A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare (1596)
“Shakespeare's wildest comedy asks one devastating question: if love is just a spell, does it matter that you felt it?”
Language Register
Four distinct registers operating simultaneously — courtly blank verse, fairy lyric verse, mechanical prose, and Puck's rhyming couplets — each socially and ontologically coded
Syntax Profile
Verse dominates, with prose reserved for the mechanicals as a class marker. The lovers' verse rhymes heavily in moments of heightened emotion and reverts to blank verse during rational exchange. Fairy verse uses elaborate enjambment and dense noun stacks ('dewdrops on the orbed flowers') that create a sense of accumulated natural richness. Puck's lines are typically tetrameter couplets, noticeably faster than everyone else's pentameter.
Figurative Language
Very high in the fairy and lover registers; deliberately low in the mechanical prose. Oberon and Titania speak almost entirely in extended metaphor and simile drawn from the natural world. The lovers' figurative language is hyperbolic but less inventive — love-as-religion, beauty-as-miracle — conventional conceits deployed with feeling. The mechanicals almost never use figurative language, which makes their accidental metaphors (Bottom's scrambled senses) the funnier.
Era-Specific Language
A child believed to have been secretly swapped by fairies; Oberon and Titania fight over one — the dispute is grounded in Elizabethan folk belief
A woman who has sworn devotion to a deity or person; Titania's bond with the changeling's mother is explicitly framed as religious loyalty
Collective term for artisans and craftsmen (not Shakespeare's word, but now standard critical usage); the characters' class status is encoded in their prose speech
June 23-24, the Eve of St. John — traditionally a time when boundaries between the human and fairy worlds dissolved, associated with madness and uncanny events
Critic Northrop Frye's term for the forest space in Shakespearean comedy where social laws are suspended and identity is renegotiated before the return to the city
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Oberon
Commands the most elaborate verse in the play — long periodic sentences, dense natural imagery, formal address. Does not use contractions. His speech signals cosmic authority.
The fairy king's language is the play's highest register. He is the primary manipulator, and his beautiful speech is part of how manipulation goes unexamined.
Titania
Equally elaborate to Oberon, but her imagery is more sensory and closer to earth — 'the moon, like to a silver bow new-bent in heaven.' Her verse is more emotional, less authoritative.
Even in fairy royalty, gender inflects speech. Titania's language is lyrical where Oberon's is declarative. She describes the world; he commands it.
Puck / Robin Goodfellow
Rhyming tetrameter couplets with a breathless, playful quality. Speaks directly to the audience. Uses contractions and colloquial phrases that Oberon never would.
Puck is a servant who enjoys being a servant — his language is liberated by its lower status. He's the only character in constant communication with both the play's world and the audience's.
Bottom
Unadorned prose with frequent malapropisms and misquotations. In Act V, performing Pyramus, he attempts verse and produces catastrophically broken meter.
Bottom's language is his class, his education, and his charm. He means what he says and says what he means. His malapropisms are the play's most honest speech because they are never calculating.
The Lovers (Hermia, Helena, Lysander, Demetrius)
Formal iambic pentameter that rhymes heavily during emotional peaks and opens into blank verse during rational moments. Their verse is beautiful but comparatively conventional — the expected language of Elizabethan romantic comedy.
The lovers are using the culturally available scripts for romantic feeling. They are sincere within those scripts; the play asks whether sincerity inside a script constitutes the authentic thing.
Narrator's Voice
No narrator — the play is pure drama, filtered through character speech and action. The closest to a narrator is Puck, who in the epilogue steps outside the fiction to address the audience directly, collapsing the frame between character and performer, play and dream.
Tone Progression
Act I
Comic-urgent, socially constrained
The comic premise established under genuine threat. The law is real; Hermia could actually die. The lovers' brightness is shaded by genuine jeopardy.
Acts II-III
Lyrical, chaotic, darkly funny
The forest takes over. Language becomes more beautiful, the situation more dangerous, the comedy more physical. Titania and Bottom's scenes are warmly absurd; the lovers' quarrel is sharp-edged.
Act IV
Quiet, ambiguous, reconciliatory
Dawn prose. The enchantments lift; the reconciliations occur. The tone is gentle but the resolutions are not all satisfying. Something is being papered over.
Act V
Metatextual, celebratory, philosophically open
The play reflects on itself. The Pyramus and Thisbe sequence is the play's most purely joyful section; Puck's epilogue is its most destabilizing.
Stylistic Comparisons
- As You Like It — another 'green world' comedy using a forest to suspend social order, but darker in its examination of gender performance
- The Tempest — Shakespeare's final play returns to the magician-as-author figure; Prospero is an older, grimmer Oberon
- Romeo and Juliet — written the same year; Pyramus and Thisbe is the comic version of that plot, suggesting Shakespeare was thinking about the thin line between tragic and comic modes
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions