If indeed A Midsummer Night's Dream 1595-96 was written and performed shortly after Romeo and Juliet 1591-95, it could easily be some kind of "revenge" for the unbearable stupidity, at least, of the organized, "civilized" relationships under the Law that people develop in cities.

The civilization based on logic is a gigantic slaughterhouse. Only love and imagination are worth anything. The rest is death and only death, dead or alive. But Shakespeare could not have reached that point, not before the Enlightenment and its culmination in the slaughterhouse of the 20th century.

Shakespeare resorted to carnival, to the ancient rite of freeing the truth of the trapped mammal man within civilization. Lovers and muffled lovers are clear. They will meet in the forest and from there they will go away, far from the Laws of the City.

As if to say, they will plunge into the area defined by carnival as liberation from reason. They are unaware of the initiation they will undergo, they must experience it as a dream and quickly forget it.

There, in the forest, romance will be born as a radical denial of the Enlightenment. It would take two centuries for romanticism to make its first steps. Meanwhile, A Midsummer Night's Dream is the beginning of the self-destruction of a world, that was just being born: the rationalized world.