A Midsummer Night's Dream

Drama · Comedy · Farce

First published: 1600
Print length: 292 pagesWadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2012

Description

In Athens, preparations for a royal wedding draw together three unruly plots. Two young couples, trapped in conflicting desires, flee into an enchanted forest, where the fairy king Oberon and his mischievous servant Puck interfere with their affections. The forest also contains a quarrel between Oberon and Titania, whose domestic struggle spills into the human world. Meanwhile, six amateur actors rehearse a play for the wedding and stumble into the same supernatural confusion. Magic scrambles love, perception, and social rank until certainty itself becomes comic. Shakespeare’s comedy moves between court, woodland, and makeshift stage, using romantic upheaval and theatrical mishap to explore how desire can transform people—and how easily dreams and performance reshape what seems real.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dialogue-driven · Ornate · Poetic · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Absurdist · Humorous · Playful · Romantic

Structure

Braided · Linear

Focus

Ideas · Plot · Relationships

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityIdentityKnowledge and truthLoveMarriageTransformation

About William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare wrote plays and poems, and his drama ranges from romantic comedy to history and tragedy. Its characteristic movement comes from characters testing motives and power through speech. Public rhetoric, private soliloquy, quick verbal wit, and dense poetic imagery do not merely decorate the action. They change loyalties, expose divided minds, and propel plots toward consequences the speakers cannot control. Hamlet suspends a revenge story inside its prince’s arguments with himself and emotionally charged confrontations with others. Macbeth is faster and more compressed, turning prophecy and intimate persuasion into a chain of murders as fear and guilt overtake its conspirators. In Romeo and Juliet, lyric courtship and comedy share the stage with street violence, so private desire remains entangled with an inherited public feud. Shakespeare repeatedly builds drama from unstable crossings between performance and belief, love and social command, political language and collective action. His shifts of register let clowns, rulers, lovers, and plotters inhabit the same play without speaking in a single authorial voice.