What Is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Really About?
- Jun 22
- 7 min read
What Actually Happened on Midsummer’s Night in Tudor England and Why Shakespeare Set His Play in the Woods
Most people think Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about fairies, love potions, and a man turned into (or revealed to be) an ass.
It is. But that is not what the play is really about.
To Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience, Midsummer Night, June 23, was a Tudor ritual. On this night, they stepped, quite deliberately, into other physical spaces, usually the woods, where behavior could shift, and no one would be the wiser in the morning for what had happened that night, even if you were Queen Elizabeth I herself.
Midsummer Night was exhilarating to the Tudors because the boundary between their orderly, rule-bound world and the wilder, ancient Britain beneath it grew thin, even permeable. To understand A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you have to follow where the Tudors went, and experience what they experienced on that night.
🔥 St. John’s Eve: The Firelit World of the Streets
Fortunately, John Stow (1525-1605) left us a key to a doorway into the Tudor world. His precise account of how Midsummer Eve, also called St. John’s Eve, was observed in late sixteenth century England vividly describes a place both festive and closely linked with the natural world of Albion, or ancient Britain.
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night…”
Oberon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i
Imagine we are walking the streets of London late on the night of June 23, 1582, the vigil of St. John the Baptist. Here, and in towns across England, the urban landscape has been transformed to resemble a summer woods. Doors are draped with green birch, fennel, St. John’s Wort, white lilies, and garlands of flowers. Lamps burn through the night, some arranged in elaborate iron frames that hold dozens of small flames, casting a steady glow along the streets.
Tables are set out before houses of those who could afford it, laden with food and drink, not only for neighbors but for passersby. “Bonfires,” fires of good, have been lit to cleanse the air and restore harmony among those who had fallen into disputes. Stow explains that the fire and lamps were an emblem of St. John the Baptist, who was a ‘burning and shining light’ preparing the way for Christ.
🌞 The Ancient Roots of Midsummer’s Night
“My fairy lord, this must be done with haste, For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger; At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards . . . For fear lest day should look their shames upon, They willfully themselves exile from light”
Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii
But the roots of Midsummer Night run very deep in time, deeper even than festivals of Roman Britain. In the forest, ancient Celtic-based tradition holds that the Oak King and the Holly King must battle to the death, twice every year, at midsummer and midwinter, to turn the wheel of the season.
The sun rising over Stonehenge’s Heel Stone on the summer solstice, precisely and theatrically, so comforted and awed the ancient Britons that they marked these midsummer and midwinter days long before the Christian tradition laid St. John the Baptist’s Day and Christmas Day on top of the ancient summer and winter solstice festivals.
Even today, some towns in Cornwall and Yorkshire still follow some ancient midsummer traditions. I have personally carried a torch on a walk with hundreds of people along the shores of Lake Como in Italy to a community celebration on St. John’s Eve in the town of San Giovanni.
🌿 Into the Woods on Midsummer Night: Where the Rules No Longer Hold
This tradition that Shakespeare was evoking for his audience was inextricably tied to the earth, to nature itself, the ancient Celts’ mythic world, and . . . fairies.
The woods were where magic happened. Plants gathered on this night were believed to hold special powers. This night’s dreams revealed what could not be known in daylight. And the boundary between the natural and the unseen was thought to thin.
Lovers slipped away from the lit streets and into fields and forests where anything could happen. Courtship’s rules were rearranged. Pairings formed that might not have been permitted within walls. Laughter, risk, and mischief mixed easily together.
This is the woods into which the four human lovers lose themselves in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“And in the wood, a league without the town . . .There will I stay for thee.”
Lysander to Hermia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.i
When Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius leave “Athens”, they are not simply escaping harsh parental and governmental authority. They are getting lost in the midsummer woods at night, where identity can blur, desire can turn without warning, and what happens cannot be fully controlled.
🎭 Why Shakespeare Sets the Comedy in the Woods
“Out of this wood do not desire to go;
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no!
I am spirit of no common rate;
The Summer still doth tend upon my state.”
Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i
Shakespeare’s plays were performed before court audiences long before they were published or performed publicly. Sitting front and center in the great halls of her private palaces, surrounded by her courtiers, Queen Elizabeth was known to get distinctly cranky if the plays bored her. Like modern playwrights, Shakespeare often slipped in political messages with humor, to tweak his monarch.
When he set Midsummer Night’s Dream on the very day in the Tudor calendar when confusion, misdirection, and transformation were expected, it framed a real historical incident that would otherwise be far more uncomfortable, and send anyone else to the Tower for satirizing the Queen.
🫏 Getting To the Bottom of It All
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare named his thinly veiled “fairy” queen “Titania”, a name he found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, associated with the moon goddess Diana, which was one of Queen Elizabeth’s pseudonyms. Under the spell of a magical flower Puck picked at fairy king Oberon’s, direction, Titania falls temporarily in love with a buffoonish mortal named Bottom. Bottom is marked by his exaggeration, self-aggrandizement and unmistakable folly. Just like the French duke named Hercule Francois, the Duke of Alencon, who came to woo Elizabeth, Bottom is an ass.
There’s more Elizabethan history with humor about Alencon here:
If you are a fan of overly-melodramatic declarations, there’s even more here:
And, if you can’t resist knowing what happened in the final act, look here:
But wait! There’s even more fun! Discover about how much of a herculean buffoon Elizabeth’s court found Alencon to be here:
…if I had wit enough to get out of this wood,
I have enough to serve mine own turn.
Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i
In 1591, Elizabeth told the Earl of Sussex that she needed to get rid of Alencon. She knew he was an ass. However much she had pretended to be love struck, she had no intention of marrying him. But getting rid of him was tricky politically because he was the King of France’s brother. And England badly needed France as an ally against Spain.
Shakespeare gave his distressed “fairy” queen the perfect out, with a little theatrical magic.
🌕 What the Tudors Understood About A Midsummer Night’s Dream
By setting the play in the woods on June 23, Elizabeth’s prolonged and highly visible courtship with Alencon became whimsically comical instead of political and awkwardly sustained. The morning after the play’s performance, everyone knew the fires would burn low, the garlands above doorways would wilt, and sleepy lovers could return sheepishly home from the woods without anyone asking questions. Tudor order would return.
Shakespeare, it seems, wrote himself into the play as Oberon, creator of the fantasy and the magic, to assure his embarrassed Queen that whatever had happened, even if she had kissed an ass (Elizabeth famously did kiss Alencon on the lips in church in 1579), it had happened on that day of the year where everyone steps out of their roles and passes from one reality to another.
Elizabeth’s botched effort at an international political alliance with Alencon and the French was nothing more than . . . a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Through this palace, with sweet peace; And the owner of it blest Ever shall in safety rest. Trip away; make no stay; Meet me all by break of day.”
Oberon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i
🧚 If you enjoyed this romp through the Elizabethan woods, you can sign up to have the next posts delivered straight to your mailbox: https://www.dorotheadickerman.com/subscribe.
A packet of exclusive Elizabethan Secrets will magically be sent by one of Oberon’s fairy messengers as a thank you!
🏛️ In a related post, we’ll look at the play’s urban setting, a place Shakespeare calls “Athens”. We think Greece. But here’s another Elizabethan Secret: he may have had a different, littler “Athens” in mind.
