Midsummer night's Dream and about the Underlying Meaning

The title of the play A Midsummer Night's Dream can have many interpretations. I will give you my thoughts on the relationship of the title to the different situations that take place in the play. These interpretations give insight and overall meaning to the thematic nature of Shakespeare's work. Although I am only going to describe three interpretations of the title, there are many other meanings to the title.

The first interpretation of the title of the play that comes to my mind was the magical dream-like night in the woods, when Robin Good fellow and Oberon, the king of the fairies, used several kinds of love potions, and messed everything up. When the lovers awoke in the morning they thought all of the ridiculous things that had happened or been said the night before had just all been a dream (Gurr: 85). However, if Oberon had been more specific in his directions to Robin, "a sweet Athenian lady is in love with a disdainful youth. Anoint his eyes... thou shalt know the man by the Athenian garments he hath on," all of this could have been avoided and everything would have been fine (page 53). This gives insight to the thematic nature of the work by setting a magical like atmosphere for the lovers to be in.

The second interpretation could be of the dream Bottom thought he had when Titania, the queen of the fairies, had fallen in love with him when he looked like an ass. He wasn't sure whether it was a dream or real because "the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what [his] dream was" (page 135). The thematic nature of this is that there is no real explanation for love. Even Bottom himself said, "Reason and love keep little company together nowadays" (Gurr: 85).

The third interpretation could have been that the entire play had been a dream. Shakespeare might have written down the play through the eyes of Robin Goodfellow. Since Robin was involved in almost all the scenes, maybe he had just fallen asleep one day in the woods and dreamed up all this love and magic. Just like he says at the end of the play, "that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear" (Griffiths: 14).

From the outset, Shakespeare subtly portrays the lovers as a group out of balance, a motif that creates tension throughout the play. For the sake of symmetry, the audience wants the four lovers to form two couples; instead, both men love Hermia, leaving Helena out of the equation. The women are thus in nonparallel situations, adding to the sense of structural imbalance (Foakes: 47). By establishing the fact that Demetrius once loved Helena, Shakespeare suggests the possibility of a harmonious resolution to this love tangle: if Demetrius could only be made to love Helena again, then ...