Comparing Romeo and Juliet to A Midsummer Night's Dream
By Madison Oldfield, Prepared for Andrew Well's BYU-Idaho Spring 2023 Shakespeare Course
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy that has interested audiences for hundreds of years. Throughout the night, four lovers are brought under the spell of a love potion. It seems to them to be as a dream. Interestingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was likely written the same year as Shakespeare’s other famous play Romeo and Juliet. With that thought in mind, many connections can be drawn by comparing the performances to one another.
Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream was published in 1598, it was written earlier than that. Scholars at the British Library believe that it was created in 1595 or 1596. Shakespeare’s other works written at that time are classics such as Richard III, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. All of those plays are written in a similar style to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which leads experts to the conclusion that they were written at the same time.
With Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream having been written close together, Shakespeare would have been able to experiment with the same theme across two separate performances. That is something that can be seen in both these plays. Romeo and Juliet tells the tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers. Both Romeo and Juliet are young, and they fight against everything around them in order to be together. When the performance ends with their deaths, the audience is left to contemplate if such love was worth the cost. Were Romeo and Juliet foolish, or were they betrayed by destiny?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other hand, is a comedy. There are two pairs of lovers, not one, and the performance begins with the lovers having already met each other and the audience being brought in the middle of the action. Like Juliet, Hermia is not allowed to marry the man she loves due to her family forbidding it. Hermia even contemplates the option of not marrying the man her father would prefer when she asks “But I beseech your grace that I might know / the worst that may befall me in this case, / if I refuse to wed Demetrius” (act 1, scene 1, lines 62-64). Hermia even goes so far as to say she would rather die than marry Demetrius. When Juliet is faced with a life without Romeo, she chooses death. Romeo and Juliet ends in the tragedy of Juliet’s decision, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends with a wedding dance where Hermia has been allowed to marry Lysander. Her end is the happier one as she has not chosen death and was granted her desire.
There has been some discussion among scholars about what Shakespeare’s intended message about love is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jan Kott, author of “Titania and the Ass’s Head,” suggests that Shakespeare wishes to show love as animalistic and fleeting. In the performance, much of the trouble revolves around the changing of lovers due to the love potion. Another possible theme could be that love can be easily fooled, as said by Helena when she states “and therefore is Love said to be a child / because in choice he is so oft beguiled” (act 1, scene 1, line 238-239).
In both plays, the audience can interpret the message of love in one of two ways: either love is a powerful force that is worth any cost but must be used wisely, or love is a fragile thing that is easily tricked and can turn even the wisest into fools. Since Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy, I find it likely that Shakespeare wished to use both plays to illustrate the potential dangers, and silliness, that can come from such a thing as falling in love.
Works Cited
Goeff, Moira. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare in Quarto, 17 Sept. 2004, https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/midsummer.html#:~:text=Creation%20of%20the%20play&text=A%20Midsummer%20Night%27s%20Dream%20is,which%20are%20similar%20in%20style.
Kott, Jan. “Titania and the Ass’s Head.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Authoritative Text, Sources, Criticism, Adaptations, edited by Grace Ioppolo, W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 139-148.
Shakespeare, William, and Grace Ioppolo. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Authoritative Text, Sources, Criticism, Adaptations. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.