A Midsummer Night's Dream represents one of Shakespeare's fullest explorations of aesthetic ideas and is a development of the genre of comedy to unprecedented levels of aesthetic complexity and self-reflection. Its subsequent history as a cultural artifact both reflects and intensifies these qualities, as the play has enjoyed a long history of representation in painting, music, and film in addition to its many and varied stage productions. For any post-Enlightenment reader or viewer, it seems to have things to say about the idea of the aesthetic avant la lettre, and the post-history of the play is a useful resource in understanding its meanings for us in the present. Such interpretations raise the question, as always, as to whether the play's original audiences could have had similar interpretations, even without the benefit of the word aesthetic. As I have argued in previous work, all our perceptions of the past are presentist in the sense that we are always immersed in our own ideologies and aesthetics as we work to reconstruct the past, and the past reveals new facets to us as our own understanding changes and develops.