Midsummer Night's Dream

aint no party like a Shakespeare party when you wake up next to an ass and fall in love with him

Never enough Shakespeare!

Midsummer night’s dream is a story that consists out of three overlapping storylines, which is quite something since the play only counts 61 pages. The first one has the characters Theseus, duke of Athens, and Hyppolita, Queen of the amazons. They are listening to Egeus’ complaints,
and here’s where it gets love-triangely: Egeus wants Demetrius to marry his daughter Hermia, but she loves Lysander, who loves her back. Hermia’s bee-ef-ef Helena is in love with Demetrius, who ignores her. To avoid Athenian law Lysander and Hermia decide to meet in the forest, so they can run off to his aunt and elope. Unfortunately for them, Helena decides to betray her bestie to Demetrius, in hope he’ll love her for it.

The second storyline contains an amateur theatre company, who wants to rehearse ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death, of Pyramus and Thisby’. They want to practice far from curious eyes, so they decide to meet up… in the forest.

The last storyline is about an ongoing discussion between Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. Titania has taken a changeling boy under her protection when his mortal mother died, but Oberon desires him to be his henchman. Titania stubbornly refuses, so Oberon decides to trick her with help from his servant Robin, a puck. Of course, this all happens in the forest as well.

Night falls. Shit happens.

Compared to the other plays I’ve read so far, this is a totally different genre. It’s more light-hearted, with a happy ending in which no one dies (pretend-dying doesn’t count!). I can’t even pinpoint if there’s a focus on a single emotion, so my theory about Shakespearean plays being about one emotion can be thrown out of the window. It was such a pleasant read that I almost felt like I was reading the script for a kid’s TV show, except that there was little morale and the fact that no one can come up with such a good episode.

I don’t know if Shakespeare wrote any other plays like this one, but if he did, point them my way!

Until next time,
Bejoes