Who wrote the play A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Shakespeare, around 1595, and it is the rare comedy with no clear source - most of his plots are borrowed and this one is largely assembled: Theseus from Plutarch, the fairy business from English folklore, and the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play from Ovid, played for laughs about eighteen months before he wrote essentially the same plot straight as Romeo and Juliet.

The mechanicals are the joke that survives best. A group of tradesmen rehearse a tragedy so badly that it becomes a comedy, worrying that the audience will believe the lion is real and writing a prologue to explain that nobody is actually killed. It is Shakespeare making fun of theatre, of actors, and specifically of the anxieties of a company that had to keep audiences from taking things too literally.

Puck is not an invention but a demotion. He belonged to English folk belief as a genuinely feared figure - a shape-changing spirit who soured milk and led travellers into bogs, whose name shares a root with words for devil across northern Europe. Shakespeare turned him into a mischievous servant, and the softened version stuck so thoroughly that the older one has largely disappeared.