SOURCE: An introduction to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, written and edited by Peter Holland, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Holland reviews the history of dream analysis and discusses the Elizabethan conception of dreams and their meaning, concluding that the play may be taken not as a "false or trivial" dream, but as a "revelation of another reality. "

Of all the commentators on Shakespeare, perhaps the oddest is Ulrich Bräker, a Swiss weaver, who in 1780 finished writing his thoughts on the plays under the title A Few Words about William Shakespeare's Plays by a poor ignorant citizen of the world who had the good fortune to read him. Bräker did not like much of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

I don't want to run down your dream, but I just can't make it out. The whole tone of the piece...