أحببتها إنها الوجه الآخر لشكسبير الوجه الساحر اللطيف الرومانسي.

بقصص حب وجنيات تتلاعب بقلوب البشر، يتنزه بنا شكسبير في غابة سحرية في ليلة ساحرة ليست بمنتصف الصيف حقا بل في أواخر الربيع.

يتنقل بنا بين المحبين ونرى عن كثب ماذا يفعل بهم الحب، فعاشقان لا يرضى الأهل عن قصة حبهما، وأخران يستعد الجميع لحفل زفافهما الملكي، وتلك العاشقة الهائمة بحب من لا يراها بالأساس، وهذا العاشق الولهان بمن تهوى غيره وزوجان يتبادلان المكائد ببعضهما وبمن حولهما من بشر.

n  n

كل هذا في جانب، وعلى الجانب الأخر هؤلاء العمال الذين يقررون تمثيل مسرحية ليؤدوها أمام الملك في حفل الزفاف، لتتحول تلك المسرحية الرومانسية التراجيدية على إيديهم إلى مسرحية هزلية بأداء تمثيلي أضحكني من قلبي.

n  n

بوتوم النساج هو ألطف من في الرواية أحببت حماسته وإندفاعه وثقته بنفسه وتفانيه في دوره كأسد ووقوعه في الحب وهو برأس حمار

This was so much fun! Discovered another Shakespearean play I love :D
A Midsummer Night's Dream took me out of my reading slump. Hopefully, this luck continues :D

This is my favourite play by Shakespeare!

I saw it represented more than once, but it was my first time reading it, and I enjoyed it just as much.
It's so light compared to Shakespeare's tragedies, you could even call it fluffy, because that's what it is. It's funny, light-hearted, and I had such a nice time!

It's definitely a play I see myself rereading in the future:)

Midsummer madness abounds in A Midsummer Night's Dream – one of William Shakespeare's most popular comedies, and one that contemporary audiences still find to be openly, unabashedly, and understandably funny. The mischievous sprite Puck, or Robin Goodfellow – whose use of magical powers makes him an important catalyst for the play’s misadventure-laden plot – famously says at one point in the play, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" And yes, he means every one of us, as Shakespeare makes clear throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The play, as most of us probably know by now, seamlessly weaves together three plotlines:

Plotline #1: The Fairies. In the world of the fairies – supernatural spirit creatures who wander “Over hill, over dale,” unseen and unknown by humans – Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the Fairies, are involved in a sort of custody battle over a changeling (a human child abducted by and brought up among the fairies). Titania has the changeling, and Oberon wants the changeling – all of which explains the harshness with which Oberon greets Titania upon their first meeting in the play, saying, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.”

As Titania refuses to surrender the changeling, Oberon concocts a plot to humble his proud wife. Puck will be involved in this plot, as Oberon once saw the love god Cupid unsuccessfully shoot one of his love arrows at “a fair Vestal [Virgin], thronèd by the West”. The arrow fell to the ground, while the untouched Vestal walked away “In maiden meditation, fancy-free”; where the arrow fell, a flower was spawned, and its juice has the power to make one fall madly in love with whomever he or she sees.

Oberon, who knows where Titania is sleeping during their estrangement – “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows” – sends Puck to gather this flower, with plans to make Titania fall in love with a particularly lowly mortal, someone far beneath her in social station. Puck assures Oberon that he will move quickly to get the flower – “I’ll put a girdle round about the Earth” – and Oberon grimly apostrophizes Titania once she has left him: “Thou shalt not from this grove/Till I torment thee for this injury.”

Plotline #2: The Nobility of Athens. Don’t expect this play to feel terribly Athenian – it seems to have about as much to do with Athens, Georgia, as with Athens, Greece – but it is, at least theoretically, set in Athens, where a sort of love quadrangle is in play among four noble young people of the city. Briefly, Lysander and Demetrius both love Hermia. Egeus, Hermia's father, wants her to marry Demetrius. (Why? I really couldn’t say. Maybe Egeus and Demetrius are drinking buddies.)

Hermia loves only Lysander, and wants nothing to do with Demetrius; meanwhile, another young woman, Helena, desperately loves Demetrius. An angry Egeus invokes an Athenian law setting forth that Hermia must either marry Demetrius, take a vow of lifelong chastity, or be executed; Theseus, King of Athens, reluctantly agrees that the law must be enforced. Small wonder that Lysander tells his loving Hermia that “The course of true love never did run smooth,” as the two plan to run away from Athens in hope of finding happiness somewhere else. Demetrius, informed of the plan by Helena (whose love he nonetheless sets at naught), plans to follow.

It will be understood if the modern reader or playgoer, observing these elements of the plot, finds him- or herself thinking of the J. Geils Band’s 1980 hit song “Love Stinks”: “You love her,/And she loves him,/And he loves somebody else,/You just can’t win.”

Plotline #3: The Common Folk. The above-mentioned Theseus, King of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons – and indeed, part of the reason for his reluctance to support Egeus in applying the harsh Athenian marriage law against Hermia may be that doing so is not likely to incline Hippolyta toward a quick acceptance of connubial bliss. Yet the plans for the royal wedding continue to go forward, and a group of ordinary working men of Athens want to put on a play in honor of the upcoming nuptials. Their plan – one no doubt influenced by Shakespeare’s reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses – is to stage the tragic, Romeo and Juliet-style story of the separated lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Among the artisans – or “rude mechanicals,” as they are called at one point – one Nick Bottom, a weaver, stands out as a particularly eager and enthusiastic would-be actor.

At this point, the three plotlines start to be brought together. The woodland to which the four noble lovers have repaired – Lysander and Hermia having fled there together, while Demetrius pursues them, and Helena pursues Demetrius – is also the woodland where Titania is taking refuge with her fairy attendants. While Titania’s attendants sing the fairy queen to sleep – “You spotted snakes with double tongue,/Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;/Newts and blindworms, do no wrong,/Come not near our Fairy Queen” – Oberon steals onto the scene, and, unseen, by any of the fairies, anoints Titania’s eyelids with the love juice. So far – from Oberon’s point of view – so good.

But then fate, or chaos, takes a hand. Oberon, having seen Helena’s expressions of love for the disdainful Demetrius, and having taken pity on the distraught and despairing Helena, has told Puck to sprinkle some of the love juice on Demetrius’ eyelids, so that he will return Helena’s love; but Puck mistakenly applies the juice to the eyes of Lysander, who abandons his beloved Hermia and begins pursuing Helena.

As another part of his busy day, Puck interrupts the drama practice of the artisans, gives Nick Bottom an ass’s head, and arranges things in such a way that Titania sees Bottom immediately upon waking up, and falls uncontrollably in love with the donkey-headed man. Was Shakespeare looking back upon his earlier life and expressing his sense that he was once in love with someone who turned out to be a real ass? I suppose we’ll never know.

Oberon soon learns that Puck applied love-juice to the eyes of the wrong Athenian youth; Puck dutifully applies love-juice to Demetrius’ eyes; and before long, both Lysander and Demetrius are running after Helena, declaring their love for her, while Hermia, once loved by both men, is now scorned by both. Helena meanwhile is convinced that she is the subject of a cruel practical joke: “O spite! O hell! I see you all are bent/To set against me for your merriment.” Lysander and Demetrius declare their readiness to fight to the death for Helena’s love, while an angry Hermia chases a frightened Helena through the wood. It is in this context that Puck makes that famous declaration of “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Yet A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy, and therefore all ends well. Oberon, having won his argument with Titania and gained custody of the changeling, relieves the enchantment she was under, and the fairy queen awakens, thinking nothing more than that she has had a very strange dream. Puck removes the love-charm from Lysander’s eyes, and his love for Hermia is restored; Demetrius remains charmed, so that his love for Helena will continue. Love quadrangle resolved! And oh, yeah – Nick Bottom loses the donkey head and gets his real head back.

Theseus and Hippolyta enter the woods on a pre-nuptial hunt – Hippolyta recalls how “I was with Hercules and Cadmus once/When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear” – when they find the four sleeping lovers, who like Titania awaken thinking all has been a dream. Seeing that these four once-unhappy lovers are now paired-off as two happy couples, Theseus decides to disregard the law that would have let Egeus dictate his daughter Hermia’s marriage choice – “Egeus, I will overbear your will;/For in the temple, by-and-by, with us,/These couples shall eternally be knit”.

Why couldn’t Theseus have just said that in the first place? Why, so that William Shakespeare would have a full-length play to write, of course – and so that the literary critics of subsequent centuries could write books and articles about how fathers in Shakespeare plays are always trying to dictate their daughters’ marriage choices, and always fail.

The happy-ending triple-wedding goes forward as planned, giving King Theseus a chance to reflect upon the madness of love: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact.” The artisans’ less-than-competent post-nuptial staging of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe gives the newly married couples a good laugh, and the play ends with Puck asking the audience to place themselves in the position of those characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream who believe that what they have experienced was but a dream state:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended –
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.

The play has been filmed successfully a number of times -- the 1935 film with James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney; the 1968 film with David Warner, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, and Ian Holm; and, most recently, the 1999 film with Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, Christian Bale, David Strathairn, Sophie Marceau, and Roger Rees. Look at that list of actors, and you'll see that this play has drawn some serious talent to it.

The poetry of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may not be Shakespeare's very best -- he throws in lots of rhyming couplets where rhyming couplets may not absolutely be needed -- but it is a comedy whose humour remains resonant for contemporary audiences, 400 years after the play’s first staging. Truly, it remains a dream worth dreaming.

how to flirt, shakespeare style, a midsummer nights dream edition:

- elope with your love in a fairy wood

- follow your friends into the fairy wood with your ex-fiancé, who you still pine over even though he loves another woman

- become entranced by magic flower juice and chase after the wrong girl until you fall over with exhaustion

- call your girl an acorn

- realise your ex-fiancé is truly the one you love, even though you ditched her once you got to the woods

- have a double wedding with your lover, your friend, and the f-boi who used to love you

i guess its true what they say - the course of true love never did run smooth.

↠ 3.5 stars

3,5

Although I'd seen a student production of this play back in my college days, I'd never read it until now. This month, it was a common read in one of my Goodreads groups; so I decided to join in, and watched it again (this time on film) as well. (I didn't read it in the above edition, but in the 1918 Yale Shakespeare set edition.)

Quite a few of my Goodreads friends have rated this play, mostly at four or five stars. My three-star rating (which is rounded up from two 1/2!) marks me as a bit of a heretic, or at least nonconformist. I'll readily admit that it has its pluses. As several reviews point out, it's funny (in places), especially if you like screwball situational humor --but the verbal humor of the play-within-a-play is a hoot as well. The blank verse diction of the play is grandiloquent and impressive (and has a few often quoted lines) as poetry. And I'll admit I'm always a sucker for a happy ending (okay, that's not a spoiler; given that it's one of the author's comedies, would you expect it to be tragic?) But it has, IMO, it's artistic weaknesses as well; and some of its attitudes haven't worn well with time. I wouldn't rank it as highly as some Shakespeare plays I've read/watched.

Naturally, I sympathize with Hermia and Lysander, who seem to genuinely love each other, and I rooted for them to be together. To his credit, Shakespeare clearly doesn't side with Egeus' and Theseus' ultra-patriarchial defense of arranged marriage and absolute paternal authority. Egeus, who wants to hand his own daughter to a suitor of his choosing in complete disregard for her feelings, and is seriously willing to actually have her killed for defying him, comes across to me as out-and-out evil pond scum. For me, though, that's a dysfunctional family situation that's hard to see as the stuff of comedy. Demetrius doesn't show up as much better; he's physically and selfishly infatuated with Hermia, to the point where he wants to essentially rape her for his own gratification regardless of what she wants, an attitude as far from love as it's possible to get. And he's thrown over an engagement (which the Elizabethans regarded as just as binding as marriage) to Helena, whom he obviously doesn't love either, to pursue this infatuation; and he treats her like dirt. It's hard (no, make that impossible) to imagine what Helena can see in him, and why she'd actually want him. Her absolute groveling before him, with lines like, "I am your spaniel... The more you beat me, I will fawn on you," etc., etc., for any male viewer who admires and respects women, can't help but come across as wince-worthy (or vomit-worthy). The fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titiana, have their own battle of the sexes going on, over a changeling human boy that Oberon selfishly wants to take for his own, despite Titiana's rather touching desire to raise him out of love and respect for his dead mother. Shakespeare's handling of some of these plot elements doesn't exactly suggest a real proto-feminist statement.

The motivation for some of the characters' key decisions at turning points of the plot are incomprehensible and implausible. Helena has nothing to gain by betraying her close friend's confidence to Demetrius, and much to lose (besides unaccountably throwing away a cherished friendship, she's acting to keep Hermia in the sights of a man she herself wants; is she wearing a sign saying "STUPID"?). And it's never explained why Titiana's infatuation with Bottom in his donkey-eared guise is supposed to make her suddenly willing to give in to Oberon's wish about the changeling, when nothing in her feelings about that situation have had any reason to alter, and falling for someone else would seemingly make her LESS considerate of Oberon, rather than the reverse. We might add that most husbands who want revenge on their wives probably wouldn't think of getting it by trying to make her fall in love with somebody/something else, at least if they valued her fidelity at all (though some aspects of fairy folklore suggest that fairies weren't thought of as being naturally monogamous, the way that humans are in their created nature).

A central premise of the play, the idea that love can be magically alienated from its object and attached to someone else, sends a rather reductionist message about what love is, and the role of the mind and free will of humans in those kinds of feelings and choices. To be sure, we don't take this message seriously, because we don't believe fairies and magic exist; to us, they're just literary conceits. But to Shakespeare and his audience, these things actually DID exist (and love philtres were taken as seriously as a heart attack in the folk magic of that day --though most of them were actually just herbal aphrodisiacs), and we have techniques of brainwashing and mind control today that their believers credit with as much reductionist power. At a deeper level than the superficially amusing, one might find it problematical to see things like love and friendship made playthings for fairy amusement, and "esteem" it less of a "sport" than Puck does. That raises fair questions about the ending, too. How valid is Helena's HEA if Demetrius' newly-regained "love" for her is the product of ensorcellment, even if neither of them knows that? (And how "happy" is any lady going to be who's sentenced to life with Demetrius?) While we're on the subject of the ending, if Theseus couldn't override the laws of Athens on paternal authority at the beginning of the play, how come he can near its end?

While Bottom and his fellow artisan actors (who obviously aren't well-educated, as few manual laborers were in the 16th century) are highly comical at times, one can detect a certain stereotyping and disparaging of those who aren't of the upper class in some lines. There seems to be an intent to portray them as being as moronic and naturally inferior to their social "betters" as possible; and that's another aspect of the play that comes across as irritating if you dig below the surface level.

Some readers/viewers might find the Elizabethan English here (and in other plays of the period) to be a deal-breaking stumblingblock. For me it wasn't. In viewing the play, I think most intelligent people could basically follow the action and get the gist of the dialogue without a problem. Making sense of the written text actually isn't too hard in most places (especially if you've previously seen the play performed). The Yale Shakespeare has very short explanatory footnotes, and longer endnotes, explaining the meanings of archaic words and phrases, with an index of words glossed; but I usually didn't have to refer to this. (When I did, it was generally helpful.) This edition also has short appendices on the sources of Shakespeare's ideas for the play, on the theatrical history of the play (to 1918), and on the text of it, and a few suggestions, now a bit dated, for collateral reading. I didn't read over any of these in much detail, but I'll probably refer to some of the material for discussion in the group during the rest of the month.

"The course of true love never did run smooth;" is a famous, often-quoted line - a truism throughout all ages and cultures. Where does it come from? It is spoken by a character called Lysander, in Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, and articulates possibly the play's most important theme.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a fanciful tale, full of poetry and beautiful imagery, such as,

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:"

and,

"Weaving spiders, come not here;
Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence."

It is thought that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written between 1595 and 1596, probably just before Shakespeare wrote "Romeo and Juliet", although both underwent many revisions, both on-stage and off. And as with all Shakespeare's plays, it is impossible to be sure of any dates or an exact order. Unusually, the main plot seems to have been entirely his own invention, although some characters are drawn from Greek mythologies. Theseus, for instance, the Duke whom we learn at the start of the play is to marry the Amazon queen Hippolyta, is based on the Greek hero of the same name. Plus there are many references to Greek gods and goddesses in the play. The play is set in Athens, and there is a "play within a play" (a theme to which Shakespeare returned time after time) which is based on an epic poem by the Roman poet Ovid.

The play also includes many English fairy characters such as "Puck" - or "Robin Goodfellow", to give him his alternative name. "Robin Goodfellow" is a particularly English figure, who was very popular in the sixteenth-century. Fairies had been very much respected and feared for time immemorial. People were in awe of their magical powers. They were believed to often be mischievous at the very least, if not positively malignant, and names such as "Goodfellow" were meant to appease or pacify them, so as not to incur their vengeance. The moon was a source of myth and mystery, to be wondered at and its influence possibly feared. Oberon's,

"Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania"

And Puck's,

"Now it is the time of night,
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide:"

are indicative of the audience's superstitions and the common beliefs of the time. Many such elements in Nature were viewed as supernatural; what we now term "pagan" was the norm, and although people were fascinated by the fairies and "little people", they also feared them. Puck's comment,

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

could be voiced by any fairy up to mischief. The woodland at night would be both enchanting and thrilling to an Elizabethan audience - an unpredictable place of danger and possible bewitchment. The fantastical atmosphere, and the magic of the surreal fairy sphere which Shakespeare conjures up, are important and unique elements of this play.

The third component is the depiction of ordinary working trade and craftsmen in London of the time, and the theatrical conventions such as men playing the roles of women. The scenes where these foolish and absurd characters are involved provide much of the humour. They often make laughing stocks of themselves via Shakespeare, for our entertainment, and although much of this play seems strange and whimsical to a modern audience, it is classed as one of his comedies. It is completely different from any other of the plays which Shakespeare had written up to that point, although some of the themes present themselves again in "Romeo and Juliet", but given an entirely different emphasis and dramatic intent.

One such theme is the ownership of females by their father. The play opens with Egeus asking for Theseus's support, in insisting that Hermia (Egeus's daughter) should marry whom he chooses,

"As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman
Or to her death, according to our law"

(The third choice, if his daughter refuses to do her father's bidding, is for her to live a life of chastity as a nun, worshipping the goddess Diana.) This was the prevailing ethos in Elizabethan times, and there is no question that a daughter was the legal property of her father. Additionally, a common justification for choosing a future husband for his daughter could be summed up in the idea that "love is blind". Egeus is not merely insisting on his rights as a father, but wants the best for his daughter, and according to the Elizabethan view, thinks that an arranged marriage is the best way of protecting her from any irrational romantic nonsense.

Hermia herself is refusing to submit to her father's demands, as she is in love with Lysander. This theme, of a young girl's rebellion against her father, is against all conventions of the time, and is taken up with a devastating conclusion in "Romeo and Juliet." Shakespeare's own views on the power of love are unclear. Helena says,

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind:"

which could easily be the author's voice, and tends towards the opposite view. Perhaps one could speculate that this could have been the reason why he developed the idea further, to make a much more serious statement in his tragic play.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, is a much more frivolous and fanciful affair. Not one love affair but three are intertwined throughout the play. Demetrius, whom Hermia has been commanded to wed, is in turn loved by Helena. So Hermia loves Lysander, and Lysander loves Hermia. Helena loves Demetrius - but Demetrius also loves Hermia rather than Helena. So one young woman has two suitors, the other none, but since four are involved the audience are hoping for a traditional "happy ending". In the meantime, there are plenty of chances for misunderstandings.

As the play proceeds we are invited to laugh at this hapless group, in their lovelorn afflictions, rather than feel any true sympathy, because the whole affair is portrayed in such a light-hearted way, as opposed to the tragic story of young love, "Romeo and Juliet", which has probably not yet been completed. In that play there is tension throughout, and the sure knowledge, (as the audience had been told in the prologue) that there would be no happy outcome. Here we are free to poke fun at the young lovers' "torments", as we are fairly sure of everything ending happily.

Other characters who become involved in the confusion are "Titania", queen of the fairies, and "Oberon" king of the fairies. Shakespeare has taken the character of "Titania" from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", and his "Oberon" may have been taken from the medieval romance "Huan of Bordeaux", translated by Lord Berners in the mid-1530s.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon is jealous of Titania's favourite, a changeling Indian child. She is keeping the child as a page, but Oberon wants to train him as a knight. All the young lovers from Athens, plus the main fairy characters, are in the woodland for various reasons at the same time. The woodland of course being also the realm of the fairies, much confusion is bound to follow. The audiences of the time will have greatly anticipated and appreciated this devilment, as "Robin Goodfellow"'s pranks and tricks will have been well known to them.

To a modern audience, the events seem farcical, and the play does require quite a leap of faith to enjoy the fairytale whimsy of the woodland scenes. Nevertheless, the scenes of passion between the beautiful, graceful Titania and the clumsy Bottom, with a grotesque ass's head, are so incongruous that its humour is timeless and crosses any boundaries with ease.

There are other "opposites" which tickle our funnybones even after so many centuries. Helena is tall, a "painted maypole", whereas Hermia is short, "though she be but little she is fierce," and both their scuffles and the enchanted lovers' declarations seem deliberately ridiculous in this context. They are overly earnest and serious - and followed immediately by joking, merry, clumsy workmen. All the fairies are ethereal, Titania being particularly beautiful; all the craftsmen earthy and clumsy, Bottom being particularly grotesque. Puck plays pranks, whereas Bottom is an easy and natural victim. Puck uses his magic with ease, whereas the craftsmen's attempts to stage their play is laborious and ridiculous by contrast. The incompetent acting troupe's enactment of the "play within a play", "Pyramus and Thisbe", is still humorous even now. Juxtaposing these extraordinary differences to exaggerate the contrast, meant that Shakespeare ensured laughs from his audience, while heightening the surreal fantastical elements.

The idea of dreams is perhaps the central pivot of the play. Events happen in a haphazard fashion, and time seems to lose its normal motion and progress. No one in the woodland scenes is ever in control of their environment - even Puck makes mistakes with his love potions. He gleefully revels in such mistakes,

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!
...
"Then will two at once woo one, -
That must needs be sport alone;
And those things do best please me
that befall preposterously."

Yet Theseus and Hippolyta are always entirely in control of their rational world. The audience is given no explanation for the fantastical woodland sphere, with its illusions and fragile grip on reality. Shakespeare is clearly manipulating our sense of understanding throughout, inducing a dream-like feeling to the action.

The love potions are magical or supernatural symbols of the power of love itself, inducing the same symptoms that true romantic lovers exhibit in their natural state, of unreasoning, fickle and erratic behaviour. No one who has been given a love potion in the play is able to resist it, much as falling in love appears to others to be inexplicable and irrational.

Towards the end of the play we have a delightful rendering of the bumbling tradesmen's attempts to stage "Pyramus and Thisbe," which Shakespeare has taken from Ovid's epic poem "Metamorphoses". He also incidentally uses the plot again for "Romeo and Juliet", which seems quite bizarre, given the way it is used as a ludicrous farce here. Theseus and Hippolyta are well aware that the enactment of this play may be farcical and clumsy. They have been warned by Philostrate that the production is by "hard-handed men", (or as Puck calls them "rude mechanicals") and that their production is,

"Merry and tragical! tedious and brief
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow"

and this adds to their anticipation. And Theseus will welcome the diversion of such fancies. His wise words earlier, about his world of the rational,

"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends"

could refer both to the action which we have seen so far, and the workmen's play we are about to see.

The audience views this absurd little play through the eyes of Theseus and Hippolyta. The young Athenian lovers are also present, having been satisfactorily paired off, as we suspected they would be. Everyone is relaxing and poking fun at the hapless players,

"This is the silliest stuff I ever heard"

protests Hippolyta, but Bottom, the bumbling buffoon, breaks out of character every now and then, to earnestly assure his audience that all is as it is meant to be - they merely need to keep watching and they'll understand...

Shakespeare has written their performance as a delicious satire of the overly melodramatic earlier actions of the young lovers, and recognising this makes it even more hilarious to the audience. The young Athenians' overpowering emotions are made to seem even more ridiculous by virtue of these clumsy actors and this provides a comic ending to the play. Since the Pyramus and Thisbe of the craftsmen's play were themselves facing parental disapproval, it encapsulates and echoes the whole play within which it is set.

The final speech by Puck highlights the thematic idea of dreams. If the audience does not care for the play, he says, or if we have been offended by it, then he suggests it should be considered as nothing but a dream. It is interesting that the fairies are all still present as the wedding are about to take place. Shakespeare's message is not entirely clear here; it is as if he is merging the fairies and their magic with Theseus and Hippolyta's rational world. Perhaps it is to convey that we will never be free of the irrationalities and unpredictabilities of romantic love; either that or that the fairy folk will always be around us to create havoc. The workmen's play was mocked by Theseus and Hippolyta, perhaps the message is that human behaviour and ceremonies of the larger play, that is the real rational world, are unknowingly mocked by the fairy folk. Who knows?

A Midsummer Night's Dream is not one of Shakespeare's greatest masterpieces. Although it remains popular and is staged quite regularly, this may be down to imaginative staging and the exceptional production values we now have. On the page it reads as an inconsequential play, all whimsy, candyfloss and fluff. It is both significant and noticeable, how Shakespeare revisited some of the themes here, in "Romeo and Juliet," but in that play he used them with such skill that he created an abiding and deeply tragic drama. In both plays we have the intoxicating and overwhelming influence of romantic love, the powerlessness of young women to rise up against their families and conventions, and the "potions" to influence a particular course of events; all those elements are here too, but combined to make a fantastical, frivolous, illusory bit of nonsense.

However there is much beautiful poetic imagery in this play, such as,

"My soul is in the sky"

"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;"

"...by thy gracious, golden, glittering streams" and,

"O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!" (even if this last is to an ass...)

Yes, A Midsummer Night's Dream does provide a few smiles even now. And if your taste runs to flights of fancy; if you like to read tales of fairies such as Peas-Blossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustard-Seed, using language and imagery such as,

"Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:"

"[I] heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back..." or

"Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness"

if you are attracted by gauzy fragility and a sense of illusion, then you may enjoy the fantasy and whimsy of Shakespeare's play. For as "The Bard" says,

"... as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

این کتاب حاصل یه ایده باشکوه و جذاب دیگه از شکسپیره… عشاقی که وارد یک جنگل میشن و‌ وقتی چشم باز میکنن میبینن عه! عاشق یکی دیگه شدن
تم فانتزی این اثر تجربه جدیدی از آثار شکسپیر برای من بود و صحنه دعوای اون مربع عشقی با ادبیات شکسپیری هم برای من خیلی جذاب بود D:
شکسپیر توی این نمایشنامه یه نمایشنامه دیگه رو‌ خلق میکنه که آخر عاقبتش خیلی شبیه به رومئو‌ و ژولیته. ولی قسمت های مربوط به نمایش جذابیت زیادی برای من نداشتن
نمایشنامه شخصیت اصلی مطرحی نداشت، با این حال شخصیت تزیوس و جملاتش درخشان بودن✨

«طبع شریف، شایستگی عملی را که مردم قادر به انجام آن نیستند معیار قضاوت قرار نمی‌دهد، بلکه کوشش آنها را می‌ستاید. دانشمندان بزرگی را دیده ام که خود را برای خوشامد گفتن به من آماده کرده اند ولی هنگامی که با من مواجه شده‌اند به خود لرزیده و رنگ خود را باخته و با کلماتی مقطع از شدت ترس چند جمله ای شکسته ادا کردن و مانند اشخاص لال حرف خود را ناگهان بریده اند و نتوانسته اند به من خوشامد بگویند. باور کن عزیزم، من از همین سکوت مفهوم خوشامد آمها را درک کردم و همین شرمساری را که از احترام توام با ترس سرچشمه می‌گیرد به همان اندازه معنی داشت که زبانی فصیح بخواهد با تهور و بی پروایی مطلبی را ادا کند. پس محبت و سادگی و سکوت در مورد افراد عادی به نظر من مفهوم فراوانی دارد.»

"...as pessoas apaixonadas veem o que imaginam, não o que seus olhos enxergam e, portanto, o Cupido alado é pintado com vendas nos olhos..."

I’m glad I decided to do a reread of this.. I always thought this play was a lot of fun, and who doesn’t love some Fae trickery and drama?

It's still as awesome as I remember. Though, unfortunately, causes me some initial irritation with The Iron King.

Robbie Goodfellow is a wicked spirit running around having fun and pulling ridiculous pranks. He's not a serious teenage boy who is dramatic and suspenseful or mysterious or sexy.

Why do we have to turn everything into sexy these days? Why does every male character have to suddenly fit the romantic male archetype?

Why are mythological creatures becoming obsessed with teenage girls?