Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

What explains the special quality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Samuel Johnson called the play “wild and fantastical”, noting how “all the parts in their various modes are well written and give the kind of pleasure which the author designed”. The 19th-century critic William Hazlitt wrote, in the play’s own imagery, of his “wandering in a grove by moonlight” through “a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers”. For these critics, the variety of language, character and incident on of...