A Midsummer Night’s Dream had a major influence on The Mystery of Edwin Drood — in a Through The Looking Glass sense — helping to shape the imagery, characters and plot. Dickens draws a multitude of ironic parallels between the two stories and characters.

Helena: “the story shall be changed [i.e. reversed]: Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase; the dove pursues the griffin”.

Rosa and Hermia both have an unwanted husband imposed on them (and rebel against it), but the degree of tyranny the two girls face could not be more sharply contrasted. Egeus, Hermia’s father, knows that she loves Lysander, but if she refuses to marry Demetrius, his arbitrary choice, she must either “die the death, or ... be in shady cloister mewed, To live a barren sister ... Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon”. (And Rosa’s guardian/stand-in-father, [Gr]ewgious, is the ironic counterpart of Egeus, being liberal in all his commands.)

Oberon (who’s ‘King of shadows’) and Jasper both direct the action, manipulating events and people mainly through drugs, but while Oberon induces love with a love potion, opium, in Dickens’s story, has the opposite effect and generates hate — not least, in Jasper himself. (Incidentally, in order to plant a suggestion in Crisparkle’s mind of where to find Edwin’s jewellery, Jasper would have drugged him with laudanum first; it wouldn’t be credible (or creditable to Crisparkle) otherwise. It would also parallel Oberon’s use of drugs in Midsummer Night, and, most tellingly, neatly invert The Moonstone’s plot. Instead of an opium-drugged character hiding jewellery as a result of innocent remarks, Crisparkle finds jewellery because of suggestions deliberately put in his head. Perhaps Crisparkle accepted an offered drink from Jasper (lightly drugged) before departing on his memorable walk which revived in his mind the previously planted thoughts.)

Bottom and his fellow clowns are granted the singular honour of playing their dreadful tragedy (featuring a thorn-bush) before the Duke of Athens, but Bazzard can’t get his play, The Thorn of Anxiety, performed at all. Not in front of anybody.

Concider:

And I serve the Fairy Queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green. [make fairy-rings]

The cowslips tall her pensioners [attendants] be;

In their gold coats spots you see.

Those be rubies, fairy favours [gifts/love-tokens];

In those freckles live their savours.

I must go seek some dewdrops here,

and hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.

There’s no Fairy Queen in the almost 4,000,000 words of Dickens’s other 14 novels and only two occurrences of ‘cowslip’ and one of ‘dewdrops’. Let’s see what we can find in the 4,000 or so words of Chapter 13 ... (Again there’s an inversion: it’s a midwinter day not a midsummer night.)

Rosa has been ‘crowned by acclamation fairy queen of Miss Twinkleton’s establishment’, and is awaiting Edwin ‘in her bower’. (Titania: “lead him to my bower”.) Edwin arrives bearing a ring for the ‘fairy’ with “rubies delicately set in gold”, intended as a gift/love-token (so ‘fairy-rings’ twists into ‘a fairy’s ring’ and ‘fairy love-tokens’ into ‘a love-token for a fairy’). But, ironically, it acts to check (repress) his matrimonial intentions. Having broken off their engagement, Rosa (who, earlier in the chapter, had been amongst the girls quaffing ‘cowslip wine’ — girls who had always been anxious to ‘anticipate this or that small present, or do her this or that small service’, or, in other words, to attend on her) laughs ‘with the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes’ [‘dew her orbs’].

Puck replies to the ‘Fairy Queen’ speech above by recounting how Oberon is violently jealousy of the Fairy Queen because of her Indian boy. Jasper, on the other hand, is violently jealous of an ‘Egyptian boy’ because of his ‘fairy queen’. (Rosa: “Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms”.) ‘Egyptian’ suggests ‘Indian’ because in The Moonstone, which Dickens deliberately recalls, it’s Indians who use a boy’s hand for divination.

The Fairy responds by calling Puck a ‘shrewd and knavish sprite’ and relating some of Puck’s knavish tricks. In the play, though, Puck acts purely as Oberon’s deputy, performing his tricks. Deputy in Drood (who gives a ‘shrewd leer’ and who in a deleted passage is called a ‘sprite’) not only doesn’t serve Jasper (who therefore has to perform his own ‘knavish tricks’), but becomes deputy to Datchery, Jasper’s principal foe. Also, while Puck is a “merry wanderer of the night”, Deputy is a reluctant cater to other nightly wanderers: “The travellers give me the name [Winks] on account of my getting no settled sleep and being knocked up all night; whereby I gets one eye roused open afore I've shut the other”. So while Oberon’s deputy affects the sleeping eyes of others (“upon thy eyes I throw all the power this charm doth owe”), in Drood it’s the sleeping eyes of Deputy that get adversely affected. An additional link between the two characters is that ‘Puck’ was formerly a word for the Devil and Jasper calls Deputy a “Baby-Devil”.

Near the end of the play, Puck deliberately leads other characters astray. In Drood, I suspect, Deputy would have done so accidentally. On learning from Datchery that Jasper was suspected of murder, he’d have revealed that he’d seen Jasper in, or hovering around, Sapsea’s tomb, which would lead to an excited investigation. One doomed to failure, though, as that’s not where Edwin was buried.

‘And when Mr Sapsea [who’s a ‘Jackass’] has once declared anything to be Un-English, he considers that thing everlastingly sunk in the bottomless pit’. Bottom: “It shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom”. While Mr Sapsea tries to enlarge himself and his role in Cloisterham, making an ass of himself, Bottom wants to play almost every role in the play within a play and is made an ass of by Puck.

Bazzard’s favourite (ironic) short phrase, “I follow you”, sums up the action of Midsummer Night where characters constantly trail one another, and ‘follow’ is used repeatedly. It would be a nice touch if the writer of what is evidently one of the world’s worst tragedies was associated in some way with the best. And perhaps he is. Hamlet says “I follow thee” to his father’s dead murderer as he himself drinks from the poisoned cup.

Hippolyta: “I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder”. Honeythunder?

Lysander: “My lord, I shall reply amazedly, half asleep, half waking”. A condition of much relevance in Drood where many things are in a transitional, in-between state e.g. the unfinished portrait of Rosebud (who in the course of the novel blooms into womanhood). Dichotomy, too, is one of the main motifs of the novel e.g. ‘half stumbling and half dancing’, ‘half-protesting and half-appealing’, ‘half shy, half defiant’, ‘half in jest and half in earnest’, ‘half strange and half familiar’, ‘half washed and half dried’, ‘half laughing at and half rejoicing in’, ‘half drops, half throws’, ‘half wearily and half cheerily’, ‘living at once a doubled life and a halved life’ etc and Jasper himself is Janus-faced and split in half. (Lots of things in Drood are in a ‘half’ condition or at a mid-point. Ironic.) Dickens even creates a character who’s in an almost permanent in-between state, ‘Durdles being as seldom drunk as sober’.

Rosa may be the Fairy Queen (she’s also ‘First Fairy’ and ‘Queen’ of Mr Tartar’s cabin (“Frustrate his knavish tricks! On Thee his hopes to fix? God save the Queen!”)) but she’s also the counterpart of Hermia. In her squabble with Edwin over his “red-nosed giantess” she especially recalls Shakespeare’s vertically-challenged heroine. And both girls have a best friend called Helena. There’s the usual amusing reversal: Helena in Midsummer Night is a sissy, “Let her not hurt me ... I am a right maid for my cowardice”, while Hermia “is keen and shrewd. She was a vixen when she went to school, and, though she is but little, she is fierce”.

With his twisted, inside-out love, Jasper is happy to be tormented by Rosa: [the interjections are Hermia’s] “Give me yourself and your hatred [“The more I hate, the more he follows me”]; give me yourself and that pretty rage [“I give him curses, yet he gives me love”]; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn”. [“I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.”]

Rosa has ‘dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes’. Helena on Hermia: “How came her eyes so bright? Not with salt tears”.

‘“Like a dream?” suggested Helena. Rosa answered with a little nod, and smelled the flowers.’

Lysander: Hang off, thou cat ...

Hermia: Why are you grown so rude? What change is this, sweet love —

Lysander: Thy love! Out, tawny Tartar, out! [In Drood it’s ‘Mr Tartar’s man’ who’s ‘tawny’.]