Love's Triumph
One of the central themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the enduring and triumphant power of love. Comedies in early modern theater tended to conclude with at least one marriage, and this play is no exception. However, beyond the genre of comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream is an exercise in showcasing how love persists despite numerous challenges, obstacles, and complications. Despite the chaos of the play's plot, the pairs of lovers who exist at the beginning of the play – Hermia and Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius – are married by the play's conclusion. Thus, the play explores (with lighthearted and imaginative delight) the trials lovers face as they attempt to navigate their way back to one another.
Patriarchal Control
The beginning of the play is marked by a gendered divide between the desires of young women and the power of older men. Specifically, Hermia wishes to marry Lysander instead of Demetrius, despite Demetrius being the suitor that her father, Egeus, had chosen for her. Egeus actually requests from Theseus the right to punish his daughter with death for denying his wishes, something the lovers skirt by escaping into the woods. However, this conflict at the beginning of the play dramatizes Hermia's maturation from a girl to a young woman, and therefore her transformation from a meek subordinate to an autonomous person who challenges patriarchal control.
Gender and Power
Related to the conflict between Hermia and her father is the play's broader interest in portraying power dynamics between men and women. One of the ways it accomplishes this theme is through the characters of Oberon and Titania – a king and queen of fairies, respectively, who vie for power throughout the play. The two are often evenly matched, seeking playful revenge on one another. This sense of equality between the two figures suggests that in the fairy world where magic determines one's ability, power associated with gender becomes mostly irrelevant.
Dreams and Imagination
Because of the role of the supernatural in the play, many characters are often tricked into believing that they were simply dreaming the bizarre events that happened to them. At the end of the play, Puck encourages the audience themselves to assume they were dreaming if they, for whatever reason, did not enjoy the performance. This focus on dreams is significant because it allows the supernatural plot points to exist in the play without reason or profound meaning. Instead, characters and audience members alike are thrust into a "dream-like" state where they can experience their familiar world and in an unfamiliar way.
Performance
Like many of Shakespeare's plays, there are a number of meta-theatrical elements involved in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The most obvious of these is the botched performance of Pyramus and Thisbe that becomes rife with problems and ineptitude. The laborers performing the play believe that the audience will not be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality, a belief that comments both on the broader plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream and on the nature of theater-going in the early modern period more generally. Through the failed performance of the Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespeare highlights the difference between "bad" and "good" performance, inherently showcasing his own skill as a playwright.
Magic and the Supernatural
Magic is a crucial element in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and one that helps drive the plot in major ways. With the intervention of Titania and Oberon into the lives of Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius, the play takes on a dream-like quality that detaches the lovers from the reality of their lives in Athens. As such, rationality and explanation disappear, and characters are left to rediscover a sense of stability in a largely unfamiliar and irrational world.
Nature
Recent scholarship on A Midsummer Night's Dream has begun considering the play within the discourse of ecocriticism, or literary scholarship related to the environment. This development has likely occurred because the primary backdrop for the play is the woods surrounding Athens. Thus, characters retreat (literally, as Hermia faces death if she stays in Athens) to the woodlands outside the city, where they encounter supernatural powers and are thrust into a dream-like series of strange events. While entertaining for the audience, many scholars argue that Shakespeare's representation of nature is impressively nuanced, as he shows nature both as a respite for humans looking to sidestep the governance of urban life and as a fearsome and mysterious power in its own right.
