The fun of the fairies and the play of the rude mechanicals are what Cardinal Newman in The Idea of the University calls “liberal” activities that are loved for their own sake as ends in themselves

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

by Mitchell Kalpakgian

• Human problems lend themselves to many solutions, some of them with an oppressive heavy-hand and others with a gentle touch. 
• Gravity easily oppresses and complicates problems whereas lightheartedness  simplifies the complex and applies a magical gentleness that Shakespeare compares to the play of the fairies at night that perform their favors in the silence of sleep with no one hearing or seeing them.
• The problem that daytime Athens with all its business and busyness cannot solve, the nighttime world of the forests with its mirth and revels resolves in the most mysterious and hidden of ways. 
• The king of the fairies’ love juice that quietly anoints the eyelids of the sleeping lovers in the forest proves more miraculous than all the threats and warnings issued by the authorities of Athens invoking the letter of the law and threatening confinement to a nunnery or death by execution if Hermia does not marry Demetrius to please her father.

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