A Midsummer Night's Dream

Oberon's love-in-idleness flower, squeezed onto sleeping eyelids to make its victim fall instantly for whoever they see on waking, is less a fairy-tale device than the play's whole argument made literal: Shakespeare keeps insisting, through Lysander's abrupt switch from Hermia to Helena and back again, that romantic passion in daylight isn't obviously more rational or more chosen than passion manufactured by magic overnight. The lovers wake from the wood convinced their feelings have simply resolved themselves correctly, but the play has just spent four acts showing how easily those same feelings could have resolved the other way, arbitrary in exactly the same proportion whether a flower or an unexamined impulse is doing the choosing.

The mechanicals' clumsy rehearsal and performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, staged for the newly married couples as comic entertainment, doubles the wood's dream logic in a different key: a group of amateur actors take a tragedy of thwarted love completely seriously while producing something the onstage audience can only receive as farce, and Shakespeare lets that gap stand as its own commentary on how unstable the line is between a story that moves you and one that makes you laugh, depending entirely on who's telling it and who's watching.

Titania, drugged into infatuation with Bottom the weaver while he's wearing a donkey's head, produces the play's strangest and, in its way, most tender relationship: she showers him with genuine devotion, and he accepts it with an unbothered, almost regal calm entirely unbothered by his own transformation, treating fairy attendants and midnight serenades as simply his due. Shakespeare never plays the pairing purely for cruelty; there's real sweetness in how completely unembarrassed Bottom is by circumstances that would mortify anyone else, which makes their sudden separation, once Oberon lifts the spell, feel less like a punchline than like the play's clearest demonstration of how much of desire has nothing to do with what its object actually is.