SOURCE: "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Errant Eros and the Bottomless Dream," in William Shakespeare: The Comedies, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 34-50.

In the following excerpt, Macdonald examines ways in which A Midsummer Night's Dream plays on the interrelationship of illusion and reality, focusing in particular on Shakespeare's use of theatrical and literary conventions.

In the middle of the seventeenth century the diarist Samuel Pepys noted that A Midsummer Night's Dream was "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." Although this can hardly be taken as evidence of a unanimously held opinion or even of a consensus, it is probably a fair indication of the theatrical taste of Pepys's age, which favored the hard-edged, realistic milieu of London as the setting of comedy, rather than the exotic and fanciful places, the often outright never-never lands, in which Shakespeare preferred to set his comic plots. Restoration...