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It is unknown exactly when A Midsummer Night's Dream was written or first performed, but on the basis of topical references and an allusion to Edmund Spenser for an aristocratic wedding (numerous such weddings took place in 1596), while others suggest that it was written for the Queen to celebrate the feast day of St. John. No concrete evidence exists to support either theory. In any case, it would have been performed at The Theatre and, later, The Globe in London. Alan love the play

Some features of the plot and characters can be traced to elements of earlier mythologically based literature; for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the transformation of Bottom into an ass is descended from Apuleius' The Golden Ass. Lysander was also an ancient Greek warlord while Theseus and Hippolyta were respectively the Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons. In addition, Shakespeare could have been working on Romeo and Juliet at about the same time that he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it is possible to see Pyramus and Thisbe as a comic reworking of the tragic play. A further, seldom noted source is The Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.^[2] A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the few plays in Shakespeare's canon, along with The Tempest and Love's Labor's Lost, for which there is no known source for the main plot.^[3]