Into the woods they flee, joining a world of spirits, of night creatures that fly about swiftly until dawn and disappear with the first rays of morning light. Not at all. There are deliberate deceptions perpetrated by these airy spirits. As a result, there is turmoil, confusion, misunderstanding. They revile one another, turning love into hate.
Young love seems fickle and perverse.
Widely recognized as a comic masterpiece, A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular works. The play has inspired numerous adaptations, including Felix Mendelssohn's acclaimed musical score for a nineteenth-century production. Written about 1595, A Midsummer Night's Dream is considered Shakespeare's first mature comedy the playwright successfully balanced a variety of narrative styles and dramatic procedures to create an unforgettable artistic effect. . . This account of the tribulations of a love quadrangle during a night of madness imaginatively combines ambiguous allusions, wordplay, sinister hints, fragments of noble poetry, and profound meditations on the nature of art and love. The brilliant characterization, richness of language, and compositional complexity of this play have provided critics and commentators with material for much theorizing.