A Midsummer Night's Dream was a popular play, published in quarto in 1600 and 1619, and revived when the theatres reopened during the restoration of the monarchy. But the revival required the most strenuous manhandling and rewriting, because Shakespeare's oddly shaped play simply could not be shoved into the sort of theatre that existed at the end of the seventeenth century.

In the whole Elizabethan repertoire there is no other play that illustrates so well the peculiar nature of the Elizabethan stage, because there is no other play that so exuberantly takes advantage of that stage's possibilities. Shakespeare felt at home in a theatre of poverty, skimping on stage sets and costumes; his whole art depends on the quick shifts of scene that are possible only on a stage where there's no scenery to shift—or in movies. The magniloquence of the text is a direct function of the miserliness of the props:

This speech is best spoken on a bare floor. Either you have the Renaissance equivalent of Cecil B. DeMille, making the audience gasp at the gilded bargemachine moving forward on the crank-turned wave-rollers, or you have Enobarbus's speech; only an annoying sort of interference would result by turning the speech into a commentary on a stage effect that the audience had previously witnessed.

Many of Shakespeare's plays take advantage of the quasi-improvisatory aspect of Elizabethan dramaturgy, but A Midsummer Night's Dream is unique in that it keeps replaying the same scene over and over—Hermia awakes and finds Lysander absent/hating her/loving her; the play is about rehearsal, about replaying a scene until you get it right, or (in the case of the Pyramus skit) wrong beyond any possibility of being put right.