Midsummer’s Day, celebrated on June 24, was “one of the most popular and keenly-observed festivals throughout the early modern period.” (The summer solstice, the longest day in the year, occurred between June 20 and June 22.) “Rural communities marked the night before with Morris dancing [a traditional English folk dance], processions, late-night drinking, the blessing of crops and the ritual banishment of devils and other unwelcome sprites—precisely the sort of pagan-originating, Catholic-saint-encompassing mishmash that Protestant reformers despised,” according to Dr. Will Tosh. Midsummer was thought to be a time, “when spirits were thought to be free to walk the earth.”

While “midsummer” is mentioned in the title of the play, May Day is another festivity that echoes throughout the work. Lysander speaks, when discussing plans to run away with Hermia, “a league without the town / (Where I did meet thee once with Helena / To do observance to a morn of May) (1.1.167-169). During the lovers’ confusion in the forest, Hermia insults Helena, in reference to her height, “thou painted maypole? Speak!” (3.2.311). Theseus speaks of the disheveled lovers, found sleeping in the forest, “No doubt they rose up early to observe / The rite of May (4.1.37-38). 

The aforementioned “rite[s] of May” were known to be a “raunchy” affair, “ a time of dangerous sexual excess, when the usually strict rules of propriety and chastity were relaxed.” People, during the summer months, took advantage of, “mild temperatures and the privacy afforded by a shady grove to spend time together with a freedom that would have been impossible in day to day life. Like cultures the world over, pre-modern English people understood the significance of set times in the year when disorderly conduct was permitted—even encouraged—as long as the festive cycle concluded with a return to strait-laced ‘normality’.”

Shakespeare likely knew of Midsummer’s Day and May Day due to his rural upbringing; the holidays were not celebrated often in large towns and were falling out of favor in the countryside due to opposition from the church and bourgeois society’s concerns with respectability. 

The structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may parallel the structure of the Midsummer festival, with the pagan Midsummer’s Eve on the night of June 23 being followed by the Christian St. John’s Day the morning of June 24: 

Shakespeare’s use of the pagan and Christian aspects of Midsummer serves as a framework for his comedy. The lovers, whose function is that of generation, flee from the constraints of the city into the woods, where they act out the pagan rite of fertility amid darkness, confusion, and the manipulations of those forces which rule vegetative nature. They emerge, their conflicts resolved, into the light of Christian reason and accept the restraint of monogamy so as to effect their integration into the social order, and, more importantly, to insure their salvation.