Is the overall tone in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream humor or irony?

Tone is a somewhat subjective topic when referring to plays. Certainly tone can be found in language, but theatrical texts also derive a great deal of tone from the specific elements of production. A theatrical production is usually mounted under the supervision of one person's vision (the director or an artistic director), and that person's artistic interpretation of the text can go a long way toward influencing the tone of the production.

With this particular play, one of Shakespeare's most well-loved comedies, the tone can be very light-hearted, or very dark, or somewhere in between. I have seen two productions of it, one in the United States (at the Hartford Stage Company), and one at Stratford in England, and the overall tone of both productions was markedly different.

The Stratford production certainly played up the laughs; the fairies had fake prosthetic ears and were all dressed in ill-fitting public school uniforms; they acted like bratty adolescents. The production design was very eclectic, taking design cues from several eras, including the 1930s and the Edwardian era. The lovers all dressed in comfortable Edwardian style summer clothes and Doc Marten boots. Puck was portrayed as a sort of wise-cracking Big Man on Campus that the other fairies admired. These eclectic elements gave the production a very fresh and humorous tone.

But the Hartford production, done with contemporary costumes and settings, often had a melancholy tone; the music chosen for the scene where the lovers are charmed with fairy dust was "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel, and it was used again when the lovers are reunited, which lent a very romantic air to the production. The melancholy felt by Titania and Oberon at the beginning (as Titania stared into a huge cracked mirror wearing a wedding gown) was echoed at the end when the lovers switch partners while dancing; there is hint of the confusion and love spells that took place earlier. Audiences can interpret this as a commentary on love and marriage in general, as if we might as well all be under the manipulative magic of fairies. This could be said to be an ironic interpretation.