Four young lovers flee into an enchanted forest, a fairy king and queen are locked in a marital feud, a mischievous sprite misapplies a love potion to entirely the wrong pair of eyes, and a troupe of amateur actors rehearses the worst play ever staged — all of it collides in one night, and Shakespeare somehow resolves it without a single death, which was not the era’s usual instinct for comedy.
What holds the chaos together is the fairy realm’s total indifference to human romantic suffering. Oberon and Puck treat the lovers’ anguish as an amusing side effect of a marital squabble that has nothing to do with them, and the play’s genuine unease — the sense that human desire is only ever a plaything for forces that don’t take it seriously — sits just beneath the comedy’s surface.
It’s a very different register than the tragedies, but the same playwright’s understanding that love, examined closely, is never entirely rational.
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