SOURCE: Paster, Gail Kern and Skiles Howard, eds. Introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts, edited by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, pp. 1-9. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

In the following essay, Paster and Howard survey the themes and central action of A Midsummer Night's Dream and provide a general review of critical trends.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is enchanting, lyrical, and very funny. So say generations of readers and audiences captivated by the play's eclectic mingling of lovers, fairies, and artisan actors in an action filled with mythological allusions and moved by the combined power of love, magic, and self-conscious theatricality. Thematically, the play stands forth as a comedy about romantic desire and the trials of imagination. Its two central actions—the love chase of Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius and the encounter between a metamorphosed Bottom and the fairy queen Titania—symbolize the...