A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

Published 1600 · 17,144 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Satire & Humor

How hard is A Midsummer Night's Dream to read?

A Midsummer Night's Dream scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
Elizabethan English with fairy vocabulary, classical mythology (Pyramus and Thisbe, Titania, Oberon), and the mechanicals' comic malapropisms. Multiple registers from courtly to rustic.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Varied verse forms: rhyming couplets for the fairies, blank verse for the court, prose for the mechanicals. The play-within-a-play adds another syntactic layer.
Abstraction: 52 out of 100
The comedy of mistaken love and fairy mischief is concrete and theatrical. Ideas about imagination, performance, and the irrationality of desire emerge through action.
Information density: 48 out of 100
Four interwoven plots move quickly: the Athenian lovers, the fairy court, the mechanicals' rehearsal, and the framing wedding. Dense with incident but clarified by symmetry.
Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
The comedy is built on dramatic irony: the audience knows about the love juice while the characters stumble through its effects. Meaning is theatrical rather than hidden.
Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
The forest as unconscious desire, moonlight as transformation, the love juice as the irrationality of passion, Bottom's ass-head as the bestial in love. The play-within-a-play mirrors the whole.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Shakespeare maintains comic distance from all four plots. Theseus's skepticism about lovers and lunatics provides an ironic frame, but the play also celebrates imagination sincerely.
Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
All four lovers pair off correctly, the fairies reconcile, Bottom returns to his friends, and the triple wedding proceeds. The most completely resolved ending in Shakespeare.
Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
Four distinct plots interwoven with mirror-symmetry: court, forest, fairy world, and the mechanicals' play. The play-within-a-play at the end nests another structural layer.

How A Midsummer Night's Dream is regarded

A Midsummer Night's Dream holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where A Midsummer Night's Dream sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (38 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, A Midsummer Night's Dream scores 45 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.12. About the map of stories.

Mode: High Mimetic (with romance machinery)
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which.
Mythos: Romantic Comedy iv (Green-world phase) (comedy iv)
Egeus, I will overbear your will; for in the temple, by and by with us, These couples shall eternally be knit.
Genre: Drama
If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear.

Where the story of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place

  • Legendary Athens under Theseus, and a wood nearby, the main setting
  • Fairyland in the moonlit wood: Oberon and Titania's revels

5 things that are true of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the passage for each

  1. Egeus invokes an Athenian law allowing him to have his daughter put to death if she refuses the husband he has chosen.

    As she is mine I may dispose of her; Which shall be either to this gentleman Or to her death, according to our law

  2. Puck says the fairy king and queen are quarrelling over a changeling boy stolen from an Indian king.

    A lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king; She never had so sweet a changeling.

  3. Oberon describes the flower whose juice will make a sleeper dote on the next living creature seen on waking.

    The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid Will make or man or woman madly dote Upon the next live creature that it sees.

  4. Puck's line 'Lord, what fools these mortals be!' comes as he watches Helena and the mistaken Lysander.

    Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!

  5. Theseus says the lunatic, the lover and the poet are all made of imagination.

    The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact:

Scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream that Frye would name

16 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Senex iratus, passage 2
Full of vexation come I, with complaint Against my child, my daughter Hermia. Egeus is the blocking father who invokes the law of death or a nunnery.
Alazon, passage 7
Let me play the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man's heart good to hear me. Bottom is the self-important braggart actor who wants every part.
Lyric, passage 12
You spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen; The fairies' lullaby is an embedded song within the dramatic action.
Anagnorisis, passage 27
My Oberon, what visions have I seen! Methought I was enamour'd of an ass. Titania recognises her delusion once the charm is lifted.
Cognitio, passage 28
I wot not by what power, (But by some power it is) my love to Hermia, Melted as the snow Demetrius's love is restored to Helena, which releases the society from its block.
Analogy of innocence, passage 11
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, The flowered bank is a pastoral image of the green world.

Books that share these scenes with A Midsummer Night's Dream

About the author

William Shakespeare