A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unique in Shakespeare’s corpus. It is his only play named for an experience (but curiously just whose experience is unclear). Is the title a reference to the dream of Lysander? Hermia? Demetrius? Helena? Could it be the dream of Queen Titania? Or even of Theseus? A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place in May (not midsummer) leading Lowenthal to conclude this must be a reference to the dream of Shakespeare, himself, rather than any character in the play –perhaps it was written during a particular midsummer in Shakespeare’s own life. It is his dream.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of only three of Shakespeare’s plays set in Greece, and one of only two in Athens. It might rightly be contrasted with Timon of Athens, a tragedy which takes place at the decadence of late Athens, whereas A Midsummer Night’s Dream hearkens back to the heroic age of Theseus and Hercules just before the Trojan War. Most of the main characters in the play –Theseus, Egeus, Hippolyta, Lysander, and Demetrius—are loosely borrowed from the pages of Plutarch wherein they are depicted as great commanders, while in A Midsummer Night’s Dream they are lovers. What is Shakespeare saying about heroic lovers absent the battlefield –indeed, soon to embark upon the defining battle of the ancient world– in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Lowenthal notes the tension between the ancient or ancestral rule in the play, as invoked by Egeus, and an emerging democratic consensus, as demonstrated in the relationship between Theseus and the citizens of Athens. When the ancient rule of force is tempered and reason takes hold, two regimes begin to appear –either democracy or aristocracy. Lowenthal argues that Theseus’s Athens lays the foundation for democracy, a regime based on equality and consent, rather than aristocracy, which is based on merit or virtue.

Lowenthal, David. Shakespeare and the Good Life. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Lanham, Maryland (1997).