Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream

• Theme: Love, fantasy, transformation, metatheatre, and the mutable nature of desire.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not merely a comedy of errors, enchantment, and reconciliation. It is a luminous theatre of erotic discourse, disciplinary desire, and subjectivation, viewed through the prism of Foucault’s deep concern with how human beings constitute themselves as desiring and ethical subjects within historically contingent systems.

In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault explores how ancient Greeks practiced an aesthetics of existence—wherein pleasure was not suppressed but regulated and stylized, woven into the conduct of life. In Shakespeare’s play, however, we do not find ancient balance, but a clash between social law and chaotic Eros—a carnival of misdirected affections, intoxicating spells, and dissolving identities.

The forest, that twilight zone outside Athens, becomes the heterotopia of desire—a Foucaultian “other space” where the structured norms of Athenian law (Theseus, Egeus, patriarchy) are suspended, inverted, and rewritten. This forest is not “natural” but a theatre of erotic experiment, where the characters’ subjectivities are deconstructed and reformed by forces they cannot name.

Desire in Dream is fluid, errant, and performative. When Puck mistakenly enchants Lysander and Demetrius, love becomes an arbitrary construct, a flickering pulse induced by an external agent. This dramatizes one of Foucault’s key insights: that sexuality is not innate, but historically produced through discourses, gazes, rituals, and power relations. Desire here is neither authentic nor stable—it is refracted through magic, spectacle, and myth.

Moreover, the characters’ transformations echo the process of subjectivation—where individuals are made into moral agents by navigating and interiorizing norms. Hermia, Helena, and Titania each contend with forms of sexual governance: obedience, jealousy, consent, shame. Yet in the enchanted realm, these forms are transgressed, mocked, and ultimately re-integrated—but not without residue. When they re-awaken, they are not who they were, even if they act as though nothing has changed.

The artisans’ play-within-a-play (especially Pyramus and Thisbe) foregrounds Foucault’s metatheatrical concern with representation, authorship, and power. Who speaks for whom? Whose body is displayed? Who controls meaning? The performance becomes a burlesque of seriousness, revealing that all theatre (and indeed all identity) is a scaffold—fragile, fluid, and ideological.

In The Care of the Self, Foucault discusses epimeleia heautou—the practice of turning inward to form oneself. Shakespeare’s play ironically reverses this: instead of introspection, characters are bewitched, losing agency, only to return having absorbed their transformation as if it were their own. Thus, Dream becomes an allegory of modern selfhood: the illusion of autonomy masking deep structures of manipulation and production.

In the end, the forest recedes, but its dream lingers. Theseus’s marriage is not the climax—it is the disciplinary reintegration of erotic freedom into sovereign order. The “dream” is not false; it is what reveals how constructed “reality” truly is.