A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, perhaps, William Shakespeare’s most charming and endearing dramatic work. Not only is it a marvelous comedy, but the play is also a wonderful fantasy. Shakespeare was never one to shy away from exploring and expanding upon the boundaries of his own imagination, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the playwright fashioned a new and original work that drew upon the mythology and fantasy of Western culture.
Although Shakespeare’s play is often cited as being one of the first works in English literature to present a fairy tale fantasy, that is not entirely true. Fairy tale literature actually had been in existence for hundreds of years, and the origins of fairy tale literature actually can be found in ancient Greek and Roman mythology as well as in the myths and legends of other lands. The stock figure of the wicked witch, for example, which appears in numerous fairy tales collected and transcribed by the Grimm Brothers (circa 1815), has her roots in Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, which dates back to approximately 800 BC, the hero Odysseus encounters a witch named Circe, who has the magical ability to transform people into animals. Mythological characters like Circe thus became the predecessors or prototypes for many of the typical or stock characters of later fairy tale literature.
One of the prominent characters appearing in this Shakespearean comedy is a fairy by the name of Puck, who is also called Robin Goodfellow. Puck is not an original creation by Shakespeare. In fact, the creation and legend of Puck occurred in the Anglo- Saxon era in England (before 1066 AD). Even in those early times, the idea of a mischievous and troublesome sprite or fairy that would play pranks on people but that also might render them a useful service was a common character of literature in the oral tradition of England.
However, the earliest fairies of England were often considered to be dark or sinister supernatural figures that could bring deadly harm to humans. In fact, the words fairy and demon were practically interchangeable. Fairies in England have their roots in medieval Celtic myths. Such fairies were as large or larger as humans, not the tiny or diminutive creatures that appeared in the fairy tales of later times. And these fairies inhabited a forbidden underworld that was dangerous for humans. This Celtic underworld forms the setting for a later medieval story entitled The Turk and Gawain. In that tale the hero, Sir Gawain, enters the underworld to discover that a castle and the lord of that castle have been transformed into dark and sinister forms by a fairy. Sir Gawain breaks the spell of enchantment to free that lord. Such a tale, obviously, suggests an early version of the later fairy tale known as “Beauty and the Beast.”
During the Middle Ages the fairies might also be helpful to the race of humans. In another tale involving the knightly hero Sir Gawain, a fairy disguised as an ugly old hag helps to save King Arthur from death. The story, which is entitled The Wedding of Sir Gawain, ends with the fairy transforming herself into a beautiful wife for Gawain after he successfully passes her test.
Just about all of the characters that appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream have appeared before in literature in one form or another. However, Shakespeare develops and refashions these characters in such a way that they vastly transcend the thin and two-dimensional treatment that they had previously been given.
Moreover, William Shakespeare takes these older characters and older stories and combines them in a manner that surprised and delighted the audiences of his day. Also contributing to such delight is that the playwright took five completely separate and unrelated tales and wove them together into a splendid fantasy tapestry. The five tales do not seem as if they belong together, but Shakespeare makes it work. Each of the five stories is integral to the whole play. If any one of the five stories is edited out of the play, the play itself would unravel and fall apart. There is nothing extraneous or digressive about any of the parts. All five together form one unified glorious whole dramatic work of literature.
The following five stories are interwoven together:
(c) Lysander / Demetrius / Helena. Adding further complications among these lovers is a conflict that develops between Hermia and her father. Hermia wants to marry Lysander, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius.