Who Ends Up With Whom in A Midsummer Night's Dream? Lovers, Fairies and a Man With a Donkey's Head

At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia marries Lysander, Helena marries Demetrius, Duke Theseus marries the Amazon queen Hippolyta in the same ceremony, and the quarrelling fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania, are reconciled and bless the newlyweds. Getting there takes one magical night in a wood outside Athens, a love potion squeezed onto the wrong eyelids and a weaver who wakes up with the head of a donkey. Shakespeare wrote this comedy between 1594 and 1596, and it is one of his most popular and widely performed plays.

When it was written

No one knows exactly when the play was first performed, but topical references and an echo of Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion point to 1595 or early 1596. Some scholars have suggested it was written for an aristocratic wedding, but there is no firm evidence. It belongs to the same lyrical period as Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare had probably already completed. Unlike many of his plays, it is not an adaptation of a single earlier story, although Ovid's Metamorphoses and Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" fed into it. The first printed edition appeared in 1600.

Reading it right after Romeo and Juliet is revealing. Both plays feature young lovers defying a parent, a threat of death and a story about Pyramus and Thisbe, two lovers who die through a misunderstanding. In one play that pattern ends in a tomb. In the other it is turned into slapstick for a wedding party.

Four storylines in one wood

The play weaves together four groups. The Athenian nobles are Theseus and Hippolyta, preparing for their wedding. The four young lovers are Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius. The "mechanicals" are six Athenian craftsmen led by the carpenter Peter Quince and the weaver Nick Bottom, who are rehearsing a play for the wedding. And the fairies are Oberon, Titania, the mischievous sprite Puck and Titania's attendants. Each group enters the same moonlit forest, and the comedy comes from how their stories collide.

The tangle of lovers

The trouble starts in Theseus's court. Egeus wants his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, but Hermia loves Lysander. Egeus invokes an old Athenian law: a daughter must marry the man her father chooses, or die. Theseus offers a third option, a life as a nun devoted to the goddess Diana. Hermia and Lysander decide to escape through the forest. Hermia tells her best friend Helena, who is still in love with Demetrius after he left her for Hermia. Hoping to win him back, Helena tells Demetrius about the elopement, and he follows the couple into the wood, with Helena following him.

So at the start, two men love Hermia and nobody loves Helena. Shakespeare is about to turn that situation upside down.

Fairy politics and a magic flower

In the same forest, Oberon and Titania are feuding over a little Indian boy whom Titania refuses to hand over. To punish her, Oberon sends Puck to find a flower called "love-in-idleness". Its juice, put on a sleeper's eyelids, makes that person fall in love with the first living thing they see on waking. Oberon puts it on Titania's eyes. Having seen Demetrius cruelly reject Helena, he also tells Puck to anoint the Athenian man in the wood.

Puck, who has never seen any of the lovers, picks the wrong Athenian. He puts the juice on Lysander, who wakes, sees Helena and instantly adores her. When Oberon tries to fix things by enchanting Demetrius too, both men end up chasing Helena, who is sure they are mocking her, while Hermia is furious with her old friend. The two women quarrel and the two men nearly fight. Now everything is reversed: both men love Helena and nobody loves Hermia.

Bottom and the fairy queen

Meanwhile, the craftsmen are rehearsing in the wood. Puck turns Bottom's head into a donkey's, and his terrified friends run away. Titania, waking under the spell, sees Bottom and falls in love with him on the spot, in the play's own words: "Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass." While she is infatuated, Oberon takes the changeling boy.

Bottom is the comic heart of the play. He is vain, enthusiastic and completely unbothered by being adored by a queen while wearing a donkey's head. In the first rehearsal he wanted to play every part himself, including the lion. Many readers find him the most lovable character in the play precisely because he never stops being himself, whatever happens to his head.

Waking up

Before dawn, Puck leads the quarrelling men apart by imitating their voices until all four lovers fall asleep. Lysander's enchantment is removed, while Demetrius stays in love with Helena. Oberon releases Titania and Puck restores Bottom's head. When Theseus and Hippolyta find the sleeping lovers on a morning hunt, Demetrius no longer wants Hermia, so Theseus overrules Egeus and announces a group wedding. The lovers can barely remember the night and decide it must have been a dream. Bottom wakes up too and declares he has had "a most rare vision", a dream "past the wit of man", which he wants Quince to turn into a ballad called "Bottom's Dream".

Notice that Demetrius is the only character who is never released from the spell. His happy ending depends on magic, which is one of the small dark notes that critics like to point out.

The worst play ever performed

In the final act, the craftsmen perform "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe" for the newlyweds. They are so bad that the noble audience laughs as if it were a comedy. One actor plays a wall, another plays moonshine, and the lion explains to the ladies that he is not really a lion. When the humans go to bed, the fairies bless the house, and Puck steps forward to suggest that if the play has offended, the audience can think of it as just a dream.

Themes: love, dreams and who is in charge

The play's most famous observation about love comes from Lysander: "The course of true love never did run smooth." The plot proves it. Love in this play is sudden, irrational and easily redirected, and the scholar David Bevington argues the play shows the dark side of love even while it makes us laugh. Helena's line "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind" is a neat summary of the whole night.

Identity is another theme. Lovers swap partners, a weaver becomes half animal, and the craftsmen pretend to be a wall and the moon. Critics have noted how the play blurs the line between fantasy and reality. There is also a question of authority. Athens is ruled by a harsh law that lets a father condemn his daughter; the forest is a place where that law does not reach. Theseus in the end sets the law aside and forgives the lovers.

A play that was once called "insipid"

Not everyone loved it at first. Samuel Pepys saw it in 1662 and wrote that it was "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life", though he enjoyed the dancing. For a long time afterwards it was performed only in heavily adapted forms, such as Henry Purcell's musical The Fairy-Queen (1692).

Music, ballet and film

The play has inspired a remarkable amount of music. Felix Mendelssohn wrote a concert overture in 1826 and later incidental music for a production; its best-known piece, the Wedding March, is still played at weddings around the world. Benjamin Britten turned it into an opera in 1960, and George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton made ballets from it. On stage, Peter Brook's 1970 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, set in a blank white box with acrobatic fairies, changed how many directors approached the play. On film, there is a 1935 Hollywood version with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, and a 1999 film with Kevin Kline as Bottom and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania.

For learners, it is also the friendliest way into Shakespeare. The plot is funny, the stakes are low, and much of the verse is musical and easy to read aloud, which makes it a good first play before the tragedies.

Learn with A Midsummer Night's Dream: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
the course of true love never did run smooth	real love always meets obstacles	They broke up twice, but the course of true love never did run smooth.
Lord, what fools these mortals be!	(jokingly) people are so silly	They queued all night for a phone? Lord, what fools these mortals be!
love is blind	people in love ignore faults	She doesn't see his flaws; love is blind.
ill met by moonlight	an unwelcome meeting	Ill met by moonlight: my ex was at the same party.
a dream past the wit of man	something too strange to explain	The trip felt like a dream past the wit of man.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a confusing week, using "the course of true love never did run smooth" and "Lord, what fools these mortals be!".