&#8220;The course of true love never did run smooth.&#8221;
Shakespeare&#8217;s A Midsummer Night&#8217;s Dream was classified by the mighty C.L. Barber as a festive comedy, which means it is a particular sub-branch of the comedic genre concerned with holiday and high occasion.  No matter how grotesquely its thematic content might deviate from social norms during the central action of the play, in the end it, both the plot and the characterological elements affirm the inherent values of the society in which the action presides. That&#8217;s what is typically meant, dramaturgicaly, by a comedic ending.
The &#8220;festive&#8221; part connotes that the play celebrates a major feast or festival, whether Epiphany, as in Twelfth Night, or the rites of May in A Midsummer Night&#8217;s Dream. These festivals provide superb opportunities to ruminate on human change and seasonal renewal as the holiday season allows for societal rules to temporarily invert, safe in the knowledge there will be a &#8220;return to form&#8221; by the end of Act V.
All&#8217;s well that ends well, one might say.
But in Shakespeare&#8217;s greatest comedies—As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night&#8217;s Dream—even when the plot is tied up neatly in a bow, audiences are left to ruminate on the apparent disjunctures between what extremes of emotion or flights of fancy their characters experienced during the play, and what new realities they must conform to as the proverbial curtain closes for the evening.
Welcome to Athens, a mythic Athens ruled by Duke Theseus, and his bride, the Amazon warrior-queen Hippolyta. Only in this particular fictionalized version of legendary Athens, Shakespeare presents us with a kind of hodgepodge with the Green World, featuring faeries of European folklore, and a very &#8220;hard-headed,&#8221; rustic, slapstick presentation of Elizabethan factotum, known by their vivid sobriquet, &#8220;the mechanicals.&#8221;
Here we have a romance without love, a love story without understanding, a justification of marriage, that to amend a statement of Winston Churchill&#8217;s, exercises the best and most wise choice for a longlasting romance after exhausting virtually every other option.
For too long pasturized in 19th century Enlish boarding school presentations, the &#8220;real&#8221; Dream, if such an interpretation may be fairly said to exist, ought to exhibit all the blandishments and outrages of thwarted hopes, romantic misconnections, erogenous mishap, and even taboo. The play opens with the promise of marriage and the threat of exile, it ends with a wedding and a comic reinterpretation of a tragic tale (Ovid&#8217;s &#8220;Pyramus and Thisbe&#8221;), but in-between these two poles features all the vagaries of human desire: the dream itself, where flowers are potions, love is war, and man is made a true ass.
Our most human, all too human, protagonist, Nick Bottom, the weaver, shows us, in the way all true performers must, how to hold a mirror up to nature, and to submerge that mirror in the funhouse mirror of a midsummer night&#8217;s dream, only to reflect back a powerfully unexpected portrait of human love when human affairs are meddled with by nature, dreams, and the subconscious mind.
-Allen Guy Wilcox