A Midsummer Night's Dream

A comedy by William Shakespeare in which a character describes a Morris board disrupted by weather. Its intertwined plots follow lovers, amateur actors, and fairies in an enchanted wood.

Puck: A mischievous fairy in Shakespeare’s play who serves Oberon and meddles with the lovers. His mistaken use of a love potion drives the lovers’ comic confusion.
Love-in-idleness: A flower in Shakespeare’s play whose juice makes a sleeper fall in love with the first living thing seen on waking. Puck’s use of its juice repeatedly redirects romantic desire.
Pyramus and Thisbe: A pair of doomed lovers in Ovid’s Metamorphoses whose story inspired the craftsmen’s play. Their tragedy is comically mangled in the performance at Theseus’s wedding.
Morris dance: A traditional English dance performed by groups, often with sticks, handkerchiefs, or bells. The play’s weather speech invokes Morris dancing as a sign of disrupted communal life.
Love and desire in Shakespeare: Recurring dramatic treatments of attraction, courtship, jealousy, and marriage in Shakespeare’s works. The play makes desire mutable through enchantment and romantic misrecognition.
Oberon: The king of the fairies in Shakespeare’s play and Titania’s estranged husband. His quarrel with Titania sets the fairy plot in motion.
Play within a play: A dramatic structure in which characters perform a play inside the larger work. The craftsmen’s performance of Pyramus and Thisbe makes theatrical artifice part of the comedy.
Ovid: A Roman poet whose Metamorphoses recounts myths of transformation and desire. His Pyramus and Thisbe story is the source for the craftsmen’s entertainment.
Morris board: A patterned board used in the strategy game known as Nine Men's Morris. Titania’s speech names the board as a place where rain has flooded the ground.
Dreams in literature: The use of dreams and dreamlike states as literary devices, themes, or structures. The ending invites uncertainty about whether the night’s events were real or imagined.

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