How do Elizabethan celebration activities for Midsummer Night (also called Midsummer Eve), June 23rd, relate to what happens in A Midsummer Night's...

Midsummer's Eve, the celebration of the longest day of the year, has a long history in England and is intertwined with the country's folklore. 

According to A Midsummer's Night Dream: Texts and Contexts, edited by Gail Paster and Skiles Howard, two festivals blended together in Elizabethan England: the six weeks of May Day activities, also called Maygames, which culminated in Midsummer's Eve. But while the Maygames celebrated the natural world and fertility, Midsummer's Eve focused on...

Midsummer's Eve, the celebration of the longest day of the year, has a long history in England and is intertwined with the country's folklore. 

According to A Midsummer's Night Dream: Texts and Contexts, edited by Gail Paster and Skiles Howard, two festivals blended together in Elizabethan England: the six weeks of May Day activities, also called Maygames, which culminated in Midsummer's Eve. But while the Maygames celebrated the natural world and fertility, Midsummer's Eve focused on the supernatural. It was a time of magic, fantasy and even madness, a night when fairies were thought to dance in meadows, sometimes tricking mortals. 

It's easy to see how this ancient holiday and the fairy stories that went along with were incorporated into Shakespeare's play. For Eliabethans, midsummer faeries and sprites like Puck would have been as familiar as Santa and his elves to us. Audiences were likely to delight in a story in which fairies and mischevious spirits quarreled with each other and interfered in comic ways in the love lives of mortals passing though their woods.