It is a play about love's irrationality, imagination and the shifting line between dream and reality.
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare is a play set for IGCSE and International GCSE Literature (Cambridge International 0475, OxfordAQA 9275). The board decides the set texts and the years they are examined, and your school confirms them. Our teachers teach whichever text your child sits.
What it is
In Athens, Hermia is told to marry Demetrius but loves Lysander. She and Lysander flee into the woods, pursued by Demetrius, who is in turn pursued by Helena. In the forest, the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania are quarrelling, and Oberon sends his servant Puck to use a magic flower to make Titania fall in love with the first creature she sees.
Puck mistakenly enchants the wrong young man, spinning the lovers into confusion. Meanwhile a group of tradesmen rehearses a play for the duke's wedding, and one of them, Bottom, is transformed. By morning, order is restored, the couples are paired and the tradesmen perform their play at court.
Themes and ideas to track
Love, desire and irrationality
Love in the play is sudden, changeable and often absurd. Shakespeare laughs at lovers while treating their feelings with sympathy.
Order, authority and rebellion
Hermia's defiance of her father and the law, and Oberon and Titania's quarrel, show clashes of power. The woods allow rules to be turned upside down before order returns.
Dreams, imagination and illusion
The night blurs what is real. The play asks how far imagination shapes experience, and it ends by inviting the audience to treat it as a dream.
Art and performance
The tradesmen's play within a play pokes fun at bad theatre and shows how audiences supply imagination.
How the writer builds it
Shakespeare weaves three plots, the lovers, the fairies and the tradesmen, and shifts between verse and prose to mark social worlds. Rhyming couplets give the fairy and lovers' speech a musical, playful quality, while the tradesmen speak in comic prose. Contrasts of setting between the court and the wood structure the action, and the play within a play highlights the nature of theatre.
Imagery of moonlight, flowers and transformation recurs. Consider how Puck and Oberon control the plot and how the ending restores harmony.
How to write about it in the exam
Write about the play as a play: think about staging, audience and the effect of entrances and tricks. Pick a moment, such as the enchanting of Titania, and explain how language form (verse, rhyme, comic misunderstandings) shapes response.
Link technique to the play's ideas about love or order. As the text is public domain, short attributed quotations are fine, but your analysis should lead.
A teacher can practise essay planning on A Midsummer Night's Dream with your child in a one-hour trial.
An exam-style question to practise
How does Shakespeare present love in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
Plan three points before you write, with a short quotation for each. Then check your plan against the mark scheme section below.
More question angles
- Explore the ways Shakespeare uses the forest as a setting.
- How does Shakespeare create comedy in the scenes with the mechanicals?
- Discuss how Shakespeare presents power and authority in the play.
How this maps to the mark scheme
Examiners mark Literature answers against assessment objectives. These are the skills the paper rewards. For Cambridge International 0475, the objectives are summarised on our qualification page.
- AO1: Show detailed knowledge of the content of literary texts in the three main forms (drama, poetry and prose), supported by reference to the text.
- AO2: Understand the meanings of literary texts and their contexts, and explore texts beyond surface meanings to show deeper awareness of ideas and attitudes.
- AO3: Recognise and appreciate ways in which writers use language, structure and form to create and shape meanings and effects.
- AO4: Communicate a sensitive and informed personal response to literary texts.
- The four assessment objectives carry equal weight, about 25% each.
For A Midsummer Night's Dream, build your argument around “Love, desire and irrationality” and “Order, authority and rebellion”. Support each point with a short quotation. Then analyse the writer's method, using the section above.
Keep context about William Shakespeare brief and tied to the words on the page.
Read the text alongside these notes. This page is our own analysis and original teaching material. Where we quote this public-domain work, it is a short, attributed phrase.
Where to go next
Plan your essay with our guide to planning a literature essay, then see a worked answer in our literature essay structure model response. Browse more set-text notes or read about Literature in English tuition.
When you have written an answer on A Midsummer Night's Dream, a paid one-hour trial lesson lets the teacher who would continue mark it with you.