A Midsummer Night’s Dream exists both as Shakespeare’s play with the most sources and also as one of Shakespeare’s plays with a wholly original plot. 

The most significant source for Dream is Ovid’s poem in fifteen books, Metamorphoses, penned in 8 AD; Metamorphoses is a text that Shakespeare would have read and translated from Latin in grammar school.  From this, Shakespeare’s Dream finds the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe and references to “the stories of Daphne and Apollo, Cupid’s golden and leaden arrows, [and] the battle of the Centaurs.” (For more information on Pyramus and Thisbe, please refer to the section of Greek Mythology → Pyramus and Thisbe.)

Shakespeare also borrows from Chaucher’s The Canterbury Tales, in The Knight’s Tale, in which Theseus marries Hippolyta of the Amazons, and in which two lovers are vying for the hand of the same woman. First century Greek historian Plutarch also serves as a source through his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated into English by Sir Thomas North in 1579. 

Second century Latin-language writer Apuleius’s tale of the Golden Ass in his Metamorphoses, translated by William Adlington in 1566, serves as a source for Bottom’s ass-head; Apuleius’s tale features a young-man-turned-ass by a botched magical experiment. A beautiful girl falls in love with him, feeds him acorns, and makes love to him.

Shakespeare’s fairies are derived from a number of sources; Shakespeare drew on both the classical, ancient mythology; courtly traditions in chivalric tales; and English folklore in crafting the world of Dream, blending all to create a new brand of benevolent fairy. Featuring “fairy royals operat[ing] in unheroic proximity with humans,” Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale from his Canterbury Tales illustrates, “the King and Queen of Fairies (conflated with Graeco-Roman Pluto and Proserpina) wrangle in open gender-conflict in a manner prefiguring Oberon and Titania.” Robin Goodfellow, meanwhile, is a figure featured “in English fairy mythology, of both Celtic and Teutonic origin.”

There exists a number of other works that may have served as minor sources for Dream, based on their publication dates, the likelihood Shakespeare read or had access to them, and the similarities between them and the text of Dream.