SOURCE: Wiles, David. “A Midsummer Night's Dream as Epithalamium.” In Shakespeare's Almanac: A Midsummer Night's Dream: Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar, pp. 114-25. Cambridge, Mass.: D. S. Brewer, 1993.

In the following essay, Wiles asserts that A Midsummer Night's Dream is effectively an epithalamium—a poem in honor of marriage.

The closing speeches of A Midsummer Night's Dream constitute the kind of finale that we would expect to find at the end of a wedding masque. No other play by Shakespeare ends quite like it. Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest celebrate a betrothal, not a wedding. In As You Like It, the appearance of Hymen in a kind of masque suggests that the couples should be understood as married rather than betrothed at the end of the play, but the moment of marriage is left vague. Orthodox ceremonial does not seem to belong in the Forest of Arden...