SOURCE: Olson, Paul A. “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage.” ELH 24, no. 2 (June 1957): 95-119.

In the following essay, Olson suggests that A Midsummer Night's Dream was intended to serve as a guidebook for married aristocratic couples and, by extension, for a moral society.

The opinion that A Midsummer Night's Dream is largely a shimmering fabric of “moonlight, with a touch of moonshine”¹ has become stock among students of Shakespeare. One rephrases habitual insights concerning gossamer and magic whenever one treats of the work. But there is more to the play than a dream. The efforts of historical scholars to place this comedy in the setting of its dramatic tradition, to see it as “sui generis, a ‘symbolical’ or masque-like play”² suggest that we ought to revise our romantic preconceptions of its structure and theme. Elizabethan masques usually afforded pleasures more serious than those of...