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Though Shakespeare\'s plays are now divided for us into acts and scenes, these are very likely the work of later editors. We do not really know where Shakespeare\'s players made their pauses. The Elizabethan stage was so bare and fluid that it wasn\'t necessary to stop frequently for scene or costume changes, as it is today. It\'s more interesting to look at the play itself to get a sense of form and structure.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT\'S DREAM: THE FIVE-ACT STRUCTURE
ACT I: EXPOSITION. The problem with the four lovers is revealed. They each seem to be in love with the wrong person.
ACT II: RISING ACTION. The quarrel between Oberon and Titania intensifies. Lysander is given the love juice.
ACT III: CLIMAX. Oberon\'s plan works: Bottom is transformed and Titania humiliated. The lovers are in complete disarray.
ACT IV: FALLING ACTION. The lovers, Titania, and Bottom wake up from their \"dreams.\" Oberon and Titania are reconciled.
ACT V: RESOLUTION. The three couples prepare for marriage, and the play within the play is performed, exorcising the tragic element in favor of the comic.
The play has a very simple time architecture. Most of the action takes place during one long frantic night, framed at either end by a brief spate of day. And time parallels place. The play opens at court, in the sunny, rational, social world of Theseus the duke. The main course of the play takes place in the Athenian woods outside of town. There it is night--a mysterious world filled with spirits and human passions. At the end we are in court again. Day has returned, the order of marriage is triumphant, and the bonds of the social world are re-strengthened.
You might also find structural beauty in the way Shakespeare juggles the four realms his characters inhabit. By the way they speak and the kinds of characters they reveal, the people in the play seem to occupy distinct realms or zones of existence, which Shakespeare interweaves throughout the play. Theseus and Hippolyta, as members of the royal court, live in an extremely social world and stand for the orderly workings of society. The four lovers, in their travels from court to wood and back to court again, exist in a realm governed by the passions, and so come to stand for man\'s volatile emotional life. The rustic workingmen, with their simple trades, physical comedy, and earthy sensibilities, represent the material world. And the fairies--delicate, mysterious, elemental, with creative power and poetic art--represent the world of the spirit. All these worlds exist simultaneously. Shakespeare means us to see that the structure they combine to create is the human universe.
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