'A Midsummer Night's Dream' by William Shakespeare is both captivating and brilliant. With his use of characterisation, theme and structure he pulls the audience in; gripping them on to see what happens next. The play covers all the necessary fields for a great drama: romance, mystery, tragedy and comedy; with the odd splash of irony along the way. The entire story can be summarised with an extract from the play: "The course of true love never did run smooth." We see examples of this all throughout, which only adds to the chaos and disorder. Shakespeare keeps the audience interested by flipping the characters about, giving us three different stories within the play, that all seem to intertwine with one another. The play is orbits around love and all the hardships that come with it. The basic idea is that love is complicated and can cause all kinds of disasters. Shakespeare is able to tell a very tragic tale of love, in a very light hearted way: "Either to die the death, or to abjure forever the society of men" - Theseus. At the very start we are met with the theme of love. By this point we see Egeus (Hermia's father) come to the well respected Duke of Athens Theseus, to ask permission to condemn his daughter to death, if she denies Demetrius' (who was previously with Hermia's best friend Helena) marriage proposal. Theseus agrees, on account of respect towards parents being a massive deal at that period in time. Theseus gives her three options though: she can either die, become a nun or marry Demetrius. Hermia “who is already very deeply in love with a man equally as worthy (Lysander) is left angered by this request. Shakespeare cleverly moulds his love story with aspects of an almost morbid tragedy. This entices the audience, thrilling them so that they watch, or read on to see how it ends. I think that the idea of taking the generic 'forbidden love' storyline and spinning it along in such a serious context, in which he portrays in