.  After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.  This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;  and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.  According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other". 

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.  Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".  Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.  The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.  In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.  In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play-offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".  In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,  uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn.  In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot. 

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.  Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.  Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher. 

Performances

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.  After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.  Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest ... and you scarce shall have a room".  When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.  The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. 

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice.  After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.  The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees." 

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.  The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.  He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.  In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

Textual sources

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.  Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.  No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".  Nor did Shakespeare plan or expect his works to survive in any form at all; those works likely would have faded into oblivion but for his friends' spontaneous idea, after his death, to create and publish the First Folio. 

Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.  Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.  In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion. 

Poems

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.  Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,  the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.  Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects.  The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission. 

Sonnets

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.  Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends".  Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.  He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". 

The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.  Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time. 

Style

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.  The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted. 

Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.  No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.  By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.  Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:.

After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".  In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.  In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "... pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air ..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense. The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity. 

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.  Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.  He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.  As Shakespeare's mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre. 

Influence

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.  Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.  Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.  His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes." 

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear.  Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.  Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German.  The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature. 

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English.  Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.  Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech. 

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.  In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy.  The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser.  In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art". 

Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.  Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare".  For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.  By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo. 

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.  In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation.  "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible".  The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.  The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry", claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete. 

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T.S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern.  Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare.  By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies.   In a comprehensive reading of Shakespeare's works and comparing Shakespeare literary accomplishments to accomplishments among leading figures in philosophy and theology as well, Harold Bloom has commented that, "Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St. Augustine. He encloses us, because we see with his fundamental perceptions." 

Works

Classification of the plays

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories and tragedies.  Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both.  No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, Dowden's term is often used.  In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet.  "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays."  The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy. 

Speculation about Shakespeare

Authorship

Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.  Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.  Several "group theories" have also been proposed.  Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution,  but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century. 

Religion

Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when practicing Catholicism in England was against the law.  Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by his father, John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ as to its authenticity.  In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse.  In 1606, the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford. As several scholars have noted, whatever his private views, Shakespeare "conformed to the official state religion", as Park Honan put it.   Also, Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula, and he was a confirmed member of the Church of England, where he was married, his children were baptized, and where he is buried. Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare's religious beliefs. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of belief in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove. 

Sexuality

Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the centuries, some readers have posited that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical,  and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love.  The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons. 

Portraiture

No written contemporary description of Shakespeare's physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,  and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as mis-attributions, repaintings and relabelling of portraits of other people. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare  between 1590 and 1597. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta. 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.

Plot

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. 

The play opens with Hermia, who is in love with Lysander, resistant to her father Egeus' demand that she wed Demetrius, whom he has arranged for her to marry. Helena meanwhile pines unrequitedly for Demetrius. Enraged, Egeus invokes an ancient Athenian law before Duke Theseus, whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death. Theseus offers her another choice: lifelong chastity while worshipping the goddess Artemis as a nun.

Peter Quince and his fellow players Nick Bottom, Francis Flute, Robin Starveling, Tom Snout, and Snug plan to put on a play for the wedding of the Duke and the Queen, "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe".  Quince reads the names of characters and bestows them to the players. Nick Bottom, who is playing the main role of Pyramus, is over-enthusiastic and wants to dominate others by suggesting himself for the characters of Thisbe, the Lion, and Pyramus at the same time. He would also rather be a tyrant and recites some lines of Ercles. Bottom is told by Quince that he would do the Lion so terribly as to frighten the duchess and ladies enough for the Duke and Lords to have the players hanged. Quince ends the meeting with "at the Duke's oak we meet."

In a parallel plot line, Oberon, king of the fairies, and Titania, his queen, have come to the forest outside Athens. Titania tells Oberon that she plans to stay there until she has attended Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding. Oberon and Titania are estranged because Titania refuses to give her Indian changeling to Oberon for use as his "knight" or "henchman", since the child's mother was one of Titania's worshippers. Oberon seeks to punish Titania's disobedience. He calls upon Robin "Puck" Goodfellow, his "shrewd and knavish sprite",  to help him concoct a magical juice derived from a flower called "love-in-idleness", which turns from white to purple when struck by Cupid's arrow. When the concoction is applied to the eyelids of a sleeping person, that person, upon waking, falls in love with the first living thing they perceive. He instructs Puck to retrieve the flower with the hope that he might make Titania fall in love with an animal of the forest and thereby shame her into giving up the little Indian boy. He says, "And ere I take this charm from off her sight,/As I can take it with another herb,/I'll make her render up her page to me." 

Hermia and Lysander have escaped to the same forest in hopes of eloping. Helena, desperate to reclaim Demetrius's love, tells Demetrius about the plan and he follows them in hopes of killing Lysander. Helena continually makes advances towards Demetrius, promising to love him more than Hermia. However, he rebuffs her with cruel insults against her. Observing this, Oberon orders Puck to spread some of the magical juice from the flower on the eyelids of the young Athenian man. Instead, Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, not having actually seen either before, and administers the juice to the sleeping Lysander. Helena, coming across him, wakes him while attempting to determine whether he is dead or asleep. Upon this happening, Lysander immediately falls in love with Helena. Oberon sees Demetrius still following Hermia and is enraged. When Demetrius goes to sleep, Oberon sends Puck to get Helena while he charms Demetrius' eyes. Upon waking up, he sees Helena. Now, both men are in pursuit of Helena. However, she is convinced that her two suitors are mocking her, as neither loved her originally. Hermia is at a loss to see why her lover has abandoned her, and accuses Helena of stealing Lysander away from her. The four quarrel with each other until Lysander and Demetrius become so enraged that they seek a place to duel to prove whose love for Helena is the greater. Oberon orders Puck to keep Lysander and Demetrius from catching up with one another and to remove the charm from Lysander. Lysander returns to loving Hermia, while Demetrius continues to love Helena.

Meanwhile, Quince and his band of six labourers ("rude mechanicals", as they are described by Puck) have arranged to perform their play about Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus' wedding and venture into the forest, near Titania's bower, for their rehearsal. Bottom is spotted by Puck, who (taking his name to be another word for a jackass) transforms his head into that of a donkey. When Bottom returns for his next lines, the other workmen run screaming in terror claiming that they are haunted much to Bottom's confusion since he has no idea what has happened. Determined to await his friends, he begins to sing to himself. Titania, having received the love-potion, is awakened by Bottom's singing and immediately falls in love with him. She lavishes him with attention and presumably makes love to him. While she is in this state of devotion, Oberon takes the changeling. Having achieved his goals, Oberon releases Titania, orders Puck to remove the donkey's head from Bottom, and arranges everything so Helena, Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander will all believe they have been dreaming when they awaken. Puck distracts Lysander and Demetrius from fighting over Helena's love by mimicking their voices and leading them apart. Eventually, all four find themselves separately falling asleep in the glade. Once they fall asleep, Puck administers the love potion to Lysander again, claiming all will be well in the morning.

The fairies then disappear, and Theseus and Hippolyta arrive on the scene, during an early morning hunt. They wake the lovers and, since Demetrius no longer loves Hermia, Theseus overrules Egeus's demands and arranges a group wedding. The lovers decide that the night's events must have been a dream. After they exit, Bottom awakes, and he too decides that he must have experienced a dream "past the wit of man".

In Athens, Theseus, Hippolyta and the lovers watch the six workmen perform Pyramus and Thisbe. The performers are so terrible playing their roles that the guests laugh as if it were meant to be a comedy, and everyone retires to bed. Afterwards, Oberon, Titania, Puck, and other fairies enter, and bless the house and its occupants with good fortune. After all the other characters leave, Puck "restores amends" and suggests to the audience that what they just experienced might be nothing more than a dream.

Characters

The Athenians

*Theseus: Duke of Athens
*Hippolyta: Queen of the Amazons, betrothed to Theseus
*Philostrate: Master of the Revels
*Egeus: father of Hermia, wants her to marry Demetrius
*Hermia: daughter of Egeus, in love with Lysander
*Helena: in love with Demetrius, Hermia's friend
*Lysander: in love with Hermia at first but later loves Helena and then returns to loving Hermia
*Demetrius: initially loves Hermia but later loves Helena
*Spirits 1 & 2 (speak only to Puck and Oberon)

The fairies

*Oberon: Titania's husband and King of the Fairies
*Titania: Oberon's wife and Queen of the Fairies
*Robin Goodfellow/Puck: servant to Oberon
*Peaseblossom: fairy servant to Titania
*Cobweb: fairy servant to Titania
*Moth: fairy servant to Titania
*Mustardseed: fairy servant to Titania
*Blossombum: servant to Oberon
*Tomkey: servant to Oberon and Titania

The mechanicals

*Peter Quince: carpenter, leads the troupe and plays Prologue
*Nick Bottom: weaver, plays Pyramus
*Francis Flute: bellows-mender, plays Thisbe
*Robin Starveling: tailor, plays Moonshine
*Tom Snout: tinker, plays Wall
*Snug: joiner, plays Lion

Sources and date

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.

Publication and text

The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on 8 October 1600 by the bookseller Thomas Fisher, who published the first quarto edition later that year. A second quarto was printed in 1619 by William Jaggard, as part of his so-called False Folio.  The play next appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623. The title page of Q1 states that the play was "sundry times publickely acted" prior to 1600. The first performance known with certainty occurred at Court on 1 January 1605.

Historical criticism

Dorothea Kehler has attempted to trace the criticism of the work through the centuries. The earliest such piece of criticism was a 1662 entry in the private diary of Samuel Pepys. He found the play to be the most ridiculous one he had ever seen. He did, however, admit to liking the dancing involved in the performance he viewed. He also liked the "handsome women" of the cast. The next critic to write on the play was John Dryden, writing in 1677. He was preoccupied with the question of whether fairies should be depicted on theatrical plays, since they did not exist. He concluded that poets should be allowed to depict things which do not exist but derive from popular belief. And fairies are of this sort, as are pigmies and the extraordinary effects of magick. Based on this reasoning, Dryden defended the merits of three fantasy plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest (also written by Shakespeare), and Masque of Witches by Ben Jonson.

Charles Gildon in the early 18th century recommended this play for its beautiful reflections, descriptions, similes, and topics. Gildon thought that Shakespeare drew inspiration from the works of Ovid and Virgil, and that he could read them in the original Latin and not in later translations. James Halliwell-Phillipps, writing in the 1840s, found that there were many inconsistencies in the play, but that it was the most beautiful poetical drama ever written. Henry Austin Clapp, writing in the 1880s, commented on the inconsistency of the time depicted in the play, as it should take place in four days and nights and seems to last less than two. He felt that this added to the unrealistic quality of the play. Horace Howard Furness felt that the apparent inconsistency did not detract from the play's quality. In 1971, Neil Taylor argued that there was a double time-scheme in the play, making it seem to last a minimum of four nights but to also be timeless. In 1977, Anne Paolucci argued that the play lasts five days.

William Duff, writing in the 1770s, also recommended this play. He felt the depiction of the supernatural was among Shakespeare's strengths, not weaknesses. He especially praised the poetry and wit of the fairies, and the quality of the verse involved. His contemporary Francis Gentleman, an admirer of Shakespeare, was much less appreciative of this play. He felt that the poetry, the characterisation, and the originality of the play were its strengths, but that its major weaknesses were a "puerile" (childishly silly and immature) plot and that it consists of an odd mixture of incidents. The connection of the incidents to each other seemed rather forced to Gentleman.

Edward Malone, a Shakespearean scholar and critic of the late 18th century, found another supposed flaw in this particular play, its lack of a proper decorum. He found that the "more exalted characters" (the aristocrats of Athens) are subservient to the interests of those beneath them. In other words, the lower-class characters play larger roles than their betters and overshadow them. He found this to be a grave error of the writer. Malone thought that this play had to be an early and immature work of Shakespeare and, by implication, that an older writer would know better. Malone's main argument seems to derive from the classism of his era. He assumes that the aristocrats had to receive more attention in the narrative and to be more important, more distinguished, and better than the lower class.

Kehler argues that the 19th century found the play receiving more important critical attention. In 1808, August Wilhelm Schlegel had significant critical views on this play. He perceived unity in the multiple plot lines. He noted that the donkey's head is not a random transformation, but reflects Bottom's true nature. He identified the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe as a burlesque of the Athenian lovers. In 1817, William Hazlitt found the play to be better as a written work than a staged production. He found the work to be "a delightful fiction" but when staged, it is reduced to a dull pantomime. He concluded that poetry and the stage do not fit together. Kehler finds the comment to be more of an indication of the quality of the theatrical productions available to Hazlitt, rather than a true indication of the play's supposed unsuitability to the stage. She notes that prior to the 1840s, all stage productions of this play were adaptations unfaithful to the original text.

In 1811-1812, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made two points of criticism about this play. The first was that the entire play should be seen as a dream. Second, that Helena is guilty of "ungrateful treachery" to Hermia. He thought that this was a reflection of the lack of principles in women, who are more likely to follow their own passions and inclinations than men. Women, in his view, feel less abhorrence for moral evil, though they are concerned with its outward consequences. Coleridge was probably the earliest critic to introduce gender issues to the analysis of this play. Kehler dismisses his views on Helena as indications of Coleridge's own misogyny, rather than genuine reflections of Helena's morality.

In 1837, William Maginn produced essays on the play. He turned his attention to the speech of Theseus about "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" and to the response of Hippolyta to it. He regarded Theseus as the voice of Shakespeare himself and the speech as a call of imaginative audiences. He also viewed Bottom as a lucky man on whom Fortune showered favours beyond measure. He was particularly amused by the way Bottom reacts to the love of the Fairy Queen, completely unfazed. Maginn argued that Theseus himself would have "bent in reverent awe" of Titania, while Bottom treats her as if she was a "wench" in the local bar. Finally, Maginn thought that Oberon should not be blamed for the humiliation of Titania, which is the result of an accident. He viewed Oberon as angry with the "caprices" of his queen, but unable to anticipate that her charmed affections would be reserved for a weaver with a donkey's head.

In 1839, the philosopher Hermann Ulrici wrote that the play and its depiction of human life reflected the views of Platonism. In his view, Shakespeare implied that human life is nothing but a dream, suggesting influence from Plato and his followers who thought human reality is deprived of all genuine existence. Ulrici noted the way Theseus and Hippolyta behave here, like ordinary people. He agreed with Malone that this did not fit their stations in life, but viewed this behaviour as an indication of parody about class differences.

In 1849, Charles Knight also wrote about the play and its apparent lack of proper social stratification. He thought that this play indicated Shakespeare's maturity as a playwright, and that its "Thesean harmony" of Athenian society reflects proper decorum of character. He also viewed Bottom as the best-drawn character, with his self-confidence, authority, and self-love. He argued that "Bottom the weaver" stands as a representative of the whole human race. He felt that the work is best appreciated when read as a text, rather than acted on stage. He found the writing to be "subtle and ethereal", and standing above critical analysis and its reductive reasoning.

Also in 1849, Georg Gottfried Gervinus wrote extensively about the play. He denied the theory that this play should be seen as a dream. He argued that it should be seen as an ethical construct and an allegory. He thought that it was an allegorical depiction of the errors of sensual love, which is likened to a dream. In his view, Hermia lacks in filial obedience and acts as if devoid of conscience when she runs away with Lysander. Lysander is also guilty for disobeying and mocking his prospective father-in-law. Pyramus and Thisbe also lack in filial obedience, since they "woo by moonlight" behind their parents' backs. The fairies, in his view, should be seen as "personified dream gods". They represent the caprices of superficial love, and they lack in intellect, feeling, and ethics.

Gervinus also wrote on where the fairyland of the play is located. Not in Attica, but in the Indies. His views on the Indies seem to Kehler to be influenced by Orientalism. He speaks of the Indies as scented with the aroma of flowers and as the place where mortals live in the state of a half-dream. Gervinus denies and devalues the loyalty of Titania to her friend. He views this supposed friendship as not grounded in spiritual association. Titania merely delights in her friend's beauty, her swimming gait, and her powers of imitation. Gervinus further views Titania as an immoral character for not trying to reconcile with her husband. In her resentment, Titania seeks separation from him, which Gervinus blames her for.

Gervinus wrote with elitist disdain about the mechanicals of the play and their acting aspirations. He described them as homely creatures with hard hands and thick heads. They are, in his view, ignorant men who compose and act in plays merely for financial reward. They are not real artists. Gervinus reserves his praise and respect only for Theseus, who he thinks represents the intellectual man. Like several of his predecessors, Gervinus thought that this work should be read as a text and not acted on stage.

In 1863, Charles Cowden Clarke also wrote on this play. Kehler notes he was the husband of famous Shakespearean scholar Mary Cowden Clarke. Charles was more appreciative of the lower-class mechanicals of the play. He commented favourably on their individualisation and their collective richness of character. He thought that Bottom was conceited but good natured, and shows a considerable store of imagination in his interaction with the representatives of the fairy world. He also argued that Bottom's conceit was a quality inseparable from his secondary profession, that of an actor.

In 1872, Henry N. Hudson, an American clergyman and editor of Shakespeare, also wrote comments on this play. Kehler pays little attention to his writings, as they were largely derivative of previous works. She notes, however, that Hudson too believed that the play should be viewed as a dream. He cited the lightness of the characterisation as supporting of his view. In 1881, Edward Dowden argued that Theseus and his reflections on art are central to the play. He also argued that Theseus was one of the "heroic men of action" so central to Shakespeare's theatrical works.

Henry A. Clapp and Henry Howard Furness were both more concerned with the problem of the play's duration, though they held opposing views. In 1887, Denton Jacques Snider argued that the play should be read as a dialectic, either between understanding and imagination or between prose and poetry. He also viewed the play as representing three phases or movements. The first is the Real World of the play, which represents reason. The second is the Fairy World, an ideal world which represents imagination and the supernatural. The third is their representation in art, where the action is self-reflective. Snider viewed Titania and her caprice as solely to blame for her marital strife with Oberon. She therefore deserves punishment, and Oberon is a dutiful husband who provides her with one. For failing to live in peace with Oberon and her kind, Titania is sentenced to fall in love with a human. And this human, unlike Oberon is a "horrid brute".

In 1895-1896, Georg Brandes worked on his own views on the play. He was the last major critic of the 19th century to deal with the work. The 20th century brought new insights into the play. In 1961, Elizabeth Sewell argued that Shakespeare aligns himself not with the aristocrats of the play, but with Bottom and the artisans. It is their task to produce a wedding entertainment, precisely the purpose of the writer on working in this play. Also in 1961, Frank Kermode wrote on the themes of the play and their literary sources. He counted among them fantasy, blind love, and divine love. He traced these themes to the works of Macrobius, Apuleius, and Giordano Bruno. Bottom also briefly alludes to a passage from the First Epistle to the Corinthians by Paul the Apostle, dealing with divine love.

In 1964, R.W. Dent argued against theories that the exemplary model of love in the play is the rational love of Theseus and Hippolyta. He argued that in this work, love is inexplicable. It is the offspring of imagination, not reason. However the exemplary love of the play is one of an imagination controlled and restrained, and avoids the excesses  of "dotage". Genuine love is contrasted with the unrequited love (and dotage) of Demetrius for Hermia, and with the supposed love (and dotage) of Titania for an unworthy object.

Dent also denied the rationality and wisdom typically attributed to Theseus. He reminded his readers that this is the character of Theseus from Greek mythology, a creation himself of "antique fable". Theseus' views on art are far from rational or wise. He can't tell the difference between an actual play and its interlude. The interlude of the play's acting troop is less about the art and more of an expression of the mechanicals' distrust of their own audience. They fear the audience reactions will be either excessive or inadequate, and say so on stage. Theseus fails to get the message.

Also in 1964, Jan Kott offered his own, rather controversial, views on the play. He viewed as main themes of the play violence and "unrepressed animalistic sexuality". Both Lysander and Demetrius are, in his view, verbally brutal lovers, their love interests are exchangeable and objectified. The changeling that Oberon desires is his new "sexual toy". The aristocrats of the play, both mortal and immortal, are promiscuous. As for the Athenian lovers following their night in the forest, they are ashamed to talk about it because that night liberated them from themselves and social norms, and allowed them to reveal their real selves. Other writers of the time wrote in favour of or against Kott's views, though few ignored them.

In 1967, John A. Allen theorised that Bottom is a symbol of the animalistic aspect of humanity. He also thought Bottom was redeemed through the maternal tenderness of Titania, which allowed him to understand the love and self-sacrifice of Pyramus and Thisbe. In 1968, Stephen Fender offered his own views on the play. He emphasised the "terrifying power" of the fairies and argued that they control the play's events. They are the most powerful figures featured, not Theseus as often thought. He also emphasised the ethically ambivalent characters of the play. Finally, Fender noted a layer of complexity in the play. Theseus, Hippolyta, and Bottom have contradictory reactions to the events of the night, and each has partly valid reasons for his/her reactions, implying that the puzzles offered to the play's audience can have no singular answer or meaning.

In 1969, Michael Taylor argued that previous critics offered a too cheerful view of what the play depicts. He emphasised the less pleasant aspects of the otherwise appealing fairies and the nastiness of the mortal Demetrius prior to his enchantment. He argued that the overall themes are the often painful aspects of love and the pettiness of people, which here include the fairies.

In 1970, R.A. Zimbardo viewed the play as full of symbols. The Moon and its phases alluded to in the play, in his view, stand for permanence in mutability. The play uses the principle of discordia concors in several of its key scenes. Theseus and Hippolyta represent marriage and, symbolically, the reconciliation of the natural seasons or the phases of time. Hippolyta's story arc is that she must submit to Theseus and become a matron. Titania has to give up her motherly obsession with the changeling boy and passes through a symbolic death, and Oberon has to once again woo and win his wife. Kehler notes that Zimbardo took for granted the female subordination within the obligatory marriage, social views that were already challenged in the 1960s.

In 1971, James L. Calderwood offered a new view on the role of Oberon. He viewed the king as specialising in the arts of illusion. Oberon, in his view, is the interior dramatist of the play, orchestrating events. He is responsible for the play's happy ending, when he influences Theseus to overrule Egeus and allow the lovers to marry. Oberon and Theseus bring harmony out of discord. He also suggested that the lovers' identities which are blurred and lost in the forest, recall the unstable identities of the actors who constantly change roles. In fact the failure of the artisans' play is based on their chief flaw as actors. They can not lose their own identities to even temporarily replace them with those of their fictional roles.

Also in 1971, Andrew D. Weiner argued that the play's actual theme is unity. The poet's imagination creates unity by giving form to diverse elements, and the writer is addressing the spectator's own imagination which also creates and perceives unity. Weiner connected this unity to the concept of uniformity, and in turn viewed this as Shakespeare's allusion to the "eternal truths" of Platonism and Christianity.

Also writing in 1971, Hugh M. Richmond offered an entirely new view of the play's love story lines. He argued that what passes for love in this play is actually a self-destructive expression of passion. He argued that the play's significant characters are all affected by passion and by a sadomasochistic type of sexuality. This passion prevents the lovers from genuinely communicating with each other. At the same time it protects them from the disenchantment with the love interest that communication inevitably brings. The exception to the rule is Bottom, who is chiefly devoted to himself. His own egotism protects him from feeling passion for anyone else. Richmond also noted that there are parallels between the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, featured in this play, and that of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

In 1972, Ralph Berry argued that Shakespeare was chiefly concerned with epistemology in this play. The lovers declare illusion to be reality, the actors declare reality to be illusion. The play ultimately reconciles the seemingly opposing views and vindicates imagination. Also in 1972, Thomas McFarland argued that the play is dominated by a mood of happiness and that it is one of the happiest literary creations ever produced. The mood is so lovely that the audience never feels fear or worry about the fate of the characters.

In 1974, Marjorie Garber argued that metamorphosis is both the major subject of the play and the model of its structure. She noted that in this play, the entry in the woods is a dream-like change in perception, a change which affects both the characters and the audience. Dreams here take priority over reason, and are truer than the reality they seek to interpret and transform. Also in 1974, Alexander Leggatt offered his own reading of the play. He was certain that there are grimmer elements in the play. But they are overlooked because the audience focuses on the story of the sympathetic young lovers. He viewed the characters as separated into four groups which interact in various ways. Among the four, the fairies stand as the most sophisticated and unconstrained. The contrasts between the interacting groups produce the play's comic perspective.

In 1975, Ronald F. Miller expresses his view that the play is a study in the epistemology of imagination. He focused on the role of the fairies, who have a mysterious aura of evanescence and ambiguity. Also in 1975, David Bevington offered his own reading of the play. He in part refuted the ideas of Jan Kott concerning the sexuality of Oberon and the fairies. He pointed that Oberon may be bisexual and his desire for the changeling boy may be sexual in nature, as Kott suggested. But there is little textual evidence to support this, as the writer left ambiguous clues concerning the idea of love among the fairies. He concluded that therefore their love life is "unknowable and incomprehensible". According to Bevington, the main theme of the play is the conflict between sexual desire and rational restraint, an essential tension reflected throughout the play. It is the tension between the dark and benevolent sides of love, which are reconciled in the end.

In 1979, M. E. Lamb suggested that the play may have borrowed an aspect of the ancient myth of Theseus, the Athenian's  entry into the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. The woods of the play serve as a metaphorical labyrinth, and for Elizabethans the woods were often an allegory of sexual sin. The lovers in the woods conquer irrational passion and find their way back. Bottom with his animal head becomes a comical version of the Minotaur. Bottom also becomes the Ariadne's thread which guides the lovers. In having the new Minotaur rescue rather than threaten the lovers, the classical myth is comically inverted. Theseus
himself is the bridegroom of the play who has left the labyrinth and promiscuity behind, having conquered his passion. The artisans may stand in for the master craftsman of the myth and builder of the Labyrinth, Daedalus. Even Theseus' best known speech in the play, which connects the poet with the lunatic and the lover may be another metaphor of the lover. It is a challenge for the poet to confront the irrationality he shares with lovers and lunatics, accepting the risks of entering the labyrinth.

Also in 1979, Harold F. Brooks agreed that the main theme of the play, its very heart, is desire and its culmination in marriage. All other subjects are of lesser importance, including that of imagination and that of appearance and reality. In 1980, Florence Falk offered a view of the play based on theories of cultural anthropology. She argued that the play is about traditional rites of passage, which trigger development within the individual and society. Theseus has detached himself from myth/imagination and rules Athens harshly. The lovers flee from the structure of his society to the communitas of the woods. The woods serve here as the communitas, a temporary aggregate for persons whose asocial desires require accommodation to preserve the health of society. This is the rite of passage where the asocial can be contained. Falk identified this communitas with the woods, with the unconscious, with the dream space. She argued that the lovers experience release into self-knowledge and then return to the renewed Athens. This is "societas", the resolution of the dialectic between the dualism of communitas and structure.

Also in 1980, R. Chris Hassel, Jr.  offered a Christian view of the play. The experience of the lovers and that of Bottom (as expressed in his awakening speech) teach them a new humility and a healthy sense of folly. They realise that there are things that are true despite the fact that they can not be seen or understood. They just learned a lesson of faith. Hassel also thought that Theseus' speech on the lunatic, the lover, and the poet is an applaud to imagination. But it is also a laughing rejection of futile attempts to perceive, categorise, or express it.

Some of the interpretations of the play have been based on psychology and its diverse theories. In 1972, Alex Aronson argued that Theseus represents the conscious mind and Puck represents the unconscious mind. Puck, in this view, is a guise of the unconscious as a trickster, while remaining subservient to Oberon. Aronson thought that the play explores unauthorised desire and linked it to the concept of fertility. He viewed the donkey and the trees as fertility symbols. The lovers' sexual desires are symbolised in their forest encounters. In 1973, Melvin Goldstein argued that the lovers can not simply return to Athens and wed. First, they have to pass through stages of madness (multiple disguises), and discover their "authentic sexual selves". In 1979, Norman N. Holland applied psychoanalytic literary criticism to the play. He interpreted the dream of Hermia as if it was a real dream. In his view, the dream uncovers the phases of Hermia's sexual development. Her search for options is her defence mechanism. She both desires Lysander and wants to retain her virginity.

In 1981, Mordecai Marcus argued for a new meaning of Eros (Love)  and Thanatos (Death) in this play. In his view, Shakespeare suggests that love requires the risk of death. Love achieves force and direction from the interweaving of the life impulse with the deathward-release of sexual tension. He also viewed the play as suggesting that the healing force of love is connected to the acceptance of death, and vice-versa.

In 1987, Jan Lawson Hinely argued that this play has a therapeutic value. Shakespeare in many ways explores the sexual fears of the characters, releases them, and transforms them. And the happy ending is the reestablishment of social harmony. Patriarchy itself is also challenged and transformed, as the men offer their women a loving equality, one founded on respect and trust. She even viewed Titania's loving acceptance of the donkey-headed Bottom as a metaphor for basic trust. This trust is what enables the warring and uncertain lovers to achieve their sexual maturity. In 1988, Allen Dunn argued that the play is an exploration of the characters' fears and desires, and that its structure is based on a series of sexual clashes.

In 1991, Barbara Freedman  argued that the play justifies the ideological formation of absolute monarchy, and makes visible for examination the maintenance process of hegemonic order.

Themes in the story

Carnivalesque

Both David Wiles of the University of London and Harold Bloom of Yale University have strongly endorsed the reading of this play under the themes of Carnivalesque, Bacchanalia, and Saturnalia.  Writing in 1998, David Wiles stated that: "The starting point for my own analysis will be the proposition that although we encounter A Midsummer Night's Dream as a text, it was historically part of an aristocratic carnival. It was written for a wedding, and part of the festive structure of the wedding night. The audience who saw the play in the public theatre in the months that followed became vicarious participants in an aristocratic festival from which they were physically excluded. My purpose will be to demonstrate how closely the play is integrated with a historically specific upper-class celebration." 

Love

David Bevington argues that the play represents the dark side of love. He writes that the fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titania's eyes, forcing her to fall in love with an ass.  In the forest, both couples are beset by problems. Hermia and Lysander are both met by Puck, who provides some comic relief in the play by confounding the four lovers in the forest. However, the play also alludes to serious themes. At the end of the play, Hippolyta and Theseus, happily married, watch the play about the unfortunate lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy and laugh at it.  Helena and Demetrius are both oblivious to the dark side of their love, totally unaware of what may have come of the events in the forest.

Problem with time

There is a dispute over the scenario of the play as it is cited at first by Theseus that "four happy days bring in another moon". The wood episode then takes place at a night of no moon, but Lysander asserts that there will be so much light in the very night they will escape that dew on the grass will be shining  like liquid pearls. Also, in the next scene, Quince states that they will rehearse in moonlight,  which creates a real confusion. It is possible that the Moon set during the night allowing Lysander to escape in the moonlight and for the actors to rehearse, then for the wood episode to occur without moonlight. Theseus's statement can also be interpreted to mean "four days until the next month". Another possibility is that, since each month there are roughly four consecutive nights that the moon is not seen due to its closeness to the sun in the sky (the two nights before the moment of new moon, followed by the two following it), it may in this fashion indicate a liminal "dark of the moon" period full of magical possibilities. This is further supported by Hippolyta's opening lines exclaiming " And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities."; the thin crescent-shaped moon being the hallmark of the new moon's return to the skies each month. The play also intertwines the Midsummer Eve of the title with May Day, furthering the idea of a confusion of time and the seasons. This is evidenced by Theseus commenting on some slumbering youths, that they "observe The rite of May" (Act 4, Scene 1).

Loss of individual identity

Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, writes of the blurring of the identities of fantasy and reality in the play that make possible "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play".  By emphasising this theme even in the setting of the play, Shakespeare prepares the reader's mind to accept the fantastic reality of the fairy world and its happenings. This also seems to be the axis around which the plot conflicts in the play occur. Hunt suggests that it is the breaking down of individual identities that leads to the central conflict in the story. It is the brawl between Oberon and Titania, based on a lack of recognition for the other in the relationship, that drives the rest of the drama in the story and makes it dangerous for any of the other lovers to come together due to the disturbance of Nature caused by a fairy dispute. Similarly, this failure to identify and to distinguish is what leads Puck to mistake one set of lovers for another in the forest, placing the flower's juice on Lysander's eyes instead of Demetrius'.

Victor Kiernan, a Marxist scholar and historian, writes that it is for the greater sake of love that this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters are made to suffer accordingly: "It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to have dubious effects on its acolytes".  He believes that identities in the play are not so much lost as they are blended together to create a type of haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and more practical ties between characters as a means of coping with the strange world within the forest, even in relationships as diverse and seemingly unrealistic as the brief love between Titania and Bottom: "It was the tidal force of this social need that lent energy to relationships". 

The aesthetics scholar David Marshall draws out this theme even further   by noting that the loss of identity reaches its fullness in the description of the mechanicals and their assumption of other identities. In describing the occupations of the acting troupe, he writes "Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered". In Marshall's opinion, this loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which Marshall points out may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinions on love and marriage. Further, the mechanicals understand this theme as they take on their individual parts for a corporate performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Marshall remarks that "To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part". He claims that the mechanicals understand this and that each character, particularly among the lovers, has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater benefit of the group or pairing. It seems that a desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what quietly moves the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As the primary sense of motivation, this desire is reflected even in the scenery depictions and the story's overall mood.

Ambiguous sexuality

In his essay "Preposterous Pleasures: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream", Douglas E. Green explores possible interpretations of alternative sexuality that he finds within the text of the play, in juxtaposition to the proscribed social mores of the culture at the time the play was written. He writes that his essay "does not (seek to) rewrite A Midsummer Night's Dream as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ... moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy".  Green states that he does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "discontents of civilisation", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not resolve so neatly in real life.  Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality" in the story must be considered in the context of the "culture of early modern England" as a commentary on the "aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order". Aspects of ambiguous sexuality and gender conflict in the story are also addressed in essays by Shirley Garner  and William W.E. Slights  albeit all the characters are played by males.

Feminism

Male dominance is one thematic element found in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander and Hermia escape into the woods for a night where they do not fall under the laws of Theseus or Egeus. Upon their arrival in Athens, the couples are married. Marriage is seen as the ultimate social achievement for women while men can go on to do many other great things and gain societal recognition.  In "The Imperial Votaress", Louis Montrose draws attention to male and female gender roles and norms present in the comedy in connection with Elizabethan culture. In reference to the triple wedding, he says, "The festive conclusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream depends upon the success of a process by which the feminine pride and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and wilful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands."  He says that the consummation of marriage is how power over a woman changes hands from father to husband. A connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn. The juice employed by Oberon can be seen as symbolising menstrual blood as well as the sexual blood shed by virgins. While blood as a result of menstruation is representative of a woman's power, blood as a result of a first sexual encounter represents man's power over women. 

There are points in the play, however, when there is an absence of patriarchal control. In his book Power on Display, Leonard Tennenhouse says the problem in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the problem of "authority gone archaic".  The Athenian law requiring a daughter to die if she does not do her father's will is outdated. Tennenhouse contrasts the patriarchal rule of Theseus in Athens with that of Oberon in the carnivalistic Faerie world. The disorder in the land of the fairies completely opposes the world of Athens. He states that during times of carnival and festival, male power is broken down. For example, what happens to the four lovers in the woods as well as Bottom's dream represents chaos that contrasts with Theseus' political order. However, Theseus does not punish the lovers for their disobedience. According to Tennenhouse, by forgiving the lovers, he has made a distinction between the law of the patriarch (Egeus) and that of the monarch (Theseus), creating two different voices of authority. This distinction can be compared to the time of Elizabeth I, in which monarchs were seen as having two bodies: the body natural and the body politic. Elizabeth's succession itself represented both the voice of a patriarch as well as the voice of a monarch: (1) her father's will which stated that the crown should pass to her and (2) the fact that she was the daughter of a king. 

Religious

It has been well established for two centuries that Puck and Robin Goodfellow are both names for the devil from English folklore. Cena argues that the character of 'Wall' acted by Snout represents the partition that exists between Earth and Heaven and that comes down on the day of Apocalypse. Pyramus and Thisbe are a late Renaissance allegory for Jesus and the Church, and that the source of the names Peter (petros, Greek for a stone), and Quince (quoin, a term for a wedge shaped cornerstone) suggests his identity as St Peter.  The play-within-a-play therefore can be a religious satire. The allegorical dimension was extended to the other characters and demonstrated in performance by the Dark Lady Players in a New York production in March 2007. 

Performance history

17th and 18th centuries

During the years of the Puritan Interregnum when the theatres were closed (1642–60), the comic subplot of Bottom and his compatriots was performed as a droll. Drolls were comical playlets, often adapted from the subplots of Shakespearean and other plays, that could be attached to the acts of acrobats and jugglers and other allowed performances, thus circumventing the ban against drama. When the theatres re-opened in 1660, A Midsummer Night's Dream was acted in adapted form, like many other Shakespearean plays. Samuel Pepys saw it on 29 September 1662 and thought it "the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw ..." 

After the Jacobean/Caroline era, A Midsummer Night's Dream was never performed in its entirety until the 1840s. Instead, it was heavily adapted in forms like Henry Purcell's musical masque/play The Fairy Queen (1692), which had a successful run at the Dorset Garden Theatre, but was not revived. Richard Leveridge turned the Pyramus and Thisbe scenes into an Italian opera burlesque, acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1716. John Frederick Lampe elaborated upon Leveridge's version in 1745. Charles Johnson had used the Pyramus and Thisbe material in the finale of Love in a Forest, his 1723 adaptation of As You Like It. In 1755, David Garrick did the opposite of what had been done a century earlier: he extracted Bottom and his companions and acted the rest, in an adaptation called The Fairies. Frederic Reynolds produced an operatic version in 1816. 

The Victorian stage

In 1840, Madame Vestris at Covent Garden returned the play to the stage with a relatively full text, adding musical sequences and balletic dances. Vestris took the role of Oberon, and for the next seventy years, Oberon and Puck would always be played by women. 

After the success of Madame Vestris' production, 19th-century theatre continued to stage the Dream as a spectacle, often with a cast numbering nearly one hundred. Detailed sets were created for the palace and the forest, and the fairies were portrayed as gossamer-winged ballerinas. The overture by Felix Mendelssohn was always used throughout this period. Augustin Daly's production opened in 1895 in London and ran for 21 performances. The special effects were constructed by the Martinka Magic Company, which was later owned by Houdini.

20th and 21st centuries

Herbert Beerbohm Tree staged a 1911 production with live rabbits.

Max Reinhardt staged A Midsummer Night's Dream thirteen times between 1905 and 1934, introducing a revolving set. After he fled Germany he devised a more spectacular outdoor version at the Hollywood Bowl, in September 1934. The shell was removed and replaced by a forest planted in tons of dirt hauled in especially for the event, and a trestle was constructed from the hills to the stage. The wedding procession inserted between Acts IV and V crossed the trestle with torches down the hillside. The cast included James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney and Victor Jory, and a corps of dancers which included Katherine Dunham and Butterfly McQueen, with Mendelssohn's music.

On the strength of this production, Warner Brothers signed Reinhardt to direct a filmed version, Hollywood's first Shakespeare movie since Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford's Taming of the Shrew in 1929. Rooney (Puck) and De Havilland (Hermia and Zara) were the only holdovers from the Hollywood Bowl cast. James Cagney starred, in his only Shakespearean role, as Bottom. Other actors in the film who played Shakespearean roles just this once included Joe E. Brown and Dick Powell. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was brought from Austria to arrange Mendelssohn's music for the film. He not only used the Midsummer Night's Dream music but also several other pieces by Mendelssohn. Korngold went on to make a Hollywood career, remaining in the U.S. after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.

Director Harley Granville-Barker introduced in 1914 a less spectacular way of staging the Dream: he reduced the size of the cast and used Elizabethan folk music instead of Mendelssohn. He replaced large, complex sets with a simple system of patterned curtains. He portrayed the fairies as golden robotic insectoid creatures based on Cambodian idols. His simpler, sparer staging significantly influenced subsequent productions.

In 1970, Peter Brook staged the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a blank white box, in which masculine fairies engaged in circus tricks such as trapeze artistry. Brook also introduced the subsequently popular idea of doubling Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania, as if to suggest that the world of the fairies is a mirror version of the world of the mortals. British actors who played various roles in Brook's production included Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, John Kane (Puck) and Frances de la Tour (Helena).
Since Brook's production, directors have used their imaginations freely in staging the play. In particular, there has been an increased use of sexuality on stage, as many directors see the palace as a symbol of restraint and repression, while the wood is a symbol of unrestrained sexuality, both liberating and terrifying.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has been produced many times in New York, including several stagings by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park and a production by the Theatre for a New Audience, produced by Joseph Papp at the Public Theater. In 1978, the Riverside Shakespeare Company staged an outdoor production starring Eric Hoffmann as Puck, with Karen Hurley as Titania and Eric Conger as Oberon, directed by company founder Gloria Skurski. There have been several variations since then, including some set in the 1980s.

The University of Michigan's Nichols Arboretum's programme Shakespeare in the Arb has presented a play every summer since 2001. Shakespeare in the Arb has produced A Midsummer Night's Dream three times. These performances  take place in a 123-acre (49.7 hectares) natural setting, with lush woods, a flowing river, and steep hills. The performance takes place in several places, with actors and audience moving together to each setting. "As one critic commented, 'The actors used the vastness of its Arb[oretum] stage to full advantage, making entrances from behind trees, appearing over rises and vanishing into the woods.'" 

Adaptations and cultural references

Literary

St. John's Eve written in 1853 by Henrik Ibsen relies heavily on the Shakespearean play.
Botho Strauß's play The Park (1983) is based on characters and motifs from A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Neil Gaiman's comic series The Sandman uses the play as a focal point in issue #19. In it, Shakespeare and his company perform the play for the real Oberon and Titania and an audience of fairies. The play is heavily quoted in the comic. Shakespeare's son Hamnet Shakespeare appears in the play as the Indian boy. It is strongly hinted that he is later taken away by Titania, much like the changeling in the story. This issue was the first and only comic to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, in 1991. 

Terry Pratchett's book Lords and Ladies (1992) is a parody of the play. 

Michael Gow's play, Away (1986), features inter-textual references to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and opens with a performance of the final part, with the protagonist, Tom, in a role similar to that of Puck.

Musical versions

Henry Purcell
The Fairy-Queen by Henry Purcell consists of a set of masques meant to go between acts of the play, as well as considerable rewriting of the play to be current to 17th century audiences.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn composed a concert overture, inspired by the play, that was first performed in 1827. In 1842, partly because of the fame of the overture, and partly because his employer King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia liked the incidental music that Mendelssohn had written for other plays that had been staged at the palace in German translation, Mendelssohn was commissioned to write incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that was to be staged in 1843 in Potsdam. He incorporated the existing Overture into the incidental music, which was used in most stage versions through the 19th century. The best known of the pieces from the incidental music is the famous Wedding March, frequently used as a recessional in weddings.

The choreographer Marius Petipa, more famous for his collaborations with Tchaikovsky (on the ballets Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty) made another ballet adaptation for the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg with additional music and adaptations to Mendelssohn's score by Léon Minkus. The revival premiered 14 July 1876. English choreographer Frederick Ashton also created a 40-minute ballet version of the play, retitled to The Dream. George Balanchine was another to create a Midsummer Night's Dream ballet based on the play, using Mendelssohn's music.

Between 1917 and 1939 Carl Orff also wrote incidental music for a German version of the play, Ein Sommernachtstraum (performed in 1939). Since Mendelssohn's parents were Jews who converted to Lutheranism, his music had been banned by the Nazi regime, and the Nazi cultural officials put out a call for new music for the play: Orff was one of the musicians who responded. He later reworked the music for a final version, completed in 1964.

Ralph Vaughan Williams
"Over Hill, Over Dale", from Act 2, is the third of the Three Shakespeare Songs set to music by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. He wrote the pieces for a cappella SATB choir in 1951 for the British Federation of Music Festivals, and they remain a popular part of British choral repertoire today.

Benjamin Britten
The play was adapted into an opera, with music by Benjamin Britten and libretto by Britten and Peter Pears. The opera was first performed on 1 June 1960 at Aldeburgh.

Moonwork
The theatre company, Moonwork put on a production of Midsummer in 1999. It was conceived by Mason Pettit, Gregory Sherman and Gregory Wolfe (who directed it). The show featured a rock-opera version of the play within a play, Pyramus & Thisbe with music written by Rusty Magee. The music for the rest of the show was written by Andrew Sherman.

The Donkey Show
The Donkey Show is a disco-era experience based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, that first appeared off Broadway in 1999. 

Other
In 1949 a three-act opera by Delannoy entitled Puck was premiered in Strasbourg. Progressive Rock guitarist Steve Hackett, best known for his work with Genesis, made a classical adaptation of the play in 1997. Hans Werner Henze's Eighth Symphony is inspired by sequences from the play.

The Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts Theatre Department presented the show as a musical adapted/directed by Beverly Blanchette (produced by Marcie Gorman) using the songs of The Moody Blues. The show was called Midsummer and was subsequently performed at Morsani Hall/Straz Performing Arts Center in Tampa, at the Florida State International Thespian Society Festival. Text/Concept Copyright, 9 December 2011.

In 2011, Opera Memphis, Playhouse on the Square, and contemporary a cappella groups DeltaCappella and Riva, premiered Michael Ching's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Opera A Cappella. 

Ballets

* George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, his first original full-length ballet, was premiered by the New York City Ballet on 17 January 1962. It was chosen to open the NYCB's first season at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1964. Balanchine interpolated further music by Mendelssohn into his Dream, including the overture from Athalie.     A film version of the ballet was released in 1966.
* Frederick Ashton created his "The Dream", a short (not full-length) ballet set exclusively to the famous music by Félix Mendelssohn, arranged by John Lanchbery, in 1964. It was created on England's Royal Ballet and has since entered the repertoire of other companies, notably The Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.
* John Neumeier created his full-length ballet Ein Sommernachtstraum for his company at the Hamburg State Opera (Hamburgische Staatsoper) in 1977. Longer than Ashton's or Balanchine's earlier versions, Neumeier's version includes other music by Mendelssohn along with the Midsummer Night's Dream music, as well as music from the modern composer György Sándor Ligeti, and jaunty barrel organ music. Neumeier devotes the three sharply differing musical styles to the three character groups, with the aristocrats and nobles dancing to Mendelssohn, the fairies to Ligeti, and the rustics or mechanicals to the barrel organ.  Neumeier set his A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2005. 
* Elvis Costello composed the music for a full-length ballet Il Sogno, based on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The music was subsequently released as a classical album by Deutsche Grammophon in 2004.

Film adaptations

A Midsummer Night's Dream has been adapted as a film many times. The following are the best known.
* A 1925 German silent film Wood Love directed by Hans Neumann.
* A 1935 film version was directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. The cast included James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, Joe E. Brown as Francis Flute, Dick Powell as Lysander and Victor Jory as Oberon. 
* A 1968 film version was directed by Peter Hall. The cast included Paul Rogers as Bottom, Ian Holm as Puck, Diana Rigg as Helena, Helen Mirren as Hermia, Ian Richardson as Oberon, Judi Dench as Titania, and Sebastian Shaw as Quince. This film stars the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is directed by Peter Hall.
* A 1969 film version was directed by Jean-Christophe Averty. The cast included Jean-Claude Drouot as Oberon, Claude Jade as Helena, Christine Delaroche as Hermia, Marie Versini as Hippolyta, Michel Modo as Flute, Guy Grosso as Quinze.
* A Midsummer Night's dream/Sen noci svatojánské (1959) was directed by Czech animator Jiri Trnka. This was a stop-motion puppet film that followed Shakespeare's story simply with a narrator. (The English language version was narrated by Richard Burton).
* A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) was written and directed by Woody Allen. The plot is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, with some elements from Shakespeare's play.
* Bottom's Dream (1983) was an animated short directed by John Canemaker, showing events of the play from the point of view of Bottom. The film uses selections of Mendelssohn's music, lines from the play, and surreal imagery to convey Bottom's experience.
* Dead Poets Society features the play as a production for which Neil Perry tries out for and wins the role of Puck, in spite of his father's disapproval of his acting aspirations.
* A 1996 adaptation directed by Adrian Noble. The cast included Desmond Barrit as Bottom, Finbar Lynch as Puck, Alex Jennings as Oberon/Theseus, and Lindsay Duncan as Titania/Hippolyta. This film is based on Noble's hugely popular Royal Shakespeare Company production. Its art design is eccentric, featuring a forest of floating light bulbs and a giant umbrella for Titania's bower.
* A 1999 film version was written and directed by Michael Hoffman. The cast includes Kevin Kline as Bottom, Rupert Everett as Oberon, Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Stanley Tucci as Puck, Sophie Marceau as Hippolyta, Christian Bale as Demetrius, Dominic West as Lysander, and Calista Flockhart as Helena. This adaptation relocates the play's action from Athens to a fictional "Monte Athena", located in Tuscany, Italy, although all textual mentions of Athens are retained.
* A 1999 version was written and directed by James Kerwin. The cast included Travis Schuldt as Demetrius. It set the story against a surreal backdrop of techno clubs and ancient symbols.
* The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream (2002) directed by Christine Edzard, was produced by Sands Films at their studio in Rotherhithe, London using 350 school children from Southwark, between the ages of eight and eleven, all theatrically untrained.  The sets and costumes were designed to scale and made on site.
* A Midsummer Night's Rave (2002) directed by Gil Cates Jr. changes the setting to a modern rave. Puck is a drug dealer, the magic flower called love-in-idleness is replaced with magic ecstasy, and the King and Queen of Fairies are the host of the rave and the DJ.
* Were the World Mine (2008) features a modern interpretation of the play put on in a private high school in a small town.
* Strange Magic (2015) was inspired by the play.
* More Strange Than True is a surrealist comedy inspired by the play.

TV productions

* The "play within a play" from Act V, Scene I, Pyramus and Thisbe, was performed by the members of the British pop music group The Beatles on 28 April 1964 for a British television special, Around The Beatles. Paul McCartney appeared as Pyramus, John Lennon as Thisbe, George Harrison as Moonshine, and Ringo Starr as Lion. The performance, before a live audience, was done with great comic intent and included a number of intentional hecklers. This was broadcast in the UK on ITV on 6 May, and in the US on ABC on 15 November. 
* The 1981 BBC Television Shakespeare production was produced by Jonathan Miller and directed by Elijah Moshinsky. It starred Helen Mirren as Titania, Peter McEnery as Oberon, Phil Daniels as Puck, Robert Lindsay as Lysander, Geoffrey Palmer as Quince and Brian Glover as Bottom.
* An abbreviated version of A Midsummer Night's Dream was made into an animated short (with the same title) by Walt Disney Television Animation in 1999 as part of the "Mouse Tales" series. It was featured in a 2002 episode of Disney's House of Mouse ("House of Scrooge", Season 3, Episode 34). The star-crossed lovers are played by Mickey Mouse (Lysander), Minnie Mouse (Hermia), Donald Duck (Demetrius), and Daisy Duck (Helena). The character based on Theseus is played by Ludwig Von Drake, and the character based on Egeus by Scrooge McDuck. Goofy appears as an accident-prone Puck. The story ends with the revelation that it was a dream experienced by Mickey Mouse while sleeping at a picnic hosted by Minnie.
* In 2005 ShakespeaRe-Told, the BBC TV series, aired an updated of the play. It was written by Peter Bowker. The cast includes Johnny Vegas as Bottom, Dean Lennox Kelly as Puck, Bill Paterson as Theo (a conflation of Theseus and Egeus), and Imelda Staunton as his wife Polly (Hippolyta). Lennie James plays Oberon and Sharon Small is Titania. Zoe Tapper and Michelle Bonnard play Hermia and Helena.
* In a 2006 episode of the Disney Channel show The Suite Life of Zack & Cody called "A Midsummer's Nightmare", the title characters perform in a low-budget production of the play that goes awry. The plot of the episode ironically (and loosely) follows that of the play. 
*  BBC1's 2016 production was a 90-minute filmic adaptation by Russell T Davies directed by David Kerr starring Matt Lucas as Bottom, Maxine Peake as Titania, and with a diverse cast including Nonso Anozie as Oberon, Prisca Bakare as Hermia and Hiran Abeysekera as Puck. 

Astronomy

British astronomer William Herschel named the two moons of Uranus that he discovered in 1787 after characters in the play, Oberon and Titania. Another moon, discovered in 1985, has been named Puck.

Gallery

File:Reynolds-Puck.JPG|"Puck" by Joshua Reynolds, 1789
File:Johann Heinrich Füssli - Titania liebkost den eselköpfigen Bottom.jpg|Titania and Bottom by Johann Heinrich Füssli 1793–94
File:Titania and Bottom John Anster Fitzgerald.JPG|Titania and Bottom by John Anster Fitzgerald
File:Joseph Noel Paton - The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon.jpg|Joseph Noel Paton: "The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon
File:Fitzgerald, John Anster - The Marriage of Oberon and Titania.jpg|The Marriage of Oberon and Titania by John Anster Fitzgerald
File:Henry Meynell Rheam - Titania.jpg|Henry Meynell Rheam: Titania welcoming her fairy brethren
File:Gervais Folie de Titania (2004 1 188).JPG|La Folie de Titania, by Paul Gervais, 1897
File:Scene from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' by John Simmons, 1873, watercolor.jpg|A Midsummer Night's Dream by John Simmons, 1873
File:Thomas Stothard - Oberon and Titania from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Act IV, Scene i - Google Art Project.jpg|Thomas Stothard - Oberon and Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act IV, Scene I
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
 Copy is a fairy in which Shakespeare play? 

 I'd be happy to help generate in which Shakespeare is not no such thing or non would you like to tackle and been with in in