The ending of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is characteristic of all of Shakespeare’s comedies in that it is light-hearted and ends with a marriage.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play ends happily with a wedding between Demetrius and Hermia and Helena and Lysander. These couples have been separated by the feuding between Oberon and Titania, and now they are reunited.
The four lovers are also reunited in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, although these plays tend to be more serious than A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Twelfth Night, Viola disguises herself as a man to search for her brother Sebastian after he disappears from their home on board ship; she finds him at sea with his friend Antonio. They return together to their home but must disguise themselves again when Olivia’s brother comes to visit them at Orsino’s court.
Moreover, the ending is representative of his comedies in that there is a sense of the supernatural or magical, with Puck’s final words hinting at this. It is possible that this might cause some confusion among modern audiences: after all, how could everything have been merely a dream when there were so many people involved? However, we must remember that the original audience would have understood exactly what Shakespeare meant by these words. The word “dream” was used often in Elizabethan times as a way of saying “this isn’t real.”
