The arithmetical chaos of the four Athenian lovers ends happily. After they explore most of the permutations possible within their little system, Fate allows them to save-to-disc the one that affords the most general satisfaction. The happy end seems deserved in that it happens after a thorough examination of the possibilities for unhappiness.

But this local rectitude appears to be won at the expense of some larger messiness. One of the tasks of twentieth-century science was to reconcile biology with entropy: how is it possible that living things seem to violate the second law of thermodynamics by constantly increasing the intensity of design within a system? The answer, of course, is that there's always a larger system that grows still more disordered even as the amoeba manages to convert free-floating chemicals into new amoebas. Shakespeare, like many earlier writers, had the intuition that happy endings are precarious affairs, islands of pleasure surrounded on all sides by desperate turbulence.

As a marriage comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream discovers its goal in the eugenic spell that Oberon casts at the weddings—of Theseus and Hippolyta, of Lysander and Hermia, of Demetrius and Helena:

It seems that it takes all the concentration, all the resources of Oberon, of Fate itself, to insure that sound children will result from the marriages. And there is some hope that the seasons will readjust to a more normal pattern and that fewer cows will die of the pox, since those aberrations sprang from the dissension of Oberon and Titania, which ended when Titania agreed to award to Oberon her changeling boy (4.1.60). Still, the cowpox has not been eliminated, and children with moles and harelips and clubfeet will continue to fill the world; Oberon's white magic seems able to operate only within a charmed circle, even though his black magic can infect the universe. The last scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides the audience with a charm to bear unblemished offspring—but also with the Pyramus and Thisby skit, which is blemish writ large, one of the most spectacular displays of wrongness in the history of literature, discourse that swells, withers, palsies, contorts, trembles, gasps for breath, Shakespeare's most misbegotten child.