A Midsummer Night's Dream: The play presents love in all its glory, warts and all: Love at first sight, innocent love, love twisted by the mind, by drugs, by lust, by jealousy, by a marriage on the rocks and even violence. Once a year, there is a day of midsummer madness, that Shakespeare was riffing off of, when all our worlds are topsy-turvy, and what happens in the realm of shadow and dream, alters and distorts the everyday world, which seems so ordinary.