For those living in or close to New York City, the wonderful tradition of Shakespeare in the Park — free performances of the Bard’s plays set in the beauty of Central Park — continues this year with Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s great comedies (that features a strong female lead to boot!).

While Shakespeare has a bad rap for being alienating and esoteric, the fact is there’s a lot to enjoy from his works for your average fantasy fan. Chances are if you like Tolkien and Lewis, you’ll probably get a kick out of Shakespeare.

Now, not all of his works are astoundingly fun and exciting. He had quite a dark side, as evidenced by some of his tragedies, like Othello and Titus Andronicus. Those looking for action and magic might be bored by his history plays, even though there’s some great drama in them.

But what endeared Shakespeare to me at an early age was his blatant and unapologetic love of fantasy storytelling. His works are littered with magical sub-plots, powerful sorcerers, and mystical potions. He was a student of world mythology, and thus had a respectable knowledge of gods and faeries, which he used freely and liberally, often changing characters or inventing new ones depending on the needs of his story.

One of his most famous and oft-performed comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a series of one magical plot after another. The play opens in Ancient Greece, when a wedding celebration between Theseus and Hippolyta, the Amazon Queen, is overshadowed by four young lovers who just can’t seem to figure it out. (It’s complicated and non-magical, so to us it’s boring.)

Soon we are treated to a scene featuring a quarrel between Titania, the Queen of the Faeries, and Oberon, her consort and Faerie King, over which one should have custody of a changeling servant. Oberon orders his spritely servant, Puck, to dose her with a magical potion and make her fall in love with some nasty forest creature.

Wackiness, as always, ensues. Puck (a character whose fame has possibly outgrown the play that features him, and is where we get the word puckish) puts a spell on a mortal, giving him the head of an ass, and sets it up for Titania to get hot for him. The love potion — has there ever been a better plot device? — is also used to mess around with the mortal lovers, but of course, this being a comedy, all ends happily.

If you’re intrigued by the story, there’s a pretty decent film version from 1999 starring Rupert Everett, Kevin Kline, and Michelle Pfeiffer (who, as Titania, looks so beautiful she might melt your television screen.) If you like musicals and don’t mind a little guy-on-guy action, there’s also a really interesting film called Were the World Mine that just came out last year, which features a high school kid who discovers the secret to the love potion’s formula while playing Puck in a school production.

A less light-hearted but no less magical work is The Tempest, a play about an exiled magician, Prospero, who comes to rule the spirit-infested island on which he is marooned. He rescues a spirit, Ariel, who is trapped in a tree, and then forces Ariel to do magic on his behalf. (Arthurian scholars might remember the legend in which Merlin is trapped in a tree by the sorceress Morgan le Fay — a story Shakespeare was probably familiar with.)

Prospero takes revenge on those who did him wrong by sending out a great storm and shipwrecking his enemies on the same island, eventually drawing them closer towards an inevitable reunion. Also of note is the character Caliban, who is said to be the son of a mortal woman and a devil, and is sometimes describes as half-fish, but always referred to as a monster. (He also might be the basis for the character Calibos in Clash of the Titans, a creature who has no actual Greek counterpart.)

While Midsummer and Tempest are Shakespeare’s most obviously fantasy-rich plays, bits of magic are speckled in his other works. The presence of a ghost kicks off the action of Hamlet, and a ghost also appears in Julius Caesar. Three witches, commonly called the Weird Sisters, are heavily featured in Macbeth.

It’s clear Shakespeare enjoyed a nice magical romp. Even if you’re not a fan of him per se, at least you can know you and Shakespeare were fans of the same genre.

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