A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), 1600
Four lovers, a fairy king and queen, and a troupe of terrible actors collide in one wood outside Athens, all under the same love potion. A light, quick-footed comedy that shifts between moonlit lyricism and slapstick, with a knowing, mischievous voice guiding the tangled loves.
Feels like wonder, joy and humor. About love, nature and art.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy romantic comedy mixed with fairy mischief and language that sings as much as it jokes. The early modern English and verse can slow you down, especially in longer speeches.
Why read it
Read it for the pleasure of a comedy where language, fancy and foolishness keep spilling into each other; it gives you a brisk, generous stretch of imagining.
Pages from the book
A description of a place so lush it can put a queen to sleep.
I know a banke where the wilde time blowes,Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes,Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine,With sweet muske roses, and with Eglantine;There sleepes Tytania, sometime of the night,Lul’d in these flowers, with dances and delight:And there the snake throwes her enammel’d skinne,Weed wide enough to rap a Fairy in. The friend left behind when the wedding invitations go out.
We Hermia, like two Artificiall gods,Haue with our needles, created both one flower,Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,Both warbling of one song, both in one key:As if our hands, our sides, voices, and mindesHad beene incorporate. So we grew together,Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,But yet a vnion in partition,Two louely berries molded on one stem,So with two seeming bodies, but one heart,Two of the first life coats in Heraldry,Due but to one and crowned with one crest.And will you rent our ancient loue asunder,To ioyne with men in scorning your poore friend? The brighter the flash, the less of it there is to keep.
Swift as a shadow, short as any dreame,Briefe as the lightning in the collied night,That (in a spleene) vnfolds both heauen and earth;And ere a man hath power to say, behold,The iawes of darkness do deuoure it vp:So quicke bright things come to confusion William Shakespeare.Puck was already a familiar figure in English households — 'Robin Goodfellow' — long before Shakespeare put him on stage. The play gives him the last word.
Books that feel like this
More by William Shakespeare
Hamlet
William Shakespeare, 1603
A prince in mourning delays, dissembles, and thinks too much, while a court watches every move. Read for the language, stay for the recognitions.
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare, 1597
Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
Macbeth
William Shakespeare, 1606
A soldier is greeted by three strangers who promise him a crown, and we watch, line by line, how quickly a decent man can argue himself into murder.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Midsummer Night's Dream for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy romantic comedy mixed with fairy mischief and language that sings as much as it jokes. The early modern English and verse can slow you down, especially in longer speeches.
- What is A Midsummer Night's Dream like?
- A light, quick-footed comedy that shifts between moonlit lyricism and slapstick, with a knowing, mischievous voice guiding the tangled loves. Feels like wonder, joy and humor. About love, nature and art.
- What should I read after A Midsummer Night's Dream?
- If you liked A Midsummer Night's Dream, try Persuasion (Jane Austen), Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy) and Lamia (John Keats).
A taste of the feed
The particular loneliness of a room shared with someone you once loved.
They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples), there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.
Persuasion · Jane Austen
What happens to a woman who has never needed anyone, the first time she does.
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
Far from the Madding Crowd · Thomas Hardy
Dazzling all over, and yet somehow sorrowful.
She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries— So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar: Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete:
Lamia · John Keats
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