In A Midsummer Night's Dream there is a situation in Athens, where people are divided into hierarchical groups: royalty with Theseus and Hippolyta, nobility with Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, Helena, and Egeus, and commoners with the craftsmen. Those at the top have more power than the characters at the bottom. The upper class characters are educated which makes them better able to appreciate art and culture. On the other hand, the craftsmen are "hard handed men that work in Athens here. Which never laboured in their minds til now". Roughly, the characters in the play fall into two categories, humans who dont have special powers and fairies who do. In the play there are also some ghosts that come out at night and wandering here and there. Fairies like Oberon are mostly harmless and they go out of their way to protect humans. Some names of the characters are significant in the play. Bottom, for example is silly and 'at the bottom', a piece of wood. Peter Quince is a carpenter and his name sounds like quoins, which are the wooden wedges. Snug is a joiner and his name refers to the kind of snug joints. Starveling is a tailor and his name plays on the common idea that all tailors were skinny. In the play, Shakespeare uses different speech styles for different classes. The rude craftsmen use everyday slang. The more noble tend to speak in verse. To differentiate the upper class characters (like Theseus) from the commoners (like Bottom), Shakespeare has the members of the nobility speak in a style that's called "blank verse," or "unrhymed iambic pentameter." Sometimes, the young Athenian lovers will speak "rhymed verse,".
