Calderwood, James L. A Midsummer Night's Dream. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, 227 p.

Examines the play in light of the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, looking in particular at issues of male authority, desire, and personal identity.

Empson, William. "The Spirits of the 'Dream'." In William Empson: Essays on Renaissance Literature, edited by John Haffenden, pp. 226-48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Explores interactions between fairy and human characters in the play.

Farrell, Kirby. "A Rite to Bay the Bear: Creation and Community in A Midsummer Night's Dream." In Shakespeare's Creation: The Language of Magic and Play, pp. 97-116. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1975.

Suggests that Shakespeare uses the interaction between the city and the fairy wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream to dramatize the harmony between rational and irrational behavior that is necessary in order to attain a balance of freedom and community in love.

Freeman, Barbara. "Dis/Figuring Power: Censorship and Representation in A Midsummer Night's Dream." In Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy, pp. 154-91. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Reads the play in terms of issues of censorship and self-censorship and the relationship between poets and their aristocratic patrons in Renaissance England.

Garber, Marjorie B. "Spirits of Another Sort: A Midsummer Night's Dream. " In Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, pp. 59-87. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Suggests that in this play Shakespeare explores analogies between dreaming and the dramatist's imaginative transformation of reality.

Hollindale, Peter, ed. A Midsummer Night's Dream. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992, 152 p.

Includes an introduction examining the play's sources, structure, characterizations, and imagery, and a discussion of its treatment of marriage.

Rhoads, Diana Akers. Shakespeare's Defense of Poetry: A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985, 255 p.

Studies the role of the poet in civil society as a central concern of the two plays.

Smidt, Kristian. "Doth the Moon Shine That Night? A Midsummer Night's Dream." In Unconformities in Shakespeare's Early Comedies, pp. 120-40. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Notes various inconsistencies and contradictions in the play's plot and its representation of the fairy world and relates these to the play's ambiguous treatment of love.

Stewart, Garrett. "Shakespearean Dreamplay." The English Literary Renaissance 11 (Winter, 1981): 44-69.

Discusses the self-reflexive "interweaving of dream and drama" in the language of the play.

Summers, Joseph H. "Dreams of Love and Power: A Midsummer Night's Dream." In Dreams of Love and Power: On Shakespeare's Plays, pp. 1-22. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Examines relationships between love and the imagination and between love and the exercise of power in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Taylor, Brian Anthony. "Golding's Ovid, Shakespeare's 'Small Latin,' and the Real Object of Mockery in 'Pyramus and Thisbe.'" In Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production 42 (1990): 53-64.

Argues that the character Peter Quince represents Shakespeare's parody of himself as an under-educated but versatile playwright and actor with "a weakness for romantic and tragic verse, and a fondness for Ovid."