The themes embodied in Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream recall the line that questions whether all that we see or seem is merely a dream within a dream. Unlike his other plays, the title of Shakespeare's fantastic comedy poses a theme itself that ties up the strands of related motifs in the play's nocturnal dream world. What the characters say about dreams leads to an insight of what the title meant to Shakespeare.
Evidence of ambiguity abounds. The use of the fairy kingdom to as parallel of the Romantic confusions of two sets of lovers alerts the reader to multiple meanings and magic tricks.
These dreams and illusions occur at night, in the fairy ruled woods beyond the reality of Athens and the conflicts of young lovers thwarted by authority. The love potion ordered by Oberon to pacify Titania, but misapplied by Puck, produces absurd contrasts. They are magically real, but interpreted as dreams by unreal characters played by real men. Dream includes the illusion of a theatrical performance in which the audience knowingly suspends its rationality.
Midsummer madness, Charles Boyce notes, referred to a heated-induced period of lunacy, especially the moon's legendary influence on human romantic behavior (435). The love potion used on Bottom, Titania, and the lovers produces what they think are dreams, but are actual events, at least in the play. Titania, about a foot tall, falls in love with Bottom, who sports the head of an ass. Bottom boasts that he has had a vision: "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream." (IV.i.207). Puck speaks in the epilogue for the cast, and perhaps for Shakespeare:
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