The title announces the play's central theme. Are the events in the forest a dream? Puck asks the audience to treat the whole play as one. Shakespeare blurs the boundary between the rational and the magical.
The love potion makes visible what Shakespeare suggests about love generally: it is arbitrary, overwhelming and not subject to reason. People do not choose who they love.
The play celebrates imagination — both the lovers' capacity for wonder and the theatrical imagination that makes magic visible. Theseus argues that the lunatic, the lover and the poet all share the same fertile fantasy.
The mechanicals are working men who produce hilariously bad art but with sincere effort. Shakespeare treats them with genuine affection — Bottom is a fool but never a villain.
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