[1] The Athenians: The Mechanicals: The Fairies: The play consists of several interconnecting plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen Hippolyta.

Enraged, Egeus invokes an ancient Athenian law before Duke Theseus, whereby a daughter needs to marry a suitor chosen by her father, or else face death.

The mechanicals, Peter Quince and 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".

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.

Meanwhile, Quince and his band of five labourers ("rude mechanicals", as Puck describes them) have arranged to perform their play about Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus's wedding and venture into the forest, near Titania's bower, for their rehearsal.

This soon turns into a quarrel between the two ladies, with Helena chiding Hermia for joining in the mockery session, followed by the latter furiously charging at her for stealing her true love's heart and blaming her for the supposed 'mockery'.

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.

[3] 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.

Further consolidations of this late Elizabethan date are provided by "Oberon's unmissable compliment to Queen Elizabeth (2.1.155-164)" (Chaudhuri), and Titania's description of flooded fields and failed crops which occurred through England in the years 1594-1597/8 (2.1.84-121).

[8] In Ancient Greece, long before the creation of the Christian celebrations of St. John's Day, the summer solstice was marked by Adonia, a festival to mourn the death of Adonis, the devoted mortal lover of the goddess Aphrodite.

[9] The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the mistaken and waylaid lovers, Titania and Bottom, even the erstwhile acting troupe, model various aspects (and forms) of love.

[10] 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.

[19] 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.

[19] 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'.

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.

[24] Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality"—the first hint of which may be Oberon's obsession with Titania's changeling ward—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".

[25] 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.

Based on this reasoning, Dryden defended the merits of three fantasy plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens.

[40] He sees Theseus as a Tudor noble; Helena a mere plot device to "concentrate the four lovers on a single spot";[40] and the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-the-play a parody of a prominent topos of contemporary plays.

[52] 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".

[54] 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.

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.

Samuel Pepys saw it on 29 September 1662 and thought it "the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw ..."[55] After the Jacobean / Caroline era, A Midsummer Night's Dream was never performed in its entirety until the 1840s.

[69] 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.

[69] 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.

[citation needed] 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.

British actors who played roles in Brook's production included Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, John Kane (Puck) and Frances de la Tour (Helena).

"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.

[78] Absurda Comica, oder Herr Peter Squentz by Andreas Gryphius, which was probably written between 1648 and 1650 and was published in 1657, is evidently based on the comic episode of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream.